Extraordinary Theory of Objects

by Stephanie LaCava

  Le Vésinet

  Fall 1993

  I bent down to pluck a mushroom* from the wet ground. Clusters of them had sprung up along the path to the park. I sank deep into the mud, my new sneakers covered in thick brown paste. My mother had finally allowed me to buy a pair of skateboarding shoes like the other kids at school. Kneeling, I tried to keep my feet in the air as I pulled at the plant with its red cap and cream-colored spots. I braced my legs against a tree, lifting my thin slip dress to let my knees touch the earth. It was difficult to see. The sun wouldn’t rise for another two hours.

  I liked to walk alone in the dark. The first time I had tried a late-evening stroll was two days after our arrival in France, the night of the skeleton key. Sneaking out at night became my escape from days filled with books and silence, a boredom verging on insanity, locked inside with my little belongings and endless ruminations. My brother too had become uncharacteristically quiet and withdrawn since the move, shutting himself in his room, leaving only for a croissant from the kitchen before returning to his toy cars. He had always shown signs of being odd, evidence that I wasn’t a changeling after all, but his behavior, like mine, grew stranger by the day. He, my mother, and I moved through the house, airy versions of our old selves, coasting over the cold marble floors. My mother’s Oriental rugs wouldn’t arrive for another month, the same for her toile de Jouy curtains, and the same for her husband. He’d been traveling for much of the year. The entire house was hollow and icy, even though it was only early September. It was warmer outside.

  I had taken a pale tan cardigan* with me when I left the house in case the wind stirred up as the sun started to rise over the streets. The left shoulder of the sweater slipped off, exposing the thin strap of my dress, as I yanked at the mushroom. The root gave way, and I fell backward. The slip flew up, and my bare bottom hit the ground. My back and legs, like my sneakers, were now covered in dirt. I stood, shook the dress down, and pulled the cardigan on, all with my left hand, as my right held tightly to the mushroom. The freshly picked plant wouldn’t last forever, but long enough to sit on a shelf and lend its charm to my new collection.

  There were more patches of mushrooms huddled together at the corner of the street leading to the park. The mottled markings on my skin matched the patterns on their hats. I knew the park Les Ibis wasn’t far from rue Ampère, where we lived, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to get there, and I couldn’t ask anyone. The few women I walked by looked at me with disdain, because of my sneakers. They were dressed in long skirts or tiny fitted suits with heels. I didn’t care, feeling rather invisible anyway. I was the French cartoon character Fantômette. By following a young woman pushing an old-fashioned stroller, I found the entrance. We took two rights and a left, past a roundabout and the green painted gate. Two swans stalked nearby with beady eyes and orange beaks. One ducked its head into the neck of the other. This one then flicked her wings and spread her orange web toes as she waddled back into the water to float among branches and fallen leaves. Her friend followed, and they both coasted toward the Palais Rose across the pond. The mansion looked like a film set, with its pink-and-white pillar marble façade and massive black-and-gold gate. I read its history off of the plaque on the ground. In 1900, Arthur Schweitzer had commissioned the mansion to be built after the Grand Trianon at Versailles. It was then sold to Ratanji Jamsetji Tata for three pearls and an emerald. The next owner was Comte Robert de Montesquiou, Proust’s “Professor of Beauty.” There, in Le Vésinet, Montesquiou entertained the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and Auguste Rodin. In 1922, the Marchesa Luisa Casati* came to live at the Palais Rose with her library of books on the occult, pavilion of portraits, mechanical panther, stuffed boa constrictor, Blue Rolls-Royce, and wax effigies.

