Souvenirs

Abstract

Souvenirs M. Colón-Margolies (bio) Last week, while I was taking summer clothes out of storage, I discovered a trove of notes written on slips of paper and the backs of receipts in the bottom of a drawer in my bedroom. The handwriting was my own, but the letters looked unfixed and childlike, as if I'd written them twenty years before. The events they recounted, however, occurred two springs ago—during our confinement year in Paris and the year before that. When I spread the notes on my bed, when I pored over the emotions and events recorded in them, all I saw were lies. A pale mosaic, immaterial to the life I now lead. But all of it is true. ________ The earliest notes date to 2019. Our third year in Paris, a time when all I did was forget. My wallet at a restaurant, my gloves on the train. A misplaced taxe de habitation I later had to pay a fee on. I was pregnant at the time. Always hungry, and yet also always nauseous. Repulsed by heavy foods, meat and eggs, but lascivious, envious even, when it came to sweets. I'd stare at the chocolate studded pains suisses nestled in the window display of the bakery by my apartment, and debate whether a taste might be worth the queasiness that would come afterwards. Pregnancy is a time of bodily embarrassment, but also beauty, thwarted desires, and contradictions. You're exhausted, but unable to sleep. Connected to the creature inside you, and yet wholly detached from it. Even your immune system has to suppress itself so it won't mistake the baby for a disease. So maybe it made sense that I felt harebrained at the time, that I continued to forget. In Paris, you have to apply for a place in the public daycare system when you're three months along. The system is excellent and inexpensive, but it's hard to get into. My husband Hector and I organized our application for weeks, and then, on the day we were supposed to drop it off at the mairie, I realized I'd forgotten to bring an essential form. Then, at the interview, I struggled to answer questions in French, and felt my cheeks grow hot at the fact that the language I'd studied for years could still evade me when the slightest pressure was applied. I looked down and saw that the fabric of the red shirt I was wearing seemed cheap. A self-possessed civil servant appraised me over her black-rimmed glasses, and six months [End Page 104] later, a slender envelope arrived in our mailbox informing us that we'd been rejected. Our daughter, Sara, had just been born, and I had to go back to work full-time in a few months. We couldn't afford a nanny and didn't have family in France who could take care of Sara during the day. I worried, but Hector said in a calm voice that he knew we'd find a solution. He touched my cheek and gave me a teasing smile, a gesture he sometimes made to diffuse tension or show tenderness. Then he said he'd do some research. We could still apply for a garde partagée, a kind of nanny share, he said a few days later. Or the halte-garderie, a public part-time daycare, but our best bet might be applying for a place in an employer-subsidized crèche system that reserved a handful of places for the children of employees at his and other nonprofits around the city. Hector's office had just joined the network, and even though it was late in the year and there was a lot of demand, his coworkers said that they thought we'd get priority because we had no roots in France, no blood on the continent, and therefore had no one who could help us. So, we applied, and after many pleading emails and phone calls, dossiers photocopied and delivered, one brilliant cold morning, we got in. The director of the crèche was a former pediatric nurse. A sensible and jolly woman...