Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [214]
More clapping from the obedient Child-adorers, a bit subdued and possibly even confused (Jeannette? Who’s Jeannette?), but an ovation nonetheless. On stage left, Macy’s PR scowler was gnashing her teeth. I bestowed upon her one of my sweetest smiles.
Before Julia finished her talk, the audience was already furiously buying sets of her videotapes and mushrooming toward the stage to have her autograph them. I had to act fast. I pulled a big white apron out of a shopping bag and laid it before her.
“Would you please sign this to my four-year-old daughter, Natasha?”
“Of course,” she said, scrawling all across the front, in bright blue ink, “To Natasha. Bon Appétit. Julia Child.”
“Does she like to cook?” she asked, intently dotting all three i’s.
It was a logical question, considering the circumstances. It didn’t seem to require deep philosophical reflection. But it made me wonder if I should be giving my daughter an apron after all, if this was one of those things that were “very nice but not particularly feminist.” Would I be reinforcing the traditional girlie messages, blurring for Natasha the distinctions I’d tried to make clear for myself? Ideally I didn’t want my daughter even to know that there was a time when women couldn’t do whatever they wanted; and even though that time was still very much with us at her four-year mark in 1985, there were indications that her generation might feel its constrictions less strongly. Their talents and potential might flourish, if not unhampered at least less encumbered. That is, if they weren’t confused by gifts of aprons and other such symbol-laden trinkets.
As I tucked the apron back into the bag, I took a last serious look at it. For a second I was startled. How could I have missed something so obvious? Of course this apron would make a fine present for my daughter, for anybody’s daughter. Its message was not “Stand by the stove” or “This is your life” or “Anatomy is destiny.” Far from it. Its message was “Bon Appétit.”
We’ll Always Have Paris
STACY SCHIFF
WHEN THE AUTHOR of this piece and her family left Paris after a year there, they had more suitcases than they cared to count (though the number was significantly less than the 126 Benjamin Franklin reportedly had upon his departure in 1783). But even her then ten-year-old son had to admit the family had had an experience that couldn’t be measured by suitcases.
STACY SCHIFF, a noted biographer, has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She’s the author of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Henry Holt, 2005), Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown, 2010), Saint Exupéry: A Biography (Knopf, 1994), and Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage (Random House, 1999), which won a Pulitzer Prize for biography.
THE OBSESSION TOOK hold in New York, which posed a problem: what I wanted to write about next was Ben Franklin’s eighteenth-century adventure in France. On some level, I knew from the start that the only way to research that book was to move our family, for some period of time, to Paris. And from the start—even as friends enviously asked if we would do so—I dreaded the prospect. Generally Paris is not considered a hardship posting, save to someone who values efficiency, candor, and Sichuan takeout. Nor was this to be a larky, lighthearted school year abroad. Paris means Angélina’s chocolat chaud and the Tuileries at dusk and the Rodin Museum and Pierre Hermé, but it is also a city, I had come to learn, of phone repairmen, plumbers, and dentists, the vast majority of them French. With age, the dislocations tend to announce themselves less as bracing, extra-carbonated mental states than as crippling tornadoes of small details.
In part I suppose I dreaded what can only be termed my own devolution. Whereas at home I am organized, competent, and semiarticulate, I am in France awkward and incapable. I can be deaf to nuance; some frequencies elude me entirely. Franklin was very clear about the fact that a man