Plum Blossoms in Paris

by Sarah Hina

  All in all, I’m loosening him up a little.

  But he’s still got that fierce disdain for America as an Idea, for America as the Great Homogenizer, I lament, arriving at my destination on the Champs Elysées, that shamelessly global boulevard in Paris where the Gap, Häagen Dazs, and Louis Vuitton comingle in a classless orgy of consumerism. I consider Mathieu’s championing of the French way of life laudatory, as I am beginning to appreciate their insistence on fresh food and taking things slow, but would love to prove that he is capable of succumbing to those frothy experiences he righteously rants and rails against.

  And so it is that, enjoying a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream outside of a movie theater featuring a poster of Tom Cruise, sans smile, with gun, I hatch a wonderful plan. Not only will Mathieu learn to embrace America’s fun side; he will have the pleasure of living in America—or in a stylized, Pop Art America—for an entire day. After all, if I am to go without gorditas and The Daily Show for the remainder of my days, he can put up with a smidge of retribution.

  Not that I really see it like that, of course. I’m simply inviting him to the Happiest Place on Earth.

  “Darling.”

  “Yes.”

  “My turn today.”

  “Hmm?”

  “My turn, my turn.”

  “I’m listening,” he says, eyebrow cocked.

  I roll over, playfully pinning him. “My turn to play tour guide.”

  He smiles drowsily. “And where will you take me?”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “If it’s with you,” he murmurs, nuzzling my ear. The poor dear.

  There is no gentle way of breaking it.

  “Disneyland. We are going to Disneyland Paris.”

  He loses his smile, and groans. Mathieu sloughs me off as easily as he might Beckett. Sitting up in bed, he places his head in his hands. “No, Daisy. It is not possible.”

  He says this in the same way people speak of peace in the Middle East. I run a hand up his neck, ruffling that hair which continues its backward progress. There has not been the time, or inclination, for haircuts, appointments, work: the clocking of real life. Our gears have seized at some graceful Nowhereland. I brace his head gently, but forcibly, making him look at me. “You can do it,” I say. Stifling the urge to laugh, I declare, “I will see you through the whole of it, and I promise you this: we will escape unscathed.”

  His expression is that of a little boy who is told that he will have to go to summer school instead of baseball camp. A positive pout on those pensive lips that love to argue and kiss with equal fury and abandonment. It is the opposite of my reaction to theannual Disneyland pilgrimage, taken during the summer vacations spent with my grandparents. I was a different person in California. Nothing was expected. I was lazy, happy—afloat.

  Never was the world more a blissful convergence than on the days when my mom and grandmother accompanied Henry and me to Anaheim’s Disneyland. We arrived early and left late. I loved the faux nostalgia of strolling down Main Street, with its marble-tiled ice cream parlor, where you could find lollipops the size of your head and overpriced Mickey ears to be discarded the next day, when the magic ran out; I loved the sensory thrill of Thunder Mountain, where the wind whipped through my hair for a short pluck of time well earned by long lines and enforced cowboy music; I even loved “it’s a small world” with its pretty promise of world harmony and that damnably catchy refrain that massaged my mind until I marched to its insistent metronome; and mostly, I loved my grandmother, a vigorous consumer of things and people, buying me a new doll with each visit—and not any old Minnie or Mickey—but exotic dolls from around the world, dressed in romantic costumes that bore no resemblance to cultural truth. They were prettier than anything real or, until then, imagined. I remember the French doll perfectly: she was a cancan dancer. I fingered the lace on her silk pantaloons, not understanding what they were all about, but knowing that they felt as soft as her name sounded: Gigi.

  I know what Mathieu thinks. To him, Disneyland is like The Matrix: manufactured living for the slobbering masses. Walt Disney may as well have lobotomized me, before plugging me into a shared, commercial imagination, where Goofy did the thinking for all of us. Gowsh, folks! A warm wet dream. A fiction. A lie.

