Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  My parents lifted their hands together like London Bridge Is Falling Down, and everyone went under their bridge. My mother closed her eyes and bounced on the balls of her feet. I was embarrassed for her intensity and enthralled by it. I couldn’t look away. Luke came out from his bedroom down the hall and watched, too. “Why don’t they let us sleep? They’re not teenagers.” But he was a teenager, and this meant he went back to bed. I couldn’t stop staring. I was eleven. My parents had this whole other life.

  The following January, my mother left on a trip to Greece with a group of intuitive healers from the Bay Area—seventeen of them on a 747 from the Oakland airport with a layover in Zurich and a visit to the Jungians there, then a tour bus in Crete. She was gone for thirty-one days. The longest month of my life. Sausalito got stuck in a wet fog, and she only called once from Athens. No telephone credit cards back then and it cost her a fortune. The line echoed so that she sounded underwater while she screamed into the receiver, “I’m coming home soon, Willow! But I’m testing the marriage theory I’ve been working on. I’m looking at the matrilineal bonds in generations of Greek families. The marriages are very strong. I’m doing interviews. It’s so sunny here!”

  She was supposed to stay in Greece for two weeks, and now she’d thrown our house off its axis. My brother cooked hamburgers for my dad and me every night while my mother was gone. You got to choose: burgers with a slice of American cheese on top or a bowl of cornflakes with milk. This was when Luke began to help raise me. He didn’t say anything about it. He was just organized with the clothes washing and making sure I had food for lunch. Even then he carried my sadness for me.

  The first night she was back, my mother unpacked the gifts at the kitchen table: a strong Greek liqueur called ouzo for Dad. A traditional black velvet vest for Luke; a white cotton dress with red embroidering for me. Her cheeks were flushed while she handed out the presents. Was she feeling guilt? Shame for leaving us? What I remember is a mild defensiveness that flashed on her face if you questioned her too hard. I wanted to sit on her lap. I was too old for this, but I did it anyway and stared and stared at her green eyes to see if she’d changed. Then I buried my face in her chest. I didn’t have words for my longing for her. When she put me to bed that night, I asked her why she’d gone. I couldn’t not ask. I had to know. She said, “I just needed a little break.” Then she kissed me on the head like this was normal—like mothers flew to Greece and took breathers all the time. This wasn’t the answer I needed. I wanted her to tell me her research called to her. That it was vital work. I could understand that. Did mothers really need breaks? This was different. Muddier. It made me feel funny. Overlooked. Passed by.

  Had she gotten bored with her marriage? Her spell in Crete was nothing compared to running off with the artisanal cheesemaker on Mount Tam like our neighbor Mrs. Gallant, three houses down, did. The real problem was my father. I loved him entirely and he gave hugs that involved spinning me on his back in a circle, but my father was a mathematician. Yes, he listened to Jim Croce and smoked his homegrown weed, but he was not a real hippie. He liked structure. My mother had left and come back and my father was not done processing this information; there was more to come from him on the subject.

  It’s not that he was anti-feminist or anti-women or anti-anything, really. He just loved her with a mathematical conviction, and even though he’d sanctioned Greece, he couldn’t believe she’d actually stayed away for so long. “One time,” he said to my mom in the kitchen the fourth night she was home. I could hear him from my bed. “I got married one time. You’re not going to leave me and make me do this all over again with someone else, are you?”

  I watched him out my bedroom window that night—a small man with dark sideburns who threw one leg over the seat of his motorcycle and kick-started it and drove away. He waited two more months to actually leave my mother. Maybe her trip made him see how much he loved her. Maybe he couldn’t handle that kind of vulnerability. Or maybe he was just too stubborn and proud. It was May 1971. A Monday. One week before the end of seventh grade. He loved us, didn’t he? He gave those hugs.

