I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (11 page)

And yet in my world, it was all about the beat poets and Audre Lorde. It was about protesting the Afghanistan war and wearing T-shirts to school that read
FUCK BUSH
. It was about the Great Books course with the charismatic teacher where we wrote our own versions of
The Sound and the Fury
and
Pale Fire.
Even the girls from the Upper West Side dyed hidden locks of their hair purple.

It seemed important, in those high school years, to knock off firsts as quickly as possible. First kiss, first hangover, first cigarette, first class cut, first joint rolled, first blowjob, first ride in a dealer's car. But at fifteen, I had never kissed anyone. Not even at summer camp.

My best friend and I went to CBGB. It was long past the punk rock luster of the 1980s, but it was one of the few places with live music that did not card us at the door. In the bathroom, we tried to open the bottle of wine I had stolen from my parents with the backs of our earrings, with a pen, with a safety pin, while heavy metal shook the walls. In bodegas, I bought us beer by speaking in fractured Franglais. “Twenty-one?!” I would exclaim. “In my country, it's sixteen!” It worked about half the time.

In the basement of the Brooklyn townhouse where the permissive parents filled the upstairs bathroom with marijuana plants, I spent long stoned evenings grabbing for my cell phone, sure my mother was calling and sure that I had forgotten how to speak French. My friend and I bought a glass pipe on Canal Street, but we had nothing to put in it, so we unrolled cigarettes and shoved the tobacco in the bowl. The first time I bought pot,
I said “twenty dollars' worth” to the dealer on the phone, and my friend went gray with embarrassment. We cut school one day to practice rolling joints until they were perfect cylinders. I learned to ask for “a dub” or “a dime.” I learned to say “trees” and “bud” instead of “pot.” I learned to say “word, he's mad chill” as I watched Zane disappear around corners to kiss other girls. I learned to make it all roll off my tongue, like so many exhalations of smoke. All of this happened very fast, though it felt long then. A few months, maybe. I shed childhood with a vicious shake.

Then, once or twice, he waited for me outside my math class, pulling faces through the window in the door. My exhilaration could have ripped the world in two. In college, a girl told me that she already knew she would never in her life be as happy again as the first time she tried cocaine. Sometimes I wonder if it's the same with love.

And then, miraculously, we had a date. He asked me out to the Film Forum, to see a documentary about the music of apartheid. I floated to the movie theater. When I arrived, his mother, father, little brother, and grandmother were there. I tried to hide my surprise. We all went out to a diner for greasy burgers afterward. Under the fluorescent lights, I memorized a particularly unflattering angle of his nose, just in case. His family was kind. I hugged them all good-bye. I was a few blocks away and halfway home when I heard footsteps running behind me. I turned and he kissed me. My cell phone rang, my mother calling.

That night, I jumped up and down on my bed like I had when I was a child. I did not care that my head nearly hit the ceiling.

He held my hand in the hallways and rested his head on my stomach when we lay in large groups by the lockers. He kissed me between my classes, and though kissing was not like I had
imagined—more invasive, less sensual—I liked it anyway. We went to protests and he fought with the cops. During the morning Pledge of Allegiance, a new post-9/11 policy in New York's public schools, he stood and said a “pledge of resistance” instead. He was reprimanded for it and continued. I traced his name with my finger in the article in the school paper, flushed with pride. I filled notebooks with the intense peaks and valleys of emotion I felt each time he smiled at me or didn't and tried not to let him see. It did not seem to occur to either of us to actually get to know each other. He told me about his childhood once or twice, only happy things. Mostly he told me the plots of movies I had not seen, acting out the parts.

