Sisterchicks Say Ooh La La! (5 page)

Joel and I were married when I was thirty-seven and
he was forty-two. To Amy’s delight, Joel had a pinch of French blood in him on his dad’s side. I moved into Joel’s house with the sheltering elm tree where our smashing first encounter took place. Fitting into the lives of three men came easily for me. Within a few short years, both the boys were out on their own, and Joel and I were as settled in as if we had been married for thirty years instead of only half a dozen.

That’s when the subject of Paris presented itself again.

This time it was Grandmere’s doing. The dear woman had passed away several years earlier, and Amy’s mom decided she was ready to leave the brick house on Forrest Avenue and move to Paris. Paris, Kentucky, that is.

Amy coerced me into going with her to Memphis to pack up her mom’s belongings. We planned to make the move from Tennessee to Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend sans husbands, since both of them had been planning a camping trip complete with pup tents and fishing poles. Neither of them expressed too much disappointment when Amy and I announced we wouldn’t be joining them. Amy’s girls quickly made plans with friends for the long weekend, and we all went our separate ways.

Armed with as many collapsed packing boxes as we could rustle up, Amy and I took turns at the wheel of a rumbling U-Rent truck for the eight-hour drive to Memphis. We packed boxes with fervor, swallowing a tear
each time we wrapped one of Grandmere’s flower-painted glass dessert plates or sorted towels that had been embellished with her handiwork decades earlier.

When we reached Amy’s old room, the nostalgia engulfed both of us. Very little had changed in that pink room. The faded, sagging canopy over the bed came down with sneeze-inducing dust clouds and went in a Dumpster. We found my long-missing navy blue sweater under the bed along with an unopened roll of Necco candies that by all appearances seemed as fresh as they were thirty-plus years ago.

On the top shelf of Amy’s closet we discovered a black vinyl Barbie case, with one blond Barbie and one Ken tucked inside.

“Why, hello there, Barbie,” I said in a deep voice, taking the Ken doll and walking him toward the Barbie in Amy’s hand. “Would you like to go to the dance with me?”

“Why, Ken!” Amy answered in a squirrelly voice. “I never thought you’d ask!”

We walked the dolls across the top of Amy’s bed. Then, because the only dance they could do with those stiff arms was “The Monkey,” we knelt beside the bed, and I defied my eighty-four-year-old mother by playing dancing Barbies. And I was the one playing with the Ken, no less! I felt a strangely smug sense of “so there!”

“You know what?” Amy pulled her Barbie off the dance floor, ruining all my fun. “Your mom was right.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Well, she was. Look at this doll. The body proportions are unrealistic. I mean, look at these legs. Barbie has no thighs. How many real women do you know have no thighs? And this waist. Yeah, right!”

“Come on, Barbie,” I said in my best Ken voice. “The night is still young. Let’s dance some more.”

“I’m going to the refreshment table, Ken,” Amy said in her Barbie voice. “I’ve decided it’s time I got myself some thighs. And maybe a little jelly roll around my middle, too.”

“I’ll join you. What’s for dessert?”

“Oh, Ken, you’re so supportive! After all those years of being locked up in that box, and yet just like me, the first thing you think of when you get out is chocolate!”

We laughed impishly, and Amy added in her Barbie voice, “You know what
stressed
is spelled backward, don’t you, Ken?”

I couldn’t switch the letters fast enough to figure out the answer, so in my Ken voice I said, “Ahh, it starts with a
d,
right?”

“Why, yes, it does, Ken. You’re so smart! The answer is
desserts.
Get it? Stressed? Desserts?”

I cracked up and said in my own voice, “How did you ever figure that one out, Amy?”

“I heard it somewhere.”

We laughed and switched back and forth from our
Barbie and Ken voices as we finished clearing out the remains of the closet and stacked the boxes in the living room.

