But the truth is, I don’t always feel like working. Sometimes I’ll procrastinate for hours with a blank canvas in front of me, watching YouTube videos that I’ve already seen so many times I’ve memorized all the words. I’ll wash a canvas with a background color and tell myself it needs to dry for three times longer than it actually does, during which time I will play Tetris and sing along to the Les Mis soundtrack alone in my room. It was so easy to put things off before I was staring, sink or swim, at the prospect of actually making art my career.
Sometimes I’ll be two brushstrokes into a painting before I remember that I had an urgent appointment to make myself a snack, and then I’ll conveniently forget to go back to the painting for the next four days. Inspiration feels like a temperamental housecat who shies away and pretends I don’t exist when I want to cuddle her. It’s usually only once I’m actually painting that inspiration creeps up behind me and rubs against my legs.
But now I’m leaving the museum feeling completely inspired. Whoever invented the museum would be so happy if he could see me now, totally fulfilling his mission. The sun is out, the sky is blue—every Electric Light Orchestra song just makes so much more sense. I’m in such a good mood that I have to wonder if it’s actually because this is the first time in forty-eight hours I’ve been away from my mother for more than a few minutes.
Probably not.
Maybe.
Possibly.
Okay, almost definitely.
I sit in a coffee shop and look for a waitress. I plan on ordering coffee in perfect French (“Café,” this version of me says, in a sexy accent, a cigarette drooping from my fingers), but when she actually approaches, I get tongue-tied and say, fully and completely in English, “Hi, can I get a coffee please and a croissant sorry thank you?”
Her face shows no sign of understanding, but she doesn’t ask any follow-up questions, and a few minutes later, she returns with a tiny espresso cup balancing on a tiny saucer in one hand and a croissant in the other. She drops them at my table like it was an accident and leaves without making eye contact.
I devour half the croissant in a bite and a half, and I scan the café for a subject to draw. I’m sitting by the window, and the sunlight hits me in a strong, warm beam. I take off my cardigan and pull out my notebook as quietly as I can, trying not to be any more of a public disturbance than I already have been by being The Girl Who Spoke Loud and Obnoxious English in a French Café.
Who can I draw? There are the tween-looking girls sitting in the corner with glitter belts and headbands pulled down across their foreheads, gossiping. And then their middle-aged counterparts two tables down: two women, both in white button-downs and red lipstick, drinking wine. I could draw the businessman drinking multiple espressos and reading a newspaper, but then I see the waitress in the corner.
She’s standing, looking out at the restaurant, but her eyes aren’t latching onto anything in particular. It looks like she’s on break, but she’s not sitting, or smoking, or talking. She’s just leaning in the darkest corner of the restaurant in midday, slightly hunched.
I reach into my bag to pull out charcoal, but when my fingers close around a pencil, I decide that clean, tight pencil lines are definitely a better course of action. Any concern I had about my staring being obvious fades away; the waitress is standing still and shows no signs of moving anytime soon. Her long brown hair is pulled into a high ponytail, and there’s a weariness to her expression. The longer I look, the older she seems. The lines on her face jump out at me. Her entire body becomes geometry.
You know that feeling you get when you see a word so many times it stops looking like a word? Like “bowl.” “Bowl” may seem like a perfectly normal word, but if you stare at it long enough, or say it enough times in your head—bowl, bowl, bowl, bowl—it starts to sound and look like a foreign language. That’s what it feels like as I look at the waitress, then back at my drawing pad, and then at the waitress again. I watch as she becomes nothing but angles: the pitch of her elbow against her pelvis, the rhombus of light across her nose, the negative space between her legs.
When a shadow passes over my page, I swat angrily at the air around my head, hoping whatever is causing it will go away.
“’Ello, hi,” says a voice from above me. I briefly look up to see a man with a good jawline and salt-and-pepper hair. He’s smiling. “You’re American, yes?” He gestures to my pad. “An artist?”
