by Phoebe Stone
Finally Ginger had to break down and help me. There was only one thing to do. We had to get the letter back just after the mailman delivered it, before Windel came home from school. Good thing we didn’t use email. Email moments of rashness can never be retrieved!
And so it was that Ginger and I sauntered over to Windel’s street and noticed a tiny window in the Watsons’ basement. It was propped open for cleaning day. Ginger poked her head through it and heard a vacuum going and we saw the cleaning lady’s van parked out front. We also knew the mail had been delivered through a slot in the front door and that Windel was at the practice building where he always was at this time. Ginger took the plunge and squeezed herself through the small opening and rolled down, struggling to land on the floor of the basement. Her purple jeans got torn and dusty. I squeezed in after her. I too was covered in cobwebs.
Still we managed to creep up the stairs and open the door. We slipped into the hall. And as luck would have it, there my letter lay on the Persian carpet by the front door, all alone and waiting. Ginger grabbed it. Oh, such relief! Every time she ripped it, I felt grateful beyond measure. Grateful beyond imagining!
She stuffed the pieces of the letter in her pocket and we quickly stumbled down the basement stairs, patting each other on the back. “We did it!” Ginger whispered. “Yes!”
We were just headed for the window again when suddenly Mrs. Watson appeared in the basement with a mop in hand. She was angry. No, she was furious. She pulled on Ginger’s sleeve. She yanked on my braid. She dragged us to the basement door. “I don’t know what you two fools are up to today but Windel finds your antics unacceptable! He is not amused!”
She gave us both a terrible shove out the basement door. We landed on our faces in the wet, cold winter grass. “This is called breaking and entering. It’s illegal. If you stalk my son anymore, I will call the principal. I know your principal personally. I will have you expelled from school. Windel is very angry about all this! Please leave!”
Ginger and I limped away in devastation.
Of all the tangled mistakes I have made in my younger-sister life, that one was the worst. Oh, the darkness of this apartment when all the lights but mine are off! There is only the pointed beacon light shining on my sewing table.
I haven’t closed my curtains yet. I look out my window and see the girl across the street. She’s alone too as usual with her birds.
Everyone in Paris has a bird or a dog, it seems. Dogs are allowed to ride the city buses on leashes or sitting on laps or tucked into coat pockets. They let dogs in the restaurants too. Under many tables lurks a waiting dog, hidden mostly by the white tablecloth, though often you can see a tail sticking out. Sometimes you will see a Frenchman lean over and give half his beefsteak to something under the table. You hope it’s only a dog.
The girl across from me looks rather sad, alone at night with nothing but the lights of the Paris skyline to cheer her up. Suddenly I get this Beanly idea. Grandma Beanly calls it the crazy hopping Hoosier in me. (Most of the Beanlys live in Indiana.) I get out a nice fat marker and a big piece of paper and I write in heavy letters “Salut!” which is a cool way to say hello in French. Because I am still part child and look like one, as Ava is quick to tell me, I can do this. I press the paper against the glass and I stand beside it. Soon she presses a piece of paper to her window that says “Salut!”
Then she goes back to her birds and I go back to my sketches, all the while thinking of Ava’s letter from Logan. If only Ava would stop taunting me about everything. She aims and shoots so perfectly. The girl across the street has disappeared into her back rooms but she taped the word Salut to her window so it’s still there. She appears to be so kind. I think too about Delphine and her sister. Such closeness. Oh, I wish I hadn’t taken Logan’s letter at all. It was wrong. Really wrong and I need to give it to Ava. Right away!
The problem is, how do I go about giving Ava the letter? I decide against leaving it downstairs because it’s dated four days ago and Collette is cleaning the hall and has removed the little table on which a letter might sit. I can’t leave it on the floor.
Ava has been having more closed-door tête-à-tête conversations with Mom, in which I hear dangling threads like, “Honey, don’t fret. I am sure he didn’t kiss you and dump you. That just doesn’t sound like Logan.” More arrows to my heart. Ava and Logan have kissed. She gets everything. I feel so bad and lowdown I could scream.
