by Sejal Shah
[2003]
Street Scene
Parisians call this neighborhood mixed. Mixed is code; it means immigrants. “Think Brooklyn,” Caitlin says. We are in the Twentieth Arrondissement, near Père Lachaise. I am here to see the Louvre and the Turkish baths; I am here to visit my friend Caitlin. I have a map and some time for wandering. To travel by yourself and enjoy it is a skill; I don’t practice it enough.
The Twentieth Arrondissement. Storefronts with fuchsia and blue signs; Senegalese behind tables of patterned scarves, watch caps, and leather bags; music, a low flare around which we warm ourselves at the park, at pool tables, at long wooden bars. LeeAnne isn’t here to tell me where she stayed in Paris. When I think of her, I see us talking in my backyard, splashing in the pool, Upstate New York summers. It surprises me. She was never there, but I can see it: the blue pool, our hideaway; beach towels; instant iced tea. I imagine we lay ourselves out on the uneven flagstones, waiting to be hot enough to peel ourselves off and fling ourselves into the water. If I close my eyes hard enough, if I squint, I can almost see it, this scene— that we grew up together. She was that kind of friend. As I walk through Paris, I keep expecting to catch a glimpse of her, vanishing into some narrow street.
Paris is a walking city; even my softest black shoes will produce blisters. We are on the Champs-Élysées, on the way to a makeup store to have our eyes made up. Caitlin and her roommate are going to a birthday party tonight. I am back in seventh grade, conjugating verbs, acting out a skit in which we say, “Where is the party? I’ll meet you there. We will see you there. I will see you there. See you there?”
Caitlin and I were neighbors toward the end of our twenties. I am staying with her in Paris for a week. We are neighbor-friends—neighbors who became friends—friends who once lived close by. She moved into our apartment complex, two doors away from me. She wore pencil skirts, perfectly tailored, unusual to see in a graduate student in our hippie college town. I admired her. Then her new boyfriend showed up, playing guitar, sitting out on the back porch, and I felt shy. And I was embarrassed. He was someone I had known from the university years before. We had once, twice had two beers too many and kissed awkwardly in the apartment he shared with two other musicians. The years passed; he and Caitlin broke up. Now neither of us is in touch with him, and I fly across an ocean to visit her.
The word for neighbor is la voisine. The word for sister is ma sœur. Friends are les amies.
Each day, I walk across the street to the internet café. There is something comforting in something you do every day. Repetition, even across one week, is key. This is what I say to the Senegalese man who works there: “Un café au lait et un pain au chocolat, s’il-vous-plaît.” He answers in French rather than in the English we both know he knows. I take this as a kindness.
I take the Metro to the Musée d’Orsay. I look at paintings everyone recognizes. I dig my camera out from between pens and street map and take pictures: a long-faced woman; a flock of ballerinas in blue tulle and chiffon; a rooster; a bride and groom, suspended.
We sang songs in seventh grade. Alouette, gentille alouette. Skylark, nice skylark, I will pluck the feathers off of you. I will pluck the feathers off your head, off your back; I will break your beak. I will remove your heart. I am going to dismember you. This is what runs through my head: French class. Even though I am in France.
I came to Paris to make up for seven years of French in grade school. What do you do with a language you never use? I didn’t know when I booked my flight what I was looking for. I had a friend in France. I thought, Why not?
We had a concrete pool in the backyard of my parents’ house, but it no longer exists. My parents filled it in five years ago. They hired someone to break down the raised rim; they must have rented a crane to fill the hole with earth. My brother and I saw pictures, but we were not there to see the pool in which we spent our summers lifted away and filled. We were not there to see the yellow bulldozers or the torn wooden fence. We did not see the truck full of earth brought to reclaim the kidney-bean shape: curved, fetal. We saw the earth there, without grass, sinking. More dirt needed to be brought in to cover the indentation of what was gone, what had left.
