The Paris Library(33)
“At least I have a life, unlike you.” She stomped out.
Their bickering was better than the silence at home. Only Mary Louise’s mom treated me the same as always. It was a strange comfort to be told, “Don’t be so damn lippy.”
The whole town pitched in to feed Dad and me. He bought a deep freeze to store the casseroles. At dinner, we barely spoke—the news anchor, our constant companion, did the talking. Our conversations were stilted, and pauses lasted as long as commercial breaks.
When school let out for the summer, Angel introduced Mary Louise and me to Bo and Hope on Days of our Lives. Their soap-opera love story let me forget my loss for an hour as I absorbed its lessons: love is longing, love is agony, love is sex. I imagined Robby and me, our bodies and souls entwined.
My soap-opera binge lasted a month. When the thermometer hit one hundred degrees, Dad took off early from work and came to get me at Mary Louise’s. He looked past us to the television, where the lovers were locked in their signature tongue-on-tongue embrace.
Dad’s brows shot up, then settled into a scowl. “I came to take you out for ice cream,” he said. He had meant for the invitation to include Mary Louise, but now he was mad, blaming her for a choice I’d made. She saw that and stayed put. I stalked out to the station wagon and pouted the whole way to the Tastee Freez. A strawberry milkshake did nothing to cool my temper.
“Why can’t I watch what I want?”
“Your mother wouldn’t like it,” he said, the best way to silence me.
When we got home, Dad marched over to Odile’s. Leaning on the haunch of our car, I listened to him complain about the perils of daytime television and Mary Louise’s permissive parents. Towering over Odile on the porch, he opened his wallet and held out some bills. He thought everyone was as interested in money as he was. She shoved his hand away.
“I need someone to look after her,” he said, adding the caveat, “no soaps.”
“I don’t need a babysitter!” I shouted.
The following morning, I found myself right where I’d always wanted to be, at Odile’s, but the reason I was there filled me with resentment. She understood and stayed busy in her garden. Over lunch, I tried to remain sullen, but the ham-and-cheese sandwiches she served broke down my reserve. We ate the croque monsieurs with our forks and knives, since there was a layer of bubbling Swiss cheese on top. Everything about Odile was elegant, even the way she ate her sandwich. In Froid, she stuck out like a sore thumb, but maybe in Paris, she was just an ordinary finger. I longed to see her world. Would she ever go back? Would she take me with her?
As we washed the dishes, she asked me to teach her to make my favorite dessert—chocolate chip cookies. Surprisingly, she didn’t know basic things, like the fact that you’re supposed to lick the beaters clean. That’s the whole point of baking.
Mom had let me eat as many cookies as I wanted, but Odile let me have two. When I tried to take more, she replied, “Two feed your stomach, the rest your soul. We’ll find another way to soothe your heart.” She handed me a book. “Literature, not sweets.”
I groaned and plunked myself down on her brocade couch. She sat in what she called her “Louis the fifteenth” chair. Its carved wooden legs made it seem expensive. Maybe she’d been rich, and when she was my age, her governess made her walk around the castle with the musty family Bible on her head. I’d lived next to Odile forever, well, my forever, and knew nearly nothing of her life. I eyed the drawers of the buffet and wondered what was inside. Maybe I could sneak a peek.…
“Read,” she ordered.
The Little Prince began with a boy who made simple drawings. When he showed them to adults, they didn’t understand. I knew how he felt; no one understood how much I missed Mom. “Jesus needs her in heaven, hon,” the ladies said, as if I didn’t need her down here. I continued reading. “It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears”—the words from a dead aviator comforted me more than trite phrases from folks I knew. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” The book carried me to another world, to a place that let me forget.
Odile said Le Petit Prince had been written in French and that I was reading a translation. I wanted to read the original, to understand the story the way it had understood me. I wanted to be eloquent like the Prince, elegant like Odile. I told her I wanted to learn French. “I’d love to teach you!” she said. In a notebook, she wrote: le mariage, la rose, la bible, la table. When I asked why there was a “le” or “la,” she said French nouns were either masculine or feminine.
“Huh?”
“Let me put it another way. They’re either… boys or girls.”
“In France, tables are girls?”
She laughed, a pretty, tinkly sound. “Something like that.”
La table? I imagined tables wearing dresses. A denim miniskirt or floral gown that grazed the ground. It seemed silly, but then I remembered Mom combing her hair at her vanity, knees brushing its gingham skirt. The idea of a table being a woman made sense.
It had been four months since Mom died, and for the first time, I didn’t feel heartbroken when I thought of her.
* * *
IN THE EVENINGS, I was alone: Dad shut himself away in the den. At my desk, I revised each day’s French lesson, repeating the words until they no longer felt foreign. Odile got me my own French-English dictionary—an orange is une orange, but a lemon is un citron Je voyage en France. Je préfère Robby. Odile est belle. Paris est magnifique. Basic sentences, simple pleasures, one word at a time, every sentence in present tense, no sadness of the past, no worries about le futur. I loved le fran?ais, a bridge to la France, a world that only Odile and I knew, a place with mouthwatering desserts and secret gardens, a place I could hide away. I could not master heartache—too dense, too overwhelming—but I could conjugate verbs. I begin—je commence; you finish—tu finis. In this secret language of loss, I spoke of my mother: j’aime Maman.