I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (13 page)

When the door closed behind him, she'd scoured the empty apartment for loose change, her fingers plunging through the holes in coat pockets and underneath the mattress. She'd scavenged enough for one baguette a day. One baguette, and no more. She learned all the different feelings bread could have in her mouth, the many different ways there were to chew.

Ten days. She moved her tongue in her mouth to recover the
memory of speech. Their friends at architecture school called her Guérinette—Jean-Michel Guérin and his Guérinette. They were gone as well, and with them, her name. She hadn't seen her mother in months, and she had yet to be invited to the houseboat. She was too proud to see her father. The city was empty, chilly, strange.

When summer vacation came around, Jean-Michel took her with him to Ussel. Jean-Michel's mother didn't want them on her property, but his father gave them use of a small cabin outside the town. They were three now: Jean-Michel, Françoise, and their dog, Chivas. Françoise's fingers roamed through Chivas's fur, untangling knots and removing burrs. He was a stray they'd brought back from Afghanistan, part wolf she thought, and he grew bigger by the day. She loved the solid mass of him, his gravity. In the evenings, she rested her head on his stomach as it rose and fell, breathing in his familiar smell, and underneath it something wild.

She and Jean-Michel were together, but it was no better than when they had been apart. Jean-Michel had a car, places to go, friends to see, family to visit. Françoise did not know how to drive and would, anyway, have had nowhere to drive to. She had no friends there of her own. She felt trapped by the same loneliness she had felt the summer her mother had separated her and Andrée.

She began to worry that her depression had a smell. Her unhappiness seemed to cling to her, to drip from her, staining the air where she had been. She worried Jean-Michel would sense it and recoil. She went for long walks while he was gone, trying to lose herself in the open air. Chivas trailed after her. Jean-Michel grew still more distant. The further he went, the more desperately she grabbed for him.

At night they went out dancing. Jean-Michel liked to drink. His voice rose loud over a crowd. He pulled his childhood friends
around him in a tight circle that left Françoise outside, watching. She envied the ease with which he made people laugh, the energy he took from the loud music and bright lights that battered her into a corner. She tried to loosen up, but she hated the swimming feeling of being drunk. She hated the loss of control. When she tried to dance her limbs moved awkwardly, resisting the music.

On the way back to the cabin, she gripped her seat as Jean-Michel tore around the curves of the country roads. It wasn't that she was afraid of dying. A day didn't go by that summer when she didn't fantasize about death—the blankness, the quiet, a state of being neither empty nor full. But she wanted to die by her own hand. Jean-Michel insisted that the danger of driving drunk was part of the fun.

One morning, Françoise opened the front door to find Chivas's corpse there, his fur matted with blood.

The neighboring farmers told her they'd had to shoot the dog because he'd killed a goat. “Beast like that, once they get the taste of blood . . . ,” they'd said, shrugging.

She called the police, the words fighting their way out of her, fury under the wave of tears.

“But what a
parisienne
!” The police officers laughed. “Crying over an animal!”

“Don't take it so hard!” Jean-Michel said. “It's the country. They do things differently here.”

She felt the gulf between them grow infinite. Jean-Michel was so far away that she could no longer see him. Or rather, he could no longer see her.

He urged her to come dancing. She refused. They argued. He left, the door slamming behind him.

She was a weight on the world. She was a black stain. She was poison. Her unhappiness choked the air from the room and pushed
itself up against the closed windows. She opened the door and found that her feet led her to the toolshed, to the paint thinner. If she was poison, then let her be poison utterly. She drank as much as she could, then she lay on the grass outside and waited to die. She imagined a blackness spreading inside until it reached her skin, turned her lips and fingernails black. If only she could kill a goat, be shot for her wildness. But she didn't even know how to dance.

And then she was on all fours, heaving. The poison came out in a flood. Her stomach contracted over and over, long after the poison had left it. Her traitorous body, all animal and no sense, chose life at all costs. She pulled herself upright and went back to the dark cottage. She fell into the sucking hole of her bed. She was asleep when Jean-Michel came home, got into bed beside her, slipped into his own heavy oblivion. In the morning when they woke, he kissed her gently. Alcohol on his breath, poison on hers, so heavy they could not taste each other. She said nothing.

—

I
N
C
ONNECTICUT
one weekend, my mother and I were discussing fact and fiction. We'd recently found a diary she'd briefly kept, a diary that contradicted the chronology of the story she was telling me. She'd put it aside and continued to tell me the story as she remembered it.

“I'm saying that there is no objective reality, no true nonfiction,” she was saying now. Nonfiction was a construction, albeit a construction that followed different rules from fiction.

“But what about newspapers?” I asked. “Wouldn't a newspaper story be true nonfiction?”

“Facts are transformed by being recounted,” she said. “They're turned into stories.”

“But still,” I said, “in a newspaper article there's only one story to tell. One true story.”

“No,” she said, “there's always the question of what makes it in. Last week there was an accident around the corner, in Chinatown. The next day the story was in
The New York Times
. A van had been double-parked on East Broadway, but the driver had accidentally left it in reverse. The van backed up slowly onto the sidewalk and killed a four-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. They'd been walking with their teacher, holding hands. It was a tragedy. But if the van had crashed into a storefront, it wouldn't have been a story. No, it was a story because there happened to be no car blocking the van's path to the sidewalk, because no one realized until too late that there was no driver, because the van happened to hit small children, because they were holding hands. Because you can see it all unfolding before you, a tragedy in the Greek sense, destiny carved out in advance.”

“But still,” I said, “it's nonfiction. All the events are real events.”

“No,” she said. “We construct reality. When I tell you I don't remember if something actually happened or not, it's because for me it's the same thing. There's no way to know if my memories are
solid.
” She slapped the book she was holding to emphasize the word.

