Paris Times Eight Read Online Free PDF Page B

Paris, feigning delight in my new surroundings. But my messages inevitably ended with, “Wish you were here.” I meant it. I wanted to share with her what I was experiencing, not the angst, but the aching beauty of the place.
    The Paris gardens were graceful oases of picturesque charm, open at all times to the public and punctuated by an obelisk or a decorative arch or the visual folly of a fountain that made its waters perform arabesques against a serge-blue sky. There were always chairs scattered about—thin and made of faded wrought iron. No one ever stole them, it seemed, or dirtied them with graffiti. People seemed to respect that the chairs were there for their enjoyment. And they looked as if they did enjoy them, taking for granted, I sometimes thought, their city’s largesse. Paris exalted people with all sorts of sensual gifts. This wasn’t true of all cities, certainly not my own city of Toronto, where chairs, if they were made available at all to the public, would be bolted down and made of ugly prison-issue concrete. Toronto underscored that people were inherently bad, not to be trusted, while Paris, embracing a Rousseauian point of view, allowed that people, whether rich or poor, were good and deserving of all the fine things in life, like a pretty garden view.
    I thought everyone should see Paris, if just once. Paris galvanizes you, makes you think of better things, be a better person. I wanted my mother to partake in that, to grow as well. Grow with me, not against me. Grow closer.
    But she was about as good a writer as she was a reader. The one letter I received from her, almost at the end of my trip, ignored my veiled screams for help. She wrote, “Hi there. Having an okay summer. Some rain. Mother.”
    In the meantime I felt as if I were sinking in mud. My shoulder-length hair lacked the bounce and shine of the hair belonging to other young women I saw in Paris that summer, whom I also envied for their apparent nonchalance, the ease of living well inside their own skins.
    Certainly they exuded confidence, and even if they weren’t beautiful their belief in themselves made them so. They plucked their eyebrows to frame their expressive eyes and were never seen without lipstick—pink for day, red for night. They wore heels with their jeans and walked with heads held high, miraculously avoiding the dog poop that clotted the city’s sidewalks. Their earrings were small and discreet, pearls or small gold hoops. Ostentation they left to the North American women who, during a gathering of the crowds at the Place de la Concorde on Bastille Day, stood out for wearing garish T-shirts instead of starched blouses, rumpled shorts instead of sleek skirts. French women were all pencil thin. I furtively watched them in the cafés, eating salade niçoise and drinking red wine. When they exited, they walked tall, and their hair fell coyly over their shoulders. No au pairs here. I felt that my hair constantly betrayed me by underscoring how hopelessly unchic I was. It was my dunce’s cap, my beanie of defeat.
    And my clothes! I had a suitcase full of hand-me-downs from one of my girlfriends, who had generously given them to me on the occasion of my trip abroad. All wrong! They were several sizes too big, and besides, embroidered granny dresses were not my style or the prevailing style of Paris. I felt ragged in these second-hand clothes. I really was the au pair, living off the avails of others. But I was in no position to complain. I had no real wardrobe of my own.
    My situation was complicated by a food fetish that had flowered in Paris, city of sybaritic pleasures. I thought that if I could only be thin enough, no one would notice what a North American oaf I was. I wanted to shrink from scrutiny and the burden of feeling that I wasn’t good enough.
    The irony was that we were all in Paris to make sure that Jenna got fat. She was certifiably anorexic. Her doctor had told her