Once, LeeAnne spent two weeks by herself in Paris at museums. I could barely do two days. We met when I was twenty-four, close to too late for meeting a friend you could love as if you were young. I rushed in, late to an orientation for a new job; she put her hand on the chair next to her. “Here,” she said. I sat down, embarrassed, out of breath. She leaned over and whispered, “You didn’t miss anything. You’re fine!” Her face opened up whenever she saw me, as though I were the most precious and wonderful present in her life—a rare flower, a perfect day. She was like that with all of her friends. She made you feel—by the quality of her attention, her shining hazel eyes, her rapt, joyful smile—loved.
I was looking at a painting. I stood shaking in front of flowers: dull flowers, heads bent. I knew she had been happy. I knew nothing. She is gone. What do we really know about anyone else? Or their sorrow? The flowers were alive and painful to gaze at: brown, fading; green and purple, thick paint, too thick, streaks nearly grotesque, almost lovely, nearly gorgeous. I cried in front of the other tourists. I wanted to find her. She was gone. I closed my eyes. I wanted to see her once more. I want to see her again.
There is no one on the street in this street scene. The scene is the angle at which the road curves and so it seems to open up, to hold some possibility. The paintings are the signs for l’hôtel and pâtisserie. The color is the color of fall leaves. The only figure is a church steeple, slate gray. I remember walking alone though I was in a city, a much-walked city, and I must never have seen a corner that empty. In Paris, I feel as if I am walking, again and again, across a stage set. The entire city stands still, posed, as if a museum or a photograph.
We could see the cemetery from Caitlin’s apartment. Important people were buried there, I’d been told. I pressed myself against Caitlin’s window and took pictures of the gravestones. Who was there? Van Gogh, Degas, Giacometti, Modigliani? No. It was Morrison, Stein, Chopin, Proust. LeeAnne would have chosen more time with the art, not bothering with the cemetery. I thought of the flower heads bowing at the museum, irises bending, shrinking back. I thought of the mint tea from the hammam, the sharp-scented blue soap, the hands of women I don’t know on my back. I thought of LeeAnne gazing up at the Chagall; she would have been transfixed by the violet sky, clasped arms, bound by the colors, turning to someone in delight. She would have been breathless. Nine years later, one fall day, she was no longer picking up the phone. I called that morning—was it near noon? I hope she heard my voice on the machine before she left the house. (She was in Kentucky, and I was in Massachusetts; two months had passed since we last talked.) “I’ll be driving all afternoon. Call me anytime.”
I want to believe she paused, that she brightened, just one moment. But how could she have brightened when she was no longer picking up the phone, when she had written out a note, when she had tucked a bottle of pills into her pocket? She didn’t change her mind. She took their dog for a walk to a wooded area. She didn’t want her husband to have to find her. She wrote our names in black ballpoint on Post-its to affix to cardboard boxes she left for all of us: in mine, books, a key chain, a clutch of pomegranate-colored beads strung together like flowers, a clay plaque that says create in raised letters. Her husband handed me my box after the service. I keep the Post-it near me; I keep the plaque on a wall in my apartment—in every apartment I have lived in for the past nine years; I misplace the beaded flowers and find them again every few months. I called on a Friday morning. Her husband called me on Sunday. It had taken a day to find her.
I want to believe she heard my voice before she left the house. It is selfish, but I want to believe she knew I was thinking of her. Still, I will never know what she thought or if she heard or what she felt, at the end.
Once, crossing the street, we saw children. They cross
the street with their teacher. They are a line of ducks in the rain. In my head, I am taking notes: I passed children, walking like ducklings. They wore blue slickers and yellow boots. Notes to myself, notes to LeeAnne. It has been nearly ten years now. My French dictionary is no help. I would like to find a word for this besides suicide, but in French the word is the same. I would like to find a word for a friend who was better than a friend, who was as close as a sister, but I do not have a sister (une sœur), and something in these words won’t translate: to be like something is not the same as to be something. I would like a better word. Something to stay past this passing of time, something that will last.
