I knew where I wanted to start the search. There was a young man who dealt in furniture, oddities, and old books down one of the rows. He’d once given me an antique copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, covered in pale cream fabric printed with green clovers. I knew he did it so my parents would buy something far more expensive, but the gesture had charmed me nonetheless. I found him sitting in a chair made of horns sorting through a box of old postcards. “Do you have any of Le Vésinet?” I asked in my best French.
He looked up and recognized me. “Ah, jolie mademoiselle, I do.” He handed me two that looked like my favorite waterfall at Les Ibis and a house near the Palais Rose and rue Diderot. “Those are for you. You live there?” he asked.
“Yes.” He looked to be in his thirties, handsome with stubble at his chin. His clothes looked expensive, but at the same time carefully eccentric. He wore a cardigan with leather arm patches, corduroy pants, and sneakers. I felt an odd sensation when he touched my arm to pass me the postcards.
“My parents live there too. This is really their stall. I just work here some days, because I find it interesting to meet people like you. But then I end up giving things away for free. I guess I am not much of a salesperson,” he said, laughing. Again, I felt the strangeness in the pit of my stomach.
“How lovely, then what do you do?” I hoped he could understand my French.
“I am a writer and a philosophy student, I guess,” he said, looking straight at me. I blushed. He must have known I was much younger. I was happy I’d worn some mascara that day. “What are you looking for today?” he continued.
“I’m decorating a room. I need to find some, er, taxidermy.”
“That is quite a mission.”
“Yes, well …”
“I have something hidden I can show you.” He walked behind a pale green curtain and came back with an object in hand. It was a black window box embedded with rubies flanked by two big coral* branches at each side. Inside was the tail of a beautiful fish attached to the body of a stuffed lamb’s head. It was meant to look like a sea-goat, which reminded me of my papier-mâché projects.
“How much is it?” I asked.
“It’s not for sale,” he said. “I love it too much.” Once again, I turned red. “Although, I do have this for you.” He went back behind the silk sheet and came out with a box covered in tiny iridescent green beetle shells. “Do you like it?”
“Very much.”
“Do you promise not to tell anyone?”
I nodded.
“It’s yours.” Behind him, I noticed a large armoire, each door carved with fish.
“Thank you so much. That just caught my eye,” I said, pointing to the piece of furniture. “Do you remember my parents? It’s exactly what they are looking for.”
“Well, I will hold it and you will bring them by?” he asked.
“Yes, please also hold the box until we return. Then you’ll know I’ll be back.”
“This is our plan, little beauty. See you soon.”
I walked to the next aisle, wondering if all he wanted was a sale. Only Jake had ever thought I was beautiful or appreciated my oddness. Why would a handsome older man? I nearly tripped over my brother, crouched above a chest on the ground.
“What are you looking at?” I bent over to find the box was filled with glass eyeballs.*
Zach was picking through them carefully, looking for something in particular.
“Aren’t they amazing? I want to find ones that look like your eyes.”
“My eyes?” I asked.
“Yes, pretty green ones,” he said.
“For what?” I had a brilliant idea. “Dad said I could decorate the empty room downstairs. Why don’t we get a ton of these and cover an entire wall with them?” I said to Zach.
“Cool!” he exclaimed. I went over to the lady in charge and asked the price.
“They’re two hundred and fifty francs, about fifty dollars each.” I reported back why we could never afford to do a wall.
“I thought they would be much less, all loose in this box,” Zach said.
“Maybe we can find them at another dealer.”
I followed him around the corner and up a row to stop in front of a set of bleachers covered in red velvet and filled with all sorts of taxidermy mixed with old stuffed plush animals. There were chickens, parrots, toucans, little dogs, a lynx, Mickey and Minnie Mouse dolls, and assorted insects set up in dioramas.
“What do you like the best?”
He pointed to an enormous snake in a plastic rectangular case that was bigger than he was.
“You know that pink marble house in the park?” I asked.
He nodded.
“The woman who used to live there kept her pet boa constrictor named Agamemnon stuffed in a display case when he died.”
“Stop it, Stephie.”
“No, really. It’s true. She also had a life-size mechanical panther.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Madame, do you know the time, please?” I asked the old lady who owned the snake.
“It’s sixteen hours,” she said.
“It’s four o’clock, Zach, we have to get back to the meeting spot!” The woman smirked and turned away, pulling the cloche she was wearing down over her ears. We ran away to find our parents.
My mother and father were waiting for us, empty-handed except for the picnic basket.
“We found everything,” I said. My brother nodded. “First, I need to take you to see the armoire.” They followed me back to the stall.
“It’s perfect,” my father said, while the young man watched me. “How much is it?” The man quoted quite a large figure. My father bargained with him for a few minutes before they agreed on a price. “Stephie, good find.” He paid and discussed arrangements with the man, all in English. It turned out he spoke rather perfect British English, and I wondered if maybe he wasn’t French at all but an expat, just like me. “All done,” my father said, and he and my mother started to follow my brother, who was excited to show them his discovery. I lingered behind. The man came over to me and whispered, “Thank you,” as he handed over the beetle box. I didn’t have the confidence to reply. I would never see him again.
