Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  We’ve spent weeks in the Sonoran Desert with my taskmaster father, camping out in valleys and rationing our water until we became parched and it was hard to swallow. 1970. I was ten and Luke was twelve. Dad was doing field measurements for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It’s cartography, for God’s sake, Kate,” he said at the kitchen dinner table the night before we were all meant to leave for the desert. “A science. Have I ever not been safe?” He threw his hands up in the air and rolled his eyes.

  The kitchen was made of wormwood beams Dad had rescued from a nineteenth-century farm in Petaluma. Then my mother had added her own touches: the bird mosaic over the stovetop and the wallpaper with orange finches. Slices of medium-well pot roast sat on white plates, sides of scalloped red potatoes, two full glasses of whole milk. Luke and I laughed. Laughing at Dad’s jokes could make things better or worse, depending whose side you were on.

  The next morning Mom put things in our food at breakfast: brewer’s yeast and wheat germ. She was doing this a lot now, said we couldn’t taste it, but I thought it made the oatmeal like newspaper. She didn’t wear a bra either. Just the T-shirt she’d slept in. I could always tell, because her breasts were soft and jiggled and I was still fascinated by them. By her.

  She’d begun raising chickens, and carried one like a house cat outside while she watched Dad pack the truck. “I’m not coming,” she said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  I’d learned at school that chickens have very small brains, and it bothered me how much she adored them. I couldn’t tell her, though. You couldn’t tell my mom these kinds of things. She resented you for it. She called them petty criticisms that didn’t help change the world. And that was what she wanted to do more than anything when I was growing up. Heal the mentally ill. Fix people. Her birds slept in a little shed attached to the back of the house by an internal door. They were always going for me, pecking at my feet and making a racket. I went back inside the house and upstairs to get my sleeping bag. Then Mom was downstairs, telling Luke that it wasn’t safe to camp in the Sonoran Desert during flood season. “What is your father thinking? He wants me to let the chickens go. He thinks the chickens are more important to me than our marriage.”

  I froze on the stair landing. I’d never heard her use the word “marriage” that way—like it was something separate from our family, a word that didn’t mean me or Luke or the house. Wet things hung from the banister where I stood: Luke’s T-shirts and my striped underwear and a blue bedsheet. To conserve oil, Mom had unplugged the dryer that month and rolled it into the shed, where the chickens had begun to roost on it.

  I ran downstairs and grabbed my jean jacket from the hook in the hall. Then the three of us backed down the driveway without Mom. It always felt like a bad idea to leave her. I was so tied to her. How would she manage alone without me? I waved at her on the porch the whole time Dad pulled away. “Jack!” she yelled. “People die in flash floods every year. They don’t even hear the water coming! Think about this, Jack!”

  My father didn’t slow down. The Land Rover had a dented right front fender, and the navy paint was peeling along the grille. But there was a radio. Luke and I lay in the way back with the red five-gallon water jugs and tent stakes and tarp and pressed our ears to the speakers. I tried to forget my mother while Luke sang along to Paul Anka and Johnny Mathis and I just pretended, mouthing the words.

  “When do we get to make the maps?” Luke asked.

  “Luke!” Dad yelled from the front seat. The yelling worried me and I bit my nails. Dad always became a bigger version of himself on the camping trips, barking more orders. “Longitude and latitude, right?”

  “Right!” My brother wore khaki shorts with a metal compass on a clip at his waist and an orange T-shirt with a chest pocket crowded with pens. “Vertical and horizontal.”

  “Two lines and a point.” It was their game.

  We drove over the Richmond Bridge, toward Oakland and San Jose. The hills were dry and russet-colored, with new subdivisions stretching as far as I could see toward Alameda. After two hours we hit I-5, which took us three hundred miles. We parked in a rest stop at noon to eat the tuna sandwiches Mom had made and to pee. I must have slept for a few hours after that. I woke up when Luke said, “Dad, I’m going to design a radical map of outer space that shows the way to navigate a rocket ship to Pluto.”

  “A radical map,” I yelled. I spent a large portion of each day repeating everything my older brother said.

