Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  Some things never change.

  I’ve just met my mom at Bar les Célestins with a freshly cut head of hair and she’s aghast.

  “It’s not great, I know,” I say, pulling up a chair. “They cut hair really bizarrely here—she used a man’s electric razor.”

  “Not great?” she says, getting up to see the back of it. “Mia, she totally botched your hair. Why on earth didn’t you tell her to stop when she pulled out a man’s razor?”

  “I figured that’s just how they cut hair here.”

  “Of course it’s not, the French are known for their great cuts, and even if it was, should that matter? You should have left.”

  “Whatever, it’ll grow out.”

  “No kidding it’ll grow out, but what are you going to do until then?” she asks, brow furrowed with genuine concern.

  “Mom, why do you care so much? It’s my head and the haircut was your idea!”

  I was sixteen when I first realized my mom was more concerned about my appearance than I was. I had broken my nose, and the next day I was called out of the classroom and told to go to the director’s office. Nervous (when you’re in a boot-camp school, it’s not quite the same as the high school principal calling you in), I walked in the room and heard my mom’s voice on the other end of his phone yelling, “Her nose is in the middle of her fucking face.” As if he didn’t know.

  Sometimes it’s nice that your mom cares about details that no one else would, like what you ordered to eat on a date or what errands you have to run today. But that same eye for detail is also why I’ll be talking to my mom and realize she hasn’t heard a word because she’s studying my face to see if the foundation I’m using is a good match for my skin tone.

  Last week I snapped at her after she reminded me—for the third time—that I should get my teeth whitened when I’m home because of how much coffee we’ve been drinking here. It seems like there’s always something I need to improve, my nails, my weight, my hair, my clothes. I told her living with her was like being attached at the hip to John Madden. Who’s he? she asked. A football commentator, I replied, who evaluates a player’s each and every move. Emphasis on every.

  YEEOOOWW!!”

  “Oh, stop being a baby!” Mia barks as she tries to grab a half-attached wax strip from my upper lip.

  I slap her hand. “Get away from me!”

  With the weak dollar, Jolen Creme Bleach here is twenty-five dollars. Hence, I let my daughter talk me into waxing. She tries to grab it again but I duck and turn.

  “No! I’ll melt it off or something! You lied, it hurts like hell! You just want revenge for the haircut!”

  She suddenly starts yelling, which makes me turn back to see what that’s all about and—RRRRIIPPP! A sneak attack!

  “Owwww!! You little bitch!”

  Both our jaws fall and our eyes pop. We burst out laughing hysterically. I start crying at the same time because my upper lip is on fire. “That was so not nice, Mia . . .” blubber blubber waaah waaah.

  “My God, what a baby! Nobody bleaches, Mother. A blond mustache is still a mustache. You’ll get used to it.”

  “No, I won’t!”

  “Oh, please, it’s a teeny ping and it’s over. You should get a Brazilian, then you can complain.”

  “Oh, of course! The moment I get home! I can’t wait for Ludmilla to rip my pudenda and then slap it!”

  My girlfriend Chris and I first learned about Brazilians when we went out with our daughters for sushi and sake one night. If the girls hadn’t corroborated each other, we’d never have believed that women let a complete stranger first rip the hair off their labia and then slap it to ease the pain. Then they make them flip over on their side and stick a leg in the air so they can rip the hair from their hind ends, all the hair, even around the. Chris and I were laughing so hard we practically slid out of our chairs. The sake didn’t help.

  Whatever happened to a bikini-line wax or a shave and trim? I personally was never a fan of hairy armpits or the Jane-of-the-jungle look in the nether parts, but come on.

  How is it that one of the things we most feared when we were young—being seen as unattractive—causes our daughters more trouble now, instead of less? We are the first female generation with media influence, our own money, political clout. Shouldn’t we have made it better for them? Instead, the trauma, trouble, and time women expend in the name of feminine allure has grown exponentially.

