by Mandy Berman
She found “The Babysitters” again and read it in full. It was the one poem in the book she liked, about sisters who had once been close but grew apart.
O what has come over us, my sister!
On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get
We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups’ icebox
And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read
Aloud, crosslegged on the stern seat, from the Generation of Vipers.
So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted—
A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,
Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing,
But ten years dead.
The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.
We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,
Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.
We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.
I see us floating there yet, inseparable—two cork dolls.
What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut?
The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,
And from our opposite continents we wave and call.
Everything has happened.
* * *
—
Growing up, Fiona observed the ways other sisters interacted with each other and wondered what she had missed. She had cousins, Beatrice and Zelda, the big-eyed, dark-haired daughters of Amy’s artist brother, who flanked Fiona in age. They were quiet, witchy girls, forever whispering to each other, speaking in what sounded like tongues, a language the sisters had invented for themselves. When Fiona was a child, with Liam ringleader of the boy cousins and Helen not yet born, she found herself the third wheel to Beatrice and Zelda at family parties, following behind her cousins as they ran through the woods behind their grandmother’s large property in Connecticut, traversing the trails hand in hand while Fiona pretended not to feel left out. Once, playing a game of hide-and-seek, five-year-old Fiona crouched behind a pine tree for half an hour before she came to the realization that Beatrice and Zelda were never planning to look for her. She peed herself in fright, pants soaked and face tear-streaked by the time she was reunited with her very pregnant mother.
When Helen was born, Fiona was optimistic at first: they could become like Beatrice and Zelda one day, with a secret language of their own. But, as a baby, Helen wanted nothing to do with Fiona; Fiona’s holding her or patting her head only made Helen cry harder. Once Helen began to walk and talk, she became unnerved by Fiona’s presence, often toddling away in the opposite direction whenever Fiona approached her; she knew how a mother and father and big brother could serve her needs, but Fiona, too old to be a playmate and too young to be a caregiver, was of no use whatsoever. Fiona was awkward with Helen and sensitive to her indifference, which Helen seemed to be able to smell on her; the harder Fiona tried to impress her little sister, the silly faces and the overly affectionate squeezes (“Too tight!” Amy would warn, loosening Fiona’s well-intentioned grip around Helen’s neck), the less Helen wanted to do with her.
No one seemed to feel bad for Fiona for being in this predicament; Helen’s every action was, to her parents and to Liam, precious and warranted. Fiona had no choice but to begin hating her.
As Helen got older, Fiona had little flashes of hope for their relationship: Once she starts going to school, Fiona would think, we’ll become friends. Helen made friends at school instantly, though; she didn’t need an extra one. By middle school, Fiona gave up trying, and the chasm between them cemented over. By that last summer at camp, they barely spoke except in situations of absolute necessity. They were all but strangers to each other when Helen died.
Fiona actually had no idea if Helen had even cared about taking a trip to Paris. She’d never asked.
* * *
—
Over the next three days, Fiona tried everything to get Liv to spend time with her exploring the city. She suggested the Louvre and the Orangerie and the gardens. She suggested a day trip to Giverny.
“Giverny in May?” Liv responded. “It’ll be crawling with tourists.”
Liv was only interested in the things that she thought real Parisians did, which was to say: Not see any of the city, really. Sit outside cafés and smoke a million cigarettes and speak French, even to each other—which was absurd, frankly. Begin a three-course meal at nine-thirty at night. Go to niche galleries; shop at boutiques and spend hundreds of euros; meet other French people at bars, at concerts, and find a way to get invited back to their house parties.
Fiona wanted to go back to the Louvre. She wanted to stroll past the booksellers along the Seine, maybe walk down to the river with a picnic. She wanted to lie down in the Tuileries Garden with no plans. She wanted to stand in front of the Water Lilies in the Orangerie and cry. So what if these were things that Americans did? They were American girls.
And she wanted to do these things with her friend, not by herself. Because that outing to Shakespeare and Company had been too sad alone. So Fiona tagged along with Liv, because she preferred to be with someone, anyone, even if it meant doing things she didn’t want to do.
Fiona also felt like she owed Liv time together in light of the breakup with Brandon. Even though Liv had not mentioned him once, Fiona got the sense that Liv’s real feelings were percolating somewhere underneath her shiny, happy veneer. It couldn’t have been easy, considering how serious they had been and their plan to move to New York together. Fiona and her roommates had been shocked by the news back in April, a couple of weeks before graduation, but Liv had refused to talk about it. They didn’t know why it had happened, or even who broke up with whom.
Liv didn’t like talking about her problems. She only liked talking about other people’s problems.
On day four, sitting outside a café with Liv, who was smoking something like her tenth cigarette that day, Fiona read in A Moveable Feast: “Never…go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
* * *
—
After another overpriced dinner, the two girls went to a bar in the Latin Quarter. (Liv had consented to go to the Left Bank for this particular bar, which she’d read about in some list online.) It was packed with French college students.
