*Non-Fiction — October 6, 2022
A Place For It
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By the time we boarded the plane, I’d been obsessing for weeks over what Mama would eat. I planned to lead her around Paris for eight days, but I knew I would never persuade her to try French food—that I would be alone in my pursuit of baguettes and cheeses, quiches and pâtés.
In my Let’s Go! guidebook, I showed her a photo of a croque-monsieur. I explained it was like a French ham-and-cheese sandwich. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Maybe. As long as the cheese isn’t too weird.” At the airport McDonald’s, she ate half her Value Meal, and I piled my pickles on her tray.
My whole life, she had been the world’s pickiest eater. She lived on pizza, cheeseburgers, Diet Pepsi, and chardonnay. The rest of the time she starved herself. As I grew up, she nudged me to finish the vegetables my dad cooked without ever having tasted them herself. My dad’s limited time in the kitchen was lively in my memory: stirring homemade stews with a splintered wooden ladle; standing with a tie whisked over his shoulder, scooping out a grapefruit with a serrated spoon; leaning over broccoli on the stove, steam catching in his salt-and-pepper beard. I ate anything they put in front of me, even proclaimed broccoli my favorite food, as though trying to set a good example for Mama. By this trip, when I was seventeen and Dad was gone, I couldn’t wait to eat everything.
In the dim American Airlines cabin somewhere over the black Atlantic, I watched her pick at a microwaved English muffin and sip a cup of white wine. I asked if she was hungry, and she told me not to fret. I tucked extra bags of tiny pretzels into my backpack. “These will be your petit déjeuner,” I said.
“Come on,” she said, smiling. “They’ve got to have French fries over there, right?” My carry-on was stuffed: blow-up neck pillow, pocket French dictionary, money belt, a list of addresses for postcards. There was our printed-out itinerary, which I’d been planning in meticulous detail, studying Metro routes and dog-earing my Let’s Go. After all, I was the one who’d used a passport before, and who’d been to France—one year earlier with a busload of American students and our frazzled Madame Doo-Bluh-Vay. I was ready to be the tour guide this time.
Nestled in the center of my bag were the most precious objects, including a hard-bound journal covered in red paper. My boyfriend, Lev, had given it to me just before we left. He’d inscribed the first page in purple pen, the letters drawn in Art Deco style, to The Audacious and Intrepid Katie Moulton. Lev was four years older, twenty-one, an art student at a commuter college. He was serious and funny and threw great parties. He’d designed a music-focused social networking website, like a local MySpace. He was clearly a genius. Our love was only a few months old, but felt fated, overwhelming. I was still technically a virgin, but those days were numbered. This much-anticipated mother-daughter trip posed a monument-sized delay to Lev and I finally having sex. I ran my fingertips over the rough-cut page edges and felt pricks of electricity.
Beside the journal was my dad’s paperback copy of Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, recently returned from Lev, the pages bleeding yellow with my own highlighter. Lines like, “There are three lost continents. We are one: the lovers,” and “Who knows how to make love stay?” reminded me of Lev, our new and unparalleled love. At the same time, I read my family in those words: me and Mama and dad.
My parents married at twenty, stayed married for twenty-six years. They were the other’s first love, only lover, loves of each other’s lives. One morning, a year earlier, Mama had driven my dad to St. Anthony’s hospital. He had been drinking hard for longer than I’d been alive, sneaking prescription opioids—breaking down slowly, then fast. His kidneys were failing. Mama and I were used to him feeling sick and staying in bed, languishing behind a closed door, but then his skin—for so long luminous and ruddy—turned sallow overnight. He saw himself in the mirror and agreed to go.
None of us expected him to die. But when he never came home, I told myself it was inevitable. As fated as their love and my existence—the sudden loss we’d been moving towards my whole life, that we’d carry with us forever.
Mama and I co-hosted wakes in two states, riding from St. Louis to Terre Haute across the crumpled bag of Illinois to bury my dad beside his own. I’d already forgotten whether there was actual food at the services, though I’m sure there were Lay’s potato chips and French-onion dip for Mama. She could eat when it didn’t feel like eating—just a few translucent handfuls to keep going. At the burial, Mama dug a golf tee into the fresh dirt and balanced a Titleist on top. It was the same quiet ritual my dad had always performed at his own father’s headstone. He never mentioned it, but if his mother or siblings saw it, they’d know he’d been there.
Six weeks after my dad died, I boarded a plane for France—a class trip that I’d been saving and selling candy bars for since middle school. In an interior pocket of my carry-on, I found a note from Mama—and a golf ball. She wrote, Maybe you’ll find a place for it.
