The year I turned nineteen I came down with lack-of-plan-itis. It was a long- drawn-out illness with no apparent end in sight; made worse by constant solicitous inquiries from family and friends of family.
"Ava! Nice to see you. Home from school?"
I'd shrug, hoping they'd get the message to lay off. Mostly they didn't.
"Not at school? What are you up to then?" neighbors out tending their lawns would ask in one form or another as I passed their houses on my way to the home where I grew up, on a horseshoe-shaped drive in West Hartford, Connecticut.
I was working as a cashier at a twenty-four hour self-service gas station, which I didn't really feel like talking about, so I cut back on visiting my grandparents to escape the non-stop questions before I made it into their house. Once I was inside, things got even worse. My grandmother would punctuate her stone-cold silences with snappy references to the year's worth of college tuition they'd just thrown away on me at music college where I'd been studying to become a music teacher until I'd dropped out.
It wasn't my fault their plans hadn't been mine. I'd been trying to hint at that all along, but the symphony of my grandmother's own perfectly-laid goals for my life had drowned out the tiny tinkling of whatever ideas of my own had been struggling toward being heard. They held the moneybags and I didn't. That was the gist of most of my grandmother's lectures. It was hell not to have a plan at age nineteen.
I'd screwed up since finishing high school in Maine - and that was after I'd screwed up beginning high school at a private school in Connecticut where my grandparents had first sent my mother and then me. But I wasn't a screw-up. I just didn't know where I fit in. I was neither here nor there, and the place I inhabited in the middle wasn't exactly right either.
I loved ninth grade at the all-girls' private school. But at home there'd been endless fights and negotiations with my grandmother . "This is my house and you'll do as I say as long as you live in it" didn't offer much room for maneuver. We sparred over why I couldn't wear blue jeans. "Young ladies do not wear blue jeans." How I should wear my hair."Nancy Shelton told me the other day you could be such a pretty girl if only you'd stop hiding your eyes with that shaggy hair in your face." As well as why I couldn't do just about anything else a normal teenage girl might want to do in the late twentieth century.
Finally I got shipped up to Maine to stay with my aunt and uncle for my remaining high school years. I'd made the best of it and graduated fourth in my class at a public high school Down East (that's the area along Maine's coast from Penobscot Bay to the Canadian border) then returned to Connecticut to attend music college where I'd fancied myself some sort of budding concert pianist. It didn't take longer than one week of classes to know I lacked both the talent and focus to consider a performing career at the keyboard. By spring semester even my piano teacher, a vivacious Pole who bounced and grunted on the piano bench when she performed, suggested kindly to me that I might have more strengths as a writer than a pianist, after reading yet another of my well-thought-out notes explaining why I had not been prepared for our lesson. The simple fact was I didn't have the concentration necessary to sit around and practice a Bach fugue or any other piece of music hour after hour, day after day. I was too distracted by the whole, wide world out there, waiting for me to discover.
At the end of my first year I dropped out. My grandparents wanted me to become a music teacher, but I wasn't the teacher-type. Who wanted to put up with nasty public school children who might not want to be in a music class anyway? One of two things I took away from music college was that teaching surly junior high schoolers would be a surefire way to lose one's love of music. The other was that I wasn't a specialist. I was a generalist. Liberal arts colleges were created for people like me.
After spending the summer cashiering at a twenty-four hour self-service gas station I needed to come up with a plan for the next school year while I went through the winter-through-spring process of applying to liberal art colleges -- the ones I should have applied to my senior year of high school instead of letting my grandmother talk me into music college. If I got into a good school, maybe my grandparents would help pay for it. If not there were student loans and scholarships I could apply for. But if I didn't get into a top college I knew what was waiting back in West Hartford for me - secretarial school.
I'd rather kill myself.
My grandmother's idea of a career path for a woman consisted of either teaching, secretarying or marrying up. Nursing was out in her book. It involved getting one's hands dirty -- something a lady didn't do. I'd heard her talking to my grandfather behind closed doors one Sunday afternoon I'd arrived early for a visit and let myself in unannounced.
"And that's the last penny we spend on her," she'd said as I crept to the other side of the dining room wall where she couldn't spot me through the entry-way to the sun room.
