On our first trip to Europe, some of us fell in love with Paris: the art, the architecture, the tiny cafes where you could sit drinking coffee and eating bread and cheese all afternoon. Lillian took up smoking short brown cigarettes and spent hours jotting in her journal. Petra teased that Lillian was talking on a Gertrude Stein persona. “She’s got all the answers,” Petra said.
“And all the questions too,” Lilian responded.
Maris took a train to Provence and got a job serving cassoulet at a farm house bistro. She sent us a card saying she would not be returning to the states with us. Raul, who had always been in love with Maris, declared his intention to return to drinking. But he didn’t much care for the only wine he could afford in Paris. He hitchhiked to Bavaria where he could drink himself drunk on German beer and cheap gin.
Maris wrote long letters to Lillian which Lillian shared with the group. The letters had seemingly random titles centered on the first pages, as if they were essays or short stories. Lililan’s favorite had been dubbed “In the Middle of My Grief.” Maris had just finished sophomore year at Oregon State, and as far as any of us knew, no one close to Maris had ever died. Yet Maris wrote about a deep sorrow in which she felt compelled to dive into the shadowy corners of her own heart. She wrote of traversing dark sidewalks without street lights into a corridor where a mighty bald eagle was snagged on some kind or orange netting left by a team of careless sewer workers. Maris’s heart was breaking at the struggle of the hapless bird.
“What does this mean?” she wrote to Lillian. “What can I do?”
“The choice is yours,” Lilian replied on a post card from the Louvre, still attempting to emulate Gertrude with a terse but weighty remark. Then, hoping to further provoke Maris’s creativity, she added, “Mister White has seen the elephant.”
Concerned, Petra wrote to Raul and convinced him to catch a train to Maris’s small village and entreat her to come home. Eventually we all converged on London’s Heathrow—as had been arranged all along—and headed home in time for junior year.
We are all older now, and I remember that summer as a time when my biggest challenges were the unforgiving nature of railway time tables, and the limitations of time zones.
I spent the last day before returning home in Greenwich with Petra and Maris. It was raining like crazy but we didn’t care; we walked along the Thames, snapping photos and eating sugared peanuts. There was a moment, waiting for them at the loo, when I looked out a café window and saw a sky so deeply purple against a shattering green grass, and I thought: I have never seen these colors before. I wonder if I will ever see them again.
When we came home, Petra returned to her given name Patricia. But Maris abandoned Marianne, and became now and forever Maris.
Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash
