And so I don’t respond, and to the percussive backbeat of my mother pecking at her keyboard, I start scrolling through Instagram. My finger lingers on a picture of Lena kissing Nick’s cheek at a soccer game, which makes me feel only slightly less nauseated than the prospect of spending weeks in Europe with Alice Parker. Is it too much to ask that after you break up with someone, they should be forced to move to Canada and never interact with anyone you know ever again? You’re not in love with him, I tell myself in my most grown-up voice. That way your stomach clenches when you think of him isn’t love. It’s jealousy, infatuation, regret, embarrassment, lust—anything but love. Mind over matter! Excelsior!
I scroll past, proud of myself, through the pictures of skeletal fashion bloggers posing with bug-eyed sunglasses and mucus-green juices. They’ve all mastered the same look: marble countertop with a magazine, headphones, coffee, and a designer lipstick accidentally-on-purpose strewn to look artistically askew.
I close Instagram, and, for the millionth time, I open the DCYA website on my laptop and am greeted by photos of the idyllic Irish countryside and students painting on canvases and posing together by a lighthouse. A SUMMER OF ARTISTIC GROWTH AND FRIENDSHIP reads a banner at the top of the page.
I’m temporarily comforted by the fact that I’ll eventually be one of the students in those pictures, smiling a vague stock-photo-model smile and posing by an Irish lighthouse with new friends. And none of those friends will be dating a boy I used to be in love with.
Within forty minutes, my mother finishes packing her suitcase and, with a few claps, shepherds me into the car to drive back to O’Hare, this time by the light of full morning.
After my mother finishes a final, curt phone call to some poor woman at United (“Thank you, Deborah. Have a lovely day.”), we’re left to sit in silence.
“Is your suitcase under twenty inches?” I ask. I know the answer, but I’m picking a fight. I’m entitled, okay? My mom—who doesn’t know the first thing about art, I should say, who wouldn’t know her Monet from her Michelangelo—made the unilateral decision to completely upend my trip. I’m allowed to rub in the fact that I was the only one who prepared.
She doesn’t reply.
“Twenty inches,” I repeat. “Your suitcase?”
“What?” she says, not looking away from the road. “No, it’s my tan suitcase. Twenty-three inches.”
“UGH. European airlines are different, Mom! They charge, like, more than the actual flight for checking luggage, and their overhead compartments are smaller! Rick Steves specified that if you’re traveling throughout Europe, you should only have a carry-on. That’s what he does.”
“Who is Rick Steve?” my mother asks, completely missing the point.
“Steves. And he’s, like, the European travel-guru guy. You’re going to have to check your bag if it’s bigger that twenty inches.”
“Well, if I have to, I’ll check the bag,” she says in a reserved voice.
My voice comes out louder than I intended. “And that leaves me where? Waiting by the luggage carousel for you when I could be out, I don’t know, meeting new people? Exploring a new city like I was supposed to be doing?”
My mom turns to me with that Mom look and a pause that usually means I’m about to have car privileges revoked, but then her face softens. It’s the face she makes when she sees an acquaintance at the grocery store who doesn’t know that she and Dad are divorced. Hide your left hand. “Yes, we’re doing wonderfully, thank you for asking.”
“I know a trip with your mom may not sound like fun on paper, but I’m so excited to spend some time with you, Nora!”
I tighten my lips into something that might be a smile but is probably closer to a dog with peanut butter on the roof of his mouth.
Mom senses my moment of weakness and moves in for the kill. “You’re going to miss me when you’re away next year.”
Whatever response I had dissolves like a lump of sugar in my throat, and I silently vow to try to be a good sport to my mom for as long as I can. I don’t even draw in the car on the way back to the airport. My mom asks me to pick the radio station. Clearly she’s trying her best too.
Because of the last-minute ticket purchasing, both my mom and I have tickets in middle seats. While we wait at Gate 2B, I scan through the other passengers en route to Paris and make a mental roster of who might be flanking me on the eight-hour flight to come.
