by Kyra Wilder
We stopped at each display window to see the latest and the best. For you, E said to me, as we walked along, pointing at all the sparkling things. The necklaces that looked like chandeliers or snakes. The bangles and watches and rings. For you, for you, for you, she said and I smiled at her my biggest and my best smile, the one that told her, I am so happy, don’t you see how happy I am. You have a happy, happy mother, my smile said. We are a happy family in a beautiful place. I pushed B along in his stroller with one hand and said to her, Thank you, I love you, thank you, I love you, thank you, I love you.
We walked along the backstreets too. Twisting, when the mood struck us, further into wherever we happened to be. We wandered past little run-down cigarette kiosks and underneath scruffy buildings shuttered in yellow and green. Walking behind the Parc Bertrand I looked up and saw an old woman on a mouldering balcony watering her geraniums topless. Her magnificently sagging breasts brushed the tops of her pink and red blossoms, deadheading them maybe.
Once, we walked all the way to the Bois de la Bâtie and stood on the small pedestrian bridge over the point where the two rivers, the Rhône and the Arve, met. Look, I said to E, pointing, making sure she noticed that the rivers were two different colours. Making sure she saw the way they swirled together, the way they stayed apart. Afterwards, we walked up the hill to the library and found books about rivers written in beautiful inscrutable French. Well, we were here, in a way, to be lost, to lose ourselves. Why else would we have come?
I loved it in the hotel. I loved the days. I called my mother many times and told her this. I told her that everything was new and everything was wonderful. White buildings, red-tiled roofs, blue lake, jewels and chocolate everywhere you looked. Fresh. It was June, and the rain kept away. The sun never got too hot. There was always a cool breeze coming off the lake.
If I wanted to take E to the lake to feed the swans, the lady at the reception desk would give us bags of stale bread, and while we were gone maids would go into our room and make the beds for us. I told M he could leave us in the hotel for ever. I told him he could leave me anywhere where there were plenty of young men with silver trays of coffee who would come to my room whenever I rang for them. He laughed and said, Sure, stay for ever, but of course then the memo appeared and we had to find an apartment.
The last night in the hotel I put E and B to bed early and ordered a half-bottle of an excellent champagne. An older woman who looked like she was probably at the end of her shift brought it up and popped it for me out in the hall. I refused to be disappointed by her perfunctory attitude, by her tiredness, by her not being like the winking young men who brought the coffee. So I thanked her grandly and after she left, drank the whole thing on the balcony looking out over the lake. M was at a work party and I had planned to have him find me with the champagne, with the last sip maybe, still between my lips. Like, oh-there-you-are, and-here-I-was-having-a-really-absolutely-fine-time-on-my-own, but he didn’t come back until long after I had drunk every drop. Until I was half asleep on the sofa.
Who was there? I asked him, sleep-whispering. Oh everyone, he said. You should have come, he said. The hotel had babysitters of course, I could have gone to the party, had even maybe been expected to. But how could I have left E or B with someone I didn’t know? A hotel nanny with a plastic name-tag pinned to her shirt who didn’t know how they liked to be tucked into bed, how E liked the sheet tight against her chin and how B liked to be rocked and rocked.
M’s shirt, when he leaned down to kiss me, smelled of a hundred different perfumes. He slipped a hand down my back but I was already asleep.
The next morning we left for the apartment. We’re going home! I told E and tried to make her feel that, that we were. M had taken the morning off, and when we left the hotel E stood in between us, holding both of our hands. On our way out I saw the same woman who had brought me the champagne the night before wheeling a cleaning trolley down the hall. I smiled at her but if she saw me she didn’t show it.