I look up at him and then look back down. “Yeah.”
I can tell he’s smiling from my peripheral vision. He leans down to try to see what I’m drawing, but I don’t move my elbow from blocking his view, and eventually he gives up. “My friend runs a small gallery just up the avenue. Would you want to come see it?”
I remain silent as I try to get the angle of the waitress’s nose just right. “I’m working,” I say. And then I say nothing else. He gets the hint. Cute as he is, I’m not about to run off with some stranger in a French café, especially not when I’m so close to creating a drawing that might actually be good. No flirtation is as satisfying as the feeling of finishing a drawing exactly the way I want it. I wish Nick were here to see me, turning down a handsome French stranger. Jesus, no, I’m not thinking of Nick now. I don’t care what he sees or doesn’t see.
I briefly wonder whether Lena is still my best friend or not, whether Nick’s told her and now they both hate me. The thought makes my insides twist like an empty Coke can being crushed. I push it out of my head and think only about the woman in front of me.
I sketch for the rest of her break. It can’t have been longer than five minutes, but when she sighs, stretches one leg forward, and walks back toward the kitchen, I put my notebook down. My fingers ache; I didn’t even realize how tightly I had been gripping the pencil.
At first I’m proud. It’s a good drawing; anyone could tell you that. The waitress’s limbs and features are in the right proportion, the drawing is shaded well, and it’s . . . interesting. But the woman on the page doesn’t look like the waitress. I didn’t capture her sadness, her anxiety, the forlorn way she stared at nothing in particular like the girl in the absinthe painting.
My first instinct is to tear the page up—to rip it out of my notebook and then into as many tiny pieces as I can manage, covering the café floor with paper snow. But it is a good drawing. It may not be right, but it is good.
I think about my grandpa’s note. Do I feel like I know her? From my drawing, this is who I imagine she is: She’s in her mid-thirties, living with a man name Jean-Claude who works as a tour guide and can’t commit himself to marriage. He cheated once, long ago, and though he swore he’s reformed, she’s still nervous, waiting tables more nights than she lets on and putting money away into a saving account that’s just for her, just in case. She’s worked at this café long enough that they’ve offered her a promotion, but she’s always refused. She has a cat named something hilariously human, like Charles or Frank, but she doesn’t see what’s funny about it. And she’s not happy. Not sad, not most of the time, but not happy. This is what I extrapolate from my drawing.
This woman never would have kept hooking up with Nick after he told her he didn’t want his friends to find out, after he told her he “didn’t want it to be a whole thing.” This a woman who knows who she is.
I look back at the drawing. She looks so much lonelier than I had intended. Maybe I can make it better when I get back to the hotel, before bed. I check my phone, and it’s almost five o’clock. I’m surprised I haven’t heard from my mom yet, especially about dinner.
I make it back to the hotel so easily that I feel like a Parisian local, or at least the type of American who goes to Paris so often that she has restaurant recommendations and knows store workers by their first names. I am a competent lady artist! A brilliant world traveler! Even if I do accidentally say “good morning” instead of “good evening” to the French doorman who lets me
inside the hotel.
I hesitate at the door to our room, not sure whether it feels right to burst in victoriously or to plan to apologize for ditching Mom all day. More than anything, I just want to plop on the bed, face down, until dinner. But then I hear a voice—her voice—in a harsh whisper on the phone. Hesitantly, I slip inside the room.
“No, no, I appreciate the help. Really. It’s just—no, okay. Okay. That’s fine.” Her eyes meet mine. She looks both furious and terrified. “My daughter just walked through the door. We’ll have to continue this conversation another time,” she says before hanging up the phone.
“Hi!” she says to me, a little too sharply, with the ringing sound of the phone slammed into its holster still vibrating in the room. “How was your day?”
“It was great,” I say, but the tension in the room drains any actual excitement I may have had. “Went to the museum, drew a little.” I say the words like they’re lines in a play. I want to ask what the phone call was about, but I know she’ll just say, “Work.”