He dropped acid after school even though I'd asked him not to. I was worried that it might change him and did not want anything to change. My father had told me a story about a man who dropped acid only once and now spent his days in front of a supermarket, slowly swallowing and then disgorging the same long length of rope. But then again, my father had also told me that hallucinogenics were the only drugs worth trying, back when he thought I would never grow up. Zane took acid anyway, which did not surprise me, then apologized, which did. He did not become a man who swallowed rope. He continued to be my boyfriend, a miracle so monumental it never ceased to leave me dizzy. I was newly uncertain about all my deeply held convictions. Two years before, I had been making antismoking collages. Now I smoked on my way to school. Were all the things I had once thought taboo supposed to be swept away, one by one?

We had been dating for five or six months when we took that walk in Prospect Park. Our intimate conversation felt perfectly
private in the anonymity of the city. He named the two other couples who already had. He asked me gently if I felt ready. Somehow, I was surprised. It hadn't quite occurred to me yet that this was a thing that we might do. Blowjobs seemed complicated enough. A friend who was very proud of having already given one tried to show me in the school hallway. “One finger or two?” she asked, grabbing my hand for demonstration. None of my close friends had had sex yet. There was some competition about which of us would be first. But no one, including me, had thought it would be me.

I wanted to forge myself into a girl who was fast, rebellious, fearless, but I was not she and never would be. I liked the fumbling times Zane and I fooled around. I liked the terrible poem he wrote for me comparing my orgasm to a tsunami, liked it so much I did not tell him I had never had one. And yet, virginity was something one lost, and I was not sure I wanted to lose anything just yet. I sensed that he expected me to hesitate, and so, gratefully, I did.

Shortly after, my mother asked me if I would like to invite Zane to join us in the South of France that August.

“Really?” I asked, once again in awe of her gift for thinking of wonderful, impossible things. I had brought friends on family vacations to France before, their presence balancing the volatility of our nuclear four. But to bring Zane! To be with him, just him and me, far away from school, for days on end!

“Yes,” she said, bemused. “Really.”

But Zane did not seem eager. He told me that he planned to go to Cuba with a group of American activists that summer, as an act of resistance.

“You could come after,” I said. And I also said, though it makes me cringe to remember it, “If you came, you could bring condoms.”

His parents wanted to meet my parents first, which my parents found amusing. They planned a Fourth of July picnic in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The air was filled with fireflies. Zane and I played with our little brothers while our parents talked. I looked across the river at that strange, changed skyline. I realized, as I looked at that still jarring gap in the air, that there was no going backward. Some of the things I had put down so hurriedly could never be picked up again.

On the day Zane arrived in France, we walked together to the small medieval village on a hillside. He pointed out the graffiti on the abandoned cement structures by the path.
FUCK YOGURT
, one said in a scrawl, and we laughed. Then he told me that in Cuba he had kissed a girl.

“It was mad whack of me,” he said. “If it makes you feel any better, my friend punched me in the face after.”

“Oh no,” I said, glancing to make sure he was not bruised. “Okay. That's okay, I guess.” I was not going to let this small thing derail my joy.

My mother set up the pullout couch in the small cabin we had rented. My brother and I slept in twin beds in the same room down the hall.

Could my brother sleep on the couch? I asked. And Zane in our room?

Absolutely not, my mother said.

But my brother had said he wouldn't mind.

“Isn't it already enough that you have your boyfriend here,
without making your poor little brother sleep on the couch?” she said.
Why should my brother mind the couch?
I thought. It was bigger than our small beds.

“I'm sorry my parents are so lame,” I told Zane.

“Now?” he asked, when we were kissing in the lit-up pool that night. But the pool was open to all the cabins, and people could appear at any time.

“Now?” he asked, in the middle of the afternoon, when my family was out. But they were coming back any minute.

“Now?” he asked, the night he and I babysat for family friends who were staying in a hotel. I could hear the children tossing in their sleep in the room next door. I looked at the bed, at those white hotel sheets.

“No,” I said. I could sense his growing agitation. I worried that I had made a promise I'd be unable to keep. But I wanted a moment with magic. I wanted a moment worth remembering.