  That morning, as my sneakers grew soggy in the manicured grounds, I stood in front of the grand house, trying to imagine its old owner, the insane and beautiful Marchesa Casati. I thought I saw someone in the window with almond eyes, holding a candle, though the image was only one of many daydreams. They happened often, because I was so unbalanced: on the best days, I experienced a realism deficiency with an excess of whimsy. Some people’s bodies need to make extra blood cells or insulin for survival; mine manufactured fantasy. This marble palace at the end of my park was comfort against the creeping tediousness of my days and odd new faithless impulses. I had to try to sort through what exactly I was doing in this foreign place. The swans honked, and I stepped backward.

  Without quotidian American distractions, I became aware of my thoughts as I never had before. My growing insecurity wasn’t rooted in anything specific that happened, but rather what didn’t happen. It was on walks like this that I began to notice how my head dealt with the world. I wasn’t wired for contentment. All these fears, all these thoughts, they wouldn’t stop, unless I buried them with stories and random information. Numbers suddenly became important to me. I liked to do everything in even counts. Some superstitious reasoning told me that odd meant something bad would soon happen.

  Not once that morning had I considered the feelings of my mother back at the house, perhaps terrified, looking for me in an empty bedroom as the sun rose. I knew it was insensitive, but I couldn’t bring myself to go home. Instead I walked around Les Ibis exactly four times and then toward town.

  There were two shopping areas in Le Vésinet. The larger one was just beyond the silver stag roundabout with streets of gourmet shops, a general store, and an ice-skating rink near the site of the outdoor market. I walked toward the older, smaller center with its boulangerie, épicerie, North African traiteur, and papeterie. It had been over three hours since I’d left the house and I was feeling unusually hungry. I had a ten-franc bill rolled up in my shoe.

  The man who ran the épicerie was a small, tan Algerian who spoke in patient unintelligible words. I liked him from my first visit to his shop, with my mother, to find some milk. He had offered me an electric-colored candy from the plastic bins he kept stacked by the cash register. I had chosen a red ribbon covered in little sour crystals. He recognized me immediately. I was thankful he was open so early.

  “Qu’est ce que tu veux?” he asked, looking at me with gentle eyes.

  I lifted my shoulders knowing very little French yet.

  “Des bonbons?” He pointed to the stacked clear containers.

  I nodded, not caring that this would be my breakfast. Those sorts of societal conventions had never meant much to me: mealtimes, talking in turn. He passed his hand over the bins of green frogs with crème bellies, sunny-side eggs with yellow centers, and rainbow sour strips. I shook my head. He lifted his finger.

  From beneath the counter he pulled out a lovely little oval box printed with two lovers amid tiny purple flowers. I nodded. He pried it open, and inside were sugar-dusted violet candies.*

  I’d never eaten anything flower flavored before, but I picked one up and placed it on my tongue. It was wet, natural, and sweet, like I imagined the earth would have tasted had I taken a handful from the lawn in front of the Palais Rose and shoveled it into my mouth.

  I left the little man with a small bag of the violet candies. He had refused my ten francs and insisted on giving me the sweets. I’d never been in a shop alone with its owner, nor one where we couldn’t communicate, but we shared something of a bond. After all, he wasn’t from France either. I paused for a moment in front of his green-and-yellow-striped awning with a white-spotted red mushroom in one hand and a bag of purple candies in the other. The sun had come up, lighting this part of Le Vésinet to resemble a scenic throwback to seventies small-town America. A Deux Chevaux crackled by a roundabout planted with primary-colored tulips and lilies of the valley, which would arrive from beneath the ground in the spring. I wasn’t sure I knew how to get back to rue Ampère, to my house, and to my mother and brother inside. But I started home, eyes fixed on the street.

  Then, I saw it: a violent blue spark in the sidewalk, which quickly paled to discrete white, like a shy phantom. It sparked again, th
is time, illuminating purple and pink. I bent over, holding the mushroom in one hand while letting the candy fall to the puddle-covered ground. My knees, caked with dirt, began to drip mud. I pulled my cardigan up over my shoulders as I picked up the glittering object. With my free hand I lifted the thing as if it were the tail of a snake covered in creamy blue and lavender spots. I was holding an antique opal necklace,* somehow lost and forgotten. It may have been exhaustion, or simply my anemic common sense, but it didn’t strike me as that strange a discovery or that it belonged to someone else. I picked up the candies and continued walking back to the house with my mushroom, violets, and fiery jewelry.