As the sun rose on that first descent into De Gaulle, I was chatting with a Swiss boy across the aisle. He had shaggy brown hair and round, thin-framed glasses. Before landing, my classmate drooling on my shoulder, the boy flagged down a glamorous flight attendant and ordered us each a Bailey’s on ice. “You must try it,” he said. So for the next fifteen days, I tried everything: eating sole meunière and cutting my feet in the Channel, sipping water flavored with almond syrup in Nice, spending my last coins on crêpes in an alpine valley. And on a gravelly Mediterranean beach, for the first time, I watched two people have sex. They were strangers in half-shade, still wearing salted, pushed-aside bathing suits. They lay on their sides on a slab of concrete and didn’t seem to notice me. It was less fluid than I’d imagined.
When I returned, I told Mama some of these things, and many others I kept for myself. I carried the golf ball all the way home again. That first trip, as I wrote in my college application essays, made me believe that I would go on living, that I could carry my loss into the unknown world, the endless future, and be met with nourishing beauty.
I wanted Mama to feel that too. I could hold her hand through it. Our row on the plane had a miraculously empty seat. We cheersed our wine and popped Tylenol PMs. I stretched out and curled my knees into the fetal position, covered in a pashmina. I lay my head in Mama’s lap.
The hotel in the ninth arrondissement had a small lobby with white tablecloths at breakfast time. We sat together as I piled thick, creamy cheese onto a baguette. Mama carefully speared a half-moon of melon and crossed her freckled legs. She wore old khaki shorts and a crisp sleeveless top, buttoned over her soft middle and breasts, which were large no matter how much she weighed, and which I was already certain I’d never inherit. It was hot outside, and her coarse reddish hair was gathered in a tiny elastic at the nape of her neck.
The hotel in the ninth arrondissement had a small lobby with white tablecloths at breakfast time. We sat together as I piled thick, creamy cheese onto a baguette. Mama carefully speared a half-moon of melon and crossed her freckled legs. She wore old khaki shorts and a crisp sleeveless top, buttoned over her soft middle and breasts, which were large no matter how much she weighed, and which I was already certain I’d never inherit. It was hot outside, and her coarse reddish hair was gathered in a tiny elastic at the nape of her neck.
“Where to today, cruise director?” she chirped.
So far, we had basked in stained glass from Sainte-Chappelle to the Opera Garnier. We’d lifted to the top of the Eiffel Tower at sunset. I was still bleary with hormonal jet lag, but Mama was cheerful, though I knew she had to be running on fumes. She remained faithful to her Protestant work ethic for fun.
I passed her a copy of my itinerary, now scribbled with notes. “What are your top three picks still on here?” I mumbled. I flipped open my red journal. I was already counting the days until I could be back in Lev’s bed, doing the math on how many hours until I could call him from a payphone.
“Notre Dame, the catacombs, and that hill where all the street painters are,” Mama said. “And we’ve got to find someplace good to leave the golf ball.”
“Montmartre,” I said, corrective. I handed her the guidebook, told her a page number.
“Oooh,” Mama said suddenly. “And can we go to Jim Morrison’s grave?”
I had never heard her talk about Morrison before, didn’t think she listened to The Doors. It struck me as a Baby Boomer cliché, a pilgrimage she thought she was supposed to make, and I cringed. Anything too obvious, anything too heart-on-the-sleeve made me cringe in those days—unless it was my own heart, own sleeve.
The last time I’d gone to an Alateen meeting, just before my dad died, I’d hung around outside afterwards for a few minutes, and a lanky boy told me that if he ever visited Paris, he would go straight to Jim Morrison’s grave. I said cool, but I didn’t think it was cool. Morrison didn’t mean much to me. I was familiar enough with the frontman’s cerebral bad-boy reputation—the Val Kilmer movie, the trippy poetics—but I didn’t get the mythology. I thought “Touch Me” was a decent, bizarre-in-a-good-way song: sprightly horns and film-score strings swirling around those good pledges—I’m gonna love you ’til the heavens stop the rain. But I couldn’t stand the booming melodrama of Morrison’s voice. Was he really deeper or sexier than other rock stars? What claim did he have on Paris anyway?
I remembered reading in Dad’s Rolling Stone how Morrison’s lover had found him dead, cold and bloated in a bathtub. How depressed he’d been, how he had drunk and drugged himself to the end. I wondered if Mama was ignoring the parallels between Morrison and my dad, or if that was why she wanted to go. That kind of morbid romanticism was another thing that made me cringe.
