Alone in Paris, on a quiet street in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, I venture to find a place for lunch. It is mid-September in 1996. Summer hasn't given way to autumn, though a chill salts the air. In an hour, my scratchy blue wool sweater and the orange silk scarf given to me by James, my best friend back home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, will be too warm. Even on an intimate side street, the scale of Paris makes me feel simultaneously grand and very small, often in quick succession, like Alice in Wonderland nibbling "Eat Me" cakes and tasting "Drink Me" cordials to shrink and enlarge herself according to need.
Outside a bistro, a sidewalk billboard lists a prix fixe menu written in plain white chalk. "Meat and potato" something and "tarte" something at a price that won't devastate my weekly au pair's wages. I am the daughter of a "don't touch," "how much," "wait for the sale" mother. For decades, my mother has guided our family across a tightrope strung above the potential for financial ruin caused by my father's drinking and largesse. Throughout my childhood, my mother's jaw tightened as the Safeway clerk added up the cost of our basic groceries: enriched whole wheat bread, a gallon of two percent milk, canned cream of mushroom soup, margarine, ground beef, and Corn Flakes, plus frozen vegetables and orange juice concentrate. At restaurants, to which we rarely go, my mother is never hungry, never has an appetite, yet she eats our scraps before the waitress clears the plates. My mother knows where every penny goes.
Once inside the bistro, a waitress welcomes me, asks if it's just me, and nods toward an empty table. There are roughly 15 tables, most of them full. As I sit down at a two-top, she removes the setting opposite me and brings me water, establishing I'll have the set menu, the only menu there is. Throughout this interaction, I am relieved I do not have to say a word of French.
My waitress doesn't know she is part of a sacred ritual: being served by a waiter and enjoying a meal in sit-down restaurant. Beginning in elementary school, I would save my allowance to take myself to Cheyenne's restaurants and cafés. Eggrolls dipped in the Twin Dragon's shockingly red sweet and sour sauce. Late night bottomless mugs of coffee and slices of pie at Shari's. Denny's Grand Slams or toast and tea. Frosted cinnamon rolls at the Owl Inn. Holding a paper or laminated menu in my hands, reading through my many choices, being asked, "What would you like?" and listened to, fills me with an uncommon pleasure born of a sense of power and well-being. Through the course of a meal, sometimes with friends, often alone, I feel safe. Inside a restaurant's walls and choreographed order, I have a life separate from the television droning incessantly in the TV room, the thick coatings of dust and animal hair along the baseboards, and the agony of anticipating my father, a man whom I love and resent with all my being, weeping and complaining when he comes home drunk.
This bistro matches the France I've seen in books and movies. Halfway up the windows, linen café curtains hang on brass rods. Sunlight inches up from the ground to reveal the woodgrain on bentwood chairs. Ironed white tablecloths, fabric napkins, porcelain plates—not Corelle or plastic—and a pot of pungent yellow mustard at the table's center. A tiny kitchen, just the one waitress speaking to an invisible chef, retrieving plates, serving diners contentedly eating lunch. I hope for a nice meal. Based on the smell of slow-cooked meat and slices of flaky baguette in baskets, the odds seem good. My high school French teacher stressed the French take food seriously, especially lunch, their largest meal of the day. Marion, the seven-year-old girl in my care, eats multi-course meals on actual plates with knives and forks in her school canteen—a far cry from sporks and Styrofoam trays with compartments for chili or mashed potatoes and a carton of milk, though I relished my school lunches, too. Michel, Marion's father, says the canteen doesn't cost the children or their families anything. All the children eat the same meal, which is simply part of French education and culture, the mark of civilized society. At my elementary school, the color of free and reduced lunch tickets outed kids whose families had fallen on hard times.
The waitress approaches my table with a small silver tray. She bows slightly and places a petite wineglass above and to the right of my knife. There must be some mistake. I didn't order wine. I just graduated high school and only learned a year of basic French. My language classes at the Sorbonne don't start for at least another week. Surely there's a misunderstanding. Wine is probably expensive, and I can't afford mistakes. I'm embarrassed to ask, "C'est combien?" How much? No, no, the waitress reassures me. The apéritif, a "kir," made with crème "of something" (a fruit I don't know) and white wine, comes with the meal. She walks to the kitchen in a few efficient strides, speaks to the chef, and loads her arms with plates.
The kir casts rosy, wavering parallelograms on the tablecloth. I have never seen wine this color. Not quite the dark burgundy of the wine served at church, nor the fair yellows of white wine. Not the pale pink wine my father poured from a jug into a water glass one morning during our stay with his elder sister Claudia in Riverside, California. I don't believe in the Devil, not really, and I'm not currently speaking to God, but I believe in evil. I believe in temptation because I have seen it. I think of that moment, my father sipping wine instead of black coffee on a beautiful California morning, the fruit ripening outside on my Uncle Jimmy's lemon tree, the pound cake Aunt Claudia would later make with those lemons to express her love, and my obvious disgust and disappointment as I poured myself a bowl of Frosted Flakes, the arrogant defeat on my father's face as he drank his breakfast, and I suppose what I'm saying is I believe in the fall.
Since arriving in France, I have begun to drink, a new reality that frightens and excites me. I'm afraid to enjoy the taste of alcohol and the customs surrounding it, to thrill at getting away with something illegal for my friends and former classmates back home. In Wyoming, no adult ever served me a glass of wine or offered me an apéritif. The only wine to pass my lips was port, the sweet sacrament of Christ's blood tipped into my mouth from the rim of a silver communion chalice. After the winter holidays during high school, some kids talked of flutes of champagne on New Year's or diluted wine at family gatherings, but they moved in an elite realm of remodeled or custom-built homes and season tickets to the Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra. The people we know are regular people, not "season tickets" people. Normal people drink reduced fat milk or coffee or soda or Kool-Aid with their meals. They care about their children's bones and know all the trouble underage drinking leads to: teen pregnancy, DUIs, juvenile delinquency, debt—and that's just getting started. Now that I'm in France, I tell myself the occasional Martini Vermouth before dinner or a small pour of table wine during the meal amount to politeness, fitting in, appearing more mature and less American. Drinking is not something I discuss with my parents.