  Girls wear more makeup and sexier clothes and do more to their head and body hair in junior high than most of us ever did in our twenties. And as mothers we’ve allowed it. We’ve modeled it. We’ve sold them down the river—we’ve actually bought them down the river, because we often finance it, even as we lament it.

  Where’s the Whole Foods mentality for our girls? We support organizations and have whole branches of the government to keep our land and water clean. We censor what they dump in the lakes but not our kids’ minds, and our girls are paying. And we do have the power. Corporations and the media are loath to offend mothers, who do most of the buying in the country.

  Then again, why would we insist on something for our daughters that we accept for ourselves? Most of us have bought into the same mind-set. We’ve always seen ourselves as an ongoing self-improvement project, first for vanity, then to keep our jobs. Being seen as older isn’t just a social hazard, it’s professionally dangerous.

  What difference will all the Take Your Daughter to Work days, getting more women elected, and achieving professional equality, make if we teach and model “not enough” in the most basic, gut-level way? How do we expand the definition of beauty for our daughters, and sons, instead of narrowing it?

  Given my mom’s shock at Brazilians, I’m glad I never told her about pole-dancing. Not that I did it for any length of time; it took me all of twenty seconds to clamber up a few feet, cling desperately, and—because a pole is a slick, cylindrical object and I am not a tree frog—drop like a rock.

  I’d been curious about pole-dancing for a while and when I saw it listed on the classes offered at my gym, I thought, Why not? Home stripper poles had been featured on Oprah; Teri Hatcher and Kate Hudson touted pole-dancing’s firming benefits. Maybe it’d put an extra bounce in my step, make me turn a paler shade of green when passing one of Manhattan’s many gorgeous models.

  So, after a day of negotiating with Elle editors, NPR producers, and other people that reassured me my student loans hadn’t gone to waste, I found myself flanked by a mélange of sweating and panting professionals, performers, students, and stay-at-home moms. As it turns out, the pole itself is only part of what’s included in a pole-dancing class; the rest of it involves lots of hip-thrusting, hair-tossing, crawling on your hands and knees while making bedroom eyes at the mirror, and, as I was learning, floor-humping. When the perky instructor ordered us to lie on our backs, go spread-eagle, then flip to our stomachs and hump the floor, some went at it with reckless abandon, others mimicked the instructor in earnest, and the rest, like me, flip-flopped like fish gasping for air on a slippery deck.

  Two thoughts, meanwhile, were running through my head. One, my mother (who only ever let me play with Doctor Barbie) would die if she ever saw me like this. And two, am I seriously humping one of the germiest surfaces in Manhattan? A surface, by the way, that I pay ninety-five dollars a month to have the privilege of humping.

  But I took the class for me! To unleash my inner beast, as the course description promised, because being sexy feels fun and powerful! Leaving the class, however, I felt anything but, and as I walked home I wondered how I actually came to think that crawling on my hands and knees would boost my confidence.

  I may have fared better in the era of salons, when a woman with the quickest wit drove men wild, and less was considered more. Or rewind several hundred years earlier, to the days of courtly love, of troubadours and ardently delivered poems and window serenades.

  Actually, courting rituals like that originated close to where my mom and I are
staying in France, and were pioneered by a mother and daughter. Courtly love was already a growing tradition in Western Europe, but it was under Eleanor of Aquitaine, the powerful twelfth-century French queen, that the movement became famous. Eleanor set up her court at Poitiers and, because courts hadn’t previously existed in that region of France, her younger courtiers were as unruly as college freshmen. Running a kingdom being time-consuming and all, Eleanor called in her daughter, Marie de Champagne, for help.

  Peer pressure has always been an effective means of coercion and, recognizing this, the savvy Marie changed the culture to one where it was no longer cool for young men to be bragging and boorish, and young women to be swooning and promiscuous. Rather, the most enviable women were the ones with mannered, chivalrous, and respectful men pining after them.

