The Light of Paris(63)

She had always thought she wasn’t the sort of girl men wanted to dance with. She had always thought she was lesser somehow, that she would never have the things other girls had. But maybe the problem hadn’t been her. Maybe it hadn’t ever been her. Maybe it had been the place, and her mother’s unforgiving expectations, and the way everything expected of her was tight and ill-fitting, and had never allowed her to breathe properly, never allowed her to see anything properly, not even herself.

When it began to grow light outside and the crowd had thinned, people stumbling out into the pale early morning, the waiters arrived with breakfast, fruit and croissants and pots of yogurt. Margie ate some berries, but her stomach was too light to hold anything, so she found Dorothy and the two of them went home, Margie floating the whole way. It hadn’t been her at all. She hadn’t been the one who was wrong, who didn’t fit. She had been this girl all along. It had been the place that was wrong. And now, here, in Paris, she could see herself clearly. She could see who she had been meant to be, now that Paris was hers.





seventeen





MADELEINE


   1999




“Go through and pack up whatever you want,” my mother had told me. When I had gone to her with each piece to ask for permission, she waved me away. “It’s fine,” she said each time. “It’s fine.”

“Don’t you want some of these things?”

She shook her head. “There’s more than enough.”

And really, there was. My mother and grandmother had both been only children, so they had inherited all the family flotsam and jetsam. I supposed I should have been grateful I wasn’t going to be expected to take everything with me, as they had. Instead, I chose the things I had loved as a child. I packed boxes of hand-painted china, so thin you could see your fingers behind it if you held it up to the light, boxes of silver, monogrammed and tarnished and entirely impractical for anything. I wrapped photographs and paintings without wondering where they might find a place to rest in the modern wasteland of my condo. I rolled up my favorite carpet and moved my father’s chair out of the sitting room. I piled my treasures in the dining room until I realized I was rapidly running out of space.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff, anyway?” I asked the crowded room. The furniture stared back at me, silent and stoic. It was okay. I knew the answer, even if I wasn’t willing to admit it. I was furnishing my house. Not the condo I lived in with Phillip. Some mythical, imaginary place, like my old apartment in Magnolia. A home decorated with furniture and rugs worn to a comfortable shabbiness, warmed by the memories of people who had lived there before. Rooms where the decorations held stories and histories, and where I could leave a teacup on the coffee table or a book on the sofa without its looking like a violation.

When Phillip and I had moved into the condo, I had donated all my books to the library. He said they ruined the look of the shelves, the gorgeous, wall-to-wall shelves in the living room that clearly called out for rows and rows of books and instead held the oddest objets d’art: a silver sphere woven out of twigs with a tendency to shed spray-painted bark onto the carpet, empty vases covered in mirrored glass, so every time you touched them you left fingerprints as though you were creating a crime scene, a pair of white papier-maché masks I found so disturbing I had finally turned them to face the wall, a sculpture made of menacingly twisted railroad spikes, and a set of metal leaves that looked as though they had been plucked from a forest near Chernobyl. Despite his faith in my artistic knowledge, whenever I complained about them, Phillip insisted the decorator had known what she was doing.

I would have rather looked at a shelf full of books.

“You have to move these things,” my mother announced, sweeping into the dining room with the grandeur of a duchess arriving for dinner at Buckingham Palace.

“I’m realizing that.” I put my hands on two boxes and carefully—and clumsily—clambered out from between them. Pulling a chair out from the dining room table, I collapsed into it. I had been on my feet nearly nonstop, either painting or packing or carrying boxes up from the basement for my mother to sort through, and the exhaustion hit me, sudden and strong. Upstairs, a carpenter moved from room to room, fixing the molding, the comforting buzz of a saw and the intermittent thwack of a hammer punctuating my thoughts.

My mother was still standing with her hands on her hips, as though she expected me to magic the boxes away.

“I’ll put them in the basement. I’ve cleared out half the stuff down there and once you look at what’s left and decide what you want to keep, I’ll call someone to haul the rest away.”

“You can’t. Remember? Sharon says it has to look like there is a lot of storage space downstairs.”

“There is a lot of storage space downstairs.”

“Yes, but it has to look like it.”

Leaning forward, I pushed the chair at the head of the table out for her. “Have a seat, Mother. Take a load off.”

With a movement somehow both reluctant and grateful, she sank down into the chair as well, looking as happy to be off her feet as I was, though she most emphatically would never have referred to it as “taking a load off.” My mother was always in motion, on the phone or writing letters or rushing off to a meeting or a fundraiser or a function. I had never even thought my mother had the capacity to be tired or stressed, and yet here she was. Despite her makeup, I could see shadows under her eyes, and there was a slump to her shoulders that made her seem even smaller than she was.