We'll Always Have Paris (7 page)

Within the first five minutes of their meeting, the girls were giggling uproariously in the back seat of Molly’s car, delighting in their mutual misunderstandings. “Did you bring a swim costume?” Megan asked Katie.

“A
costume
?” Katie asked.

“We’re taking you to Hever Castle tomorrow and we can run in the water fountains in the gardens,” Megan explained.

“You mean a swimsuit?” Katie asked.

Megan squealed. “A suit?! What the…?!” The little girl had an easy laugh and a penchant for saying “what the…?!” She had golden blond hair with a smattering of freckles and huge blue eyes that looked like they belonged on a Madame Alexander doll.

My jaw clenched and I dug my fingernails into my palms as I watched the oddity of Molly driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road. Every time we turned a corner, I flinched, certain we would have a head-on collision. But everyone seemed perfectly comfortable, so I began doing my square breathing exercises: three breaths in, hold for three beats, exhale for three, and hold for another three.
No
one’s killed us!
Repeat.

“A few things you’ll want to learn,” Molly said, her eyes on the road. “A chip is what Americans call a French fry. If you want what you call a potato chip, ask for crisps. Many Americans have declined my offer of digestives because they think they’re some sort of stomach medicine.”

“What are they?” Katie asked.

“They’re digestives,” Molly said. “But Americans call them cookies.”

“
Cookies?
” Megan said, laughing. “What the…?!”

We pulled into the driveway of Molly’s Tudor style home in Kent, which she shared with her adult son, Alun. Naïvely, I expected her home to look like an English cottage with a stone fireplace warming the sitting room laden with floral patterned comfy chairs. I thought her kitchen would be decked out with copper pans hanging chicly from the ceiling and a pot of porridge simmering on the Aga. In reality, it was like most American homes I’d been in, complete with the hallway filled with framed photos of family, including Alun at eight years old wearing a yellow T-shirt with his name in iridescent iron-on letters. I smiled at the familiarity of the large TV with a DVD of
Friends
beside it and a tidy desk equipped with a Mac.

I was astonished by Molly’s generosity as she showed us around the kitchen, pointing out all of the snacks she’d purchased for us. She told us she planned to take us to Hever Castle and Oxford. She promised to make us a Sunday roast before we left. It was a must, she said with a lilt. I was embarrassed thinking about what an awful hostess I would be if the tables were turned. If I were kind enough to allow two strangers to stay in my home, I’d likely hand them a key, ask them to please clear their hair from the shower drain, and wish them good luck in San Diego. While Katie and I napped after our arrival in Kent, Molly washed and folded our laundry. Within an hour, she assumed the role of our auntie, and I felt terribly unworthy yet very grateful for her kindness.

***

“Is this where they beheaded Anne Boleyn?” I asked Molly the following day as we stood on the lush grounds of Hever Castle.

“That was the London Tower,” she explained as the girls ran through the stone fountains and waterfalls laughing at nothing. We had just taken a tour of the castle, and I was trying to imagine what it was like in its heyday. Our tour guide explained that King Henry VIII had Anne Boleyn beheaded for treason and adultery, but a recent review of the evidence did not support his charge.

As Molly and I watched the girls splashing freely, we took in the grounds. It was easy to picture the king’s men on horseback galloping the expansive green, ornately trimmed with a maze of bushes. Molly wasn’t overly chatty, and for once I didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with conversation. But after twenty minutes, the peacefulness became too uncomfortable.

“Do you think it hurts to be beheaded?” I asked Molly, who turned her head of shaggy red hair toward me quizzically. “I mean, I’ve always heard that it was a pretty painless way to go, but how can that be? It’s got to hurt when the blade hits your neck. I hear there’s a minute or two where you’re still alive after your head’s completely severed and your eyes can still see. Wouldn’t that be awful to see your decapitated body on the guillotine?”

Molly pondered this. “Well, I don’t imagine it would be terribly pleasant, Jennie.” She gave me an encouraging pat on the leg. “I don’t think there’s much chance anyone will behead you, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

I
hear
freezing
is
the
way
to
go
, I thought better of saying.