What sits before me in this harmless little glass? I don't know, but it means something different. This kir marks my first drink alone and during the day, two sure signs of having "a problem." My father has "a problem." Everybody knows he has a problem, including him, and I am terrified of becoming my father—the person I am most ashamed of and most admire in the entire world. After two tours in Vietnam, he befriended Jimi Hendrix in Seattle and sold antiques in the Pacific Northwest. He is a virtuoso storyteller with an infectious bass laugh. He sees television ads about starving children and quietly weeps, though he denies crying. My father wants to save the world's population of poor and hurting kids, children like he was. He is the father who disappears on a weeklong bender, taking the Ford Taurus, our one good car, without warning, leaving us to worry whether he has driven into a ditch or killed someone. Part of me knows my father doesn't want to be an alcoholic, but if he really loved us, wouldn't he stop drinking?
At an Alateen meeting, one of the adult sponsors said alcoholism is a disease passed down, making it sound like diabetes or a higher risk of cancer. The sponsor called alcoholism a family disease that makes everyone around the alcoholic sick. I don't want to be sick. I won't be. So, when people tell me I look like my father, or that I take after him, what I hear them saying is I am going to ruin my life. Bit by bit, day by day, I will destroy the lives of all those who love me. I will break their hearts by giving them front row seats to the spectacle of me slowly killing myself. It doesn't matter that my father and I are different people, from different generations and places, or that my father started drinking in elementary school. By graduating high school, I have already exceeded his level of formal education, though I know I will never exceed his brilliance or hunger for living. My father admits he loves the taste of alcohol, Crown Royal and beer, and that he likes to drink. What happens if I start loving alcohol, too? What if his disease is already inside me, a destiny waiting for the right environment to manifest?
There is a story about my first drink my family finds funny. As an infant and toddler, I had a reputation for stealing and foraging food. Before I could walk, I crawled to the trashcan and retrieved the gnawed corncobs I was forbidden to eat. My mother placed freshly baked chocolate cupcakes out-of-reach, but I somehow managed to grab one. I murdered that cupcake, the evidence a trail of chocolatey crumbs circling my mouth and scattered down my onesie. Once I could walk, bacon was not safe.
At some point, my mother forbade my father from drinking in the house, so the summer afternoon he brought home a six-pack of bottled beer must have been before that moratorium. No one had seen or heard from me for a while. They went looking and calling, and when I didn't reply, they eventually discovered me around the southside of our front porch, among the flowering sweet peas and the four o'clock's perfume, sitting in the hot dry soil and coaxing the remnants from my father's empties into my upturned mouth. I hadn't started kindergarten.
By the time the waitress brings my entrée, I haven't touched the kir. I am pretty sure she notices. Something about the way she serves food, opens bottles of wine, pours water, folds napkins; I sense she is proud of the food and her service. She would be upset if someone didn't enjoy the lunch she has made possible. The chicken is dark and tender, braised with onions and carrots, glazed in a rich brown sauce flecked with parsley and thyme. The potatoes in the gratin are thinner, less cheesy than I'm used to, and their salty, slightly browned crust yields easily to my fork. Maybe cooked with butter and stock instead of milk? My family boasts gifted cooks on both sides. And on special occasions over the years, we've enjoyed excellent meals at Cheyenne's best restaurants—the Whipple House, the Hitching Post, Poor Richard's, and Little America—but this food is among the best I've had.
I tear off a piece of baguette and sip the kir, forgetting I am Excell Perry's underage daughter drinking alone during the day. For a moment, I look down and brace myself for the other diners' withering stares. When I look up, no one is looking at me. No one notices. Michel drinks wine at lunch during the workday. No one cares. Why should people care? In France, drinking is normal, and anyway, isn't each person the center of their own universe? My father says my life is like a movie. I am the director. I cast the parts. I write the pink slips. I breathe a little easier realizing these strangers don't know me or my father. For them, there is nothing remarkable about a girl satisfying her need to eat and drink.
The next time I taste the kir, its mild white wine carries the flavor of the fruit the waitress mentioned—blackcurrant, I will later learn. The kir is delicious on its own, and because it improves the taste of every bite, I try to make it last.
After I finish my entrée, the waitress checks on me, "Everything good?"
"Oui, excéllent. Merci," I say, looking her in the eye.
"Bon," she smiles and clears my plate and empty wine glass. Her departure and the plain white table, the orderly space she leaves and creates, bear the pleasant, expectant weight of absence, like a pause between orchestral movements. When the waitress returns with a slice of tarte tatin paired with a dollop of whipped cream, several of my fellow diners have moved on into the rest of their day. Strange not to know any facts about their lives, except for what they've eaten; strange, given what has occurred, that they know no facts about me. I've never had tarte tatin, but I recognize the components: pastry, thickly cut apples, and a sweet caramel nearly caught but saved by a quick hand.
At her post near the kitchen, at the end of the lunch rush, the waitress surveys the dining room. She is a woman who has done her job and appears content to have done it well. The banter between her and the chef has shifted into a looser, more jocular register. It's weird that observing people eat and drink—noticing and attending to all the little gestures and details—is part of her job. If someone wants to pay, if they need more bread or water. Can she tell just that, more than anything, I want to be someone? I wonder if she knows how desperate I am to know what I'm made of and who I will become. I wish she could tell me if I am the girl becoming that woman even now.
