On our way, we encountered a small outdoor market. I found a bracelet for Alicia. It was silver with a large clasp, and it had a pink stone in it, which looked like her to me. I bought one for myself, as well. Mine had a black stone.
“Vous êtes italienne?” the vendor asked.
What was it about me that looked so Italian, all of a sudden? I was made up of so many different things: English, Irish, French, Canadian Indian. But not an ounce of Italian.
Maybe this explained why my boyfriend had chosen me. He is half Sicilian.
“Non,” I replied, “américaine.”
He nodded, and I realized that I had been holding my breath. I guess I was afraid that I was going to get some sort of reaction, but no lewd hip-thrusts or party invites followed my revelation.
The bracelets went into my purse, and we continued our trip to the Metro station.
After a short ride, we exited the station, and it was evident that we were at a very exciting place. A bustle was in motion that reminded me of San Francisco’s
Union Square during the holidays. Many people held shopping bags, and everyone seemed so stylish.
I felt like an idiot for wearing my huge boots. All of the ladies that I saw wore very feminine footwear. Little shoes with chunky heels. My enormous feet looked totally out of place. Like clown feet.
“Where would you like to go first?” Lulu asked.
“I have no idea.” I looked in wonder at all of the famous stores around me. “Let’s go there! We know that one!” She grabbed my wrist and pulled me across the street, toward the Louis Vuitton boutique.
***
Opening the door, I immediately felt out of my element. All of the women who worked in the store wore black. But it wasn’t the kind of black that I like to wear. It was… snooty black.
They weren’t in uniform, but they were all similarly dressed. One wore a cardigan with a small, delicate silk scarf tied around her neck. Another wore a knit mini dress with impossibly high shoes. There were a few of them, and when we entered, they all looked in our direction. I could see the almost imperceptible tilt of their noses toward the ceiling, and I wanted to turn and run.
“WE ARE HERE TO LOOK AT PURSES,” my grandmother announced. Using her I-know-you-do-not-speak-our-language voice.
No one jumped to help us. Finally, the lady in the mini dress walked in our direction.
“Oui,” she said, “I can help you.” She hardly even had an accent.
Beautiful purses covered the walls and shelves in all directions, like artwork. Most of them were brown with the golden LV lettered print, which has made the brand so famous.
Scarves with the print were on a table next to me, and I looked at a price tag. It cost more than I made working for two weeks at the mall. I unconsciously wiped my hand on my dress. A shop minion adjusted the scarf, as if I had completely destroyed the display—pretending that I wasn’t still standing right next to her. Black eyeliner reached all the way around her eyes. She looked like a cat. A very mean cat.
“You see,” I could hear Lulu say, “I bought this purse in Paris many years ago.”
The saleslady looked at the bag and then at Lulu’s face.
“It is made of alligator.” Still no response. “I was wondering if you might have something like this in your store because I need to replace it.”
The lie was so thin that it made me cringe. No way was my grandmother prepared to pay hundreds of dollars for a new accessory. Even in Paris. And they knew it.
“Non,” sang the Cat Lady, next to me, “we do not carry anysing like zat... old bag. We carry only what you see around you.” Her “r's" buckled in her throat, as they do in the French language. When she said “carry,” I thought a ball of phlegm might fly out of her beautifully made up, pouty lips.
Lulu was not deterred. She was not catching the hint.
“Well,” she continued, “that is such a shame. I wonder how much something like this might cost in Paris these days.”
She was looking for an answer, but not getting one. I could feel my cheeks betray me with their burning. I was horribly embarrassed, but even angrier about how they were treating their customer: she was my grandmother, dammit!
“We don’t need to shop here,” I mustered up the snarkiest voice that I could find. “I guess we will have to buy your new purse somewhere else.”
Scarf Girl rolled her eyes and raised one perfect eyebrow at me.
“You should know,” I continued in my best French, “that we came to your country specifically to buy a new designer bag for my grandmother. Your loss.”
Another one that I hadn’t seen before came out from behind the cash register. Her hair was artfully twirled at the back of her head and held together with combs.
“Wait,” she called, also in French, “maybe I can help you.”
The other women smirked at her.
“Non,” I replied, “I don’t believe I will let my grandmother shop in a store that treats their customers so poorly.” I tilted my chin and glared at her.
“As if she were a real customer. Look at that old bag! Look at her, too. And you! You two did not come into our store to purchase our product today!”
Lulu looked back and forth at us, watching an invisible ping-pong ball; confused since she couldn’t understand what we were saying.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to judge a book by its cover? What is wrong with you people?”
“By ‘you people,’ do you mean the French people as a whole, or just us?”
“Just you,” I said in French, but then switched to English, “bitch.”
At just that moment, my tenuous control unhinged—and every ounce of extra special brainpower that I had been born with grabbed onto the merchandise on the shelves and racks and pulled.
I took Lulu’s arm and hurried her out of the store. Ridiculously priced accessories whipped from their displays, some landing on the sales girls. They shrieked and squealed as bags and key chains toppled onto the floor and scarves formed a tornado around the room. I was furious with those horrible women, but the look on Lulu’s face stopped me from a sloppy emotional outburst.
