bright lights, big city

Since we slid past the winter solstice over a week ago, the days have been getting longer, but I don’t think anyone has noticed yet. It’s still dark when we wake up and dark again by a few minutes past naptime. Paris really pulls out all the stops on holiday lighting – the Champs-Elysées is a corridor of blue lights and icicles, and I’ve recently learned that even my beloved electric light trees in our local fountain are the product of a city-sponsored contest, “Paris Illuminates Paris,” which has invited lighting designers to unleash their imaginations on city streets since 2004. The spangly tree-of-lights display at Place Victor Hugo actually has a title – “Sapin Féerique” – though come to think of it I’m not sure if that refers to the metal trees G and I watched get hoisted in the fountain with a crane, or the lights in the real, bare trees surrounding the place. Frankly, these look flung up a bit too casually for a “lighting designer” (it’s what I like about them), but maybe they are going for a total effect.

The whole “by design” nature of the lights is a testament to a well-administered modern city, but it kind of puts a kink in my romanticized imagining of Paris as having organically evolved over the centuries to feed the felt needs of the human psyche, boiled down to a longing for light, especially in winter. And yet, what makes it less magical that this patient illusion of beauty is planned and worked for (and who did I think put up the lights? Elves?)? After all, other than the benefit of a river running through, Paris is short on beauties of geographical accident and long on those that are the cumulative effort of human imagination, carefully tended over time. And when you add to that how far north we actually are, and the vagaries of Parisian weather – let’s just say it isn’t the quality of the eternal sunshine that gives us the “city of light.” Instead, even without the holiday extravagances to carry us through the dead zone of the shortest days, there are streetlights and river lights and the most beautifully lit monuments known to man. At night the decorative statuary on the Grand Palais actually looks as if it is on the verge of rising into the heavens. The crown jewel, for me, anyway, is the Eiffel Tower, which, in addition to being lit constantly with the usual dramatic monument fare, twinkles for absolutely no reason at all, every hour on the hour, for ten minutes. The effect is just glorious – almost enough to make me believe in god, and certainly enough to earn my undying gratitude to Mayor Bertrand Delanöe, who caved to public demand and extended the twinkles indefinitely past their splashy debut for the millennium. When our little neighborhood darkens the holiday lights in mid-January, I’ll depend on the Eiffel Tower to get me through – February, particularly.

And then…we’ll have a new baby in a few weeks, and it’s prompted us to start having conversations about what our life might look like when we go home to the states, as ultimately we must. We talk about it as “going back” even though physics and experience tell us there is no such thing. My life here in Paris still feels so new that I expect things to be different every day – when I called to make an appointment at the salon where I last had my hair cut, oh, nine months ago, I was utterly surprised that the same person who cut it before was still there, would still be able to cut it again. While it seems normal, expected even, that two or three small storefronts across from us have already closed and reopened as new entities – the suspicious video shop is now a real estate agent; the unfriendly toy store is, as of tomorrow, a lighting supply. Yet somehow my vision of home, like any place left behind, is frozen in amber. When we left the states I was barely a mother; we’ll return with two little boys, not babies, even. So I don’t know if it will be more disconcerting for things to seem completely familiar or completely changed. Stranger still, I’m sure, is the huge place Paris will occupy in our imagination once we’re gone, in inverse proportion to the faint blip we’ll leave on the register of the city. “Our” Paris will be its own reflection, no deeper or truer than any, giving the lie to the faint sense of ownership or belonging that we feel over the average tourist. The specific memories that, to us, belong to Paris forever – G’s first steps, nighttime visits to Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter, the action of lifting a stroller onto a thousand Paris buses – will simply close over without a ripple into Paris’ collective consciousness. Which is fine; they’re our memories, not Paris’.

We’ve been getting the annual check-ins with friends and loved ones, cataloguing a year in which, again, we’ve failed to keep in touch the way we might have or wanted to. Mostly blessedly ordinary lives and passages, moreso because of the few wrenching changes we’ve heard about, which leave me sad for days. Even if a calendar is no more significant than a way for humans to keep tally, some people we love are coming into 2008 with too much left behind and too heavy a load to carry forward. I’ll be thinking of them when we pop a clandestine bottle of champagne and, weather willing, wake our son to let the tiny lights on the Eiffel Tower illuminate the first few minutes of our new year.

Bonne année, everyone.

early mornings

It’s been a long, hard pull this month, and we’ve been up a lot in the wee hours, not just contemplating our existential condition. Almost exactly one month ago today, we were having a quiet post-bedtime dinner with friends when G appeared in the doorway, blinking a little against the bright lights. It seems that in one lightning flash all the strategic engineering for not only climbing out of his crib but also for opening the bedroom door had fallen into place. No wonder he looked a little shocked. None of us has been able to recover equilibrium since.

At first, G just seemed bewildered that a couple of simple physical acts could so thoroughly displace his world. We moved his mattress to the floor of his room, and for the first two nights he reluctantly went to sleep there, albeit with many interruptions and a final relocation to our bed. Then he just became enraged.

The crib exodus happened to fall exactly in step with a nasty virus brought home from the garderie that felled both G and me, as well as a ten-day separation from S, who had to go back to the US for a conference. It’s not that G didn’t want to sleep, it’s just that it’s hard to achieve a state of steady regular breathing, let alone unconsciousness, when the world as you know it has completely shifted under your feet (and your mattress), and you’re too small to be able to blow your nose by yourself. There was a lot of screaming. We were both sick and miserable, and I alternated attempts at comfort with desperate fantasies of child abandonment. It got to a point where I would find him leaning against the wall in the hallway, eyes half closed, wailing, “Close your sleepy eyes! Close your sleepy eyes!” It’s a line from a lullaby I sing him, but it punts in well as a cri de coeur. When his eyes were open and he wasn’t wailing, he looked hard at me as if he wanted to do me extreme violence, and often did, hitting me with a force that underlined his frustration that the one person who ought to be able to do something about this was clearly falling down on the job.

Mme. Marron, who with her family graciously hosted us through the worst of the stint, put her hand on my shoulder at one point and said gently, “He’s going to be really interesting to have dinner with in eighteen years. It’s what you have to hold on to.” That and being able to drink again in about six weeks.

In the last week, we’ve achieved a tenuous balance that involves G going to sleep – s-l-o-w-l-y – in his “new” big bed (the single bed from our spare room, tarted up with some splashy IKEA textiles and a stuffed hippo), and then coming in to sleep with us at about 2 am. Our bed, she is very crowded, and no one is really getting what I would call a good night’s rest. Some nights I have taken to just giving up and getting up – it makes me much less grumpy than lying there with eyes wide open. I read, I stare out the window, I rustle around the kitchen – but mostly just enjoy the suspended silence that is the one reward of this fractured schedule.

One of the last few mornings, much to our surprise, Lucy and I actually found ourselves out on the streets at five a.m. I was up because G. was in bed with us, flinging limbs across my rapidly decreasing corner of mattress and banishing me to the study. Lucy was up because I was up; her dim sense of the circadian, whatever they may say about dogs, being completely undone by anyone being out of bed with the lights on. After I had been reading in the study for about half an hour, I heard her heave off the bed and start a restless tap-tap-tap across the bedroom and down the hallway. A couple of minutes later, she poked her head anxiously into the opposite door of the study, her eyes saying, “Hey, Vertical Human, time to get going.” So I pulled on a sweater and jacket over my pajamas and we went out.