Liv ordered them both glasses of champagne. She handed her card to the bartender.
“Cash only,” he said to her.
“Shit,” she said. “Fiona? Do you have euros? I’m out.”
Fiona reached into her purse, put a twenty on the bar. “That’s all I have left,” she said to Liv.
“That’s okay,” Liv said. “We’ll find some gentlemen to buy us the next round.”
Fiona saw then, across the crowded bar, a face that looked familiar to her. At first she could not place it—it was easily transferrable, handsome but Waspy, plain, almost suspiciously blank. The man was tall and tanned and speaking to a captive audience of two young men his age. She figured she could not know him, because who did she know who was Parisian?
“Oh my God,” Liv said then, her mouth next to Fiona’s ear.
So she did know him. Maybe he was famous.
“He’s someone, right?”
“That’s…” She looked at Fiona, waiting for her friend to fill in the name. “You don’t know?”
“I can’t place him.”
“It’s Gabriel Benoit.” She said his name in a hushed tone.
Suddenly the memories rearranged themselves around her, and she was taken back to that drunken night in the fall, nearly a year earlier. Waking up parched in the middle of the night, desperately groping for water. Him waking up, too, holding her captive when all she wanted was a drink of water. The next day she’d felt prideful, but something had been off. Liv had warned her about him, and F
iona hadn’t wanted to admit that Liv was right, so she had secreted the memories away. The pain of his fingers inside her. His limp dick, no condom on it. Rasping, “Stop,” the scratch of the word against her dry throat. His hand gripped tightly around hers, forced tightly around him, while she stared at the ceiling. She looked at him now, at his smarmy grin. It made her queasy.
“He’s French?” Fiona managed to say.
“One of his parents is,” Liv said. “I forget which one,” she added, as if that mattered. “We should talk to him, right?”
“I’m not sure he’ll remember me.”
“Really? How did you guys leave things?”
Here’s how he had left Fiona, anyway: feeling dirty and base. For drinking too much; for sleeping over; for not quite being able to tell him what she wanted, or didn’t want; for being cripplingly hungover the next day; for hoping, even after all of that, that he’d text or call. Because if he called, it would prove her wrong, and the night, in retrospect, wouldn’t be as bad as she’d thought it was. She had not told Liv this at the time, and she certainly couldn’t tell her now, here in this bar, on their Parisian vacation.
So she said, instead, “I don’t really remember,” and shrugged. “Nothing really came of it.”
“No harm in saying hi then, right?” Liv asked.
“Don’t you hate him, though? What happened to him being bad news?”
“I don’t know. You slept with him and said he was fine, right? Besides, maybe his friends are cool.”
There it was: the way that Liv’s priorities bent to her own needs. Then, she could play at being responsible, like she was looking out for Fiona; Fiona realized now, in this Parisian bar, that it had only been an act back in the fall, only a way for Liv to assert her power over Fiona: maybe a way to get her kicks, or maybe an expression of her own jealousy of Fiona being single, of Fiona having the choice to sleep with whomever she wanted. But had it been a choice, even? Wasn’t it the illusion of choice? Hadn’t Fiona gone home with Gabriel precisely because Liv had told her not to?
Before Fiona could respond, Liv was walking across the room and approaching the men. Fiona could see from the way Liv’s mouth moved that she was speaking to them in French, and then, by their mouths, that they responded to her in English.
She turned and beckoned Fiona over to her. Slowly, Fiona made her way through the crowded bar.
“Hi,” she said to all of them, and the three men looked at her, appraising. She was wearing tight jeans and a tank top with no bra, and she regretted it; she could feel the men’s eyes on her nipples. Each of them gave her bises and said his name as he did so. When she got to Gabriel, he kissed her on the cheeks and introduced himself no differently than the other men had.
“Fiona,” she said back, a bit stunned. The moment passed in which she might have asserted herself, said something to the effect of “You don’t remember me?” But she had not acted fast enough, and now she had to pretend that she was meeting Gabriel for the first time.
“You go to Buchanan, too?” he said to her.
“Yeah,” she said. Liv looked at Fiona, confused, her mouth parted as if she were about to interject and clear things up herself, but Fiona shook her head once, and Liv closed her mouth.
“What are you girls doing in Paris?” one of the Frenchmen asked. He was smirking, with a dark five o’clock shadow. He said “girls” like “gahhuls,” the back of his throat sticking on the nonexistent “h.” And he also said “gahhuls” with disdain, as if by virtue of being young women they were miniature, insignificant, and squashable beneath his large French feet.
“Vacationing,” Liv said, as if vacationing was a thing she did all the time, like studying or going to work.
“See anything good so far?” the other Frenchman asked. He was more handsome, with freckles and full lips.
“Well, we’ve both been here before,” Liv was quick to say. “It’s mostly been a lot of shopping and relaxing.”
“She saw the Kandinsky retrospective at the Pompidou,” Fiona said.
“I saw that, too,” the handsome Frenchman said. “I didn’t love it.”
