August in Paris

When I had only two children and they were small, I spent a few days in a cabin in the woods at a retreat for artists and writers. I remember standing in the grocery store in Georgia befuddled. What did I like to eat? I had no idea. I was pretty sure it wasn't Hot Pockets or sliced orange cheese. Eventually, I put in my cart a bag of rice, a bottle of Tabasco, and one can each of beans and mustard greens, chosen for their endearing Southern brand names and labels.

Oh, coffee. And a bottle of wine, and a peach.

A mother can forget what she likes. She can even forget what she is like. Wherever you go, there you are, say the Buddhists: but so are they. The fruit of your loins, in their Fruit of the Looms. Buy them, clean them, fold them, fix them, hunt them, buy some more. Eventually, you run out of memory, like a computer running too many applications. Before you were the finder of socks, the maker of sandwiches, the driver of carpools, the kisser of boo-boos, the full-service factotum of family life, you were a person who filled whole days with something. What was it? Who were you? There is only one way to find out.

Though it is difficult to abandon those who count on you for their very undergarments, if you play your cards right, distant obligations arise. A business trip. Personal duty. An obligatory invitation. Really, you must go. If only to pry yourself loose from your pathetic martyrdom and see what is left.

Good-bye! Back soon! Just microwave them for two minutes on high!

To gaze at the ocean. To meditate on a mountaintop. To steam in lavender and eucalyptus. To this list must be added what I have found to be an equally restorative experience of spiritual solitude: to sit in the airport terminal. There are few things more stressful than being in an airport with a horde of children, but when you travel alone, the place is transformed. In its airy, comfortable reaches, wholly devoted to sitting, reading, and snacking, you are resurrected as an individual.

One person, one seat, one ticket, one will. No arguments.

Whatever automatic reaction people have to you when you appear in public with your familyâpity or amusement, aesthetic appreciation or concernâwhen you are alone, those reactions are nowhere in evidence. Nor is the presumption that, because you are with children, such reactions may be displayed with impunity. No, instead of conducting your private life on a public stage with generally humiliating results, you will be as untroubled as if wrapped in a cocoon, free to read the
New York Times
and drink Starbucks coffee. How could aromatherapy on Big Sur be better than this?

And you never know, perhaps they will announce a delay. When traveling with children, your powerlessness over such things is a problem, a violation of natural law that must be explained and re-explained, even to teenagers. When solo, powerlessness is the dharma. The fact is, you will have to sit there, accomplishing nothing, for many hours. Try to adjust. You have packed three books, and even now someone has discarded a copy of the
New Yorker
containing a 15,000-word article by Janet Malcolm or Diane Middlebrook. This may be your only chance in the next decade to get through these articles.

After a while, you might even stop looking up every time a small voice utters, “Mommy.” Or maybe you won't. Either way, you will soon remember what you like to eat.

You might think a hotel room a more luxurious experience of solitude than a terminal gate, and it has its points, but it lacks the invigorating friction of a public setting. It is the presence of strangers combined with the act of transit that resets one's sense of self. See: suddenly, you are a woman in black jeans sitting in a chair reading a 15,000-word magazine article. A compact, self-contained organism. If someone speaks to you, they do so politely, and if they look at you, they do so covertly, because that's all that's allowed. Your boundaries, under continual assault by the condition of motherhood, start to firm up. You are mutating into that least maternal and most impermeable of beings, a stranger.

My first experience of this occurred years before my pathetic martyrdom, when I took a trip at 18. I flew to Taos for a yoga retreat, first staying overnight in Albuquerque in a Holiday Inn, then catching a bus the next day to the mountains. I had a sense of who I was during that wheezy journey. (I know this only because I wrote about it excitedly in my journal: girlness is separated from airness by red flannel shirtness. (Sorry, it was 1975 and, as I said, I was 18.) I filled pages with the bubbly chronicle of my experiences, including my purchase of a bright green Navajo blanket the day before. I leaned against the yellowed window of the bus, that blanket in my lap, as small, dusty Southwestern towns went by outside, populated by ethnic groups I had never seen before.

No one knew a thing about me. I could tell them my name was Kitty or that I was an orphan. I could tell them nothing and let them wonder. After so much adolescent self-loathing, I almost had a crush on myself.

