Lunch in Paris (19 page)

With the invitation, Sarah included two recipe cards to be sent back by each guest, whether they were coming or not. Afra,
my best friend from college, lives in San Francisco. Her family is Persian, and she sent along her mother’s recipe for
sohaan-e asali,
tiny sweets made with ground almonds and pistachios. The first time I went to her house for the traditional Persian New Year,
I ate so many that I couldn’t button my pants on the plane home.

Coincidently, the wedding had inspired this same gesture from Gwendal’s family. A few weeks after we announced our engagement,
Gwendal’s great-aunt Jane sent us several family recipes, neatly copied by hand in blue ink on white graph paper. One of them
was
le bon jeune homme.
Gwendal described it with rapture as an island of chocolate custard floating in a sea of
crème anglaise;
I could see him, nose barely higher than the tabletop, standing on tiptoe to peek over the edge of the dish. I scanned the
directions; the first paragraph alone involved forty-five minutes of continuous stirring. It was a taste of Gwendal’s childhood,
something I was now responsible for preserving and passing on.

Sarah had included her grandma Vicky’s recipe for sugar cookies, and her gift to me was a set of cookie cutters. She found
a ballerina, to commemorate our years of matching tutus, and a camel, like the one we rode on our trip to Israel and Egypt
when we were twelve.

I was so moved that I wanted to crush her lungs in an enormous hug. At the same time, part of me was thinking:
But the French don’t eat cookies
. My first winter in Paris, Gwendal and I were invited to a holiday party at the home of another American. She made Christmas
cookies in the shapes of trees, candy canes, ornaments. She made sky blue and cherry red icing, decorated each one—the works.
When Gwendal saw them, all he could say was this: “Why would anyone want to eat blue food?”

The rest of the afternoon was lost in a sea of pastel wrapping paper, tea sandwiches, and heat-resistant spatulas. But the
best present, the one I would run back into a burning building to get, was a hot pink plastic binder from my aunt Joyce. Aunt
Joyce, my mother’s younger sister, is the best cook in our family—equally enthusiastic about a dinner at the Culinary Institute
of America and a breakfast of cold pizza and Diet Coke.

The binder is a family heirloom, a collection of recipes that my mother made for Joyce when she got married in 1972. It includes
some of my parents’ early dinner-party classics: my father’s fettuccine Alfredo, “French toast” cream cheese and jelly sandwiches,
my grandmother’s mandel bread. My mother, ever the schoolteacher, made each page into a mini collage with illustrations cut
from magazines. One shows a young woman, still in her wedding veil, sitting on a piece of lettuce the size of a magic carpet,
pulled along by a single dove. Underneath is the heading “The Bride Makes Salads.” Joyce had added to it over the years, and
written an inscription inside:
This book was made with love. It was used with love. It starts the cycle again, with love.

As I got up from the living couch in my silly paper hat covered with ribbons, I caught sight of myself in the mirror across
the room. The girl who lived in Paris might not have recognized me. I looked at myself among this well-meaning and loving
bunch of people, and I knew that for all I carried with me, my life would be radically different from theirs. I hoped these
recipes would be enough to link me to my past, and open the kitchen cupboard to my future.

W
HEN I GOT
back to Paris it was time to look for a wedding dress to accommodate those other family heirlooms, a pair of 34-DD boobs.

Nicole and I went to Galeries Lafayette. France’s most famous department store is the Saint Peter’s of shopping, topped with
a splendid glass dome and probably traversed by an equal number of tourists.

We bypassed the bridal department without a second look. I hardly needed to be walking up the seedy boulevard de Magenta on
the day of my wedding in a satin train. Gwendal’s only request was that I be able to dance. Searching among the endless racks
of size thirty-sixes (that’s a small American four) left me feeling, at five seven and a slim size ten, like the Jolly Green
Giant. French women are, there is just no other word for it,
petite
. They have little bones and little noses and they wear little jackets with little shoes. Not to put too fine a point on it,
there’s just nothing in the tits-and-ass department. The cannonballs with which Napoleon conquered all of Europe probably
didn’t amount to a 34-DD.

This was torture. Everything seemed to have a cap sleeve (out of the question) or a skirt designed to lie beautifully over
the hips of an eleven-year-old boy. After an hour, I was ready to throw myself off the Belle Epoque balcony. Nicole was mute;
I think I was scaring her. We were heading toward the escalator to make a quick escape when I spotted a dress in taupe chiffon.
It looked a little like a costume from a Fred Astaire movie, a flapper dress, with delicate beading along the neckline and
below the bust. I tried it on. It landed lightly just below my knees and billowed slightly when I turned. It was simple, elegant,
a perfect match for my grandmother’s silver prom bag, which I wanted to carry. Naturally, I was falling out of it a bit, but
the right bra ought to solve that. With a surprising lack of hesitation, I paid for the dress and left. I felt human again.
My American body and French fashion had been reconciled.

Temporarily.

Two weeks before the wedding I was walking down toward the canal wearing a long navy blue sundress with an Empire waist. My
path was blocked by two men on a motorcycle parked in the middle of the sidewalk. As they revved up the engine, a cloud of
black smoke belched right into my face. The friend turned to look at me. “
Attention,
” he said to the driver, “not in front of the pregnant lady.”