Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

They turned down their little street. Up ahead of them a heavyset woman hurried in the middle of the road with a funny hitch, then suddenly turned, worked a shiny black girdle to mid-thigh, and peed in the gutter, an astounding flood that stopped the Langfords.

Helen said, “Awesome.”

“That,” said Kit, “was impressive.”

“City of lights,” said Wes.

In their medieval apartment, they ate like medieval people, tearing bread with their teeth, spreading butter with their fingers. They all went to bed at the same time, the girls in their nightgowns — Kit’s patterned with roses, Helen’s another Linda XXL T-shirt. “Good night, good night,” said Laura, standing between their beds. They had never shared a room, her girls. Then she and Wes went across the hall to the other room.

The necessary closeness of the three-quarters bed amplified everything. Her tenderness for Wes, who had been so sure this was the right thing; her worries about how much money this trip would cost; her anxiety at having to use her threadbare high school French. She understood this was the reason she was thirty-six and had never been to Europe. It was a kind of stage fright.

In the morning they discovered that the interior walls were so thin they could hear, just behind the headboard, the noise of M. Petit emptying his bladder as clearly as if he’d been in the same room. It was a long story, the emptying of M. Petit’s bladder, with many digressions and false endings.

“We’re in Paris,” whispered Wes.

“I thought there would be more foie gras and less pee,” Laura whispered back.

“Both,” said Wes. “There will be plenty of both.”

In Paris, Helen became a child again. She was skinny, pubescent, not the lean dangerous blade of a near-teen she’d seemed at home, in skin-tight blue jeans and oversized T-shirts. In Paris you could buy children’s shoes and children’s clothes for a person who was five-two. The sales were on, clothing so cheap they kept buying. Helen chose candy-colored skirts, and T-shirts with cartoon characters.

At le boulevard Richard-Lenoir, near the Bastille, Helen bought a vinyl purse with a long strap, in which she kept a few euros, a ChapStick, her name and address, a notebook for writing down her favorite sights. She walked hand in hand with Kit: they were suddenly friends, as though their fighting had been an allergic reaction to American air. Both girls picked up French as though by static electricity, and they spoke it to each other, tossing their hair over their shoulders. “Ouais,” they said, in the way that even Laura, whose brain seemed utterly French-resistant, now recognized as how Parisians quackingly agreed.

There were so many pâtisseries and boulangeries and fromageries that they rated the pain au chocolat of one block against the pain au chocolat of the next. The candy shops were like jewelry stores, the windows filled with twenty-four-carat bonbons. The caterer Laura worked for had given her money to smuggle back some young raw milk cheeses that were illegal in the United States, and Laura decided to taste every Reblochon in the city, every Sainte-Maure de Touraine , so that on the last day she could buy the best and have them vacuum-packed against the noses of what she liked to imagine were the U.S. Customs Cheese Beagles.

Paris was exactly what she had expected and nothing like it. The mullioned passages full of stamp shops and dollhouse-furniture stores, the expensive wax museum the girls wanted to go back and back to despite not recognizing most of the counterfeit celebrities, the hot-chocolate emporia and the bare-breasted bus-stop ads. These were things she had not known were in Paris but felt she should have. The fast-food joint called Flunch, the Jewish district with its falafel (“Shall we have f’laffel for flunch,” Wes said nearly every day). She never really got her bearings in the city, no matter how she studied the map. Paris on paper always looked like a box of peanut brittle that had been dropped onto the ground, the Seine the unraveled ribbon that had held it together.

“What’s your favorite thing in Paris?” Wes asked.

“My family,” she answered. That was the truth.

After a while they bought a third pay-as-you-go phone for Helen and Kit to share, so the girls could go out in the city together after lunch. Then Wes and Laura would go back to the apartment. She thought every languishing marriage should be prescribed a three-quarter bed. They didn’t even think to worry about M. Petit on the other side of the wall until later, when news of his careful, decorous life floated back to them: a ringing phone, a whistling teakettle, a dainty plastic clatter that could only be a dropped button. This was why it was good to be temporary, and for the neighbors to be French.

“How did you know?” Laura asked Wes.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Helen. How good she’d be here.”

“I don’t know. I just — I felt it. She is, though, isn’t she? Good. Sweet. Back to her old self.”

Her old self? Laura thought. Helen had never been like this a day in her life.

Still it was a miracle: take the clumsy, eager-to-please girl to Paris. Watch her develop panache .

Then it was August. It was hot in Paris. They hadn’t realized how hot it would be, and how — Laura thought sometimes — how dirty. The heat conjured up dirt, centuries of cobblestone-caught filth. It was as though Paris had never actually been clean, as though you could smell every drop of blood and piss and shit spilled in the streets since before the days of the revolution. Half the stores and restaurants shut for the month, as the sensible Parisians fled for the coast. French food felt tyrannical. When they chose the wrong place to eat, a café that looked good but where the skin of the confit de canard was flabby and soft, the bread damp, it didn’t feel like bad luck: it felt as though they’d fallen for a con. As though the place had hidden the better food in the back, for the actually French.

Laura was ready to go home. August was like a page turning. July had felt lucky: August, cursed. From the first day, Laura would think later, no mistake.

The day of Helen’s accident — or perhaps the day before; they would never know exactly when the accident happened — she was as lovely and childish as ever. In the makeup section of the Monoprix, she lipsticked a mouth on the edge of her hand, the lower lip on her thumb and the upper on her index finger.

“Bonjour,” she said to her mother, through her hand.

“Bonjour, madame,” said Laura, who did not like speaking French even under these circumstances. The Monoprix was air-conditioned. They spent a lot of time there.

France had refined the features of Helen’s face — Laura had always thought of them as slightly coarse, the thick chap-prone lips, the too-bright eyes — the face, Laura thought now, of a girl who would do anything for a boy, even a boy who didn’t care. Her own face, once upon a time. But in Paris, Helen had changed. She had lost the eagerness, the oddness, the blunt difficulty of her features. She had become a Parisienne. Laura tucked the label of Helen’s shirt in, felt the warmth of her back, and with the force of previously unseen heartache she knew: they would fly back in three days and nothing, nothing would have changed. They would step back into the aftermath of all they hadn’t dealt with.

“Are you looking forward to going home?” Laura asked.

Helen pouted. Then she jutted her thumb out, made her bee-stung hand pout, too. “Non,” she said. “ J’adore Paris . I’d like to stay here forever.”

“Not me,” said Kit. “I miss Frogbert.”