I couldn’t help myself. In all our collective grief for Parisians this week, I needed to write about the year I lived there as a child. Writing is good friends with therapy. If you’re tired of the biased news onslaught that just has ALL the information, you might enjoy this sweet reminiscence. Nothing newsworthy, just real and warm. Some of this essay you’ll find in my forthcoming book. Due out January!
We lived on the 3rd floor of an apartment building on Avenue du Roule in Neuilly sur de Sienne, a lush and residential section of western Paris. Dad drove a red Renault. Our apartment was large by Parisian standards. Dad had worked hard to find one that would suitably fit our sizable, boisterous American family. Three bedrooms, a large living room, two dining areas and the commodes (endlessly amusing to us kids): three rooms for each private business: a toilet room, the shower room, and the bath/bidet room (which we used for Barbie “poolside” adventures).
Allison and Eric shared a bunk bed in a small room off the narrow kitchen. Heather and I shared a bedroom with a beautiful patio that rushed from the end of the room, overlooking the well-kempt courtyard below, enjoyed exclusively by our landlord, his fat wife and their naughty child.
The apartment was stocked with more dishware and utensils than we would ever use, including some kitchen items that my young, Midwestern mother had never seen: garlic press, French press, a marble cheese slab.
We ate off those foreign plates and drank from the cups. We wiped our mouths respectfully; we laid the dishes carefully back in the cupboards. The landscape was not ours, but we scraped from it all that we could. It was a warm and comfortable little shelter in the cultural center of the world.
While Mom and Dad squinted at their English/French translation book, the four of us kids found life in France whimsical, as only children can in a foreign country. The unfamiliar language was not a deterrent – we found ways to communicate. Plus, our French increased daily, and we often rolled our eyes at our parents’ flat mid-western attempts at the tongue rolling r’s. Allison was four and attended an all-French pre-school. Her teacher was thin, in her 20’s, exuding French style. Cashmere grey cardigan, discussing with her little flock all things French starting with the letter “A.” By the end of our year in Paris, she informed my mother that it would be a crime for us to leave France. Allison’s French accent was perfectly formed now, and she could be fluent in a year. My mother thanked her and looked at her youngest daughter with a hint of awe.
At Marymount International School, Heather, Eric and I enjoyed friendships with people from all over the world. We had all come together in Paris because of our fathers’ jobs. It was no longer odd that I had moved around so many times, so had all my classmates. Military children, ambassadors children, kids whose fathers worked for IBM. We all wore the same navy and white uniforms. We all attended morning Mass; we all sat through French class and stumbled in and out of understanding.
As a child in Paris, you have no sight above your parents’ hips. You rarely glimpse the grand cathedrals, or Arch, or Eiffel Tower the way adults photograph them. Your range of vision centers on sidewalk and trees, fresh market tables and bums crouched in corners. You learn the place by scent. Stale bread in gutters, the oily cuff of a bum’s sleeve as he reaches for a franc. Dog poop in petite conical shapes around the bases of trees, just outside the patisseries. The steamy honking streets and the smell of diesel mingled with stale water in the flower bins at the markets.
Right before dinnertime, Mom put two francs in my palm. “Jess and Eric run to the boulangerie for me.” We skipped down our small hallway, into the elevator and then out the big brass magnetic doors, chasing then racing each other, through the gate and just a block down our avenue to the boulangerie around the corner. The bread in the window was for show. We pushed open the clinking door.
“ Bonjour, petits enfants americains!” the shop ladies, their hair swept back in buns, blouses loose and work-worn. The smell of butter wafting from their breasts .
“Deux baguettes s’il vous plait?” we held out our sweaty francs.
“Evidenment!” the women exclaimed. One came around the counter. She laid two baguettes in my arms like they were tender babies.
“Dites bonjour a votre mere pour nous.”
“We will!” we slipped back into English and waved au revoir.
Outside the patisserie, I broke off the end of one baguette, split it down the warm white middle and handed half to Eric. We walked slowly back to our apartment. That robust French woman should have called to us from the doorway. She should have chastened us, “ Remember this moment! You’ll never be happier than this!”