“Might be a joke,” said Quiola. “It could also be, well, just American kitsch. The colors and typeface look fifties, but I think the card’s a replica.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Somewhere in Paris.”
“Says here it was published by Petley Studios, Albuquerque, N.M.”
“Helpful.”
“Why did you buy it?”
Quiola put her hand out for the card, and smiled. “Because it’s so awful. And because it’s so – so –” she shrugged. “So American.” She folded the card inside a shirt. “I was homesick. When I found the card, it made me laugh, so I tacked it up over my desk – I know, it’s weird. But in Paris, it seemed less so. I mean, whenever I’d run across another American – even a loud, fraternity kid – I’d practically throw myself at them because I am American. I’ll never really be anything else. Even if I know that postcard is twisted, just plain wrong, I also think it’s typical, so American.”
“I see what you mean. Like those shops you find near a beach or a lake somewhere, Indian Trading Post. Genuine Indian trinkets.”
“Yeah. I was confused by those places, as a kid. I also wanted the doll and her papoose. Mother eventually broke down and bought me one, but she also taught me how to bead the old-fashioned way, so I could make myself, and my doll, more beautiful things that the crappy stuff it came with.”
“I’ve never seen you bead, or even wear anything beaded.”
Quiola sat down on her bed next to the suitcase. “No. I haven’t done that since I was a teenager. I stopped because everybody back then wore beaded flower necklaces. It was the ’70s, after all. Flower power. I remember, though, one Halloween, I dressed up like what I thought an Indian Princess would look like, and I made a beaded headdress but that pained Mother so, the next year I was a flapper. I had a straight white dress with fringes all over it, and an elastic headband with a feather in front – my Indian princess headdress from the Halloween before, worn backwards and covered in gold sequins. That was first time my Mother let me wear makeup like a real woman, with the lipstick and the eye-shadow where they were supposed to go. I had worn lipstick a few Halloweens before, when I was really little, but it was in a straight line from the side of my mouth to my chin–blood dripping down the side of a young vampire’s face. Anyway, flower-power, when it took over, never appealed to me. I didn’t want to be a flower child. I wanted to be a robot.”
“A robot? Seriously?”
“Seriously. It would be cool to be mechanical. So lean and chrome. Looking back, I suppose it was self-defense. A robot can’t get hurt.”
“It can break down.”
“Of course, but they can also be fixed, like a toaster or a car. That’s what I thought. But even mechanical things sometimes can’t be fixed.”
“Like the Heap. Like me.”
Quiola rested her hand on top of the suitcase and gave C.C. a look that said, without speaking: and this is why I have to leave, for now. When you say things like that.
“Well? It’s the truth, isn’t it? I’ll never be entirely the same.”
Quiola stared at the wood floor, silent.
“Goddamn it, Quiola. Can’t we even talk about this? I’m not the same, I’ll never be the same, and there’s no guarantee I’ll even make it. You ask me to promise to get well, but you can’t really ask me, for your sake, to believe in a miracle, can you? You can’t just ignore the fact that I’ve been bent, spindled and mutilated, that I’m sick, and that you’re leaving.”
“I’m not leaving, leaving. I’m coming back. Three weeks.”
“Fine! I stand corrected. I’ll be alone for three weeks.”
“But you won’t be alone! There’s Margaret next door, and then Valerie will be here – and you said you’d be all right, you said it was a good idea! I can cancel my trip –”
“No. That would be a mistake.” She glanced up warily. “For both of us.”
“Yes, it would. I need to get – I’m sorry, C.C. I need a break. I’m not perfect.”
“Neither am I,” said C.C. quietly. “Neither am I.”
♦
“Mom.” Her long, thick dark hair in a single braid down her back, Quiola stood solemn, a point of stillness in her blue Catholic school uniform. The cramped kitchen bustled, as the first wave of the dinner hour swung into tempo at Rose Garden. Tucked into a corner of the Lower East Side, the tiny restaurant had grown hot as a furnace with local traffic. Rose Otter turned away from the gas stove she’d been supervising at the sound of her daughter’s voice. A spry woman, Rose Otter was just thirty; her employees called her Mrs. Dynamo.