And it was a beautiful early morning. I’m not often up at this hour, let alone outside. This time of year (or maybe every time of year, how would I know?) it’s still pitch dark, and in the mists the streetlights look like giant fireflies. You can understand why a thousand ersatz paintings have tried, and failed, to capture the same mysterious effect. At five o’clock the middle of the night is bumping elbows with the crack of dawn – while there weren’t many of us out, we were evenly divided between those just waking up and those just finishing their evening. On the first corner, a man was delivering eggs to the bakery; the next doorway spit out two men with rumpled hair and glasses, papers under their arms. They shook hands and wished each other a bonne fin de nuit.

At the end of the block, I could see a young man and a much older man walking arm in arm, with some difficulty, as if the older man were being supported as they made their way along. As Lucy and I got closer, though, and stepped aside to give them room on the sidewalk, it became clear that it was actually the older man doing the supporting, ramrod straight and impeccably dressed in a camel hair topcoat, cordovan dress shoes, and a cravat – a cravat! – at 5 a.m. The young man, in a black leather jacket, was listing hard, and singing to himself – coming off the end of a long night, I supposed. I hesitated to acknowledge them, from a combination of learned Parisian reserve and the clear the protective anonymity of that time of day. The older man kept his eyes grimly set forward and Lucy and I kept going.

But then, at the end of another turn around the block, punctuated by enthusiastic grate-sniffing and other business, we met them again, coming off the place. This time there was no way to maintain polite ignorance – we had to speak to each other. By this time the young man had stopped singing to himself and was just hanging heavily against his supporter, head down. The older man hesitated briefly, and in that moment it occurred to me that this was no one-off drunken airing out but something of a nightly ritual, the evidence of who knows what hidden sorrow. It was impossible to determine their relationship to each other – friends? lovers? father and son? – but I could feel the weight of it, and its shared sadness, pressing against us in the cold air. I held Lucy to one side and said “Bonjour, monsieur.” He glanced down at my belly and then back up at my eyes. And then, instead of saying anything, he inclined his head and tipped an imaginary hat to me – the most courtly of gestures at the strangest of moments – before walking on.

I don’t know if he was wishing me well against the cold of the morning, or against the whole future of 5 am and the things it might bring. But I hurried home to the warm apartment where my boys were just stirring, waking from a restless night that suddenly seemed easy. And for the millionth time since G was born I wondered how we ever survive, these brittle piles of bones covered with such fragile, fragile skin.

strike out

I’ve been working on something intelligent to say about the strikes in Paris vs. the strikes in Hollywood, the weather, and some things I’ve been reading, but they will all have to wait. It’s 4:00, it’s raining, and my toddler still has no pants on – that’s just the kind of day it’s been. If I weren’t eight (almost) months pregnant, it would be time for a toddy; instead, I’m taking myself out for a cup of tea. Tune in tomorrow.

Or maybe Thursday.

In other news, G (pantsless, of course), was negotiating a particularly tight spot between the sofa, my legs, and the coffee table this morning, in order to get to the toy he had shoved between the sofa cushions. After a moment’s contemplation, he decided, finally, to shove the coffee table a few inches backwards and delicately step over my ankles. In the middle of the procedure, he looked up at me, beamed, and said, "Excusez-moi, mommy."

At least one of us is learning French. And I even got the respectful vous. I take it where I can get it, boys.

tie me up, tie me down

The nostalgia for my prenatal yoga class back in Washington finally drove me to search out a yoga studio here in Paris, though I was dubious about what the results might be. No offense to the francophone yoga practitioner – while I admire with all my being the ascetically toned “serious” yoga body, I do love my yoga to come with a healthy soupçon of affirmation and aromatherapy. And, preferably, some tinkling bells. I haven’t spoken very much with my inner self lately, but I find it comforting to assume I have one. This is really not very French at all, unless it involves a leather couch and an hourly rate.

The yoga studio in our neighborhood is on the main shopping avenue running up to the Arc de Triomphe. It’s actually more than a studio – it’s an Institute, which provides teacher training to its most serious students along with reluctant classes for the hoi polloi. The main space has big windows facing onto the street – discreetly shielded by sheets of frosted glass, installed to about halfway up, like bifocals – between a small brasserie and a shop selling fancy underwear. But you enter the studio through a courtyard door, accessed by a wrought-iron, glass-plated gate (When I went to the class for the first time, I actually got stuck in the courtyard on the way out. Most Parisian exterior doors have a wall button that you have to push in order to be let out of the building. Try as I might, I could not find the button for this exterior door, and only managed to succeed in opening the glass-plated window in the wrought iron – which of course I could not get to close again. I had to wait for my rescue, Estragon-like, until someone else was coming in the building, all the while being fanned by the cold wind gusting in through the wrought iron).

There are heavy red velvet curtains just inside the door, to keep out the cold, which you push through to get into a foyer with a small reception desk facing a set of bookshelves on which you are meant to leave your shoes. All this was familiar enough that I did not let myself be deterred by the extensive health questionnaire I was asked to fill out as precursor to yoga pour femmes enceintes – in France, pregnancy is a condition, which accords you all sorts of privileges and special treatment that I accept guiltily and gratefully, but may the anger of the gods fall upon you should you lift anything heavier than a hatbox or a champagne bottle. I only began to worry a little upon entering the studio space itself. It’s in what used to be the main salon or ballroom in the building’s previous life, still hardwood parquet floors with a grand fireplace and lots of decorative plasterwork. But directly beneath the plasterwork the walls are hung with wooden boards, which themselves in turn are hung with ropes and various tackle-like equipment. Silence reigned in the studio, even as a teacher or two appeared along with a few more lumpen pregnant women. I just stood in the middle of the room in my yoga pants, waiting, as the rest of the women started dragging out mats and pads and bolsters and strange looking wooden contraptions. Finally one of the teachers told me rather gently to sit down over there.

The yoga teachers (named Helga, Nanette, and Alexandrine) do not dress in the height of yoga chic or ballet tights, as I might have imagined. Instead they wear tee-shirts printed with the Institute logo and short, gathered knit bloomers. The whole effect is very Soviet-era gymnastics team, equal parts severe and silly. The teachers are presided over by Madame, who is married to the studio founder, is invested with an iron rod in her spine, and wears a skirt instead of the bloomers. She didn’t stay for the whole class, but every time she drifted into the room all the teachers suddenly looked like they were being tasered.

The fact that I noticed this at all is something of a wonder, since most of my conscious thought was taken up in absorbing the truly strange things that were happening to me. Instead of beginning with music or any sets of vaguely meditative stretches, the little clutch of teachers clustered around me and busily set to with a mass of straps, pillows and wooden blocks, arranging me and my limbs over the back of a low wooden arch in an uncomfortable back bend and then using the straps to fasten me in place. All of this happened with a minimal exchange of words – as happens often here, I felt like I had stumbled into a system whose rules had been inscribed in everyone else’s DNA, and that it could only be incomprehensibly rude for me to question what I ought to know already and would certainly come to understand in time if I were only patient and attentive. So by the time I thought to weakly raise my voice – what happens if there is a fire alarm? – the teachers had already moved on, in their bloomers, to the next pregnant woman and were out of range.

