Dimanche 26 septembre 1999

Last night was the full moon, the harvest moon, which I only know to call that because my grandpa farmed. I walked up to the Trocadéro by myself and sat on the steps with about four hundred tourists and one accordion. The moon came up huge and orange off to the left of the Tour Eiffel, and the tower was all lit gold, and the accordion guy played "La Vie en Rose," because of course he did. I rolled my eyes and then I cried anyway.

Here's the thing I haven't written. On Thursday Madame sat me down in the kitchen with a coffee and asked if I would stay until June. Not December, like the contract says. June. She said Mathilde asks every night if Claire is leaving at Christmas. She said, very French and very kind, "We are not family, but we are not nothing."

I called Mom from the booth on the corner with a new télécarte. It was noon in Paris and five in the morning in Wisconsin, and she picked up on the second ring like she always does, like she sleeps next to the phone. I told her. She was quiet and then she said, "Well, honey, the house isn't going anywhere." Which is Mom for come home and stay at the same time.

I don't know yet. I have a month to decide. I'm going to eat a pain au chocolat about it.

Jeudi 23 septembre 1999

First day of fall. First cold morning, too. Hugo, who is four, looked at his breath on the way to school and announced that he was a dragon, and then that I was also a dragon, and then that Paris was full of dragons in the morning and nobody knows but us. He's right. Look at all those people on the sidewalk, puffing.

Bought a scarf. Navy. Everybody here has one and now so do I.

Samedi 18 septembre 1999

Small victories, a list:

1. The boulangère on the corner, who has answered me in English every single morning since January with a little sigh, answered me in French today. No sigh. She said, "Et avec ceci?" and I said "Ce sera tout, merci," and she said "Bonne journée, mademoiselle," and I walked out holding the baguette like an Olympic torch.

2. At dinner Monsieur told a joke about a Belgian and a parking meter, and I laughed at the right time, for the right reason, before anyone explained it.

3. I had a dream in French. Nothing special, I was looking for my keys in a Métro station that was also my high school. But everybody in it spoke French, and so did I, and nobody noticed.

4. I went a whole day without thinking about Julien. Okay, most of a day. Until I wrote number 4.

Mardi 14 septembre 1999

Homesick today. It comes in on little feet.

It was the smell in the Monoprix, of all places: somebody in the next aisle had a coffee that smelled exactly like the percolator at home. And then all day it was Mom. Mom in her blue scrubs at the kitchen table doing the crossword before her shift. Mom yelling at the Packers on Sunday like they can hear her. Mom saying "Oh, for cute" about every single baby we ever passed at the grocery store.

Seven hours between us. When I'm putting the kids to bed she's eating lunch. When I'm finally asleep she's watching the ten o'clock news. We live on the same day but never at the same time.

Madame found me in the kitchen staring into the dishwater and didn't say a thing, just put a square of dark chocolate on the counter next to my hand and walked out. French comfort. It works a little.

Mom, if you read this at the hospital computer, which I know you do even though you're not supposed to: I love you. The scarf is navy. I'm eating.

Dimanche 5 septembre 1999

La rentrée. There isn't really an English word for it. It's back-to-school, but for the whole country: everybody comes back from August at once, tan and grouchy, and the traffic comes back, and the bakeries reopen, and the stationery stores are mobbed with mothers holding lists.

The family got back from Brittany on the 30th. The kids hit me in the doorway like two small linebackers. Hugo had a jar of shells for me and one crab claw "for later." Mathilde, who is seven, had grown about an inch and had decided in Brittany that she is "too big for Hugo."

This week she started CE1, which is second grade. New cartable, which is a stiff leather backpack that looks like a tiny briefcase, new shoes, a whole list of notebooks with the exact right kind of lines. At the gate she held my hand so tight, and then she saw her friend and dropped it like it was hot, and didn't look back. I stood on the sidewalk with the other nannies and mothers feeling proud and ditched at the same time.

That's the whole job, I think. Be the hand they drop.

Mercredi 25 août 1999

Julien ended it last night.

We were at the café under his building on the rue Monge, the one where the waiter never brings the check unless you stand up. He was quiet all through his beer, and then he said it. Very reasonable. Very philosophy student. You leave in December. I stay. I don't do long distance, I don't do "maybe." À quoi bon? What's the point?

And I said, the point is that it was nice. The point is the eclipse. The point is that I learned the subjunctive for you, you jerk. (I didn't say jerk. I said something in French that I will not be typing into a public computer.)

He paid, which is how I knew he meant it.

I walked home. All the way from the fifth to the sixteenth, along the river, over an hour. Paris in August is half-closed and all the shutters were down on the bookstalls along the quai. It felt right. I kept thinking of the moment the sun came back in that field, and how everyone cheered, and how I thought, this is the beginning of something. It was just the sun coming back. It does that every day.

Seven months. It wasn't nothing. I'm not going to pretend it was nothing.

Samedi 21 août 1999

Paris is empty. Half the shops have handwritten signs on the door: Fermeture annuelle, back September 1. Even the butcher went to the beach. Julien has been "busy." I have been reading on the roof.

Jeudi 12 août 1999

I saw the eclipse. I have to write this down before I lose any of it.

Paris was only going to get a partial, so Julien borrowed his cousin's old 2CV, which sounds like a sewing machine with opinions, and we left before seven to drive north into Picardy where the total part would cross. Half of Paris had the same idea. The autoroute was a parking lot by nine. We got off and took little roads through villages with one bakery and one war memorial each, and finally Julien just pulled over at the edge of a beet field and said, "Voilà. Here."

And it was cloudy. Completely gray. There were maybe thirty people along the road, a family with a picnic, two old men in caps, some Germans with a telescope. Everybody had the cardboard eclipse glasses from the tabac. Everybody was staring at clouds.

Then a little after noon the light went strange. Not dark yet, just thin and silvery, like an old photograph. It got cold, fast. The birds quit. Under the poplars along the road the ground was covered in hundreds of tiny crescent-shaped suns, coming through the leaves. I didn't know that happens. I knelt down and put my hand in them.

And then the clouds opened. Just a hole, right where it needed to be, like somebody pulled a curtain. And it went dark in a few seconds, and there it was: a black circle where the sun should be, with this white light pouring out around it like silk hair blowing. All the way around the horizon it looked like sunset in every direction at once. One of the old men said "Mon Dieu" very quietly. The Germans were cheering. I think I was crying. Julien held my hand so hard it hurt.

It lasted maybe two minutes. Then a single point of light came out on one edge, the "diamond ring," and everyone clapped like it was a show, and the clouds closed back over like nothing happened.

It took four hours to get back to Paris. I didn't care. I kept looking at the sun out the window, just to make sure.

Lundi 2 août 1999

The family left this morning for the grandmother's house in Brittany, the Peugeot packed to the roof, Hugo waving his stuffed rabbit out the back window until they turned the corner. I have the whole month off. Everybody in France has the whole month off. It's in the Constitution or something.

Julien wants to drive north on the 11th for the eclipse. He says there won't be another total one in France until 2081 and he is not planning to still be around. I said I'll be a hundred and five and I'll be there with my cane. He said, "Then I will push your wheelchair," and I decided not to think about what that meant, and just be happy.

Four and a half months until my contract ends. I'm not counting. Much.