Plum Blossoms in Paris Read Online Free Page A

not a pretty picture. In fact, I’ve rarely been described as such. Striking, yes. Arresting—gee, thanks. Someone, a colleague of my father’s, once called me
handsome
—the horror. As a child, they told me I had a face full of potential: all it needed was time to blossom. I fervently pinned my girlish hopes on those celebrity anecdotes about how gawky and hideous they were once upon a time … back in the day …
like, really! …
envisioning when I, too, could screech and cringe when my mom slyly dragged out old class photos for my friends to laugh at. I am still waiting.
    My face chugged along in much the same manner: with an excess of creativity, and not enough discretion to know when to stop. It is better when I smile. My mouth is my best feature—generous, with a fuller upper lip that arcs downward at the corners. Hence I have a tendency to look sulky, even peevish. But when I smile, the corners bow, and my teeth burst forth with radiant, bleached brilliance, to startle the person across from me. Accustomed to my moroseness, he will often look uncertain, like he’s coaxed a smile from a sphinx.
    Sometimes I think my appearance, coupled with the incongruity of my name, has afflicted my personality more than anything else. It’s as if Goldie Hawn was born looking like Susan Sontag. Whichever direction you choose to go in, sparkly orpainfully serious, you end up feeling ridiculous. Never underestimate the power of a name or a mouth that genes conspired to turn the wrong way. As Daisy Lockhart, I could never be considered quite brilliant; as the owner of a face sculpted by an anonymous, cubist hand (think Picasso’s Dora Maar), I will never be the belle of the ball, even if it’s Case Western’s Annual Biology Boogie.
    The train lurches forward, and I kick my carry-on bag, which holds a hodgepodge of items in disarray. Slumping forward, I see something cylindrical and urgently green roll down the long aisle. I gasp and make a grab for it, but it’s too late. The thing lazily ricochets across the rubbery aisle, alerting everyone of my presence. Every French eye, snatched from perusing
Le Monde
or
Le Figaro
, watches its progress, as it pitches this way and that, according to the undulations of the train car. It hits an older lady on the back of her chunky heel before banking across the aisle and coming to rest against a leather bag whose owner I cannot fathom.
    It’s the portable oxygen mask sealed in a canister—“The Life Force 3000”—I take on every airplane flight, in case of emergency. My father bought my first one twelve years ago, before our family flight to England, and I have purchased this one, the third, from a catalogue that sells such things as radiation suits and water filtration devices and, well, lifesaving oxygen. The third, because they expire. Oxygen doesn’t last forever, apparently.
    I bolt from my seat, mortified to be an instigator. Each placid eye finds new focus, zeroing in as I stumble forward, fixing me with such a look of scientific detachment that I feel like a lab rat put through a maze for their study. At least the rat has some cheese to focus on. I compensate for my gaffe by mumbling, “Sorry, sorry,” not even capable of locating
“Perdón”
in my small French repertoire during the low tide of this second, petty humiliation of the day. I am cognizant of how overly abused the word
surreal
is in our language, but I don’t know how else to describe chasing downmy emergency oxygen mask in a train barreling toward Paris on a foggy morning, with the imperious eyes of France judging me. I almost expect that lady, the one three rows up, with the fussy white dog whose eyes bulge and whose tongue pinkly protrudes, to drink her coffee from a cup wrapped in fur. I have never seen a dog like that, much less on a public train. It’s wearing a pompadour and roosts like a hen on its silk, saffron pillow.
    “Sorry. Sorry,” I repeat as I inch forward, smiling nervously, hopeful that,