This went on for the next silent hour-and-a-half, and I moved from the wooden arch to a folding chair to a sort of balance beam to finally hanging from one of the wall-ropes like an untidy side of beef. I had a pounding headache, which I mentioned hesitantly to Helga, the most approachable-looking of the teachers. She scurried off to consult with Madame, with whom she returned, and they both stood gazing at my shoulders for a few minutes, frowning. Apparament it was all a question of posture, and the answer to the question was that mine was very bad. Madame sucked in her breath, planted her feet on either side of me, and wrenched my shoulders into the proper position while Helga exerted an equal but opposite pressure on my spinal column. I gasped, and Madame tut-tutted – “It is difficult the first time but it will be better when the muscles are re-educated.”

At that point Nanette, the smallest teacher, took the opportunity to ask Madame what she ought to do next with her particular pregnant lady. Without letting go of my shoulders or turning her head, Madame hissed, “Nanette, I am sick and tired of telling you one hundred times what you should already know. Go away.” Poor Nanette slunk away, and I wanted to. Re-education indeed.

It’s clear to me that the problem isn’t really the yoga, but actually about managing the sense of disjunction that is always present under the surface as a foreigner in another country. Most of the time I find the displacement exhilarating, a tonic. But the class was the first time that instead of a displacement I felt a dislocation, like a phantom limb wrenched out of joint. I thought, maybe I just don’t belong here. And of course, I don’t. That’s the point. But I like to feel more in control of my stranger-ness, and I suppose there was something distressingly literal about being tied up in a dark room where no one would talk to me.


I stayed through to the end of the class, and even came to one more – no one could say I didn’t try – but the next week I checked out a prenatal yoga video from the American Library featuring a long-legged blond Californian in a catsuit who softly coaches me through the poses while sitting next to a running stream. G and I watched the video together the first time through, comfortably ensconced in a pink armchair and letting our inner selves imagine the actual work of stretching.

note to handbasket: we’re on our way to hell

G has reached a new milestone this week – he now understands the concept of bribery.

On Monday morning, during the usual contortionist stroller-wrestling match, I finally crouched down next to him and in my best soft-mommy voice said, “Now, sweetheart, I need for you to be a good boy and cooperate because mommy is very tired. If you can climb into your stroller all by yourself like a big boy, mommy will give you a trick-or-treat” (we have a bag full of more or less nasty/wonderful Halloween candy in honor of the holiday, which isn’t really celebrated here. Since G hasn’t really had candy before – though he’s had his fair share of pastry and cookies, mind you – we’ve taken to calling all of it “trick-or-treat”).

G stared at me for all of three seconds – what brave new world is this? – and then crawled right into his stroller. Just like that.

So I gave him some candy.

Since then life has been pretty merry in our fallen, candy-trading universe. My happiness has taken on the sheen of a snack-sized Snickers, at least until God strikes me down with a parenting manual blow-to-the-skull.

Or all of our teeth rot out of our heads.

a tempest and a teapot

Go away for a couple of weeks, and when you come back, the president is getting a divorce. This week’s cover of Elle France is all Cécilia Sarkozy, curled up catlike in a dark sweater and riding boots, proclaiming “Je veux vivre ma vie sans mentir” (I want to live my life without lying). This, and a Paris Match exclusive, just days after the president’s office at the Elysée Palace issued a terse announcement and a “M. and Mme. Sarkozy will not be commenting publicly.” Just one of the many things that makes Madame such fun to watch. Allow yourself to imagine, just for a moment, the same thing unraveling in the US. Well, no, you can’t. And frankly, in spite of the well-known collective Gallic shrug at the private life of politicians (so sensible), this is not exactly par for the course here, either. Discretion being the better part of valor and all that. It’s quite the pyrotechnic flameout for the thoroughly modern president, and everyone’s enjoying the show.

While the president was acquiring a vacancy in the master suite and a very public headache, I got myself a new teapot. It is made of tempered glass and has a fine tracing of cherry blossoms painted along one side. The design of the teapot, called an Egoiste (see, there’s a link here somewhere), dates back to the earliest days of fine tea-drinking. The small pot, which holds enough water for about two and a half cups of tea, nestles into the top of a wide-mouthed teacup (also painted with cherry blossoms, if you were curious). The nesting feature says not only “this is mine and mine alone,” but also warms the teacup. Neat. I’ve seen pictures of Egoiste teapots in silver filigree as well as, of course, Sèvres and Limoges.

My own Egoiste teapot has a flaw – it is missing its lid – and therein lies the tale of why a house that also shelters the Engine of Destruction would contain a teapot made of barely-more-than-eggshell-thick tempered glass. Just before we left on vacation, I decided to take my visiting cousin to my favorite teashop, a tiny gem I discovered on the walk to my ob/gyn’s office (all things have their rewards). The shop doesn’t serve tea, only sells it, but behind and to the left of the counter is a tiny table and chair where the shopmistress can sip a cup and read chapters of a novel while waiting for custom to arrive. When I saw that, I fell in love. Madame herself is nothing less than adorable – finchlike in manner and in the way she wears one piece of bright color, with a touch of restraint – and she loves tea. Even though I am at heart a Tetley’s tea bag kind of girl – it’s better suited to my habit of leaving half-drunk mugs of tea all over the house – I have bought obscenely expensive tea from this shop at regular intervals just for the pleasure of the purchase.

My cousin wanted to buy some flower tea for her girls, and my teashop, of course, sells their version of the latest tea phenomenon in little silk sachets with a satin bow. So, while she browsed the different possibilities, I decided to take the time to examine the shop’s collection of tea-related merchandise. These include a large number of cast-iron teapots, in various sizes, a bit of porcelain, and then the tempered glass. Ignoring everything I’ve ever read or heard about the clumsiness of pregnant women (and my own ample evidence of same), I reached straight for the cherry blossoms. And as soon as I had it in my palms, my hands quivered, the pot shook, and the lid leapt off like a fish, shattering on the wooden floorboards.

I insisted on buying the teapot, of course, over the distressed noises of Madame, who kept saying, “Oh, ça m’ennuie ce qui vous a passé!” (literally, “it annoys me that this has happened to you!”) as she whisked up the glass bits, wrapped up the teapot, and threw in a flower tea sachet for my pains. I told her it was like getting an unexpected present for myself, and that I was lucky that the teapot was still usable. She pressed her hands together and told me she still wished it hadn’t happened this way – and I think she really meant it.