  This is hard to argue. There is a reason you cannot see the outside world in Disney parks. They (a sinister word itself, especially when talking about giant corporations inclined toward soft mind control) want to induce a break from reality, a pleasure park for thesenses, where the gratification is born more from having expectations met than confounded. I’m sure Mathieu objects to all of it: the corporate hegemony, the trite machinations spelled out in singsong voices of enlarged, even grotesque, cartoon figures, adults made equally grotesque by the aping of their children, the stock, phony cheeriness of the workers, and the hard bottom line supporting it all. It is a French nightmare. One influential critic, upon the park’s opening outside Paris, described it as a “cultural Chernobyl.” I know this because I am a long subscriber to the Mouse Savers Newsletter. There was some protestation by the enthusiastic—okay, rabid—ladies who followed this controversy that the French didn’t deserve “the Disney experience.”

  I’m inclined to agree. After all, not everything in life needs to be examined from all angles, its intentions weighed and argued until it becomes more abstraction than reality. We don’t often get a chance to touch upon the pleasures of childhood, and Disneyland may be the closest thing we have to a fountain of youth. Even if it’s bought and paid for by nervous stockholders swollen with quarterly expectations.

  “But Daisy, why would you want to?” Mathieu finally asks. “It is like going to London, and having the chance to go to the Tate, where the art is alive and magnificent and difficult, and instead waiting in line with the herd at Madame Tussauds’, so you can have your picture taken with The Beatles.”

  “Ooh, can we do that when we go? I call Paul,” I squeal, flipping my hair behind my shoulders. “No, John … no, definitely Paul. He’s the cute one.”

  He throws up his hands, muttering something in French. He probably called me a little artichoke, without its heart.

  “Mathieu, you are being ridiculous.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for telling me this. There is nothing more absurd than someone who is ignorant of his own absurdity. It’s what makes your Britney Spears so amusing.” He looks at me evenly. “Perhaps it is you who is being absurd.”

  My Britney Spears? I throw on my shirt, neglecting my bra, and bark, “Is that right?”

  “Yes. What is more ridiculous than an American, coming for the Parisian experience, who begs her French boyfriend to go to the most typically American, and bourgeois, tourist attraction in the whole of Europe?”

  “I don’t beg. If you won’t go with me, I’ll go by myself.” I start with my pants but can’t seem to work the zipper.

  “Have fun.” He waves me off, turning toward the infernal typewriter. “Give my apologies to Mickey Mouse and Michael Eisner.”

  The fucking teeth of the zipper are gnashed together, off their marks. I struggle, but it won’t budge. “Merde!” I scream, jamming the thing for good.

  Mathieu turns to stare at me before bursting into laughter. He springs at me, kissing my heated brow. “But you see,” he says, lifting my chin and smiling into my eyes, “you are more French than you realize.”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “How American can you manage?”

  He contemplates the set of my jaw and swallows something. “On y va.”

  My shoulders slump. “I’m not French yet.”

  Mathieu zips up his own pants effortlessly. “On y va!” He turns toward the door. “Off we go.”

  Chapter

  24

  The Top Ten Things that Daisy doesn’t miss about America:

  1) Local TV news.

  2) Fox News.

  3) Walmart.

&nbs
p; 4) Christmas starting at Halloween.

  5) Road rage.

  6) Pickup trucks with

  a) Calvin pissing on a Chevy/Ford

  b) Dale Earnhardt devotionals

  c) Sportsmen for Bush stickers

  d) Jesus fish/Jesus fish eating Darwin thingy, or

  e) all of the above.

  So pretty much all pickup trucks then.

  7) The soul-sucking apathy.

  8) Those awful local TV commercials wherein a car salesman/carpet salesman/chimpanzee salesman shamelessly uses his children/spouse to vomit-inducing bad effect in order to hock some cars/carpet/chimpanzees.

  9) Paris Hilton.

  10) Living like I have something to prove.

  The Top Ten Things that Daisy does, in fact, miss about America:

  1) Being awakened by the Saturday Morning Lawn Brigade.

  2) My crappy car.

  3) Mama Santo’s pizza in Little Italy.

