Right before I started second grade, my parents moved us back to Amherst for the second, and final, time. I remember my first day at Wildwood the way I remember the first day of everything: I was really anxious, and really bored.
When you grow up in a college town, there are always new kids in class. In the fall of 1988, this crop included myself, and a French girl whose parents were visiting at Amherst for the semester. They were living on Lincoln Avenue, the gorgeous street downtown where the college keeps some grand old houses for visiting professors and their families.
I don't remember much about her. What I do remember, I don't trust. But my brain says she was petite and blond with skin like milk and a perfect petal mouth and she wore blue dresses every day. So, yeah. If Madeleine and Bridgette Bardot had a baby. Whatever. She wasn't imaginary.
Anyway, I love everything French, and her - let's call her Madeleine Bridgette - eighth birthday party is probably why. Don't even talk shit. I call them frites, bitches.
This party. I want to say it was in November. There was a scavenger hunt where we each had to follow a different colored string that wound through the house. At the stairs - the amazing, sweeping central stairs - a massive tangle derailed the hunt as 15 second-graders extricated their string from the yarny cluster-bang, but no one CARED, because they were the kind of stairs people dance down in musicals. The yarn, when finally untangled, led us all to different - but equally wonderful - prizes, scattered under old oak and maple trees, concealed amongst the rhododendrons, nestled against the mossy side of rocks.
And they fed us radishes. I don't think I'd ever had a radish before (at seven! The shame!) Madeleine-Bridgette's father cut one in half, sprinkled salt on the skin, and handed it to me. I think I ate like, four. Then I demanded my parents buy me radishes to sprinkle salt on and devour. (That's how I know it all happened. Whenever radishes are brought up - which isn't that often, but more often than you might think - my parents remind me of this.) All their soap smelled like lavender. The windows were leaded glass, and there were pillows on the floor of the living room, like you were supposed to sit there.
When my parents came to get me, I was not feeling going back to my American house to watch Back to the Future Part 2 for the eleventy billionth time*.
School let out early the day before Christmas break. We lined up against the door, waiting to be dismissed, or however they did that shit. When we finally were, Madeleine Bridgette broke from the line (I think we lined up by buses? I walked to school - when no one cares when you leave, you stand at the end of the line) and ran back to me. She hugged me hard and kissed the side of my face twice.
"Goodbye, Katie!" she chirped in that ADORABLE accent all foreign children have. "I will never see you again!" Then she kissed me again and ran out the door. I remember leaning back against the wall and thinking "How would she know that?"
Because she just did, I guess? It's been 23 years, and of course she was right. I don't even know what reminded me of this. It's just...how many people do you say goodbye to, totally accepting - expecting - that you'll see them again whenever you'd like? That this is your show, you pick the players? Nah, son. We've got no control over anything.
Also, how fucking cool are French people? Girlfriend was seven years old and dropped some truth that took me TWENTY THREE YEARS to process.
Madeleine Bridgette, I do wonder where you are. I hope everything's turning out wonderfully. Hugs, baby girl.
** That is a straight-up lie. I love BTTFPT . I enjoyed every viewing. On Saturday mornings, before Pops woke up, Beets and I made cushion forts while watching Biff's alternate reality play out. If I remember correctly, we had some pretty advanced conversations about the space-time continuum for people too small to reach the cereal without climbing on a counter.
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