I, on the other hand, was just saying all those things to make her feel better and cover my embarrassment, while promising myself not even to look at the Visa charges I had incurred for my pains. But I surprised myself on the walk home by actually being excited about the teapot. Living in France for me has been an interesting confrontation with my relationship to the pleasure principle. Paris is a city of luxuries, both big (the couture shops on the Avenue Montaigne) and small (chocolate, tea, silk scarves), but they all have the common denominator of being understated, complicated, and requiring for their enjoyment a certain education in taste and a belief in the mysticism of the experience, not to mention the expense. Perhaps it’s just a reaction to my Calvinist upbringing, but I’ve always liked my pleasures a little faster, brighter, cheaper, inserted directly into the vein. I want to be the sort of person who can make a meal off of an exquisite pair of coffee-colored calfskin boots for ten years, but I’m actually the person who loves the petroleum product faux-motorcycle boots bought at the flea market for ten euros. I’m much more magpie than modiste. And while I appreciate the understated – the smooth hair, the browns and grays that make you notice the cut of the clothes – I sometimes feel a little stifled by the lack of cheap thrills, and undermined by the realization that I just look better, dammit, with messy hair and mismatched clothes. It’s just the way it is. But somehow buying a superfluous teapot that I broke myself, covered in red flowers, no less, made me feel like I was turning a corner. That perhaps I’ve been in Paris long enough now to stop playing the invisible – and monochrome – tourist, and be the person that I am. Je veux vivre ma vie sans mentir.

Image is a teapot-shaped gas station on an old US highway. Yep, that's pretty much me.

rainy day wishes

It’s been seeping rain here in Paris for the last several days – the kind that works its way down into the deepest sidewalk cracks and releases odors that have been hiding there, possibly for centuries. When I take Lucy out for a quick walk, which consists of ducking and weaving between awnings for a long block, her nose quivers with barely suppressed passion for all the ghosts who have gone before. It’s a depressing fact – you can still see the Eiffel Tower through the mist, but when it rains in Paris everything smells a little like pee.

In dubious concert with the weather, we’ve also had the first strike of the season, courtesy of the cab drivers. The taxis blocked off most of the Left Bank, it felt like, driving up and down and beeping their horns, and wreaking havoc with the bus routes. I missed any announcements by newspaper or radio while stumbling around in my usual morning fog, and only discovered the strike while vainly trying to get across the river by bus to join the American Library in Paris. Well, actually not vainly – when the bus stopped for good a few blocks shy of the river, I got out and walked, a vision of fertile loveliness with damp hair, no umbrella, and completely unsuitable-for-the-weather ballet slippers. And not one of the striking taxis took a moment of pity. I made accidental eye contact with one of them, who looked back at me as if to say “Lady, I got nothin’.”

This in a city where the only times I have been propositioned (it’s three and counting, now) have been since I was visibly pregnant. It’s as if all the negative points I am assigned for non-glowing hair, stains, and unacceptable choices in footwear are knocked out of the park by the bonus of “rollicking good breeder.” It’s a little disconcerting, but nice, after the bizarre contradictions of being pregnant in the US, where you are invisible until the moment you touch a cup of coffee or start to eat a piece of soft cheese, and the pregnancy police zoom in. I like the louche appreciation, even if it’s just because I’ve proven capable of bearing the heir to the throne. (Pregnancy also breaks down the otherwise unbreachable rules against sharing personal information with strangers here. Yesterday the boulanger smiled at me and said, “You’re getting nice and large, madame. Another boy?” I was so startled I almost dropped my baguette).

But I digress. The point is, I made my way through rain and strike to the library, which bears out within its walls the comforting familiarity of every public library at home, including the New Yorker cartoons and newspaper articles taped to the pillars as inside jokes between librarians. There’s a research room, a children’s room, a periodicals section, and of course the rows upon rows of hardcover fiction in crinkly plastic covers. I got a memoir by Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood’s latest, another book I can’t remember but was on my list, and a board book about monster trucks for G. I even remembered to bring my carryall bag.

I love the part in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway discovers Sylvia Beach’s lending library. She lets him take his first set of books without paying, and when he gets home he and his wife get completely carried away by the new imaginative (and gastronomic, of course – that old connection between words and food) horizons that access to books implies.

“We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink,” Hemingway says.

“We can have two drinks.”

“Then we can eat somewhere.”

“Don’t forget we have to pay the library.”

“We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.”

“And we’ll never love anybody else but each other.”

“No. Never.”

Poor Hemingway, even knowing all that he did to wreck things for himself. We’re actually going to Beaune this weekend, so we’ll have to raise a glass of Burgundy in honor, pregnancy police be damned. And the next time it rains, I’ll be able to stay home and read.


*Hemingway quotation from A Moveable Feast, Scribner edition, copyright 1964 by Ernest Hemingway Ltd.

appeasement

Yesterday morning I caught sight of my rear view in the mirror while getting dressed and it caused me to reel back in horror. I know it’s basic physics – without something in back to anchor the rapid expansion out front, I’d just topple over like a faulty Weeble. It was the same way last time, and much to my relief the Brobdignagian proportions shuffled back to something like their former selves. And yet, today, I am not relieved. I am convinced that this latest incursion is a malevolent relapse, a gathering of forces for a secondary assault. It’s like that horror movie where the evil hand tries to kill the rest of the body (after first killing a lot of other people). Not personification, exactly, but more like synecdoche’s evil cousin, where instead of the part coming to symbolize the whole (and we won’t even go there), it secedes instead and stages a revolution.

It wants to take over the world.

S must have heard me whimpering in front of the mirror – or noticed the furrowed brow – because he interrupted his own toilette to ask what was wrong.

“It’s huge,” I said. “It’s revolting.”

He looked for himself. “It’s definitely bigger,” he said, and then added, catching my facial expression, “but it’s cute.”

I burst into tears, which no patchy assertions of “beautiful,” “natural,” or “necessary” could contain. S slunk out and went to work. I’ve been feeling a little sensitive since my last doctor’s appointment, when Dr. Napoleon indicated that I had “un peu trop grossie.” It didn’t help that he followed it with a “c’est pas grave,” or that I know that French doctors seem to expect women to gain exactly nine pounds and for their babies to emerge smoking Gauloises and quoting Sartre. Instead I’ve been watching, with growing alarm, the host of tiny pregnant women in my neighborhood, who appear simply to be escorting a smallish basketball out front, like a chic handbag. And not a sign, not a hint from the back that anything is going on.

I might as well strap on a sandwich board. It feels like the final physical betrayal of my Americanness – no matter how much I try to blend in, speak correctly, swathe myself in ever-increasing yards of “slimming” and anonymous black and decorous scarves, there is still the unstoppable urge to enlarge, envelop, and advertise. (That’s not a flag I’m waving, sir, it’s just my - - -).

S called, midday, cautiously, to check in on the state of things.

“How’s the world domination coming?” he asked.

“Still actively plotting,” I said. “Still huge.”

He thought a minute.

“Maybe you could just give it the Sudetenland."

le jardin du paradis

It was strange times yesterday morning at my fruit-and-vegetable-stand, Le Jardin du Paradis. Now, most fruit-and-vegetable-stands have similarly hyperbolic names – La Bonté de Dieu, La Richesse de Mon Jardin, etc., etc., but I think this one is meant to distract from the fact that the stand is located in Paris’ biggest eyesore of an indoor shopping center, plunked underneath a disastrous high-rise apartment building that looks like something that was rejected by the mother ship (seriously, I would love to know the size of the bribes that got this built). Still, I am loyal to this particular stand, because of their amazing lettuces and also because of the couple running the stand, who, if not overflowing with warmth (it would be un-Parisian), always greet me with a friendly smile and let me take my time. Monsieur is a giant man with rumpled hair, sausage fingers, and a very delicate way with a tomato; Madame is whippet thin with sparkling round glasses and a deft hand at the cash register.