  “NASA will use the map for space travel.” Luke smiled out the window.

  “Space travel,” I said. We drove another hour, toward Pasadena and I-10. Then past San Bernardino and El Centro and across the Arizona border to Yuma. In the very last half hour I began the tricky business of climbing up to the front seat. “Dad, I need to pee.”

  “Give me eight minutes, miss.” His beard hadn’t turned white yet, and he wore his straw safari hat with a chin strap even in the car.

  “Too long, Daddy. Eight minutes and I’ll wet my pants.”

  He turned off the narrow tar onto the dirt. We were deep in Arizona, flat scrub as far as I could see, broken up by giant saguaros and brown shoulders of the Santa Catalina Mountains. Dad was there to do a revised map of the Sonoran Desert, detailed with water sources and elevation lines. His job was growing in importance, though I didn’t realize then that water would become a commodity. “Don’t think about peeing, or go in the way back and use the cup.”

  “I’m not using the cup. The cup’s gross.” My voice got louder. “The cup’s for Luke when he can’t hold it. Not for me!” We’d been driving since morning. I hadn’t peed since the truck stop three hours ago. Dusk made the sky look bruised and dangerous. “You don’t get it. You never get it. Call Mom. Mom knows you need to stop!” I screamed, and Dad slammed on the brakes.

  “Don’t you speak to me like that, Miss Willow!” His yelling always made me ashamed, though not for the things he accused me of. Why did he have to yell? He yelled at Mom for the chickens and for the intuitive healing she’d started doing. He yelled at me for forgetting long division with decimals. He didn’t yell at Luke so much. Luke was on some sort of par with him. The older one. They included him in their circle of two so much more often than me. They appealed to his good judgment. His yelling hurt my ears, and it embarrassed me so much I usually forgot what he was yelling about. “For your information, we’re miles into the desert. Not a pay phone in sight. Don’t ever forget whom you’re talking to. This is your father speaking!”

  Ten minutes later, we came to a stop in the scrub. I climbed out of the car sobbing and ran behind a saguaro to pee. Luke dragged the metal cooler out of the back and handed me a root beer when I was done. This was his way of saying how much it sucked. Just pure sucked when Dad yelled. We sat and watched our father make an angry pile of tent stakes. It was July 6 and already 101 degrees.

  I gulped the soda. “Dad breaks Mom’s rules, doesn’t he?”

  Why hadn’t she come? It was treachery that she’d stayed behind, without me. Maybe this was the start of a feeling I sometimes had later that I couldn’t fully locate my mother in the world. She didn’t quite fit.

  “He doesn’t break all of them,” Luke said.

  “The soda one and the holding-your-pee one and the sleeping-with-your-clothes-on one.” Why was it so hot? Dry heat that made me breathe too fast until my throat hurt.

  “I think Dad breaks rules you have to break when you’re camping.”

  “I’m gonna tell Mom about the soda rule. I’m gonna tell her that he wouldn’t stop to let me pee. I’m gonna call her.”

  “She knows about the soda, dingbat. He told her he was going to give us soda.”

  “The next time we’re in town, I’ll find a pay phone and call her.” I felt like I’d been abducted. I missed her in a visceral way. Her skin and teeth and hair. She was still how I tried to translate the world. Through my brother through her.

  Dad carried the telescope from the car and un
folded its legs, and focused the lens. “I can figure out the location of that rock without ever walking over there.” He wrote some numbers down on the small pad he kept in his shirt pocket. “Remember when we talked about triangulation? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. Both of you. Don’t tell me that.” He could be strict, or he could be the most fun you’d ever known. But when his voice rose, I got nervous. He might start yelling again. Luke and I stood close and nodded our heads so we wouldn’t be accused of having spaced out. “Here it is,” Dad said to himself while he looked through the lens. “Once I know one side and two angles.” He stepped back and smiled. “The math is beautiful! The math figures out the rest.”

