Sisterchicks Say Ooh La La! (18 page)

“Six pounds? Amy, we’ve walked off six pounds since we’ve been here. At least. Forget about the six pounds. What about the fifty pounds you lost before we came?”

“Forty-nine,” she corrected me.

“Forty-nine! Forty-nine, Amy! That’s a huge victory! You went after a gigantic goal, and you not only met it, you conquered it. That’s what you do. You fight for what matters to you. You are my Joan of Arc. You can’t walk away now. This is it. The Eiffel Tower. You need to go up there and make peace with your fear of heights.”

Amy looked at me defiantly. “Why?”

“Otherwise you will spend the rest of your life telling yourself that you had the chance to scale the one and only Eiffel Tower and look down over all of Paris and conquer this thing. But you didn’t do it. And I know you well enough
to know that
that
isn’t something you will want to live with.”

Amy crossed her arms. “I hate that you know me so well.”

“Yeah, well, I do. And sometimes I hate it that you can see right through me, too. But that’s why we have each other, Amy. What did Jill say we were? Sisterchicks? Yeah, we’re Sisterchicks. And I’m telling you as your Sisterchick that you need to leave this city with no regrets. Believe me, you do not want to leave here with memories that will haunt you the rest of your life.”

My voice had elevated. A couple walking past looked over at us. I took it down a notch and said, “Just promise me something. I’ve made lots of promises to you. This is what I want you to promise me. Promise me, Amelie Jeanette DuPree Rafferty, that you will not leave Paris with regrets. No regrets. Promise me.”

She paused before nodding her head slowly. “Okay. But the same goes for you, Lisa Marie Kroeker Moreland. No regrets like last time.”

Her words sliced my heart with the precision of a surgeon’s blade. In my typical duck-and-cover routine, I pulled out a diverting surprise. “Amy, my middle name is not Marie.”

“What?”

“It’s not Marie.”

“Yes it is. You told me your middle name was Marie when we met in third grade.”

“No. Actually,
you
told me my middle name was Marie, and I didn’t correct you. I liked Marie better than my real middle name.”

Amy’s hands were back on her hips, and her mouth was open. “So what is your middle name?”

“Mona.”

“Mona. Mona? Your middle name is Mona? That’s not so bad. All these years you let me believe your middle name was Marie because you didn’t want me to know your name was Mona?”

“I didn’t want anyone to know. It was another one of my father’s little jokes.”

“And what is so all-fire funny about the name Mona?”

I gave Amy a come-on-work-with-me-here look. Apparently I had to do the math for her. “Think about it. How would you like to grow up being Lisa Mona Kroeker.”

“Ooh. Lisa Mona. I get it.”

“You renamed me that day on the school ground, Amy. And I let you.” My voice, tone, and posture softened. “It was the first time anyone accessorized me with hope. Sorry if I wore it too long.”

I didn’t know if Amy was going to laugh or cry.

She did a wonderful thing. She opened her arms and wrapped me in the accessory that is even more versatile and lovely than hope—she wrapped me in acceptance. Grace upon lovely layer of grace.

“Your dad …” she muttered under her breath.

“I know.” I pulled away and blinked back a rogue tear.

“You do know, don’t you, that I named my daughter Jeanette Marie for the two of us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Jeannette because of my middle name and Marie for what I thought was your middle name.”

I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of my stomach. “I always thought it was Jeanette for your grandmere and … I guess I never knew where you came up with the Marie. Oh, Amy, now I feel awful.”

“Well, you should,” Amy said with a snit in her voice, giving the end of my flyaway hair a flick of her fingers. “But I’m not going to change her name now. Not to Jeanette Mona. I would never do that to a daughter of mine. I can’t believe your dad did that. Or, actually, yes I can believe it. Lisa, I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry? I’m the one who’s sorry. I should have told you years ago. It was too painful to admit in elementary school. You know how cruel kids are, making fun of other people’s names. By the time you and I reconnected, it didn’t seem to matter. I had no idea you named Jeanette after me.”

“We’re pathetic, you know that?” Amy said. “Come on. We need to go someplace else.”

“Where?”

“I don’t care. We just need to leave and come back here another day. I’m not ready to sort through any more of
your childhood trauma or my fear of heights. The Eiffel Tower will still be here tomorrow.”

Amy linked her arm through mine. “When we get home, I’m driving you to the county courthouse or wherever we need to go, and you are going to change your middle name.”

“You mean legally change it to Marie?”

“You can change it to anything you want. Just make the Mona go away.”

“Fine.” I sounded snippy but secretly agreed with Amy and appreciated her nudge.

“You know what I think we should do now?” Amy asked.

“It’s obviously not going to the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

“I think we should go to the Louvre and see the real Mona.”

“You are such a brat.”

“No, I’m not. I’m trying to make up for lost time yesterday. The book said all the wings are open until midnight tonight.”

“I suppose that’s to make up for being closed on Tuesdays?”

Amy shrugged. “All I know is, we have almost five hours before we go to dinner. We can find the Louvre easily by Metro, and it’s close enough to our hotel that we can change before we go to the restaurant.”

“What are we waiting for?”

I asked the same question of Amy again half an hour later. We were standing in a sea of people in front of the glass pyramid dome that marked the escalator entrance to the Louvre.

“They’re checking through everyone’s bags before we can enter,” Amy said.

I adjusted my shopping bags and watched the glass circular elevator that rose in the center interior of the glass pyramid. “I hope they don’t unpack all our gifts.”

“Or confiscate our chocolates,” Amy added.

Once again, her familiarity with French came to our aid because she was able to explain where we had bought the items we were lugging around with us. The guards checked only our purses and waved us through into the museum. At the base of the pyramid, we stood in another line to buy entrance tickets.

