Authors: Shauna McGuiness
Lulu looked around the restaurant, flipping up
her glasses and snapping her fingers on both hands.
“
Garçon
,”
she cried, “
Garçon
!”
Garçon
means “boy” in French.
Although it is customary (or so I’d read in second period high school
French class) to call for a “
Garçon
,”
or waiter, in a restaurant, she was taking it to the extreme.
“I don’t think anyone works here,” she huffed.
A female server stopped at our table and asked
what we would like, in broken English.
Lulu ordered crêpes.
I pointed at
the familiar thing on the menu.
I also
asked
for a diet soda.
I could see Lulu trying to tell me to order
water, signaling with her eyes and pursed lips.
Of course she ordered some for herself.
Finally, I managed to calm myself enough to
take in our surroundings.
The place was
beautiful.
On one of the walls, sheer
white curtains covered windows. Summer raged outside, but the inside was dark,
and there were candles on each table.
It
was bearably cool
where we sat.
The floor was made of parquet wood, providing
a pleasing square pattern underneath our feet.
“What time is the show tonight?”
I looked over the top of my glass after
taking a drink, twirling some of the ice cubes in my mouth.
“We’re supposed to be there by seven,” Lulu
said.
Only five more hours to fill.
Terrific
.
I wondered how many stores we could examine
for outdated alligator purses in five hours.
Lulu’s food came first.
The crêpes were beautiful and looked
delicious.
Then my dish arrived.
Alicia would have died.
Unwittingly, I had ordered
escargots
.
I stared at my plate.
What
kind of loser orders snails for lunch without realizing it?
“
Bon
appetit
,” our server exclaimed, walking
away.
As if it was a perfectly normal thing to serve snails to someone in a
restaurant. They looked like, well,
snails
.
They
were still in their shells, and they sat in small depressions on the plate.
The server had provided some little tongs and
a two tined fork, for easy snail extraction. The sauce smelled like garlic
salty goodness.
Lulu was obliviously enjoying her meal.
My sauce smelled delectable.
So, alternately hungry and disgusted, I was going
to have to be brave enough to eat my food.
However, they were
snails.
And they
looked
like snails.
When I was very young, maybe
three or four (it was prior to my mother
marrying my stepdad),
my father had gone
on a hunting trip and had brought back different animals.
Dead animals.
He and his friends thought it was so funny to feed me deer and frog
meat.
“Tastes just like chicken, don’t it?”
they all laughed.
At least
that meat had looked like meat.
“What did you order?”
Lulu asked, between bites.
“
Escargots
.”
I waited for her reaction.
The recognition registered on her face as she
looked at my plate.
She put down her
fork and looked at me.
“Did you really mean to order that?”
“Uhm.
Yeah, of course I did.”
I just
couldn’t let it go. I smiled at her and put my white linen napkin on my
lap.
“When in Rome... "
Because
her
nod to being Roman was a vegetarian dish, she bounced her head in agreement.
Pretty stumped, never having
even eaten lobster out of its tail,
I picked up the tongs and pretended I knew
what I was doing.
Looking around the restaurant, I saw a large
man with a round, red face.
He had a
napkin tucked into his shirt and he was angrily discussing something with his
tablemate.
Gesturing wildly with one
meaty hand, the other was resting on the table—holding the same little fork
that was on my plate.
I watched him, guessing that woman on the other
end of the table was his wife.
Glaring
at him, she answered him with monosyllabic answers in a language that I had never
heard.
The man was sitting just to my right and one
table over.
Using my peripheral vision,
I watched as he pinched his snail meat out of the shell, dipped into drippy
sauce, and popped it into his mouth.
I can do
that.
Carefully holding the tongs, I used the fork to
hold the shell on my plate.
It was a
special plate, it seemed.
Made expressly
for holding
escargots
.
I used the tongs to extract the meat.
I was relieved to note that it looked as
though it had been previously removed, cleaned and cooked.
I was also grateful for my Snail Eating
Tutorial, which made me think I sort of, like, maybe looked like a skilled
escargot eater.
Feeling as though I was holding a booger on
that specialty fork, bile rose in my throat, but I smiled at Lulu again and
opened my mouth.
The wonderful smell was
overwhelming and made my stomach growl.
The sauce dripped off of the morsel, which was quite a bit larger than
your
average
morsel, and it made me
feel clumsy—in addition to starving and repelled.
I put that thing in my mouth and chewed.
The seasoning was the only thing I could
taste.
