I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (2 page)

On the morning of my sixteenth birthday, I stared into the mirror opposite our kitchen table in profound disappointment. I had not quite realized that I had still been waiting to become a fairy, but I had been. My mother walked in, wearing the faded pink nightgown that had belonged to her grandmother. I saw her for an instant the way you rarely see the people you've known your whole life. I saw the purple under her eyes, her olive skin growing thin and soft with wrinkles, the gray roots of her hair that had been going gray for years. And yet I knew, still knew, that she was a fairy. I knew it from the way she could make me feel invincible with just the right words. I knew it from the way she called my cell phone three seconds into each first kiss. I knew it from the way she took one look at my face that morning and asked me if I could fly.

—

W
HEN
I
WAS
SIX
, and my brother a year and a half old, my mother accepted the position of art editor at
The New Yorker
. It was the first job she'd ever had for which she needed to wear nice clothes. She hired us a string of babysitters, ambitious French-speaking young women who were guaranteed to leave within a year or two and whose names I can now barely remember. She woke at six-twenty each morning to drive us to school, ripping up the FDR Drive to Twenty-Third Street before bringing the car back to SoHo and heading off to her office high above Times Square. She was home for dinner each night, even if the babysitter cooked, even if it meant that we ate long after the sun had set.

When I was sick or school was closed, my mother took me to work with her. I sat on the couch in her big office and watched as artists came with their sketches for magazine covers. She circled the pictures with her red pen, climbed on a chair, steady in her short leather skirt and heels, and tacked the sketches to the wall. She pulled proofs, ran down to the printing department, corrected colors, told the fact-checkers (who checked every image with shocking literalness) that rabbits could be pink when it was Easter. Sometimes she gave me scissors and I made crazed snowflakes from her scrap paper, trying to imitate her constant motion. I gave my creations to every person on the floor, running between the offices, never doubting their gratitude for a second. When I was with my mother, I felt invulnerable.

But when my mother drove us to school in the morning, the air was charged with a different energy. She slapped the steering wheel in frustration. Her French exhalations, her
argh
s and
pff
s
,
crowded the air like comic book sound effects that left no room for speech. And yet she insisted on driving us. She didn't want us to be made to go to school alone, as she had. It seemed strange, once I knew the full story, that this was the only part of her childhood that she allowed herself to resent.

I tried to picture her young, but I saw her exactly as I knew her. I'd seen not a single photograph of her between eight and eighteen. As far as I knew, none had been taken. She'd told me she drank coffee as a child. I tried to imagine her making it for herself in careful silence in the gray light of a Paris morning while the rest of her family slept. Seeking a road map to her, I petitioned for years to be allowed to drink coffee as well.

Outside our home, my mother's name was almost always appended to my father's. “An impressive woman in her own right,” the articles said. My father's graphic novel
Maus
about his parents' experiences in the concentration camps, won a Pulitzer Prize when I was five. The spotlight of his fame projected a larger-than-life version of him to the world that even he often struggled with. But inside our home, it was my mother who loomed large.

“Françoise takes care of reality and I take care of everything else,” my father often said, jokingly. And even though it was true that my mother handled the finances, the plumbing, the carpentry, our education and our vacations, while my father often disappeared for weeks at a time to his studio, I saw her wince when he said this, not taking it as the compliment he intended.

“My girlfriends and I talk about how much we hate you,” a friend of my mother's once told her. “You're French, you've got the best job in New York, you've married a successful man, you're
beautiful, you're thin, you've got two wonderful children. It's not fair. You're perfect.”

My mother wasn't perfect. My mother was intense. Things didn't happen because they were possible, they happened because she decided they would. She once fit a couch through a door frame that was several inches too small simply by pushing with all her strength and saying, “Couch, go in!” But, as anyone who has read a fairy tale knows, all spells come with a cost. The magic pulled on hidden sources. My brother referred to her exertion of will as “the fireball technique.” She could set the universe aflame, but she used herself as fuel. Somewhere inside, the earth was scorched.

—

O
NE AFTERNOON
, when I was eight years old, my mother caught me sharply by my wrist as I wandered back to my room from the kitchen. She was furious. I stared at her in surprise.

“You can't walk around naked when the plumbers are here!” she said. The bathroom door was still open and the plumbers working there could hear, though they didn't speak French. I spent a lot of time naked as a child. I had never been scolded for it before. But now I burned with a sudden and vivid shame. “It's indecent!” she said, and I could see in her eyes the real shock that I had not already understood this. I understood it then, all at once.

A woman's body was a private thing. My body was a private thing. My body was a woman's body. My mother was a woman. My mother was a private thing. There were dangers. There were secrets. There was something to guard.

I had thought that my shame had seared the memory deep only for me. But when I brought up this incident twenty years
later, my mother nodded in recognition. I felt a small thrill. There were so few memories that we actually shared.

“Yes, there were these big men in the house that were strangers, and you . . . ,” she said. “That was when I knew that something was really off. You never had . . . modesty.” I burned with shame all over again.

My mother was a ferociously private person. She did not gossip and never betrayed secrets. She did not easily forgive these things in others, either. She did not go through my drawers or read my diaries. It never occurred to me that she would. She never asked questions of my friends or tried to remember their names. She talked disdainfully of American mothers who put themselves on the same level as their children. The boundaries between us were clear: the parents in the front seat, the children in the back. They were the source of her power. I tried to break them. I told her too much about myself. I told her about my crushes and my petty fights with friends. I told her all the things she would never ask.

