I never leave Paris without having the sense of a missed opportunity. Not because I didn’t go to the coolest or oldest or weirdest bistro or shop or alley, but because I meet Paris every time, like I’m meeting someone at a party whose face I know—yet can’t quite place. “You look familiar, have we met?”
“Yes,” says Paris. “You’ve seen me by day, you’ve seen me by night, we’ve been acquaintances for over forty years. It’s insulting for you to ask.”
Paris doesn’t say that, of course. Paris doesn’t give a merde about whether I remember her or not. Instead, she wields the swift scalpel of an up-and-down glance that moves on before the blood from the wound has even begun to flow.
My life was lived under shared custody and split lives. I’d been consigned to my West Coast hippie father for the white rapids of my teen years. Suddenly, after living in the Midwestern suburbs with her full-time except for summers, I only saw my mother at Christmas. My father eschewed phones (and electricity and running water, for that matter), so I only spoke to my mom every few weeks, sitting in someone else’s living room, using their house phone and reversing the long-distance charges. I didn’t have many photos, either, and I still don’t.
There’s one ragged photograph of my mother and me when I was 14, with her face Kilroy-was-here peeking over my shoulder. We took it in a Wisconsin airport photobooth when I was about to fly back to my father in California after my first Christmas visit with her. “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?” she used to croon, and I always took her at her singsong word. For reasons known only to my teenage self, I took a semester of French because France sounded cool and far away. “Où est la Seine?”
Then, when I was 18, she unexpectedly invited me to come back and live with her full-time. My stepfather, Bob, had gotten a gig as a substance abuse counsellor for the US military in the grey purgatory of Bremerhaven, but it still counted as moving to Europe. She wanted me close for reasons I didn’t understand at the time. Of course, what I did right away was to fall in love with a German guy. I wanted to spend all my days and nights with him.
The first time I was in Paris, my mother was the one who dragged me there. It was away from my teen boyfriend in Germany. I didn’t want to go. My mother wanted to see the City of Lights, and it didn’t matter how much I said I longed to spend the weekend lolling around with my new German boo, I was going to go see some culture, so get on the damn train, kid.
We took long train rides westwards to Paris, me sullen and suffering. Bob sat across from me with a withering glare, much like Paris would do for my entire life, like I was getting everything wrong.
Which, to be fair, I was. I was 18, and about as adept at planning out my life as a stick caught in a storm flood. I hadn’t even figured out why we had moved to Europe to begin with. I hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on around me, and no one was offering any hints. Hence the boyfriend. One thing I’d already discovered: Warm bodies were good things to cling to in a storm.
There’s a blurry snapshot of me, dazzled by the lights of the Place de la Concorde. All I remember of the Notre Dame Cathedral is that it was dark inside and smelled of old wood and faded prayers. I used my minimal French to ask directions because we knew we were within a block of the Seine, we could smell it, but we couldn’t find it. Anywhere. “Où est la Seine?”
My mother, god love her, was proud of me. Especially when the shopkeeper cracked a grin and answered in French, and I understood it. Incredible.
That’s it. That’s all I remember of the entire trip. And I had to do an online search to determine the location where the photo was taken. Sad.
Within a few months of having moved to Germany, my mother started to get ditsy. She had fainting spells. She fell asleep on a southbound train and ended up in eastern France, only finding out where she was when an agent asked for her passport. Which she didn’t have with her because she hadn’t meant to get on that train, much less to cross pre-EU borders. She was tall, grey-eyed, a head-turner with an easy smile. She was overtly innocent when it came to people and deeply cynical when it came to life. She liked reading other peoples’ biographies but rarely talked about herself. She was 26 years old when doctors told her she probably wouldn’t see 40. Did I mention that we moved to Germany in 1980, the year she turned 40? Like Paris, my mother hadn’t yet revealed her secrets to me in a way I could remember.
By the time she was trespassing international lines, she was living on borrowed time at the Landstuhl US military hospital. The border officials put her on the next train back to Germany instead of detaining her. A few months after that, we pulled up stakes and got her back to the US, to begin the search for suitable organ donors. She recounted the border story like it was a joke, as if she didn’t know her life, every day, was on a fast train, headed towards the wrong country.
I heard her voice while I was on the plane to Virginia in 1986. A doctor had called in the middle of the night to say I’d better hurry. She’d pulled through so many operations with a smile. It never occurred to me that someday she might not. This time, the transplant had failed, and so had everything else. In my head, I’d been begging her to wait until I got there, so I could tell her I loved her. Right into my ear as if leaning forward between the seats, she said, “I know. But I’m already gone.”
That was the last time I heard her speak.
I visited Paris in my twenties, more than once. I know that at some point, I was led to the city’s ‘the best millefeuille bakery’. There was only millefeuille in the vitrines that stretched in regiments of impeccably tan-clad oblongs of pastry variously layered in bright or custard fillings.
