Frankie in Paris
Authors: Shauna McGuiness
Frankie in Paris
By Shauna McGuiness
Copyright © 2012 by Shauna McGuiness
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or
used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the
publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Une Idée
I took French all through high school,
conjugating verbs and doing lame skits with as much enthusiasm as I could muster—which
was actually quite a bit.
Although never
fluent in the language, I could definitely hold a conversation.
I learned how to say “
Qui vole un oeuf vole un boeuf
” (‘He who steals an egg steals an
ox’) and, “
L’ananas va sauter en
parachute
” (which means something about parachuting pineapples, I think).
It was possible for me to understand what people were saying
en français
, if not give an intelligible
response.
French was on my schedule in junior college,
too—for one semester, at least.
All I
remember about that class was the Croatian guy who sat next to me and talked
incessantly about his “smokin’ hot” blonde girlfriend.
Apparently, she resembled Cameron Diaz.
He thought so anyway:
he took her photo out of his wallet and
showed me once.
I wasn't impressed.
She seemed more Soccer Mom than Supermodel.
Sitting around Lulu’s swimming pool in July, France was the
farthest thing from my mind.
I was
sitting away from the pool.
In the shade
.
I had been working on keeping my skin a
vampiric shade of pale for years—which is quite a feat if you were born and
raised in sunny California.
Okay now, back to my twenties.
Actually, back to twenty:
I had just left the teen years behind about
four days prior, and my grandmother had an idea. Flipping up the attachable
sunglasses that she wore over her regular specs, she looked at me
intently.
“Every twenty-year-old girl should visit Paris,” Lulu
announced.
“Really?”
My interest was piqued because the only girl in
the general vicinity who fit that bill was
moi
.
“How would you like to go?”
This blew my mind a little because we generally
aren’t the kind of family that just up and flits off to foreign countries on a
whim. We didn’t have that kind of money and my parents were under the
impression that places should be visited by car, truck or RV. Even places that
are very. Far. Away.
Say, like, Canada.
***
Never will I forget spending days in the bed of
my stepfather’s truck, bumping along from California
to Banff. This
was before those crazy seatbelt laws were put into effect (my dad would want me
to mention that there was a cover over the truck bed).
I spent hours and hours crowded back there
with my whiny siblings, listening to endless ‘80s music.
Just what every tween girl wants to do on her
summer vacation.
I still can’t listen to
"Material Girl" without thinking about Expo ’86.
Totally Radical, Dude.
The best part about that trip was getting my
photo taken with a life-size cardboard cutout of my latest crush, Don Johnson,
from
Miami
Vice.
He was wearing the white sport
jacket with the rolled up sleeves, made super famous by the TV series he
starred in during the 1980’s.
A pink
T-shirt was visible under the manly-chic jacket.
If you squinted your eyes and looked sideways
at the photo, it almost looked real.
Best eight bucks I ever spent.
***
Now forward to twenty:
Paris
!
C’est magnifique!
“So, how do we do this?”
I asked, trying not to be too hopeful.
“Well, I lived in France, you know!”
Forty years ago.
I'm sure
it hasn’t changed at all
.
Yeah, right!
"When should we go?”
“How about soon?
How about next week?
Do you want some melon?”
She handed me a paper plate filled with
cantaloupe slices.
“Uh, Lulu, don’t we have to get plane tickets
and a hotel room?”
“Really, Francesca, you
do
know that this isn’t the first trip that I’ve ever planned!”
***
My name is Francis, but everyone calls me Frank—because
I don’t
feel
like a Francis.
I was named after an aunt on my maternal
side, somewhere way on down the line.
Nobody remembers anything about her, but my mother thought it sounded
like a sophisticated name. My very good friends call me Frankie, but Lulu
insists on calling me Francesca and always has.
I have no idea why.
My younger brother and sister got average
names.
Jimmy and Sally:
you can’t get more normal than that.
That’s okay, though, because
the truth is and will always remain that I am
not. Normal, I
mean. Because as far as I can tell, not too many
normal
people can do this one particularly strange thing that I am
able to do:
I move things with my mind.
There, I said it.
Sort of like an
episode of
The Twilight Zone
, or
something, isn't it?
It’s called telekinesis, or TK for short.
Sounds crazy, right?
Well, it
is
crazy.
Some experts believe that most people have the
ability to do what I can do, but they just don’t know how to channel the
energy:
I’ve spent a whole lot of years
trying to figure out how
not
to use
this... talent.
Can you imagine how freaked out the teachers at
Happy Time Preschool got, when toys and books would fly right off the shelves
into my hands?
Or how Manny Lucas’s
peanut butter sandwich inch-worming, as though alive, across the snack table
didn’t go over terribly well?
All I can
say is that I was a PB&J devotee and my mother packed me tuna.
