Ben Avon Street

Ben Avon Street Kathleen Veslany Paris is tauntingly bright the morning that I fly into it for the first time. As much as I want someone to be here waiting for me, I know the odds. There was a storm my plane could not pass through, and I've been rerouted through London. During the sleepless flight over ocean, I had the fantasy and fear of disappearing; I'd already found how easy it was to lose myself. For one night I'm the only one who knows where I am, miles above the sleeping. When I appear in Paris, it is hours after I was expected. The gate, flight, airline are all different. I wonder where Ellen went when I did not arrive as we'd planned. I feel less fantastic than frightened at the prospect of being lost this morning, wonder how long it wiU take two moving bodies to find each other. \-\ I am here to meet Sarah; Ellen is Sarah's older and only sister. I found Sarah when my family moved from our redbrick house on Chestnut Street across town and into a larger redbrick house on Hamilton Avenue. Years later, when we started to understand orbits outside of our own, we laughed about the medieval landscape of our town, the way the nicest neighborhoods sprawled along the crests ofhiUs and thinned out on the descent into town. On the first day of second grade, my mother walked me down the mile-long hiU to my new school and we waited until the doors were unlocked. I only remember the day beginning: my mother saying good-bye, sitting alone in a classroom between the staircase and the cafeteria, waiting for someone, anyone, to arrive and distract me from everything unfamiliar, Sarah coming into the classroom and sitting with me. Our geography then was the accident of where our parents brought us to live, and my recent move to HamiltonAvenue brought me within a block 135 136Fourth Genre ofBen Avon Street, the house where Sarah Uved, the other home I grew up inside, the girl I made into something like a sister. There is something inexhaustibly coded between us because we have grown up together in a smaU town, have each seen ourselves in the other from the time we could write our own names, have memories that prove our synchronized rites of passage and that have accumulated into something impenetrable, untranslatable. When I meet EUen and eventuaUy Sarah in Paris, I've known them for nearly twenty years in the strange role of what I cannot name. 0 This airport is a series ofrings, and I arrive at the outermost perimeter. I trail the passengers from my flight down a long electric walkway and into the beginning of another circle where the stream of people dissolves into bars and boutiques and perfume shops. The more French I hear, the less I beUeve any ofit is understandable. I walk faster, my shoulder slack beneath the bag that bangs into my thighs. I know neither where I am nor where I want to be going. Here I feel invisible to everything I lay my eyes on for the first time, to the foreigners I watch talking comfortably with one another, to my own shape in the mirrors and glass. My passport proves that I am here, a square photo inside a blue book with a name to contact in case of emergency. But each time I offer my passport it is returned without the stamp I expect, without the evidence I want. I try to ask for help, though I am too embarrassed even with strangers to say their language back to them. I would rather say nothing than something incorrectly—a worthless kind ofpride. I come close to crying, look in vain for EUen's face on every body know she could be anywhere, pray for her appearance. They point me through customs, gesture wildly and say "Up! Up!" By this time, words seem so much my enemies that I even distrust English to be a tongue I know. ? The house I entered on Ben Avon Street in second grade had waUs and a rooflike mine...