Katie and Megan scampered over to us, soaked from every strand of their hair to their wrinkled toes. “Aren’t you coming?” Megan asked us.

“Into the water?” her grandmother replied.

“Just dip your feet,” Katie suggested.

When we declined, the girls looked at each other and shrugged, unable to fathom how we could pass on such fun.

***

The following day, Katie and I took the train into London on our own and decided to walk to the West End to buy tickets to
Mary
Poppins
. Before we could make it out of Charing Cross Station, though, a wall of images of a very familiar face hit us.

“What the…?!” Katie said, now for the second time that morning. “That’s the mum from the Chunnel.” We stopped dead in our tracks, taking in the multiple magazine covers. Her face was absolutely everywhere, like Thandie Newton wallpaper. Over the next week, we poked fun at ourselves every few hours by asking, in our best Thurston Howell III accent, “Isn’t this the place our darling best friend
Thandie
Newton
recommended?” Katie clenched her jaw to imitate an aristocrat. “My dear,
dear
friend Thandie said this loo was the finest in all of London.”

***

After our day at Hever Castle, we didn’t see sunshine for the rest of our visit. A cloud hung over London, threatening a constant burst of showers. As Katie and I walked the promenade along the Thames River, she looked at her map and pointed to the House of Commons and Big Ben. “London Bridge?” she asked, perplexed. “I thought that fell down.”

As we passed landmarks, I knew my father must have laid eyes on the same sites when he lived in London thirty years earlier. I wondered if he was feeling optimistic about his music career, or if he viewed Big Ben as a giant game clock pressuring him to hit it big or go home.

When my father returned to the United States, he brought with him a British version of Monopoly, marked with the streets Katie and I were now walking. Leicester Square: coded yellow and worth £260. I wondered if Coventry Street and Piccadilly—the other yellow properties—were nearby.

Every few days, Katie and I found ourselves passing the London Eye, the enormous Ferris wheel that provided a panoramic view of London. The line for rides snaked perpetually for what seemed like miles, so we agreed to try our luck another time.

Someone handed us a coupon for the London Dungeon, which Katie and I thought sounded like oodles of fun even though it didn’t have the Thandie Newton seal of approval. The London Dungeon smelled moldier than the rest of the city. London never seemed to be completely dry, which unfortunately resulted in a small but pungent population of men who smelled like socks that had been worn in the rain.

When a cast of gruesome misfits greeted us at the entrance to the London Dungeon, I knew the historical walking tour of torture and plague was going to be extraordinarily well produced. I was awed by the gorgeous costumes, though they were smattered in blood and gore. Live rats scurried behind glass as our guide began yelling at us in a thick Cockney accent. He looked like Johnny Depp playing Jack the Ripper.

“Anytime you want to leave, just say, ‘Stop the ride,’” I whispered to Katie.

“It’s not really a ride,” she whispered back.

“But that will be our code. If it gets to be too much, just tell me it’s time to stop the ride.”

“Why do we need a code? Why don’t I just tell you I want to leave?”

“I don’t know, I thought we could have a—”

“Do I ’ear talking?!” the tour guide barked. “Why, I’ll come over there and cut out yeh tongue if I ’ear another word out of yeh, ay? Yel choke to death on yer own blood and I’ll feed you to the rats.”

Good
God
, I thought.
I’m ready to cry “Stop the ride” already.

***

“Don’t you ever get sick of Coney Island?” my father asked as we drove toward Brooklyn. “Maybe we could spend a Sunday just hanging out and feeling each other’s vibes.”

“Feeling each other’s
vibes
?” I asked. “Daddy, there are rides at Coney Island.” My father raised his hands in surrender and lit a cigarette. He turned on the radio, which blasted Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat” mid-rock. “They call this music?” he scoffed.

“It’s catchy,” I said.

“Music is about a universal human connection,” he said, sounding a bit frustrated. “Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over,” he mocked. “What bullshit.” He turned the knob on the radio until it landed on Cat Stevens’s “Wild World.” “
This
is music.” Relieved that he seemed settled, I sang along with the chorus. He smiled and joined in, “Oh baby, baby, it’s a wild world, and I’ll always remember you like a child, girl.” Absorbed in the music, he kept the beat by tapping his silver-and-stone ring on the hard plastic of his steering wheel.