"Well, Helen, we'll see if she's interested. Maybe she doesn't want to go to secretarial school." My grandfather's mild voice warmed my heart.
"We'll do no such thing, Walter. She needs to learn a trade so she can get out and support herself."
"First she needs to figure out what it is she wants to do."
"Not with my hard-earned money she won't."
I stifled a giggle. My grandmother hadn't worked a day in her life -- or perhaps a year or two as a teenage fashion model before she'd married -- up, of course.
"Helen, you can't force a young person to just go and become something you want them to be. They have to want to do it themselves." I silently congratulated my grandfather for going out on a limb for me. There would be hell to pay later.
"Ridiculous. She has no idea what she wants to do with her life. Wasn't that clear when she dropped out of school?"
"She was tops in her high school class. She just didn't want to be a teacher, that's all."
"I'm not spending another dime on her unless she studies something practical and sticks with it. Or she can go find those worthless parents of hers and have them pay for college."
"That's not going to happen, Helen, and you know it."
"She either goes to secretarial school or we cut her off and that's final."
"You can't just cut her off like you did your daughter when she didn't do what you wanted her to do, " my grandfather bravely rejoined. Now he was really asking for it.
"I'll do what I damn well feel like doing in my own house with my own money," my grandmother shot back, her voice in that spoiling-for-a-fight mode that told the rest of us to back off fast. Otherwise we'd never hear the end of it and would have to fend for ourselves at dinnertime.
I tiptoed back to the kitchen and let myself out the back door. It was best to make an announced appearance at a moment like this. I ran around to the front of the house and rang the doorbell. My grandfather let me in and I silently blessed him as I kissed his cool, smooth cheek. He'd been my champion. But no one could oust my grandmother from her high horse.
Now that I knew what she was cooking up for me, I began to work on a plan to leave my current job behind in the dust without getting roped into becoming a secretary. Not that there was anything wrong with being a secretary, but these were times of feminist awakening -- I wanted to become someone in my own right - not an adjunct to someone who was Someone.
I began to think about what I could do to support myself that would also allow me to get away from my grandparents -- especially from my grandmother's endless disappointment. Although I knew it wasn't just me she was disappointed with -- it was life, in general -- it was hard not to take her attitude personally.
At night I prayed God would show me a way to escape my current stalemate. I was too young to have my soul deadened by my grandmother's bitterness with life. Her minor-key dirges didn't sing to me at all. I needed out as soon as possible.
* * *
About two weeks later, on one of those aimless days which figured largely in my life at that time, I took the bus to downtown Hartford for pretty much no reason at all. I didn't need to go into work until six p.m. that evening, it was only thirty-five cents to take the bus, and I'd be less likely to bump into anyone I knew if I hung around downtown Hartford instead of West Hartford Center where I'd spent time with friends when I'd been in junior high school.
So there I was in downtown Hartford wandering around the Woolworth's Five and Dime store when I got a very bad idea to shoplift a pair of dangly pink and gold hoop earrings. The second I got the idea I knew I needed to get out of the store.
But I didn't.
Fingering the delicate filigreed hoop earrings, I held them up to my ears and looked in a mirror then made a great show of putting them down again. Problem was that I only put down one pair of gold and pink earrings, not the two pairs I'd picked up. Don't ask where I'd learned that technique -- this is a story about my future, not my past.
I walked up and down the aisles of the main floor, passing the jewelry, cosmetics, sunglasses and sewing goods sections until there was pretty much nowhere else to go other than out the door or again to the jewelry section to put back the pair of earrings. Attached to a small rectangle of plastic backing, they nestled in the palm of my right hand, dangling next to the big, roomy right pocket of my green army pants.
They were mighty close -- those earrings and my loose, empty pocket. All I needed to do was relax my grip for those earrings to deposit themselves deep in the folds of my pants. I decided not to think about it, just see what happened.
"Hey," a deep, male voice said close behind me. A smell of hair grease assailed my nostrils.
I jumped sideways, almost smashing into the display case I was standing next to. Every muscle of my body tensed, including my right hand. Instantly I put both hands up to my chest to protect myself. I could feel the posts of the hoop earrings digging into my palm. Ouch.