  His leaving was the worst feeling I’ve ever known. He returned to the house on Thursday in his pickup to collect more of his maps—piles of old folded drawings and elevation charts and a pair of rare celestial globes by Vincenzo Coronelli. I found him in his basement office putting the globes in a blue plastic milk crate. I said, “You’ve ruined my life. I hate you with all my heart.” I wanted to tackle him and hold him to the ground and make him stay.

  This was the week in middle school when I began to spend a small part of third-period study hall reading the dictionary. Part of me felt like I was spinning off the flat surface of the earth. The words made my brain feel good. When I memorized definitions, it quieted my mind. Each dictionary entry was like an orderly, prescribed planet. How generous of the authors to give two or three alternative meanings and an archaic definition and to use the word in a sentence.

  Luke was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that week. He came home from school on Friday to cook the hamburgers before the performance. He was nervous about the play. He made the burgers very thin, with Swiss cheese and onion. I sat at the table in the corner of the kitchen with the two windows behind me, and the word “divorce” appeared in my head. The letters were spelled on a small blackboard nailed to a white wall. It seemed pretty obvious why the word was there, even though I didn’t know where the letters had come from. But I could define “divorce” and so I did, and the word went away and I had a bite of the hamburger. I thought maybe the word had just been a bad omen and I was done with it.

  But the next word was “empty.” An easy word. I defined it to myself while Luke poured us glasses of milk. Then it disappeared, just like “divorce.” After that, things got a little out of control for a few minutes. Luke sat at the table next to me, and I thought he must know about the words in my mind because they were coming so fast. Maybe he was getting them, too? There was no reason for them and I still had to define them and I thought I was getting sick. He put ketchup on the inside of one of his hamburger buns and scraped around in the mustard jar with a knife and I decided he wasn’t seeing the words.

  It was hard to come up with definitions so quickly and eat the burger and it was close to time to leave for the play. I thought seeing these words in my head was worse than being sick and that I was crazy. My mother came downstairs in an Indian tunic dress and Greek leather sandals. “Let’s go, my lovelies. Luke needs to get to school early. The play will be sublime.” I didn’t know what “sublime” meant. I hoped that word wouldn’t come for me now, because what would I do when I didn’t know a word?

  “Please, Mom. Cut it out. No big words. This is serious.” But I didn’t tell her why. I kept the words to myself. I was scared. I didn’t want her big words to come over to the blackboard in my mind and ask me to spell them. That would be more trouble than I could handle at the moment. The three of us walked out of the house and climbed into the Beetle. I think each of us thought Dad was going to surprise us by jumping out from behind a eucalyptus tree.

  We drove to the play without him. I sat in my chair in the dark theater and clenched my hands in my lap and worried about Luke. Would he remember his lines? “Shakespeare” and “brother” came, and I defined them. Then the play started and Luke was Puck and he was so good up there on the stage. I relaxed and laughed out loud and cheered for my brother in my deepest of hearts.

  I kept reading the dictionary—just ten minutes or so every day at school. I liked to do it. The words were like a nervous tic that lasted through eighth grade and on into the fall of ninth. They came only when I was rattled. I’d define them and they’d leave. I didn’t usually mind them. They were almost a comfort, something I could count on, and they kept my mind busy.

  After he left us, Dad became famous in the geology department at Irvine for the series of undergrad girls he brought to the desert with him. He lived in an old blue REI tent in the Sonoran
Desert and kept a studio apartment near the university when he was back in town, and he sort of unraveled for a little while. He was thirty-five. Too old to be drafted for Vietnam, but he hung out with the anti-war protesters in the desert. There were many of them. And the girls at Irvine dared each other to go camping with him. He lived with one for a time in town, and Luke got to meet her. Dad wrote the girls great job recommendations and helped them get government grants. He was not unkind.

  He moved back in with us after close to two years because a flash flood almost killed him. It was 1973. It wasn’t the only reason he came back, I’m sure, but the flood changed everything. He started sleeping at the house again, and the words stopped appearing in my head as suddenly as they’d arrived. They’d been a phase, and now they were over. I didn’t even need to read the dictionary at study hall anymore. Dad said the water had carried him downstream, but he’d kept his head up and looked for things to grab. He’d found a small tree in the middle of a basin and held on to it all night, and for the first time in his life, he began to talk to God.

