I sat up straighter and pulled back my shoulders. Today, more than any day in my life, I wanted to be an honorary DuPree woman.
Norene slipped in and out of the room several times. Each time she returned with a plate of simple but beautifully presented food. First came a bowl of freshly washed strawberries and a small ramekin of sugar for dipping the strawberries. Next she brought a round of goat cheese. Then the last plate included a decorative knife, a fan of crackers, and a dark spread.
“Pâté.” Amy raised her eyebrows appreciatively.
Knowing full well that I was being offered goose liver, I spread a modest amount of the pâté on a cracker and took a bite. The flavor made my taste buds stand up and do a little cancan dance on my tongue.
Amy asked how I liked it. The du Bois women waited for my response. I said the first appropriate thing I could think. “Ooh la la!”
The women smiled and offered me more goat cheese. I silently congratulated myself for passing International French Diplomacy 101 with such an easy final exam. I felt honored to be a guest in the fabulous room with such charming women. I knew Amy couldn’t possibly be more pleased with what she was experiencing.
Our visit lasted a little more than two hours. As the conversation wound down, Madame du Bois rose and offered Amy and me fragrant kisses on each cheek. We returned the gesture and followed Norene downstairs. I noticed that Norene had put up the closed sign on her shop door while we had been upstairs celebrating.
Before she opened her doors again to the public, Norene turned to us. “My mother and I would like you to select anything from our store as a memory to take with you.”
I shouldn’t have been stunned that she spoke perfect English, but I was. I realized that probably Madame du Bois spoke English as well. But this was their home. Amy had honored them by speaking their language, and no doubt she had endeared herself to them as a result. She had done what Grandmere had asked. She had blessed the du Bois family that afternoon.
“Thank you,” I said to Norene. “Merci. You have been very kind and generous to us.”
“You brought joy to my mother. I am the one who offers a thank-you.”
Amy and I took our time, viewing the amazing assortment of fine French linens. We had observed in the other shops that the French considered it impolite to finger everything while looking, so we put our hands to our sides and used our eyes to evaluate the rows of bedsheets and stacks of tea towels.
I selected a striped tea towel for my kitchen. Norene insisted I take two. I tried to decline, but Amy gave me a firm look from across the room, and I relented. As Norene expertly wrapped the matching tea towels in tissue paper and tied the flat bundle with a raffia ribbon, I told her that every time I used the towels I would think of her, her mother, and their beautiful shop and home.
She looked pleased.
However, she was much more pleased when Amy took a bold step, went all out, and decided to take home a complete set of sheets. I was stunned. I didn’t think selecting something so expensive would be polite. Norene, however, looked as if Amy was paying her a compliment by wanting the nicest quality linen in the store.
It was all so fitting. Amy went after life wholeheartedly. She always had.
In a further gesture of generosity, Norene insisted on shipping the gift home for Amy so she wouldn’t have to pack the thick set in her suitcase.
With addresses exchanged, more airy kisses on the cheeks, and a potpourri of French and English farewells, Amy and I stepped out the door into the plein air.
“Well?” I grinned at my radiant friend. “That was wonderful.”
“Yes, wonderful.” Amy murmured. “So wonderful.”
“Would you mind if we did a little backtracking?” I asked.
“Sure. Where do you want to go?”
“Back to the blouse shop.”
Amy looked surprised. “Change your mind?”
I nodded. “Every now and then it’s good to be a little extravagant and celebrate life, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely. Especially when the last time I remember your being extravagant was seventeen years ago.”
I tried to remember what I’d bought seventeen years ago and couldn’t recall the memory that Amy seemed to have at her fingertips.
“For Jeanette. At the hotel room. Don’t you remember the huge basket with all the gifts? That was immensely generous of you.”
I remembered how much I’d hesitated and second-guessed myself that day. “It’s not easy to break through the money barrier after growing up celebrating frugality.”
“True,” Amy agreed. “And it’s not easy breaking through the discipline barrier when sugar is practically a daily food group. But you know what? We’re getting better, you and me. We’re finding a little balance in life.”
I wasn’t quite ready to pat myself on the back. I hadn’t bought the blouse yet.
The shopkeeper at the blouse store recognized Amy and me and seemed surprised to see us when we entered. She switched to English when I said I had returned to buy the blouse I had tried on. She asked if we had gone far before returning to her shop.
“No,” Amy said. “We’ve been at the linen shop. Madame du Bois’s mother taught my grandmere to sew.”
The shopkeeper’s face burst into a smile followed by many friendly words in French. We left her shop twenty minutes later with my new blouse wrapped in tissue and cradled in a silver box with a white ribbon around it.
“She really didn’t have to give me that discount,” I told Amy. “I was prepared to pay the full price.”
“I know. I think she wanted to do something nice since we were friends with the du Boises. It wasn’t a very big discount. You probably saved a total of ten dollars. Maybe fifteen.”
“Still, it was kind of her.”
“Then just receive it and be blessed,” Amy said.
We walked with our shopping bags tapping against our legs. Part of me struggled with feeling as if the expensive blouse, discount and all, was something I shouldn’t have splurged on. This whole trip was such an extravagant gift. The rich experiences were enough in and of themselves.