"Hey sweet thing, how 'bout a kiss?"
The man before me was in his forties or fifties, graying, disheveled and glassy-eyed. Ycch. His right arm shot out and grabbed my own. I struggled to get away from him as he leaned toward me, leering.
"How 'bout it, honey?" The smell of his breath was even more nauseating than the smell from his greasy hair. He pushed his face toward mine until I could feel the air expelled from his mouth onto my own. Revolted, I twisted violently then stamped my right foot on his, as hard as I could.
"Bitch - watch it," he yelled as I pulled my arm free. I bolted down the aisle, followed by a string of foul epithets.
"You got it coming, girlie. You was asking for it, bitch. I'm going to get you and your sweet pussy."
I ran to where I thought the nearest exit might be, dropping the earrings on the floor of the store.
"Serves me right, serves me right," screamed in my head, drowning out the feeling of the man's fingers digging into my arm, his fetid breath inches from my mouth.
Outside I fled down Main Street, looking wildly for a safe place, somewhere the man behind wouldn't follow. I passed the library then Hartford's largest department store, G. Fox & Company. He could follow me inside both places, so I kept running.
"Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, I'm sorry I'm sorry about the earrings. I'm sorry." Then I switched to "God help me. help me Jesus, help me now.
Past the department store, a dark, stone building with large, marble columns in front loomed ahead. It looked vaguely familiar. I glanced at a small, elegantly- lettered sign on the front wall - Hartford Racquetball Club. It was a place my grandfather had taken me once for some sort of reception with our next-door-neighbors the Sheltons -- a private club for Hartford's finest families.
Up the steps I ran with the speed of light, almost colliding with the uniformed man opening the door for me.
"Yes, Miss?"
"Excuse me, but may I use your restroom?"
"This is a private club, Miss. I'm sorry."
"Yes, I know." I pulled myself together, straightening my back and looking him straight in the eye. "Listen -- I -- " I lowered my voice. "I'm being followed. A man is chasing me -- a homeless guy. Just let me use the ladies' room. Please." My eyes bored into his, willing him to understand -- and respond.
He hesitated, looking less certain. I could bet they didn't care for scenes in a place like this.
"Please. He won't follow me in here. I'll just be a minute." I tried to look like the kind of person who wouldn't make a scene -- the daughter of the kind of person who might belong to a club like this one -- although I wasn't.
His face blanched as he shifted uncomfortably. "Well -- if it's just for a minute."
"I promise -- thank you." I craned my neck around him to see where the ladies room might be.
"To the left at the end of the hall," he said quietly, his eyes discreetly indicating which way.
I flew down the hall and around the corner. The Ladies Room sign was on the left. I ran to open the door.
Locked.
Ugh. Turning, I looked around. On the other side of the hallway was another door with a sign over it -- Ladies' Locker Room. As I watched, a trim, blonde woman with a ponytail walked out, duffle bag and large handbag in hand. She reached into her handbag for something. As she did I grabbed the door handle to hold it open for her.
"Thank you," she said, not making eye contact, still rummaging in her bag.
"You're welcome," I said, a tight, WASPy smile on my face in case she looked up. She didn't. And thank you. I sped into the locker room and entered the nearest bathroom stall to recover myself.
After a few minutes, I'd calmed down. Conflicting emotions chased each other through my head and nervous system -- guilt, disgust, relief. I was disgusted by the gross man who accosted me in the store. But hadn't my own actions pursuant to his arrival been just as gross? Which was worse, being a lecherous homeless guy or a shoplifter?
Had God used that repugnant man to save me from breaking a commandment? 'Thou shalt not steal' had no qualifiers attached, such as 'Thou shalt not steal items valued over five dollars.' I'd been rescued from my scum ball-self by a gross, homeless person. They weren't kidding when they said God moved in mysterious ways.
Exiting the bathroom stall, I moved to the sink to wash the guilt off my face. The mirror told me I looked the same. It lied. I was older and scummier than I was an hour earlier. But God still loved me. He saved me from myself. I shook my head in disgust at the image of my round, unmarked pink and gold face, the same colors as the earrings I'd almost stolen. There was something at work here I didn't understand. Was this what they called grace?
