Chapter XI. Everything That Rises Must Converge.
XI.
EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE.
LOS ANGELES.
On the days we don’t have Parisa, I wait for Lucie in the parking lot.
She files out of class with her fellow dancers, full of laughter and light, and I am overjoyed to see her with her new friends.
But the Wednesday following my return from Paris, I decide to venture inside the studio, hoping to get a glimpse of my ballerina in action.
I don’t. The interior doors are closed, and so I stand in the waiting area with a handful of other moms anticipating the girls’ exit.
There are no men here. Either carpooling duties have fallen entirely to the female sex, or the dads who’ve been roped into chauffeuring have been instructed to wait in the parking lot.
Once again, I am the only one who looks like me.
There’s a cluster of blonds chatting in the center of the room.
They could easily be taken for a sorority.
Long, beachy, center-parted hair, faux-tanned skin.
Most are wearing Lululemon, although it’s six thirty in the evening.
A few are in skinny jeans with strategic tears at the knees.
I imagine they are all about my age, but some have had work done and it’s difficult to tell.
The one anomaly is the Asian American woman seated on the bench lining the far wall, scrolling on her phone.
She is dressed very chicly: flesh-colored three-inch slingbacks, a tailored black dress, a large Céline tote with a laptop peeking out.
I don’t see many working moms on the Westside, and so I start to fantasize about what it is she does.
Lawyer, banker, consultant … Whichever, she is an outlier.
I am transfixed by the Westside Woman. By how similar so many look.
How they are all effortfully thin, veiny forearms from too much yoga, faces drawn yet plumped, hair colored and styled, impeccable pedicures, and wrinkle-free smiles.
They are a tribe. In Patagonia and Uggs.
In Range Rovers and Audis. In Cartier Love bracelets.
I wonder what beauty it is that these women are consuming en masse.
Who and where are their influencers? Goop?
Tracy Anderson? Karyn Grossman? Garth Fisher?
I am mulling this over and wondering how I might work it into my current project when one of the blonds approaches me.
“Hey,” she says. She’s wearing a hooded cashmere cardigan, Anita Ko spike stud earrings. Her freshly balayaged hair hangs past her shoulders. She is both slouchy and expensive. “Who’s your person?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you here to pick up someone’s child?”
I stare at her for a second. In France, strangers don’t approach you and start up personal conversations for no reason. “Yes,” I say eventually. “Mine.”
“Oh, I’ve just never seen you here before. I’m Allie.” She smiles, offering her hand. “Mackenzie’s mom.”
“Hi, Allie.” I do my best to be pleasant. It is not the first time I’ve been mistaken for the nanny. “I’m Cecilia.”
“And who’s your child?”
“Lucie Charlot.”
She tries to place her, but it takes a moment. “Oh, the new girl! From Paris! Mackenzie says your family is French?”
“Yes.”
She cocks her head, her blue eyes sizing me up. “Your English is so good. You have absolutely no accent.”
At that I laugh, genuinely. “I should hope not. I grew up in New York.”
“Oh, I was about to say, you don’t look French.”
For a moment, I say nothing. I want to tell her that the millions of French citizens from Martinique and Guadeloupe and Réunion, who look not unlike me, are legally 100 percent French. But it hardly seems the time or place for a geopolitical lesson.
“So your husband is French?” she continues.
“Yes.”
She nods, cocks her head in the other direction. I can only imagine what’s going on under all that swinging balayage of hers.
“What brings you guys to LA? Work?”
“Yes.” I nod.
“Is your husband in the business?” It’s an innocuous question, but it agitates me: the fact that she assumes we have moved here for my husband’s work, and not mine. The fact that she is right.
“Yes,” I say, and nothing more, hoping she’ll stop her barrage of questions. She doesn’t.
“Mackenzie says Lucie is a very good dancer. Even though she’s the youngest. She’s one of the best in their group.”
This is likely true. On our arrival Lucie was placed in the Intermediate II class, which was mostly twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. My daughter was rather proud of that fact.
“The eleven-year-olds are still doing baby ballet,” she’d reported after her initial assessment in January, with Miss Margaret, the head of the program. “They’re not even close to ready for pointe.”
“Not everyone is on the same schedule, Lu.”
“Not everyone takes it seriously, you mean,” she’d huffed. “Some of them also do soccer. Which is all the wrong muscles.”