In maturity, auto-romantic opportunities are rare; also endangered are the crushes on strangers that were a standard feature of my younger travels. Not that I can't still fall in love with someone on the basis of a ten-minute conversation. I can, but my adult life tends to be overpopulated. Nowadays, most people I meet remind me so much of someone I already know that I just get confused. In any case, if I talk to someone, I won't be able to read my book. Or make my lists, for the other urge that comes over me shortly after liberating myself from my schedules and responsibilities is the compulsion to make lists of things to do when I return. Even on car trips I do this, scribbling messy columns of verb phrases in a notebook open on the passenger seat. It is hard to write in the car, but I always remember a slightly dotty, doe-eyed poet I used to know named Sandra Lynn who said she wrote her poems while driving. If Sandra Lynn can do it, so can I.

Lists of things to do are poems of a kind. The free verse of a vast and efficient future, in which cars are inspected, birthday presents wrapped, videos returned, boxes of books packed up and sent off to young nephews. What a beautiful life I'm going to have when I get home. And yet, despite the bright promise of the lists, and the refreshed quality of my identity, I have never once managed a smooth homecoming. Two seconds into re-entry, the traveling me has vanished, my self-possession left behind at baggage claim.

I walk in the door, and all the things and people I am responsible for seem to fly toward me, neglected and furious. Everything is wrong, and crooked, and left out on the counter. My husband, who has done everything a person possibly could to keep life running smoothly at home, is annoyed in advance, knowing I will be a bitch. “So how was it?” he asks.

“Oh God, it was great,” I say. Already, in the other room, they are shouting, “Mom!”

“They never stopped the whole time you were gone,” my husband says wearily. “So what did you do?”

“Nothing,” I say, dropping my suitcase and moving swiftly toward a jar of peanut butter with the lid off, which is also shouting my name. “Nothing.”

August in Paris

The term “family travel” is an oxymoron. What you see if you visit Chichen Itza with your children in tow is the same thing you see in Ocho Rios or Epcot Center: the exotic crushed relentlessly under the heel of the mundane. For example, the only reason I found to stay up past midnight in Paris during our infamous family trip of 2005 was the same as at homeâwhere the hell are the kids? And while it is true that I had spent much of the month wishing my family would fall into the Seine, after I actually lost two of the children, I changed my tune.

On the way home from dinner, 17-year-old Emma and 15-year-old Vince had jumped off the subway at the nasty Chatelet stop to find a clubÂ Emma had read about on the Internet. Had we actually given permission for this? "Be back by midnight!" I called.

Now, long past that time, I was standing outside our borrowed apartment, freaking the hell out. The rue de la Tombe-Issoire was as silent and motionless as a hyperrealist painting, every shuttered pastry shop, every glowing streetlamp, every parked scooter pulsing with ominous portent. On the corner, the red digital marquee of a closed-up drugstore ticked off the minutes. 2:11. 2:12.

At what point should I wake my husband, Crispin? When would we have to call his ex-wife in Baltimore and tell her we had lost her daughter? When to go to the police? I gingerly began to imagine what could have gone wrong. They weren't dead, of that I was fairly certain, but they could be with bad people. Bad people with cheap vodka and bad drugs. Bad people in bad apartments with no furniture, with smelly mattresses and uncircumcised penises, with larcenous hearts and false assurances.Â

Vince was tall and sort of imposing-looking, but he was only 15. Emma was small and vulnerable and, though less reckless than Vince, no wizard of circumspection. But part of my panic that night was that I assumed the two of them wouldn't do this on purpose. Something had to have happened to them.

At 3:21, a white police van pulled up right in front of me and three young officers, two male and one female, leapt out. Le Mod Squad. I rushed up to them shouting in broken French. “Les enfants! Ils sont disparus!”

They looked at me like I was nuts and said to go the main police station and file a missing persons report. Then they went into the alley with flashlights, executed “la mission,” rushed back to the car, and sped away.

Practicing for the post-August crime rush, perhaps.

Around 4:00, I went inside to pee. "Are they not back yet?" my mother-in-law, Joyce, whispered down from the loft. Now it turned out that both she and her friend Sallie had been awake all night. They had heard the phone ring at 1:15, when, thank God, we heard from Emma, calling from a pay phone to say that they had missed the last train. Her younger brother Sam answered the call; Emma hung up before I got there. I chided Sam about this, as if he could have prevented it, and the poor boy was beside himself. Until I stepmotherishly snapped, “Stop apologizing, for God's sake!”

While Sam drifted off at last, his tiny, white-haired grandmother was tiptoeing down the narrow wooden staircase in her bathrobe. Life is tough, people are weak, Marx was rightâthese tenets are the building blocks of my mother-in-law's worldview. Much in the world does not pass her exacting muster. Lucky for me, when I met her for the first time, a couple of months into my relationship with her son, a 40-year-old woman in horrifically short cut-offs (that detail haunts me), floating into her living room like a Macy's parade balloon of midlife romantic happiness, she took to me right away. Having been hated by my previous mother-in-law, I cherished my good fortune. In fact, this whole trip to Paris had its inception when I said something dreamy about wanting to spend some time there, and Joyce sighed, “I've never been. And now I'll probably never go.”

My own mother hadn't been either, I realized. And though each of these elderly widows needed little help in most areas, it seemed Paris was my department. I had been several times, I speak a little French, I know a few people.

If I had planned a trip for just the three of usâ¦but this simple, civilized approach never crossed my mind. I never thought of leaving my husband, or the five kids we had between us, aged 5 to 17, or my best friend Sandye and her four-year-old, and now both of our mothers were coming, and pretty soon Joyce decided she couldn't leave her best friend eitherâ¦and so we were 12.

I e-mailed a Paris-based contact to see if he had any leads on lodging. He offered me his place, because he, like everyone else, was leaving for the month. Though he had only one toilet and two bedrooms, there was a daybed in the kitchen. Of course we would fit! I arranged two shifts of travel, so we'd never be more than eight at once.

Unsurprisingly, Joyce took a dark view of the missing-children situation. I told her I had spoken with the police earlier and they said I had to go to the station.

“So go,” she said.

Wearily I trudged back out to the alley and pushed open the iron gate. I was only halfway down the next block when I felt so cold and tired that I wondered if I mightn't wait until morning. I should get Crispin's opinion, I decided, and turned around.

“Crispin,” I whispered, kneeling by the bed.

One blue eye opened under its gingery eyebrow.

“The kids never came home.”

He pushed himself up on one elbow. “What the hell,” he said grimly. Like his mother, he was quite certain that I should go to the police station immediatelyâeven though we had no idea where it was, and it was the middle of the night.

Other husbands might have objectedâbut this is the problem with always acting like you are the most capable person around and don't want or need any help at all. People will take you right up on it.

I arrived at the precinct around 5 a.m. Outside at a guard booth were a pair of cops, male and female, both smoking. I looked longingly at their Gauloises but felt that bumming a cigarette might not be best opening move.

Â Inside was a large, dirty reception area with three more gendarmes lounging behind a long counter. One was fat, one had a moustache, one was fat and had a moustache. They heard my taleâ“les enfants ne rentraient jamais!”âbut were unimpressed. First of all, said the moustache, there was nothing they could do right awayâno phone call to make, no database to check. A missing persons report was a “grande procedure” and I should come back with our passports around 7:00 and plan to spend most of the day.

However, he continued, les enfants would probably be home by the time I got there, because the trains and buses started running again at 5:30. I searched their faces, hoping for something more. “Au revoir, madame,” they said. The one with the moustache threw in a Gallic shrug.

Back at the ranch, Crispin and Joyce were at the table sipping coffee. Once I had weakly responded to all their questions, we fell silent. Outside, the sky paled to gray.

The Depression-era song “April in Paris” was written by Yip Harburg, also the lyricist of “Over the Rainbow.” Frankly, the lyrics are uninspiredâblossoming chestnuts, singing hearts, etc.âbut apparently, the mere thought of April in Paris was enough to lift the spirits of New Yorkers in breadlines to the extent that the song lived on for all time as a symbol of romance.

Our family, unfortunately, missed April by a season and a half. Instead, we had August, the month when those who live in Paris leave and lend their apartments to others. One by one, the shops close, the window-gates are pulled shut, the chairs and tables are hauled in. Only the museums staunchly hold wide their portals as the city is given over to throngs of tourists. These are the people of August, people who dare not speak its name, because they cannot. What kind of word has three vowels and one diacritical mark before you ever get a consonant? AoÃ»t. Really.