I passed into the anteroom between the washroom and the door. A vanity stood on one side, a couch and two chairs on the other. I glanced at the notice board.
Announcements of candidates for membership were posted: 'Gerard Aldrich (vice-chairman - Travelers' Insurance Corporation) and Penny Aldrich (wife) have been recommended for membership by Gaddis Newton. They have three children and reside in Avon and Nantucket.'
Further down the board, a summer home in a place called Provence was listed for rent. Below that, more mundane listings for housekeeping and child care were posted. My eyes swept over them: mature nanny, F/T for two children under age four in Farmington, five years experience min, must drive; housekeeper available, has car, legal, excellent references; au pair wanted for Anglo-American family in Paris. Native English speaker only.
Au pair? I heard the term before. That was a babysitter for a family in another country. Most of the au pairs I'd heard about were college students or in their early to mid-twenties. Just where I was headed. My hand tingled. The same one that squeezed then released the pink and gold earrings an hour earlier.
Looking around, I spotted a notepad and pen next to the house phone on the vanity table. I grabbed them and jotted down the phone number for the au pair listing.
At the front door I nodded to the doorman who let me in as I slipped out. He looked relieved to see me go.
On the steps I scanned the sidewalk -- my drunken rescuer from commandment-breaking was nowhere in sight. I shivered, thanking God for saving worthless, pathetic wretches like myself from myself as well as homeless lechers. Then I went straight home, where I took the longest hot shower of my life as soon as I got inside the door.
Right before leaving for work I called the number for the au pair. A voicemail message came on; a woman's voice with a clipped, airy British-inflected accent. I left my name and number, careful to speak clearly to exhibit that not only was I a native English speaker but a native nice-English speaker.
Two days later one of my roommates handed me a message. Someone named Annabel something-or-other had called about a babysitting job. I guessed immediately the Anglo-half of the Anglo-American family was the mother. How many American women were named Annabel?
This time a live person answered.
"This is Ava Fodor returning a call from Annabel about an au pair job," I said, wishing my roommate had gotten her last name. I didn't want to sound too informal to a prospective employer - especially not a British one.
"I see. What did you say your name was?" Her commanding voice told me I was speaking with the female head of the household.
"Ava. Ava Fodor." I enunciated each syllable clearly, careful to make the right first impression.
"And who was it at the club who recommended you?"
No one. What was it about clubs and recommendations?. Thinking fast, I said "Mr. Shelton." He was the one who'd invited us to a reception at the Hartford Racquetball Club years earlier so I hoped he might still be a member.
"Mr. Shelton?" The woman at the other end wasn't giving anything away. I couldn't blame her.
"Mr. Fred Shelton?" I offered weakly. Please God, let the Sheltons be members. Please, God."
"Oh -- you mean Fred and Nancy Shelton?"
"Yes. They're our next-door-neighbors," I said, emulating her English accent. Inside, I gasped with relief. "Thank you, God."
"In West Hartford?"
"Yes. On West Hill Drive."
"I see. And what are your parents' names, dear?"
"Walter and Helen Rusk." They were my grandparents, but so what? She was bound to ask the Sheltons about me and they could let her know I'd been raised by my grandparents. Maybe it would make her more sympathetic to me -- a poor, homeless orphan in need of a job.
"And do you have any babysitting experience?"
"Oh yes. Quite a lot." Now I was using British syntax -- 'Quite' instead of 'a whole lot.'
"Have you ever lived with a family as a babysitter?"
"Well -- I lived with the Sheltons for a summer while I took care of their daughter."
"Do you mean Rebecca?"
"Oh -- you know her." What a relief. "Yes I looked after her a few summers ago down in Renwick."
The woman on the other end of the phone gave a laugh like tinkling bells. Had I said something funny?
"Just a minute." I heard the murmur of a male voice in the background. After some sort of interchange I couldn't make out, she got back on the line.
"Hullo?"
"Yes, I'm here." I tried to sound erudite, cultured, worthy of keeping her children's English up to snuff.
"We're looking for someone to look after our three children. There's two boys and a girl; ages six, eight and eleven.
"That would be fine." It was hard to sound enthusiastic as well as British. Something about the two didn't go together.
