Lynx Jacket

This is from a 1983 diary excerpt written in a Clairefontaine notebook in aqua fountain pen ink, the handwriting tiny and crabbed. I have 53 years’ worth of these volumes that I’m slowly skimming and purging.

Yesterday Mme. came home with a lynx and mink jacket. Since she has been complaining of money problems, I naturally assumed it was an imitation and asked if it was rabbit. She gave me a withering look. Subconsciously, I suppose I did it on purpose.

At the time in 1983, I was Madame’s servant, taking care of her 3-year-old daughter while she worked every day at the Banque Nationale de Paris, and cleaning her apartment in the 12^th arrondissement. I didn’t do a very good job of the cleaning, but I was good at telling the little girl fairy tales, even in my fractured French and my honking American accent.

I called her Madame in my diary even though she was only 2 years older than I and insisted that I call her by her first name, as if we were copines, which we were not. Sometimes she would be rude, even cruel to me, telling me that my French should be better by now, that drinking Coke causes boutons, and when the child came down with a cold, blaming me for not dressing her warmly enough the day before.

She and her husband didn’t really have the money or the accommodations for a servant, but there I was as their au pair. They wanted to try to look more successful and yuppieish – that was a real term in 1983 – and I needed a job and a place to live, like thousands of people living in Paris without papiers.

I slept on a fold-out canape in the living room. In the morning I folded it up and the room looked like no one had been there. I erased myself every day.

What would I have known from lynx jackets, me with my puffy midwestern down jacket, not a foulard in sight, and a pastel wraparound skirt from LL Bean that, Madame hastened to inform me, had a stain on the back? I had fled to Paris thinking I’d refashion my life, but all I did was shatter it even further.

Forty years hence I remember that I’d been adrift and lonely, but until reading these desperate diary entries again, I’d blocked out just how bad it had been. I realize how self-indulgent that sounds – oh, I was living in Paris, anyone’s dream, but I managed to make it awful.

There were lessons in Paris. If you try to wear a down jacket to the opera on a cold night, an imperious Frenchwoman will take it off of you and insist that you wear her pearl gray wool coat, cut too slim for you. You will descend in the ascenseur and emerge in the rue Claude de Caen, crying with rage and humiliation. The French word for pimples is the same word as for buttons. Moving a continent away in a dramatic flourish changes nothing – your heartbreak will be crouched there, waiting for you.

1-800-Junk

My foray into creative writing has almost ended — only three more sessions remain in my class at Long Beach City College.

Yesterday we “workshopped” our short stories. Trying to write a short story is a clumsy exercise for me, but that was the point of taking the class, to try to jumpstart a part of my brain I have never used.

My story reviews were mixed: some students remarked that I used many words in the story they didn’t know, which surprised me. Another student told me “nothing happens” and decreed that “if this was a video, it would all be filler.” He is my most severe critic: on an earlier assignment for a voice poem, he commented that the girl described in the poem “needs a kick in the pants,” an assessment that delighted me in spite of myself.

I just read my friend Cynthia Carbone Ward’s post about turning an old diary into confetti. Her post is about so much more than that, as are all her essays on her “Still Amazed” blog, rich stories about hope and loss and love. Old diaries have been plaguing me lately too, evidenced by this poem I wrote to complete another assignment this term.

I’m Sorry I Hoarded These Things

Now that I’m dead, you’ll have to deal with them. When I cleared the attic

two years ago you commanded briskly, “Just call 1-800-JUNK,” but I couldn’t.

Go ahead now.

Get rid of that box of recipes with index cards written in elegant, curling script.

It belonged to my sister, Mary, who you never knew and, if you had, she might have

touched a match to a flaming dessert for you in her tiny Queens kitchen.

I couldn’t bear to throw it out, though I never made Baked Alaska or Cherries Jubilee.

Part with my parents’ wedding album, 1951, St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

I rescued it once decades ago, plucked it from the trash where my mother had bitterly thrown it.

Occasionally I’d scan the cigarette-smoke–yellowed pages,

imagining that in the beyond my mother and father would somehow be joined together,

all the old sorrows fallen away, laughing like they are in these photos.

Ditch the diaries I kept since I was 13. For God’s sake don’t read them.

I started going through them, cringing as I read. I did get through a few randomly — 1982, 1974,

and disposed of those. But I had to stop, unable to continue

the unwelcome reunion with my awful, trite self, who constantly misspelled “surprise” and “definitely.”

Trash all your baby teeth, kept gruesomely in a blue envelope in an old jewelry box

stuffed in my bottom dresser drawer. They’ll seem gross to you, but to me they were talismans.

Dump the trove of campaign buttons. Never mind who Mo Udall was.

Chuck your organdy, lace-trimmed christening gown, worn by every baby in the family since 1918. I won’t be

there to see your children born, but I know you’re happy

I can’t insist that they be baptized in that fragile, tattered gown.

Do away with the few baseball cards that remain from my once-sizeable collection — Joe Pepitone’s rookie card,

Ellie Howard, Chuck Knoblauch, and my namesake, Nate Colbert.

I checked; they’re worthless. I kept them so I could remember trading them

with my brother when we were little, before we knew everything would go to hell.

Jettison the junky Christmas tree ornaments, even though I was especially attached

to the ones with your picture and handprint, made for me in preschool and kindergarten.  

Let go of the stacks of letters, remnants of a time when a letter’s arrival

made it a good day. Don’t complain too much — there were 10 times that many

before I winnowed them, saving only the most treasured.  

Chuck all the photos. I spent hours sorting them, identifying the people and places, and writing that on the back.

I’m sorry I wasted my time now, because

you won’t be interested in these fusty relics.

Oh, but keep the copy of Abel’s Island with its dogeared pages

and peeling silver Newberry Award medallion. It was both of our favorite.

Even if you never have kids, you might want to reread it yourself one day.