  *

  A few days later my father was finally back. The last time he’d been in France was prior to the first shipment of furniture and before setting off to North Africa, or somewhere like that. He was at my bedroom door.

  “Come in, Dad.” As I sat up he ran over to me and gave me a hug.

  “I missed you.”

  “Then why did you go for so long?” I asked. He said nothing and the mustache didn’t move.

  “What’s this I hear about you bringing fungus inside?” My mother had been begging me to throw away the plant I had put on the shelf as part of my collection.

  “It’s my mushroom.”

  “And you need it here on your windowsill, why?”

  “Look at how beautiful it is!”

  “That is one nice mushroom,” he said.

  “Please, Dad, don’t be like Mom, she’s annoying enough.”

  “How about I make a deal with you?”

  “What?”

  “You lose the mushroom, and I take you somewhere special today filled with things just like it—better things, things you can’t even imagine.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Have I ever lied to you?” It was true; every crazy thing he’d ever said had come true.

  “Fine, take my mushroom.” I sighed as I watched him walk over to the windowsill, crawling with little black bugs.

  “You still have the tooth I gave you! The one from Nantucket.”

  “Yes, I like it.”

  “I loved that tooth when I was little. I took it with me everywhere. What’s that key for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We will have to find out. For now, get dressed, we are going on a little trip.”

  *

  It took us an hour and a half with traffic to drive from Le Vésinet to our destination in Paris. My father planned to park in a garage, which meant our car had to be inspected first by police. Everyone was on high alert because of the recent bombings by Algerian insurgents. My father showed the men his papers, and they seemed satisfied after a quick sweep of the backseat and trunk. When they were done, we drove down one level and found an empty spot. Neither of us said a word as we got out of the car and locked the doors. I quietly followed my father into the elevator to the ground floor. When we stepped onto the street he motioned me to the left, and we walked two blocks before reaching the entrance to the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, the museum of natural history.

  “We’re here,” my father said as we took our place at the end of the ticket line behind a tall teenage boy and his girlfriend. I suddenly felt self-conscious, having barely brushed my hair. I was wearing a blue-and-white long-sleeve sailor stripe sweater underneath a yellow T-shirt, and loose, faded black leggings with my skateboarding sneakers. My hair was matted and tumbling down my shoulders in gnarled red strands. I watched as the boy took the girl’s hand after they paid and led her into the museum.

  “Stephie?” my father said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where are you? Let’s go.” He put his hand on my shoulder and steered me to the main hall.

  There, at the heart of the museum, was a taxidermy parade: a timeline of stuffed animals from prehistoric reptiles to present day. An enormous scaled lizard led creatures like a fat woolly mammoth, Indian elephant, Bengal tiger, and big-horned ram. I loved their beady eyes and frozen bodies and that unlike their dynamic former selves, they could go nowhere. They were enduring objects rather than beasts. “You see that?” my father said, pointing ahead. “That’s a real dodo bird.* They’re extinct now. You can’t find one anywhere.” But there one was, with its squat, feathered body and curved beak.

  “How many are there in the world?” I asked, immediately enchanted.

  “I think this is the only one left.”

  “No?”

  “Yes, unless you count those that survive in stories.”