Paris is for writers—for everyone who wants something from their wanting. What do you do in a city? You walk. I walked. Repetition is key. In my head, I sang. Je te plumerai la tête. I walked around the city for one week. (In my head, I spoke French.) I looked at the river. It rained. I must have looked at the river. Alouette. I walked and walked. I took pictures. Skylark, lovely skylark. I thought of a pool that once existed—rough concrete, paint chipping, the sharp comfort of chlorine. I thought of LeeAnne. We were markers, marking what? There was earth and it was sinking. Et la tête. Of how she just wanted to rest. Et la tête. Of what use is the head. There is ringing. Of what use is a ghost-blue pool. I am in my head. Din din don. And then ringing. Din din don. There is the outline of what was once a pool—now an indentation, now an impression, now fresh, now earth.
We should have been two girls, swimming. (I cannot say it in French.) We should have been two girls lying on the flagstones in the sun, talking, and lemon juice in our hair and iced tea in tall flowered glasses by a light blue pool; we would have had time. So this is the Seine. I know I should let her go. So this is time. I’m not ready yet. We are flowers alive by the side of the pool, bowing and bowing toward each other, heads bent, as girls always do.
[2011]
Bird
I have not been to Cobb’s Hill since last summer, when I returned to Rochester for a wedding. I was with A. We had each flown in from the larger cities where we lived, and we were restless in our quiet town after each event ended. It was an Indian wedding; you had to pace yourself. We found ourselves on one of those nights parking on Highland after driving around and then hiking up the drive. Red radio tower lights blinking in the distance. It took on the quality of a date or of high school only after we began walking.
Sitting on our hill looking out at our city, we talked, the way you talk when you are looking at a skyline—any skyline—and it is warm enough, a particular kind of warm, which is not too hot, not too humid, not anything but enough to make you glad that your skin is the only layer between you and the world, heat-lightning in the distance, talking too much to people you don’t know well enough. But no one is listening to anyone too closely. Overtalking. This was seventeen again. We listened to the sound of our own voices, heard them cross each other. We leaned into each other.
When my parents were young, when they were new transplants to this country, they brought their young children, my brother and me, to Cobb’s Hill. And summer and fall evenings we would chase each other around the reservoir and race each other down the hill. My parents and their good friends, a childless couple—kind but frozen in that way of people without kids—would walk patiently, their after-dinner digestive. I always looked for the roof of the house with eight chimneys. As though I had a tic, I would count all eight and wonder the same thing: Who lives there? How can you have eight chimneys?
The house was one of many talismans for me, landmarks in the two or three miles of this city I still recognize as mine. The sky was a faint pink-purple, and you could even see the top of our high school from that hill. Now it surprises me to consider how many other people this park must belong to. I rarely went to the nonreservoir side of the park, where there are basketball courts and fountains and tennis courts. I don’t play tennis. For me, Cobb’s Hill is the reservoir, is the scrubby patch of pines and the clearing where people practice tai chi, is the cement structure, houselike, at the top where people sit with their kids or their lovers. And it is the hill where we went sledding or sat on for kissing. At the top, we’d always pause to look at the view. We would sit on the steps leading down from the pavilion and the gatehouse that looks like Greek or Roman ruins—something classical about the architecture, something dignified—though these columns were built in the 1900s and they are not in ruins.
Cobb’s Hill felt like my backyard, the corner of the city and the suburbs, an intersection, a line. It was where we learned to drive, where we ran sprints in track practice. If you run again and again up and down the same hill, you will lose your breath. Pause at the foot of the hill, hands resting on your hips, you will look at the row of pine trees instead of the skyline, because that is what you can see, and you will begin to belong to a place and it will belong to you.
