Sisterchicks Say Ooh La La! (9 page)

“There it is. On the right.” Amy led the way down the narrow street lined with small parked cars.

Entering the unassuming police station, I felt as if we were entering a parallel universe to
The Andy Griffith Show
but with some peculiar twists. The two officers on duty were watching
The Simpsons
on a small television with the volume turned low. One of them was smoking. He immediately put his cigarette behind his back, as if one of us were his mother and had stepped into his bedroom unannounced.

Both of the men stood up straight to greet us in their freshly pressed uniforms. They couldn’t have been much older than twenty

Amy explained our problem in chopped-up French. She added a stream of apologies in English for all the words she couldn’t remember. Then she apparently asked for something to drink.

The officers responded immediately The shorter one
pulled a bottle of wine out of the desk drawer and went looking for glasses.

Amy called after him in French requesting water.

The other officer reached for a pad of paper and asked Amy a string of questions. She tried to keep up with the translation for me, explaining that the men had received the dispatch of our situation and needed more details from us.

Two glasses of lukewarm water were offered to us, and I discreetly didn’t drink mine. I doubted it was bottled water, and I didn’t want to get sick my first night here.

Amy tried to explain the questions the officer was asking her.

“Amy, don’t worry about translating for me. You can just answer everything so that things go faster.”

If these young men spoke English, they weren’t planning to use it. Instead, they tested Amy’s weary French vocabulary to its limits. I was proud of her. She kept on task and tried hard to communicate.

I wished I could have been some help. The shorter officer bounced between listening to Amy’s descriptions and trying to engage me in the conversation. I did a lot of sideways nodding, trying to get him to pay attention to Amy. My stomach grumbled loudly at one point, and I placed my hand over it as if to silence it. The officer asked me something, and Amy said he was offering us food.

“That’s okay.” I held up my hand to let him know I was okay. “We can eat later.”

Amy looked at me and then at the officer. She spoke to him, and with a nod he slipped out the front door.

“What did you say?”

“I told him we were hungry.”

“Amy, he doesn’t have to feed us.”

“It’s okay. Relax.”

I was not at all relaxed as I saw the young man take off on a Vespa and putter down the narrow street. He returned less than five minutes later with a long loaf of French bread tucked under his arm. Entering the station, he held up the bread and a small bag of Roma tomatoes and said something to Amy.

“He went to his apartment,” Amy said. “That was nice of him. Merci.”

I watched him slice the crusty bread with a pocketknife and hold out a chunk for me on the tip of the blade. My first thoughts were, “I don’t want the section of bread that was under his armpit,” followed by, “I hope he washed those tomatoes.” Then I realized what a germ-freak I was being. Growing up I had eaten everything placed before me.

“Merci.” I received the gift that was being offered so sincerely. Something inside me stepped down a notch in that moment. I was a guest in a foreign country. Practically a refugee, since we were without luggage. I should just be quiet and be appreciative.

The dry bread and ripe tomatoes were nice. Tasty, even.

Half an hour later Amy finished providing the men with all the particulars. Paperwork completed, she told them in English and then again in French where we could be reached if any news came in about the taxi or our luggage.

The men smiled for the first time that night, and one of them said something to Amy that made her blush. She smiled and shook her head saying no and thanking him. I thought I noticed a hint of tears glistening in her eyes. As soon as we were out of the station, I asked Amy what he had said.

“He offered us a ride back to the hotel on his Vespa,” she said with a crooked grin. “But he could only take us one at a time, so I declined.”

“Good choice. Not that I wasn’t secretly hoping you would leave me at the police station while you took off scooting about Paris with your arms around the middle of a man young enough to be your son.”

Amy started to cry.

“I was only teasing, Amy.”

“I know. And what you just said was hilarious.” She propped open a wobbly, upside-down umbrella smile that caught her spring shower of tears.

“Then why are you crying?”

“Because for that brief moment I believed I actually could fit on the back of a Vespa!”

“Of course you could fit on the back of a Vespa. In your skinny jeans, no less!”

Amy’s shower of tears turned into a downpour.

“What? Amy, what’s wrong?”

“My skinny jeans are in our stolen luggage!” she wailed.

I
tumbled in my shoulder bag
for a tissue and handed it to Amy under the glow of the streetlight. “It’s been a long day. We’ll go shopping tomorrow and buy you some new skinny jeans. Shopping in Paris! Ooh la la, right? How fun will that be?”

“Lisa, it’s not the jeans. It’s more than that.” She sniffed. “Don’t you see? We’re in Paris. It’s spring. Springtime in Paris! You and I are finally here. A French guy just offered me a ride on the back of his Vespa!”

“Yes,” I said, still not seeing the cause for so much emotion.

“A year ago if someone would have made me an offer like that I would have thought they were making fun of me!” She burst into a fresh round of tears.

“Oh, Amy-girl!” I wrapped my arms around her. “You
did a superb job losing all that weight. You should be flattered that he offered you a ride.”

“I am flattered.” She pulled back and wiped her tears. “That’s just it, Lisa. Don’t you see?”

I was having a hard time seeing anything through my hazy brain at that moment. I handed her another tissue. Amy blew her nose and dabbed away the final tears. “This is what I always dreamed of you and me doing.”

“What, blowing your nose at midnight on a Paris street corner?”

“No, being here. Together. Coming to Paris. We did it! We’re here! But I didn’t expect to be this old when we finally showed up. Don’t you see? We’re here, but we’re old. It’s all so wonderful and so tragic at the same time.”

“I know.” I gave her my most sympathetic smile. But I knew something Amy didn’t. Age had nothing to do with the aching that had overtaken my forty-five-year-old friend. Paris was equally exhilarating and tragic when I was twenty-two.

