My mother nods like she’s trying to understand, and a small sliver of gratitude opens inside me.
The truth is, Delacroix’s art isn’t even what attracted me to the museum. I don’t even think it holds a large collection of his paintings. But the museum is located in his former home, and it’s been left almost entirely intact. Visiting Delacroix’s house, I’ll be able to see the windows that filled his studios with light, the counters where he left his half-open paints, the mirrors he pursed his lips in front of when he agonized over whether his work was any good. I need to see it to believe that it was real—that a real artist lived in Paris and painted real things after he brushed his teeth and made eggs for breakfast. That he’s not just a name in a textbook. That I could be like him one day.
I don’t explain this to my mother, who I know would immediately point out that I’ve been to Grandpa’s house plenty of times. She won’t understand that a struggling artist from Naperville, Illinois, who worked at a car dealership and painted in his basement until he quietly established a major foothold in the art scene at age fifty is very different from a bohemian soul who spent his life in Paris, focused on nothing but his art.
Not that Alice asks me anything else about Delacroix. Instead, she stares at the green streak in my hair, absentmindedly playing with the front few inches of her own hair.
“Why did you do that to your hair? Doesn’t the bleaching destroy the cuticle?”
“No, I think my cuticle is perfectly healthy.” I eye her hair, more auburn than it used to be but still a pretty red unlike my mousy, nondescript brown. If I had inherited my mother’s hair, I probably wouldn’t have dyed my own.
Alice raises her eyebrows. “At least you’ll be over this”—she selects her word like it’s a macaron—“look by the time you’re applying for jobs.”
“Probably not, because this ‘look’ is what I like.” I take another sip of hot chocolate and let it sit on my tongue, partly to savor it and partly to keep me from saying something I’ll regret later.
“I’m just saying,” she starts again, “there wasn’t anyone at my office—” She stops herself midsentence. I look up, and her eyes are on me. “Let’s not fight this morning. We’re in Paris and it’s beautiful, and we should enjoy it.”
“Okay,” I say. And I mean it.
My mom calls over a waitress, a girl with skin that looks so perfect she doesn’t even need makeup and eyelashes like a cartoon skunk. Are all French girls this pretty? Is that why fashion magazines write about them (“Eat Breakfast like a French Girl!” “The Seven Style Essentials French Girls Want You to Know!”) like they’re mythological creatures?
“Excuse me, is this skim?” she says, lifting up the tiny silver pitcher of milk the waitress had brought with her coffee.
“Crème,” the waitress says, expressionlessly.
My mother visibly recoils. I wish I could sink into my chair and slither out the door. I wish I could move to a different table and pretend I never met the Ugly American complaining about the crème they bring for coffee.
“I need skim, please,” she says and hands the confused waitress both the cream and the cup of coffee that has been ruined by an unacceptable fat content.
“Crème for the coffee,” the waitress says. “Yes, milk.”
“Well,” my mother says, “is it milk or cream?”
The waitress looks at my mother, looks at me, then at the dairy in the tiny pitcher, then back at me. “Uh, milk?” she says. “Yes. Milk.”
My mother sniffs. “See, but you said it was cream, and now I’m worried it’s actually not milk.” She hesitates for a moment and then turns back to the waitress with a fake smile. “You know what? I’ll just get a cup of tea.”
The waitress raises her eyebrows but takes the dishes and heads off.
“So rude,” my mother says when the waitress is out of earshot.
“No, you were rude,” I say, and then I try to backtrack. “I mean, just go with the flow. It’s fine.”
“If I’m paying for coffee, I want it to be the way I want it. I don’t want to have to argue about whether I’m drinking milk or cream.”
“Fine,” I say.
I’ve already finished my hot chocolate by the time the tea arrives at our table. The awkwardness in the air is thicker than the richest cream you could buy in Europe.