  Marie accomplished this by hiring a prominent cleric to write a rule book outlining new codes of behavior concerning love. The book was modeled on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Loving), but while Ovid told men how to dress, approach, converse with, and toy with women, Marie’s book placed women squarely in control, advising them of the rules they should set forth for suitors and exactly how and when to judge them.

  This came none too soon; during Eleanor and Marie’s lifetimes, Europe changed from a feudal society to a medieval one. While feudal Europe was undoubtedly patriarchal, women there still had legal rights; once the Church came to power in the late twelfth century, we lost the right to own property, and ourselves became the legal property of fathers or husbands.

  Newly powerless, women across Europe used Marie’s text to turn themselves into perfect coquettes, harnessing their seductive powers to move up the political and economic ladder. They became well-versed in the intricate and highly stylized dance of seduction, and masters in the art of pleasing, both in dress and manner. By the fourteenth century, France was the fashion and perfume capital of the Western world precisely because of the critical role appearance played in the art of seduction.

  And appearance didn’t necessarily mean beauty, nor did pleasing imply anything sexual; wit, charm, intellect, and style counted far more. Upper-class women were educated not just for their own benefit but because it gave them an edge in the art of conversation and courtship. The incredibly powerful mistress of King Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, rose to power thanks to her exquisite charm and good taste, and Ann Boleyn, attractive but no great beauty, used the coquetterie she learned growing up in the French court to snag the title Queen of England.

  Women in those days had to learn to make men their emotional pawns because, legally, we were theirs. Clearly, women aren’t men’s legal pawns anymore, but I wonder to what degree we’re cultural pawns. Until the rise of advertising and male-driven corporate culture, salons—which were almost exclusively run by women—created and determined culture. Which writers, philosophers, or artists came to prominence was largely determined by who was invited the most frequently to the most influential salon. Maybe it’s time to bring some of this back.

  If you were standing in Place Saint Didier right now, you’d be treated to this little performance: a young couple banging on one of the closed glass phone booths, yelling Frelon d’Asie! Frelon d’Asie! at the madwoman sealed inside, who is bouncing off the glass, flailing one arm and hollering.

  The city is alive with scenes like this, actors performing bits of their plays to entice you to attend. Many integrate themselves into city life so well it takes a moment to figure out that the drunk on the carousel hollering epithets is acting out a scene.

  Most are definitely not part of everyday life: a group of prisoners bound together by a rope marches through the streets begging their cause on one block, screaming curses on the next. A dozen flight attendants in matching red suits scurry about as if on a secret mission, whispering in the ears of passersby. A somber, doomed noblewoman in eighteenth-century finery sits imprisoned in a wooden cage carried by a few scruffy citoyens. Following them is a poker-faced priest in a voluminous black robe billowing in the wind, handing out flyers for her cause (and the playwright’s).

  The woman in the phone booth, however, is not an actor, she is me. One minute I’m on the phone with a friend, next I’m screaming with pain and confusion, because out of nowhere it’s like a humongous red-hot poker was shoved up into my armpit! I don’t know if I’m bitten, have blown a blood vessel, or been shot.

  “Frelon d’Asie!” the couple outside keeps yelling, pointing at some great big moving thing by my feet. “Frelon d’Asie!”

  I smash my foot down on it. Frelon (hornet) my butt! Whatever it is, it’s so big that by the time I’m done stomping on it, it looks like a flattened Hershey bar. And what the heck does Asia have to do with anything?!

  “Arrêtez (stop), madame, arrêtez!” they urge me, which I finally do. They shove the door open and I fly out of there like a bat outta hell. I take off for the studio, flapping my arm up and down and sobbing unashamedly. I’m such a big hit with the crowds, I swear I hear clapping.

  Sssst!”

  That sucking in of breath through closed teeth that the French do when shocked is what the cute little pharmacist does upon seeing the cantaloupe that is now my armpit. I actually had to walk here with my arm held up.

  Last night when I stumbled into the studio after the hornet attack, Mia and I couldn’t find any stinger or bite marks. There was, however, a small hole. No pharmacies were open, we couldn’t find a doctor, and we couldn’t reach Chrystelle. So we disinfected it, I took four ibuprofen at once with a huge glass of wine to knock myself out, and I went to sleep with an ice pack strapped on. By morning, voilà, un melon.

