Frankie in Paris (17 page)

Tourists
milled everywhere.
 
Night had stretched
its cloak around us, but I could still make out the Seine River
flowing next to us.
 
Artists, packing up
for the evening, traveled with easels under their arms.
 
Such a romantic scene.

If
you were with the right person.

“That
woman was completely insane,” Lulu finally spoke.

“Yeah,
I would have to agree with you on that one!”
 
We looked at each other and broke into laughter.
 
Hers was high pitched, and mine sounded
desperate, but it felt really good to laugh together.
 

Gently
guiding her toward the queue, we became part of it.
 
As we got closer to the ticket window, I
could see a bust of a man.
 
It was Gustav
Eiffel.
 
I stared at the bronze nose and
lips, thinking that this was The Man, as far as Paris was concerned.
 
  
Actually,
that might be a stereotype.
 
Maybe it was
only the rest of the world
that
equated his work with being the epitome of all things Parisian.
 

A
rack of postcards stood near where we were, and I thought of Ginny and her
sticky fingers.
 
I watched Lulu very
closely to make sure that we didn’t have a similar problem.
 
When it was our turn to order tickets, I told
the man in the window that we needed to purchase two for each level.
 
This meant four tickets.
 
The total came to around fifty dollars, and
Lulu almost lost her mind.

           
“Why is it so expensive?
 
Can’t we just walk?”
 

“Look
up, Lulu
—
do you think that you could walk all the
way up there?”

She
huffed and puffed for a moment, but the people behind her began to get a bit
surly, so she slowly handed the clerk a wad of money.
 
Counting it, he
 
found us a few francs short.
 
I quickly reached into my bag and supplemented
our payment, and the tickets were handed to us at the bottom of the window.

Only
a couple dozen people waited to board the elevator, so it wasn’t a horribly
long line.
 
From what I had been told,
this was a blessing, since tourists sometimes end up spending hours waiting for
their trip up.
 
Lulu did not see it this
way.

“Why
is there such a long line?”

“Actually,
I’ve heard of people waiting for hours to get to the top.
 
I think we’re pretty lucky,” I said.

“Well,
I’m hungry and I don’t know how long I can wait.”

I guess that's what happens when you
refuse to eat dinner
.
 

After
listening to her complain, on and off, for about twenty minutes, we were on our
way to the first level.
 
The elevator
didn’t seem very substantial for the trip that we were making.
 
I mean, this was
The
Eiffel
Tower!
 
It was one of the tallest structures in the
world, and it was over one hundred years old.
 
I almost felt as though the box we were in could detach and fly to the
ground at any second.

 
No one else seemed to have my concerns.
 

Lulu
began to unwrap a mint from a roll of green and white speckled breath
mints.
 
Dinnertime!
 
The fresh scent
filled the small space.

The
doors opened, and everyone spilled out like beans out of a beanbag sack. They
were in awe of being on France’s
postcard darling and seemed to only take a few steps out of the lift before
they stopped and stared.

“Keep
moving!”
 
Lulu called out, in her
singsong voice.

I
found a spot for viewing the city.
 
It
was magnificent:
 
night had fallen, so
everything below was touched with light.
 

Paris
looked like a
super complicated assignment from a Lite Brite toy, the kind where you stick
the colored plastic pins into the black board, then turn on the lights to see
what you’ve created.
 

Little
sparkles beamed off of the moon and bounced along the Seine.
 
Actually, they must have been pretty big
sparkles if I could see them from way up there.
 
Reflections of the moon
—
the same one
that Rich could see from home.
 

Lord,
how I missed Rich.
 
I needed his strong
arms and crinkly blue eyes to experience this with me.
 
I covered my ring and pretended that it was
Rich’s hand, instead of my own.
 

Again,
I couldn’t help but imagine what being on this adventure would have been like
with him, instead of
her
.
 
He would have pulled me close, and we would
have laughed as we tried to identify the sparkling landmarks below.
 

“
Je t’aime
,” I would have professed my
love to him, in only the
most amorous
language, ever.

“
Je t’aime
,” he would have reciprocated,
wrapping his black leather-clad arms around me.
 
He would have leaned towards me and
—

“Alright.
 
Let’s go to the next level.”
 
Lulu was standing less than two inches away
from me, looking straight up into my face.

“Okay,
Lulu.”

We
produced our tickets at the elevator.
 
The crowd was much smaller on the way to the top.
 
It wasn’t really the top
—
no one was allowed up that far.
 
The tip-top was used as a radio and TV tower,
so we were slowly lifted as high as touristly possible.
 
Gnawing on the cuticle of my pinkie finger, I
thought that I might be a little claustrophobic.
 
Or maybe afraid of heights.
 
In any case, a stall on the way to Heaven
might not have been the best place for me.

Gasping
for air with my eyes closed, I pushed some people out of the way when the doors
slid open.
 
