Gigi stands on the peeling steps of her gray deck in Connecticut and stretches forward over her dull, worn wooden cane to prune a rhododendron bush. She reaches for an exquisite act of willpower, a way to assert herself even as her body fails her—and this decision gives her great satisfaction, a whole-body giddiness the opposite of her wizened self; she feels younger than she has in years. The lavender-pink petals pronounce themselves against the dark green leaves in a clustered blur, and she leans even closer to greet her old friends.
The breeze from the fall is soothing and stern at the same time: it forces wisps of her thinned white hair out of her bobby pins, and she lands with a thud, a betrayal, on hard cold stones that line the patio.
She hobbles up two flights of stairs and over the beige carpet that softly pads her living room and down the long narrow hallway (now feeling even longer, like in her recurring dream — she’s back in high school in 1941 pushing her way through a sea of black and gray crepe streamers, kicking ones that have coiled in concentric circles on the floor with her saddle shoes), to her bedroom, where blood from her head seeps into an old pillow and forms the shape of a jagged heart.
Her son finds her, wearing her signature sunglasses (Gigi wears them indoors; she refuses to let anyone take a photo of her without them). The following week her granddaughter Madeline sits next to her, attempting to distract her from the piercing pain of five broken ribs, the purple bruises that match her garden painted across her skin. She reads aloud passages from the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a book they both love.
“Proust wrote most of the seven volumes while he was confined to his bedroom, Gigi,” Madeline teases her. “Where’s your masterpiece?”
Gigi stares at her, a look that could be mistaken for mean, but that Madeline knows as a discerning way of showing her love. “I’m looking at it.”
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A month later, Madeline is greeted by her Airbnb host in Paris with a baguette and a warm apple cake she purchased from the local patisserie. The older woman glimmers with a sheen of sweat on her forehead; she kisses Madeline on both of her cheeks and Madeline could swear she smells the same violet lotion Gigi used to wear.
“Gigi” means “earth-worker”, something she lived up to all of Madeline’s childhood. Even now, at 35, she can’t see gardens without thinking of her grandmother crouched in the dirt, multiple smudges of soil streaked across her face.
A few weeks before Gigi’s accident, Madeline had called her to let her know she was going to Paris. Gigi was excited for her.
“This time you must wear the dress I gave you,” Gigi insisted. “None of those jeans with the awful holes in the knees. You listen to your Gigi!” And then, in her typical fashion of changing the subject as quickly as a hummingbird: “Did you know that the rhododendrons by the deck have never looked lovelier! A huge mass of blooms. I’m in heaven,” Gigi had told her — a statement now too close to the uncomfortable truth. Not that Madeline believes in an afterlife, unless it includes a library with vaulted ceilings and never-ending bookshelves.
After Gigi fell, Madeline tried to cancel her trip, but her grandmother wouldn’t hear of it. “If you don’t go, I’ll bop you over the head,” Gigi threatened, raising her voice but laughing at the same time. “I mean it. I’m starting to feel better, and this is a great opportunity for you.”
Gigi speaks French but has never been to France, or outside of New England. She keeps picture books of Versailles and Monet’s paintings on her coffee table, and as a little girl Madeline once took a red Sharpie and drew hearts on as many of the water lilies as she could before Gigi caught her, but she never purchased a new copy of the book. Madeline suspects that Gigi was secretly amused by her transgression.
Madeline’s in Paris to give a talk on writing, and for a self-imposed writing retreat, two weeks of mostly uninterrupted writing time, a break from her everyday life in Brooklyn, where the books on her shelves taunt her (“When am I going to read a book by you?” Gigi often asks her), and people from her past haunt her neighborhood coffee shops, including a pretentious professor who shamed her for not wearing matching lingerie. He once gave her Infinite Jest as a gift, and it remained unread, covered by a thick film of dust.
But Madeline is also in Paris for Gigi, who always wanted to see the fireworks on Bastille Day. “The French know how to celebrate,” Gigi once told her.