But when I arrived yesterday, both Madame and Monsieur were huddled behind the orchard fruits, glued to a television screen. Their faces were so somber, I was sure I was stumbling on some kind of epochal news moment, like the death of an ex-president or Brigitte Bardot. As I walked into the shop, the screen crackled and Monsieur faintly swore; they both looked over at me with such intense reluctance I almost said I would come back later. Madame’s eyes were actually glistening behind her glasses. With a final longing glance back at the screen, Monsieur heaved himself around to the center of the shop and asked if he could help me. I made my requests as quickly as possible and Monsieur weighed, wrapped and stacked my purchases with heretofore unseen lightning speed. When I was ready to go over to the cash register, Madame had still not torn herself away from the television, and so I used the opportunity to come closer and see what they were actually watching. The camera had zoomed in on the faces of two anguished lovers, clearly in heated conversation, although the reception fuzz was so noisy I couldn’t understand the French. As I watched on, waiting for Madame to gather herself, I realized that the blond woman looked very familiar, though I couldn’t quite place her. I scrolled through the short list of French actresses I know until it struck me quite suddenly that the helmet of hair being sported by both players was about as un-French as you could get. As was the swelling background music, tinny and familiar as well.

And it came to me. They were watching The Young and the Restless, dubbed into French. Vive l’Amerique!


* The above image is a cast photo from the Young and the Restless. The blond in question, incidentally, is the woman standing just to the left of the cake, Melody Thomas Scott. I don't actually know who she plays, but she's been around at least since I was in high school. And don't you think Le Jardin du Paradis would be a good name for a soap opera, by the way?

get me a ticket for an aer-o-plane

G and I are bearing the scars of our first flight à deux, and we are bearing them bravely. We spent a wonderful weekend in the hills above Nice with our friends Mme. and M. Marron and their daughters, the current fervid center of G’s tiny but expanding universe (he’s woken up every morning since calling their names).

It was a busy weekend of hiking, eating, dog-wrangling, and escape-hatch finding, and we subsequently arrived at the airport on Monday afternoon napless and still raring to go. We spent a long time at the Air France ticket counter dealing with the possibly insurmountable bureaucratic challenge of G having been issued a ticket at Paris Orly the previous Friday under my last name, when the name on his passport and carte de sejour is undeniably different. Perhaps the lady at the counter was actually worried that I might succeed in smuggling the world’s tiniest terrorist into the heart of Paris, which would all be traced back to her lack of due diligence at the ticket counter, or perhaps she was just exercising her duty as a true fonctionnaire. Either way, the final issuing of our tickets involved multiple consultations with colleagues and a trip to the back office, behind a mirrored door.

During the wait, G got a bit squirmy, a situation which was not improved by the snaking security line or the subsequent few minutes in the departure lounge before boarding. I kept him mostly distracted on my lap with cookies and airplane-spotting, but still the one time I let him down to stretch his legs, he darted behind the check-in desk and almost boarded another plane before we managed to stop him. This was just a harbinger of things to come.

In my oh-so-infinite wisdom, I had chosen the 4:00 flight back to Paris – the last flight you can take after a morning meeting in Nice that will still get you home in time for dinner. The plane was packed, and mostly with men in expensive suits carrying Hermès briefcases. There were a couple of other families on the plane, but instead of corralling us in the back along with the small animals and the flight attendants, the way they had done on the way over, we were dotted around the plane, every man for himself. G and I were squeezed into a window seat beside two of the expensive businessmen, who blessedly gave us tolerant smiles and then pretended we weren’t there. This attitude soon began to require expanded powers of imagination, as Air France proceeded to hold us on the tarmac for 20 minutes with no air conditioning while we waited for a delayed connecting flight.

G does not like to be hot. In fact, being hot probably falls on his list somewhere just above taking medicine and only slightly below being stuck with a poker. He also doesn’t much like being confined. As the plane got hotter, I think he reasonably thought to himself, well, I’ll just get down off Mommy’s lap and walk around for a minute until the situation improves. Except that no one was allowed to get up in the face of imminent departure, and he would have had to crawl over three people to get anywhere, anyway. I said no, he wiggled, and I tightened my hold some more, haunted by visions of a resourceful G actually crawling under the seat in front of us.

Realizing he had reached the end of his options, G started to scream. Loud, piercing, unrelenting screams of a depth and decibel level that are unimaginable unless you have happened to experience them personally. A friend visiting over the summer who witnessed the screams during a particularly reluctant nap session said to me afterward, “If I heard a child screaming like that without any reference, I would call the police.”

The woman in front of us asked to be moved. The flight attendant came over and asked us if everything was ok, which in polite language the world over means, “Can’t you do something about your child?” The American woman sitting behind us, who didn’t realize that I could understand her, or even hear her over the screams, said to her companion, “It kind of makes you rethink having children, doesn’t it?”

I actually thought about how difficult it would be for us to ask to get off the airplane and rent a car.

And then, finally, they turned the air conditioning on, and revved up the jets, and we took off. G stopped crying almost as soon as the first blast of air hit us, although he didn’t stop wiggling or eliciting evil glares from the woman in front of us who was not, in fact, moved. At the end of the flight, we slunk off the plane, avoiding eye contact, gathered our luggage, and got a taxi home. The taxi driver smiled at us and told me that G had beautiful eyes, and I was so grateful I gave him an enormous tip.

To all of you without children who have ever flown with me and my counterparts, I am sorry. If there were any other way to get from here to there, we would do it, even if it involved drawing our own blood with a dirty needle.

Twice.

garçon

So we went to have the second echographie (ultrasound) last week, in yet another Haussman-era apartment building remade into gracious offices. The monitor for the ultrasound machine actually sits in the fireplace of the former salon, which makes for elegant, albeit strange, viewing. The radiologist is yet another member of the Corsican medical mafia to which I’ve gained entry through my OB, and he speaks the same confident, Italian-voweled French that both delights and completely flummoxes me. (I’m at the point now that most everyday interactions don’t involve too many hand gestures, but at the doctor I generally find myself reduced to pantomime. I feel like I enter the building with a giant, glowing question mark over my head, the Alfred P. Newman of pregnant women. It makes my doctors take a vaguely paternalistic attitude toward me, which in other circumstances would irritate me no end, but I’m actually finding it sort of placid and comforting to play stupid.)

Anyway, after a few minutes of reading French Elle in Barcelona chairs, S. and I were ushered into the examining room. The general suavity of French doctors, who lean toward tailored suits under their white coats, preferably with open-necked shirts and a little chest hair showing, only heightens the strangeness of lying on a table while another man smears Astroglide all over your belly. But after a couple of seconds, the doctor directed our gaze over to the monitor and started pointing out pock marks in the moonscape that turned out, to our delight and surprise, to be our baby’s fingers and toes. I was concentrating on the counting – un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq – that verified the correct numbers belonging to each appendage, when I heard S say, in French, “hey, is that a --?” The doctor stopped in the middle of counting to shush him dramatically and say, “but does maman want to know?”

When I had assured him that maman did indeed want to know, he paused again for effect, pointed back at the screen, and said “Voilà le zizi!” (yes, that’s what they call it, which I think explains a lot about French sexual attitudes all the way back to Molière). And it really was like a magic trick, the tiny penis appearing out of the swirling void. Also, don’t you think every man on the planet secretly wants to say "Voilà!” every time he opens his fly?

