“Agree, consent. Or you could just say d’accord. See, it’s not as hard as you think.”
“How’s five sound?”
“En français.”
“Five, five . . . cinq,” he said.
“Bien. Cinq. Oh, how formal is this dinner?” I asked, thinking about what Chastity had said.
“My father wears a jacket and tie. For a Saturday-night dinner, we do dress, but it’s not black-tie.”
“Okay,” I said, a little unsure. Now I wished I had saved my dress for that night.
I hung up but was immediately overcome with worry.
“I just made you an appointment today for your hair,” Mama said, stepping into my room. “Two o’clock. I thought it would be a good excuse to do it, no?”
“Yes. They dress a little formally, Mama. I don’t know if I have anything nice enough.”
She thought a moment and then ripped off her apron. “We’re off to shop.”
“Really? But you just bought me new clothes, Mama.”
“That was a start. I’ve got a lot of making up to do, for myself as well as for you,” she said. “Allons.”
Papa didn’t put up a syllable of resistance. It was as if we all wanted this incoming tide of new happiness to keep washing onto our family shores.
But there is a lot out there in the sea, and the shore has little to say about what washes onto it.
7
This time, Mama and I knew we couldn’t get past Papa’s scrutiny so easily, but she wanted me to have a more conservative look anyway, so we bought a black dress, but it was calf-length. She bought me a purse to go with it and then another pair of shoes. Afterward, she bought herself a new dress and a pair of shoes, too. I felt this was a different sort of shopping spree, very different from when she was buying me new school clothes. It was as if my going on a date and being invited to a boy’s home for dinner had opened up a new world to us both, a world I thought she had missed with Roxy.
I could feel how she was looking at me differently, too, talking to me more like one grown woman to another. I sensed that there was a moment in time, perhaps, when your mother becomes more like your sister. We giggled over some of the clothes we both tried on, complimented each other when something looked good on us, and then went to celebrate our successes at lunch. Mama talked more about herself as a young girl, some of the boys she had dated and thought she had loved. There were revelations about her family that I had never heard. According to what she told me, her mother was almost as strict as Papa. In some ways, what her sister Manon had done had put her in a place very similar to the place I was in because of Roxy.
“My mother was always worried that I would have the same fate as Manon,” she said. “I could see it on her face whenever I went with a boy or a boy came to our home. Fortunately, she was very fond of your father. She saw he was a no-nonsense man right away. I think she liked him more than I did in the beginning. Suddenly, everything he said and wanted was sensible, and everything I said was questionable.
“But my love life was far from perfect. I had many disappointments, especially when I was your age or a little older. Affections were more fleeting. We were all so eager to have a romance, to be involved with someone, but it didn’t take long to realize that it wasn’t wise to put too much faith in someone so quickly. After all, we were both just exploring our own feelings, going into what your father calls ‘uncharted territory.’ Just as you’re doing now, we were exploring, testing ourselves.” She smiled, and I could see that she was smiling at some memory.
“Was there one special boy before Papa?”
“Oh, there was, but it wasn’t as deeply felt. There wasn’t that sense of commitment, what my father described as an investment of life in someone else. He was a bit of a romantic, my father. No one but me knew it, but he loved reading Daphne du Maurier. He’d see one of my mother’s or sister’s romance novels and say he was going to read it to see what the big deal was.”
She laughed, and then she looked at me intently, deeply, and said, “I envy you for the journey you are about to begin.”
“Are you sorry about anything you did when you were younger, Mama?”
“No. I’m with Edith Piaf. Je regrette rien.”
I hoped I would regret nothing, too. She hugged me, and we finished our lunch.
Hearing my mother talk about her past like this, revealing more of her intimate memories and her feelings, drew us closer to each other than ever. It was always difficult to imagine your parents when they were your age, even when you saw pictures of them back then, but her willingness to share with me enabled me to have at least a glimpse of her as a young girl.
Papa thought we had drunk too much wine or something when he saw us afterward. We were still giggling and making jokes about the people we had seen and the things we had done.
“Who’s the teenager here?” he cried, pretending to be upset.
Afterward, Mama talked him into taking a walk with her in the park. “For a little while,” she said, “we’ll be like we first were.”