Paris
Spring 1996
“He definitely wears a baby blue Onesie, the sort with feet,” Jake remarked as he watched a man with round tortoiseshell glasses limp by us.
“Really? You think so?” I asked.
“Totally.”
“What about her?” I pointed to a beautiful teenage girl with long, blond hair who was sitting across from us at the café.
“Black lace, for sure.” I had expected that answer. “Maybe neon lace, the kind you wear sometimes.” He was referring to an acid-colored camisole I wore with army green pants, a combination I had seen in one of my magazines. My surprise that he noticed my wardrobe mediated my disappointment at his comment on the other girl. Jake and I had “broken up” a few months ago, but nothing had really changed in our relationship. I still liked Raees, but Jake was the one with whom I spent time and flirted with confidence. I wondered what he thought I wore to sleep, but I never got up the nerve to ask him. We were never part of the pajama* game, only strangers. Jake had taught the game to me: you had to guess what any passerby wore to sleep at night as a way of imagining his or her character. I had told him I played a similar game in which I watched people and guessed at where they might be going in the world. Both distractions were useful to manage the mystery of strangers. I found comfort in knowing that there was something unknown and interesting happening in anyone else’s life at any moment. Jake liked the game, because it helped him develop characters for his films. Raees just sat there, listening to us with a bemused look on his face. I imagined we were at a café like in The Sun Also Rises. I had always thought that the perfect woman was Lady Brett Ashley, appearing to be insouciant and happy. It would have been so lovely to be young in Paris if she and Zelda, Sagan and Seberg, all of them,
were here with me, instead of Charlotte and her clique.
“Hey, you know who you look like?” Raj, one of our other classmates, piped in. He was sitting between Jake and Raees.
“No, who?” I asked.
“Angela from My So-Called Life.* It has to be the red hair.” I didn’t know whom he was talking about, only that Claire Danes played the character on some television show I’d never seen.
“I haven’t seen it.”
“You haven’t seen it?”
“No.”
“Everyone’s seen that show.”
“It’s not on television here.”
“Don’t you have friends in the States? They can send it to you.” I didn’t answer him. It was funny that although I didn’t understand the references of Generation X, I knew all about the Lost Generation.
“So are you stoked to go to Burgundy?” Raj asked Jake in reference to the weeklong trip our class would soon take to central France.
“I cannot wait. Raees is bringing his guitar, we’re going to jam out.” They both looked at me expectantly.
“Um, it should be cool. I’m excited to see the relics at the churches in Vézelay.” They both laughed.
“You’re one of a kind,” Jake said, unexpectedly placing his hand in my lap. I pulled away.
“We’ll have fun,” he said. “Kind of like tomorrow.”
“What’s happening tomorrow?” I asked. The three of them just laughed.
*
The next day, we were sitting in English class, waiting for our beloved Mrs. Smith to start the lesson, but she refused to do so without Jake, Raees, and Raj, who had yet to arrive. All of a sudden someone screamed, and in ran three men, dressed in black with panty hose pulled over their heads. “Terrorists!” Charlotte screamed, and we all went under our desks as we’d been instructed to do during drills.
I kept my head down but could hear Mrs. Smith laughing. These people are insane, I thought to myself, we’re all about to die. I was shivering, trying to keep my eyes to the floor and my body as compact as possible. So far there had been no gunshots, and none of the masked men had spoken. I said a prayer of love for my family and tried to become even smaller, inching toward the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” someone asked.
I almost fainted but then realized the voice was familiar. Keeping my eyes downward, I tried to think of what to say and why I felt I knew the intruder.
Charlotte started laughing. Such disrespect would get us killed. They are all certifiable, I thought to myself. “Look at that idiot,” Charlotte whispered. I could feel her eyes on me.
The same voice that had questioned me about my earlier movements spoke again. “You have all been taken hostage by the Abott Charles Dingie Administration.”
All of a sudden I knew exactly who it was. Unfurling myself, I looked up at the front of the room. There were Raees, Jake, and Raj with panty hose pulled over their faces.
“It’s all in good fun,” someone said with a British accent.
*
I had trouble understanding the humor in the coup d’état incident. It would never have been allowed in an American school, but that wasn’t what really bothered me. Crouched on the floor in the classroom, I’d only been able to think of Charlotte’s insensitivity—and my father. I worried about him every day. It was selfish, but I needed him to help me figure out how to get out of my head, as my anxiety had become increasingly worse. He was so patient and calm. Why didn’t I inherit those traits? I got only the crazy ones. He sensed I was nervous about the upcoming school trip, and the weekend before, he made sure he was available so that we could spend a special day in Paris together. We had decided to make two stops. First, we would go to the catacombs* and then to the famed Parisian taxidermy shop, Deyrolle.