  4) My dog.

  5) My parents.

  6) My brother (hey, what the hell).

  7) Walmart.

  8) Smiling and nodding hello to people on walks and not having them look at me like I have escargot oozing from my ears.

  9) Andy’s obsession with the World Series, especially with the Red Sox and all.

  10) Feeling comfortable in my own skin.

  11) Oh, and Disneyland.

  The sweet anticipation is the same. I feel it accelerating the RER to the park, which is about twenty miles outside Paris. Our car overflows with electric Americans, snapping their gum and T-shirted up, and I smile good-naturedly at my equally toothy countrymen. Next to the world-weary Mathieu, they look like the friendliest souls in the world. The kids are excited and can’t sit still, so they start a friendly game of “let’s do crazy shit for as long as they let us get away with it” in the aisles. Their harried parents check the batteries in their video cameras and look distractedly at brochuresfor the main attractions, plotting their plans of attack and making adjustments to original allowances for discretionary spending. A sunburned boy, about five, who wears a Hulk T-shirt and whose name I have learned with the thoughtful aid of his mother’s admonishment—“You’re not a fire engine, Campbell!”—trips up to Mathieu and stares somberly into his face. It is remarkable how naked kids are. Watch Mathieu squirm with something akin to insecurity.

  “Are you American or those other people?” Campbell finally asks, brown eyes crinkling with suspicion.

  Mathieu’s body bunches closer to the train window. He smiles uncertainly and says, “One of the others, I’m afraid.”

  Campbell nods dejectedly. “Thought so.” He does a strange twisting thing, balancing briefly on his Nike tiptoes, and tumbles toward the other kids, forgetting us in the blink of a long-lashed eye.

  Mathieu folds his arms over his chest and, looking peevish, ruminates on the nothing view.

  I poke at him. “What? Are you bothered by that adorable little boy?”

  He shrugs. “How do you think he knew?”

  Laughing, I tease, “Maybe because you’re the only one on the train who looks like he’s bound for Auschwitz, not Disneyland.”

  Mathieu rolls his eyes at my hyperbole and leans on the window for support. I might be enjoying this a little too much.

  “So why no kids if you think they are so adorable?”

  Grrr . …

  He gestures toward Campbell, who is now pretending to be a motorcycle. Or a Nascar driver. God knows. His mother, conquered, has her eyes closed and rests her head back on the seat, while his father booms into his cell phone, lamenting to someone called “Man” that vacations with kids are no kind of vacation at all. His dewy-eyed daughter, nonplussed by her father’s desire to be rid of her, placidly sucks her thumb on his lap. Her Three Princesses shoelights up as she kicks it rhythmically against the seat, and her pink T-shirt reads, in silver glitter, I Know I’m Cute, So What’s Your Excuse?

  “What was the question again?”

  Mathieu has swiped my smirk. “I see. So you want to be the eternal child instead of having children of your own.”

  “Nope. You see the look on that mother’s face over there? That horrible combination of exhaustion, worry, and resignation that warps her otherwise lovely face? Well, that’s why I don’t want kids. They’re cute and everything, but a life with kids is no kind of life at all,” I say, paraphrasing the words of the battle-scarred father over there. “Not if you prize personal space and sleeping in on Sundays.”

  “As I said, the eternal child.”

  “And you think your lifestyle right now would really support kids?” I retort, my dander up. He has a habit of cloaking loaded subjects in that light, irreverent tone. We had a balls-out fight about my using his typewriter the other day that started by his coyly announcing, “André Gide almost knifed a man who once touched his typewriter.” Real subtle stuff. “What, Mathieu, would they sleep cozily on the windowsills with Beckett? Crawl on their dimpled knees to the rooftop with us at night? Read a lispy Proust in lieu of Dr. Seuss?”

  “You don’t have to indulge children with material things, Daisy, to make them feel loved and secure. Kids are happy with very little,” he says, very precisely, like a boy reciting his catechism. Or in a good imitation of what he thinks a father ought to sound like.