But the texture!
Foods
like mashed potatoes, pasta, and rice rock my
world.
Comfort food.
Starches.
Carbohydrates.
Maybe a steak,
here or there. Rubbery,
chewy
things?
Notsomuch.
The bite reminded me of eating calamari, something that I have endured,
but have never craved or really enjoyed—since chewing them feels like you're munching
on rubber bands.
“How is
it?”
My grandmother studied my face.
I was very careful and used my mad acting
skills.
“Mmmmm!
Love
it!
Now I can tell everyone that I’ve
eaten snails!
In Paris!”
Wow, that was unnecessarily shrill
.
She paused, mid bite, for a second.
Then she continued chewing.
“Would you like to try one?”
I offered.
“No thank you, dear, I’m stuffed.”
Challenge
not accepted.
Damn.
I thought of a
I thought of Lithia Park.
And I chewed.
Soon my plate was empty, making me feel as
though I had accomplished something big.
It took four Diet Pepsis to wash my lunch down (no
free refills), to the almighty chagrin of my grandmother.
She paid our bill.
It was a considerable amount:
it turned out that escargot was one of their
high dollar
entrée
s. I couldn’t feel
guilty because I swear I could feel my food swimming in my stomach.
Maybe crawling.
Slithering.
***
The next four (hundred) hours were spent picking
up souvenirs.
For my stepfather, I found a train car which
had a French brand name on it.
I hoped
it was the right scale for his electric train set.
My sister had a
"
J'adore
Paris
" T-shirt in her future,
and I managed to find a reasonably priced
tapestry for my mother.
It was small
enough to roll up into what could pass for a junior high school diploma, but
beautiful.
To me it looked very European:
the image of a woman in a powdered wig
listening to a man in tights, playing a lyre, was woven in multitudes of dark
colors.
Nothing seemed right for Jimmy,
but we still had some time.
Lulu bought some cute little metal Eiffel Tower
key chains, and I decided to get one for each girl at Above the Waist.
As we walked, they made a rhythmic, clinking
noise in my purse—which was becoming heavy with souvenirs.
I had to
find something good for Richie, so I was glad that we still had a few days to
look.
***
We found ourselves in a Lancôme boutique, and I
bought some lip gloss.
This particular brand
was sold at department stores at home, but it had originated in Paris.
The gloss was over-priced, but it was from This
Actual Shop.
In Paris.
Never mind that I never would have thought
about purchasing this product at the mall counter in San Jose—as Lulu was grumpily
quick to point out.
I think she still
felt bad about not letting me buy the Doc Martens, so she didn’t argue more
than some basic
tsk tsk
-ing.
***
A long hour was spent in French Burger
King.
It looked exactly like American
Burger King.
I ordered more diet soda,
and
Lulu even ordered a Sprite.
The place was mostly empty in the section we
had chosen, so I stared at our straws, making them stir the liquid round and
round in our cups.
The straws would bob
wildly for three or four seconds, calming, whenever I stopped stirring.
We
looked at my purchases a few more times and found new things to say about them
each time. A little man came by with his broom and swept under our table every
fifteen minutes.
We watched people come,
eat, and leave.
The clientele consisted
of families from all over the world and lots of teenagers.
Finally, we threw our cups in the garbage and
headed back onto the street. Lulu was humming a tune that I recognized.
It was a song by one of Rich’s punk
bands.
The soft rock version, apparently.
***
Printemps was our next destination.
Actually, we sort of wandered aimlessly to
the front door, but it had air conditioning, so it seemed like a good place in
which to spend some time.
It reminded me
of any department store at home, like Macy's. The only real difference was that
the signs were all in French and everything cost francs instead of dollars.
Lulu looked at the shoes, but I could tell that
she didn’t really want to buy any.
Spending
a few minutes looking through the jewelry, she tried on a few necklaces—but she
was so short that she had to reach over her head to get the pieces that they
took out of the case.
My grandmother
looked tired.
It occurred to me that we were merely killing time until our evening
could begin.
Poor Lulu was already
exhausted and probably would have preferred to return to the hotel.
But instead, she was out there:
braving the Champs-Élysées for me.
While I was trying on sunglasses—the kind that
Rich’s emergency money wouldn’t even begin to cover—a little white head popped
up from around the display case.
“I just got us tickets to a fashion show!”
“A fashion show?
Here?”
“Yes!
Isn’t this exciting?
It starts in
about twenty minutes, and we’ll still be able to make it to The Lido in time!”