Madeline is touched by the Airbnb host’s hospitality and as soon as the woman leaves, she inhales a few bites of the cake, greedily, standing up, her overstuffed crimson backpack still draped over one shoulder, slightly out of breath from climbing so many stairs. Crumbs collect along the glass coffee table. Gigi would tell her not to eat like an animal, to eat over a plate like a proper human being. As she sits down on the couch, her exposed right leg brushes too closely against the sharp edge of the table, slicing open her skin. She fishes out an alcohol pad and a Band-Aid from one of the pockets in her backpack, and the burning sensation jolts her awake for a minute before a depressed mania solely related to jet lag sets in. Despite the snack, her mouth still tastes like recycled air from the plane: stale and soporific.
Madeline unzips her packing cubes and chooses a medium-length mulberry eyelet cotton dress (the one Gigi gave her; she herself rarely buys new clothes), slips it on and feels the cool cotton fabric flutter against her thighs. It’s tight around her stomach, meant for an idealized version of a woman’s body instead of her own. She sucks her belly in as she strains to pull up the zipper.
Gigi is 92, maybe 93, she’s always lied about her age. Every year since Madeline was a little girl, for 35 years now, Gigi made a grand pronouncement: “This year will be my last Christmas.” She is prone to melodramatic statements. Madeline has inherited that quality; she is hot-blooded and emotional. When she was six, her mother’s friend told her she looked like Gigi, and Madeline burst out in tears. “I don’t want to look like an old person!”
But now, in the pasty light of the apartment, she looks in the mirror over the desk and sees Gigi at 35, only uglier. She’s memorized the photo of glamorous Gigi with her smooth blonde hair slicked back into a bun as she leans out the window of a Studebaker wearing the same dress she gave Madeline for the trip, a strand of pearls around her neck and her lips accentuated by lipstick. Madeline’s nose is bigger, her eyebrows aren’t chiseled, her teeth could be bleached, her lips are perpetually chapped, her hair is “mousy” (according to her ex-hairstylist) so she dyes it blonde.
Madeline slides her feet into silver Birkenstocks, appreciating how they’ve broken in to match the shape of her soles, grabs her passport and wallet, a worn and underlined copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and makes her way down the many wide steps. The door is stuck, and she feels frustration’s sharp kick in her stomach, mixed with the desire for a glass of rosé; she considers giving up and going back to her flat when she notices the button on the wall. As she leaves the building, the heavy hunter green door closes with a soft click. Madeline loves the doors in Paris, how they announce themselves in a way that American doors don’t; they take up more space, but there’s nothing cruel about them.
Outside on Rue des Pyrénées, she appreciates the distinct pleasure of being alone in a foreign city she’s been to before, a tinge of familiarity mixed with the new. Her senses are heightened here; she notices the way the air changes when you walk past a bakery, the sweet seductive siren call of butter and sugar. It’s hotter than normal in Paris, the hottest July in many years, and her armpits are damp, but her throat is dry.
Two years ago, she stayed ten minutes away on rue Alexandre Dumas, and because she’s a creature of habit (and overwhelmed by too many choices), she spent most of her time at the corner café, Café du Jardin, sometimes staying from lunch until two in the morning when they’d start stacking the chairs all around her, reading entire novels in one sitting and taking notes in her journal. One night she talked to a French filmmaker working on a documentary about people who traveled to quiet meadows to listen to the stars. “You mean see?,” Madeline had asked, thinking it was lost in translation. “No, listen,” the girl had said, gesturing with her glass of wine with such momentum that drops sprinkled the table. “The stars make music.” Madeline believed her. She remembered hearing about scientists who used loudspeakers to make dead coral reefs sound healthy, tricking the fish to flock back to these ghostly places, with their silver fins like delicate paper lanterns released into the sky.
But this time in Paris, she is distracted by a level of unease that gives a gauzy glaze to the city, as if everything is underwater. The zipper on her dress digs into the flesh of her back, pinching her skin.
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It’s a few weeks before Madeline leaves for her big trip, and she is making Niçoise salad for her grandmother, but with roasted potatoes instead of mealy boiled ones. Gigi waits in the sunroom of her house, sitting on a bright yellow cushion and white wrought iron chair she purchased at a yard sale many years ago. She hopes Gigi can taste the food; most meals these days taste like cardboard to her. Why must getting old mean gradually chipping away at everything you enjoy? First it was Gigi’s hearing that went, so bad that she watches football games at the highest volume her outdated television will go. Then spots formed in front of her eyes while reading, but she’s stubborn, she hates doctors, ever since a doctor misdiagnosed her mother’s nephritis. The night before her mother died, Gigi awoke to find a pearled light hovering above her own chest, a light that separated but stayed connected like Monet’s spun lily pads, and she knew she was looking at the angel of death.
