by Lily King
Nicole found her silk shirt on Guillaume’s chair mashed into a pillow and scolded him in a singsong voice that just made him grin at her. She asked me a few polite questions, which I answered with the simplest expressions I knew. There was something about Nicole, the swift strokes with Odile’s brush and now the same movement with her hand to rid the silk of wrinkles, that told me immediately that she was not a person to tolerate mistakes, and I suspected that my four years of textbook French would not hold out for very long.
I had the feeling, from the moment Nicole glanced up and saw me, that I had either arrived too late or too early in the afternoon. There was something distinctly inconvenient about me, which turned out to be a feeling that persisted for several months. It could disappear for long stretches of time, then resurface inexplicably one day as I walked into the kitchen with her dry cleaning or into the living room to call her kids to dinner. She would look at me with that same vague surprise, that attempt to veil vexation. During those first months, no matter how close I came to feel to that family, that look of Nicole’s could cast me straight back out to that initial moment on the deck when I wondered if I was too early or too late to begin my life with them.
I followed her down the steep stairs into the house. I’d never been on a houseboat before or been to Paris or spoken French outside a classroom. A house on a boat on a river in France. A house on a boat on a river in France. It took a tune in my head as we clomped down the steps and I thought someday I’d sing it to Lola, who liked me already, which I knew by the way she watched beside me with her seal face, her round brown eyes, and hopeful mouth, watching for my reaction to this new world, her world. I wondered if she knew any English, if she would understand house or boat or river. Already I felt that if I said those words—or any words—Lola would understand them all.
I was actually the only one who clomped. Lola bounced and Nicole trotted, gold thongs swatting her heels as she led me down a corridor and pointed without stopping to the children’s rooms, bright with rugs, posters, and comforter covers. The beige hallway carpet bled into my room at the end, where there was no vestige of the many girls who’d come before me, only a single bed covered in a washed-out floral fabric that appeared more vividly beneath the glass of the dressing table and on the pillows of the ottoman in the corner. I glanced at this corner placidly, as if I’d often had an ottoman in my bedroom.
Nicole showed me how to open the window and told me I was not to spill in the room or use nails on the walls or eat meals anywhere but in the kitchen. Then she made me open the window myself and repeat back to her the negative commands she’d given. I couldn’t remember some of the words she’d used. My comprehension was still way ahead of my recall. Nicole’s face said she’d done this a thousand times with the same result. For her I was just another fille marking another year, another rentrée.
Lola pleaded my case. “Don’t worry, Maman. She’s understood you.” But Nicole looked one last time at the room, as if she’d never recognize it again, and led Lola away to let me unpack.
But Lola and Guillaume were back in my room in a few minutes to model their back-to-school clothes. Lola’s were boyish, mostly jeans and soft cotton shirts, while Guillaume’s were for a child far younger: wool shorts with tall socks, a shirt with a scalloped collar, plaid overalls. I showed them the pieces of magenta and chartreuse paper I found in a dresser drawer, and they told me it was Sigrid’s from two years ago. Because I couldn’t understand all of their simultaneous explanations, they resorted to fingers that became scissors, then pulled me into each of their rooms to show me the framed cutouts on their walls.
“And the other girls. How many?” I was wary, in those early days, of full sentences.
“Millions,” Lola said, letting her arms flail. “Thirty or forty?” She looked at her brother for verification. She was a spindly, awkward girl in the most awkward stage of her life. I knew from watching her that people had begun to tell her to calm down, to lower her voice, to keep her arms at her side.
“More,” Guillaume said.
Their fingers became full of names.
“Pilar!” Lola stopped. “Remember her? She wore Maman’s clothes when she wasn’t home.”
“But Tonia was worse,” Guillaume said. “She called Turkey every night and the bill was five thousand francs and she had to work six months for nothing. She cried a lot.”
They went through the long list: Vibeke the witch, Begonia the poet, Hélène the belcher. They spent awhile debating if it was Ella or Elsa who ate her cigarettes after she smoked them.
“And me, what?” I finally dared ask.
“You mean what will we say?”
I nodded. Lola shrugged and said something I wasn’t sure was a word.
She repeated it. “Chais pas.”
“What does it mean?”
“Chais pas?” She seemed disappointed, as if she’d had higher hopes for me. “Je ne sais pas.”
“Chais pas.” I practiced. “Chais pas.”
“How do you say it in English?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly.
But she was impatient. “I know, but how do you say it fast?”
“I dunno.”
“Dunno,” Lola said, in that precise accent she had whenever she repeated me.
“Perfect.”
“Dunno,” Guillaume tried.
“Dunno,” I repeated.
“Dunno.”
“Good,” I said, but it was a lie to stop the game short and he knew it.
“I don’t need to learn English. I’m going to be a priest.”
“A priest?” I said, trying to say the word prêtre as beautifully as he had and failing.
“We’ll say that you aren’t very stylish—I’m not either—but that you’re very nice,” Lola said.
“That you’re disorganized.” Guillaume looked at my open suitcase and all the balled clothing.
“And that you have a pretty smile.”
“And that you’re a little fat.”