Okay, if I hand Ava the letter, what do I say? I mean, how do I begin? And I don’t want Mom to know about this. I mean, this is just between me and Ava and my own guilty conscience.
Ginger whispered to me before I left, “Anything can happen in Paris. Miraculous things!” But then Ginger isn’t always right about her fortune-telling. Once she predicted Melanie was going to come home from a family trip to Vermont with a boyfriend in tow and instead she came home with a Chihuahua, one of those little dogs that bark all the time.
Miraculously an occasion finally arises for me to give Ava her letter. Mom comes out into the hall with two bags of laundry this morning. She wants Ava and me to take them to the Laundromat. “Girls,” she says, “there’s a sidewalk café next to the Laundromat and you two can sit outside and have a cup of something while the laundry dries. Have lunch, maybe. Here’s twenty euros.”
“Do I have to sit with her?” says Ava, wrinkling her nose at me and then putting on a pair of large sunglasses as if to block me from her sight.
“You can stand up, if you want,” I say, trying to wrinkle my nose back at her. But my nose won’t wrinkle. You have to have storybook skin for that.
I go in my room, feeling sure when we are sitting at the café I will find the right moment to give Ava her letter. So I zip it into my backpack and sling it over my arm. Soon Ava and I head off down the rue Michel-Ange, me the misguided elf with Santa’s bag on my back and Ava swinging hers at a distance like a sleek model with a French poodle in tow.
After we load the machines in the Laundromat we go to a café and sit outside at a table along the wide stretching boulevard. There is a feeling of open sky and windy space and there is no explaining how grown-up and cool I feel suddenly having coffee with my older sister. I feel as if I am being admitted finally into the inner secret circle of grown-up older sisters and their special heavily guarded beverage, coffee.
Then Ava stares at my arms. “Weird. Are those cuffs on your sleeves actually made of a different fabric?” she says. “Where did you come up with that fabric, it’s just bizarre.”
“I found it at the Auteuil Market,” I say. “I made this jacket with the leftover material from something else I made. The sleeves are cotton. The cuffs are velvet.” Then I look down at my sleeves. They seem to darken in shadows suddenly.
“Something else you’re making?” Ava says. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping at night?”
Ava looks away, nibbling a French pastry with whipped cream inside. As I am sipping the coffee, my first real cup ever, I feel kind of extra jumpy, like a Hoosier Beanly jumping bean. I think about bringing out the letter and pause out of nervousness. Then Ava says, “There are so many empty tables out here. Why don’t you sit at your own table?”
And suddenly I don’t feel like giving her letter back to her, though I am still planning to. And then she says, “Or better yet, why don’t you go put the clothes in the dryer? I’ll pay the bill here.”
When I was younger I was always Ava’s go-to girl. Pet, go get my jacket from the car, would you? Pet, bring me some ice cream from the fridge? Get up, Pet. I need to sit in that chair, okay? When I was younger, did I ever question it? No. I was a dumb little kid and did all of Ava’s bidding. But now that I am older, I usually refuse. But today Logan’s letter is hovering over me and so I shrug my guilt-ridden shoulders and head over to the Laundromat.
Everyone always ends up in Paris, says Ginger’s mom. But you don’t hear much about people doing laundry here, that’s for sure. I push into the Laundromat and drag all the wet
clothes into a cart and now I am standing by a dryer that looks like it might be available as soon as the apologetic man who speaks neither French nor English folds the last of his worn-out blue towels.
All the other dryers are spinning away, spinning like the earth, spinning like the stars, spinning like the great vortex that Paris seems to be, according to Ginger’s mom. And it’s true everyone I know, even Ava’s unwanted father, is spinning toward its center. And in the jumble of it all, there is the letter from Logan, the letter that must be given to Ava as soon as I go back to the café!
So I get ready to head over there, looking around the Laundromat for my backpack. I check the table where I emptied the washers. I look on the chairs. I don’t see it. Where is it? I must have left it on the counter by the dryer. No. No. Hey, what’s going on? I run around the Laundromat looking under tables, even in the empty washing machines. Help!
