She never, never wanted to leave.
The place Sebastien had suggested she stay was the American Girls’ Club, a large building sprawling lazily down a side street off the Boulevard du Montparnasse. When she turned off the wide boulevard and saw it sitting there on the narrow street, leaning forward as though it were eager to make her acquaintance, she wanted to gasp and clasp her hands together in joy, like a character in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. The buildings on the street were old and whitewashed, rather than the creamy gold of so much of the city, beautiful but exhaustingly repetitive, and the Club had green shutters and flower boxes filled with an explosion of purple and pink and blue. It looked more like a country cottage than a building only steps from one of the busiest streets in Paris.
She knocked but there was no answer, and when she turned the handle, the door swung open easily. She stepped into the foyer, deliciously dark and cool after the brightness of the day outside. A woman sat in an office, a window open to the foyer, and Margie stepped over, waiting politely for her to take a break in her typing and notice Margie was there.
When the woman finally looked up and saw Margie, her expression hardly changed. “Yes?” she boomed.
Margie jumped. “Ah, yes?” she echoed, and then felt silly. “Er, bonjour?” Wait, she was in the American Girls’ Club. Why was she speaking French? “I mean, hello?”
“Yes?” the woman asked again impatiently.
“Yes, you see, I’m Margie, and I’m American, you see.” She offered a quick smile in case her nationality might buy her a little kindness. The woman continued to look at her with a grimly determined expression, as though Margie were merely an obstacle to be mowed over in pursuit of her work, which, truth be told, is exactly what she was. “Someone said I might be able to stay here?” There was a little squeak in her voice and she swallowed hard.
“We rent rooms, yes. You have an American passport?”
“Well, yes,” Margie said. “I’m American?”
Margie seemed to have spoken the magic words, because the woman began bustling about in her little office, picking up forms from various cubbyholes and bringing a notebook to the ledge that stood between her and Margie.
As she gathered her papers, the woman rattled off information about the Club’s accommodations (single or shared rooms, shared bathrooms), rules (no gentlemen or liquor in the rooms, no Marcel irons in the bathrooms), and costs.
Though she gulped when she heard the price for the only available room, a single on the third floor, Margie took a deep breath and nodded. However foolish it was, she was actually carrying all her remaining money with her. Her mother had warned her, regularly and loudly, before departure, of the insidiousness of pickpockets in Europe, but also of thieving chambermaids and usurious hotel owners. To Margie’s mother, Europe looked like one of those medieval maps, where the cartographer had filled in the unknown spaces with fear: Here be dragons. And as much as Margie didn’t want to believe her mother’s anxieties, she seemed to have absorbed them anyway, so every departure from her hotel room was fraught with decision: should she take her valuables with her and risk a pickpocket, or leave them to the mercies of a thieving chambermaid? In the end, she took them with her most days, taking comfort in the knowledge that the French didn’t even seem to have a word for pickpocket; they’d had to borrow it from English. With shaking hands, she opened her bag and pulled out her money, slowly counting out 125 francs, the price for the first week. It was quite a bargain, and yet it felt like the greatest extravagance she had ever experienced, especially when she looked at the anemic amount of money she had left. As the woman counted the money, Margie carefully filled out the card the woman had handed her. She was doing this. She was actually doing this.