  Then he and my mother began doing what they called the big repairs on their marriage. He read the Bible every day and went to the church on Racino Drive—he knew someone there, a friend of a friend from the desert who was interested in space travel. He was calmer after this, too. But I’ve never been able to decide if the change in Dad was for the worse or the better. My mother forgave him. She told me it was because life is too short. “Life is fleeting, Willow.” This was the first night after he’d come home. I was lying in her bed watching her get undressed, waiting for the quiet thrill of seeing her small pale breasts and her high-waisted underwear. She had such thin legs, like a deer. Flanks. Perfectly shaped. I was from that. From her. She was still my person even though she’d left me for Greece. Even though the passage of time haunted her and drove her away from psychology and sometimes even from us.

  5

  Testimony: a solemn declaration usually made orally by a witness under oath

  Moona likes to smoke cheap American cigarettes—Pall Malls—and I don’t know where she gets them, but I let her do it, even though it makes me nauseous. It’s her nervous thing, and almost everyone else in France smokes, too. We can’t find the ashtray at the start of the third class—the one with the black sketch of the Eiffel Tower on it. All the girls look under the couch and in between the cushions of the chairs. Precy finally locates it on a stack of books on the round ottoman by the window. Then we all take our seats. Moona’s so grateful. She smiles and lights up right away and taps her foot on the floor while she smokes. She’s got on thick brown wool socks under her sari today.

  She’s not the only one who seems stressed. It’s been a week since I was last here. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Rateeka has this new, vacant look, as if the strain of staying in this place has become too much and she’s already left us. Or is she on some new anxiety medication? Zeena has small, red burn marks dotting her forearm. Has she branded herself with a cigarette? Has someone else done this? Have the scars always been there and I just haven’t noticed them until now? Precy can’t stop touching her chapped lips with her thumbs. Esther chews the tips of her hair and hums quietly. Gita fingers the Krishna medallion.

  The girls need to be able to tell the story of how they came to France. The judge will ask them this at the appeal hearing. They also need to write it down in a document for the judge called a testimonial. “Heart-wrenching,” Sophie said to me today before class. “Make their stories so sad that there’s not a dry eye in the house and even God’s eyes are crying, yes.”

  I stand. “It’s great to see you all again. So good to be back here with you. It’s getting warmer outside.” Then I regret saying this because no one in this class has left the center since I was last here. There’s no going back. I screwed up, but we still have three hours together. “Tonight I want to talk about what the judge will ask you at the hearing and how you will answer. A lot depends on this. So think of one or two sentences in your mind that are the real reason you’re here waiting on a hearing. Tell yourself this story. Then write it down or repeat it to yourself hundreds of times.”

  I plug a black tape recorder into the wall above the bookshelf while the girls write in their notebooks. I want them to read their sentences into the machine. Moona stands and walks over to me. “I’m done. I’m ready to tell my story now.”

  “Terrific.” I can’t wait for them to hear the sound of their own voices. I press Record. “Try to talk slowly and loudly.”

  She leans down close to the tape recorder and doesn’t hesitate: “My uncle had a dark office near the bathroom stalls at his factory in Bombay. Every day he said, ‘You look like a peacock in your sari. Where are your feathers?’ I smiled at him because he was the boss but I was nervous because something was not right with the way he was talking to me. He told me to follow him into his office one night and close the door. It was loud in that place with the machinery and I could not be heard when I yelled out and he was unwrapping my sari and unbuttoning my choli and this is when the new troubles began.”

  She finishes. “Oh Moona,” I say. “I’m so glad you’re safe in Paris. I’m so sorry. You said much more than two sentences. You said so much.”

  “But I am not being safe here. What is this you are saying?” She pauses on her way back to the couch. “I am not safe here because they will not let me stay. They will send me back, I am sure of it, because I had a dream in which this is true.”