My parents worked diligently to teach me how to
hide my abilities.
They would prefer
that I didn’t use them at all, but what fun would that be?
As a child, I would spend hours playing with my
dolls, making my Barbies create little live home movies right in front of my
eyes.
Ken would
dip Barbie and give her kisses, or
I could watch them drive her pink car around
my room.
It was better than
Nick at Nite
!
When I was six, my brother was born.
My sister followed two years later.
It
was
usually my job to keep them entertained because I could turn their nurseries
into a Sunday evening Muppets special.
It took some serious coaching to make sure that they never told anyone
about their "special" toys. It had to be understood that this was For
Home Only. No one would have believed them, anyway.
Apparently, this is a hereditary issue.
I’m the first in two generations to be
afflicted.
And yes, it is an
affliction.
The temptation to use my
gift is nearly overwhelming at times.
I’ve learned to curb the urge and have become really good at sensing
when no one is looking.
My great-grandmother was the last one to have
the gift.
It only shows up in the
females of the family, on my mother’s side.
I met her once when I was ten and we flew to Iowa for a family reunion.
Nana was already ninety and not quite all
there.
We visited her nursing home to
help one of my uncles who was picking her up so she could live with him.
The attendants at the place were spooked
about the items in her room moving around when Nana’s classical records
played.
She had forgotten, or perhaps no
longer cared, to hide her superpowers.
Uncle Ronnie put on a pretty good show, accusing the facility of being
haunted and acting really freaked out.
He could have won an Oscar for all the crucifixes he planted on himself,
backing out of the place with his fingers, repeating the "forehead, chest,
shoulder, shoulder" routine.
We're
not even Catholic!
Once we had her safely transported to her new
home, they let me have a while alone with her.
She had no idea who I was (and she thought Ronnie was my deceased
great-grandfather), but she delighted in the fact that I could do the things
that she could.
She played a Chopin
record on her ancient record player, and we made her things dance around the
room in a delicate ballet of handkerchiefs and antique costume jewelry.
“I’ll tell you what my Aunt Edith told
me.”
Her eyes were covered in wrinkly
folds, but sparkled like they belonged to a very young woman. “Use it or lose
it.”
Nana's laugh sounded like a spoon
clinking on the side of a crystal glass.
***
So, I can swing my car keys through the air, or
stir something on the stove while I’m sitting in front of the television.
My ability to multitask is awesome.
The limit is around fifty pounds—which means
I can’t pick people up, or anything.
Such a shame, since there have been plenty of times where I’d like to
lift rude customers up and hurl them out into the mall, where I worked.
Moving
numerous items at the same time takes a ton of
concentration and energy.
It can be
exhausting.
When I am really, really angry or frightened, I
can’t always control myself.
Explaining
these instances away is difficult and mortifying.
The only people—besides my family—who know about
my secret are my best friend, Alicia, and my boyfriend, Rich.
***
Looking at the sun reflecting on the pool,
I took a bite of melon and chewed
thoughtfully.
This trip was never going
to happen.
“I’ll visit Triple A.
Your grandfather will help me.
Do you think you could go next week?”
I can
definitely go next week.
If it's
really going to happen.
This was 1995, and I worked at the mall in a
store called Above the Waist.
You would
think that we only sold things that were worn
above the waist.
Wrong!
We did not discriminate against any body
part.
We even had a jewelry
counter.
We sold silver and gold,
although I was never promoted to that department.
I was usually on the sales floor selling baby
doll Ts and Bongo jeans.
I am talking about the jeans that you wore
buttoned
above
your navel.
Now
they are called Mom Jeans, but back then, it was what the girls wore on
Friends
.
I was good at my job, too.
But not good enough that I couldn’t give very
short notice for an all expenses paid trip to Paris, France.
“Lulu, I will make myself available if you can
make it happen.”
Please God. Pleasepleaseplease!
“Oh, I’ll make it happen.
We won’t need to go with a group, because I
lived there and I know my way around.”
***
Lulu Day moved from the United States to France in the late 1950s.
My grandfather was a major in the US Army and
was stationed there.
His young wife
didn’t want to be without him any longer, so she packed up herself and her two
small children and hopped on a plane from America
to France.
Unannounced.
So this wasn’t her first last minute trip to Europe.
I always loved hearing the story of how, upon
debarking from the airplane at the French airport, she realized that her skirt
was too long.
The states had clearly not
caught up to French fashion yet, and she wanted to blend in!
Lulu
carted my uncle and my mother off to the restroom and safety pinned her skirt
to a more acceptable length.
She was now
ready to take on
Le Monde
.
It is another story altogether how she had to
have her husband called away from service while in the middle of his military
duties.
He had to find her a car and a
place to live.
They ended up renting a
storefront in the Loire
Valley in some obscure
local winery.