“You like Cat Stevens?” my father asked. I felt proud that he assumed that I was up on the music hit makers at age eight and did not want to disappoint him, so I told him Cat Stevens was one of my favorites. I knew of the Jackson Five and Sonny and Cher, but could not name many others. Unless Cat Stevens was the guy who wrote “Time in a Bottle” or “Benny and the Jets,” I had no idea whether or not I liked his music. As we saw the steel frame of the old parachute ride, my father flicked his turn signal to enter the park. He sighed. “This man writes music. There’s so much bullshit and so little music these days.”

Soon we were standing in the shadow of the Wonder Wheel beside the Spook-a-Rama, debating whether or not I could go in the haunted house ride solo. “I’m not a baby,” I explained. “Plus we just went on it, I know exactly what’s going to happen. I know when Frankenstein pops out, I know when the bats fly into your hair. I have the whole thing memorized.”

“Then why do you need to go again?” he asked.

“Pleeeease?” I begged.

He conceded. “I’ll watch you through the little window,” my father said. What he hadn’t remembered was that there was only one small window where people from the outside could look into the Spook-a-Rama. That window was located at the precise point when carts passed a mummy lunging out from his casket. I’d forgotten that bit, so my father got a live snapshot of me shrieking in holy terror. As he described it, my hair was standing straight in the air like uncooked spaghetti.

Moments later, I heard men shouting, one calling my name and another chasing after him. “Don’t get out of the cart, JJ,” my father shouted from what sounded like the inside of the Spook-a-Rama.

“Are you fucking crazy, man?!” said a man with a Brooklyn accent.

“I’m coming!” my father shouted breathlessly. The cart came to a screeching halt, and for a moment, I was alone in the pitch dark. “JJ?! JJ, where are you?”

Suddenly the place was lit up like a hospital. I could see wires, levers, switches, and lights. The so-called bats were no more than shreds of rubber hanging from overhead. I’d been in car washes more frightening than this. My father raced to the cart. “Thank God you’re okay,” he said, jumping in with me.

A man caught up with us a few seconds later. “Are you out of your fucking mind?! This thing is on rails, man. You could’ve been electrocuted.”

“What could I do?” my father protested. “She was going to jump out of the cart. I couldn’t let my daughter get electrocuted!”

“What could you do?!” the man shouted. “You could fucking tell me to stop the ride. I would have hit one motherfucking button and stopped the ride. You didn’t have to come running in here like Captain Fucking America.”

“I’m sorry,” my father said. “I was so scared I didn’t think. I just knew I had to get to her.” Then he asked the same question he would pose to the security guard at the new World Trade Center two years later: “Do you have kids?”

The man grabbed my father and hugged him. “I know, I know, man, you do fucking anything for them, even stupid shit like this.”

“Thank you for understanding,” my father said.

“Next time, don’t go all fucking crazy like that. I got an off switch I could hit anytime. A little girl needs her daddy around.”

On the drive home, my father said I was absolutely never going on that ride alone again, not even when I was thirty. “You could’ve been killed jumping out of that cart,” he explained.

“Um, you know, I was never going to jump out of the cart,” I said meekly.

“You weren’t?”

I shook my head. My father pondered this for a moment and lit a cigarette. “Listen, I risked my life with that stunt, so do me a favor and let me think it was for a good reason.”

When I returned home that evening, I told my mother about my father’s heroics at the Spook-a-Rama. She knit her brow, unimpressed. “That was rather dramatic, don’t you think?” I looked at her sitting at the kitchen table with papers sprawled in front of her, likely paying bills or filling out school forms. “Why didn’t Shelly just tell someone to turn off the ride instead of making such a production?”

“He was scared,” I explained.

“More like impulsive,” she said returning to her papers. “People get themselves killed doing foolish things when there’s usually a simple solution if they’d just think with a clear head.”

“I was going to jump out of that cart,” I lied. “I would’ve died of electrocution if he hadn’t saved me. He saved my life.”

***