“What is it, Quiola? You can see how busy we are. Why don’t you go upstairs and start on homework? Then come back in an hour or to help us out. Tonight looks like a rush already. But then it is Friday –”
“Mom, I – I don’t feel well.”
Rose frowned. She touched the shoulder of the woman standing at the stove beside her. “Britta? Can you handle this by yourself?”
“Sure, no problem – it’s early yet. Go on.”
Rose wiped her hands on her chef’s apron, and laid a palm against Quiola’s forehead, her gaze full of concern. “I don’t think you’re running a fever.”
“No, it’s not like that,” said Quiola lowering her voice to no more than a whisper, which got lost in the clamor of pots, flares, chopping, dicing, the fragrance of onion and garlic, vegetables simmering, meat sizzling.
“Hey,” said Rose to a young man. “Watch how much of that oil you use! I’m not Mrs. Gotrocks, ya know! So tell me, Quiola, how don’t you feel well?”
“I’m sick.”
“To your stomach?”
“Not exactly. Maybe. Please, Mom, can’t we talk about this upstairs?”
“Have you lost your mind? Do you see what’s going on here, hmm? Dinner. I can’t just leave and you know it. Quiola, honey, what is wrong with you? Do you have a headache? I don’t think it can be flu, you aren’t running a fever and you don’t look flushed.”
“Order up, number nine!” cried Britta. “Now, George!”
“Never mind,” said Quiola. “I’ll go up and lay down.”
“Do you think aspirin would help?”
Quiola gave her mother a tragic look. “No.”
“Honest to Peter, Quiola, why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
“I can’t. Not here.”
Rose folded her arms and looked her daughter over. “All right, then, let’s go. Britta? Be back in five?”
“No problem, boss.”
Nodding, Rose threaded her way through the orchestra of preparation that was her restaurant’s kitchen ballet, to a set of back stairs that led to her apartment. Quiola followed, watching her mother’s small back and slightly hunched shoulders, wondering how to say, how to tell her mother what she knew: she was dying.
Once they’d gotten inside, and the noise from below muted to a distant rumble, Rose felt her daughter’s forehead again, and took a bottle of aspirin out of a kitchen shelf. She filled a glass from the tap, gestured for Quiola to sit at the little kitchen table beside an open window, and sat opposite to her. “All right, honey. Tell me. What’s wrong?”
Quiola shook her head, then lowered it, to stare at her feet.
Rose waited. After a few more tense moments she said. “It’s not a boy. Tell me it’s not a boy? Not that no-good Romero you went around with last year?”
“Mom, we were just friends. He’s funny.”
“Funny or crazy. Depends on how you look at it but I say friends like that one you don’t need.”
“Well it’s not him. It’s not a boy. You’ve warned me a thousand times –”
“With good reason. You don’t need to make the same mistake I did.”
“Fine. That’s not it, anyway – I – I think I’m dying.”
“You think… for heaven’s sake, Quiola what a thing to say to your mother! Why do you think you’re dying?”
“I’m bleedi
ng and it won’t stop. I’ve soaked right through the toilet paper I stuffed…up…there…I’m dying, Mama. I couldn’t tell the nuns – it’s too awful to be bleeding….”
“Down there? Oh, sweetheart, it’s all right. You’re fine! You’re not dying, you’re just growing up. Don’t you remember I told you about the flower – the monthlies. I told you it would probably start soon, just a few weeks ago.”
Quiola stared. “But you said it would just be a little – not like this, I’m bleeding.”
Rose stood up. “I thought you would be like me, a little trickle at first. But of course we aren’t all the same. Some of us start with a flood. Your grandmother did – but she had her old-fashioned ways of handling it, and said it just made her proud. Proud! Of the curse? Let me get you what you need – you’ve seen my pads, haven’t you?”
“Curse?”
Rose turned around. “Don’t you think so? Most of my friends call it the curse. A mess like that, every month and for what? To have a baby – thank god you’re bleeding and not pregnant is all I have to say.”
