When they had settled in their room, the porter having carried their luggage upstairs with no small amount of grumbling and ill will, at the end Margie guiltily pressing into his hand what she would realize later was an outrageously large tip (the money was so confusing), Evelyn began to go through her trunk, tossing things about until the room looked exactly as their stateroom had. She slipped out the door into the bathroom and emerged, somehow, despite the fact that the entirety of her sleep in the past twenty-four hours had been in the taxi on the way here, looking refreshed and lovely. Margie had changed her shoes and was consulting her Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs. It was already late afternoon, but certainly they could fit in a stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens or down to the Seine.
Evelyn picked up her bag and her wrap. “I’m going downstairs to cable Mama that we’ve arrived,” she said. Margie sat in the room for a moment and then decided to follow her. She’d wait in the lobby while Evelyn sent her telegram, and then they could go out exploring. Her heart beat a little faster at the idea. She was eager to go, to step onto the streets where the heroes of the French Revolution had walked, to pass the cafés where the artists of Paris gathered, to squeeze every drop of joy out of this trip so when she was home again with her mother, sticking her needle into the tiny circumscribed round of an embroidery hoop and listening to the endless ticking of the clock counting off the stultifying hours, she would have an infinity of things to remember, to dream about, to write about.
But when she got down to the lobby, of course Evelyn wasn’t sending a telegram. She was standing with the group from the ship, who had thrown themselves on a few of the sofas in the lobby’s sitting area as though it were their own living room.
“Evelyn?” Margie asked, coming up behind her.
Evelyn whirled around, wide-eyed. The others in the group looked at Margie lazily, one of the girls pausing to whisper behind her hand to another, who giggled. Margie flushed, red and hot and pathetic, a low, sinking feeling in her chest.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re going out,” Evelyn said, as though this had all been arranged, as though she and Margie had spoken about it only a few moments ago.
“But . . .” Margie began, and then realized she didn’t know what to say. But what, Margie? But you had some grand vision of how Evelyn was going to become a different person between the ship and here? You had imagined yourself to be a different person now that you were in Europe, someone Evelyn wouldn’t insist on leaving behind at every possibility? And then there was a sickening sadness as she realized it had been the plan all along. That was why Evelyn had asked the name of their hotel; not because she was in any way interested in the trip, but because she was telling her friends where to come get her.
“Really, Margie. You’re absolutely hopeless,” Evelyn said. She turned back to her friends. “Let’s go,” she said, and they rose sleepily, as though she had awoken them, and the men ambled and the girls glided toward the door, leaving Margie standing there alone in the lobby, her guide book in one hand and her bag in the other, with no plan and no idea what to do.
Outside, all of Paris waited for her, but Margie felt deflated and overwhelmed. She had failed, she had been rejected, and she had no idea what she was going to tell her mother. Finally, when one of the disagreeable porters cleared his throat at her until she moved out of the center of the lobby, she headed over to the front desk to send a telegram. Her pen hovered over the paper for a long, long time until she settled on something appropriately terse: Arrived safely. M & E.
seven
MADELEINE
1999
My mother invited me to another luncheon the next day, but I refused to go. I couldn’t sit through another afternoon of pretending and watching everyone else pretend. I was still heartsick thinking about all of us in that room together, playing our parts, and I couldn’t bear to do it again.
After she left, I went down to The Row to find something to eat. At the end of my parents’ street, blocks of stores and restaurants housed in low, unassuming brick buildings extended in either direction. It was an older part of the city, and when I was younger, it danced on the knife edge of respectability: boutiques where my mother bought scarves alongside a head shop and the falafel restaurant where the college students hung out. In high school, I’d gone there all the time—to pretend to be tortured and drink coffee at the coffee shop, to look at the art books at the bookstore or hang around the poetry section, hoping to meet a teenage boy with a poetic soul (FYI, based on my extensive adolescent research, I’m pretty sure they don’t exist), to buy a cookie the size of my head and window shop my way along the street.
But I noticed, as I strolled down the sidewalk in search of food, that things had settled decisively in favor of upscale cool. The head shop had been replaced by a store selling locally made jewelry and art, and a microbrewery had pushed out the falafel (probably a fair exchange in the eyes of the college students). I found a new restaurant with a tiny patio surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, where I ordered eggs Benedict and coffee, and while I waited for it to come, I leaned back and closed my eyes and let the sun lie against my skin like a warm promise.