Option 1: A couple, both with flaxen-blond hair and stained sweatpants, fishing in the bottom of their McDonalds bags. I silently pray I won’t be surrounded by the smell of McSweat for the entire trip.
Option 2: An impossibly cool-looking girl with inky black bangs who bobs her head along to whatever beat is pulsing through her massive headphones while reading a copy of Mein Kampf. This girl is either far cooler than anyone I have ever seen in Evanston, Illinois, or she’s a neo-Nazi. Fifty-fifty odds.
Option 3: A model-handsome man with red hair and a ginger beard, someone who should probably be cast on a premium-cable television show about nineteenth-century Scotland if he hasn’t been already. A venous arm is slung around his girlfriend, a woman with a chubby round face and long hair down to her butt. Her hand is on his knee. I imagine the PDA I’d be enduring with those two on either side of me. Is it possible for STIs to go airborne?
I’m feeling fairly hopeless, when suddenly I see a boy—a man, really—with an undercut and a full tattoo sleeve. He’s reading Joan Didion and has a guitar case between his feet. I think one of his tattoos might be a dwarf from Lord of the Rings.
Still looking at him, I pull out my sketchbook, hoping he’ll notice that I’m also an artist. I flip to the next empty page and draw a punk rock Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, looking up at the boy—man—after every pencil stroke. He doesn’t look at me. I concentrate on my face, hoping to look introspective and focused on my pencil movements. I bite my lip. If he looks over right now, he’ll see a sexy, determined artist too focused on her casually amazing sketch to even look up.
Please let him be seated next to me. Please let him ask to see my sketchbook and think my designs are perfect for his album cover, and please let him secretly be an about-to-become-famous musician. Please let us wander the streets of Paris together, working on our art. “Wow,” he’ll say quietly, as we sit at a café and he sips espresso while watching me sketch, “you’re . . . that’s amazing.” But he’ll actually say it in French, because he’s fluent in French.
And when we go to the Grammys together, the paparazzi will whisper, “That girl he’s with, she’s the one who did the iconic design on the album cover. Can you believe they met on a plane to Paris?”
* * *
Once I’m boarded with my book on my lap and my economical (twenty-inch!) carry-on appropriately stowed in the overhead compartment, I watch the rest of the passengers trudge through the aisles with the dead, listless gaits of zombies in a Romero movie. My mother has already settled herself two rows ahead of me, her head cradled by a blue nylon neck pillow. A dour businessman with a laptop that looks like it’s from 1987 has claimed the aisle seat of my row, but the window remains mercifully free. I breathe a sigh of relief when the four girls in Ugg boots slide into the row ahead of me, and again when I spot the McDonald’s couple disappear into their seats at the front of the plane. As the line of passengers thins, I see the boy—my future fiancé and artistic partner—making his way toward my row. Maybe if I stare hard enough, he’ll feel my gaze and make eye contact.
Five rows to go.
He’s definitely coming to sit here.
Four rows.
This is the first time one of my imaginary scenarios has actually panned out.
Three rows.
Okay, time to look back at my book. I can’t be staring at him when he gets here.
I open the novel in my lap and force myself to concentrate on the words as my skin pric
kles and I wait to hear his voice: “Excuse me, that’s my seat in the window there.”
I read a sentence in my book, then the same sentence again, and then a third time. Thirty seconds pass, and I realize it’s been too long. Just as I’m deciding whether or not to look up, a woman’s voice breaks the silence.
“Just there,” she says.
The businessman and I rise to let her in, and while I’m in the aisle, I notice that the guy with the guitar case and cool tattoos and handsome eyes has taken a seat right next to my mother.
Of course.
I spend the rest of the flight in and out of an uncomfortable sleep. At one point, I think my mom comes by to check on me, but I force myself to keep my eyes shut. I read half a chapter of Invisible Man, our summer reading assignment for AP English lit, that I barely remember, except that at one point I made a mental note to draw one of the scenes for Ophelia in Paradise, but now I have no idea which.