By then, I was in the practice of abandonment. Like a turtle leaving a precious cargo of eggs buried on a beach, I left behind memories: Generate, cache, relocate. Paris was sunk in the sands, along with the German ex-boyfriend, my year-long stint in Tokyo, and the catastrophic post-college phase that had prompted my decampment abroad. I couldn’t get far away enough from myself; every place was a shoreline footstep that would be erased with the next tide. No surprise, then, that I don’t know what kind of millefeuille I tried, or whether I tried any.
Of course, I only found out about my mother’s dire early-demise prognosis after she’d died, when my grandmother deemed me mature enough to hear that sort of thing. Or maybe Grammy thought that at 23 and motherless, I was no longer in need of mollycoddling. And then my years of wondering how I could have been so blind, so stupid, so selfish, commenced their slow blossoming.
I was much older when Paris would become more recognisable to me, just a little. We – husband, daughter, moi – had moved to south-eastern France after eight years in Germany. We used to take the mother-in-law and kid up to Paris for long weekends. I never learned the neighbourhoods or remembered my way around. I was a goldfish tourist: the same old stuff stayed new to me.
“Nothing?” Paris frowns at me. “Not my pulsing arteries? My sinewy limbs, my hard shoulders, or where I keep my heart?”
Sorry, babe. None of it. It’s not that you don’t possess undeniable charm highlighted by intriguing filth. It’s just that as soon as my back is turned, those interesting nooks and crannies vanish.
What had my mother been doing at 35? What had she been thinking at 40? As I passed each ageing milestone, I tried to remember my mother at those life stations. What she’d liked, her favourite foods, who she had befriended. When I turned the car key, I saw her hand turning in the same way.
I never twirled my hair like her. No one told me that I reminded them of her because I knew so few people who had known her. I never saw my stepfather after my final visit to him, three months after her death. Bob had put his hand on my knee and asked whether I could imagine replacing my mother in his life, a way of filling the musty vacuum of his heart. I left the room and started erasing that, too, glad my mother hadn’t lived to know what kind a man he was. Or maybe she had. Who would know?
Paris slips in and out like a song heard through an open window. The wind blows through my knowledge of which street leads to where. Landmarks float in my mind, moveable mirages that I can never find again, not without a map and sometimes even with one. I only lived a few hours away, and could no more self-geolocate than when I’d first asked, “Où est la Seine?”
I was in my forties when Paris resolved into something other than a blurred image. A trip with a girlfriend, both of us arriving from elsewhere smelling of jet lag funk, wandering the city by moonlight, finding any open bar and stopping in for a drink until the sun came up and we went for coffee. Left Bank, Right Bank, past midnight skateboarders in front of the Bourse. It was during this trip that I realised my inability to navigate the city had become wilful and embarrassing. My friend had lived there for a semester in college and had only been back a few times since, but could walk around like she’d lived there her entire life.
That was when the city released me from my amnesia. I think I know why: I was the same age she’d been when the second kidney transplant failed. 45.
Paris was the place I went with my mother when I was too young to understand that she was already dying, that she’d been watching herself dying since I was little. Navel-gazing at my own fresh love, at being in a foreign country, at learning a new language, at being invited back to live with a parent after several years away and not sure why I’d been expelled nor why I was being welcomed again. These weren’t the mysteries I wanted to explore. I didn’t care about Notre Dame. I didn’t notice how thin my mother was becoming. I was propelled by a desire that was elsewhere.
Paris is where my stepfather took us because he knew she would never return; the whole move to Europe, with me in tow, was his love song to her. I was part of the household goods she demanded to be taken along and even then, I was absent. The guilt of that ignorance, of my casual self-indulgence, while she looked on while loving me, haunts me and masks those years in an eternal fog of shame. The older I’ve become, the more I discover the depths of my obliviousness when it comes to my mother. She is the true unknown territory, the place I will never learn to negotiate except in a spotty memory, unaided by photos I don’t have, unsupported by those who knew her best but who didn’t live long enough for me to ask directions. The map I’d like to possess no longer exists. “Où est la Seine?”
All I can offer, Paris, is to map you with new memories made with my own daughter. The daughter who left her digs in London, dragging her luggage through an empty Paris on her own during the Covid lockdown, marching between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de Lyon on deserted streets, coming back to live with us during the plague. That brave woman who knows her way around a place. She met up with me in Paris a couple of years ago, and led me around like a pet turtle, my neck extended, gawking at my confident guide. She knows me, I hope, far better than I ever knew my mother.
Me, I’ve outlived my mother’s death now by almost two decades; my map is my own and at least there’s that. I try to forgive myself, on my gentler days, for being such a perpetual newcomer to so many things, because I have a lifetime of shedding the good with the bad.
“And now, do you hold my cobbled passages and narrow by-ways in your mind, poisson rouge? Do you see my pale sky and swim my waters in the bisected river of your heart?”
Paris, you beauty, ask me later.