“If we have time,” I said.
The entrance to the catacombs was through a dark-green building attached to a neoclassical tollhouse called Barrière d’Enfer. The Gate of Hell. We descended 130 steps of a spiral staircase, the tight space growing colder and danker. The catacombs were once limestone mines, the guide told us, but had been repurposed to house the dead when other Paris graveyards failed. By 1780, the Holy Innocents cemetery had been used for more than 600 years, and the weight of all that human debris started caving into nearby basements. So Paris relocated more than six million dead into this underground labyrinth.
The entrance to the catacombs was through a dark-green building attached to a neoclassical tollhouse called Barrière d’Enfer. The Gate of Hell. We descended 130 steps of a spiral staircase, the tight space growing colder and danker. The catacombs were once limestone mines, the guide told us, but had been repurposed to house the dead when other Paris graveyards failed. By 1780, the Holy Innocents cemetery had been used for more than 600 years, and the weight of all that human debris started caving into nearby basements. So Paris relocated more than six million dead into this underground labyrinth.
I didn’t know any of that before we got there, so I was expecting a simple mausoleum, a cool-temp version of your run-of-the-mill graveyard. But then we saw the welcome sign: ARRÊTE. C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT. (STOP. This is the Empire of the Dead.) On the other side of this gate-within-a-gate-of-hell were 200 miles of tunnels, stacked—every wall, floor-to-ceiling, five-feet-deep on both sides—with bones. Many of the bones were already ancient in 1780, clean as eggshells, convenient for stacking in symmetrical piles. This wasn’t so much a burial for people as elaborate storage for their bits and pieces.
“This…is…so…cool!” Mama whispered.
I, on the other hand, was totally freaked out. Here was an ossuary, a bone gallery, a jumble of insides on display. I had expected the catacombs to house extra-special people who could afford the exclusivity. But here, bones that had shared a skin may not even be on the same city block. I imagined the workers who handled these fibulas, how little they must have felt. I suddenly felt very sensitive, a child falling from a swing. All I could think was how far these bones were from their bodies, their pleasures, their functions and meanings, even in their deaths.
I thought of The Doors again, how the band took its name from Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, which promoted psychedelics as means to achieve ego death—to lose the self. But psychedelics were temporary. What to make of this permanent separation from form?
I followed Mama through the shadowy halls. The phrase la petite mort flashed through my mind. The little death. My first full-scale orgasm was still fresh in my memory. It was a peach-colored afternoon in my bedroom, my eyes closed tight, breathing into Lev’s shoulder. His hands held me, moved over me, and into me in a way that seemed to light up my every nerve. Then the room was dissolving and crashing, my brain an ocean, aahh aa, my blood pulsing lightning—ah fuck aaghh my—leg?! My eyes shot open. I had pointed and clenched my toes so hard that my leg cramped, my calf muscle spasming. Charley horse!!! I cried, and Lev quickly massaged my calf and gently flexed my foot. We were already laughing and shushing each other, and I grew teary-eyed in wonder.
Mama poked me in the ribs then, whispered, “Look at that!” In front of us, stuck into a wall of femurs, were fourteen skulls arranged in the shape of a heart.
We climbed out of hell holding hands. Down the street on a telephone pole, I posted a sticker that Lev had made: a small square of black-and-white text, edgy but clear, a promotion for the website he’d started. I was here; now so was he. Mama snapped a photo.
Mama and I walked the boulevards and alleys, crisscrossing bridges. We kept finding views, staring out through the giant clock at Musée D’Orsay, climbing L’Arc de Triomphe. I ate pressed sandwiches from cafes. Mama ate French fries for every meal. She seemed all right, but sometimes I caught her with tears in her eyes. I felt it too, pushed it down. Every new memory was razored with the knowledge it was made without him.
Mama and I walked the boulevards and alleys, crisscrossing bridges. We kept finding views, staring out through the giant clock at Musée D’Orsay, climbing L’Arc de Triomphe. I ate pressed sandwiches from cafes. Mama ate French fries for every meal. She seemed all right, but sometimes I caught her with tears in her eyes. I felt it too, pushed it down. Every new memory was razored with the knowledge it was made without him.
We hiked up cobblestone streets into Montmartre, the neighborhood with “all the street painters,” and strolled the tented stalls of gray-mustachioed artists selling small canvases or offering to draw our portraits.