M spent the whole morning moving things around the apartment until I liked it, pushing the sofa this way and that while I looked on, squinting, trying to find the perfect place. We went to IKEA together and ate hot dogs and M looked so wonderful with mustard stuck to the side of his mouth and we talked seriously-not-seriously about the kinds of wine glasses we should buy and how many we needed and what it would be like when E spoke French. A driver came to pick us up, to drop me and E and B off at the apartment and to take M back to the office. The driver held the door open for me and I slipped into the car and sitting there in the parking lot for one second the inside, the inside of the car I mean, the cool leather seats, the dark sloping dome of the roof, it all felt like bienvenue madame. It felt like it was all for me.
2
The weather had been wonderful in June. Now though it was July and we were in the apartment and summer was dragging us through its belly. We could have been the pulpy carcasses of goats swallowed whole by a crocodile. It was that hot inside the apartment. M was always gone. I found his undershirts on the floor and washed them, put his socks away and left dinners for him on the counter if I thought he might be back after we went to sleep. If I was finding everything to be harder than I had thought I might find it, well, I told myself, M was working hard too. I knew he was working so hard and everything would be easier for him, and more equal really, if everything at home was perfect and dinner was cooked well and left ready for him.
Things were going well for M’s company. Money was putting down roots and growing and growing inside all of the company’s accounts. Fields of fresh green data promised happiness to come. Everything was budding, bright and young and green. There were a lot of people to meet and shake hands with. M was travelling and travelling and shaking hands and every time he shook someone’s hand he became more like the person he was becoming. The person in a room who could be taken at a glance to be someone in charge of things, of people, of money.
London. Berlin. Rome. I couldn’t keep up really. I had trouble remembering when he was gone, and when he wasn’t gone but was at the office. Really, I had trouble telling the difference. He dropped packets of candy from where he’d been on the kitchen counter for E. That’s how we could tell he’d been away. How we could tell that he was back. The candy packets in the kitchen, with all their beautiful colours and amazing names. Jolly Jellies! Blumen-Zauber. Bombottini. We ate them all, E and me, all the packets. We ate every last thing he brought home and licked the sugar, le sucre, lo zucchero, den Zucker from our fingers, de nos doigts, dalle nostre dita, von unseren Fingern, like baby monsters.
It wasn’t as if we weren’t very busy, E and B and me. How could we not have been? There was so much to do. I signed up for a fidelity card at the dry cleaners down the street and bought a special zip-up bag with a built-in hanger for transporting M’s suits back and forth. I deliberated as to the various ways that I should request his jackets, pants and shirts be handled, wrote carefully down sentences that could be repeated to the brisk lady at the shop. But of course I stumbled instantly in front of her when I tried to read the script, tripping up over all the intricate sounds required to say, I would like. And we would end with me only silently nodding, silently thank-you smiling, and her sniffing and handing me a receipt.
M was always away one way or another. He was always gone. The apartment door was shut behind him each morning when we woke and that was good and fine really. He was getting on with things and we were left inside to our own devices. How wonderful I told E, how wonderfully lucky we are to be free like this, free to do exactly as we please.
We slept all the time, E and me and B, and sometimes we didn’t sleep at all. Time was inconvenient, unpredictable. Sometimes it rushed me along and sometimes the minutes wrapped themselves around me, pressing, expecting to be entertained like children, needing something, needing to be fed, as if the hours were animals opening their mouths, the endless parade of minutes lodging like tiny bones in a thousand soft throats. The light n
ever changed. I studied the coins M left on the bedside table like artefacts, his water glasses, the wet towels he left on the floor. I slipped my hand inside all of his pockets before I took his clothes to the cleaners. Perhaps he thought of me too, perhaps we were each of us ghosts to each other. Boo, I could whisper maybe in his ear while he slept. Here I am.
Every morning I sat by the water pump in the little park, watching E splash, arranging the blanket over B so it would shade him. I spent what felt like, what really could have been, years washing the sand off E’s feet. She on the blanket with B, me running back and forth to the pump for handfuls of water, searching between her toes. I’m a crab! I’d say, walking sideways, holding my arms up in the air. We polished the tools too and rubbed the handles clean.