I said, “There’s something about this city that breaks your hope into a thousand pieces and then stands back and watches as you cut yourself trying to gather up the shards.”

“Ooh,” Amy said pensively.

“Yeah. Ooh or ow, whichever the case may be. Come on.” I put my arm around Amy’s shoulders. “We’ll both feel better after we get something else to eat and get some
sleep. Why don’t we walk across the cobblestones, sit down at that café, and order some food?”

“I’m too tired to try to order in French. I think I’ve used up every French word I know.”

With no decision-making skills between the two of us, Amy and I ended up back at the creepy convenience store where we ignored the brooding man at the register. We left with bottled water and two oranges. We also bought contact lens solution for Amy, toothbrushes and toothpaste, and what we hoped was roll-on deodorant. It was either deodorant or a spot remover for clothing. At that point, we didn’t care.

As we entered the hotel, the night desk clerk politely greeted us and asked if we met with success at the police station.

“No,” Amy told him.

He didn’t look too surprised, which was not very encouraging.

We rode the tiny elevator to our fourth-floor room in silence. At least the room was a nice size, and the twin beds looked inviting. I ate my orange and brushed my teeth with the chalky toothpaste.

“I miss my things.” Amy sat on the edge of her bed, rubbing her bare feet. “I wouldn’t make a very good player on
Survivor.
” She finished her orange and then went into the bathroom to wash up.

“What am I going to do with my contacts?” she moaned.
“At home the travel boxes of solution come with a lens case. This one doesn’t. Why is everything so complicated?”

“Amy, just put them in the drinking glasses and get some sleep. We’ll figure all this out in the morning when we can think straight.”

We turned out the light without a kind word between us and fell asleep in our clothes.

When I woke, it was daylight, but I refused to open my eyes. I had been dreaming I was in a Jerry Lewis sort of movie that took place at a sidewalk café lit up in twinkle lights. A bunch of Johnny Depps in dark-rimmed glasses were racing around on Vespas. Amy was waving to me from the back of one of the scooters that I think was being motored about by Michael Nesmith, the tall Monkee with the stocking cap. A uniformed police officer stood in the middle of a busy intersection holding up a white-gloved hand and blowing a whistle. I didn’t know what people were saying in my dream because oddly, or perhaps expectedly, the dream was in nonsensical French phrases.

I drifted in that floaty, subconscious place between sleep cycles until Amy stirred in her bed. She padded over to the window, opened the drapes, and gasped. “Lisa, get up. You have to see this.”

“I can see from here.” I squinted in the daylight that now flooded our room. “What time is it?”

“Ten o’clock. And it’s a beautiful day in Paris! Come over here.”

I pulled my glasses off the bedside table and shuffled to the window. “Wow,” I murmured with appreciation for the expansive garden that paralleled our hotel. The green grass and trees stretched as far as we could see from the Louvre to the Concorde. Below our window and across the street were a large Ferris wheel and other amusement park attractions. Behind the wide park rose the immense central train station making a bold statement. To our right in the distance stood the landmark known around the world. The Eiffel Tower.

“What a view!” Amy said.

“We didn’t have a view like this from the youth hostel, I’ll tell you that. What I remember the most about the youth hostel was how the common washroom had one long sink like a metal feeding trough. A long pipe ran above the trough. It was peppered with pinholes from which the cold water sprayed out. That was our only way to wash up. We had to go to a public bathhouse to shower.”

“I don’t imagine the beds were as nice, either,” Amy said. “These beds are great. How did you sleep?”

I told her about my wacky dream and the part about Johnny Depp. She laughed. “Wait. Don’t make me laugh any more. I have to go to the bathroom.”

As I stood by the window and took in the view, Amy scooted into the bathroom.

“No!” Amy suddenly screeched.

“What? What’s wrong?” I tapped on the closed bathroom door.

Amy opened it with a drinking glass in her hand. “I am such a doof.”

“What happened?”

“I just drank my contact.”

“Amy!”

“I know. Don’t say anything. I know.” She walked past me and crawled back into bed, putting the empty glass on the end table.

“You brought another pair of contact lenses, right?”

“Yes. Two pairs.”

“And your glasses?”

“Of course.”

“So, relax. I doubt the lens you swallowed will goof up your digestive system. Just drink some of your cranberry extract and psyllium stuff. You brought that, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I brought some psyllium.”

“See? You’ll be fine.”

Without looking at me, she pulled the covers up to her chin. “The psyllium is with my other pair of contacts, which are with my glasses.”

That’s when I knew what she was going to say next.

“And they’re all together, packed neatly in my suitcase. My suitcase that is roaming around Paris in the trunk of a stolen taxi.”

“Oh, Amy.”

“What was I thinking? Those are essential items. I should have put all of them in my purse. I don’t know how to travel! I’m a train wreck, Lisa. A disaster limping from one fiasco to another!”

“No, you’re not. We’ll work this out. We’ll find an optometrist or have Mark send some of your contacts or something.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Put in my one surviving contact and walk around viewing Paris with my other eye closed?”

“We could get an eye patch for you at a pharmacy,” I said, halfway serious.

“Oh, great! How cute would that look? Can you see me showing up at the house Grandmere wanted me to visit? ‘Hi, I’m Amy the Pirate, and yes, I have been wearing these same clothes for the past four days. But hey, at least you can’t see the bruises on the back of my legs from when I
did
have luggage to haul around.’ ”

I ignored her ranting and stepped over to the phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling room service. We need some serious croissants and black coffee in here.”

“Oh, sure. Try to cheer me up with food.”

“Hey, I’m starving even if you aren’t.
Bon jour,
” I said, responding to the voice on the phone. “I would like to order some breakfast.”