“That’s it? ‘Went to the museum, drew a little’? I asked you how your day in Paris was!” Her voice is getting louder. I’m already sitting on the bed.
I try to cut her off. “I just meant—”
“Yes, I know what you ‘just meant.’ I hope you had a wonderful day.”
“Okay, I don’t understand why you’re getting so angry.”
“I’m not getting angry,” she says, fixing her watch, which has come unfastened.
“Okay then,” I say.
She looks at me with tight lips and then pulls on one of her boots. “I’m going out to dinner. You’re welcome to join me.”
“No,” I say, relishing the fact that I don’t have to play nice. “I’m fine, thanks.”
She laces up her boots and pulls on a scarf. “Fine,” she says. “Good night.”
The room feels oddly quiet with her gone. I turn the TV to the only English channel I can find (CNN) and try to fix the drawing for Grandpa, but I’m pretty sure I only make it worse. I decide to just mail it as is.
I eat dinner alone in the hotel room (rice and meat called “doner kebab” that I bought from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on the corner) and fall asleep before my mother is back. We’re leaving for Belgium tomorrow morning. Hopefully it won’t be a disaster.
* * *
And almost immediately, it’s a disaster.
“Please explain to me why we needed to get to the train station four hours early?” My mother is contentedly sitting on a plastic seat and reading the Atlantic while I slowly die of boredom.
“I didn’t want us to miss the train,” she says, licking her thumb and then turning the page. What a disgusting thing. Why do adults always do that?
I sigh, and when my mom doesn’t notice, I sigh louder. Still no reply. We already checked out of our hotel and took two buses to get to the train terminal on the outskirts of Paris, so there is absolutely nowhere to go. Not to mention that I have my carry-on to deal with, so even if I wanted to explore, I’d be weaving through the sidewalks with an electric-green turtle-shell-shaped suitcase. And so I sigh again.
I’ve already finished my book, so all that’s left to do is wander up and down the train station, examining the stale candies in a vending machine that looks like it hasn’t had a patron in at least a decade and looking at the signs for all the other places the trains are headed to.
“How do you know this is even the right train?” I say to my mom from a few rows of seats away. “It says AMSTERDAM on the electronic screen.”
She glances up from a book she opened after finishing her magazine, and for half a second I think she’s going to become concerned, but then her face relaxes back into full confidence, the look I’ve seen her give in a courtroom on days she couldn’t find a babysitter for me.
“This is the three P.M. train. It stops in Brussels, but I assume it continues on to Amsterdam,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. “But it looks like there are, like, four trains leaving at three P.M. How do we know which one stops in Brussels?”
And now she sighs like I’m the one who made the train station confusing. I wish there were more people here—someone we could ask or try to commiserate with about this confusion. But the station—or at least the distant corner of the station we’re in—stays relatively empty until two fifty-six (or, as the big electric clock says in military time, fourteen fifty-six), when a wheezing, exhaling metal tube of a train crawls into the terminal and, with a tinny shiver, opens its doors.
We go from sitting in the plastic chairs of the train station under fluorescent lighting to sitting in the dusty plush seats of the train in the semi-darkness of a compartment shared only with an elderly couple who smell like canned soup.
I have nothing to do but listen to music and watch my iPhone battery slowly go to red while I sketch, although my options for subjects are limited. There’s the terrible ’80s pattern of the seats, the luggage rack, or the view out the train window, which, at the moment, is a dingy train station.
“Would you please stop tapping your leg?” my mother half-whispers to me, clearly trying not to bother the nice elderly couple. I can tell they’re French. The woman is wearing a scarf and has blood-red nails on her gnarled hands, and the man is in a fedora that somehow doesn’t look ridiculous.
I didn’t even notice I was doing it, but it’s the only thing keeping me from going stir-crazy. I’ve been sitting for longer than I want to think about. I do try to stop, at least for a few minutes, but when it starts up again it’s not my fault—it’s just my body trying not to deteriorate like the muscles of an astronaut on the International Space Station.