On our last day, we again walked together to the village. It was a small road, with few cars, that wound through vineyards and a shady forest. I spotted a field lit up gold in the early-evening light. Bushes shaded it from the road.

“Now,” I said, and grabbed his wrist and pulled him toward it.

The itchy grass raised small welts on my sensitive skin. A grasshopper landed on my calf, sticky legs springing off again. Gnats aimed for my eyes. Zane was nervous, and it took a very long time and then a very short time. And yet, in that moment, I was thinking,
This is a story. A field at sunset in the South of France.
He looked into my eyes and seemed to realize for the first time that they were not brown but flecked with gold and green.
This,
I thought, as he curled his head against my shoulder like a small boy,
is a story I will
tell my daughter someday.
Only later, when my best friend laughed at me, did I realize what a strange thought that was to have.

That evening, as I got ready for dinner, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror to see if I had changed. I was too young then even to know how clichéd that impulse was. My face was flushed, and grass stuck in my hair. My parents did not seem to notice. Their friend did, however. He was a decade older than my father. He stared hungrily across the table. He put his hands on my shoulders to massage them. He told my boyfriend, several times, what a very lucky young man he was. My parents laughed. I pulled Zane away from the table when their backs were turned and we went and sat quietly under a tree.

That fall, my parents' friend sent a glossy photograph of me taken that summer, with a love letter attached. It was a surprisingly unflattering photo. My eyes were as dull and vacant as a cow's. My mother sat on my bed to read the letter to me.

“
Ew,
” I said.

“It's sweet,” she said. “You should keep it.” She left it next to the plastic pink fairy figurine I had not had the heart to place in the box with my other toys.

A few months later, I stood in the doorway of my mother's bathroom.

“
Maman,
” I said, “
s'il te plaît!
Just let me spend the night at Zane's house.”

“The answer is no,” she said, leaning into the mirror to adjust a curl.

“But why? His parents already said it was okay. Please?”

“I already said no, Nadja. Stop arguing with me.”

“But give me a reason!”

“I don't need to explain myself to you. You . . . you don't want
to go getting yourself into situations where you . . . where you will feel pressured to do things that you don't want to do,” she said.

“
Mais, Maman,
” I said, exasperated, “you don't have to worry about that. That's already happened, and I wanted it to.” I thought this might convince her. It seemed impossible to me that she didn't already know.

She finally turned to look at me.

“The answer is definitely no,” she said. “And you really shouldn't tell me these things.”

—

F
RANÇOISE DIDN
'
T REALIZE
what had happened until that autumn. The knowledge came to her all at once, a sure and physical thing, like a ball she had caught without knowing it was being thrown. Her breasts were swollen. She slept all the time. She'd missed her period, though that had been easy to ignore, as it had begun only a few months earlier.

She wasn't nervous about telling Jean-Michel. Wasn't this what they had daydreamed together all summer long—children, a house of their own? He seemed at least hesitantly happy at her news. But she was terrified of telling her mother.

“I knew it!” Josée spat angrily. “Of course you are. Well. Will he marry you?”

Jean-Michel and his father, Louis, sat stiffly in the living room of the Paris apartment. Françoise had imagined her parents rendered silent by Jean-Michel's declarations of love—he was a big talker and proud of his eloquence. But now he sat quietly by his father, meek in his too-tight tie and shiny shoes. He kept his eyes on the ground as Louis and Josée worked out the details. Françoise fought a heavy wave of disappointment. It was just another sign, she told herself,
just another sign that they needed to escape these parents, these formal rooms, this deadening, stifling atmosphere, and build a home of their own where their voices could carry as loud as they wished.

After Jean-Michel and his father left, Paul pulled Françoise into the dining room and shut the door.

“You're not marrying him,” he said. He wasn't going to stand by and watch her throw her future away. She was only fifteen. She hadn't even passed her baccalaureate.

On the contrary, it was perfect timing, Françoise said. She'd have the baby in May, which would leave her a whole month to study for her exams.