Sisterchicks Say Ooh La La! (14 page)

We held up the menus and whispered between the two of us as if we, too, had important matters to discuss. Soon enough, we both settled in and accepted the close quarters.

“How come I feel like I’m back in my childhood bedroom?” Amy asked.

“It’s the pink. And the ruffles. Was I right? Do you love this?”

“Yes.
Très élégante!
”

Our decisions were easy. A piece of chocolate cake to split and two macaroons. We also ordered pots of tea.

“So.” Amy folded her hands and leaned across the table. “I have something to ask you.”

“Okay.”

She tilted her head. Amy knew me far too well for my own good. “Lisa, when are you going to tell me?”

T
ell you what?”
I asked nonchalantly, stirring a pinch more sugar into my Darjeeling tea.

“Your Paris story,” Amy said without glancing at the other diners in the Victorian teahouse. “When are you going to tell me the whole story? I want to hear what happened to you here twenty years ago. I know something did.”

I could feel my heart rate picking up but tried to keep my expression static so she wouldn’t notice the tears in my eyes. All they needed to do was push the first one over the edge, and the rest would follow. I didn’t want to start the cascade here or now—not with strangers sitting a few inches away. Especially after I had done such a stellar job the past few days of ignoring all the memories I had of this city and the paralyzing feelings that always accompanied those memories.

“Ask me later,” I said. “I can’t tell you now.”

This was another one of Amy’s shining moments. She always honored my boundaries, never questioning or pushing. Not when it came to my mother’s rule about Barbies and not now. Amy always said, “okay” and never made me feel I owed her something in return for her kind favor.

The thing I realized after we began to sip our imported loose-leaf tea was that she knew. I’d never told her any details about Paris or my broken heart. Joel didn’t know. My brothers didn’t know. My mother, of course, didn’t know. I hadn’t told anyone. But Amy knew. She knew about Gerard, even though I had never mentioned his name.

I suppose an individual couldn’t walk in stride with you for so many years and not notice even the tiniest hitch in your step when a pebble sneaks into your shoe. Gerard was the pebble in the corner of my heart that would not fall out no matter how many times I’d tried to shake out the memories.

I realized that by answering with not now, I was finally admitting to Amy and to myself that I did have a story to tell. Up until that moment I had managed to convince myself there was nothing to tell. But now I even invited her to ask me later.

I’m sure the chocolate was divine. The macaroons are one of Ladurée’s specialties, but I couldn’t tell what they
tasted like. I listened to Amy and smiled. I took appreciative bites and dabbed the chocolate from my lips. But none of it filled me. What I was really doing was sobbing on the inside. The tears found my resolve too strong, and so they retreated, cascading back into the corner of my heart they had kept flooded all these years.

We split our bill, bought some more goodies at the bakery counter downstairs, and ventured back out to the sweet afternoon air.

Our next tentatively scheduled event was to go the rest of the distance on the Champs-Elysées and see the Arch of Triumph.

We approached the grand memorial and stood at a distance, just as we had with the Eiffel Tower. Amy held the tour book and read the details about how Napoleon had commissioned the construction of this impressive archway to celebrate another victory after one of his many battles.

I stood back, fighting one of my own battles. The top observation deck of the Arch of Triumph held a few too many memories for me. From up there, I had once looked out over all of Paris and marveled at the way the tree-lined boulevards stretched out like spokes from that central hub. All the lines of my young adult life seemed to start at the same point and radiate out to points unknown.

I had felt as if I were on top of the world as Gerard’s arms enveloped me. All of the future for me, for the two
of us, stretched out from that place and from that moment with possibilities as endless as Paris’s charm. I was so naïve. So vulnerable. So willing to believe that anything could happen. A suave, twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman really could be in love with me. It was not too far-fetched to believe that he would wait for me. I felt free that day. I was happy. Fully accessorized with glittering hope.

“Do you want to go up to the top?” Amy broke into my thoughts.

“No,” I said quickly. “Do you?”

She shook her head. “The tour book says you have to climb a network of narrow spiral steps. I don’t think I can do that.”

“Are you sure? It is the Arch of Triumph, you know.”

“I know.”

I wasn’t sure why I was trying to convince Amy to go up, except that she didn’t have memories of this place yet. I didn’t want to hold her back. “The view is amazing. You can see all over Paris. You might be sorry later if you don’t go up to the top.”

She hesitated before saying, “I’m going to pass. If I’m sorry later, I’ll just have to live with being sorry. I don’t mind waiting, if you want to go up without me.”

“No, that’s okay. I’ve already seen the view from the top. It’s an experience I don’t need to repeat.”

“We have lots of other things to see,” Amy said.

“There’s Montmartre, Notre Dame, the Louvre.”

“Not to mention the visit we need to make to the family Grandmere wanted you to see.”

Amy nodded.

“Are you avoiding that visit?” I asked.

“I don’t think I’m avoiding it exactly I’m nervous about my French being good enough to communicate.”

“Amy, you’ve been communicating fantastically with everyone since we arrived. There’s nothing wrong with your French. If you didn’t speak and understand French, this would be a completely different trip. We would probably still be at the police station trying to give those two officers descriptions of the taxi driver.”

Amy smiled. “I was thinking this morning that we should take them some cookies.”

“Cookies?”

“Sure. Cookies or maybe chocolate. They were nice young men. They helped us out and gave us glasses of water, remember?”

“One also offered to give you a ride on his scooter. Is that your hidden motivation, Amelie Jeanette?” The tease in my voice was evident. “Are you hoping to take him up on his offer?”

“No! You said it the other night. I’m old enough to be his mother. I just wanted to be polite and offer a motherly gesture of appreciation. That’s why I came up with the idea of cookies.”