The doctor seemed so proud, as if perhaps he’d had something to do with it, and he and S. beamed at each other for several seconds before S. turned to me and said, “So I guess you’re going to be outnumbered!”

Yes, but not outclassed. Voilà.

**********************************************************************


A word about the above image – let it be said that I have never, in any restaurant, on any continent, referred to a member of the serving staff as “garçon.” I just couldn’t resist the visual joke.

homeopathie

I’ve been meaning to write about the vet for a while now, but broken legs and other things interposed. Earlier in the summer, Lucy woke up one morning with symptoms that could only entail Armageddon for a household that contained a pregnant person and a toddler. Poor Lucy, sad-faced under the best of circumstances, looked positively humiliated, ears and tail pointing straight downwards in misery. I made an immediate call to the vet around the corner.

I had been curious about this vet since we moved in – the office is in a corner of the same building where our good friends N and T live, as well as our regular babysitter, and it has charming lace curtains at the window with “Veterinaire” spelled out, apparently in masking tape, on one pane. The “homeopathie” treatment advertised on the doorplate has given me pause, as I wonder if our extremely lowbrow mutt isn’t exactly the sort of 16th arrondissement client for homeopathic veterinary medicine. But since it’s three minutes walk from our house, I had been keeping it in mind for emergencies just like this.

It turned out Mme. la veterinaire answers her own phone, is very nice, and suggested I come toute de suite as her first morning appointment was running late. She didn’t raise an eyebrow when I showed up with dog, baby, and stroller in tow, and even offered to help me get the stroller up the steps into the building. She directed me to sit down on one of several ice cream parlor style chairs arranged around the waiting room, which was painted the exact same pink as our vet at home, but didn’t smell as if a single dog or cat had ever crossed the threshold. We waited a couple of minutes until two young women came out of the examining room, empty-handed, and then Mme. came back out and ushered us in. She left the exam room door open so G. could supervise the proceedings from his stroller, and immediately coaxed Lucy onto an examining table that rose smoothly from floor to examining height on a hydraulic pump, just like at the garage. I was impressed and the dog was only mildly freaked out, which was a minor achievement considering her temperament.

I had actually checked the dictionary before even calling the vet to try to find some of the specific vocabulary I might need for the diagnosis – these symptoms not being traditionally included in a college French course, let alone polite conversation. Even so, once I promptly missed the softball of “how long has she been feeling this way?” the conversation quickly devolved into franglais – meaning that the doctor switched into perfect English while I vainly tried to continue answering in French without appearing rude. Whether this worked or not, the doctor was very patient, and at the end of the interchange said, “Now I going to give her an injection and then I will give you some medicine. Excuse me for just one moment.”

And then she bent over behind her desk to extract the limp body of a cat, which she deposited on the countertop behind us. She arranged its legs, leaned over its head for a minute, said “Bon,” and turned back to me. “Would you hold her head please?” she said. For one wild moment I thought she meant the cat, whose eyes were wide open in sedated bliss, and I hesitated. Then I noticed that she was holding Lucy’s collar, and I gratefully took her place. The cat just stayed on the countertop for the rest of the time we were in the office. The only other mention of its presence was when the doctor asked me to come back later for the paperwork – “I’m in a bit of a hurry, as I have two cats here.”

I don’t have any idea where the other one was (tucked in the closet?), but I think “I have two cats here,” is an excellent explanation for just about any set of circumstances. And Lucy has been right as rain ever since.

orthopedia

I had a little conversation with myself last night, after G. was (finally) in bed. It went like this:

Me: How’s it going?

Myself: My feet hurt. And they look ugly.

Me: We need some new shoes.

Myself: But Parisian shoes are so disappointing, and expensive. Unless you are willing to pay upwards of 400 euro, they still just look like Payless. Not that I mind Payless, but not for 100 euro. And did I mention my feet hurt?

Me: I think it’s time for Target online. How about these babies?













Myself: That is not going to solve our walking problem.

Me: I know, but I feel better about Myself already.

Myself: Me, too.

guidebook moments: exhibit A

Among the things I will remember about living in Paris: stepping into the vestibule at St. Sulpice last Saturday afternoon as the organist was playing a Bach fantasia (which one, I have no idea – I also didn’t know that St. Sulpice’s organ is world-famous until a friend pointed it out, because a) I am an amateur admirer of organs and b) I assume on face that all organs in Paris churches are probably world-famous…). You could almost hear the organist cracking his/her knuckles as he paused for dramatic effect between one big, booming set of chords and the final extravagant, athletic flourish, filling the whole building with sound. All those stops, they were definitely being pulled. And yet it was ridiculously perfect, and brought tears to my eyes, because I’m that kind of person.

In Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (I’m that kind of person, too), one of the main characters uses pipe organ-building technology during World War II to create an early-days computer that can be used to decode German messages. It’s this giant hulking assembly of glass tubes so fragile that it also has to constantly run a cooling system so that the tubes don’t explode. St. Sulpice’s own hulking assembly is made of metal and wood and decorated with carved angels, and not likely to explode, but in this lovely building where the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment step up and shake hands (what on earth did they say to one another?), there must be a similar wedding of science and mystery, endlessly cloaking and uncloaking.

The thing about living in Paris, depressing as it is to admit, is that you forget you could do these things, any minute of any day, and instead you get caught up in the same worn trough of laundry and post office and what’s-for-dinner (and, okay, we have A LOT of laundry). It takes a moment of surprise to bring you back up to face with your absurd good fortune. Anyway, I felt really lucky, coming out of the church, and all the way home on the bus.


In other news, G. had his first haircut this weekend. It had gotten so long in front that he was unable to see, and in constant danger of crashing into things (not on purpose, anyhow). I made S. grab him in a wrestler’s hold while he was still wrapped up in a towel after his bath, and kind of cleared away at the brush with the scissors to create something that approximated a fringe over the eyebrows and above the ears. I hesitated to go much shorter without risk to life and limb. The result is that he can see, and we think he looks dramatically different, but every old lady we pass on the street still says, “Oh la la, qu’elle est mignonne!” (“Oh, isn’t she cute.”) But that’s a battle for another day.

qui peut y résister?

Our neighborhood is starting to wake up again this week, at the beginning of the rentrée. The ghost town was strangely peaceful, but I’m enjoying the new noise and bustle, especially the sound and sight of children everywhere (how could I not have noticed that G.’s voice was the only child’s I heard for almost a month?). The bakery downstairs, which we missed more than I care to admit, reopened Monday morning. We can smell baking bread again when our windows are open, and more importantly, we have renewed access to the city’s best baguette tradition – guidebooks be damned. The bakery lady has returned from her holiday tanned to exactly the same shade as the crust of this favorite baguette (while I am as pale as only someone who has spent the entire holiday month of August in a rain-soaked city can be), and she had a special smile for G. and me when we came in. And the cheese shop, oh the cheese shop – even the fresh paint job doesn’t compete with the smell of S.’s favorite Livarot.