♦
Paris, 1960. C.C. traveled aboard a steamer, to live in the City of Light for a while, with Liz Moore. Paul had willed Lizzie everything, having no one else, which included a Paris studio he hadn’t used since before the War, and it was in that one, high-ceilinged room, the kitchen a mere hotplate wedged into a closet with a sink and a glass fronted door, so the ‘kitchen’ could be closed off from the ‘dining room’ and miniscule bathroom, that she’d found a certain peace about his passing. Not an entirely peaceful peace, lined like a too-thin linen garment with a sheer slip of fear: what would she do now, without him?
Yet more immediately that summer she had another question: what was she going to do with Nancy’s daughter? Twenty-four, all grown but as far as Liz could see, Smith College hadn’t changed the Davis girl much, though it had given her the veneer of a sophisticate – she smoked, drank martinis, wore the latest, no matter what it was – but then again, most middle-class American girls in 1960 feigned so much world-weary sophistication. C.C. was no different than the rest: she arrived off ship with a Samsonite set, complete with pert little make-up bag, though Liz knew C.C. never made up.
Must be Nancy’s doing, she thought, as she gave the girl a customary Parisian kiss; predictably, C.C. found the unfashionable 11th arrondissement studio appalling. It took her a week to give up her white gloves, and she never quite stopped walking on her toes in the morning, sure the place had mice: it didn’t. What it did have was birdsong in the bathroom, some kind of acoustic trick that funneled the lark and pigeon tweets down the roof and into the bathroom, as if the birds had nested in the pipes.
One Sunday morning found Lizzie with Le Monde, late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair on the enclosed patio. The cracked cement floor was as dingy as the dead delphinium and sagging clothesline, but she was reasonably happy. She restricted her view to the oranges and the dark sweet coffee or, better still, when she leaned back, to the sky, past the backs of the apartments with the shuttered Sunday windows, their mute façades. She’d taken, lately, to watching birds, an idling sort of interest, born of loneliness.
“What are you doing?” asked C.C. from the solitary window that looked out on the front patio.
“What does it look like? I’m writing a piano concerto.”
“It looks like lazy to me.”
“And just what should I be doing?”
C.C. stepped out onto the patio, barefoot, wearing a man’s shirt, her hair braided into a knot at the back of her neck. She looked every inch a well-scrubbed American.
Lizzie regarded her houseguest appraisingly. “Lovely.”
“Do you think so?” C.C. made a quick pirouette.
“Of course. I’ve always thought you were a pretty child.”
“I’m not a child.”
Liz tipped back her chair. “Aren’t you?”
“No. I wish you’d stop treating me like one. I want to go out to the bars and cafés at night. I want to hear jazz, and dance. I want to meet…” she hesitated, her glance on the ground. Then she gave Liz a frowning look. “I want to meet a girl.”
Liz sat very still, tipping the chair back into place. “What sort of girl?”
C.C. said nothing. Slowly, she sat down on the stoop.
“I see,” said Liz. “Have you told your mother?”
“Oh, no. Not Dad, either. I can’t. They’d be so – shocked.”
“You’ll have to tell them someday.” Liz folded the paper. “Sooner or later. I won’t lie to them. I couldn’t. Not to Nancy.”
“I know.”
“And are you sure? Sometimes, you know, it passes, that feeling. You’re young.”
C.C. laughed. “I’d be lying if I said I wanted a boy. I’ve tried. I dated a couple Amherst guys, my freshman year, whooo, what a mistake! I couldn’t stand them, not at all, the very idea of petting made me queasy. I couldn’t get away fast enough. I thought, of course, that there was something wrong with me, but to whom could I spill the beans? Then one night, late, I was talking to this other girl in my dorm – we were in French class together – and I told her, well, I told her how much I couldn’t stand boys and the next thing I know, she’s kissing me. And I liked it. I liked it a lot. We became roommates. Her name’s Susan Perry.”
“And you fell in love with this Susan Perry?”
“Yes.”
“And where is she now?”
C.C. pouted. “I don’t know. When she found out I had a ticket to Paris she threw a fit. ‘You’re not going without me!’ she kept shouting, but how could I bring Suz? I couldn’t ask Mom and Dad for another ticket, and I couldn’t see myself asking you to put us both up. I haven’t heard from her since I left the States. I wrote. Nothing. No offense, Liz, but I’m –”
“Horny,” said Liz.