That summer night, I was walking with A. We strolled and paused behind a Canada goose that wasn’t able to fly and just squawked in dismay to another goose, its friend, floating on the reservoir. It walked in front of us on the circular paved path surrounding the water, flapping its wings and hopping. And it was something, watching an animal that was never going to make it, this bird that had stopped being able to fly and would not clear the iron fence, wondering what was going to happen to it; and we were walking in the perfect night air, and though we liked each other and talked; we were back somehow in high school, powerless, driving around looking for a pizza place open past eleven.
We were never to kiss. We were only to look at the dark water, only to talk around and at, to nod at the three other people who were there on the hill at night, to stop a moment to lean into the bars around the reservoir and then to resume walking. He chased after the goose a bit—we wondered if we could scare it into flying. Startle it. It didn’t seem right for a tall bird to be walking in front of us like a woman in shorts, exercising.
At the wedding, while waiting to get a drink at the bar, A and I had suddenly realized that almost everyone we had grown up with, and almost everyone there, was married. We were in our thirties, but it still surprised us. A lives in San Francisco. I live in New York. In those places we are merely single, not odd.
I can see, at Cobb’s Hill, my seventeen-year-old self with B before our first date. We were going to dinner at a place his mom had recommended, and it was spring but still cold. He picked me up at my house, and we stopped briefly at Cobb’s Hill to look at the sunset. And I am nineteen, running down the hill the night we both knew it would never work out, and then in my early twenties with C, and he had brought a bottle of white wine and two glasses. He was always scaring me because he wanted to talk about things I didn’t want to talk about.
It was winter again (it was nearly always winter then in Rochester), and when C and I got out of the car, B was there with his girlfriend. So we drank the wine and talked, but we also got out of the car and went sledding. It was a steep hill, and you could spill right out into traffic on Monroe, but that and the stories of people who had been paralyzed—they never stopped us. I shared a sled with B’s girlfriend, one like me, whom he did not marry. I only remember that she had dark hair and one of us must have held onto the other in order to stay in the sled. B and C liked each other, too; we went out for beers once or twice at Rohrbach’s.
A is for animal, B is for boy. We, all of us, were in our early twenties then. Who knew how any of it was going to turn out? We were young, each pair of us an animal. We were ourselves, fledgling: birds that would never lift off, never rise.
[2010]
Walking Tributaries
In his book about the Upper Iowa River, Oneota Flow, Decorah native David Faldet writes, “We are walking tributaries. The smell we sense in rain, in an ocean, or on the banks of a midwestern river attracts us because its familiarity runs deep.” Iowa returns to me. I remember the view from the top of the hill where I lived. This was the Christiansons’ home, the butter-cream-colored house at 110 Pleasant Hil
l Road—a house with a Norwegian name—Soli Høda or “Sunny Heights.” I can feel the sun heating up the small square living room, warming my face and legs. Most days, I sat gazing from this perch at the First Lutheran Church steeple, the dark red brick of the old middle school, and the miniature downtown.
I drank my coffee or eight-dollar red wine and looked toward the center of town, which once held stunning river views before the river was rerouted to prevent flooding. The sky gathered streaks of pink and purple, deepened, and streetlights emerged on the downtown main street, Water Street. I stayed for nine months—enough time to create a new life or spend an academic year as writer-in-residence, renting the house of another professor.
Three years later, I returned to that same small town, Decorah, for three weeks in the summer. I was without a car this time, and rented a bike in order to get from campus to town to the house where I stayed. Ben at Decorah Bicycles, next to The Whippy Dip, the local soft-serve ice cream place, took a brown Trek bike down from the racks. He was handsome in a blonde, midwestern, athletic way; were I ten years younger, I’d allow myself a ten-minute crush. Outside, he showed me the gears. “Remember, to change the gears you have to be pedaling,” Ben said. When have I ever felt this old? He left me to push up onto the bike, to circle the parking lot like a seven-year-old boy, to find my balance. I concentrated on making circles and loops, remembering the freedom I felt when I first learned, late at ten years old, to ride a bike.