  GAIRD FINDS a parking spot on Victor Hugo and jogs around the car to open Luke’s door and help him climb out. Then he turns and pulls Luke’s duffel bag from the trunk. I go hold the wooden door to the apartment building open. “Let’s get him inside, shall we?” Gaird takes Luke’s arm, and they walk past me.

  I leave them on the living room couch and call Sara from the kitchen, where I start making them mac and cheese. “We’re here. Eagle landed. But Gaird’s being sort of priggish. It’s a side of him I’ve really never seen.”

  “You need to give him room—it’s his apartment, after all. You’re too close to it, Will. Don’t say things you’ll regret.”

  “You’re right. He’s a kind man, isn’t he? How did you know that I’m about to say things to him that I’ll regret?”

  “Because I’ve lived through your worst love affairs.”

  “What I want to say is something about him not being generous. Then I’ll weep.”

  “Of course you will.”

  “I always weep when I get mad, which makes it more pathetic.” I stand at the counter with the phone deep in my neck and grate cheese with the metal grater I found in the drawer. Tears leak down my face. “My crying has nothing to do with Gaird.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “I’m jealous.”

  “You don’t like sharing your brother.”

  “And I don’t like it when he’s sick.” I circle the kitchen with the phone and reach for the whisk and add cheese to the milk and make a big mess of a knot with the cord behind me. “But the real problem is, Gaird loves differently.”

  “Like in a different language? Like Norwegian love? What are you talking about, Willie?”

  “There are rules about shoes: none in the apartment. And no street clothes on the bed—take them off and put a bathrobe on before you lie down. It’s more than that, though. I have to go. I have to feed them.”

  When I bring in the plates, they’re watching a black-and-white special on the Allied invasion at Normandy. “I don’t care what you say, Luke.” I put the food down. “You glow. You look healthy. Though why you’re watching this war channel, I don’t know.”

  “It’s history,” Luke says without looking up. Gaird pretends he hasn’t heard me. “War history.” Luke picks up the plate. “This looks delicious. You are a good person to cook for us. Gays, by the way, need to watch war movies. We need to bulk up on this artillery stuff.” He reaches for his fork. The TV screen blinks, and the sun goes down behind the clean line of mansard roofs across the avenue. I stare at the two of them and secretly wish them a happy ending.

  I TAKE a taxi home across the river—a luxury, but it’s late and I feel like I’ve been gone from my apartment for weeks. The message light on my machine blinks. “Hello. Hello, yes, it’s Macon Ventri. Gita Kapoor’s lawyer. Yes. I was wondering if we could meet tomorrow at the center before your class? I will be there to interview Gita, and I believe that is when you teach.” I smile at the machine. I can’t help it. His English is so precise and grammatical. And he speaks in something that almost sounds like a British accent.

  I change into sweatpants, pour a glass of wine, and sit on the rug to set up the VCR machine. My friend Polly, from the drama department at the academy, gave me a copy of Hannah and Her Sisters. She says I’ll love it—Woody Allen follows the lives of three American sisters and their errant husbands as they fall in and out of love. I’ve spent the fall and winter in France putting on more lipstick than I’ve ever worn in my life, and still it hasn’t happened. French men seem to live inside some impenetrable fortress.

  I’ve always chosen men badly. It’s become a joke with Luke. I’m not sure how to love. I meet men and swoon, and overanalyze them. Then I can’t bring them home and they can never meet Luke. He would only find ways to make fun of them, because this is how he shows he cares. Then I regret what I’ve done until the men leave me out of confusion. But I watch the movie for two blissed-out hours, and I allow myself to go far away from the student papers on French symbolism I need to grade and the question of what’s happened to Luke’s lung. Macon Ventri has called me here at my apartment. He knows where I live. I pull up the blanket on the couch and I’m alone again in France, but not lonely.

  8

  Thanksgiving: public celebration acknowledging divine favors

  During our senior year of college, I’d driven Sara and Rajiv home for Thanksgiving in an old pickup truck I’d bought from a waitress at the Japanese restaurant where I worked in Palo Alto. The trip took much longer than it should have. The truck could only go fifty miles an hour—all of us mashed into the cab. Sara sat in the middle, listening to beginner French tapes. Parlez-vous français? She wanted to move to France even then. Oui, the three of us said in unison. Je parle français.