“Guillaume!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s true.”
“But you’re smaller here.” She poked her leg. “And here.” She touched her cheek. “And it’s very smooth. Look at Guillaume. He already has two boutons and he’s only nine.”
Though I suspected what Lola meant, I feigned confusion to diffuse a moment I thought would be embarrassing to Guillaume. But he showed me the pimples on his chin with pride.
Guillaume left then, but Lola stayed and watched me empty my suitcase. Even as I put things in drawers for the first time, I imagined Lola could already see me packing to go. Lola would treat me kindly, I thought, sometimes even with affection, as if I were a surprisingly pleasant stranger on a long train journey, then bid me farewell, a separation she had always expected and had been through dozens of times before. I felt her watching me, sizing me up against the other faces and suitcases and accents. I figured by now Lola knew exactly how much of herself to give, the extent of the attachment she could afford. What I forgot is that Lola was a child, and no matter how polite and contained and wise she seemed, she did not live within a world of learned boundaries, of hesitation and self-protection, of moderation and mitigation, of meting out and holding back. She lived wholly, fastidiously, and devoutly in the present.
That night we went out for pizza. Since the fille was not technically due to start working until the next day, this pizza treat was a tradition in the family on the eve of the rentrée.
We took a large table in the middle of the restaurant. It became clear then that Odile was out of my domain. She and her mother sat at one end, only a few feet away but worlds apart from the rest of us, thick in quiet discussion, of which I could understand not one word. Eventually Odile held her sleeve up to her mother, who examined it carefully before resuming conversation. After that I could understand a few things: soie, jupe, taille.
Guillaume wanted to talk about clothes too. He asked me if I liked his T-shirt that said BOS
TON BAISBALL RED SOCS written in a circle around a football and a flat bat. I nodded, then noticed the streaks of white scarring on his arms and hands.
He saw me looking and said something too quickly. Lola translated. “He almost died once.”
Nicole leapt out of her conversation to squelch the topic immediately with two words: “Lola. Non.” And that was the end of it.
Guillaume ate his dessert on his mother’s lap. Despite the infantile position, his voice instantly changed in rhythm and timbre and became as adultlike and incomprehensible as the other two. Only Lola remained at my level, speaking to me slowly about the unfamiliar cartoon figures that appeared on the paper place mats.
As we walked back along the quai, night had not yet fallen, though it must have been close to nine. The sky was pale green and starless. The river water below seemed not a color but a kind of light, a wan timid light that flickered and then disappeared as a Bateau Mouche slid through with its gaudy necklace of spotlights, inducing a false darkness and shattering the surface of glass.
Lola stayed behind, next to me, though I’d run out of words. I was thinking This is Paris, this is Paris, but now that I was finally here I could feel it no more than if I had been walking down a cinema aisle with screens on all sides.
When we reached the barge and filed down the narrow stairwell, the children scattered. Guillaume went straight to the TV in the living room, Lola to her bedroom, and Odile to the telephone in the study. The boat seemed so small from the street, but down inside it opened up into a real house. Nicole told me to make myself at home, then disappeared too. There seemed no place for me to go but to my room. Eventually I heard Nicole in the laundry room—folding the clothes, I guessed, that were dry on the racks. I wondered if I should offer to do it and stood in the middle of my room for a long time, frozen in indecision until it was too late. Nicole knocked on my door when she was through, her head just above the tall pile. I nodded to everything she said, though all I really understood was that she would do breakfast tomorrow but that I should be ready to do something else at ten. She wasn’t fooled by my nods but she was tired, too, and simply repeated the time, ten o’clock, when I should be ready. Then she told me to sleep well and shut the door.
One by one I heard the children wash faces, brush teeth, and go to bed.
I removed the remaining things from the pouches inside my suitcase: a paperback, mittens, a flashlight. I examined them peacefully now, these pieces from my room in my sister’s house. They bore no marks of the fury and fear with which they had been packed. But when I felt the tiny comb, my hand became too heavy to lift and I sat on the bed beside the suitcase. I was determined to look, though it took me a long time. There were several strands of the baby’s fine red hair wound up in the plastic teeth. All that hair. My sister called him Samson and pulled it up with two hands above his head, like she used to do, years ago, when shampooing me. I brought the comb to my nose because I knew it would smell of his scalp and that smelling would hurt far more than seeing. Then I unwrapped a strand and pulled it through my lips, slowly. My cheek had fit perfectly in the soft depression below his crown.
I wound it back on the teeth, set the comb carefully in the pouch, and went to the window. Although I had no sensation of movement, I could hear the faint pat of the river against the hull and, fainter still, the barge ropes straining on their fat cleats. I was relieved by the sky’s final darkness and the slow flames of light from the bridge lamps on the water. Another day, however, a day to follow this one, seemed impossible. It had taken all my strength to get this far.
Despite the lingering warmth of the air, a long chill went through me. I undressed quickly and got into bed. The sheets were good, expensive sheets, the kind that always stay slippery and cold, but I already knew sleep wouldn’t find me here.