It’s a different case at the butcher next door, which also opened on Monday morning, a week later than advertised (who’s counting days when you’re on vacation?). Here is where I have to admit that I haven’t yet visited a French butcher, that while it is among my goals to begin regularly patronizing a butcher before we leave France, I am intimidated by butchers and cuts of meat in general, and by this butcher in particular. He is young and attractive and stands in the doorway of his shop smiling out over his bloodstained apron in what can only be described as a confident leer. In the shop display window, alongside the dried sausages and foie gras, there are photographs of the fancy restaurants that he supposedly supplies. But I don’t really believe this is his business at all. I’m convinced that behind the heavy wooden doors at the back of the shop, there is no meat locker, but instead a boudoir hung in red satin awaiting the discreetly paying customer. For one thing, there are hardly ever any customers in the shop. When there are, it is always elegantly dressed women of a certain age who never leave with any packages. For another, the little “Be back later” sign on the door has four small clock faces decorated with a lipstick print instead of numbers, over which is inscribed the motto: “Le boeuf de mon boucher, qui peut y résister?” Yes, that really does translate literally to: “My butcher’s beef, who can resist it?” Me, I think I can.

This morning I noticed that the butcher has added to his display window several large, artily framed photographs (perched on easels, no less) of disturbing, glistening stacks of raw meat. I’m not sure how this fits into my gigolo butcher theory, but it does something to me. I wonder what else September has in store for us.

daytripping

I had an outing. Over the weekend I drove down to Fontainebleau with a friend who needed to recharge her car battery after a month’s vacation. S. agreed to manage the small person for the afternoon, so there were no extra diapers or car seats involved. The little town of Fontainebleau is about an hour’s drive from Paris, but it seemed like we were there even before we’d caught up on the summer’s activities. One exit off the autoroute, a roundabout, and a few blocks of narrow streets and there she blows (blew?) – several generations of French kings’ elaborate fantasia of a hunting lodge. My uncle Charlie would have taken one look and said, “What were those boys thinking?” And not a deer in sight.

After all the additions, Fontainebleau isn’t actually that much smaller than Versailles, but it seems like it’s on a much more intimate scale. It might just be that the tourist traffic is so much lighter, even in August, that you can walk along at your own pace instead of being borne aloft by the crowd surge. You can even pause halfway along Francis I’s grand gallery (built mainly so he could go from his bedroom to church without going outside) and look in both directions without getting knocked down. There’s the bedroom where Anne of Austria held court, and the completely fabulous ballroom conceived by Francis but not built until after his death (the ballroom, in turn, has almost completely walled in the beautiful late medieval chapel with hundreds of naughty – not medieval -- cherubs painted on its coffered ceiling). The horseshoe staircase where Napoleon made his departure for Elba (Adieu, mes enfants!), and the redecorated bedroom suite where he kept the Pope imprisoned until he signed the Concordat.

With that many bits of overlaid history, there are bound to be some ghosts. I saw mine everywhere. He was small and blond and had the exact facial expression of one of the putti on the chapel ceiling. When he wasn’t flirting with the museum guards (why else would they be smiling?), I heard his footsteps on the King’s Staircase, which I felt distinctly that he must have needed to climb up and down exactly twelve times all by himself. We came into the palace guardroom just after he left it, the velvet rope still gently swaying and the giant Sévres urn on the center table shifted several inches closer to the edge. And when we stumbled onto a concert demonstration of baroque French opera, it was certainly he who caused the young singer to miss a beat, by scrambling down the aisle and straight up onto the stage…Clearly, I have a problem.

The last time I came to Fontainebleau was during my first and last real trip to Paris before we moved here. I was still in college, on a trip that started in Spain and ended up in the Netherlands, and I stopped in Paris for a week to visit my friend who had just started her graduate school research. She was living with some unfriendly nuns on the Left Bank, and my visit coincided with that of some other friends of hers who were driving a car back from Luxembourg to London. We decided to drive down to Fontainebleau for the day, and after visiting the chateau and walking in the forest, we made our way slowly back to Paris. We stopped along the Seine and went swimming (well, some of us did) in our underwear, and when we had dried out we had dinner at a little riverside restaurant, on the lawn, as the sun was setting. I had snails for the first time.

This time, my friend and I drove straight back to Paris. As we entered the parking garage, I bought some ice cream and noticed the carousel that would surely be the main attraction if we bring G. back here sometime. Across the street, a wedding party was gathering in front of the park gates to have their photos taken in the garden. The bride and groom were in cream silks, and most of the rest of the party were in similar shades of summer, except for one very, very fat woman in heavy black crepe with a bright fuchsia shawl and a matching ostrich feather in her hair. I thought about her all the way home.

escape artists

When we moved to Paris, we made the difficult decision to leave one of our dogs behind. Ruby was – and still is – an exuberant lab with a funny face and a sweet personality. But we just couldn’t keep her at home. At least a couple of times a week I would glance out the window and see her, either in the act of scrambling over the fence or already running full bore down the middle of the street. We built a six-foot fence; she dug under it. When people came to visit, she bum-rushed the door. It became a familiar sight for either S. or I to be circling the alleyways within a four-block radius of the house, trying to find the trash can that would stop Ruby in her tracks and allow us to wheedle her home. In the meantime, our other dog would stand at the window or in the yard, dumbstruck. A fellow shelter adoptee, her attitude seemed to be, “hey, two squares and we get to sleep on the bed. What the heck is your problem?” When we brought Ruby home, she always seemed happy to be with us, but not repentant, either.

Having a baby in the house only complicated matters. I had privately sworn to myself not to abandon our first set of dependents in favor of the human one. I had deeply absorbed the earnest animal shelter lectures about Responsibility Forever and Not Giving Up When it Gets Hard. But the mad dash around the alley got complicated with the added logistics of a floppy newborn to negotiate, and I had visions of locking all of us out of the house by accident in the middle of winter, me half-dressed in my bedroom slippers, G in a flimsy onesie, Ruby triumphant. And did I mention that she was also a terrible, lunging leash-walker and was unpredictably aggressive with other dogs?

On the other hand, Ruby was fabulous with G. Endlessly patient and gentle, she would lie on her side for an hour and make a living cradle while G. kicked his feet in the air and batted at her ears. That kind of trust and patience was something that took our other dog much longer to develop – she spent months circling the baby at a safe distance, and even now, having reached a co-dependency détente which revolves around shared and discarded food, she will still occasionally give me looks that say, “I am only doing this for you.” Ruby never did anything for us – she did things because she wanted to, but she always did them with joy.

When G. was about three months old, Ruby broke free from her leash, ran across a park, and forced S. to execute a pavement face-dive in order to stop her from going after an elderly poodle. Our already significant nightmares about Ruby roaming the streets of Paris suddenly assumed some Technicolor detail, possibly leading to an international diplomatic incident. And so now Ruby lives in the mountains, on a farm – really, with one of S.’s cousins – and we live here.

But in a bit of the universe’s glorious irony, she is still with us, in toddler form. There is no park gate, no doorknob within reach of a handy chair, that G. cannot breach. We’ve all become very accustomed to his rear view, speeding away as fast as his short legs can take him. He does it all with absolute glee, and when he cackles I swear I hear Ruby barking.