“I hope you like it,” Madeline presents the salad to her, and Gigi takes a bite of the oven-baked salmon sprinkled with homemade mustard vinaigrette. It tastes like the vibrancy of Monet’s favorite colors: cadmium yellow, cobalt blue, emerald green, vermillion.
“This is one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten in my life!”
Madeline is relieved. Gigi isn’t one to give false compliments.
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Madeline walks to the café. She squints at Google maps and follows the blue flashlight; the streets are relatively empty because it’s early in the afternoon on a weekday in the summer. There’s little relief from the punishing sun until she gets to the main boulevard, where trees line a shaded pathway in the middle of the road. Up ahead, Café du Jardin appears, her own personal sanctuary; she recognizes the orange awning, the menu written in delicate cursive on the chalkboard. She takes a spot at an outside table, orders rosé and a steak tartare. The waiters she knew two summers ago aren’t there; instead a dour man in his late fifties, unable to smile, takes fifteen minutes to bring a bottle of water. He throws a basket of bread on the table. She asks for butter, and eats more butter than bread. The steak tartare doesn’t taste right. She forgot that Café du Jardin is a place for cheeseburgers and food that is cooked, and this dish has an unpleasant grayish tint to it. She’s suddenly aware that she’s eating the uncooked flesh of a long-dead animal. Madeline reads a line in The Waves: “Death is woven in with the violets,” and isn’t that true? You can be sitting outside on a warm day in Paris, reveling in time to yourself with a favorite book by a favorite author, getting slightly tipsy on rosé, watching the occasional flaneur pass by; all while eating dangerous steak tartare and worrying about your grandmother. She pushes the “steak” away in disgust and orders a cheese plate. The waiter brings her three sad slices of cheese; the first one is filmed with a wet coating, like a washcloth soaked in toilet water. It’s often a disappointment, returning to a favorite place. She looks around, half expecting to see the ghost of herself from two years ago, her hair much shorter and platinum blonde at the time, a red and white striped dress on. But no, it’s just her now, tricked by nostalgia to flock to the dying reef.
Back at the Airbnb, her stomach gurgles. The tartare was a mistake, and her body empties itself out. Then there’s another trip to the awkward, tiny, toilet with a window suitable for a mouse. She’s grateful she rented her own studio instead of a room in someone’s apartment. Madeline takes an ice-cold shower to cool down. There’s no air conditioning, only the pitiful fan that blows hot air around the room.
In front of the mattress on the floor is a desk where she has already stacked some of the books she packed (too many, as is her habit), random receipts, and coins that took up space in her pocket.
She wonders if her whole trip was a mistake, not just the tartare. A bookshelf divides the mattress from the living room, lined with books she can’t translate. (“All writing is a translation,” she once heard, and it’s true. Writing felt like trying to invent a new language for the words in her head.) Plants took up some of the bookcase, with long tendrils twisting down to the floor like Rapunzel’s hair (such a waste of space where more books could be), and a photo of a gaunt, bald, young woman with a secretive smile, the one personal touch in the entire apartment. Madeline wonders if she’s bald from chemo, and if she’s still alive.
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It’s the middle of the night back in Connecticut, and Gigi feels a pain and pressure in her chest that’s different than her usual heartburn; it seems to be radiating down her right arm. Maybe if she goes to the bathroom and gets a glass of water, she’ll feel better. She swings her feet to the floor, grabs the mattress with both hands, and pushes herself up. Her breath is labored; the air feels viscous, like paint in her lungs. She thinks about the home remedy her mother used to make her as a child when she was congested. How unbearable it was to hover her face over a bowl of boiling water with a towel draped over the back of her head, trapping the steam in, but eventually there was an unlodging, a jammed door opening and allowing for some expansiveness. She would give anything to feel her mother’s hand on her back, rubbing reassuring circles and encouraging her to breathe. The bedroom is darker than usual. A trickle of moonlight forms a puddle on the floor that she wants to float in. Like the lily pads, she thinks.
“Gigi? Why did Monet paint so many water lilies?” Madeline had asked her a long time ago.
“Because there are so many ways of looking at them,” Gigi said.