I pound on the office door and a rumpled-looking woman appears. “Mon sac á main,” I say, which means “my purse.” I don’t know the word for backpack. “Gone,” I say. “Missing! Help!”
The laundry lady looks even more rumpled and sleepy and shakes her head no. “Non, non. Pas ici! Pas moi!”
“It can’t be gone,” I say, racing around the dryers, magazines and newspapers flying at my touch.
Soon Ava leans in the door of the Laundromat and calls out in her usual grumpy way, “Pet, what are you doing? You’re always soooo slow. I am heading home now. Fold everything so it will fit in one bag, okay?”
“But wait! I lost my backpack. It’s gone,” I say. “Someone must have taken it.”
“Maybe you left it at the apartment or something. I’ll let you know if I see it,” she says.
“But, Ava, wait!” I call out. Ava has always been a quick leaver. When she wants to go, she’s gone. And now she hurries off at an I-couldn’t-care-less older-sister gallop.
And I am left standing in the Laundromat, knowing Ava’s love letter from Logan has been stolen along with my backpack. I stand in the middle of Paris alone, in the center of the spinning vortex.
Now I am in a pickle, to use a Grandma Beanly phrase. No, it’s worse than that. I should say, now I feel like a big, green, stupid pickle on legs. Some robber has Logan’s letter. His secret heart is being tossed about, maybe even mocked by some stranger. Why was I such an idiot? Why did I take what was not mine? Now I will have to confront Ava and explain. And this may be outside my capabilities.
Then it occurs to me that I could tell Logan his letter was lost, that the concierge threw it away by mistake and then told me. “So, um, Logan, you may have to write another letter to Ava,” I imagine myself saying.
When I get home I am full of resolve. I will be a better younger sister. To make up for what I have done, I will rewrite that book. It will still be called, as I planned, How to Be a Younger Sister. But it will include mostly instructions on becoming a selfless server, admiring, unassuming, helpful.
I go over to my sewing table and gather up the yellow cotton fabric, all cut out and ready to sew. This time I just ignore that things look moved around. I decide I have an American case of paranoia due to extreme culture shock.
I gather up the fabric and carry it down to Collette’s apartment. When I lay all the cutout pieces on her table, the dress looks like something fragmented and broken, something that needs putting back together, gluing, repairing, like me right now, like Collette right now, like Ava right now, like Mom right now, like Le Bon Bon right now. The only person it doesn’t remind me of is Dad. Dad is already in one good solid piece. And yet we’re all here because of him and his sabbatical.
I try to explain to Collette about Logan’s letter but of course it doesn’t come out quite right when I actually put it in words. I end by saying, “So can I tell Logan you threw it out by mistake?”
“Well, yes, you can do that. But perhaps it is not so good to lie. This is when the tangles get tighter,” says Collette. “This is like Le Bon Bon. He tries to tell me he is fine, that he likes to live in the darkness with the curtains closed, that he doesn’t want another love. But of course he is lying to himself and to me.”
“I know,” I say. “He’s very sad.”
“There will be a dance for families this week in the lobby at the Hôtel Magique. Anyone can go and dance le swing. I will take Le Bon Bon and Jean-Claude and peut-être you will come too? You can dance with Jean-Claude.”
“I don’t know how to dance le swing,” I say.
“Oh, it’s 1950s and early 1960s, you know, Johnny Hallyday and the big guitar. With the beat it will be natural. You will see. Jean-Claude and Le Bon Bon are both good dancers.”
“Jean-Claude can dance le swing?” I say.
“Oh, mais oui! Oui! He learned when he was four years old,” says Collette. “His uncle taught him. Okay? I will say to your friend that I am so sorry I threw out the letter, if you will go with us. We need someone for Jean-Claude to dance with. You are both children.”
“Okay,” I say. “But I am not a child.”
“You are a halfway, like Delphine Rouette, half in one world, half in the other,” says Collette, smiling at me.
And then I show Collette the doll dress in the Jumeau book that has inspired my next design and I show her my sketches.