* * *
Being in Paris makes me wonder how a place like Evanston, Illinois, even retains the will to live. How can any city dare to take up space and ink on a map when it doesn’t have cobblestone streets and robin’s-egg-blue roofs, or house a flurry of people too important to notice how beautiful everything is? None of the architecture in Paris has the clean, antiseptic lines of a suburb. The whole city vibrates with a density of culture and personalities that have built up, like rock sediment layering on top of itself, for centuries. An entire city block of street artists selling postcard-size paintings to tourists; a German couple affixing a lock to a bridge over the Seine; a school group giggling and shoving each other across the cobblestones; a man walking a cat on a leash. The place is pulling apart at the seams and sewing itself back together a million times a second.
I feel like Harry Potter when he goes through the brick wall behind the Leaky Cauldron and enters Diagon Alley for the first time: I wish I had better sight, better smell, better hearing, senses that haven’t even been discovered yet, so that I could capture the feeling of this city in a way that won’t eventually fade from my memory.
We pass a tiny bookshop, barely a full storefront, its sign a faded purple and its facade a bright blue: La Belle Hortense.
In the window sits a dense collection of books—some are familiar, most are not—with covers that could pass as a modern art installation. Without even venturing inside, I can imagine the smell (leather and stiff paper and Christmas trees and patchouli oil) and the countless stories that have unfolded just behind the shop’s glass window. I imagine anarchists meeting, ripping out pages surreptitiously; tourists falling in love; couples hiding from the rain; lonely souls looking for sanctuary. They all exist at once in that tiny place.
I hesitate, pulled toward the store by an invisible energy.
“Do you want to go inside?” my mother asks. I do, but as I pull toward the window, I notice the lights are off and bar stools are upside down on tables like strange fairytale antlers. “It’s closed,” I say. “Hours are seventeen to two.”
“Five P.M. to two A.M.,” my mother translates.
It’s a bar. A literary bar where, from the look of the counter, you pick up a new paperback and read while sipping a glass of wine. In that moment, I imagine an entirely new life for myself, where a faceless fiancé and I are regulars at La Belle Hortense, and the owner knows exactly which new releases I’ll be interested in and the exact right wines with which to pair them.
“We can come back!” my mom says, and I nod. But the truth is there are some places where you don’t quite belong yet. There’s no place here, in this bookstore that’s only open in the evenings, for Nora Parker-Holmes, the high school student from Evanston. I could walk inside, sure, but I’d be a tourist in every sense of the word. I’m not the me I need to be to belong in La Belle Hortense, and the realization fills me with a hollowness that I can’t quite describe.
My mother and I spend the afternoon wandering and shopping. Mom takes me to Longchamp and buys me a navy blue purse that I never would have bought for myself, with a price tag that makes me a little nervous for the both of us (“It’s a vacation,” she says. “We’re in Paris. Buy it where it’ll mean something to you!”).
After we walk through the chilly cavern of Notre Dame (and pick our favorite of the slack-faced gargoyles perched outside), we climb to the top of Montmartre and sit on the steps outside the white church, gazing down on the rooftops of the entire city. We’re surrounded by other people—tourists, locals, students—doin
g the same thing, but it’s still hard not to feel like we’re doing something special, something singular.
“I used to come here to study,” my mother says. “I’d just sit on these steps and read.”
“Did you read in French?”
Mom gives me a small smile. “I was supposed to! I did buy an English translation of a Zola book I was supposed to read, I do remember that.”
“Were you an English major? I didn’t know you were an English major.”
I try to imagine my mom, younger—not much older than I am now—her red hair in a ponytail, sitting on these very steps reading Shakespeare and Émile Zola, writing papers. It’s nearly impossible to picture. The closest I can get is an image of Alice, middle-aged, sitting in a college lecture hall.
“I was a semiotics major,” she says. “I don’t know if those programs even exist anymore.”