  Gita stands, puts her hand on Moona’s shoulder, and lowers her head. I have no idea what they say, but their lips almost touch while they whisper. When they’re done, Moona wipes the tears on her face and Gita joins me at the tape recorder.

  The first thing she does is bend down and whisper, “My name is Gita Kapoor.”

  “Gita, you don’t have to get quite so close to the machine. Can you step back and try to speak louder so the machine can hear you?”

  She raises her voice, and I can’t ever tell if Truffaut’s watching us on the surveillance cameras in his office or not, but if he is then he should be ashamed. “In my story Manju is taking us to the department store. The big one. I needed a coat because the winter is coming. We all are purchasing the coats. Maa, Pradeep, Morone, and me. Mamie and me practice in the long mirror of the store, tucking the sari up under the coat, but we stop because that is not working. That is the week Manju presses into me where the coats hang in the back hall of the apartment and says that he will tell his wife—my sister, Morone—if I yell. Every morning he unties his pajamas and says the part about telling Morone. So I am not yelling. He is making red dots on my neck where he presses with his fingers and thumbs. He is almost strangling me sometimes. Then he turns back down the hall and I put on my coat that hangs behind me and I go down the stairs to my job at Shalimar in Brady Passage opening the restaurant.”

  Gita closes her eyes and pauses. Then she opens them and says, “I am not going back.” This time I know she doesn’t just mean India, but also her family’s apartment in Paris. In a way she’s asking for asylum from both homes—the one she’d grown up in and the one she’d left India for. I’m afraid what she wants is impossible. “I am not going back to Maa or to India,” Gita continues. “If I go back to India, Manju has arranged for me to marry his younger brother Daaruk. He owns many acres of land near Jodhpur. It is all prepared, Willow. Daaruk already had me in the back of Manju’s shop in Jaipur. I don’t want this to happen again.”

  “Willie. You can call me Willie. I’m so incredibly sorry for what you’ve been through.”

  “But why would I call you the name of a boy,” Gita asks, “when the name your maa gave you is being much more beautiful?” She smiles that big, open smile. “Willow is sounding better.”

  AFTER THE GIRLS have gone to their bedrooms, I find Sophie in her office writing notes on a pad of white paper as fast as she can, the black phone receiver propped in the folds of her neck. I stare at the corkboard of photographs above her desk—Po
laroids of every girl who’s ever come to the center, no matter how short or long a stay. A record of who was here. She swallows a big sip of tea, and it burns her mouth. She rolls her eyes at me and waves her hand in front of her face. Then she says, “Oui, oui, oui. Merci. Merci beaucoup!” And hangs up. “Ow. Ow. So hot! So darn hot! More girls coming tonight. Two from Algeria.” She puts her fingers on her lips. “Ow.” Then she looks at me. “How are things, my dear girl?”

  “Moona? She tells me she’s been raped by her uncle in a shoe factory in Bombay.”

  Sophie shakes her head from side to side. “Many of the girls here have been raped. You have no idea the number caught in human trafficking rings. You have no idea the number of children. It is the most appalling thing of all.” She says Moona’s father had been an Indian soldier in Kashmir for ten years. He later became a clothing importer, buying kurtas and saris directly from wholesalers there. When tensions began rising in 1987, he was stuck on the Pakistani side of the border. There was no work for him there, so he spent most of his time hiding in the house of a distant cousin.

  I play Sophie Moona’s tape recording. She closes her eyes and puts her hands together under her chin like she’s praying. Then I play Gita’s recording. Sophie doesn’t seem surprised by this story, either. “A baby was lost. God’s will. Amen.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lost’?”

  “Gita got pregnant, God save her.” Sophie stacks papers on her desk. “For a Hindu girl like Gita, having an illegitimate child is grounds to be thrown out of the family. Disgrace. If Manju convinced Morone that Gita seduced him, Gita might have been killed. So God granted Gita safety here. It is a sad thing to be locked in so your own family can’t get you.”