On our trip so far:

1. Vince had fallen illâhis throat swollen, his lungs congested. Never a stalwart sort, he lay moaning on the kitchen daybed as if on a Civil War battlefield. His illness was a poignant throwback to other family vacations: Hayes's horrific diarrhea in Mexico at 18 months, Sam's ear infection in Jamaica, Emma's impacted tooth in San Francisco, the headaches and digestive problems that tend to follow Crispin around the globe and can escalate to crisis proportions if one of us happens to leave the Tylenol at home.

2. The interpersonal tensions of the group had been steadily rising. One evening, just before we went out to dinner, we had a gloves-off brawl about the location of a particular Italian restaurant. It was me against them, Crispin, Hayes, and Vince, and I was right in the end, but that didn't help. The meta-arguments, as usual, were the killer: “This is your worst trait!” Vince said darkly, meaning that I argue so hard, which seemed a low blow considering they were all 100 percent incorrect, but by then Hayes had done the typical Hayes thing of changing what he had been saying so he was actually not wrong, which is his worst trait, and this move destroyed the fragile alliance between him and Crispin. Vince at one point tried to smooth things over, saying everyone has bad traits, but Hayes shouted him down.

These people are not very nice to me, I sadly concluded (again). And though we were not at home, I continued in my domestic enslavement to them, their clothes, their meals, their dishes, their rumpled beds. And all of this was my fault, of course, since the ultimate horribleness of one's horrible children is that one has only oneself to blame.

3. Hayes was at an age when a trip to Paris with his mother and her entourage was far from an appealing prospect. He had insisted on bringing his golf clubs, despite my increasingly hysterical explanations that there were no golf courses in Paris. Now he sat morosely in the tiny apartment, staring at his golf bag. One day, we took three subway lines to the outskirts of the city so he could hit balls on a driving range set up in the middle of a racetrack. This did not make either of us feel any better.

4. My mother, on the other hand, was no trouble at all. During the Italian restaurant imbroglio and most others, she repaired to a table in the alley with her martini, her cigarette, and one of the seven books she had imported from her public library. Having passed on the task of driving me insane to the younger generation, she could now relax. By the time the kids disappeared, she and Hayes had taken their flight home.

Around 5:45 a.m., the front gate clanged shut; Joyce, Crispin, and I all heard it. We looked up from our mugs into each other's eyes. Then we heard the soft chatter, the familiar voices, and raced out onto the stoop.

When the two of them saw the three of us lined up like that, shrimpy and exhausted, their jaws dropped. They'd had no idea how much worry they had caused us and had only even begun meandering their way home in the last couple of hours, my midnight curfew apparently forgotten. Meanwhile, we grownups filled them in on exactly what we had been through in their protracted absence.

While Vince, who has been my son all his life, didn't seem too concerned about the worry he had causedâjust another drop in the bucketâmy stepdaughter, Emma, felt very badly. It was rather refreshing for me to see the forlorn, anxious, apologetic look on her face. I don't think my boys ever learned to make that face.

Perhaps more time would have been devoted to the aftermath of this crisis if another hadn't broken in its wake. I received a phone call from my mother in which she used the F word at least 15 times, explaining that she and Hayes had been delayed overnight in Boston, then flown to Washington instead of Baltimore, and had arrived at BWI 36 hours behind schedule only to find that Hayes had lost my mother's car keys.

By this time, stress had sandblasted every synapse in my brain. I could just imagine getting into this sort of situation with my mother, and my primary reaction was, better him than me.

For our last day, I pulled myself together and planned a three-stop outing: the famous Deyrolle taxidermy shop, a restaurant with a view, a carnival in the Tuileries. We set out gamely enough but hit the Paris-in-August trifecta. All three places were closed, despite the assurances in my guidebooks. At the sight of the carnies taking down the Ferris wheel, the youngest members of our party burst into tears.

“Good thing we're leaving tomorrow,” said Vince, “before they roll up the streets.”

At that point, believe it or not, it started to rain.

Ah well. Soon it would be September, and we would be back home in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, where the fact that everything was open for business and we had four toilets in our house would not make us as happy as you might think.

In many ways, it would be surprisingly like Paris.

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