“I’ve never heard of it.” I don’t offer that I don’t actually know what the word “semiotics” means. Instead I say, “So, what did you want to be when you grew up? I mean—”
“I wanted to be a lawyer.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, but she looks at me with a sad, sideways smile.
Of course. No—Alice Parker never would have wanted to be anything that didn’t involve wearing a pantsuit and black shoes that clack on linoleum floors and ordering people around. It’s no wonder she’s never even opened her mind to the possibility that my career could be something else.
We sit on the steps for a few more minutes while a pigeon picks at crumbs perilously close to our feet.
It’s a warm summer afternoon, with a slight breeze carrying laughter and shouts from across the steps. We have an expansive view of the city beneath us like a doll set. It should be a perfect moment. I know that. But my mind keeps circling through concerns like an endless carousel: Mom is hiding something. Spin. She planned to come on this trip from the beginning. Spin. I bet she worked something out with Grandpa. Spin. What are Lena and Nick doing right now? Spin. Has he told her? Spin. I bet he told her. Spin. She’s going to hate me. Spin. Mom is hiding something. And around and around and around.
I clear my throat and check my phone. “Two thirty,” I say. “The Delacroix museum closes at five—we should start heading over.”
Mom stares out at Paris for a few seconds, and I wonder whether or not she heard me. Just as I’m about to repeat myself, she says, “One last place. There’s one more place I want to take you quickly—just for a quick coffee. We’ll be done by three and head over, plenty of time!”
“So, it’s a coffee shop?”
“Sort of. It’s . . . a bit of everything. I was there quite a lot when I studied here. It’s on the Rue La Fayette.” Her eyes search back and forth in the sky like she’s trying to remember something. I can’t tell whether it’s a good or bad memory. “Called Le Henrique,” she adds. “Hold on, let me check my phone.”
She pulls me toward a shady awning to get out of the way of the steady parade of tourists. She types infuriatingly slowly, and my hands itch to take the phone from her and do it myself. It’s like the Apple store teaches all parents the same terrible way to use their iPhones: Be sure to spend at least thirty seconds on a single word. Oh, and only use one finger while you type—it’ll drive your kids crazy!
“It’s not listed,” she murmurs, more to herself than to me. “Maybe I’m forgetting the name. Le . . . Honorie?”
“Wait, you don’t know the name? How are we supposed to know where we’re going?”
“I remember where it is,” my mother says.
“This better not take too long,” I say. It comes out harsher than I mean it to. Impatience has a way of calcifying my words. Luckily, she spares me a response.
7
“I’M PRETTY SURE it’s just around this corner,” my mother says for the fourth time in twenty minutes. The sun has sunk a little, dipping behind the uneven roofs that zigzag the streets with shade, and my faith is diminishing rapidly. I’m anxious and thirsty, and my feet hurt—damn Lena and her Parisians-are-always-so-fashionable rant—because we’ve been walking in circles in some forgotten corner of the city, and I’m wearing ballet flats that leave angry red welts where the shoes meet my skin.
This can’t possibly be a good neighborhood. The giant three-story shops housing luxury brands that I actually recognized have now been replaced by narrow jewelry stores and discount clothing shops, their windows covered by bars. Instead of women with blonde hair and linen dresses who look like they’d be on their way to a brunch regardless of the time of day, we pass skinny street punks with anarchist symbols on their ratty T-shirts and boots that look heavier than I am, and also men with potbellies wearing stained tank tops. A few of the men call out lewd comments as we walk by—even without understanding French, that tone and cadence is unmistakable—but my mother keeps an unflinchingly determined look on her face. “Le Henrique,” she mumbles under her breath.
“Do you really think you would’ve gone to a place this far from the campus?” It’s a legitimate question, but it comes out of my mouth sounding like something between a whine and an accusation.
“Yes, I do.” She can’t hide the hesitation in her voice.
After two more wrong turns, my mother’s steps have gotten faster, verging on frantic. I try not to think about the open wounds developing on my feet.