The last room to pack up was Grandmere’s bedroom. I think all of us kept that one till last because every time we went in there and opened the closet, we caught a faint wisp of her perfume or spotted an article of clothing we remembered her wearing. Grandmere had been gone for more than four years, and yet everything remained in neat order, as if she might return any day now from her long journey.

“The new owner wants to keep the bed,” Amy’s mom said. “But I told them I was taking the bedding.”

Amy and I pulled off the comforter and the sheets. I lifted the top mattress so Amy could gather the dust ruffle and there, under the mattress, was a satin envelope purse that was padded like a small pillow. Grandmere’s embroidered initials appeared in the lower right-hand corner.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
Amy asked, switching to French and looking at her mother.

“I don’t know what it is. It looks as if Grandmere made it.”

I dropped the mattress, and the three of us sat on the edge of the bed, lined up like three twittering birds on the edge of a fence rail.

“Go ahead. Open it.” Mrs. DuPree said.

Amy unlooped the elaborate closure, placed her hand inside, and pulled out a handful of crumpled bills. She also
pulled out an ivory linen note card sealed with wax and embossed with Grandmere’s initials.

“It’s for you,” her mother said. “It has your name on the envelope, Amelie.”

We all glanced at each other as if we had found buried treasure.
What if we hadn’t lifted the mattress to remove the dust ruffle?
I thought.
The new owners of the bed and this house would have been in for quite a surprise one day when they moved the bed.

Amy broke the wax seal, opened the envelope, and blinked at the handwritten note. “It’s written in French, Mom. I’m going to need some help.”

Between the two of them the message was translated and the meaning made clear. Grandmere had saved all the money she had received for her seamstress work since they had moved to Memphis. Every dollar had been tucked into the elegant satin purse so Amy could use the collected sum to “experience the one thing I have longed for but will not do again in my lifetime.”

“What did she mean?” I asked.

“Paris!” Amy and her mom said in unison.

“She always wanted Amelie to go to Paris,” Elie DuPree said with a wistfulness I found as intoxicating as I had when I was a child. She always pronounced Paris as the French would,
Pair-ee.
And
Pair-ee
rhymed so nicely with
Amelie,
as in “Amelie must go to Pair-ee!”

The only answer that rhymes with “Amelie must go to
Pair-ee” is,
“Oui, oui, mon ami!”
And that, I knew, meant, “Yes, yes, my friend.”

The question was, had I moved far enough away from my disastrous experience in Paris to answer Amy with, “Oui, oui, mon ami”? Then I realized a bigger question was whether I was still on Amy’s potential guest list.

“Look, Mom.” Amy turned over the note. “There’s more on the back.”

Elie translated for both of us. “Return to the linen shop of the du Bois family on Rue Cler and bless the family that first put a needle and thread into my young hands.”

Amy looked at me, her eyes sparkling. “How much money do you think is here?” She emptied it all in her lap.

She and I sorted and piled the cash with the same excitement we had shared the summer we set up our lemonade stand on the corner and hocked our overly sweetened wares for a dime a cup. Our take that day had been $4.10—enough to get us both into the air-conditioned roller skating rink for an entire afternoon. We practiced our spins in the center of the floor until our knees were bloodied and our egos bruised.

After that we both thought we would do better at tap dancing. Yet we never were motivated enough to earn the amount needed for even one lesson.

From Grandmere’s purse we extracted a total of $9,352.

“Ooh la la,” Elie said under her breath.

Amy didn’t say anything. She left the stacks of money on the bed as the three of us went back to work, side by side, silently packing up the remaining earthly treasures of a woman who had lived with seamless poise and left a silent gift behind for her only granddaughter.

I kept thinking about how $9,352 represented an awful lot of tiny stitches. And all of those stitches had been made after Grandmere was fifty years old.

Not until we had sorted, organized, and packed up Grandmere’s belongings did Amy say anything. “I have a question for you, Mom.”

As I hung back, Amy asked her mother if she would go to Paris with her.