" Then I'll be in touch, dear." She clicked off before I could respond.
That was it? Why hadn't she asked more questions? Had she been laughing at my pathetic American accent? My face flamed as I put down the phone. It was so hard to interpret someone from another country. Maybe that was why it might be educational to babysit in France rather than, say, somewhere in the U.S.
I spent the rest of the day despondent, knowing I'd blown it with God, blown it
with the British lady, blown it with everyone in general. Still, it occurred to me to call the
Sheltons just in case I hadn't entirely blown it and a friend of theirs named Annabel
asked about me. Then I remembered they were down at the beach that weekend.
I couldn't afford to call long distance so I decided to wait 'til Sunday evening when
I planned to visit my grandparents for dinner.
That Sunday the Sheltons hadn't arrived back when I got to my grandparents'
house.
"Nana, do you know when the Sheltons are coming back from the beach?"
"Why do you want to know?" my grandmother snipped, looking at
me suspiciously.
"No reason. I just thought I might take Ginger for a walk when they get back,"
I explained, referring to the Shelton's dog. "She'll probably be desperate to go out after
a long car ride."
The practice of hiding almost all personal information from my grandmother
had become ingrained in me. She had a way of using whatever I told her as evidence
of my misguided ways. I wouldn't mention the au pair job unless something came of it.
"Well, Nancy mentioned some sort of benefit they were going to this afternoon in
Renwick, so I doubt they'll be back until late.
"Okay."
I hung around after dinner, long after my grandmother retired to her bedroom
with a thimbleful of Dubonnet to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Finally I heard the
Shelton's station wagon pull into their driveway. Not wanting to force myself on them
after a long drive, I watched from the window until I saw Uncle Fred come out the
back door with Ginger on her leash, straining and raring to go.
Quietly I slipped out the front door then walked in the other direction, knowing I'd
run into him halfway around the horseshoe-shaped drive, out of sight of
my grandmother's bedroom window.
Within five minutes his courtly, medium-tall figure loomed in sight. He was
scratching Ginger's ears as they rested by the stone fence that bordered West Hill Drive
from Farmington Avenue, the main thoroughfare it opened onto. I ran to him.
"Ava, what a nice surprise to see you." His face broke into a smile as he spotted
me.
"Hi Uncle Fred. How are you?"
"I'm fine. Nancy and I were just talking about you with our friends today.
"You were?"
"We saw the Griffiths this afternoon down in Renwick and they asked about you.
Do you remember them?"
"I - uh - I'm not sure." The Griffiths? Weren't those the folks with the trampoline
in their backyard?
"Nancy told Annabel Griffith what a terrific job you did babysitting Becca a few
summers ago."
Annabel Griffith? The same woman I'd spoken with on the phone?
"Is that the lady with the English accent with the trampoline in her
backyard?"
"That's the one." He nodded thoughtfully, looking approvingly at me. His eyes on
mine offered an antidote to my grandmother's baleful looks.
"They mentioned you'd spoken to them about a job babysitting their children
in Paris for the school year."
"That's just what I was going to ask you about, Uncle Fred. I -- I gave them your name as a recommendation."
"Already done, dear. Nancy raved about you to Annabel."
"Uncle Fred, you're too amazing!" Just the thought of a year in Paris made my heart pound as fast. My face tingled at the thought of a whole world full of foreign cultures and countries to learn about. Much more appealing to generalist, adventurous me than deconstructing a Bach fugue.
Our eyes met, his filled with kindness and love. Everything was perfect for one shining moment until my grandmother's face popped into my head. How would she receive the idea of me going abroad for a year? Any proposal coming from me was out. It always was, on principle.
"Umm -- if Mrs. Griffith wants me for the job, how should I handle telling my grandmother?" Very few people outside our immediate family knew what a prickly character she was, but Uncle Fred was one of the cognoscenti. To outsiders, my grandmother presented herself as a paragon of Southern warmth and charm. Even I was impressed by the incredible snow job she did on my friends.