“We’ll find another store, Lulu. They didn’t know anything about alligator bags at that stupid place.”
The madness inside the store gradually began to subside as we walked away, leaving the people standing amongst piles of Louis Vuitton to wonder what the hell had just happened.
***
After we caught our breath, we wandered down the street looking for treasures. We saw many, but none in our price range. We stopped at a nice restaurant for lunch, but I was still so angry from our first boutique visit that I couldn’t concentrate on the menu.
There was some outdoor seating, but we sat inside—trying to find some reprieve from the heat. I could see the people out on the sidewalk, scurrying to their various destinations.
One item on the menu looked familiar. Maybe from one of my classes. I thought that I remembered hearing a teacher saying that you had to try it if you ever made it to France, or something like that. I was so sick of eating bread at that point that I might have been willing to try anything.
Lulu looked around the restaurant, flipping up her glasses and snapping her fingers on both hands.
“Garçon,” she cried, “Garçon!”
Garçon means “boy” in French. Although it is customary (or so I’d read in second period high school French class) to call for a “Garçon,” or waiter, in a restaurant, she was taking it to the extreme.
“I don’t think anyone works here,” she huffed.
A female server stopped at our table and asked what we would like, in broken English. Lulu ordered crêpes. I pointed at the familiar thing on the menu. I also asked for a diet soda. I could see Lulu trying to tell me to order water, signaling with her eyes and pursed lips. Of course she ordered some for herself.
Finally, I managed to calm myself enough to take in our surroundings. The place was beautiful. On one of the
walls, sheer white curtains covered windows. Summer raged outside, but the inside was dark, and there were candles on each table. It was bearably cool where we sat. The floor was made of parquet wood, providing a pleasing square pattern underneath our feet.
“What time is the show tonight?” I looked over the top of my glass after taking a drink, twirling some of the ice cubes in my mouth.
“We’re supposed to be there by seven,” Lulu said.
Only five more hours to fill. Terrific. I wondered how many stores we could examine for outdated alligator purses in five hours.
Lulu’s food came first. The crêpes were beautiful and looked delicious.
Then my dish arrived. Alicia would have died.
Unwittingly, I had ordered escargots.
I stared at my plate. What kind of loser orders snails for lunch without realizing it?
“Bon appetit,” our server exclaimed, walking away. As if it was a perfectly normal thing to serve snails to someone in a restaurant. They looked like, well, snails. They were still in their shells, and they sat in small depressions on the plate. The server had provided some little tongs and a two tined fork, for easy snail extraction. The sauce smelled like garlic salty goodness.
Lulu was obliviously enjoying her meal. My sauce smelled delectable. So, alternately hungry and disgusted, I was going to have to be brave enough to eat my food. However, they were snails. And they looked like snails.
When I was very young, maybe three or four (it was prior to my mother marrying my stepdad), my father had gone on a hunting trip and had brought back different animals. Dead animals. He and his friends thought it was so funny to feed me deer and frog meat.
“Tastes just like chicken, don’t it?” they all laughed.
At least that meat had looked like meat.
“What did you order?” Lulu asked, between bites.
“Escargots.” I waited for her reaction.
The recognition registered on her face as she looked at my plate. She put down her fork and looked at me.
“Did you really mean to order that?”
“Uhm. Yeah, of course I did.” I just couldn’t let it go. I smiled at her and put my white linen napkin on my lap. “When in Rome... "
Because her nod to being Roman was a vegetarian dish, she bounced her head in agreement.
Pretty stumped, never having even eaten lobster out of its tail, I picked up the tongs and pretended I knew what I was doing.
Looking around the restaurant, I saw a large man with a round, red face. He had a napkin tucked into his shirt and he was angrily discussing something with his tablemate. Gesturing wildly with one meaty hand, the other was resting on the table—holding the same little fork that was on my plate.
I watched him, guessing that woman on the other end of the table was his wife. Glaring at him, she answered him with monosyllabic answers in a language that I had never heard.
The man was sitting just to my right and one table over. Using my peripheral vision, I watched as he pinched his snail meat out of the shell, dipped into drippy sauce, and popped it into his mouth.
I can do that.
Carefully holding the tongs, I used the fork to hold the shell on my plate. It was a special plate, it seemed. Made expressly for holding escargots. I used the tongs to extract the meat. I was relieved to note that it looked as though it had been previously removed, cleaned and cooked. I was also grateful for my Snail Eating Tutorial, which made me think I sort of, like, maybe looked like a skilled escargot eater.
Feeling as though I was holding a booger on that specialty fork, bile rose in my throat, but I smiled at Lulu again and opened my mouth. The wonderful smell was overwhelming and made my stomach growl. The sauce dripped off of the morsel, which was quite a bit larger than your average morsel, and it made me feel clumsy—in addition to starving and repelled.
I put that thing in my mouth and chewed. The seasoning was the only thing I could taste. But the texture!