The DuPree graciousness shone through as Amy’s seventy-eight-year-old mother said, “Amelie, you will enjoy your first trip more if you aren’t waiting for me to catch up with every step. I have my memories. It’s time for you to gather your own. Promise me you’ll go while you’re young.”

Amy and I were forty-four, and that didn’t feel young to either of us. We had a hard time figuring out how we had grown that old so fast. But then, I’m sure Amy’s mom would have said the same thing, if we asked her.

I thought Amy would invite me on the Parisian adventure next, but she didn’t. We slept in a forest of boxes that night and the following. In between sleeps, we worked hard to designate every box either for Elie’s new place at
Monarch Manor or for “storage,” which was Mark and Amy’s garage.

Amy didn’t bring up the Paris trip again until Monday afternoon when the three of us were seated in the front cab of the U-Rent truck heading for Kentucky. We were following the moving van that contained all of the furniture and dozens of the boxes. The experience of sifting a lifetime of belongings down to the essentials that would fit into a two-room living space had been sobering for all three of us. No one thinks she is materialistic until she has to decide what to give up and what to keep.

For the past few days I’d watched Amy’s mom tell her stories about lamps and porcelain curios simply because we were there to listen. That had been my gift to this woman who had filled my childhood with all the sweetness and frills that had never sprouted in the garden my mother had planted for her children. The DuPree women planted daffodils and forget-me-nots in the garden of life. My mother raised eggplants and parsley.

When traffic on I-40 slowed down, Amy released a telling sigh. I knew that sigh. She was resolved.

“Lisa?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

I had been thinking, too, and was pretty sure I knew what she was going to say. She wouldn’t ask Mark to go to Paris with her. Mark was a lot like my husband. Both Mark
and Joel were great at family road trips to Lake Michigan or mission trips with the youth group to any place the old church van would take them. Mark enjoyed fishing for hours from a collapsible chair set up on a river’s edge.

Asking a man like that to fly across the Atlantic for the first time in his life to look at statues and buildings and art, to take pictures under the Eiffel Tower, and then to top it off by sipping dark coffee at a cramped sidewalk café where no one was speaking English was more than Amy would be willing to ask of her husband. He would be lost and silent the entire time and ruin the ambience for her. We all knew that.

Amy’s daughters weren’t ready for Paris. Bright Jeanette was immersed in her job at a local pizza place that doubled as the meeting spot for all her friends. Her college plans were in full swing. Amy’s thirteen-year-old, Elizabeth, was a lot like her father when it came to vacation preferences. Lizzie forever had a paperback novel in her hand and would undoubtedly rather read about Paris than actually go there.

In the end, I was the best choice for Amy’s travel companion to Paris. She had asked me to go with her three decades ago. I was pretty sure she was going to ask me again.

“Lisa, I want to ask you something, but you don’t have to give me your answer right away.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to think about going to Paris with me.”

“Of course I’ll go to Paris with you.” I grinned. “I told you I’d go all the way to Monarch Manor and help you unload this stuff at your mom’s new place.”

For a moment Amy didn’t catch my silly joke. Then she looked irritated. “No! Not Paris, Kentucky. I mean the other Paris.”

“The one with the big pointed tower and the fancy cathedral where the hunchback lived?”

Ignoring my poor attempt at humor, she pushed through the conversation. “Lisa, I know you said a long time ago that you would never go to Paris again, but I’m asking you to reconsider. That’s all. Just reconsider.”

Amy’s mom reached over from the passenger’s seat by the window and patted both of us on the leg. “I think this is what Grandmere hoped for all along.”

“Amelie Jeanette,” I said, “I would love to go to Paris with you. I’m honored that you asked. My answer is oui, oui, mon ami!”

“Très bien!”
Elie clapped her hands.

Amy added a trainful of celebratory French words, and we began to make plans. I’d become so adept at packing up the past at Amy’s childhood home that I subconsciously covered my previous memories of Paris with a layer of invisible bubble wrap. Then I taped the heart bundle so tightly closed that no one, not even my dear hubby, knew a wound hid under the padded layers.