Plum Blossoms in Paris (3 page)

I examine my drink, while the Canuck sips from his. The silence is oppressive. Somehow I want this inconsequential person, this peacock, to inquire about me, to find me worth the mild strain of his attention. When he won’t, I force myself on him.

“I’m actually going to Paris to get over a broken heart,” I say, reddening. It sounds like I’m bragging.

“Oh?”

“Yes, my boyfriend, my high school sweetheart too”—I take a sip of my drink—“dumped me yesterday, so I’m going to lose myself in Paris. Or find myself. Whichever.” I gulp some more liquid courage. “Quit grad school for the semester and everything. Totally freaking crazy, eh?”

Eh?!

“Could be.”

I bob my head and grin like a salesman. He thinks Americans are impulsive, shoot-from-the-hip types. I’m doing him a great favor by satisfying his preconceptions.

Clearing his throat, he asks more graciously, “What are you studying?”

“Neuroscience.” I start lecturing him on my ear cells, to illuminate my intelligence (not all Americans are ignorant, apathetic asses, though I cannot, for the life of me, remember the name of Canada’s prime minister, or is it president?), but notice his attention wandering. “I know, it’s not AIDS.” I laugh.

His face hardens. Too bad for the string of cheese or nicotine gum suspended from the tip of his goatee because he’d like to wear contempt well. “That’s not something to joke about.”

Cliff has AIDS. Or his girlfriend does. Or someone close, like Uncle Mountie, or maybe a hockey buddy.

“I-I’m sorry.”

He nods curtly and turns toward his book. My eyes flash to the cover:
The Da Vinci Code
. Of course. What else could it be, on the way to Paris? I see him darting through the Louvre, sniffing for Mary Magdalene’s remains, ignoring the great art in favor of a good conspiracy. He wants to close the book on our conversation, but something’s caught, like a hook in his lip. Finally, he turns and says, “I can’t bear for an American to say anything about AIDS. Not with the way your government is forcing it upon the people of Africa and Southeast Asia.”

This is surprising. “Do you mean how we haven’t backed up our promise of more money?” I ask, perfectly willing to admit some stinginess.

“No, I mean how you’re purposefully injecting people with the AIDS virus to kill off poor people.”

Okay, so he’s a nut, certifiable. I shouldn’t take the bait. I really shouldn’t.

“Are you implying that the United States government is bent on a plan of wiping out poverty, and our tiny commitment to international aid, by murdering millions of people around the globe?”

“No.”

Relieved, I laugh.

“I’m not implying. It’s a fact.”

I cough out my drink, not sure whether to laugh, cry, or hastily change seats.

“It’s not just about your aid obligations. It’s all about the supposed War on Terror. Poverty breeds terrorism. So if you kill the poor people, you kill future terrorists.” Nostrils flaring, he backs into his seat.

The lady across the aisle raises her head at the word
terrorists
and stares.

“And there are so many anti-American terrorists coming out of sub-Saharan Africa these days?” I snort.

Wait … are there?
Before he can answer, I roll on, my voice climbing with our elevation. “And anyway, the terrorists on September 11 weren’t poor for the most part. In fact, many were highly educated. So I don’t think your plan, without entering into the nightmare logistics of it, would even work.” I shake my head. “Not to mention the level of evil intent it would require.”

He looks at me pityingly, like I’m some naïve stump. “And your government is so concerned about workable solutions to actual problems and doing good? Tell that to the children of Baghdad you’ve bombed in your search for weapons of mass destruction. The prisoners at Abu Ghraib tortured by your army.”

Okay. I do not appreciate being lumped in with Lynndie England or George Bush. It’s funny how as soon as you’re out of America, you become the Face of America. Especially in October of 2004, with the world snapping its jaws for a little American red meat. I am responsible for Everything … and Nothing. Whereas, in Cleveland, my complicity was dulled by the sincerity with which I shook my head over the stinking, faraway mess of it.

I can no longer abide Mr. You-Are-Your-Country’s-Actions. I don’t hold him accountable for … well, geez, anything Canada might do that could actually be bothersome to an American. Even if I thought their pair skaters were a little annoying last Olympics, I didn’t object to their belated gold medal. I even sang the first bars of “O Canada” during the second ceremony and hummed the rest. It’s a lovely little song.

I stand, sandwiched between two rows of seats and a low ceiling. “Excuse me.”

He reels in his legs, and I find freedom in the aisle. There are no empty seats, but I will hide in the bathroom for a while.

“Hey!” he calls after me.

I flip my black ponytail over my shoulder and glance back, careful to maintain my scornful smile.

“Don’t take it so personally,” he says, shrugging. “My girlfriend is American, too.”

I spin back around, advancing toward the front of the plane. As the turbulence jolts us and I pinball across strangers’ knotty shoulders, purled together by destination, I hear him say, “I try not to hold it against her.”

n
othing makes you feel so completely American as faking French to that first native speaker. The way those round vowels flatten on my Ohio tongue shrivels me before this customs agent, who regards me with a mix of native hostility and bureaucratic boredom. I quickly abandon the hope of securing his, or anyone’s, real respect in this country, whose mean, clenched
rs
serve as a verbal green card I have no hope of securing. The French language is like a headmistress at a Catholic boarding school for atheists: fearsome, controlling, a real bitch. She won’t get you to accept that there is a God exactly, but she’ll damn well make you believe in divine judgment.

Why,
por qué
, did I take Spanish in high school?

“Excusez-moi. Parlez-vous anglais?”
I smile hopefully at the young guy whose badge reads,
Marcel Duchamp
. I blink. His photo smiles, but the real Marcel doesn’t bother with trifles.

