I've been working on some mini-memoir pieces. This is the first of many more to come.
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A man in the corner writes on yellowed pages, reminding me that I slipped my favorite book into my bag before I left the hotel this morning. The tattered pages are printed with words I have already met. A tired scent rises from the binding, reintroducing me to The House on Mango Street. I leaf through, not needing to read the story I already know. I had forgotten that I underlined my favorite passages in red:
My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.
These pages always seem to say exactly what I need to hear, making sense of what I cannot. I read, trying to recall how I felt about this book the first time I read it. What did my previous-self find in these words? Surrounded by foreign vowels, I realize that French may be the only language I hear today. But it is okay, really, because I am all right with not understanding—sometimes it’s easier than the clutter of a native tongue.
A mother and daughter sit down at a table nearby, reminding me of my family back at the hotel. Three generations of women in a city generations older than we can trace the branches of our own family tree. I think of them asleep, eyes like mine that have cried salty tears. Mouths like mine inhaling the damp air.
I woke up early this morning, anticipating another day to call Paris my own. The cold rain and dark clouds of early morning reminded me of old acquaintances greeting the tourists’ Eiffel Tower and the natives’ Île Saint-Louis. Pigeons melted into the shadows of dark alleys as I walked alone through the narrow streets near my hotel. Following sidewalks lined by empty cars with unfamiliar makes and models, I couldn’t help but feel more at home in Paris, a city with which I had barely spoken, than in my sky-colored room in my house on the corner.
Now I sit in a quiet café, giving my face a break from the cold and my umbrella a break from the rain. As I sip my coffee, memories from high school French class find a familiar face in the conversations lingering in the air. Old friends at a table near me talk quietly about an old house. I wonder why the aged floorboards and clouded windows shape their malleable words with such somber. Who did they love there? Who did they lose there?
This lonely day in Paris makes me unsure of the home that I miss and the family that I crave. I’m not sure what to long for and it’s strange. But I think that I am going to be all right because maybe for now, not knowing what to miss is just a little less painful that missing something real.
Cultural stereotypes prove themselves on the street outside. Framed in the window, elegant men and women cloaked in black grace the humble sidewalks. Lines of schoolgirls in red berets pass, holding hands and holding up traffic. Shopkeepers open shutters, revealing shelves lined with exotic fruits and labels that I cannot read. Although the day has barely started, the glint in each passing pair of eyes makes me feel as if Parisians know something about living life that I do not. As my sister, mother and grandmother sleep in our small hotel room, I am an observer.
Slowly swirling white milk into black coffee, my teaspoon is startled by a conversation whisked in from outdoors. Clashing with the elegant breeze of European perfume, I instantly recognize the voices as American. How obnoxious their tourist cameras and ponchos seem. I can only hope that I don’t sound as they do – violent vowels, unsightly consonants. I run marathons through the vocabulary stored in my memory, finding French verb tenses that can answer their butchered guidebook questions in hopes that just maybe they won’t find out that I am one of them. I want to trick them. I want to make them wonder what it is that makes me so unlike them. I want to convince them that I am exactly who I wish to be—that in this place, this Paris, I am finally happy.
My mother tells everyone that when she looks at baby pictures of my sister and me, she has to look at the names on the back to tell us apart. “Two blonde, blue-eyed babies,” she says, plaguing me with unoriginality. Today I am thankful for Paris, because no one knows that there is a sister who looks just like me asleep under an itchy hotel blanket, or a mother who has been left alone in a quiet house like I have, or a grandmother whose personality changes with the seasons, just as mine does. Today I can be myself, or, perhaps even better, someone else entirely, without the burden of a story to tell.
The old cash register and insistent milk steamer harmonize, and the Americans, despite their broken French and bright colors, take their café au laits and baguettes and leave smiling. They are glowing, and I am both envious and terrified as I realize that a change of place isn’t going to make me happy; a new language isn’t going to sing me content. I am stuck. My breaths shorten with the fear that I am stranded in a life I am not sure I’m living.
I doubt sleep will come easily tonight. Rather, I’ll sit at the window and watch the Parisian dreams that no one else sees play out under the sallow glow of the streetlights. I will wait for each moonlight wanderer, hoping that one will look up from the street with eyes that will promise me that we are the lucky ones; we are the listeners and the secret keepers. We are the unattached, and we are not nearly as alone as we have convinced ourselves.
Above the quiet fall of rain, church bells singing ten a.m. remind me of time. I leave money on the table for my coffee. Before seeping back into the reassuring grey of the street, I take one last look at my book, as it speaks gracefully of things for which I cannot find words:
She looked out her window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window
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