Paris by the Book(8)
Because I what? Even I listened to find out. But I couldn’t finish the sentence, and when I looked up, the customer was gone.
CHAPTER 2
My daughters don’t consider the store a trap, but onlookers could be forgiven for thinking they do, given the way the girls run from the building each morning as though the fa?ade were about to snap shut.
It doesn’t, it won’t, it’s the school door’s prompt closing they fear, and so off they run, me tailing, often to the pealing of bells. Each morning, long after 7:00 A.M., seven bells sound in the monastery across the street, and then seven minutes later come six bells from a church we’ve dubbed Saint Someone. It sounds like it’s only a few blocks away, but we’ve never found it; maybe it really is in a different time zone. Suffice to say, if we ever hear either building’s bells and are not already out on the sidewalk, we are late. “Sweet girls!” I call, the last endearment the girls permit me, and only in English, so that no one understands.
“Mom!” Daphne shouts. She is my younger daughter, twelve when we first arrived, perpetually in search of a headband. And I might miraculously produce one, only to have her protest, “This isn’t the good one. It’s too loose—”
“Your brain has shrunk!” This is her sister Ellie, two years Daphne’s senior. And Ellie is taunting her with the legend of the teacher who supposedly once prowled their school with a ruler, measuring the skulls of students who were doing poorly: if you do not work, your brain will shrink. Back in the States, we’d kept track of our girls’ heights with numbers penciled on the doorjamb. When I tried to resurrect that tradition in Paris, Daphne insisted I measure the circumference of her head. That’s when I learned about this story. For the record, Daphne’s teacher—young, gorgeous, kind but not indulgent, extremely serious—does not do this. More important, Daphne’s brain is fine. If anything, it may be, like her heart, a shade too large.
“Courez!” Ellie shouts. This translates to “run!” but also a private joke: the girls studied French for years in the States. Or Daphne did. Ellie mostly waited for class to be dismissed each day, which their tired teacher always did with one word, this one, Courez!
Out the door and up the street we go. Ellie first, me after, Daphne chugging along behind us both.
Ellie is tall, slender, as though consonants—those leggy double l’s—were destiny. Daphne is shorter, denser: no less lovely than her sister, though the world awaits the person who can convince Daphne of this. She is shy, smart, and reads far above her age. Daphne once told me that Edith Wharton was her best friend and cried when I told her Edith had died almost a century ago. Mornings like this, regardless of what her teachers have assigned, Daphne will lumber up the street bearing half her weight in books. Ellie only ever burdens herself with a phone.
Madame Grillo is often cleaning her sidewalk as we pass. She takes great delight in our morning routine: “courez, les filles, courez!” She gave Daphne and Ellie their own mops when we moved in. Ellie gave hers to me. Daphne used her mop so often she asked for a new one that Christmas.
“Bonjour, Madame,” I call as we hurtle by.
“Les Américains toujours passionnants!” she calls back, although I’m not quite sure that’s what she means. Neither of us is a native French speaker; Ellie insists we are not passionnants but pressés. Regardless, I like Madame. I think she likes us, or at least the daily show we provide.
If we run hard and the lights favor us—although the lights, too, seem to know we are American, and enjoy making life that much more difficult—we will make it to school just before the doors close. This is a fraught moment, whatever your nationality; one does not want to be locked out. And if you are more than twenty minutes late, you are sent to a special room, something like detention, but whose French name is emphatically more grim: permanence. But today, succès. The girls disappear into the building, never glancing my way, so mortified are they that I’ve accompanied them: parents don’t belong here. Few come. And those who do almost never go in; with few exceptions, parents are expected to stay outside.
So I do, and this leaves me to study the lunch menu, which is prominently posted on the outer wall. Cassoulet today. And for dinner? The school does not serve dinner, but the woman who heads our school takes a particular interest in food, and so sometimes posts suggestions about what les parents should serve, based on what our children have been fed earlier. Tonight: poulet, chicken. Non frit, a note clarifies, I assume just for me: not fried.
I’m sure there’s no conspiracy—Carl, the older man from the embassy who loves mysteries, says there always is—but the boucherie I will pass on the way home will already be setting up its sidewalk rotisserie, the chickens beginning to turn, the fat beginning to drip on the potatoes and onions glistening in the foil tray far below. Ellie was briefly a vegetarian; these very potatoes and onions paved her return to meat. I will turn into our street, and depending on the day and the season, a gaggle of lost tourists will block the sidewalk. Ellie tells me (because, I suspect, someone tells her) such tourists in our midst mean we don’t live a “real” Parisian life, but I’m not sure she knows what she means. Carl, fiftysomething, single, says the real Paris no longer exists, which is why he lives thirty minutes out, in a charming village I really should visit. Shelley, the retired teacher who is quite happy her husband remains in New Orleans and happier still that he sends her a monthly allowance, says Paris only gets real when it rains. Molly, the New Zealand mom, doesn’t care if it’s real or not, and doesn’t care to learn much French, since she’s the “trailing spouse” and her husband will be relocated in two years. “Everyone leaves,” she says, and jokes about leaving her kids—three under three—behind.