The Exchange: Day 19

Toward the end of our time, it’s as though a switch gets flipped. I had forgotten, but the same thing happened with Anoukis. Like the half-deflated pool floaties in my garage, it’s as if the air has just gone out of him. Is it the heat? Is it our activity level? Is it staying up too late on the infernal cell phone? I can’t get to the bottom of it or stop it, but I start to see that this is part of the leave-taking. For the last few days, they occupy your house half gone. Like some sort of reverse jet lag, it begins before the travel and mirrors what came at the other end, the beginning. Like a bookend in the heart. In France, three weeks ago, it would have registered as raw excitement and adrenaline going into the experience. Now, its counterpart looks like a low-grade coma. He gets up at 11 and is tired by two and even though there are still things on our bucket list, none that appeal. At the pool he confesses that he is “crève,” a word I do not know, so he explains — “It’s when you have, like, a machine who is out of battery.” Oh, I see. He says this leaning back in a $1,575 pool chair at our cushy club, having just eaten a pool lunch off my credit card with the towel I bought him wrapped around his shoulders, so I can tell you the machine I wish was out of battery. Dig deeper, dude. On our next exchange, should there be one, we will be chucking that thing in the pool.

Same thing in DC. I come up out of that metro ready to cross the mall. And by that I don’t mean go “across” the mall to the Natural History Museum on the other side. I mean end to end, to get the real flavor of things, take in the sights, experience something cool along the way. I’m thinking Capital steps to the Tidal Basin, or at the very least the Washington Monument. That’s my idea of “cross the mall” — end to end. But I can’t get two blocks without Francois the Fast falling behind. Apparently he does not like to walk. What? How else do you get around when travelling? In Mt. St. Aignan, Normandy, my roommate and I walked to school every morning and every afternoon. It wasn’t backward in the snow, and we weren’t barefoot, but it was five miles one way and it was uphill. We were too broke to pay for bus fare, too safety conscious to hitch, and too stubborn to do it any other way. Started to notice we could eat all the baguettes we wanted and Norman crème as well, what with all that exercise, so we just factored in the hour going and coming, and we walked. It wasn’t that unusual at all. It was a little freaky in the early morning, especially midwinter, but we kept it up for a year and it got easier. It is, I want to tell this boy of the “new” generation, it is what you do. Pretender. Your fancy Nike shirt may well say it but you don’t. You don’t Just do it.

When you are broke in a foreign city you find things to take up the days that don’t cost money (most of the museums do), and one of these things is walking. As the girls will tell you, even in record setting-heat of last summer, my favorite way to explore a French city is a walking tour. One challenge I set for myself decades ago and managed to achieve before I flew home: to cross every bridge in Paris along the Seine. At the time there were 22. And I did. I crossed every one. On foot, I laced that city together, back and forth across her bridges: the big steel industrial spans on the outlying boundary of Paris and the narrow stone bridges that have been there as long as the city itself. Like the “Pont Neuf” (new bridge), built in 1578, which at the time was the newest bridge in the city. Now it is the oldest. Apparently, according to one website, “its sturdiness has become axiomatic. Parisians still say that something is as ‘solid as the Pont Neuf’.” Now, there are more bridges. Built since I’ve been gone. Hi honey, I’m home. What did you do while I was away?

I did not walk for exercise then. Didn’t need to. I was 19, and then 21. I walked to know. I walked to see. Reading a city by a sort of pedestrian braille, up and down her grand rues, her shy back alleys, her docks and quays. To put myself out there where things happened and the great concourse of people and urban architectural beauty converged on truth and made me truly alive. My feet, my only guide. Now, of course–no walking for my teens. They are homing pigeons for the metro, and every time we pass an electric scooter or rent-a-bike kiosk they salivate, lightly touch the seats and plead with me to “try one.” I suppose he would cover some steps at Short Pump if I could get him there, and Carytown presents itself as one brief option from the bucket list before it is shot down. I’m at least gratified that he does not see shopping as worthy of his time and energy this late in the game. Take him to Short Pump in 100 degrees on a Friday? I’d rather have my face held to a 4×6 screen so cracked it is barely viewable and be made to watch reruns of some B rate French sitcom he downloaded before he left home.

Truly it is too hot. The heat index today is 107 with major alerts about curtailing activities outdoors. You can hear the garden sizzle and then steam when I go to water it. Camille, little brown water rat, doesn’t seem to mind. I’ll bet he gets some rays chez lui. His screen name, I notice on one of the many times he slips me his phone, is “Mec de Sud,” or his translation, “South Guy.” Indeed, he is St. Tropez brown and seems to know his way around the water, to say the least. If only we could have jet skied through DC I’m sure he would have been more agreeable to taking in sights.

I am, or was, still in high gear. At 53 I find I hold a charge pretty well, actually. I’m not ready to be done. These 18-hours days operating under a heat advisory, one day just fuels the next. I am as sturdy, I suppose, as the Pont Neuf. At Kings Dominion, we open the park. We close it 12 hours later. It was 94 degrees (coolest day of the week) with a “real feel” of 101, and all I ate all day was 2 packages of peanut butter crackers and four gallons of water. The boys enjoy a nice $30 lunch of burgers and fries, which with the flies and the cleanliness of the “restaurant” is a meal I can neither stomach nor afford, so I just decide to see how far I can get on smuggled crackers. Offset by a little light nausea from the early stages of heat exhaustion, I feel quite full and content. I am good for the entire day.