My glamorous life

Besides the obvious challenges of managing carsickness on public transportation, maintaining some vague sense of personal style while wearing maternity clothes and carting around a toddler, and keeping myself from eating my body weight in Haribo Tropical Fruit ( a mystical urge, really), it’s gotten to that stage in this new pregnancy where sleep is not my friend. Normally I am one of those lucky people for whom sleep is a nearly instantaneous two-step process; I lie down, I fall asleep. Over the years this has caused a lot of abruptly abbreviated conversations and snide comments from my spouse, who is of the slower to sleep variety. It’s usually not a good idea to try to talk to me about anything meaningful after 11 pm. – you won’t get much.

But not now. Both the permanently stuffy nose and the indigestion (don’t ask), get worse when I lie flat, so I usually start the process of delaying the inevitable by moving the dog, propping up on a pillow, and pretending to read for a minute, while actually thinking about the common sense misfire of now having to raise two children who are likely to outweigh me before their combined ages add up to five (will I have to stand on a chair to project authority?). When I think I might be sleepy enough to counteract the discomfort, I wiggle down in the bed, shove the dog out of the way again, and try to assume a position that might be conducive to rest. Lately this has involved extra pillows. The other night, all my moving and shaking seemed to be accompanied by an inquisitive silence from the other side of the bed, whose occupant was attempting to remain as still as possible in the process. Finally, after a last energetic round of piling, punching, and shoving, came the question: “Are you building a fort?”

Yes, I am.

Liberty

G. got his cast off a few days ago. His time in the cast roughly coincided with the amount of time the computer spent in repair purgatory, so we’ve all been stumping around the house in grumpy moods lately. By the time of the cast removal, G. had become impressively skilled at using the cast as counterweight, which enabled him to walk around the house pirate-style, swing himself up onto chairs and furniture, and threaten me at diaper-changing time.

Without the cast he’s now a little reduced, as if he’s lost his superpower and special costume all at once. He will only gingerly put weight down on his new, noodly leg, and prefers to sit on the floor in a sort of moody, yogic squat until someone comes to pick him up. I think we have a few more days of grumpy left.

In the meantime, our entire neighborhood has emptied out for the August vacation. Many of the shops have posted cheerful, handwritten notes wishing everyone “bonnes vacances” and mentioning the date of return. Other have just slammed down the security shutters as if they don’t care when they might come back. We’re down to one bakery (the snooty one) and two grocery stores, but it’s hard to feel deprived about walking an extra block for bread. Paris is left to us and the tourists, and I’m kind of enjoying it, thinking of all the crowded, hectic places I might be instead. I also like the idea that, however removed it might be from reality, the wheel of commerce could just stop turning for awhile, or could turn somewhere else, and everything will be, well, just fine. Like a world where even Sisyphus might catch a break.

fracture de cheveu

Yesterday G. was running across the Trocadero, hellbent on destroying a display of tiny Eiffel Towers, when he skidded on the marble, slipped and fell. We are regulars at the Trocadero, and G. has a special relationship with the touts there – they love him and try to give him little toys, and he tries to destroy their merchandise. It works for them. Anyway, when he got up, he wasn’t crying, but he didn’t want to put any weight on his right foot. S. brought him straight home, we made a quick consulting call to the nurse mother-in-law, and then it was direct in a taxi to the emergency room at the children’s hospital. (May I just put in a plug here for children’s emergency rooms? All the weekend emergency rooms I’ve ever been in were full of barfight victims and large people coughing up strange substances – all of whom have a perfect right to be in the ER, and I’m sympathetic to their plight, but it sure dialed things down a lot to have my sick child in a room full of other, well, sick children).

It turns out it was a good thing we went. Two X-rays and a couple of hours after our arrival, they found a hairline fracture in his right calf bone (the tibia? Yes, that one.). At that, I have to say my respect for my tiny engine of destruction went up about tenfold. He hadn’t cried at all the whole afternoon, except when the very nice French orthopedist tried to put him on the examining table, and that was much more en colère than douleur, as she put it. I think that earns him a place in the tough guy annals right up there with John Wayne, and Hannibal, and Steve McQueen. Or, as our visiting friend said, when G. figured out how to drag his cast behind him, at a pretty brisk clip, within ten minutes of coming home: “I like this kid. A lot.”

G now has a cast – old-school, plaster, weighs about ten pounds – from his toes to the top of his thigh, which he has to wear for a month. It is more hilarious than pity-inspiring, especially now that it sports a black duct tape stripe around the middle where G. has already managed to bash in a weak spot. Every indication is that he’s going to get along just fine, and I’m feeling an extremely guilty enthusiasm that my G.-chasing duties just got a whole lot easier for about thirty days. Still, when I rocked him to sleep last night, the heavy cast clunking against the armrest, his damp, sweaty hair (which is going to get especially sponge-bath stinky in the next few days) spilling over my neck, I felt my own hairline fracture crack a little, somewhere under the sternum. I’ll take the crashes and bashes, I’m signed up for multiple trips to the emergency room. But just – stay a while.

what so proudly we hailed

We had a quiet expatriate independence day yesterday. It rained. But in honor of the festivities it seems appropriate to share this article I came across recently, which documents the raging success that is McDonald’s Europe, headed by a Frenchman who may be next in lead to run Mickey D worldwide. The success seems to have something to do with gas fireplaces, unobtrusive signage, and the personalization of local menus. It’s certainly a small miracle of differentiation – our student babysitter, before she became a vegetarian, swore up and down that the French Big Macs were better than the American. Mostly I was impressed that the author managed to score an interview with José Bové and his moustache. And maybe I won’t feel as guilty when I finally give in to my recent, relentless pregnancy urge for a double cheeseburger and fries. I might even co-opt G. right along with me. So there. Vive la révolution!

she's gone and done it

It’s July, and we’ve lived in Paris for almost a year now. When we arrived last September, the crowds of tourist were starting to thin; now the first flush of lost-looking people in matching tee-shirts and sneakers – or backpacker gear and dirty Birkenstocks – is starting to make its way along the Champs-Elysees. I’ve given about eight sets of directions to the Arc de Triomphe, but so far it hasn’t really affected our lives much. Being here certainly has, though I struggle to say exactly how. It still seems like a ridiculously good stroke of fortune that we get to live here at all, that we aren’t tourists ourselves – who gets to run away to Paris when they’re boring and old and have a dog and a toddler? And yet I can’t overemphasize the sheer mundanity of most days, where the most challenging cross-cultural thing that happens to me is figuring out how to say “bloody diarrhea” in French before I go to the vet.

Since we got here, G. has learned to walk and talk (well, sort of), and I’ve done a pretty good job of documenting all that on a family website for the grandparents and forbearing friends. But I’ve done a pretty terrible job of documenting anything else. Why not? Well, I didn’t fall in love with a Frenchman, I haven’t launched on a beautiful journey of self-discovery, I haven’t learned to cook, and I’m not (thank god) renovating a crumbling but charming farmhouse in a picturesque part of France. Still, some folks have been kind enough to ask what I/we have been doing in the interim, perhaps on a blog, so I’m starting this one (a bit more anonymous than the pictorial blog, to protect the guilty). Here goes. What else is an overeducated, underemployed, tired mother of a walking id to do?

Image is a cover shot of "French for Dummies" French edition, Editions Générales First, 2001.