I knew she expected me to respect her privacy in return. The older I got, the more difficult it became. When she wasn't home, I spent hours in her walk-in closet, touching her clothes and going through her boxes. I found her old diaphragm, her love letters from my father, her lingerie. I felt guilt only about how little guilt I felt. It wasn't until I read the papers in her desk, letters from long ago, that I stopped, sleepless with questions I could not ask.

—

A
S
I
HIT
PUBERTY
, and my body began to change, a dangerous new tension arose between us. My mother thrust Rollerblades at me in the morning and insisted I get myself to school, get some exercise, while she drove my brother and his friends. On weekday
evenings, when the huge industrial skylights went dark and night fell in our living room, I knew better than to be on the couch when she came home. I gathered my books and comics and went to my room. I knew in the way one knows the things that can never quite be said that it made her furious to see me sitting still. I would listen for her “
Bonsoir!
” hurled from the door like a warning flare. It was only a matter of moments before my bedroom walls shook with the sound of my name. “
NAA DJAAA!
” Two guttural cries of frustration. I sat braced for this and yet I jumped each time. My heart raced. “Can you at least help set the table?” she would say, tears of exhaustion in her eyes, when I appeared in the kitchen doorway. And if the table was already set, if the dinner was already made, then it was a sock I had dropped in the bathroom, or shoes I had left in the hall, or something else I had done or not done that sparked her fury. Sometimes I roamed the house before her return, trying to guess the thing that would set her off and correct it. But the patterns were etched deep and felt inescapable. I felt it was not the sock or the shoes or the house but my body itself that refused to meet her expectations.

We were not allowed television (ours played only VHS tapes), so I escaped into books. I read in the bath, in the car, walking down the street, in the corner during adult dinner parties. Mostly I read books about ordinary girls in ordinary worlds who suddenly discovered their magical powers. But there was one book that I read often and kept hidden on my highest shelf. I had not wanted to return it to the library and so had paid the fine from my pocket money.
Don't Hurt Laurie!
It was a slim pink book with too-big type about a girl who was abused. Laurie's mother's anger was vicious and unpredictable. Laurie's mother told the nurses at the
hospital that Laurie had fallen down the stairs. I knew my mother would never hurt me. She had left tiny pitchers of milk and bowls of cereal in the fridge when my friends slept over when we were five. My mother kissed me good night each evening and praised the stories I wrote. But I recognized something familiar, though grotesquely exaggerated, in Laurie's mother: the outbursts that made the house tremble and just as quickly disappeared. And I envied Laurie. I envied her black-and-blue marks and her bandaged wrists. I envied her clear-cut proof that something had actually happened.

—

T
HROUGHOUT MY ADOLESC
ENCE
, my mother's reality threatened to overpower my own. One evening might pass without incident, then the next she would call me to the kitchen, shaking with fury, and accuse me of opening a second container of milk. It did not matter that the first had spoiled. It did not matter that I hadn't. When my mother was angry, the anger consumed her. Her gray-green eyes turned a lethal black. “Just apologize,” she would say. And yet I was incapable of apologizing for things I had not done, no matter how small. I could not admit to throwing away all the spoons, to moving her papers, to hiding the mustard. I knew that to cede even this much ground was to lose all sense of myself. I would go to my room and scream at the top of my lungs, hoping that she would hear the intensity of my pain, how wronged and innocent I was, and come running with apologies. But my room, which had once been my father's office, was soundproofed, and my mother could not hear me from the other side of the loft.

Soon afterward, those fights had never happened. “You're
exaggerating, Nadja,” she would say, a week later. “How could I have kicked you
up
the stairs?” I'd wonder, shakily, if she was right. I developed a code in my sporadically kept diaries—a big circled
R
on each page that detailed a fight with my mother, a reminder to myself that these events were “REAL.” Often, it was easier to allow the past to become a blur.

Most families retell anecdotes, reinforcing their legends to draw closer: that time she overturned the game board, that time he gave the dog a haircut. We did not. Instead of anecdotes, we had narratives. My mother condensed whole swaths of our shared past into a sharp tool with which she explained and ordered our present. Reminiscing led to bitter arguments. Memories that contradicted my mother's narrative were picked apart in their details. That babysitter had not worked for us during the summers. We had stopped visiting that cabin in 1998. I felt myself clinging to my version of reality as if some essential part of my selfhood might get washed away. But when proof could be produced—a restaurant receipt, a map, a diary entry, a Google search—my mother simply shifted the subject. Like many couples, my mother and father could not tell a story about their shared past without arguing about which street corner they had been standing on. Once, during a particularly drunken dinner with the writers Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster, Siri attempted to diffuse an argument between them with an anecdote of her own.

“One morning in the country, while Paul was still sleeping, our daughter and I saw a bird—it was a vision—through the window. A heron, majestic. I held her and we watched it in silence,” Siri said. “Later, I overheard Paul tell the story at a party—but now he had seen the heron. He had held Sophie. I hadn't been there at all! Because of course we had told him all about it.”

“I really thought I had seen it,” Paul said with a gravelly laugh, an open sweep of the cigarillo in his hand.

“And I believe him,” Siri said, leaning forward, her blue eyes wide and earnest. “And it doesn't matter. The point is: the heron was seen.”

I served myself again from the Chinese takeout cooling on the table, even though I was no longer hungry. My mother was the only other one still eating. She never ate, then she ate like a wolf. I put the food in my mouth without tasting it.
The heron was seen.
How blissful to be able to find that kind of peace with the past.

“I have a terrible memory,” my mother said then. She sounded tipsy, which surprised me. She drank wine every night, but she rarely got drunk. “All of my memories,” she continued morosely, “all of my memories have my children in them. Even the ones from before they were born.”

“So your life began twenty-three years ago,” Paul said. That was my age at the time.

“I guess so,” my mother said.