August in Paris Read Free

months, Sam’s ear infection in Jamaica, Emma’s impacted tooth in San Francisco, the headaches and digestive problems that tend to follow Crispin around the globe and can escalate to crisis proportions if one of us happens to leave the Tylenol at home.
    2. The interpersonal tensions of the group had been steadily rising. One evening, just before we went out to dinner, we had a gloves-off brawl about the location of a particular Italian restaurant. It was me against them, Crispin, Hayes, and Vince, and I was right in the end, but that didn’t help. The meta-arguments, as usual, were the killer: “This is your worst trait!” Vince said darkly, meaning that I argue so hard, which seemed a low blow considering they were all 100 percent incorrect, but by then Hayes had done the typical Hayes thing of changing what he had been saying so he was actually not wrong, which is his worst trait, and this move destroyed the fragile alliance between him and Crispin. Vince at one point tried to smooth things over, saying everyone has bad traits, but Hayes shouted him down.
    These people are not very nice to me, I sadly concluded (again). And though we were not at home, I continued in my domestic enslavement to them, their clothes, their meals, their dishes, their rumpled beds. And all of this was my fault, of course, since the ultimate horribleness of one’s horrible children is that one has only oneself to blame.
    3. Hayes was at an age when a trip to Paris with his mother and her entourage was far from an appealing prospect. He had insisted on bringing his golf clubs, despite my increasingly hysterical explanations that there were no golf courses in Paris. Now he sat morosely in the tiny apartment, staring at his golf bag. One day, we took three subway lines to the outskirts of the city so he could hit balls on a driving range set up in the middle of a racetrack. This did not make either of us feel any better.
    4. My mother, on the other hand, was no trouble at all. During the Italian restaurant imbroglio and most others, she repaired to a table in the alley with her martini, her cigarette, and one of the seven books she had imported from her public library. Having passed on the task of driving me insane to the younger generation, she could now relax. By the time the kids disappeared, she and Hayes had taken their flight home.
    Around 5:45 a.m., the front gate clanged shut; Joyce, Crispin, and I all heard it. We looked up from our mugs into each other’s eyes. Then we heard the soft chatter, the familiar voices, and raced out onto the stoop.
    When the two of them saw the three of us lined up like that, shrimpy and exhausted, their jaws dropped. They'd had no idea how much worry they had caused us and had only even begun meandering their way home in the last couple of hours, my midnight curfew apparently forgotten. Meanwhile, we grownups filled them in on exactly what we had been through in their protracted absence.
    While Vince, who has been my son all his life, didn’t seem too concerned about the worry he had caused—just another drop in the bucket—my stepdaughter, Emma, felt very badly. It was rather refreshing for me to see the forlorn, anxious, apologetic look on her face. I don't think my boys ever learned to make that face.
    Perhaps more time would have been devoted to the aftermath of this crisis if another hadn’t broken in its wake. I received a phone call from my mother in which she used the F word at least 15 times, explaining that she and Hayes had been delayed overnight in Boston, then flown to Washington instead of Baltimore, and had arrived at BWI 36 hours behind schedule only to find that Hayes had lost my mother’s car keys.
    By this time, stress had sandblasted every synapse in my brain. I could just imagine getting into this sort of situation with my mother, and my primary reaction was, better him than me.
    For our last day, I pulled myself together and planned a