I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (23 page)

“Okay,” I said, “okay.” We lapsed into silence. At last I said, “But so, Josée, she found you like this, and so she thought . . . ?”

When my mother spoke next, she mimicked Josée's accusing tone. “‘
Because you were always his favorite,'
she said.
‘Because he loved you so much and you were always his favorite.
'”

“Oof,”
I said. “She has a way with words.”

My mother laughed.

I said, “Do you think that Josée ever thought,
Oh god, I need to protect my daughter from this
?”

“It didn't even occur to her,” my mother said immediately. “No.”

I sighed.

“Then why? Why did she wait to talk to you about this? Why did she bring it up now?” I asked.

“She's brought it up a few times, recently, on the phone,” my mother said.

“A few times? Recently?” I asked. “Because you've gotten closer?” But their closeness wasn't recent. They'd been speaking on the phone every Sunday for years now. What was recent was my presence in France.

“No,” my mother said. “I think she'd like to bury, somewhere in this story that she's creating . . . ‘
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen,
what a great thing I did by divorcing that old pervert. Oh how I suffered
.' If my father raped me, then no one can accuse her of being a bad mother.”

I exhaled sharply, in shock.

“And then, of course, I mentioned you,” my mother continued, and I sat up, pulling myself away. “I said, ‘Paul did act very inappropriately with Nadja.' And Josée said, ‘Oh, but he just groped her a bit, he was a plastic surgeon, that's just how he was with women.' Can you believe it? She just dismissed it like that . . .” My mother snapped her fingers, incredulous. I let a beat of silence pass before I spoke.

“Maybe,” I said lightly, “it's just par for the course in France? Maybe there's a trope of the dirty old grandfather here and they consider it normal.”

This launched my mother into another story, and though I was still reeling, here it came.

“Maybe!” my mother said. “Who knows how they are in France! Because of course there was that whole thing with you and Vinchon . . .”

“Who's Vinchon?” I asked.

“Your father didn't talk to you about this?” she said, surprised. “Well then, maybe I shouldn't either. Vinchon was an acquaintance of ours, whom you met in the South of France one summer . . .”

“You had many strange friends,” I said, “who often acted inappropriately with me.” I tried to check the note of accusation that crept into my tone.

But my mother said simply, “It's true. You were never particularly well protected by your father, or your mother either, for that matter . . .” The admission was unexpected and gave me pause. I felt myself begin to relax, albeit uneasily.

After meeting our family, Vinchon had sent my father an email. My mother forgot the exact wording, but the email said how nice it had been to meet my father, and wasn't his daughter sexy and wouldn't it be great to fuck her. It was something along those lines, rather explicit. It was a French joke, perhaps, but a strange one.

“I can't believe Papa never talked to you about this,” my mother interrupted herself to say. I
mmhmm
ed, but it seemed rather clear to me why he hadn't.

My father had shown the email to my mother, amused and perplexed. My mother had been furious. “How dare Vinchon put you in the same group as himself!” she'd said to him. “Because what are you supposed to respond? ‘Yeah, I'd like to fuck her, too'?” But my father didn't react, my mother told me. He didn't threaten to break the man's jaw, like he had with my grandfather. He just never wrote back.

Later, my mother had talked about the email with one of her closest friends, an Italian woman who lived in France. “But it's just a joke,” the friend had assured her in her heavy accent. “It's just male bonding. You know how they are in France!”

“No, tell me how they are in France!” my mother had said, this being the punch line to her story. She laughed. I forced myself to join in.

“Your father didn't even defend you,” she repeated. “He never even had a discussion about it with you!”

—

“T
HAT
'
S HOW A
REAL
MAN
shucks oysters,” my grandmother said to me over her shoulder. “I bet your father doesn't know how to do that.”

Thierry tossed the empty half shells out the porthole above her
sink. He was a handsome man who lived a few houseboats over. Josée used a mixture of her charms and lavish lunches to entice him into fixing her television or setting up her new smartphone. She leaned over him as he worked, sucking the scraps of flesh still stuck to the shells and playfully scolding him for letting them go to waste. The day before, Josée had called me to verify that I liked oysters. I was touched—she'd never asked me what I liked to eat before. Now, when she told me to set the table, I tried to find my way around the ancient Japanese cabinet that housed her plates, not asking where anything was, trying to preserve our new intimacy.

“Oh no!” she said, when she looked over at the table. “
Oh la la,
we need oyster forks, Nadja, not regular forks. And steak knives for later, not regular knives! And we use small plates for the appetizer, and the big plates for the main courses. Americans! Did your mother never teach you any of this?”

Over lunch, the etiquette lessons flowed into a lecture on which seasons to drink which wines. Such lectures had seemed hopelessly irrelevant to me as a teenager, back when I would happily drink any wine available. But now I felt I'd found precious arcane knowledge with which to amuse my American friends at dinner parties. “One must only drink Pinot Noir between February and June,” I would tell them, and we would marvel at the old rules of the Old World.

A plate of six oysters was placed before me. After the third, my stomach locked tight as a fist. I wanted to finish them all—I always finished what was on my plate, more from pathology than politeness—and I had, some time ago, convinced myself to like oysters. But my body was actively refusing now. I fought my way through a fourth, then distributed the remaining two to Thierry and Josée.

Lunch poured its way through a full bottle of wine and the beginning of another. My grandmother served a beef stew. Thierry told me about his psychic connection with animals. My grandmother served cheese. As the meal wound down, I tried to clear our plates. “But really, they're barbaric these Americans,” Josée exclaimed. “Don't you know it's rude to clean while the guest is still here?” I sat back down, blushing.