"Your grandmother is sooo nice," they'd trill after meeting her and being offered a piece of homemade fudge or a brownie. She'd enjoyed five happy years in Athens, Georgia with her first husband, an agricultural professor at University of Georgia. Then he died of leukemia at age thirty, closing the chapter on the happiest years of her life. When she came north as a young widow her identity as a southern woman had firmly cemented itself in her soul. To this end she occasionally referred to African-Americans as "darkies" and had a feminist sensibility mired deep in the Antebellum South. Young women either married well or became teachers or secretaries until they did. At age nineteen I needed to get far away from her. An ocean between us for a year seemed like a great idea.
"Don't say anything to your grandmother. If the Griffiths offer you a job I'll have Nancy speak to her," Mr. Shelton advised.
"Uncle Fred, I love you," I said, truly meaning it.
We both knew if the idea came from me she'd veto it. Coming from the Griffiths via Nancy Shelton, her socially prominent neighbor, my grandmother would probably swoon with pleasure at the proposal.
On the way back to my apartment I recollected memories of the Griffiths. I'd met them down in Renwick, a private enclave next to Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the summer I babysat Rebecca Shelton. The Sheltons owned a beachfront cottage in Renwick, three houses down from the Griffiths. Everyone in Renwick was very rich or related to someone who was. It was all inherited wealth down there, something I knew because my grandmother had harped on the topic countless times as in "Fred Shelton can afford to be nice to Nancy because he's never had to work for a living." My grandmother never had to work for a living either, but in her case she'd never been nice to my grandfather, whom she barely tolerated.
Mrs. Griffith was young, pretty, blonde and British. She walked around at the beach in a teeny tiny bikini showing off her unbelievably slim post-third child figure in an effortless sort of way. I'd admired her hugely although I never dared speak to her. It went without saying that anything I said to her would sound stupid and then I'd sound even more stupid when she replied in her British accent and I wouldn't be able to understand a thing.
I'd been fourteen, about to enter ninth grade, the year before I'd been shipped off to Maine. The Griffiths were the perfect sort of all-American-with-a-European twist family I longed to be part of. My own family was twisted all-American except for one exotic European kink in the form of my father, a Transylvanian poet my mother had married at a tender age twenty-four.
Poets, by and large, do not bring home the bacon. My father suffered the added disadvantages of not speaking English. Three months after arriving in the U.S., at age forty-seven, he met my mother at a party thrown by a friend and patient of my grandfather's. My father had found work as a janitor at the Hartford Theological Seminary, a job he'd got through a sympathetic priest with a Hungarian background who'd read about him in the newspaper. He'd been photographed stepping off a plane in February 1957 -- an exiled Hungarian refugee persecuted in his own country for journalistic views he'd expressed against the new Communist regime. My mother melted at his dashing ways -- hand kissing, smoking with a cigarette-holder, and wearing his jacket flung over both shoulders. What more could a girl ask for?
Apparently, a lot. My grandmother was not amused. The way she'd spit out the 'p' in "your father, the poet..." came out as if she'd said "your father, the pauper" or "the pickpocket." There went Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and John Donne -- all out the window of my grandmother's estimation. If you couldn't make a good living or marry someone who could, you were no one in her book.
Predictably, my parents marriage fell apart soon after my mother tired of life with a man twice her age who didn't speak English and had no money. They divorced when I was four and my father now lived in Yorkville, the Hungarian-German neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
My mother resided in Greenwich Village in New York City with my younger half sister and brother,
The Griffiths summered in Renwick and wintered in Paris. How cool was that? Paris, to my fourteen-year-old imagination, was someplace beautiful and elegant where people ate croissants for breakfast on balconies festooned with intricate, curlicue designs outside grand, high-ceilinged apartments. At age five, my grandmother had taken me to see the film The Red Balloon. My bookcase was filled with Babar the Elephant books I'd read as a child and couldn't bear to give away. I knew all about Paris.
While the Griffith's were in residence at their summer beach house, their trampoline was available for any of the Renwick kids to jump on during the day. Most of the time the Griffiths weren't home -- they were at the beach, or the Club playing tennis or golfing. Rebecca and I would drop by almost every day to jump on the trampoline.