Walking out to the car I am glad I wore my travelling shoes. They are dusty, all right, but my feet and legs don’t hurt. Nothing hurts. Like Will on the Intimidator, I could right turn around and go again. What is it? Adrenaline? Lunacy? I’ll tell you what it is, actually. It is watching my boy, my boy, having the time of his life. He confesses to me in the car going up that he was so excited to go to Kings Dominion because it is not like a band trip, the only other times he has been here. At a band trip you get assigned a small group and a chaperone that function a little like being chained to a pile of cinderblocks. They don’t move well together, and they weigh you down. They don’t make quick decisions or maximize time in a park. From our early days at Disney as a family, Will knows how to sweep an amusement park of all the big rides first, fast and well. Beat the heat, the lines, and everything else to the big guns. Then the lesser rides, then later, after the lightweights have gone home, the repeats. Repeats while a park is closing are sometimes the most fun of all.

I can tell he’s a little weary of the French invasion in our home. Will. Just un peu. For one, it’s sibling jealousy. He knows I am holding him to a higher standard. He makes his bed and tends the pets and does chores and has a lawn cutting service outside the house and then he comes home and does more chores and practices his instrument. He is tired of me turning a blind eye when Camille’s room is a mess and he is frequently found on his phone at meal times or help times. Times when I all but want an air siren to sound calling my people to contribute. For another, it’s the cell phones. Will plugs his in downstairs for the night, a practice I failed to enforce with Frenchie. William also has, and more or less adheres to, some restrictions on electronics that Camille assures me “do not happen een France.” Case in point, on one of our electronics sabbaths, when I have taken the phone and hidden it from the little elves who might spirit it away, he begs and pleads with me for the first hour, and then resorts to moping and rolling backward up the stairs like a much younger child might do in the aftershocks of a tantrum. Will is disgusted with this behavior. It gets so bad my own son starts harping on cell phone usage. For real! We play a round of cards instead, and I think I’ve died and gone to oldschool heaven.

So what to do with a boy I cannot get out of the bed? We’ve come home from another pool day and he has showered and put on the little cotton pajamas signalling he is not available for a trip to the store or a trip to the skate park or to see puppies or any of the remaining items. He is like to kick the bucket list. Camille? Camille, are you okay? Do you want to go see a movie? Do you want to go shop for souvenirs? Do you want...to take a walk? “Non merci! Non, I do not. Not in a box, not with a fox, not on a train, not in the rain. I will not will not seize zeese day.” It is two days before “D” day. Departure. On the dining table I lay out things I still wish for: a Monopoly game, a deck of cards. An album containing my scrapbook from the first month I spent in France. What will you play, Camille, what will it be? “Oh I yam so tired,” says he, which in our house I know (coming from a teen) is code for, what I really need is to be fed, clothed, cared for, and wholly supported alone. Away from you. His épuisement is fueled, I can see, by the ready availability of the communities out there which await him: a group of other French students also making their baggage au moment and probably quietly holed up in other bedrooms around greater Richmond, and the families back home, in France, starting that simmering anticipation of a child coming home. No mother can play it cool with that emotion.

On the very last day, after breakfast and before the bags are packed and zipped for the final time, I suggest he go outside with Will to take a few more turns on the go-kart. It has been such a screaming favorite these past few weeks. He half-heartedly agrees. Actually I guilt him into it mother-style, by sitting down beside him on the sofa and mentioning how sad, how incredibly sad William is to be losing his friend. Surely you could play Ball Blast on the airplane, soon? Oui? When I go out to take a final photo or two I have to skip it, so morose and miserable is the expression on his little face as he spins donuts in the dust. After a few minutes he walks through the garage, lays his helmet on the work bench without a word and goes back inside. Will looks at me with sad eyes. I look up and learn a new expression in French: “crève-coeur.” It means heart break.

I have to say this. The thing that shines brightest for me through this whole experience is my own kid. I wouldn’t exchange him for anything. Even in the hilarity and “overboard” of boy mischief that’s gone on here, he is mature beyond his years. He does not make Camille feel bad. He hides his own disappointments well. He works through the exasperation he feels when both boys wake to a list of house chores, one written in English, the other, French, and though Will cannot read a word of the latter, he sees that they both get done. My boy, he speaks a language of care and consideration. He made sacrifices. Big ones. I still chuckle thinking about the movies they watched that first week, the TV blaring in French, with Will content to sit beside his new friend and read the English subtitles. A true friend, he gave the bigger half. Always. He is a teacher, patiently explaining something the best he can; a partner, finishing his own chores and then going to stand beside Camille to help fold the laundry; a co-conspirator, supporting and improving on any of the harebrained pranks they came up with; and a mom, making sure he has his money and the right stuff in his pack for the day ahead. I know a couple times he’s even snuck in to make Camille’s bed. Making his mamma happy. Making the day go. Smoothing, soothing, a day. Bearing peace. He is a true friend, and the hero of my heart. Guy of the South, meet Virginia Boy. He’s all mine.