  “Well then, our kids would be the happiest on the planet.”

  Mathieu’s lips thin. “I knew you were not happy with the way we live.”

  “I am happy with it, Mathieu. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the bare necessities of raising a child. About having to get a real job. About me having to suffer thegauntlet of bureaucracy and apply for citizenship to get that job. About having the time, and not just the money, to devote to kids. About not being able to do things like this on a moment’s notice.” I tick the items off my air-list, sinking into my seat just as the train pulls into the station. “So if loving one’s freedom means being a child, then I guess we both are hopeless babies.”

  Feeling guilty for abandoning his tour guide duties to live off my money, Mathieu starts sputtering about what having “a real job” means. While I, feeling like my father’s hand just smacked the joy right out of me, float away . …

  He wants me to recant on the children thing. I took him at his word that he was all right with my decision, when it is clear he senses an absence of female legitimacy within me. It is partly my fault for believing him before; he was wet and lusty, after all, which is never a good time to take a man at his word. Now I am lacking. If I were to become a bad mother, that would be one thing, and perhaps even anticipated. But to not feel the urge toward procreation—a radical form of womanly nihilism to many still, a generation after my mother insinuated herself into all-male bands—jars him out of his comfort zone. Mathieu requires a Mommy figure in his life more than the kids. And he needs the chance to prove to himself that he would do things differently, that he is not the sum total, or subtraction, of his parents’ flaws, but a man with his own myth to sell. I wonder if it is a compulsion of most abandoned or neglected children to surround themselves with a family of their own someday, to fill one’s life with noise and chaos, and plug up the terrifying void that came before. Mathieu is twenty-eight years old. That is a long time to endure in silence. It is no small wonder he never shuts up.

  Yet I am twenty-three. I realize now how ridiculous my fantasies of marrying Andy were: no better, really, than the little princess playing dress-up in mom’s ill-fitting clothes. I am notready to fill that oversized role. Look at Campbell’s mother, who is over forty. She likely waited until her thirties to get married, after finishing school and establishing herself in a career and achieving satisfaction on her own before the inevitable—well, anyway. My biological clock hasn’t been wound yet, and may not exist. I forget to feed Beckett now and again because I am still a kid. And I’m fine with that. I thought he was too. Two dumb kids with nothing to lose, dancing a tango on the rooftops of Paris.

>   We are here. At the Happiest Place on Earth. Yet I feel like the most miserable creature on this Picasso-blue planet.

  “—if my being a writer makes you embarrassed, or ashamed, then—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Wha—”

  “Just shut up.”

  He leans back as the rest of the travelers, happy and expectant cherubs with only minor clouds—those wispy, cirrus things—on their Nebraska blue horizons, spill noisily out of the car. They leave a gray vacuum in their wake. The car is deathly quiet, paused, while awaiting our decision. Stay, or go.

  “I know what I said before.” He sighs, overlooking my rudeness. “About it.”

  “I know what you said, too,” I say, not apologizing. We stare at the worn seats before us. The threads are unraveling.

  “It seems like such a small thing.”

  My missing period weighed like a stone in my gut.

  “Not really. It seems huge.”

  “I meant for me. I did not know that I cared so,” he explains, shaking his head.

  Hearing the sincerity in his confession, I turn toward him more compassionately.

  “I guess I am getting older.”

  And that’s true. Five years divide us. When I look back to the person I was at eighteen, I see a grub. Everything was in place for me to grow, but that thing wasn’t me yet. Who’s to say how I may feel about Daisy at twenty-three when I am Daisy at twenty-eight? It’s irrelevant. I can only act on my present convictions. Just as Mathieu is.

  I can tell by the hitch in his voice that having kids does not fit into Mathieu’s romantic idea of himself. Did Sartre have kids? Maybe bastard ones, if that. Mathieu knows that children are parasites, of the chubby-cheeked, lovable genus, yes, but still parasites. They survive by taking something from their parents. Call it life force, passion, or freedom. It all tastes delicious to the little darlings.

  My mother only plays the piano when she has to, now.