Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [28]
Across the street in the Tuileries I could hear the wind moving through the trees; it made a rustling sound, like that of a woman waltzing in a taffeta dress.
In a few minutes I reached the turnoff to the Pont Royal, the bridge that would take me across the Seine to my hotel. I walked on. Past the Louvre and across the bridge; past the small cafés and brasseries; past the closed butchers’ shops, and the patisseries still redolent with the scent of fresh-baked bread.
Near my hotel I stopped to examine a display of stylish hats in a millinery shop, some with veils as gossamer as spiderwebs. Suddenly I saw myself reflected in the window, peering out between the expressionless faces of two mannequins wearing small tilted hats with veils. Perhaps, I thought, I should buy a hat with a veil. Like Liliane’s.
Just then I spotted an elderly woman walking toward me. She was carrying something. As she moved into the circle of light spilling out from the window, I saw she was cradling a small, smiling dog in her arms. Wrapped in a heavy woolen scarf, the dog looked at me quizzically. The woman, however, never lifted her eyes from the narrow sidewalk. As she passed, the air filled with the familiar scent of gardenias; it was the same cheap perfume adored by my grandmother.
I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and pretended it was my grandmother passing by. Suddenly Grandmother’s voice sprang out from the corners of my childhood: Och, Alice, that canna’ be you? she asked in her achingly familiar Scottish accent.
I began to list all the women whose lives had intersected with mine that day. My friend Susan. The singer in the gold lamé shorts. Anne, the film producer. The women at the Ritz on their way to Egypt. The North African women begging on the rue de Rivoli. And now, turning the corner and passing just out of sight, the elderly woman cradling a dog.
How, I wondered, did we become the women we are? Was it just the accident of birth that ultimately placed some of us at the Ritz, drinking champagne, and others on the streets, begging? Or was it the fragility of permanence—the stunning ease with which an entire life can be broken and changed, in minutes, on an ordinary day. And why was it that I could imagine myself being any one of these women, doing whatever I had to do to make my way through the world?
Women do that, I thought. They learn to adapt. I watched my mother do it, and my grandmother too. Through marriage and divorce, through too little money or too much, too many children or too few, through sorrow and joy and all the longings that were not and never could be named, women, I learned, adapted.
At first the lives of women frightened me. They seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. Then I realized it was this flexibility that enabled them to survive. I saw, too, that sooner or later, by choice or by chance, most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence; in darker moods, as survival. Either way, women had to do it.
But now as I approached my hotel I left behind both past and future. I was here in Paris, alive, feeling only the simple pleasure that comes from entering the moment. The night air on my bare arms, the lamps from the nearby café punching holes of light into the darkness, the elegant, veiled hats arranged in a shop window, the skies overhead changing from pale lavender to deep violet: this was what existed for me.
In my hotel room, the bed had been prepared for sleep, its soft, cream-colored sheets neatly turned back. I opened the large French windows to let