“Pardon,” she says to a stranger with a mustache. She approached him so quickly that I do a double take when I hear her voice. “Le Henrique? Owned by an American?”
“Oui! Oui!” The man is enthusiastic in the affirmative. I don’t understand what he’s saying, but I watch the panic drain out of my mother’s face as he speaks. He talks for a while—longer than directions to a bar would merit, I can’t help but think—punctuating his words with severe hand gestures.
So we set off again, down a new street that I’m sure shouldn’t be there but that has somehow materialized in the last few minutes. Paris has become a twilight labyrinth. We continue making turns for a few more minutes before finding ourselves in front of a street painter we’ve definitely encountered before.
“This can’t be right,” my mom says, mostly to herself.
I check my phone for the hundredth time. “It’s almost three thirty. We really need to head to the Delacroix.”
My mom looks back at me as if my presence is a surprise to her. “We’re almost there,” she says. “And I really want you to see this place.”
I brace myself. “Mom. I don’t even want to go to this place, and I need to get to the museum. As it is, I’m only going to have, like, an hour there.”
She gives one last look around, searching for something—a landmark, perhaps, or a sign for Le Henrique that she’s hoping will magically appear on one of the shops we passed. It’s the same look she had on her face when I came home from school and she told me that she and Dad needed to have “a talk” with me. I don’t like seeing that face. I look around too, wondering if it’s possible that Le Henrique can expand in the space between two buildings like Number 12 Grimmauld Place in Harry Potter. But all I see is a fishmonger and a shoe-repair store. I watch my mom for a little bit longer. Finally, she gives a resigned shrug, and we give up the search.
It doesn’t take us too long to get to the Musée Delacroix. “See, we made it,” my mom says. “Look, there are still some people going in now.” And she’s right—under a banner bearing the artist’s face, a well-dressed couple make their way through the museum’s entrance.
We cross the courtyard—I shuffle as fast as I can in the medieval torture devices masquerading as my shoes—and enter the museum like marathoners reaching the finish line.
“Two adults,” Mom says as the man behind the desk straightens his collar.
“Ah, apologies, but we do not let patrons enter the museum with less than an hour to closing.” He doesn’t sound very apologetic.
“But we
just saw two people go in,” I say in a voice louder than I intended.
The man’s expression doesn’t change at all. “They had—’ow you say—” Another girl in a museum employee uniform steps forward. “Re-ser-va-shuns,” she finishes for him.
“We’re perfectly happy just to spend fifty minutes here,” my mom says in full negotiation mode. “Please, my daughter has been dying to visit.”
The man shakes his head, but I don’t hear his response. I’m too busy fantasizing about using his own tie to strangle his stupid neck while the stupid girl behind him watches. She can make re-ser-va-shuns for the emergency room.
“Wait, hold on,” I say. “I’m sure we can figure something out. Just half an hour here.” Everyone goes silent; I’m not sure what I was interrupting. They look at me but say nothing. “But you’re closed tomorrow,” I say.
“Oui,” the man says.
My mother turns to look at me, and I can tell she feels guilty. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Really.”
I should appreciate her apology, but instead I fantasize about strangling her too.
“We came all the way to Paris,” I say, the desperation in my voice palpable. “I don’t know when I’m ever going to be back here again.” My plea falls on deaf ears.
“Let’s go.” My mother tries to put her arm around my shoulder, but I duck away.
“This is your fault!” I say. The museum employees are listening, but I don’t care. “If you hadn’t attempted to relive your youth and drag me around Paris looking for a place that probably closed a decade ago, I’d be in the Delacroix museum right now.”
“I know,” she says. “And I’ve apologized. I really am very sorry.”
“Why do you feel the need to control everyone and everything around you? This is my trip. I wanted to see this museum, but instead you manipulated me into following you on a wild goose chase. And now I’ve missed out on a great opportunity. And we’re leaving Paris, and I’m never going to be able to see the Delacroix museum.”
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