C.C. blushed, then, to the roots of her pale hair and stared at the concrete floor.
Liz stood, and smoothed out the front of her summer dress. “We need bread and cheese for lunch so I’m going to run up to the bakery. Why don’t you get dressed? After lunch we can go by that gallery I told you about. Tonight you can go wherever you please. I won’t ask too many questions.”
C.C. looked up, almost in tears. “But…I wouldn’t know where to go!”
“You don’t think I would know, do you?”
“You knew Gertrude Stein.”
Liz laughed. “Knew? I met Stein, once, a long time ago. If you were an American artist in Paris at that time, you ended up at 27. But believe me, she had no use for any girl other than that Alice, whose job it was to shoo all the wives and women into a corner under those goddamn floating doves or love-birds on the wallpaper, while Gertrude held forth to the men. I believe she was of the opinion that women weren’t really artists, which made my blood boil. Besides, that was a long time ago and, well, a different world. I wouldn’t know how to locate – what you’re looking for.”
“Me and Suz found a bar in New York.”
“Of course you did.”
“But here – I don’t know. I don’t know –”
“You don’t know the territory,” said Liz. “Well, honey, neither do I. But I do know how to manage the baker. So go get dressed. Maybe between the two of us we can dope something out and come up with a solution.”
Which turned out to be a round-trip transatlantic ticket for Susan Perry. Liz didn’t want C.C. wandering about or sitting in some bar, hoping to meet some girl, when the person she really wanted, after all, was Susan.
5. Run Away
On the concrete patio of the Paris studio, under a cloudy sky, Quiola finished a cup of black coffee. At nearly two o’clock in the sticky August warm, the day dragged. She pushed back from the small wire table, hunted up an umbrella and then, locking the studio’s grille behind her, walked to the 20th arrondissement.
Cimitière Père Lachaise, the largest garden in Paris, is renowned for its eclectic mixture of famous, infamous and obscure dea
d, all jammed together in a miniaturized version of the city. Americans often make a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave, but not Quiola. Striding off the broad, living street and through the high gateway in the graveyard, she hurried past tourists. The Avenue Principale, lined with marble coffins and mausoleums, some neglected, some with flowers or new glass, set among headstones and trees, is one of the least narrow. Sunlight dappled cobbles as she approached the Monument Aux Morts, with its sobering and weird sculptural reminder of the direction we are all headed in; then she took a series of cement stairs, winding her way past tombs wedged shoulder to shoulder, over to the Avenue de St. Mary to stroll beside Etienne Godde’s elaborate cement coffins for Molière and La Fontaine. But she had a destination: the Gassion-Piaf Famille’s granite gravestone.
Standing beside the high-polished marble memorial, sweating in the heat, she wished to hear the singer’s voice again. But she hadn’t brought any Piaf overseas with her, and buying anything, from a newspaper to supper, was so unnerving she wouldn’t dare try for a CD. No matter how many times she visited France, no matter how long she stayed, a command of anything remotely like spoken French eluded her. She could read, she could understand, but she could not make her tongue or lips serve the soufflé of vowels and sibilants with the proper lift. No matter how wonderful the bread, she had never managed the alchemy that made the French word for it, “pain,” translate into anything other than the English word, pain.
After a few moments, she walked out to the shady Avenue Circulaire, to the very minimal concrete slab for Gertrude Stein. The newly mown grass was sweet, and someone had left a fresh rose. She tried to remember Liz Moore’s pithy account of Stein, but failed.
“I’ll have to ask,” she murmured aloud and walked on.
Lingering in the city of the dead did not bother her as much as did all the shuttered tight, forbidding second and third story windows she passed as she re-entered the Paris of the living. The absolute refusal of those dark evergreen shutters saddened her, as did the rain, which came down all at once, as if in a hurry to drench pedestrians. She had to leap over a massive puddle gathered at a street corner housing a tiny children’s park, complete with a carousel of rocketships to ride. Close to the studio, she gave up on a meal out, and went home. Slipping off sodden, grayed-out tennis shoes, rolling off damp cotton socks, she tiptoed across the cold wood floor to the calendar tacked on the wall beside the desk and crossed off the day.
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