“They did a study,” she said. My mother was the master of referencing psychology research to support her arguments. “They did a study where they measured a participant's brain waves while they watched someone dance. Then they asked them to imagine someone dancing. The patterns were the same. There's no physiological difference between what you experience and what you imagine. That's the reason we're always telling stories, why in every culture there are myths. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we interpret them. Take the ducklings who imprinted
Konrad Lorenz as their mother. They followed him everywhere because he really was their mother. They weren't thinking,
Oh, that's not my real mother, that's just my
fictional
mother.
The separations between fact and fiction are ones we create, and the better we control our fictions, the better we can control our reality.”

“Oh,” I said, a little lost.

As I wrote, I reminded myself: This is my mother's story, as she told it to me. This is my mother's story as I imagine her dancing.

—

S
ECOND YEAR OF
architecture school,
my mother had written next to a big bracket that swept up a whole year on the timeline I asked her to make in my notebook. In December:
Visit Mina in Cannes.
Trip to Algeria
in March. It was not until the following June, June 1974, that the stories resumed.

“I think we should see other people,” Jean-Michel said casually.

Françoise looked at him, uncomprehending.

They'd met when they were very young, he said. They should look around, explore, see the world a bit.

“Okay,” she said, because there was no other answer. It had not occurred to her that this would happen. She felt blank, frozen. It wasn't that she was in love with him. How can you be in love with yourself? She didn't know where she stopped and he began. When he left, what of her would remain? Which thoughts, which likes and dislikes, which turns of phrase belonged to her? Guérin and Guérinette.

She would need a new name. Her mind began to turn again. She would need a new place to live. She had spent the past two years in the studio apartment paid for by Louis Guérin. Once a month, she visited her father in the cold empty apartment where
he now lived alone. He had kept only the lower floor, for his medical practice. She sat with him at a table in the cramped room that had once been Sylvie's, the green and orange wallpaper still on the wall, the bed still in the corner, as his maid served lunch. He made her ask for the money every single time. He made her fight her pride and find the right polite words. He gave her barely enough to survive on. She couldn't afford to rent her own room.

She felt no anger or hurt. Only confusion, worry, and underneath that, a spark of excitement. She wasn't particularly eager to see other people, but she was eager to see herself. This body of hers, this mind of hers, what might they look like when they were hers alone?

But Paris was littered with ghosts of her past selves. She wanted a place so new it blinded her. A place that would pick her up and bleach her clean, a blank page on which a new story could begin. She wanted to go someplace no one she knew had been.

This was how she chose New York—it was the city that didn't exist. She'd seen it only in movies, dangerous and surreal. America to her was flashing lights on the Champs-Élysées advertising
USA COOL
JEANS!
It was tacky, brash, and bright. But it was big, and it was far. She wouldn't run into Jean-Michel walking arm and arm with some new girlfriend on the streets of New York City. She decided she would take a year off from school. She'd see the whole thing, first New York, and then perhaps Chicago, because that sounded good in her mouth, very sophisticated—
Shee-cah-goh
—and then San Francisco. And then Texas. She would earn money in each place, travel cheaply. She would come back to Paris an adult, all of America inside her.

First, she needed money for a ticket. She needed a place to live. She searched desperately for work in Paris and found none.

“Come down south,” her mother suggested. “Everybody's building summer homes by the Côte d'Azur; there must be work for an architect here.”

Josée, Louis, and Andrée were spending the summer in a home Louis had bought under Josée's direction. Once the detective's flashbulb had gone off in that hotel room, the divorce had devolved into an interminable battle. Paul had sued for custody of Andrée and won. He took her off the houseboat and placed her in boarding school. Josée went wild. She phoned Andrée at the boarding school as often as she could, sobbing. She turned her bedroom on the houseboat into a shrine of sorts. Suddenly this daughter, who'd just hit puberty and was the spitting image of her own younger self, meant the world to her. Now that she had her for the summer, she barely let her out of her sight.

When Andrée saw Françoise, she ran toward the pool screaming, “MY favorite sister is—” and then, right as she leapt into the air, just before she crashed into the water “—
Sylvie
!” At twelve, she no longer remembered the puppet shows she and Françoise had put on together, the hours spent playing school. The girl who had once called Françoise
maman
was at last the center of her actual mother's intense and undivided attention.

Françoise circled ads in the local paper and took the first job that presented itself, maid's work in a Cannes hotel. It paid minimum wage, but it offered room and board, she told her mother proudly. She repacked her suitcase and caught a bus.

The hotel guests were retirees in their eighties and nineties, parked there by their grown children who'd been sold on the full meal service, the company, the sunshine the brochures touted. The glossy pictures in the brochure were ludicrous when held up against the place itself. The manager gave Françoise and the sole
other maid, a timid young farm girl, a tour of their duties. He showed them how to make the beds, pulling the blankets tight over soiled sheets. The hotel's guests were prone to incontinence, strange bleedings, and other bodily emissions. The sheets were to be washed only once a week. There was a big basin outside filled with cold water. There was no soap, because soap would necessitate a second rinse. He instructed them to rub with their hands until the stains came out. When Françoise and the other girl hung the sheets to dry in the sunshine, the smell of diluted urine clung to everything.

Mealtimes were no better. The food the guests left on their plates was scraped back into a big vat to be served again the next day as a stew or a shepherd's pie. Françoise and the girl were instructed to help themselves to those same leftovers. They worked from six a.m. till eleven p.m., for fifty cents an hour.

“This is exploitation!” Françoise said to the other girl. “It must be illegal!” She needed a raise if she was ever going to make enough for a ticket to New York. If they both threatened to quit, their boss would be forced to listen, Françoise said. They'd unionize!