“Can I have that book you brought?” I say, gesturing to the paperback on my mom’s lap. It’s a thriller, about a woman and an affair and a train and a secret identity. I think I read that Reese Witherspoon is adapting it into a movie.
My mother licks her thumb and flicks the page of her magazine. “I’m going to read it when I finish with this magazine,” she says.
I start bouncing my leg again, half in protest and half because I literally have nothing else to do. “You’re not even reading it,” I say.
I realize that was a mistake as soon as my mother puts down the magazine and turns to face me, her eyes cold and dark like a shark.
“You were acting like a brat in Paris, and I’d appreciate it if you showed a little respect now. Show a little gratitude.”
Why do parents say “brat” when they really mean “bitch”? I bounce my leg as hard as I can and look her dead in the eye. “Excuse me. Grandpa is the one who gave me this trip, and you’re the one tagging along.”
At this point, the elderly French couple sharing the train compartment with us exchange a glance that I know means, “Typical—ugly Americans, thinking the whole train compartment belongs to them,” and obviously I’m embarrassed, but I can’t stop myself. I can’t just turn this into a good mood.
My mother places her hand on my knee, hard, and she hisses out, “Could you PLEASE contain yourself.”
“Fine,” I hiss, keeping my leg as still as I can. Now my mom sighs.
“Nora, I apologize. I came on this trip to bond with you, not to fall back into old habits. So tell me: How are things with Lena?”
Lena? Is she really asking me how things are with Lena, now? What am I supposed to say? Well, Mom, I was hooking up with this guy who didn’t care about me, and then Lena asked if she could maybe go for it because she thought we had only hooked up the one time, and instead of telling her that she shouldn’t “go for it” because her “going for it” would feel like a thousand tiny needles in my heart, I instead said, “Sure, go ahead,” and now they’re dating and just fabulously happy together.
“She’s fine. I don’t know. Back in Evanston.”
“Honestly, I can’t see how you expect us to get to know
each other better if you’re not going to open up.”
I straighten my back. “Me, open up? How about that phone call that you’re obviously lying to me about?”
“‘Lying’ is a very strong word, Nora,” she says in her I’m-about-to-take-away-your-car-privileges voice.
“Oh, I’m sorry, what word would you like me to use?”
And I swear, without even saying anything to each other, the old couple gather up their bags and leave the compartment, giving us death glares as they make their way out.
I slide across the bench so I’m as physically far from Alice Parker as I can be. Of course we’ve turned into the ugly Americans who can’t even ride a train without ruining it for ourselves and everyone around us. Go big or go home, right?
10
Dear Lena,
Belgium is a disaster. Like, slapstick-comedy-about-a-family-Thanksgiving disaster. Already, Belgium is the equivalent to setting a turkey on fire and accidentally baking someone’s diamond earrings in the stuffing. It doesn’t help that I’ve gained about 17.5 million pounds from eating croissants. Luckily, I’ll lose as many pounds when I go to England. (Because it’s money! Do you get it? Do you miss my sense of humor?)
I’m writing you from the hotel that we finally found after definitely getting on the wrong tram, probably accidentally not paying, and then getting off at a stop a full half hour’s walk from the hotel. The trams here have no clear signage explaining where you’re supposed to put the ticket! The doors just open and close automatically, and people step on and off. And all of their automatic ticket stands are completely in French.
Mom and I bickered the whole way to our hotel, which turned out to be a shriveled gray building on the world’s dirtiest river. There is literally a plastic lawn chair hanging from a telephone line visible from my window. We haven’t gotten to the city center yet, but my impression of Brussels is gray, dirty, bleak, and filled with passive aggression. The only thing getting me through this is the promise of tomorrow’s day trip to Ghent to see the altarpiece, which is supposed to be life-changing. Which is a good thing, because right now I would be in favor of my life being changed.
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