I had been begging him to take me to the catacombs for a long time, but we’d never had the chance. Our last visit alone to the city had been to the museum of natural history over two years ago.
“Stephie?” my father said as he pulled the car out past the gate surrounding our house.
“Yes.” I watched his mustache for any sign of emotion.
“I want to know what’s going on with you.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You haven’t been yourself.”
“I’m older now.”
“Which means what exactly?”
“What did Mom tell you?”
“That she’s concerned about you. That you lock yourself in your bedroom and take walks alone at night.”
“Seems pretty normal to me.”
He tried to hide a little smile and mumbled something inaudible.
“What?”
“I just want you to know, I’m here for you,” he said more clearly.
“No, you’re not.”
“I know I’m away often, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you and I can’t help with whatever this is.”
“You can’t and it’s kind of your fault.”
“It is?”
“Yes.”
“I have to travel for work. It is for our family, so you can go to school and we can do fun things together like today.”
“I meant, it’s your fault, because you made us move here.”
“You think whatever’s going on is France’s fault?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“I was fine before.”
“Steph, you always had this tendency.”
“What tendency?”
“To be sensitive to your surroundings, to fixate on little things. It’s chemical.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You can’t have these preconceived ideas in your mind about how life should be. Don’t think so much. Do things you enjoy with people you love. Everything is always changing. What you can’t control frustrates the hell out of you, no?” His mustache lifted as he asked the question. “But I also love this about you. It makes you special. So, tell me what you’re feeling.”
“I can’t, because I don’t know.”
“You have so much to be grateful for … ,” my father said, and it was then that I first felt guilty for having my pain.
“Why do you want to go here so badly?” he asked as we pulled into the street leading to the catacombs. I kicked something on the car floor. It was my father’s pair of binoculars.
He claimed he used them for bird-watching. When he had time to watch birds, I wasn’t sure.
“Because I like seeing what’s beneath the city and learning about death and rituals.”
“Again, not so normal, Stephie.”
“Yeah, well neither are you with your chairs and weird creatures.”
“We make those guys together,” he protested.
“Yeah, but they are your idea.” I paused and thought about my accusation. “Actually, you’re not like me at all. Maybe you’re not even my real father.”
This made him angry.
We didn’t speak throughout the tour.
My father loved history and listened intently to the guide as we walked around the skeletons. When we came to the end of the final tunnel, I tried to talk to him. “Do you think we should still go to Deyrolle?” I asked, even though it had been my request. “It’s a lot of death in one day.”
“You’ve been begging me to go and here I am, so we should do it now.” He said it as if he might not be coming back.
He realized the finality of his comment and tried to make light of it. “Also for inspiration.”
“Inspiration for what?”
“Our papier-mâché babies.”
“We could go to the zoo.”
“No, if we are creating mythological creatures in the basement we need to look at these beasts up close, to be as accurate as possible.”
“Accurate to what?”
“Their animal halves.”
“May
I buy a beetle pinned in a little black box there?” I asked. I had always wanted one.
“Do you have any money?”
“No.”
“What about from babysitting?” I babysat the four Southern children who lived in Le Vésinet. They were all blond, under the age of five, and completely wild. I made fifty francs, about ten dollars an hour, to prevent them from killing each other.
“I spent it all on the magazines I bought last week. American Vogue costs the equivalent of two hours of work.”
“Then, no bug. You have to live within your means.”
I followed my father into the car and slammed the door.
“We need to go,” he said without warning after looking at something in the pocket within his blazer. “I mean we can’t go to Deyrolle.” He kept glancing down as he started the engine.
“Why all of sudden?”
“I need to go into the office.”
“Can I come?”
“No.”
*
The long-awaited field trip had arrived, and for whatever reason, spelunking was part of the activities our class was to enjoy during our sojourn in the French countryside. We were instructed to wear clothes that could be thrown out when the day was over and to show up on time at the base of the mountain.
There was little instruction before we entered the cave, except for how to turn on our headlamps. In the first minutes, we saw three bats and countless stalagmites and stalactites. This was in the larger part of the cave, where we could all stand up and see one another, as well. After walking for half an hour, we came to a small opening in a wall. “You are each to crawl through this hole,” the instructor said in French. “It will be tight the rest of the way, just breathe and do not worry.” With that we started to enter the hole headfirst, lights beaming. I stuck my head in just as Charlotte’s feet slid forward. There was cool mud everywhere, and I had to pull my body up and into the tunnel. It was suffocating, and I couldn’t extend my arm or leg anywhere but forward. We slithered until we came to a larger opening where we were able to stand again. As far as I could tell, no one made an official count to make sure everyone had made this leg of the journey. Then, it was a short drop down another hole via a black rope and into another tiny tunnel, which smelled of mildew and something else. Someone yelled, “Stop.”
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