After a long while, someone went into Lola’s room next door. She whispered and a man’s voice hoarsed back. A father’s voice. I’d forgotten about a father. The only word I could make out—and they each said it, Lola first, her father repeating—was my name.
The next morning there were knocks at my door, knocks so swift and hard they were barely discernible as separate sounds. I pulled open the door and saw, in a flicker of a second, Nicole’s face fall again with that expression. Its source was unidentifiable; her eyes did not travel; her hands remained at her sides. But there was something in my response that caused disappointment.
As I stepped out into the hallway, I debated whether to shut the door behind me. Not shutting it seemed an invitation for anyone to paw through my things, but shutting it seemed as if I had something to hide. I glanced down to the kids’ rooms and, seeing them all open, let go of my door at about halfway, but Nicole reached behind me to shut it firmly, saying something to which I quickly agreed, not having recognized one word in all the sounds. She proceeded ahead of me then, zigzagging down the hall to shut first Lola’s, then Guillaume’s, then Odile’s door, as if to say with each tug that no one but her ever had any common sense about doors.
She wore the kind of pants shaped for shapely women, the kind that matter if they get wrinkled and are sold from hangers, not in piles arranged by waist and length. Into these black pants was tucked a sleeveless green shirt that seemed nearly fluorescent against her deep brown shoulders and arms and the even darker dip of nape below the precise cut of her hair. When we reached the coatroom, a landing halfway up the stairs, she put on a thin jacket and hung a purse on one shoulder. This morning, she explained as we stepped off the barge, she would show me how to shop for groceries.
Up on the street, I couldn’t help noticing that people stared at the pair we made. I thought Nicole absurd for dressing up to food shop, for wearing heels and a shiny evening purse that thwacked against her bony hip. It was embarrassing. But after we had walked a few blocks I realized that every woman was wearing heels and carrying shiny purses, even women juggling toddlers, purchases, and sometimes a little dog on a leash. Only in an occasional cluster of tourists moving from one bridge to the next were there women who wore sandals or sneakers or untucked shirts. Though it was only just ten (the thin strokes of a clock reached us from somewhere upriver), the sun beat down fiercely, and I marveled at these women who moved past swiftly in dark clothes and pantyhose, who fit heat-swollen feet into narrow shoes, with neither sweat nor grimace. I wore a T-shirt, track shorts, and flip-flops and was still uncomfortable.
The occasional pulses of traffic stirred up a wind hotter than the air. Nicole moved even more quickly than the rest. I realized that I embarrassed her.
“Il fait chaud,” I ventured.
“Oui, oui. Il fait chaud,” she said, without turning back to me, as if I were one of the men slouching against the river wall trying to get her attention. Then she slowed and said perfectly clearly, as I gained ground, “I adore this heat.”
“Me too,” I said, which wasn’t true, but I didn’t know many negatives and negatives made room for a whole conversation and Il fait chaud was about as complex as I wanted things to get.
She tried to tell me something else. I thought she said the heat reminded her of her childhood. But when I asked where she was from, she looked at me suspiciously. “I’ve lived in Paris for nearly thirty years,” she said, then added reluctantly, “but I come from a town in the south.”
“What town?”
“You’ve never heard of it.”
She veered off the sidewalk, then, and swiftly crossed the street. I hurried to keep up. We passed a café, a dry cleaner’s, a pharmacy, a bookstore. At the oisellerie there were birds stacked in wooden cages on the sidewalk, black roosters with scarlet crests and tongue-shaped wattles, white doves with long lacy tails. A man in oily coveralls rolled out another stack of square cages from inside the store, this one containing rabbits, white, gray, and cinnamon-colored rabbits, some hugely fat, some with ears so long they spilled onto the floor of their cage. Pigeons flocked, vying for position along the outside slats.
The smell of the cages
pervaded the hot sidewalk. I could see how people were avoiding the stench, but I thought it was delicious.
“I’m sorry,” I called, when I realized I’d come to a full stop. I hurried to Nicole, who was waiting in the shade of the next awning.
She muttered something, and when she saw I hadn’t understood told me simply and slowly that the birds made her sad.
“Oui,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say moi aussi again, because they made me elated. They made me feel I lived in a very exotic place, where in a matter of three steps the air could change from the smell of burnt diesel to the smell of a barnyard, where beneath one awning could be a cart of computer manuals and beneath the next a crate of fowl, where the world could shift centuries within a half block.
When we reached the supermarket, she pointed out a row of shopping carts. I removed one and wheeled it to the entrance, stopping on the rubber mat before the closed door.
“What are you doing?” she said behind me, after a few moments. “It doesn’t work by itself. You have to go like this”—and she took the cart from me, swung it around, and backed into the door—“like everyone else.”
When she was insulting me, I always managed to understand Nicole.
Inside the store she gave back the cart. I headed right, toward the produce, but she quickly steered me left, explaining that fruits and vegetables are delicate and should go on top. It went on like this. She would ask me to pick out pasta or bottled water, and invariably I would choose the wrong type or size or brand. She asked me to get milk and I went toward the dairy section, but that was wrong too. Milk came in unrefrigerated boxes next to the cereal. With each error would come a lengthy explanation of exactly why she bought what she did.