I could feel Lulu putting an
arm around my waist.
 

“Are
you alright, Francesca?”
 

“I-I
think so.
 
It just seems so ... high up!”

“Well,
that’s because
it is
high up.”

It
seemed like things were pretty stable, so I nodded my head and peeked out of
 
one eye.
 
The tower didn't feel like it was going to fold in half, or anything:
 
I reminded myself that it had been standing
there for a really long time
and
millions of
people had been right up where I was standing.
 

Smoothing
my newly shortened bangs
—
because I could
tell that they were perpendicular to the monolith we were visiting
—
I began making a snack of my thumb.
 

My
grandmother moved to the edge to get a look at the city.
 
I tentatively took small steps, now munching
on the side of my knuckle.
 
It was
beautiful.
 
Really, truly, one of the
most lovely things that I had ever seen. A bit windy and cold way up there
—
a nice change from the past few days of tropical
climate.
 
Miles and miles of green trees
spread out below, like miniature bunches of broccoli.
 
Churches, homes, museums
—
all for our viewing pleasure.
 
But damn, we were a bit too far up in the air for my taste.

Lulu
lifted her arm and wiggled her fingers through the safety bars. She was
standing on her toes, trying to get some height.
 
I should have offered to pick her up, so she
could see better, and
 
I thought that I
could probably do it
—
but I decided
not to find out.

Why
does
she keep waving her arm through the bars?

My
stomach plummeted, just as I had feared that elevator might.
 
She was dropping something.
 
Lulu was
throwing
something
from the top of La Tour Eiffel!

“What
are you doing?”
 
I hissed.
 
I wondered how large the security room at
this
national monument was.
 

“Didn’t
you ever do this when you were little?
 
I
used to do this from the top of the building where my father worked.”

What is she doing?

“Here,
you do one.”
 
She handed me a penny.

My
grandmother was dropping pennies from the third floor of the Eiffel Tower!
 

Being
a theater-minded individual, I was never very good at math or science (no
offense to those freakish theater people who also happen to have a talent for
math and/or science)
—
but I knew that
the velocity of something that size, shape, and weight could possibly cause
some damage if it connected with a human being down on the ground.

“Oh,
my God!
 
You can’t do that!”
 
I tried to grab her hand, to pry the little
coins away from her.
 

Artfully
eluding me, she zipped one way
—
then the
other.
 
She was actually pretty quick,
doing a funny little jumping dance, like a jig, trying to get away from
me.
 
It couldn't have been choreographed
better!
 
People were beginning to notice
our scuffle.
 
Finally, I caught her elbow
with one hand and twisted her arm behind her back with the other.
 
For a moment, I forgot that she was my grandmother,
a senior citizen.
 
Mercifully, I returned
to my senses before hurting her.

“No
more!
 
This is ridiculous
!”
 
Once I
let go of her, she lifted her chin, haughtily.

Betty
Day
, AKA Lulu,
that impish brat of advanced years
,
turned away and quickly shuffled back to the bars.
 
Turning to look at me
—
taunting me, damn it
—
she reached that
short arm through the bars and let go of a copper colored disc, then leaned
forward to witness her handiwork.

With
every ounce of psychic strength that I could muster, from the very tips of my beloved
black boots to the top of my fashionable French haircut, I stopped the penny in
mid-air: catching it before it reached the second level.
 
My whole body heaved with the power that it
took to halt that coin.
 
Beads of moisture
gathered under my new bangs and dripped down the sides of my face. Pain
blossomed above my left eyebrow, and I wondered if I might have given myself an
aneurysm.

Gritting
my teeth, I concentrated until the penny began to rise back up to us
—
slowly at first, beginning to spiral as it gathered momentum.
It flew back through the bars and pinged her on the forehead, landing in her
upturned palm.

I had
better aim than I would have thought.

“Who
is the adult here, Francesca?”
 
Technically, we were both adults, but that didn’t occur to me until much
later.

“That’s
what
I
want to know!
 
Who
is
the adult here?
 
And for God’s sake:
 
why do you call me Francesca?
 
It
isn’t even my name
!”

“I
don’t know,”
 
she said quietly, gripping
the returned penny in her fist.

“What?”

“I
don’t know why I call you Francesca.
 
I
just always have.”

“Whatever.”
 
Here
comes another panic attack.
 
Two in one
day
—
that can’t be normal.
   

“I
need to be away from you for a while.
 
Please,
please
don’t throw any
more money off of the building.
 
I am
going back to the hotel.”

“You
can’t be out here at night, all by yourself.”

“Watch
me.”

Striding
toward the elevator, I nodded at the attendant, who opened the doors for
me.
 
I folded my arms across my chest and
leaned against the cool wall.
 
The doors
began to close, when a small arm stopped them, and its owner stepped
inside.