“What do you think Lev would like,” Mama asked, “since he’s the artist?” I felt her suddenly looking over my shoulder—not just at the canvases but at my life, my nascent independence. Though I shared everything with her, reveled in our closeness, I felt an urge to keep this burgeoning sacred thing between me and Lev. I longed to be crammed into the payphone outside our hotel, camouflaged by grimy stickers and spray paint, punching in the endless numerals on the back of the calling card. I wanted him in my ear.
Mama had always told me that my dad was the only man she had ever been with, that she had lost her virginity on their wedding night. I believed her completely and understood this was the example I was supposed to follow. Then, when I was sixteen, she changed her story: “Well, we may have done other things.” Now that I was going to parties at Lev’s house across town and not coming home until daylight, she said, “Well, we may have slept together before—but only when we knew we were in real love.”
I believed I’d found the person I would love forever, and that somehow, we’d been lucky enough to find each other young. I believed that I was doing just what my parents—those doomed lovers—had done, but I would do it right.
I peered closely at a narrow canvas scraped with pastel oil paints: a replica of the cobblestone streets and pale buildings around us, washed in a hazy sunset light.
“Do you think this is the one?” Mama asked, her blond eyebrows raised.
I rolled my eyes, but said, “Definitely,” and handed over the euros.
We joined the crowd on the steps of white-domed Sacré-Cœur as the sun started to dip. In March 1971, Morrison came to Paris to take a break from the band, to write poetry and live with his redheaded, heroin-addicted lover. I read about it in Rolling Stone; Dad’s subscription hadn’t lapsed. One day, Morrison was wandering the city with a French friend. They climbed these steps, and he spotted a far-off tract of green amid the creamy gray limestone. He asked what it was. It was the Cimitière du Père Lachaise, the largest cemetery in Paris, where luminaries are buried: Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Edith Piaf, Chopin. The doomed lovers Abelard and Héloïse. Morrison—American rock-and-roll star, psychedelic hero, Lizard King—said, “I’ll be buried there.” A few months later, he was.
I told Mama this in a nearby second-floor brasserie, while I ate boeuf bourguignon. I moaned, trying to describe the rich, glorious, bright-dark taste. “It’s like Dinty Moore, you know,” I gasped, naming the canned beef stew I ate every week at home, “but, like, made by angels.” I offered bites from my fork.
“I’m good with this,” Mama said, lifting her wine glass. The evening light turned her graying red hair pink.
“I feel like we’ve nearly done it all,” Mama sighed, smiling, on our sixth day in Paris. Earlier, we’d tiptoed through Notre Dame cathedral. She was perked up, more than usual, because the bistro we were sitting in listed a ham-and-cheese sandwich on its menu. She could handle a ham-and-cheese. She would eat it, and it would be enough. I could take a break from worrying about her blood sugar, and she could take a break from pretending to be full.
“I feel like we’ve nearly done it all,” Mama sighed, smiling, on our sixth day in Paris. Earlier, we’d tiptoed through Notre Dame cathedral. She was perked up, more than usual, because the bistro we were sitting in listed a ham-and-cheese sandwich on its menu. She could handle a ham-and-cheese. She would eat it, and it would be enough. I could take a break from worrying about her blood sugar, and she could take a break from pretending to be full.
The waiter brought out my plate first: crusty French onion soup, lightly dressed arugula. “Merci mille fois,” I said. “S’il vous plait, nous voudrions une autre carafe d’eau.”
“Okay, sure,” he said. “You want ice, also?”
“Oh la la, what did you say to the garçon?” Mama sipped her Coca-Cola Light.
The server returned with the pitcher and Mama’s lunch. He placed it before her and left. She looked down and froze, her hands unfolding her napkin over her lap. She stared at the plate. At the last minute, she had not ordered un croque-monsieur, afraid that she would not like the unknown cheese. Instead, she had ordered un jambon-beurre. She thought: ham, bread, simple. But what appeared before her was not what she had pictured: obscene swaths of pink, veiny ham cascading open face over two limp pieces of bread. She gazed at the sandwich in stunned silence, her hands suspended above the table’s edge. I bit my lip. Even to me, it wasn’t appetizing.
I signaled to the server, who stood peering down. “You don’t want the sandwich?”
“Oh, it’s just—it’s just not what I thought it would be,” Mama said. She tried to smile, apologizing, red rising in her cheeks. “I’m sure it’s very nice, but—”
They both gestured at the plate.
“But you say jambon—”
“Well, yes, but, I thought—” Her eyes were full of tears now, even as she tried to catch them back with her breath.
“C’est jam-BON—”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
I broke in, saying we were très désolées, but could we just order extra French fries? With mayo? The server twirled on his heel and, like a magician in anger management, vanished.
“Merci?” I called after him.
