Walking home, the noise of The Row fading behind me, absorbed by the trees shading the sidewalk and whispering soft blessings above my head, I couldn’t stop smiling. How funny, how sad, to realize at this late date that Magnolia wasn’t only the country club and Ashley Hathaway and Ladies Association literacy fundraisers. It was Cassandra and knitting groups and Kevin’s band and restaurateurs and people who opened Wiccan shops on The Row and sold crystals and sage and led past-life-regression workshops.
It made me love Magnolia in a way I never had. How many First Fridays had I missed? How many meals with people whose stories could make me laugh and who made me want to sit them down and say, “Now, tell me everything about this thing you love”? How much had I missed out on because I had never thought to push the boundaries of what I knew? And who was I doing this for? The hair, the clothes, the right committees, the perfect husband who wasn’t the perfect husband for me—I certainly didn’t care about any of those things, and I didn’t like most of the people who did. So why did it matter to me?
My mother’s house, which had always seemed so big, seemed so small as I turned up the walk toward the front door. Looking to the side, I saw the restaurant’s parking lot was empty, but I could still hear sounds from inside, faint music and a clatter of pans and an occasional shouted demand. I longed to be there. I longed to be back at the table at the café down the street, greeting everyone who came by, getting to know them and this new way of seeing my hometown.
eight
MARGIE
1924
Margie sat alone at breakfast in the hotel, fuming. Evelyn hadn’t come back the night before; her bed lay as still and untouched as when she had left. Margie had tried to read a novel, had tried to write, first a story and then a letter to her mother. But how could she explain the truth now, when the last letter she had sent had been lies?
She had written those things with the expectation that her relationship with Evelyn would get better—that Evelyn would behave better—when they were on land. But of course nothing had improved, and Margie was left with an overwhelming fear that this adventure might be over before it had truly begun, that Evelyn’s behavior would mark Margie as an unsuitable chaperone, that her parents would demand she return and everything would go back to the way it was before, the musty parlor, the clock on the mantel chewing away the hours, the awkward dinners with desperate bachelors or widowers, and the endless growing sadness inside her as she realized there was no escape.
Well. Enough of this. She had been looking over her Baedeker, and she had decided she would go out on her own, Evelyn be damned. As long as she returned before dinner, she would be sure to catch Evelyn preparing for her night out, and the two of them would have a conversation. Margie would allow her this time in Paris, but when it was time to leave, it really would be just the two of them, as planned. When she pictured it in her mind, she was firm and strong, and Evelyn recognized the wisdom of it and nodded agreeably.
Outside, her confidence faded. In the hotel, most everyone had spoken at least some English. But here, on the street, she heard nothing but French. Margie panicked slightly at the sound—she had studied French in high school and college, but hadn’t spoken it since, and she longed for the artificial environment of the classroom, of the single, American-accented dialect, of the slow, steady speech of her teachers and professors. She had never imagined the different accents she would need to contend with, the people who mumbled or spoke quickly, or that when she descended into the Métro station and asked a question about which platform the train might be on, she might be answered with anything other than the orderly dialogue laid out in her textbooks: Où est le train? Le train est là. Instead, the man at the ticket window released a torrent of rapid French, of which Margie caught only the words for “right” and “left,” and, unable to remember which was which, she retreated, burying herself in a crowd of people and praying they were going where she wanted to go.
But she did find her way, unfolding the maps from her guide book and, when she got close enough, following other people who seemed to be slightly less lost than she. In the Louvre, she found herself tagging along after groups of Americans as though she belonged, attaching herself at the end, listening to the comforting width of American vowels, the drawls and sprawls of Southerners and Bostonians alike. The museum’s floors creaked and groaned pleasantly beneath their feet as they moved through, and Margie found her mind wandering away from the art to the palace itself. She could picture the courtiers, the kings and queens, moving along the same floors, and she closed her eyes and tried to feel their steps beneath hers. In the larger halls, she imagined people arriving for balls in the grandest, most extreme costumes, saw herself stepping out of a carriage in a high, powdered wig, her face stylishly made up, her ball gown shimmering, and there would be a handsome man to greet her—a prince!—and he would . . .