“Yeah, it was okay,” Liv said, even though she’d told Fiona that she’d adored it. “A little bit, I don’t know, reductive. Not as all-encompassing of his career as I would have liked.”
“Those were my thoughts exactly,” he said.
Now Fiona could tell Gabriel was looking at her as if he was trying to place her.
“We’ve met at Buchanan, right? Did we have a class together?”
Now was her chance. Now she could say to him: Yeah, you stuck your limp, unprotected dick inside of me. Don’t you remember me telling you to stop? Or is that so commonplace for you that I wouldn’t stand out from the others? If I called you an assaulter, or even a rapist, would you be genuinely confused?
Instead, Fiona said, “No, I don’t think we did.” Because, what if he denied it? What if she seemed crazy? She was just tired. Of this trip. Of this city. She didn’t feel like expending her remaining energy on him. It seemed too hard.
“How do you guys know each other?” Fiona asked Gabriel and the smirking one, to change the subject.
“Boarding school,” the smirking one said. “In Switzerland.”
Of course Gabriel had gone to boarding school in Switzerland. Why come to Buchanan, then? Why not Harvard or Yale or the like? He was a bad student, probably. Fiona could imagine him getting caught snorting coke off the desk in his dorm room.
For several more minutes, Fiona engaged in painful conversation with Gabriel and the smirking friend, in which they discussed their boarding school exploits ad nauseam—the girls they fucked, the drugs they did, the crazy places on and off campus in which they partook in both sets of activities. She noticed Liv and the cute guy walking away and then returning with fresh drinks, just for the two of them.
At a natural pause in the conversation, Fiona excused herself, and walked over to Liv. She tapped her friend, who was speaking very closely to the cute Frenchman, on the shoulder.
Liv turned her head.
“Oh, hey,” she said, surprised, as if she didn’t know anyone else in the bar who might talk to her.
“I think I’m gonna head home,” Fiona said.
“Really?” She turned. “You’re not having a good time?”
Fiona looked at the French guy, then blocked her body away from him.
“I just don’t really love these guys.”
“What are you talking about? They’re fun!”
“Gabriel doesn’t even remember me,” Fiona whispered.
“To be fair, you hardly remembered him.”
“I’m gonna go,” Fiona said. “You stay.”
“Come on,” Liv whined. “We’re in Paris.” Fiona was so fucking tired of being reminded by Liv that they were in Paris.
“You don’t need me to be your wingman. You know how to get home.”
“I don’t need you,” Liv said, looking a little stung. “But I want you to stay. Because you’re my friend.”
“Well, you’re not talking to me, so I don’t see what the difference is.”
Liv took a step backward. “Just go, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
* * *
—
Fiona walked home in the dark night, back over the Seine and now through the Île Saint-Louis, the quaint little island between the Left and Right Banks. All the store windows were shuttered; a few diners sat lingering over their late meals at outdoor cafés, but it was nearly midnight, and most of the restaurants had stopped serving food by now. She passed a brown, shuttered storefront that read “Berthillon” in gold medieval-looking lettering, and remembered, with a start, lining up around the block with her mother for an ice cream cone on the first day of their trip. “This is the best ice cream in Paris,” her mother had assured
her, and when their turn came, her mother ordered a pistachio cone for herself, and Fiona, stracciatella. Fiona didn’t remember what the ice cream tasted like, but she did remember her awe as her mother ordered the ice cream in French. Amy’s French came out garbled and slow, like she had stones in her mouth—she hadn’t spoken it since her semester abroad in Paris, a decade and a half earlier—but hearing her mother speak in another language was the first time Fiona had considered Amy’s life before Fiona’s own existence. It was the first time she saw Amy as a person with a past without children, as a college girl exploring her first foreign city, flirting with Frenchmen, untethered to any kind of family or responsibilities. She was amazed that the ice cream vendor understood Amy’s French and handed over the counter the exact two cones she had ordered: one white and speckled with brown, one a pale green.
* * *
—
The next morning, a Friday, Fiona awoke to the heavy door closing. It was going to be a hot day; she had broken into a sweat in her sleep. Not wanting to talk to Liv, she feigned sleep as she heard Liv walk past her own bedroom, slow her footsteps then knock on Fiona’s door.
Fiona didn’t say anything, and Liv opened the door anyway.
“Hey,” Liv said, and Fiona pretended to wake up, though it was obvious, she knew, that she was faking it. Liv was in her outfit from last night: a satin sheath and the new Chanel flats.
“Hey,” Liv said again.
“How was last night?”
“It was fun,” Liv said.
“Did you spend the night at what’s-his-face’s?”
Liv made a face—pursed lips, rolled eyes. “If you’re going to judge me then we don’t need to have this conversation.”
“I just asked an innocent question.”
“It wasn’t that innocent.”
“What?” Fiona said. “Jesus. You are impossible.”
“I’m impossible?”
“Yeah, you are,” Fiona said. “Why did you even want me to come on this trip with you?”