It was the first time I remembered admitting to myself that I had a hard time receiving gifts. I was fine with giving and doing for everyone else, usually in moderation, but nevertheless with a willingness to help out. Receiving was a different story. Something deep inside whispered that I didn’t deserve anything extra.
“Where are we going?” Amy suddenly asked.
I shook off my inner contemplations and looked around. We were heading toward the Eiffel Tower, as if a magnetic force were pulling us closer. “I wasn’t paying attention. I just started walking. But since we’re so close to the Eiffel Tower, let’s take a few pictures.”
Amy agreed, and we kept walking. And walking. The crazy part about the Eiffel Tower is that it’s so huge it looks as if you could reach it in no time. But our little trek took half an hour.
We snapped each other’s pictures during our approach, upon our arrival, and again from the center looking straight up. The structure looked different in the afternoon light. Amy said it seemed rickety and not romantic, like it had at night. I thought it looked sincere. And aging.
“We have plenty of time before our eight o’clock dinner.” I nodded toward the line at the ticket booth. “Are you ready to go up?”
Amy laughed. “I’m not going up there.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not.
“Amy, it’s the Eiffel Tower.”
She glared at me.
“You know? Paris? Pair-ee? The Eye-full Tow-er. I really, really, really think you should go up.”
“Well I really, really, really don’t think I want to.” Her hands were on her hips now, and she was getting her sass going. Shirleene’s influence was showing up loud and clear.
With my hands on my hips, I tried to menacingly shake what my mama gave me. “Amy-girl,” I raised my voice, “you are going up this thing, and yo
u are going up it now!”
Amy stared at me. “What in the world was that?”
“Nothing.” I put my hands down and silenced my rhythm-challenged hips. Switching quickly to what I hoped was psychology, I said, “You have one question to ask yourself. That question is, how can I go home from Paris and tell people I was this close but didn’t go up the Eiffel Tower?”
“Easy. I just say I went to the Eiffel Tower. I don’t have to say I went up the Eiffel Tower.”
“You have to do this.”
“No I don’t.”
“Amy, I understand your fear of heights, and I respect that. But this backing down thing is not like you. You are a woman who faces challenges with gusto. I saw the way you gave birth to your babies. And look at how you conquered your weight in less than a year.”
“I never hit my goal. I still had six pounds to lose when we left home. So you can’t say I exactly conquered my weight.”
“Six pounds? Amy, we’ve walked off six pounds since we’ve been here. At least. Forget about the six pounds. What about the fifty pounds you lost before we came?”
“Forty-nine,” she corrected me.
“Forty-nine! Forty-nine, Amy! That’s a huge victory! You went after a gigantic goal, and you not only met it, you conquered it. That’s what you do. You fight for what matters to you. You are my Joan of Arc. You can’t walk away now. This is it. The Eiffel Tower. You need to go up there and make peace with your fear of heights.”
Amy looked at me defiantly. “Why?”
“Otherwise you will spend the rest of your life telling yourself that you had the chance to scale the one and only Eiffel Tower and look down over all of Paris and conquer this thing. But you didn’t do it. And I know you well enough to know that that isn’t something you will want to live with.”
Amy crossed her arms. “I hate that you know me so well.”
“Yeah, well, I do. And sometimes I hate it that you can see right through me, too. But that’s why we have each other, Amy. What did Jill say we were? Sisterchicks? Yeah, we’re Sisterchicks. And I’m telling you as your Sisterchick that you need to leave this city with no regrets. Believe me, you do not want to leave here with memories that will haunt you the rest of your life.”
My voice had elevated. A couple walking past looked over at us. I took it down a notch and said, “Just promise me something. I’ve made lots of promises to you. This is what I want you to promise me. Promise me, Amelie Jeanette DuPree Rafferty, that you will not leave Paris with regrets. No regrets. Promise me.”
She paused before nodding her head slowly. “Okay. But the same goes for you, Lisa Marie Kroeker Moreland. No regrets like last time.”
Her words sliced my heart with the precision of a surgeon’s blade. In my typical duck-and-cover routine, I pulled out a diverting surprise. “Amy, my middle name is not Marie.”
“What?”
“It’s not Marie.”
“Yes it is. You told me your middle name was Marie when we met in third grade.”
“No. Actually, you told me my middle name was Marie, and I didn’t correct you. I liked Marie better than my real middle name.”
Amy’s hands were back on her hips, and her mouth was open. “So what is your middle name?”
“Mona.”
“Mona. Mona? Your middle name is Mona? That’s not so bad. All these years you let me believe your middle name was Marie because you didn’t want me to know your name was Mona?”
“I didn’t want anyone to know. It was another one of my father’s little jokes.”
“And what is so all-fire funny about the name Mona?”
I gave Amy a come-on-work-with-me-here look. Apparently I had to do the math for her. “Think about it. How would you like to grow up being Lisa Mona Kroeker.”
“Ooh. Lisa Mona. I get it.”