Foods like mashed potatoes, pasta, and rice rock my world. Comfort food. Starches. Carbohydrates. Maybe a steak, here or there. Rubbery, chewy things? Notsomuch. The bite reminded me of eating calamari, something that I have endured, but have never craved or really enjoyed—since chewing them feels like you're munching on rubber bands.
“How is it?” My grandmother studied my face.
I was very careful and used my mad acting skills. “Mmmmm! Love it! Now I can tell everyone that I’ve eaten snails! In Paris!” Wow, that was unnecessarily shrill.
She paused, mid bite, for a second. Then she continued chewing.
“Would you like to try one?” I offered.
“No thank you, dear, I’m stuffed.”
Challenge not accepted. Damn.
I thought of a
Happy Place. Ashland, Oregon, to be specific. I reflected on Lithia Park, located behind the Elizabethan Theater. That park had been my Happy Place for a long time.
I thought of Lithia Park. And I chewed.
Soon my plate was empty, making me feel as though I had accomplished something big.
It took four Diet Pepsis to wash my lunch down (no free refills), to the almighty chagrin of my grandmother.
She paid our bill. It was a considerable amount: it turned out that escargot was one of their high dollar entrées. I couldn’t feel guilty because I swear I could feel my food swimming in my stomach. Maybe crawling.
Slithering.
***
The next four (hundred) hours were spent picking up souvenirs.
For my stepfather, I found a train car which had a French brand name on it. I hoped it was the right scale for his electric train set. My sister had a "J'adore Paris" T-shirt in her future, and I managed to find a reasonably priced tapestry for my mother. It was small enough to roll up into what could pass for a junior high school diploma, but beautiful. To me it looked very European: the image of a woman in a powdered wig listening to a man in tights, playing a lyre, was woven in multitudes of dark colors. Nothing seemed right for Jimmy, but we still had some time.
Lulu bought some cute little metal Eiffel Tower key chains, and I decided to get one for each girl at Above the Waist. As we walked, they made a rhythmic, clinking noise in my purse—which was becoming heavy with souvenirs.
I had to find something good for Richie, so I was glad that we still had a few days to look.
***
We found ourselves in a Lancôme boutique, and I bought some lip gloss. This particular brand was sold at department stores at home, but it had originated in Paris.
The gloss was over-priced, but it was from This Actual Shop. In Paris.
Never mind that I never would have thought about purchasing this product at the mall counter in San Jose—as Lulu was grumpily quick to point out. I think she still felt bad about not letting me buy the Doc Martens, so she didn’t argue more than some basic tsk tsk-ing.
***
A long hour was spent in French Burger King. It looked exactly like American Burger King. I ordered more diet soda, and Lulu even ordered a Sprite. The place was mostly empty in the section we had chosen, so I stared at our straws, making them stir the liquid round and round in our cups. The straws would bob wildly for three or four seconds, calming, whenever I stopped stirring.
We looked at my purchases a few more times and found new things to say about them each time. A little man came by with his broom and swept under our table every fifteen minutes. We watched people come, eat, and leave. The clientele consisted of families from all over the world and lots of teenagers.
Finally, we threw our cups in the garbage and headed back onto the street. Lulu was humming a tune that I recognized. It was a song by one of Rich’s punk bands.
The soft rock version, apparently.
***
Printemps was our next destination. Actually, we sort of wandered aimlessly to the front door, but it had air conditioning, so it seemed like a good place in which to spend some time. It reminded me of any department store at home, like
Macy's. The only real difference was that the signs were all in French and everything cost francs instead of dollars.
Lulu looked at the shoes, but I could tell that she didn’t really want to buy any. Spending a few minutes looking through the jewelry, she tried on a few necklaces—but she was so short that she had to reach over her head to get the pieces that they took out of the case.
My grandmother looked tired. It occurred to me that we were merely killing time until our evening could begin. Poor Lulu was already exhausted and probably would have preferred to return to the hotel. But instead, she was out there: braving the Champs-Élysées for me.
While I was trying on sunglasses—the kind that Rich’s emergency money wouldn’t even begin to cover—a little white head popped up from around the display case.
“I just got us tickets to a fashion show!”
“A fashion show? Here?”
“Yes! Isn’t this exciting? It starts in about twenty minutes, and we’ll still be able to make it to The Lido in time!”
***
Seeing a fashion show in Paris sounds really cool, right?
Well, this wasn’t like the fashion shows that you see in magazines. There weren’t any fancy suits or crazy, creative dresses made to look like birdcages. This was a fashion show at a department store. It was like seeing one at the local mall.
We took the elevator several flights up and entered a room that resembled a conference room at my mom’s work. She worked for a telecommunications company, and the conference rooms in her place of employment were almost completely gray. Gray walls, gray tables and gray chairs. This room could have been in her building.
A couple of empty folding chairs sat next to each other in the third row, so we took a seat. I noticed that the carpet was almost exactly the same as the kind that was installed at my school—that thin, cheap, all purpose stuff that they put directly on top of cement flooring.
Loose price tags and flecks of glitter peppered the ground. Promotional posters in silver metal frames leaned up against one another on another wall. The one in the front of the stack had a picture of two women wearing bras. “Annual Under Sale,” I translated.
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