In the afternoons sometimes I called my mother. Look at this! I would say and show her something or other. A picture E had drawn maybe or a tracing of B’s hand. Look! And of course it was all amazing. Open a window, my mother would say. I can’t see anything. She would ask about M and the answer was always that he was at work. Well he was. And what about you, she said. But there never was much time to talk. There was always so much to do, so much to get done. Au revoir, I’d say to her. What’s that? she’d say.
One morning, while I ran to the pump, my keys were stolen. I’d given them to B to suck on, but, when I got back, B was holding a handful of sticks and grass and my keys were gone. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled all around the blanket looking for them, but they had vanished. I asked E what had happened but she only shrugged, as if keys and all such grown-up nonsense were quite beneath her and B only burbled and blew bubbles and was generally no help at all. I felt maybe like shrieking, but of course I didn’t. I just looked again and again and again in the grass, clicking my tongue and circling the edge of our blanket like a spider spinning a web, or like those seeds that drop, spiralling from the maples each fall. Going round and round like that.
I couldn’t ask the other people at the park what had happened, I didn’t have the words. Bonjour, I could say. Merci. But of course those weren’t the words I wanted. There was usually some way to make everything better, but sometimes there wasn’t. I made a note to myself to learn the word for help.
I thought of the door to the apartment, locked firm and fast and me and E and B on the wrong side of it. I thought of how cool the rooms might be mid-morning, with the shutters still shut against the sun, our beds all unmade, undone and scrumptious, the covers spilling this way and that and ready to have us back again. I felt such a sinking then, without the keys, without any way back into that place where E and B and I could be alone together. It was like a hole opened up, there in the park, there in the ground underneath me.
B began to fuss and I picked him up and held him close. The bedroom windows looked out onto the park from behind a little fence and I gazed at them almost hungrily. That’s when I noticed. The bedroom window, my bedroom window, was slightly open. Just a crack, but big enough I thought to slip through. I shoved all our things together, horribly jumbled into my bag, and ran over to the fence. It was a little fence, easy to get over, but still there, marking something. A neighbour’s yard perhaps, but it ran right beneath my bedroom window. I hesitated, but then we were all suddenly there at the window and I was lifting E up and setting her inside the apartment and climbing in myself, one hand pressed against the back of B’s soft baby head to steady him. I was actually breathing hard from relief, and I felt tears prick my eyes and wondered what it was I’d been so afraid of at the park. After all, keys were only keys, I could get new ones. Shakily I made my way to the kitchen to get myself a glass of water and found, beside the cooktop, my keys. Set there so sweetly as if waiting for me, as if they had been returned. There’s a word for that in French. Coming home, and maybe, in French, anything could do it, come home I mean. Les clés sont rentrées. I ran and checked the front door to see if I had somehow left it open, if everything could be explained in that way, but it was locked.
In the afternoon I walked to the fruit market, one hand in E’s hand, the other pushing B’s stroller. Words flew by all around me, like flocks of birds, feathers and wings, filling my vision brightly but leaving nothing for me to touch.
I pointed at baskets of blackberries, tomatoes the size of champagne bubbles, wheels of cheese. By opening my hands wider or narrowing the space between them, I could ask for more or for less. E ran off, disappearing into the crowd, and came back to me with the pockets of her little blue dress filled with apricots.
Back at the apartment, we ate at the kitchen table. I sliced blackberries the size of B’s fist. The apricots were soft, fuzz-covered fontanelles, we chomped them up greedily, the warm juice staining our necks. The afternoon went on and on inside the apartment. M was travelling. I tried to call my mother but I couldn’t find my phone. Look at us! I said to E. All alone!
After it was dark, I crept out the front door, and locked it, checking that I had the keys in my pocket. E and B, I left sleeping in their beds. With M gone there was no one to take out the garbage. Really, I was doing a necessary thing. I lingered by the bins. Sorting papers, pulling the plastic film from boxes, slipping the slick pits of apricots one by one into the compost. Touching everything. B might wake up at any moment. E might. Any moment was a moment they might wake and find me gone.