Amy’s reasoning made sense. She always had been the picture of graciousness.

“You tell me what you want to do,” I said. “I’ll follow your lead.”

“Let me think about it for a little while. Let’s see if we can find some more shops. I have souvenir money that’s burning a hole in my pocket.”

Crossing the boulevard, we headed down the opposite side of the Champs-Elysées and both shivered a little. The wind had changed. Standing on the corner talking for as long as we had chilled us. I watched the clouds barreling in from the east. Ducking into the first clothing shop we came to, Amy and I greeted the staff, and as soon as Amy asked a question in French about the sweater set in the window, the clerk turned into a helpful assistant.

Amy bought the cashmere cardigan with matching shell and pranced out of the store delighted. I was thrilled that she had found such great quality clothes and that the set fit her well. Two stores later Amy stopped to look in the window at a pink top with black trim, complete with a little black bow at the neck.

“That’s you,” she said.

“Me? I’ve never worn anything like that.”

“I know. But you should. Now is the time. Come on. At least try it on.”

I was sure I wouldn’t like the cutesy top, but I tried it on to appease Amy. Before she had a chance to say, “Ooh la
la!” I already was smiling at my reflection. I liked it. The price was twice what I would pay for a shirt at home, but with Amy’s coaxing, there was no way I was going to leave the store without that Parisian top. It was evidence, like Amy’s cashmere sweater set, that the two of us had fully arrived. We were buying clothes displayed in the windows on the Champs-Elysées.

I felt transformed and told Amy so. She smiled. “Voilá! We are suddenly
très chic.
”

With our spirits splendidly elevated, Amy and I ventured into three more stores. None of them had anything we considered a “find,” so we window-shopped the rest of the boulevard. By the time we had scoped out the last shop, Amy was looking at her watch.

“We can still make it to Napoleon’s tomb.”

I thought she was kidding and said, “Oh, goodie! I was hoping we would have time for that today.”

Her expression let me know that unless I wanted to be left to find my way back to the hotel on foot or at the mercy of the next Parisian taxi driver who came along, I better stow my sarcasm and stick with her. I decided it was a French thing to want to visit Napoleon’s tomb and looked at the map with her. The most direct route to the Invalides was via the underground Metro.

Our feet led us to down under the city at the first Metro station we came to. I had forgotten how impressive this elaborate transportation system was and how strange it felt
to be walking through long well-lit tunnels underground.

Amy’s French proved useful once again, as we figured out how to buy tickets and board the right train. We had no problem slipping through the sliding doors as they opened and joining the startlingly wide variety of people sitting and standing in the modern train.

“Look around,” Amy whispered to me as we stood near each other, our shoulder bags in protective mode. I had fixed my gaze out the window and was watching the walls flash past as we sped to the next stop.

“Look at all the faces,” Amy whispered.

I looked at the faces around us. Within our train car we had a mix of skin color, hair color, and apparel that made our group look as if we were headed to a photo shoot for an ad about honoring diversity.

When we slipped out of the train at Invalides, Amy smiled widely. “It was like heaven in there.”

“Heaven?”

“Yes. All those different people. So much variety. I loved it!”

Then, as if to back up her impression of the heavenlies, music suddenly filled the hollowed-out underground tunnels. A musician stood in the center of the main connecting tunnel playing a pan flute. A woman sat beside him, a blanket wrapped around her legs and holding a small wooden bowl in her outstretched hand, soliciting donations for the free concert.

Amy stepped to the side and closed her eyes to listen. The haunting melody echoed off the tiled chamber and came back to face us. Like a lonely hitchhiker, the song was looking for a free ride out of the underground chambers. We had stopped long enough for the tune to hop in.

That’s all it took for the graceful notes to settle inside our heads and catch a free ride as far as we were willing to take it. Amy placed a large bill in the wooden bowl of the music-givers and walked away humming.

We came up topside to the other world where car horns and screeching brakes created the melodies that echoed off the tall, plastered walls of the weary buildings. A fine rain fell on our faces at an angle and continued to mist us all the way to the golden dome of the Invalides museum. We toured the war museum and marched with a host of interested viewers past the tomb of Napoleon I.

I don’t know if it was a memorable experience for Amy or not. We were both so weary by the time we found a nearby bistro that our dinner conversation consisted of comments on the excellent French onion soup and amazement at how much rain was now pelting the streets outside.

We were soaked by the time we hurried from the bistro to the curb, where we hailed a taxi and made sure we didn’t put our shopping bags in the trunk.

The rain still was coming down in earnest when we reached our hotel and paid the taxi driver nine euros.
That’s when Amy realized how much the unscrupulous driver had overcharged us for the ride from the airport.

“I’m not going to let it get to me.” She turned to me in the compact elevator. “It’s not worth being mad about. Thanks for not making a big deal about it, Lisa. You could have scolded me royally that first night when I overpaid him, but you didn’t.”

I didn’t tell Amy that I’d thought about it. Wasn’t that the same as actually saying something?

“Grace upon grace,” Amy said as she slipped the key into our hotel room door. “That’s what you have always given me.”

“Actually, I would say that’s what you’ve given me, Amy.”

“You give me more.”

“No, Amy, you give me more.”

She laughed. “I’m not going to fight with you over which one of us is better at heaping grace upon grace. Let’s just say that God is the One who pours the grace on us every day, and every now and then you and I have so much left over that we manage to share some of it with each other.”

“Okay. I’ll agree to that.”

Upon entering our room, we found a sealed envelope that apparently had been slipped under our door while we were away. Inside was a handwritten note from the inspector who had dashed out of the hotel in pursuit of the taxi
driver. As best as Amy could decipher, the inspector was asking her to call him when we returned.