Those were the days before people sued each other for dumb things their kids did in their friends' backyards. There was no fence around the backyard where the trampoline stood nor was there a net around its sides. The neighborhood kids jumped into the air to their heart's content until they went home and slept like the dead that night. Every parent of small children in Renwick secretly blessed the Griffiths for allowing their children the use of their trampoline.
That summer I fantasized I was the eldest child from a family such as theirs, jumping up and down on my own trampoline. Rebecca was my adorable, blonde, five-year old sister. We lived in Renwick in the summer and in Paris in the winter. I'd jump with a dreamy expression on my face, hoping I'd spring into another life altogether like Alice down the rabbit hole.
A week after my conversation with Uncle Fred, my grandmother called. It was unusual for her to call at all since I'd begun living on my own with a group of other girls all connected up with the music college I'd bombed out of. Four of us rented the first floor of a three-family house right down the street from the gas station where I worked. It was six blocks from my grandparents' street, right over the town line with Hartford where the bad neighborhood began. It was close enough that I could still walk over to their place for the occasional non-fun family get-together but far enough away so I didn't bump into them or anyone they knew.
"Ava, I have something to ask you," she said, sounding strangely formal, as if she were playacting or something. Usually she never asked family members anything, she just told us what was what. I knew immediately something was up.
"Yes, Nana?" I asked, praying this might be the follow-up to Nancy Shelton's talk with Annabel Griffith.
"Well you certainly don't deserve this and I have no idea why they thought of you, but do you remember a family down in Renwick by the name of Griffith?"
"Yes. The family with the trampoline -- and three kids." I could hardly contain myself, but I needed to act surprised.
"Yes. Win Griffith's father is retired head of Aetna," she said, referring to Hartford's biggest insurance company. Who knew? Who cared?
Apparently my grandmother did. "Well you must have made quite an impression on them although I don't know how," she continued. The faster my grandmother's put-downs flew the better the news would be. Her compliments to family members were almost always served with a sizeable splash of vinegar. My heart thumped in my chest.
"Well, they've asked Nancy Shelton to ask you if you'd be interested to babysit their kids this school year in Paris."
"Oh wow! In Paris? Yes! I'd love to." I tried to sound as if the idea hadn't already occurred to me; been engineered by me, in fact.
"They wouldn't pay you much but it would be a way for you to stay out of trouble."
The thought of the amount of trouble I could get myself into on my own in Paris compelled me to sit down -- phone receiver trembling in hand.
"I'll spend the year applying to colleges, Nana. You'll see. I'll get into a good school."
"You already got into a good school thanks to your grandfather's and my connections and then you threw it all away."
"I'm going to do it this time without your connections, Nana. I want to do it on my own." Hadn't I just set up this babysitting job on my own? Her recurring mantra on my grandfather's medical degree flashed into my head. "Your grandfather only made it through Harvard Med School because of his photographic memory." Whatever either of us achieved, we could never win with her.
"You'll do it this time without our financial support, Ava. We're done tossing good money after bad. First your mother, now you. When you come back from your year abroad you'll either go to secretarial school or get a job. Who knows - with your luck you'll probably meet a French count." She sounded bitter -- as if being lucky was something I didn't deserve.
In your dreams, lady, not mine. "Okay, fine. I accept!" My grandmother's plans for me were always plans for herself. I wasn't particularly interested to meet a nobleman. But a close encounter with a real Frenchman would be fine by me. My fingertips tingled as I held the receiver.
"Then get your behind over here for dinner tonight and I'll have you run over to Nancy with the news. Make sure you thank her profusely. She must have told the Griffiths some whoppers about you for them to offer you a job."
"Nana - I did actually babysit Rebecca for an entire summer. Maybe that had something to do with it."
"Be here by six. And if I were you I'd pick up some flowers for Nancy. She went out of her way for you." Even though you don't deserve it, lingered in the air, unspoken.
My grandmother was artwork. Even if I hadn't wanted to spend a year in Paris, I'd have gone anyway, just to get away from my substitute mom's bottomless well of negativity and not-really-well-meaning advice.
* * *
The next two months flew by like white lightening. On a golden late-September evening I boarded my flight to Paris, excited, exuberant and ready for adventure. Goodbye West Hartford, goodbye self-service gas station, goodbye Nana, goodbye to all that.
And bonjour, City of Light.