Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

Paris
It snowed twelve inches in Raleigh, and my brother’s street was blocked off. He lives at the
bottom of a hill, and people came from all over with their seldom-used sleds and toboggans. Dad
dropped by late in the morning and warned Paul against overdoing it, saying, “You’re fat now and
you’ve got to be careful. You might hurt yourself.”
He said it the way one might warn a senior “You’re old now,” as if Paul’s condition were
irreversible. To prove him wrong, Paul tried a complicated trick and dislocated his shoulder. Unable
to sled, he now sits in the house eating cookies and growing fatter.
Every day feels the same, in part because every day looks the same. Again yesterday it was cold and
cloudy, the sky the flat gray color of a nickel. We’d planned to go to Normandy, but it turns out the
agency in Argentan has no more rental cars. Going without one means that Hugh will spend the entire
week in a sour mood, threatening every fifteen minutes to sell the house and move back to New York.
We’d both looked forward to getting away, but I’m definitely handling the disappointment better than
he is. I just watched as he poured an entire bag of coffee into the stovetop espresso machine. Grounds
spilled onto the counter, and when I asked what he was doing, he brushed them onto the floor, saying
flatly, “Making coffee.”
January 23, 2002
Paris
Monday night was our co-op meeting, which was held in the coiffeur’s shop on the ground floor of
our building. Hugh had attended one last spring, but this was my first. The apartment owners, seven of
us all together, gathered up chairs and sat in a semicircle facing an architect and our efficient syndic,
a thin woman in her early fifties whose job it is to manage things and who tended to interrupt whoever
was speaking with “C’est normal, c’est normal.”
What wasn’t normal got her full attention for a period averaging between thirty and forty-five
seconds. The main point of business was to vote on the roof repair. Two estimates had been given and
the architect suggested we accept the higher bid, claiming the lower would wind up costing us more
in the long run. Madame S. presented a case for fixing her retaining wall, saying it had been
moistened and damaged by the leaking roof. “I’d said as much to my husband,” she said.
I’m not sure exactly how long her husband’s been dead, but Madame S. mentioned him at least a
dozen times, most often in the context of some prediction. “I told him…,” “He told me…” In the
middle of the meeting, she pulled out a test tube containing a tiny lump of calcium. She’d harvested it
from her drain and waved it in the air, hoping to make a point.
“C’est normal, madame,” the syndic said. “C’est normal.”
Though everyone was civil, I sensed that our neighbors had long ago grown tired of Madame S.
Smiles faded as soon as she opened her mouth. The syndic examined her notes. The architect doodled
in the margins of his floor plan. At one point she complained that the third-floor tenants of number 98
boulevard Saint-Germain had held a party. “And the noise! The music!”