By the time the captain declares (in an impossible-to-place accent) that flight attendants should prepare for landing, I have no idea whether we’ve been on the plane for ten minutes or ten hours. The entire metal tube with its flickering dim lights and the omniscient headphone buzz has become a world unto itself.
The cabin lights ding to life, and the businessman lifts his head from an uncomfortable-looking angle, glaring at me as if his neck problems tomorrow will be my fault.
My mother waits for me just outside the plane doors, looking far less sleepy than I’m sure I do. She asks how my flight was, and I say it was fine. I ask how her flight was, and she says fine. Sparkling conversation, really.
“Sit next to anyone interesting?” I ask. Maybe she and the boy bonded, and we’re all going to meet up in Paris.
“I didn’t notice,” she replies.
“Can I get a coffee or muffin or something?” I say, realizing exactly how hungry I am for the first time now that I’m eyeing an airport Starbucks.
“We’re in an airport,” she says without even looking at me, and she begins striding away, her shoes clicking on the linoleum floor. It’s the exact walk I can imagine her using to intimidate clients in her office. “Besides,” she adds, “you shouldn’t be getting Starbucks in Paris. We’ll be at our hotel soon. I looked up the address, and there are a dozen patisseries on the same block.”
She pronounces patisseries like a pretentious college junior who just got back from six months studying abroad in France.
“But I’m hungry now.” If I were traveling alone, I’d be able to eat what I want, when I want, and not have to deal with any snobbery about an airport muffin.
My mom gives an exaggerated sigh and fishes in her pocket, pulling out an open bag of raw almonds. “Here,” she says. “This is why you should plan ahead for this sort of thing.”
Hungry as I am, I can’t think of anything less appetizing than my mom’s pocket almonds. “Thanks,” I mumble and transfer the bag into my own pocket.
Then, because my mother hadn’t realized how much easier it is just to bring a carry-on to Europe instead of checking a bag, the two of us drudge side by side toward baggage claim like zombie versions of the girls from Madeline. Yet another delay before I can get real food.
“Why don’t you get us a taxi?” My mom pulls her suitcase from the luggage carousel. “I need to make some calls.”
“For work?”
“No, not for work,” she snaps. “I just need to take care of a few more reservations for the trip.”
I sense something in her, something evasive and sharp like a splinter buried deep under skin.
“You don’t need to call anyone at work?” I ask, pressing.
“No,” she says, checking her nail beds to make sure they’re as pristine as ever. “I do not, thank you.”
So my mother just made the impromptu decision to take a weeks-long trip with me overseas, and now she has no more calls to make for work or frantic e-mails to return? An itching realization creeps into my head. She probably told them about this trip a month ago. What if she’s been planning to come the whole time?
That’s what my brain keeps whispering to me on the silent cab ride through the dark Paris streets, still buzzing with life even at midnight. My mom had given directions in slow, deliberate French, well enough that the cab driver understood her.
By the time we finally arrive, the lobby is empty aside from a single sleepy teenage concierge who hands us a large brass key after plucking my mom’s credit card out of her hands. There’s no restaurant in the hotel. I pull an almond from my pocket and eat it miserably. It tastes like sawdust and sadness.
Tomorrow I will look at the city, at the art, at this entirely new landmass that I had to fly across an ocean to see. Tomorrow I’ll visit places I’ve only seen pictures of and eat pastries that look like spun silk. Tomorrow my eyes will be less puffy and watery and my skin will be less dry.
But tonight I’ll dig through my clothes to find a toothbrush and drag myself into a twin bed with a flat, heavy blanket, and I’ll fall asleep so that this day can finally be over.
6
THE ROOM THAT looked musty and mothballed in the glare of an outside streetlamp and the dreary haze of my exhaustion takes on new life in the light of the morning. The wallpaper is a soft yellow fabric that matches an upholstered chair in the corner and the pillows I swept off the bed in a bleary-eyed huff last night. Now, the entire hotel room looks like a Cézanne painting, wide brushstroke swatches the color of sunrise.