“Oui,” she says when she sees the picture in the book. “This dress was created at the height of Jumeau, when the company was thriving. But I told you before there was trouble. Those who attended the World’s Fair in Chicago could see it. Amid all of the attention and acclaim for the little size-eight doll and her doll dress, those who knew saw what was wrong.
“In the toy pavilion you could see many of the German doll dresses and styles mirrored the Jumeau dresses. Some would say the word copied. They looked quite like them, and these dresses and dolls were cheaper. Much cheaper. I told you that spies had managed to steal the ideas for many of the dresses that came out of the workshop of Madame Jumeau. Ah, but not Delphine Rouette’s dress. No one had seen that one until it arrived at the fair. Thus, it was unique.
“You can imagine the sadness for Madame Ernestine Jumeau and the disappointment, knowing someone among her workers was spying, taking her ideas, sketching them, and selling those sketches to a German doll company.
“Madame Jumeau was sure now that the time had come to do something about it. In her great dismay, she went to visit Delphine Rouette’s mama.
“It was a miracle to have such an important and celebrated lady in their apartment. They served tea and cakes and sat just over here by the window. Yes, in this very salon. My grandmother told me about it. She remarked that Madame Jumeau wore a pale rose silk walking suit and carried a rose-tinted parasol.
“ ‘I need your help,’ said Ernestine Jumeau, sipping her tea. ‘I need you and your little daughter to be my eyes and my ears. You have worked for me for so long. I can trust you. We must find out who among us is selling my designs to Handwerck, to Kestner, and to the others. The German doll companies are trying to bring down the House of Jumeau.
“ ‘But I have made a plan,’ she said. ‘I will change our hiding place. From now on you will leave the doll dresses and the slips you make in the basement of l’église de la Madeleine. The church of the Madeleine. The great church near la place Vendôme. I know the priest there. He will help us. I will let it circulate at my workshop that we are using the Luxembourg Gardens as a hiding place and I will leave the key to the box hanging in plain sight at my workshop. But we will not use that hiding place anymore. No. Instead I will leave a doll dress in that box as a lure, a decoy. Then you and your daughter can watch and wait and see who goes there to make drawings of it.’
“And so it was. Every day, every week thereafter, Delphine and her mama would take a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens and they would picnic by the pool and walk past the statues. But they saw nothing. The spy did not appear and the whole month passed and nothing odd turned up.
“Finally one evening Delphine had gone with her
mother to the puppet show in the park. Though she was twelve, Delphine still had her rag doll sitting on her bed at home that her mama had made for her. Oh, that doll meant so much to Delphine. Her name was Chiffons, or Rags in English. She was only a cloth doll.
“Delphine never had a fancy doll with a porcelain head, the kind Jumeau made. They were too expensive. But she saw many lucky children in the Luxembourg Gardens with their beautiful Jumeau dolls dressed sometimes in outfits created by Delphine’s mama. Oh, but the world is never fair or just, is it? And back in those days, this is how things were.
“That day Delphine’s mama had an appointment not far off and she left Delphine watching the puppet show in the Luxembourg Gardens. Soon the show was over and Delphine wandered a little toward the pool where the cupid leaned into the water. She was sitting in the shade near some tulips when she spotted a figure in a dark skirt and jacket going toward the pool.
“Delphine moved closer and slipped into the bushes to hide. Oh mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! What Delphine saw! It was the spy. The spy had come to the box behind the statue.
“Delphine crept even nearer down among the leaves. It was hard to see in the shade and the shadows. The closer she got, the more sure she was. The more sure she was, the more her heart fell, the more it dropped, like a bird shot dead.
“Now she could see who the spy was. And who was it? It was Sylvie! Her dear sister! Sylvie was sitting in the shadows quickly sketching the dress. Oh mon Dieu! Oh, angels in heaven! Oh, sky above. Oh, clouds. Oh, rain. Oh, wind! Say it’s not so! Sylvie, who rubbed her feet and sponged her forehead when Delphine once had a high fever. Sylvie. She had grown up with her. They shared everything. She wrote her letters every day! Sylvie was the closest person in the world to her. She knew Sylvie’s every breath. For all their lives their rag dolls had been best friends. She loved Sylvie!
