Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley Read Free Book Online Page A

So she was onalert for it. She’d stare at me when I stepped off the school bus and into our driveway, as if I was going to say something brilliant. Sometimes I was paralyzed by her, and I said banal things or, worse, I whined and knew I’d let her down. She was so intense. She held the world accountable. She believed that everyone she met was as devoted to their passion as she was. But she’d put her arms around me in the driveway and hold me. Sometimes she’d even cry standing there because, she said, she loved me so much.
    She gave wild parties and took them almost as seriously as psychology. In 1970 she had a Halloween fondue party and asked everyone to come wearing a hat. Our house was a single-story redwood with skylights in the kitchen that Dad had put in himself. I got to greet people at the door. Luke took their coat in the hall if they had one. When the party was half full, Mr. Stevens, our neighbor, rang the bell. He was a neuroscientist at San Francisco State, and the only thing he had on was a blue beret. His genitals looked loose and ropy and scary, and I screamed for Mom. When she saw him, she laughed so hard she cried. Then she went upstairs to get him her kimono.
    At the dinner table, everyone had to stab cornichons and little pieces of beef with skewers and dunk them in the bubbling cheese. My mother stood up in her felt cloche and said, “You can’t drink the water tonight.” I leaned against the dining room door and stared. Who was this woman in the exotic hat? Where was my mother? It was hot for October in Marin. The dimmer on the pewter chandelier was turned low, so the room took on the glow of Sterno cans under the fondue pots. “You can only drink white wine!” She raised her glass and took a sip to demonstrate. “Water will harden the cheese in your stomach like stone.”
    She played Joan Baez during the meal and smiled at her neighbors and friends, who slowly and systematically got lit. My dad liked it once my mother started things for him—the talking, the people, and the food. But he didn’t seek people out the way she did. He didn’t need people. He had his math and his desert and he had her. “The Weight” by The Band came on, and everyone jumped up from the table and ran to the sunken living room and sang “Take a load off Fanny.” Mymom had just painted the walls salmon the day before, and my father had hung his Indian weavings from Arizona.
    My parents lifted their hands together like London Bridge Is Falling Down, and everyone went under their bridge. My mother closed her eyes and bounced on the balls of her feet. I was embarrassed for her intensity and enthralled by it. I couldn’t look away. Luke came out from his bedroom down the hall and watched, too. “Why don’t they let us sleep? They’re not teenagers.” But he was a teenager, and this meant he went back to bed. I couldn’t stop staring. I was eleven. My parents had this whole other life.
    The following January, my mother left on a trip to Greece with a group of intuitive healers from the Bay Area—seventeen of them on a 747 from the Oakland airport with a layover in Zurich and a visit to the Jungians there, then a tour bus in Crete. She was gone for thirty-one days. The longest month of my life. Sausalito got stuck in a wet fog, and she only called once from Athens. No telephone credit cards back then and it cost her a fortune. The line echoed so that she sounded underwater while she screamed into the receiver, “I’m coming home soon, Willow! But I’m testing the marriage theory I’ve been working on. I’m looking at the matrilineal bonds in generations of Greek families. The marriages are very strong. I’m doing interviews. It’s so sunny here!”
    She was supposed to stay in Greece for two weeks, and now she’d thrown our house off its axis. My brother cooked hamburgers for my dad and me every night while my mother was gone. You got to choose: burgers with a slice of American cheese on top or a bowl