“Yes.”

“Is there a problem?”

He ignores me.

Eventually, Marcel motions me to the side. My bag is to be searched. I endure the small humiliation of having a male handle my tampons, my ratty underwear, my A cup bras. People filing by glance at us, curious to witness someone’s privacy pillaged. Marcel lingers over this stuff, like it’s some kind of feminine contraband. I feel like an anthropological subject without the benefit of being dead.

Finally, Marcel pulls up sharply. His eyes target mine, and the satisfaction boned within recalls a dog worrying his chewy hide. There is something in his hand. For a minute, I panic. Did I smuggle some pot from Toronto? A handgun from Cleveland? I squint, prepared for tears, resigning myself to Javert in a French interrogation room, when I finally recognize what Marcel is examining with the vigilance of a bloodhound on the trail.

It’s my box—ample enough, to be sure—of Celestial Seasonings’ organic, chamomile tea.

Really, Daisy.

It turns out, Marcel humorlessly explains (after filling out the very necessary paperwork) that there is a weight limit on imported tea. Mine is ten grams over, and they can’t have that. Tea has proven a potent brew of revolutionary fervor in my country, yet I find myself surrendering easily enough. I’m more concerned with being tagged an Ugly American than with justice right now. The older American couple next to me, however, valiantly waves the flag as they go down with the ship.

The man, jiggering with his hearing aid, asks, “What’s that, now?” to Marcel’s glowering coworker. I briefly wonder who the “good cop” is.

The man’s wife, hair curled into a brass claw, shouts, “HE NEEDS TO SEE YOUR PILLS, BUZZ. THE PILLS!”

“On whose authority? We licked the Gestapo once, young man, and I’m not afraid to do it again.”

His grip on the walker does much to sell his point.

Marcel’s lips curl with derision, and he waves me away. Sadly, I am tarred through association. I sigh, wondering if anyone will drink the tea, or for how long it will sit on some dusty shelf, next to a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a withering begonia.

Suddenly, Paris seems like the least impulsive place in the world.

I collect my miserable suitcase with as much dignity as I can muster and follow the signs to the RER. It is a torturous path, and I get lost, twice. I don’t mind so much, content to melt into the slush of bodies. I’ve always liked shuffling through airports. They’re all the same, which is reassuring. I appreciate the bustling, frantic anonymity of travelers corralled into an artificial pen, until they disperse, like atoms of a liquid dissolving into air. I am going here; you are going there. We shall never meet again.

Jesus, a McDonald’s.

There it is, sandwiched between a
parfumerie
and a luxury luggage store. I’m not sure whether it’s my exhaustion, crippled emotions, or the lingering effects of being treated like a criminal, but I almost collapse with gratitude. Familiarity may breed contempt in saner surroundings, but here, in the great unknown, it feels good. Never mind that, in Cleveland, I begrudgingly ate McDonald’s only at Irene’s insistence. I enter the restaurant and demand an Egg McMuffin, feeling like I can speak English, or more precisely American, without a trace of self-consciousness under the yawning sanctuary of the golden arches. The meat muffin, complete with fatty white globules, is greasy, disgusting, and totally delicious.

And I’m lovin’ it.

Irene, devotee of Quarter Pounders with cheese, connoisseur of an American specialty described, in our house, as ketchupfied meat loaves, is my closest friend at work, where I’m an adult service aide to the developmentally disabled. Before anyone pats me on the back, let me acknowledge that it is more of a gesture than anything; grad school costs $13,000 a year, and I make $9.25 an hour, twelve hours a week. My parents foot some of my bills, and I have the requisite loans that will haunt me for twenty years. But I had to do something, and there was this ad over the summer that filled me with noble thoughts for about five minutes. Long enough to employ me at a home with my new clients, Bill, Irene, and Lucy—all of whom I had just left behind without a backward glance. My Canadian friend’s arguments aside,
I
am actually the personification of America’s international aid policy: a spew of lofty rhetoric with a predisposition to exaggerate its compassion and, when push comes to shove, to skip out on its responsibilities.

It should be hard to forget about my clients, especially Irene. Every Saturday and Sunday, she comes up to me, that wretched pair of grandma glasses perched on the end of her nose, before taking my hand and tentatively asking, “Friend, Daisy?” It is the only question anyone has ever asked that makes me feel both hopeful and lousy. There’s too much naked vulnerability there; I don’t know where to park it. Usually, I just say, “Yes, friend, Irene,” and direct her toward her “memorabilia,” which is what we call the box full of other people’s, mostly kids’, crap she has picked up on her walks. She can tell me what she ate for dinner on each day that she acquired a new “artifact.”

A rainbow pencil, personalized “Brittany”: ham salad sandwich, pickle and coleslaw on the side.

A jolly snowman mitten: pork chop, green beans, au gratin potatoes.

A cheap watch stopped at 2:23 (“Day or night, Daisy?” “I don’t know, Irene.”): meat loaf, baked potato, more green beans.

For my clients, time is measured by meals, or game shows.

I considered bringing Irene with me. Simply having the thought grew me another inch, as I breathed the full-bodied air of the selfless and inspired. Just imagine the good stuff she could pick up in Paris! And the meals she could eat! It would put ketchupfied meat loaves and prissy pencils to shame. I encouraged the daydream, wrapping my generosity around myself until it hugged me tight. Too tight.

For as much as it pains me to think of a stranger taking Irene to McDonald’s, I couldn’t have her with me now. There’s to be no context for old Daisy here. Besides, Irene loves meat loaves, particularly the ketchup on top.

And she always asks for a slice of Wonder Bread on the side.