There were people across the street, sitting at the precarious cafe tables. A woman, alone, and a few men at a table behind her sipping wine from tiny glasses. My fingers were sticky from the apricot pits. The woman wore a long wool coat despite the heat. Her white hair was pinned into a complicated arrangement. She reached into her purse and began counting out coins, laying them piece by piece on the table next to her cup. Each coin looked like it had been polished at home, maybe she too had minutes, hours, time overflowing. Long afternoons. A waiter collected her money but she made no move to leave. Instead she put a cigarette to her lips, struck a match and lit it and settled back into her chair. She wasn’t waiting for anyone. She wasn’t going anywhere. She would, maybe, sit there smoking all night.
I hurried back to the apartment. The children were still asleep. I rinsed my hands. I wondered about my phone. Tried to find it again, couldn’t. Tried to remember the notes I wrote to myself on it. Milk! Toilet paper! All the bookmarked pages filled with the various protocols I had been advised to keep always accessible. What signs of shock might result from a bee sting. What to do after a blow to the head. What to do for a burn, or for an even worse burn, what to do then. What to do in case of choking. CPR chest compression numbers. Thirty pumps and then a rescue breath.
My mother saved my life once, with a phone, with a phone call that is. I was maybe two, in the bathtub, playing in the water, and she’d fallen asleep on the floor next to me. She must have been so terrified when she woke up and found me. You were blue under the water, you were just like those swimming-pool tiles, she always said, when she told the story. Blue! Then she’d say, Why didn’t you wake me up? Why didn’t you scream or splash around, or something, she’d say, Jesus. You just let yourself slip under. Phones were screwed into the walls then and she’d been able to call 911. She’d been able to put her fingers on the right buttons and find a person on the other end of the line when she’d needed, really needed, to scream for help. Help!
Always have your phone, she’d told me after E was born. Her one piece of advice. Ohforgoodnesssake, she’d say if she tried to call me now and I didn’t pick up. Well, it was stuck maybe between the couch cushions. It could have been any old place. I curled up beside E in her bed and went to sleep.
*
The next morning B woke up early and then we all did. There was no yogurt so we had to go out. The sidewalk was already too hot. We walked so slowly. E sometimes stopped altogether. B was sweating in his bassinet. It was such a short distance to the store. I could have flown there in ten heartbeats if I’d been a bird. I felt myself becoming unreasonable. I was unhappy with the way I was dressed, with my uncomb
ed hair, my lips, barnacled with dead skin, were like tide pools. E stopped to watch a man wash the concrete in front of another building. Everything was always being scrubbed clean here. The concierge wiped my fingerprints off the front of the mailbox every morning after I checked it for letters.
I felt my breath begin to catch in my throat. I was beginning to sweat. I pulled E towards the store, harder than I meant to, and she began to cry. We only need two tubs of yogurt! I said to her, as if this could have explained everything. At the store E was mad at me but I made my best horrible face at her and said Boo! and she laughed and we were friends again.
When we got home there was a bouquet of flowers lying on the doorstep. Aurelie, the card said in beautiful looping fountain-pen French. The letters looked delicate, as if eyelashes had just happened to fall in that particular pattern on the page. I looked up and down the hall in front of the apartment door but there was no one there. There was no one there to tell me that these flowers weren’t meant for me. I grabbed them. The petals were cool against my cheek, cool and remote. As if they had only just now appeared in the world. I filled a vase with water and settled the flowers inside. There was nowhere in the apartment to put them. They were that marvellous.
What does the card say? E asked me. Who are the flowers for? Wondering perhaps, whether they were for me, or for her.
They are for the Princess Aurelie, I told her, inventing. Who lives in a white castle with golden gates. We’re keeping them for her, I said, here with us.