You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [18]
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I packed my small bag. The old woman from the hotel put her hands on my shoulders and said something I did not understand. I climbed into a taxi and waved to her. She stood with one hand on her hip, the other moving back and forth through the morning air.
Sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight to Paris, I thought of her round cheeks, thick hands, her black skirts, the sympathetic looks each morning as she brought me extra honey, her sad, encouraging good-bye. I looked down as we arced out over the island, the sea below a plate of blue, the sun just rising over the water. She’d pitied me.
GILAD
The school buses looked like those you see parked in front of Trocadero belching tourists onto the esplanade. Big things with comfortable, reclining seats. A whole fleet of them. The school invented bus stops, certain corners in each arrondissement where you’d get picked up. The first day of school there were nervous parents throughout the city standing on the sidewalk holding their children’s hands waiting for the buses to arrive.
I waited alone that first morning, so sure of myself, and when the bus came I climbed on to find it packed with Americans. Why that surprised me I can’t imagine. It had always been the same everywhere I’d been. I’d spent so much time on my own in the city, communicating in French, that I’d forgotten where I’d be going to school.
Usually it was straight directly from the airport to the compound, to embassy welcomes, to neighborhood parties, to school orientations. There had never been a time to forget that you were foreign, that you’d be driven around, kept apart. So the shock of climbing onto that bus and seeing the kids dressed as they were, speaking as they did, was terrible.
There were baseball hats turned backward, Knicks jerseys, and so on. The usual American shit. I found a seat and leaned my head against the window and listened to the same conversations.
Where are you from? Where did you live before this? Do you speak French? Do you like it here? Do you know John? Did you know Kelly? How was your summer? Have you seen Julia? Ben looks so hot. On and on.
It made me tired. It was worse here as we passed through the city, stopping to collect more along the way. I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to find more of Paris, to make Parisian friends, to escape from this world. For the first time in my life, I was sure I could become a local, could be swallowed up by a place, could move unnoticed through the streets and this, this international school, this bus, was yet another American badge.
There was a black metal gate that ran the length of the school’s property. We turned into the parking lot and followed a line of other buses as they pulled up along the curb to let students out.
You’d think that the International School of France would be a collection of beautiful buildings, ivy, lawns, and a Gothic bell tower maybe. Something academic, regal, scholarly. I imagined something traditional, something elegant.
The school reminded me of visa-processing offices, of vaccination centers in Africa, of aging hospitals. It felt like bureaucracy and routine. Having attended so many of these schools, I was used to the sudden rush of kids speaking English in their American uniforms—Gap, Banana Republic, Nike, Abercrombie and Fitch, and so on.
I’d been so sure that this school would be something beautiful.
There was a tall man with a silver ponytail and glasses standing in the foyer loudly directing traffic.
“Please move down the hall to the auditorium. Don’t worry about finding your lockers, just move down the hall, find a seat and sit in it.”
He wore a rumpled suit and waved his hands as if sending airplanes to their hangars.
“Please do not stop at your lockers. Go directly to the auditorium.