She moves toward the moonlight. Halfway to the door of her bedroom, her legs give out. Down the hallway, her son, Madeline’s dad, is woken by a thump and goes to investigate.
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Madeline sits up and looks at the cheap fan. It makes an annoying click each time it moves back towards her.
She stares at the blank ceiling. Her stomach is effervescent, and she remembers when she was a child and her parents were still married. They lived with Gigi then, and Madeline would pretend to be sick to spend more time with her. On those days, Gigi would bring her Giggle Noodle chicken soup in bed, and she’d eat the star noodles first, then the hearts, then the moons. Earlier that year, Gigi told Madeline she saw hearts float in front of her, even with her eyes open. “Sometimes the hearts are transparent, like a window, and I can make out the shadows of birds in the distance.” Madeline has heard of people having visions toward the end of their life, and it comforts her that her grandmother sees love coming her way. Perhaps she hears stars singing to her, too.
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The next morning, Madeline checks her phone. A text from her father.: We’re at the hospital. The doctor told her she had a small heart attack, but she isn’t dying, and Gigi said that’s bad news. At least she still has her sense of humor. I’ll call you later. Don’t worry, she’s okay.
Madeline calls her dad; he’s in the hospital room with Gigi and flips the camera. Gigi’s hair is wrapped in a silk scarf, her sunglasses reflect the harsh lighting above her bed, and her skin looks snowflake white, a blank canvas for Madeline to draw her emotions on.
“Hi, darling,” she says. “I told your father to tell you that you aren’t allowed to come home. I’m fine,” she says as she coughs. “Disappointed that I’m still here, but fine.”
“Don’t you die on me,” Madeline says to her, pacing around the room as she talks. “I won’t let you.”
“Go film those fireworks for me before you get on that plane,” Gigi says.
Madeline can’t write now, she can’t read either, she can’t sit at a café and people watch, all she can do is wait and worry. She calls the airline and changes her flight to the afternoon after Bastille Day.
She might as well look at art while worrying. The week before, a friend had recommended an exhibit, including van Gogh and Monet’s ‘s work projected on the walls and floor of a large converted warehouse.
When she arrives, she’s relieved to leave the sunlight behind her, in a room where Van Gogh’s incandescent swirls surround her in a 360 degree panorama. The projections are animated; van Gogh’s fields and flowers and birds have come to life around her, the water in “Starry Night Over the Rhône ” ripples on the walls, she steps into the paintings, living in the dust of the stars, tracing the circles around them.
Madeline wishes she could bring the van Gogh projections to Gigi’s hospital room, turn off the awful fluorescent lights undoubtedly giving her a headache, kick out the doctors, and let Gigi live in the heat of the paintings.
Madeline’s phone buzzes with another text from her father. Stay in Paris for now. Gigi wants you to be there. She says “je t’aime.”
She recalls something that Proust wrote: “The only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.” But that’s not entirely true, is it? She hasn’t lost Gigi, not yet, and her grandmother is her paradise, the vessel of all of her good memories, she contains everything worthy in this world.
When the exhibit switches to Monet, she stands in front of a projector and holds her arms out, transforming her skin into a rippling pond, an oasis. She understands now how Gigi felt, reaching for the rhododendrons, what Gigi was searching for; it’s what Madeline wants too: bursts of beauty. Reminders of what’s worth living for.
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Two days later, Madeline sits on Gigi’s hospital bed and plays her a video of fireworks shaped like hearts, shooting out from the Eiffel Tower. “You’re right, Gigi. They really go all out for Bastille Day. It’s like the Fourth of July on steroids,” Madeline says. Gigi gives a half-smile. She’s weak, but has waited for her granddaughter to return. She asks Madeline to play it again before she closes her eyes.
Tomorrow, Madeline will arrive to the hospital after Gigi’s unconscious; she will sprint down the echoing corridor and hold Gigi’s lifeless hand as her heart stops; she will notice saliva bubbles in Gigi’s open mouth and will be unable to think of anything else; from a certain angle, they look like marbles. She will remove Gigi’s cheap sunglasses from her face and put them on, noticing how scratched they are. “You’re the new Gigi now,” her dad will tell her, and for a split second, she won’t cry.
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Author’s note: The title “The Stars Walk Backward” is from the e.e. cummings poem “dive for dreams”