Paris Times Eight by Deirdre Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

had bad manners now? I let him sleep for about thirty minutes. Then I woke him with a gentle kick. “On y va,” I said. Let’s go. He smiled sheepishly. I helped him up. We didn’t speak on the way back. Couldn’t. The wind was in our ears and our mouths. Then again, there was nothing more to say.
    I FOLLOWED A different flight path home. I stopped first in Newfoundland and then changed planes for a direct flight to Toronto. After two months in Paris, city of chic, I gazed despondently at the assembly of my fellow Canadians—a dowdy lot, dressed in cutoffs and T-shirts, without any discernible sense of style. I was reminded of how uninspiring I found my native land.
    My mother was waiting for me at the airport. We embraced. I was happy to see her, yet sad too. I had returned with books and postcards and stories of all that I had seen and done, silk scarves and perfumes as presents, and emboldened ambition.
    She spoke to me about the neighbor’s dog barking through the night, the fact that my brother was in trouble again, that it had rained and then it had been hot. All the flowers had died. I had returned home to a lunar landscape. I sat next to her in the car in silence. Nothing had changed. Except for me.
    I realized in that moment that I had grown even more determined to transcend the narrow confines of my life in southern Ontario. I would return to Paris—but next time on my own terms and better prepared for the challenge. I was about to start my university education and saw it as a means to an end, the goal being freedom and happiness in the most beautiful city on earth.
    Although I had secured an entrance scholarship to the university, I still needed some money to help me get by. Within a few days of my return I went from the glory of the Arc de Triomphe to the whitewashed arches of Toronto’s Princess Gates, entryway to the Canadian National Exhibition, a horse-and-cow event stinking of sweat, candy floss, and manure. I landed a last-minute job on the midway, convincing passersby to divest themselves of seventy-five cents to toss beanbags into a boxed set of squares in order to win a stuffed animal. “Don’t walk by until you’ve given it a try.”
    This was my cri de coeur in the final days of the summer of 1979 , my last days as an adolescent. My last days at home.

TWO
    Wannabe
· 1983 ·
    I BOUGHT MY plane ticket with some of the money I had won for making the principal’s list in my final weeks as an undergrad. The funds were earmarked for graduate school, Plan B in case my dream of becoming a writer in Paris didn’t pan out. I had been accepted to start the master’s program in the fall, which was my mother’s idea. She had originally wanted me to be a lawyer. A more practical and rewarding career than writing. But for the last four years I had been writing for the student newspapers, and when my mother saw my name in print, she started to come around to liking the idea of me becoming a journalist. When I took her along with me to some of the shows I was then reviewing as a fledgling dance critic, we’d sit in the best seats and be fawned upon at intermission by publicists and impresarios. She liked that, the idea of me getting attention, as she imagined some of it reflecting on her. But since I was to be a writer, she wanted me to stand head and shoulders above the pack. It’s why she insisted I get the postgraduate degree. “To show that you are a cut above, which you are,” she said. “We both are.”
    But I knew I wouldn’t do it. By that September I expected to be properly ensconced in Paris, with a job. I didn’t tell my mother that. I didn’t tell anyone. I just told her that I was going to Paris for the summer, to spend time with an old high school friend, Danielle, who had offered me a bed to sleep in for a few weeks until another one of her Toronto friends arrived in June. My mother said, “Go,