My mom is already awake, tightening the laces on her gym shoes.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she says as I emerge from the bathroom post-shower (and post-exploratory use of the squat porcelain bidet).
“’S okay,” I say. I wonder what I should be wearing today. Lena had said something about skirts. Did I bring a scarf? I wish I remembered to bring a scarf.
My mom clears her throat. “I’d love to show you the Paris I remember. I studied abroad here! You know that, right?” It sounds like she’s reciting a speech she rehearsed.
I eye my sketchpad and watercolors. “I had sort of planned to go the Delacroix museum today—”
“We can do that too! Afterward. Let’s do breakfast, a few shops. I have to take you to the bakery I went to every day when I was in college. And then the Delacroix museum?”
The prospect of breakfast and a bakery is pretty persuasive. And, as long as we go to the Musée Delacroix afterward, I figure I can allow myself to be seduced by a flaky croissant and a tour guide who knows Paris better than I do, even if she hasn’t been back in twenty-five years. To be honest, there are not many things I would not be agreeable to if a croissant is offered first. “It sounds like a plan.”
* * *
I’m significantly happier than I thought I would be, sitting across from my mom, drinking the hot chocolate from Ladurée, a drink so thick it reminds me of the molten chocolate they use in fondue kits. I don’t remember ever drinking something so rich or delicious, and I’m almost positive that if I tested it, my spoon would stand upright in my cup. The waiter served it to us in silver pots, making me feel like Marie Antoinette. Early-in-her-reign Marie Antoinette, before the whole terrified-of-peasants-storming-Versailles thing. Ladurée hot chocolate is pure, unadulterated pre-French-Revolution-I’m-an-Austrian-princess-living-in-a-Sophia-Coppola-movie-of-excess-and-indulgence. Plus, it would be difficult to drink without a head.
“So, what’s your first assignment from your grandfather?” My mom stirs a quick pour of skim milk into her black coffee. Not even in Paris will she break her diet. “Shouldn’t there be something for you to work on?”
I opened Grandpa’s first envelope this morning, peeling away the orange flap and ripping the metal clasp straight off in my eagerness to see what was inside. I found a handwritten letter and another, smaller envelope. Written in Grandpa’s signature handwriting—all capitals, like an architect
—was a message to me:
BIENVENUE À PARIS! WELCOME TO THE CITY OF LIGHTS! DO NOT OPEN YOUR ASSIGNMENT (ENCLOSED ENVELOPE) UNTIL AFTER YOU VISIT THE MUSÉE D’ORSAY. I’D SEND YOU TO THE LOUVRE, BUT I CAN’T STAND THOSE GHASTLY PYRAMIDS OUT FRONT.
—RP
“He wants me to visit the Musée d’Orsay. It’s closed today, so I figure that’s on the agenda for tomorrow. Museum in the morning, art project in the afternoon.”
“He didn’t want you to go to the Louvre?” she says, furrowing her brow. “See the Mona Lisa?”
“No, he says he prefers the Musée d’Orsay.”
My mother’s expression changes slightly. She signals a waiter with pockmarks on his cheeks and orders two chocolate croissants in surprisingly good French. “It’s overrated,” she says in a mock whisper once the waiter is out of earshot. “The Mona Lisa. About the size of a postage stamp. And so crowded it’s impossible to get a good view.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I’m more excited for the Delacroix museum. And it’s closed tomorrow, so Delacroix today, d’Orsay and assignment tomorrow.”
My mother does the distracted nod of a person who is ready to move on to another subject. “If we have time today, I’d love to hit the Longchamp store—I’m sure they’re cheaper in Paris, even if we have to convert from euros.”
My face must fall, because my mom quickly backtracks. “Delacroix,” she says. “Was he the one who painted ballerinas?”
“No,” I answer, trying my hardest not to sound too condescending. “He did, like, horses. And harems. Things that were really exotic for the time. Like from North Africa.”
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