took the girl’s coat, and then led her into a room with a window and a dentist’s chair.
She sat down and began to wait for the dentist to appear. He came in the door without speaking. She watched his white cuffs as he arranged his instruments on a small tray. Finally she looked at his face. He did not look back. She understood that her mother must have told him she spoke no French. His face was as closed as though she was dumb, rather than wordless.
He was supposed to see how her teeth were doing now that her braces were gone. The orthodontist at home had snatched them off because, he said, there was no one in France who would know how to attend to them. (Attending to them meant having them tightened, excruciatingly, every other Friday.) He said the French were very backward about correcting teeth, as the girl had observed every time one of them opened his mouth. Their teeth hardly looked like teeth, yellow and crooked as kernels of corn—something to do with their wartime diet, her mother had said. The orthodontist had insisted that all his work would be undone if the girl went to France, but her mother had refused to be swayed by that. “After all, teeth are not the only consideration,” she had said, leading the girl to speculate about the others.
Now the French dentist was examining her teeth with his little metal probe. Her head was comfortably fitted into the padded brace, and the big chair enclosed her like a shell. She closed her eyes, contented. He didn’t hurt her.
As he scraped her teeth, only her tongue was uncooperative, blocking his tool now and then.
After she spat and rinsed her mouth, he motioned her up out of the chair. The woman appeared, handed her her coat, and escorted her to the front door. Behind, the dentist was smiling; she felt it, even though her coat. Somehow, even without words, she had pleased him.
The little elevator was waiting for her.
Downstairs, she pushed open the door and went out into the fading afternoon. She had no idea how long she’d sat in the chair.
Standing on the sidewalk, she looked around. The narrow street was walled with small buildings, two or three stories high. She couldn’t tell for sure, but they seemed to be houses. However, no one came, or went, through the front doors and there were no lights in the windows. She began to wonder if the houses were deserted.
The air smelled grainy with coal soot.
Half a block away, on the corner, a green awning stretched part way across the sidewalk. There was writing on the awing, and she realized that it must be some kind of shop.
As she waited, the streetlamps came on with a flash that settled into a dim glow. The ornamented tops of the buildings melted into the darkening sky. The streetlight above her head was humming to itself in a rising and falling tone, almost like a song.
A light came on in a window across the street. She imagined a woman inside, beginning to cook dinner. She would lay out carrots, turnips, and onions and begin chopping. The carrots would still have their earthy beards. Water would begin to boil on the stove. She remembered a visit they had paid to a French family; those children had had plain water in their soup bowls. Seeing that, she had wanted to cry out, and stand up from the table; her bowl was full of vegetables in a thick broth. But she had gone on spooning. “Family hold back,” her father had explained, later. There had not been enough soup for everyone, and guests always came first.
She began to shiver. Darkness was falling, solidly. The sky above the rooftops had turned black.
Hearing a metallic rattle, she looked down the block and saw a man lowering a grille over the shop window.
Panic seized her suddenly with its iron claw. She ran toward him.
He turned, surprised. He was a round cabbagey man in a long apron.
Her hands fluttered up, her mouth opened. Then she rushed in the shop door before he could close it.
A sparrow woman sat on a high stool behind a counter with a cash register and a pyramid of glass ashtrays. She stared at the girl.
“Please—”
The man in the apron came in behind her. He stood with his arms folded.
It was some kind of café. She saw a few tables, all empty.
The woman asked her something. The girl shook her head and spread out her hands.
Then she said, “Perdue. Je suis . . . perdue.” They were her first French words.
They conferred briefly, and then the man in the apron waved her toward the door. She thought he was going to lock her out but he nodded and smiled, reassuring her.
He followed her onto the sidewalk and began to gesture and speak. Eventually she understood that he was pointing at a sign with a picture of a bus on it. She’d noticed them all over the city and seen the big groaning overloaded buses pulling up.
She ran across the street and stood by the sign in a circle of yellow light from a streetlamp. He watched her for a moment and then went inside. Later he came out with the woman, locked the door, and went away with her, arm in arm.
Planting herself, she began to wait. Buses come. Buses always come. She felt in her pocket for her coins.
Finally, at the end of the block, a bus came lurching. She realized it might not stop for her and stepped into the street, holding up her hand. It was a gesture she’d seen the men in dark suits make, to interrupt each other.
The bus wheezed to a stop in front of her and the doors opened. She climbed up, fumbling for her money.
The bus was packed with dark forms.
The driver turned his face to stare at her. His hand, on the long lever, closed the door behind her and the bus started, with a jerk. He nodded at the coin box.
She dropped all her money in. He looked at her oddly.
She wanted to sit down, she wanted to fold herself into the dark mass of strangers.
The driver was still looking at her.
“Rue,” she said. “Rue Alfred Deodangue.”
He nodded, and handed her back two of her coins.
As she sat down, she remembered the poison paint flaking off the bedroom ceiling in Rome, sending the American woman home. With a stab of shame, she remembered that she had hoped they might also be recalled. Now, settling into her seat and beginning to study the street signs, she knew she did not want to be recalled.
The arm of the stranger next to her was solid and still. After a while warmth began to seep into her side.
Let us stay a long time, she prayed, until I can put it all together—the words, the streets, the woman with her face pressed against Jean’s window.
It might even be possible to ask questions now that she had some words. She imagined asking one of the jeering girls in the convent schoolyard why she hated her, what she had done. Perhaps it would turn out not to be hate at all but only some kind of game. If it was a game, any kind of question could be asked, because games were always about asking questions: “Red Rover, Red Rover, who will you send over?”
She had always been good at games, chasing the ball across the half court and lobbing it into the net or sprinting down