“Is Lucie going to audition for The Nutcracker?” Allie asks me now. The Nutcracker was going up in December. We were still in March.
“I really don’t know. I imagine so.”
At that moment the doors swing open, thank God, and a flurry of sweaty, limber preadolescents pour into the waiting area. All buns and Bloch. It is easy to spot “my person.” Curly hair, caramel skin. She is surprised to see me in the crowd, and her eyes light up like the sun.
I bid a brusque farewell to Allie as Lucie and I work our way through the crowd.
“Who were you talking to?” she asks, as we file into the car.
“Mackenzie’s mom.”
“Ugh.” She snorts, fastening her seat belt. She has only recently made the California weight requirement and relishes front-seat sitting, when she can wrangle it away from her brother.
“Oh-kay … I take it she is not a friend of yours?”
She shrugs. “She’s fine. She’s just nosey.”
At that, I laugh. “Well, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, then.”
My daughter sighs audibly and rolls her eyes. “Americans.” And in that moment I realize, my apple hasn’t fallen very far either.
I am just getting the feel of what it is to be a Westside mom, in huge part to our assistant, Parisa, a half-Mexican, half-Persian Jewish polyglot who’d lived in four countries before settling in LA to study acting at USC, and who after a decade of auditions and bit parts decided to throw in the towel.
“I’m trying to figure out my next chapter,” she’d said to me at our initial interview over cups of tea at the house.
“I know the layout of the city, I like working with kids, and I’d like to do something a little less demoralizing than waitress.
” Parisa schooled me in the subtle differences of the various Whole Foods.
Taught me never to take Sunset westbound between four PM and seven PM.
And clued me in on the bike shop in Venice that sold a simple but elegant-looking bike for my rides on the beach.
Yet, despite becoming more situated, I’m disconcerted by the fact that I’ve not made any real new friends.
Up until now I’ve filled that void with family time and occasional business dinners with Francois’s reps and/or people from the production.
But the night before he leaves to shoot in the Mojave Desert for two months, the impending isolation sets in.
“Do you have toothpaste?”
“Oui.”
“Sunscreen?”
“Oui.”
“Dental floss?”
He stops to look at me, where I am leaning against the doorjamb. We are in the master bath and I am doing something I have never done: hovering while he packs.
“Oui. You know they have pharmacies there, right?”
I nod, saying nothing. But it’s my stillness that he’s reading when he abandons his toiletries on the counter and makes his way across our big American bathroom to envelop me in his arms. His chin resting atop my head.
“You’re going to miss me. Is that what this is?”
“Maybe.”
“Moi aussi. But it’s going to go fast. I promise. I’ll be home in two weekends. And then two weekends after that. And you can come out with the kids any weekend Julien doesn’t have a competition.”
I nod, again. And he pulls back, looking down at me. His eye color muddied in this light. He is just a hair above five eleven, which is tall for the French. I like them tall.
“I love you,” he says.
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t. Promise.” And then again, for good measure. “I promise, Cile. I promise.”
He has yet to put it into words: the reason why he insisted we accompany him to America. The hope that our presence would keep him in check.
He squeezes me then, tight, before returning to organizing his toiletries. Shaving cream, a tweezer, nail clippers, his hair-growth treatment that he doesn’t need.
“Why don’t you call Anouk? Is she back yet?”
It throws me. I had filled him in on our Paris visit upon my return. But in the weeks following I had not called her. She’d flown to Barcelona to shoot a campaign for Louis Vuitton. She was low-key about it, and I did not pry. Nor had I brought her up with Fran.
But that moment during our lunch at Les Philosophes had played repeatedly in my head. The lure, the yearning. The feeling of something charged. And each time it returned, I did my best to quash it. To deprive it of oxygen. Lest it become more than a crush.
“I mean, if you’re feeling lonely. You need to get out and make some friends,” Francois says now. “Or maybe you can get involved at the school and meet some other moms.”
“Some other moms…” I repeat. “Wonderful. We can swap cookie recipes.”
“Just try it, Cile,” he says. “What can it hurt?”
And so, on a Tuesday morning in early April, I find myself sitting in a circle in the Sidney Sheinberg Community Room at the Bancroft School attending a “parent dialogue” on race and ethnicity.
There are twenty-seven of us in the room, including the two faculty members running the discussion.
Granted, it’s eight thirty in the morning and some people have jobs.
But for a K-12 school with a thousand students, I expected a more robust turnout.