  Luke had flown in from Beijing that morning, and he stood at the screen door waiting for us, big circles under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in a week. My father was at the stove, chopping oysters and cre-minis for the stuffing. This was after he’d found God in the desert and become a born-again Christian, which is still the greatest surprise of my life and something that, a decade later, I haven’t figured out how to assimilate.

  Rajiv was forced to stand at the sink with a malfunctioning peeler (my mother didn’t believe in peelers and I’d found this one under old chopsticks in the wax paper drawer) for hours: sweet potatoes, white potatoes, pearl onions, and carrots. Sara got caught up in the turkey work. She and my mother and father fretted over the bird all day. Basted it and took its temperature like it was a new pet.

  Then the turkey sat on the cutting board in my parents’ kitchen in its heat-spackled glory while we waited for it to cool. We were really going to eat it after all the pampering? Luke brought red maple leaves from China. Were there trees in Beijing? The leaves sat on the plates like small, veined hands. I assembled the salad and boiled cranberries for the sauce, and willed the boy named Ned, an ex–wide receiver for the University of Southern California I’d been sleeping with, to call me. The night before he’d phoned drunk from my friend Betsy’s house and said he was going to sleep there that night. With Betsy. Ned liked to flex his biceps when he was naked, which sounds horrible, but back then it made me laugh. He’d taken me to nightclubs and liked to borrow things from me—my sandals, my French linen nightie. I thought he was flattering me by stealing.

  Luke kept putting his hand on my wrist in the kitchen and taking my pulse to see how I was. “I’m fine,” I said when he did it for the third time.

  “You’re not fine. You’re wearing a nightgown.”

  “It’s a tunic. I swear I didn’t sleep in it.”

  “It is a potato sack.” Then he got serious. “You’re really okay? I’m here, you know. Breakups can be the worst.” I smiled, but I’d never felt this flatness before. I’d always been the one to end things until now.

  My mother took my hand and pulled me into the screened-in porch. It wasn’t warm enough to eat out there. She wore one of my father’s long navy Mister Rogers cardigans and sat me down on the bamboo couch. She’d left psychology and was studying the body on shakier ground by then. This meant she was an expert in things like chakras and energy points and nothing with a name that seemed to have anything to do with the actual, physical human anatomy. Patients came to the house so she could la
y her hands on them. She was the real fixer. She did it for a living. That day her hair was up in a thick bun, held in place with two chopsticks. “Do you love this boy Ned?”

  “I don’t know.” I’d never been in love before, so I wasn’t sure.

  She studied me. “Your third chakra is the nexus of self-esteem. It’s blocked.”

  “Oh, Mom. Please stop.” I couldn’t tell what was worse—when I was little and she used psychology vocabulary way too big for me or this weirder talk about energy. “What language are you speaking? You’ve got to stop.” I stood up. I wanted to be in love so badly then because I thought it would transform me, and that only once I was in love would my real life begin.

  I was a serial monogamist in college. First I dated Brandon, a boy from Film 101: An Introduction Across Genres. We sat together during The Deer Hunter screening, and I had a small existential breakdown during the movie and became an instant Meryl Streep groupie. I reached for Brandon’s hand the first time the war vets walked into the woods with guns. He whispered that it would be okay—that he’d already seen the film five times.

  We had sex on the floor of his dorm room that night. Neither of us knew what we were doing. His clothing hung off the radiator: dirty athletic socks with black stripes at the top, grayish boxers. He lived in a suite—six white guys who shared a swamp of a living room having Freudian relationships with their bongs.

  Then I dated Sam from Pittsburgh, who wrote love poems in the school newspaper. I ran into him at an off-campus hash party and he filled my wineglass. He said, “The girl in the straw hat in stanza three is you.” Need he have said another word?

  The poem was about taking a girl to a small lake and helping her walk out of the water. It had a proprietorship that doesn’t sound very evolved now. But here is what I thought: finally someone other than my brother to take care of me.