  Oh lá lá, cluck, cluck, cluck, the pharmacist says, the hornets from Asia! Poor thing, cluck, cluck, cluck, you are very lucky, it can kill you, this one! Comme ça—like this, she holds up her fingers to demonstrate almost three inches big. No kidding.

  The pharmacist is the first line of defense for the French. Many go years without ever seeing a doctor. Pharmacists here can diagnose, prescribe most medicines, give shots. Though they’re well-trained in holistic remedies and recommend them, the French love Western drugs. I had a raging sinus infection last time I was in Paris with a fever of 104 degrees and a very real desire to shoot myself in the head. I was prescribed, and took, no fewer than five powerful drugs, two of which are still not approved in the United States. I was stoned out of my mind but better in one day.

  Without a doctor’s visit, this petite young woman has given me antibiotics, something probably stronger than morphine, and the promise of a shot if it isn’t better by tomorrow. All for the cost of a cappuccino and a croissant.

  Once we tell her how much more drugs cost in our country, I leave there with a year’s supply of hormone replacement therapy. The hormones actually require a visit to a doctor but, Bouf! she says with a wave of the hand, you ’ave a right as a woman, you don’t need a doctor to tell you what you need! And voilà, a year of hot-flash relief for one-eighth the cost.

  It’s another thing about the French I just adore. They love to make lots of rules and then they love to break them if they’re seen as unnecessary or an affront to their rights as a citoyen. Strangers will argue passionately with one another in defense of their rights at the drop of a hat. Last time I was at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, a très petite woman in a pink Chanel suit got into it about her rights with a brawny young customs agent (in the States you wouldn’t say boo to any official who can throw you in jail). Four of his massive, handsome coworkers came, all waving les fingers, poufing, and yelling at her in unison with him. But, let me tell you, she held her own. In five minutes, they all reached agreement, which is what they desire after all, and she was waved through with a smile, which she returned as she clicked her sling-backs through the turnstile. Typical.

  They’ll also argue your rights. Chrystelle argues for ours regularly. She recently admonished a librarian who wouldn’t let us use their Internet. They are writers, madame, artistes! Last week we were walkin
g on a nearby trail when a restaurant appeared smack in the middle of the path, with a sign forbidding passage. “Bouf!” a diner exiting the place told us as she waved us in. “Who do they think they are? It is your right!”

  Sitting at Bar les Célestins at night feels like having drinks at the office. Except instead of sitting in the dim recesses of the bar waving our laptops around to pick up le wee-fee (wi-fi), we’re at a wobbly table in the plaza, where festival-goers and performers swirl around us in every direction. Roman whisks over with our drinks, snaking (as only those long, skinny legs can) between tables and humans.

  Across the street, a shirtless man who looks like Popeye leans out his third-floor window, tattooed arms crossed on his sill; his plump, elderly neighbor peers down over her geraniums. Three hundred years ago you could have gazed up and seen this exact same scene. Except, of course, for the posters plastered on the building wall between them, portraying two actors, one of whom looks remarkably like Rupert Sewell, with his finger up the nose of the other.

  The trunk of the giant plane tree in the plaza is wrapped with flyers and posters for concerts, recitals, classic plays. In the theatrical equivalent of the Salon des Refusés, the exhibit the Impressionists held after being refused into official salon, Festival Off is held outside the walls, and includes every other kind of play—lower budget, experimental, fringe; from the looks of the posters, most seem to involve a lot of yelling.

  Just beyond us, a young woman sings “La Vie en Rose” to little applause and even littler tips. She’s not bad, but Avignon’s academies turn out dozens of world-class vocalists every year. Avignon during the festival is an even tougher crowd. It doesn’t help that she dressed with little thought. It’s one thing to the French to look like you’ve dressed with little thought, quite another to actually dress with little thought.