“You renamed me that day on the school ground, Amy. And I let you.” My voice, tone, and posture softened. “It was the first time anyone accessorized me with hope. Sorry if I wore it too long.”
I didn’t know if Amy was going to laugh or cry.
She did a wonderful thing. She opened her arms and wrapped me in the accessory that is even more versatile and lovely than hope—she wrapped me in acceptance. Grace upon lovely layer of grace.
“Your dad …” she muttered under her breath.
“I know.” I pulled away and blinked back a rogue tear.
“You do know, don’t you, that I named my daughter Jeanette Marie for the two of us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Jeannette because of my middle name and Marie for what I thought was your middle name.”
I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of my stomach. “I always thought it was Jeanette for your grandmere and … I guess I never knew where you came up with the Marie. Oh, Amy, now I feel awful.”
“Well, you should,” Amy said with a snit in her voice, giving the end of my flyaway hair a flick of her fingers. “But I’m not going to change her name now. Not to Jeanette Mona. I would never do that to a daughter of mine. I can’t believe your dad did that. Or, actually, yes I can believe it. Lisa, I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry? I’m the one who’s sorry. I should have told you years ago. It was too painful to admit in elementary school. You know how cruel kids are, making fun of other people’s names. By the time you and I reconnected, it didn’t seem to matter. I had no idea you named Jeanette after me.”
“We’re pathetic, you know that?” Amy said. “Come on. We need to go someplace else.”
“Where?”
“I don’t care. We just need to leave and come back here another day. I’m not ready to sort through any more of your childhood trauma or my fear of heights. The Eiffel Tower will still be here tomorrow.”
Amy linked her arm through mine. “When we get home, I’m driving you to the county courthouse or wherever we need to go, and you are going to change your middle name.”
“You mean legally change it to Marie?”
“You can change it to anything you want. Just make the Mona go away.”
“Fine.” I sounded snippy but secretly agreed with Amy and appreciated her nudge.
“You know what I think we should do now?” Amy asked.
“It’s obviously not going to the top of the Eiffel Tower.”
“I think we should go to the Louvre and see the real Mona.”
“You are such a brat.”
“No, I’m not. I’m trying to make up for lost time yesterday. The book said all the wings are open until midnight tonight.”
“I suppose that’s to make up for being closed on Tuesdays?”
Amy shrugged. “All I know is, we have almost five hours before we go to dinner. We can find the Louvre easily by Metro, and it’s close enough to our hotel that we can change before we go to the restaurant.”
“What are we waiting for?”
I asked the same question of Amy again half an hour later. We were standing in a sea of people in front of the glass pyramid dome that marked the escalator entrance to the Louvre.
“They’re checking through everyone’s bags before we can enter,” Amy said.
I adjusted my shopping bags and watched the glass circular elevator that rose in the center interior of the glass pyramid. “I hope they don’t unpack all our gifts.”
“Or confiscate our chocolates,” Amy added.
Once again, her familiarity with French came to our aid because she was able to explain where we had bought the items we were lugging around with us. The guards checked only our purses and waved us through into the museum. At the base of the pyramid, we stood in another line to buy entrance tickets.
Entering the Louvre was completely different from when I had been there last. Feeling as if we were lining up to enter an amusement park, I hoped the humongous museum of priceless art hadn’t gone commercial.
Within the first few minutes inside the actual museum, I realized little had changed. I soon found myself lost in wonder a
s Amy and I strolled quietly side by side, consulting our guide book.
Standing in front of a statue from 1513 titled Rebellious Slave, Amy read, “ ‘Michelangelo said his purpose was to carve away the marble in order to reveal that which God put inside. In this example of Renaissance mastery, the subject seems to be struggling to free himself of the rock he’s made from.’ ”
She tilted her head appreciatively at the statue. “We can all relate, can’t we?”
“Relate to what?” I asked, awed by the fine details in the statue.
“I relate to being a rebellious slave to my old self. Don’t all of us struggle constantly to be free from the elements we’re made of?”
I gave Amy a surprised look. “That was profound.”
She ignored me and kept moving forward, following the signs to the Mona Lisa. I thought of the sensations I’d felt the first time we went to Angelina’s. I saw myself as the rebel in an orderly universe where there are no “maverick molecules.” Gravity always works.
If God was the True Artist, creating all of us and this world filled with intricate details, what was He thinking? What was He feeling? What was He trying to express? What does He carve away from us to release what He put inside?
“Amy?” I stopped in a long hallway of framed artwork. “I have a question. What do you think God was thinking when He made us?”
“Easy. He was thinking He wanted us.”
That had not been my conclusion. “Why do you say that?”
“Because that’s what He says over and over in the Bible. He wants us to be in a restored relationship with Him. Why are you asking?”
Amy made it sound so simple. I’d spent my life viewing God and His commands as complicated. I knew all about the struggle to break free from the rock I’d come from.
“Just thinking,” I said to Amy.
We worked our way down another long corridor in this converted palace where Napoleon once ruled. Our plan was to get in line to see Mona Baby and then backtrack with as much time as we had left to view other key pieces, such as the Venus de Milo.