  *

  We’d been in France for over six months, well, more like four, considering we’d spent the summer back in New York. Instead of growing familiar, my surroundings became filled with more curious customs, places, and people, but I no longer felt the excitement of initial discovery. Les Ibis, the Palais Rose, Paris even, I went to all of them each week, and while they still managed to mesmerize a little, they weren’t enough to keep me from falling into a kind of numbness. Somehow cynicism had crept over my fantastical thinking. I was mostly alone that year. I rode the bus to school and listened to my Discman while the girl in the back row threw gum wrappers at my head. The girls at school didn’t like me very much. They had never given me a chance, decided immediately that I didn’t belong, which was funny, as they didn’t either—at least not in France. They made me feel as if I had done something wrong, and they spoke badly about me to each other. Through my own odd rationalization, I decided excommunicating me meant they belonged to something, simply because I did not. They didn’t like that I had a growing friendship with the boys, either, although the one I wanted most was taken. I had met all twenty of the other people in my grade, and none of them seemed quite right for me. If I did the math, one over twenty was the fractional equivalent in the world of negative-something-crazy over all the people out there, which meant there wasn’t much chance at a real friend. Despite being so young, that’s how I thought, in fatal absolutes and always in numbers.

  Come the new academic year, the old class would be replaced with another set of students who had just moved overseas. Only a few remained year after year—and still the same insensitivity.

  *

  My family celebrated Halloween that October, as Americans tend to do. My brother and I hung white ghosts in the trees of the backyard and carved pumpkins. Our neighbor proceeded to complain to the town about the pagans living next door. As pagans, we also celebrated Thanksgiving together, while none of Europe did at all.

  Much of the American population would take off to Euro Disney for the expatriate version of the holiday feast. My brother, mother, and I followed them. My father was away. There, we ran around and rode the rides before congregating for a faux turkey dinner at the Buffalo Bill’s theme restaurant. The only problem was that I couldn’t relax and enjoy the insanity of the whole scene: five hundred misplaced Americans in a cartoon fantasyland. I became obsessed with checking every gift shop, looking for the Alice in Wonderland section and maybe a stuffed dodo bird.

  Le Vésinet

  Spring 1995

  I hadn’t left my bedroom in two days. My mother had tried to get me to come out for meals, but I’d refused. It was my plea to be recognized as prisoner-in-residence. I didn’t eat all that much anymore. My face was permanently gaunt and red, a shade lighter than my hair, from hours of crying, and my body was pale and weak from the ongoing hunger strike. It didn’t matter that my mother, my father, and my brother all loved me. I only felt dramatic rejection of everything. As a family we’d taken trips I should have been thankful for; to the rocky beaches in Marbella, the tiny town of Bruges, and then the last winter, skiing in Courchevel. Yet, on every holiday, I spent my time looking around for something else, waiting for someone to notice me, trying to engage with strangers, hoping to feel some kind of excitement. Inspired by Cécile in Françoise Sagan’s* Bonjour Tristesse, I sought an understanding of grown-up affairs—and attention from grown-up men. Cécile had admitted that
she was “more gifted in kissing a young man in the warm sunshine than in taking a degree.” It worried me that I was the opposite; I’d never kissed a boy, but school had never been a problem. I was dedicated to my studies; they distracted me from the other part of my mind. When Cécile mentioned she was trying to write an essay about Pascal, I immediately knew all about him. Adult attention, though, was only another daydream, as no one cared for a skinny little elf girl. I didn’t want to swim or ski, I only wanted to know what it would be like to sit and laugh among friends or with a lover. The part of my mind that was supposed to rationalize a pragmatic approach to problems was led by an automatic calibration of negativity. It was a chemical sadness, a slowly growing depression.

  There was a knock and then shuffling footsteps. Someone had pushed something under the door. I stood up from my bed. I’d been wearing the same pale nude slip dress for the past three days. After listening to make sure no one was in the hall, I slid the door open and found a tiny bouquet of lilies of the valley* with a note on the floor. I had forgotten it was May 1, the day when the French celebrate hope and spring and give the tiny flowers to loved ones. I opened the piece of my mother’s cream-colored stationery. “I grew these for you, Love, Mom.” It was true. She had planted them when we arrived. So much time had gone by since then, nearly two years, and now they were here and I wasn’t any longer.