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.