Entering the Louvre was completely different from when I had been there last. Feeling as if we were lining up to enter an amusement park, I hoped the humongous museum of priceless art hadn’t gone commercial.

Within the first few minutes inside the actual museum, I realized little had changed. I soon found myself lost in wonder as Amy and I strolled quietly side by side, consulting our guide book.

Standing in front of a statue from 1513 titled
Rebellious Slave,
Amy read, “ ‘Michelangelo said his purpose was to carve away the marble in order to reveal that which God
put inside. In this example of Renaissance mastery, the subject seems to be struggling to free himself of the rock he’s made from.’ ”

She tilted her head appreciatively at the statue. “We can all relate, can’t we?”

“Relate to what?” I asked, awed by the fine details in the statue.

“I relate to being a rebellious slave to my old self. Don’t all of us struggle constantly to be free from the elements we’re made of?”

I gave Amy a surprised look. “That was profound.”

She ignored me and kept moving forward, following the signs to the Mona Lisa. I thought of the sensations I’d felt the first time we went to Angelina’s. I saw myself as the rebel in an orderly universe where there are no “maverick molecules.” Gravity always works.

If God was the True Artist, creating all of us and this world filled with intricate details, what was He thinking? What was He feeling? What was He trying to express? What does He carve away from us to release what He put inside?

“Amy?” I stopped in a long hallway of framed artwork. “I have a question. What do you think God was thinking when He made us?”

“Easy. He was thinking He wanted us.”

That had not been my conclusion. “Why do you say that?”

“Because that’s what He says over and over in the Bible. He wants us to be in a restored relationship with Him. Why are you asking?”

Amy made it sound so simple. I’d spent my life viewing God and His commands as complicated. I knew all about the struggle to break free from the rock I’d come from.

“Just thinking,” I said to Amy.

We worked our way down another long corridor in this converted palace where Napoleon once ruled. Our plan was to get in line to see Mona Baby and then backtrack with as much time as we had left to view other key pieces, such as the Venus de Milo.

The crowds thickened the closer we got to the small gallery where the portrait of Mona Lisa was framed by serious-faced guards on either side. Amy and I shuffled single file through the roped-off section where the small, dark painting waited for us to take our thirty-second glimpse.

Mona Lisa was frozen, unmoving, with that evocative smile of hers. She hadn’t moved in twenty-three years, and neither had I. We were both stuck. Something had frozen in me in this place, in Paris. Something deep inside. Mona Lisa was stuck where she was and so was Lisa Mona.

This is the part of the story I hesitate to tell. I started to cry. Not sobbing or a
whaa-whaa
-spoiled-little-girl sort of crying but a deep down weeping. Inside me a wall crumbled. When it came tumbling down, the tears rolled out steadily without a sound.

A
fter we were past the mobs
of Mona Lisa gawkers and in a side room, Amy noticed I was crying.
Leaking
was a more accurate description. The long-stuffed emotions forged a stream down my face.

“Lisa?”

I turned away and wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand.

“Lisa, what is it? You aren’t crying about your middle name, are you? The Lisa Mona thing? Is that what got to you?”

“No.” I sniffed and offered a small fake smile.

“What’s going on?”

I lied to Amy. I hate that I did that. But I said, “Nothing.”

Since she was so great about respecting all my stop signs, she said, “Okay.” And she didn’t probe further.

The crazy part was I wanted her to probe. I wanted her to burrow inside this sudden crevice in the wall around my heart. I wanted her to break through, working with her bare hands, pulling off the chipped parts to reveal what was hidden inside. I wanted all my tears and fears to be liberated. I wanted to be free. I wanted Amy to do that for me without being asked or directed.

Instead, she suggested we go through the French Revolution section of paintings. We did, but I don’t remember a thing. I kept thinking about what a mess I was inside. What a hypocrite. What a big, fat liar. I was miserable.

The rest of the afternoon was a blur of colors, shapes, and textures. I floated through the Louvre, thinking the whole time. Thinking, remembering, evaluating, and sometimes crying a little more. I was stuck, and I knew it, but I didn’t see how to get unstuck. I tried to stuff my pain back inside—only deeper—so it would have less of a chance to leak out.

So that’s what I did. I stuffed. Healing myself, I didn’t know how to do. Stuffing, I did.

By dinnertime I had pulled myself together and hoped I wouldn’t ruin our experience at the fancy restaurant.

“What a quaint corner of Paris,” Amy said, when our taxi let us out on the corner of Saint Michael’s. “I wonder why they call it the Latin Quarter? It doesn’t have a Spanish sort of feel to me.”

“It’s because of the university,” I said. “The students
used to speak Latin. For hundreds of years students sat at the outdoor cafés in this area.”

“Oh, that Latin. Have you been here before? Do you remember this section?”

“Yes.”

Amy studied my response. I knew what she was looking for. Any hint of “him” on my face. All the memory starters were here. His apartment was close. The small, third-story closet that used to be his apartment. His apartment and…

Rounding a corner, my memory told my eyes to look to the left. Reluctantly, I peeked, and there it was. Just as I remembered it. The brightly lit sidewalk café where I had given away my heart. Not piece by piece like a cautious woman. No. I was twenty-two that magical summer, and I handed my heart over whole and tender and pounding.

Gerard
!

Amy stopped walking. An expression borne of deep love for me and for our friendship showed on her face. She tilted her head. “Gerard?”

“Did I say that aloud?”

“Yes, you just said, ‘Gerard.’ ”

Not once in the last two decades had I said anything about Gerard to anyone. Had my thoughts begun to leak out now in whispers?

“Is that his name?”

I slowly nodded. A fine silky rain began to mist us as
we stood in the middle of a swirl of pedestrians on the cobblestone pathway.

“Yes, his name was Gerard.”