Mama excused herself to the toilet. I reached across the table and poked an index finger between the dark-pink folds of ham. They were cold and stiff.
When Mama returned, she was still flushed, but started eating the fries. I suggested we ditch the itinerary planned for the day. “We really shouldn’t miss Jim Morrison’s grave, right?”
She lit up. I took out my maps.
Père-Lachaise was thick with trees, overcrowded with monuments. The hill was steep, and I worried Mama would get too tired to reach the top. She’d only eaten a few sheepish fries. I listened for her breathing.
Père-Lachaise was thick with trees, overcrowded with monuments. The hill was steep, and I worried Mama would get too tired to reach the top. She’d only eaten a few sheepish fries. I listened for her breathing.
“I brought the golf ball,” Mama said. “I’m going to sneak it near the grave.”
“Is—was Daddy a big fan of The Doors?”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure,” she said. “He must’ve been.”
We walked on. The map in the guidebook was tiny, out of scale. I didn’t know how we would ever find the spot.
“Did you think Jim Morrison was sexy?” I asked.
“He was a big sex symbol,” Mama said. “But he was a little scary to me. And his weight fluctuated.”
The guidebook said the grave was small and unremarkable. There had been a ceramic bust of Morrison’s famous face—exaggerated cheekbones, lion’s mane—but it was long gone.
“You know,” I said, “He promised Ed Sullivan that he’d change the lyrics to ‘Light My Fire,’ the part about girl we can’t get much higher. But then he went out and sang it live anyway.”
“I don’t know how you remember stuff like that. You weren’t even alive!” Mama shook her head, took a big breath, her steps crunching on the path. “You and Daddy are just alike.”
We reached an unmarked fork in the path. A man wearing a security uniform loitered a few feet away. He stepped aside. I said, “Salut, ça va?” He didn’t answer. We climbed around a barricade of taller headstones, other people’s graves. Peered down to the one tucked behind.
The bed of Morrison’s grave looked like an unplanted garden: a shallow gutter littered with petals of every color and material, handwritten letters, burned-down candles, CDs splintered in half. Somehow, in the most cluttered corner of the cemetery, we were the only ones there. We stood side by side. Mama wrapped her arm around me.
After a few minutes, she asked, “Do you ever think about soulmates?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Sometimes, you know, I wonder if your dad was my soulmate,” she said slowly, quietly. “He was the love of my life, yes, but was he my soulmate?”
I stayed silent.
“If we’d made different choices, you know…” she went on, “maybe it would have changed how things were for us…”
An ellipsis, a question without form.
“Maybe if we hadn’t been so young or so…I don’t know.”
I thought I could anticipate her every need, but I could barely keep her fed. Now suddenly I stood on the edge of a chasm of all I didn’t know about her.
“I guess, if things had been different…” I paused. “Then they would have been different. But then what?”
She nodded and bit her lip. Her cheeks were wet, gleaming stripes. Our knuckles pressed together, and I held very still.
I didn’t believe what I’d said: that things could have been different. I believed my parents were soulmates—a lost continent. I believed Lev and I were meant to find each other. I believed that with him I could be what he saw in me—audacious, intrepid. That maybe we wouldn’t have recognized each other were it not for our losses. For all my momentum toward independence, I clung to my parents’ story of fated love. I needed it. I missed Lev again, deep and sharp.
Mama knelt. She rubbed the golf ball in her palms and brought it to her mouth, blew on it, kissed it, whispered something I could not hear, and dropped it in the dirt on Morrison’s grave. It rolled and settled among the other offerings.
I could not guide her. I could not control how she moved through the world or how she sustained herself. From a certain point, we go alone. But in this ritual, we could make our own memorial for Dad, for the people we’d lost and the ones we loved, wherever we went. This was where our grief could still run parallel. This, without cringing, I could give her, for now.
Mama and I walked back down the steep path. The sun blinked between the trees and mausoleums. Then the path widened onto a view of the city and the open descent back through the gate. I held her hand, freckled and smooth.
Mama and I walked back down the steep path. The sun blinked between the trees and mausoleums. Then the path widened onto a view of the city and the open descent back through the gate. I held her hand, freckled and smooth.
Back at the hotel, Mama ordered us both chardonnay at the bar. Neither of us would ever have a more generous pour. Then she arranged with the concierge to order Domino’s pizza. We sat in the lobby, side by side on a small sofa. We toasted to Paris. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate two dripping slices. Mama ate her slice of pepperoni too fast and burned her tongue. Extra cheese slid down her chin. We laughed, napkins spilling on the floor.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.