When Thierry left, I tried again, but my grandmother insisted we both go lie down. A nap in the late afternoon! It was a luxury I wouldn't have dared suggest to my mother.

The rental unit in the front of the boat was currently vacant, and I occasionally spent long weekends at Josée's, sleeping there. I slid shut the Japanese paper doors and lay on the mattress on the floor. Light streamed in through the round windows and I could hear the splash of oars as rowers passed. The book I was reading was very boring and I had it open on my chest as I drifted off.

I felt a pang of nausea. I knew my grandmother's boat was too big to rock, and the Seine too calm to rock it, but I was thinking of a memory. I was very young, on a small boat on the ocean, wearing a big straw sun hat. I had been sick. I had been carried down into the captain's cabin belowdecks to lie down. That was all I remembered. But just a few days before, my mother had mentioned a trip my grandfather had taken us on. She'd been telling me how he tried to buy affection, how it always ended badly. He'd chartered a small motorboat to take us out over the Mediterranean. I'd thrown up and he'd been furious at me and my mother, his gift unappreciated. She'd taken me belowdecks, away from his anger. I asked how old I'd been. Three, said my mother, and it felt reassuring, solid, to be able to point to the exact place in time where my first memory lay.

The waves of nausea came stronger now. I leapt to my feet and began to run toward the bathroom. I threw up as I ran and changed course for the kitchen, which was closer. Someone had placed a wooden cutting board over the sink. I had no time to move it. I bent over it, heaving. Timidly I knocked on the door to my grandmother's apartment, stomach still churning.

“Oui mon chat!”
she called cheerfully. I opened the door and stood there, embarrassed. She'd changed into a kimono and was straightening some papers in her living room.

“Do you need something?” she asked.

“I threw up,” I said, feeling childish.

“On the carpet?” she asked.

“A little bit,” I said. “Mostly in the sink.”

“Let's see,” she said, and led the way. There was a small trail of vomit on the cream-colored carpet in the living room, spatters that stretched about a foot and a half long.

“Like a sick puppy,” she said, laughing.

There was a huge puddle of vomit on the cutting board in the sink. She picked up the board and threw the whole thing out the window into the Seine. “Well, that's one thing taken care of,” she said, brushing her hands briskly against each other. She fetched some blue powder and a strange hard sponge and I knelt down and started to scrub.

My stomach churned. This time I made it to the toilet. When I came back out, I returned to scrubbing the spot on the carpet. Josée put a bowl on the ground next to me in case I felt sick again. The stains began to disappear. Visions of oysters swam sickeningly before my eyes.

“Feeling better?” she asked as I stood up.

“A little,” I said. I got myself a glass of water. I could feel her
watching me, waiting for an explanation. I wanted to save us both the embarrassment of my ungrateful stomach.

“It must have been all that running around last week when my mother was here,” I said quickly. “I got used to not eating.”

“Of course!” she said, the tension flowing out of the space between us. “With the way she goes, nonstop, never a break, you must have worn yourself out trying to keep up.”

She went next door to make me tea. I went back to the bathroom and threw up the glass of water.

“I'm leaving your tea here on the table!” she called to me. “I'm going to bed. Tomorrow, we'll have to call your mother and tell her what she did to you.”

The next morning, we ate a simple breakfast of toast. I drank water out of a wineglass. My grandmother owned no water glasses. She never drank water because, she said, she knew what was in it. The night before, while I'd been sleeping, she'd thrown her broken office chair, a huge ergonomic contraption on wheels, into the Seine. I'd thought she was joking until I saw that it was really gone.

“Stress is terrible for your health,” Josée told me, “and Françoise refuses to relax even when she has the chance. She must have deaths on her conscience. We'll have to tell her what she did to you.”

She buttered another piece of toast for me, against my protests. “You have to eat,” she said.

By evening, the story had changed. At dinner, Josée told my aunt, “Nadja's been partying too hard! When she arrived at the boat for lunch yesterday, Thierry thought that she was a destitute woman seeking shelter. He almost had to carry her down the stairs. And then she drank so much wine at lunch that she threw up all over my carpet. So, slowly now, Nadja! No wine for you.” They laughed at me. I considered arguing—I'd shown up in my
best dress! Only had two glasses of wine!—and instead I stayed silent and forced a smile. But that morning, my grandmother and I had found common ground. I'd happily accepted another piece of toast and let the story be about my mother.

—

I
SA
W
J
OSÉE
OFTEN
, nearly every week. She took me to museums and to plays, even though she herself hated the theater. She gave me a handbag made of cheetah fur that one of her boyfriends, an explorer who had introduced the Western world to Easter Island, had gotten made for her in Africa. She asked me questions about how I spent my days, and when I felt at ease enough to tell funny stories, she listened, delighted. She showered me in compliments.
Of course you made friends here,
she told me,
you're so charismatic and beautiful
, she told me.
You're melting away,
she said, each time she saw me.
Only a few more pounds to lose, not even.
And still, I fought with my distrust. We each had ulterior motives, I thought, and we danced around each other carefully. Josée was a seductress, I told myself; I must not get seduced. And yet here was the woman before me: so sweet, so attentive, so increasingly frail. Here she was, lighting up whenever she saw me. Here were the meals she so carefully prepared, here were the presents she gave so easily. Was she secretly a monster? Or was I, for projecting that possibility onto her?

One afternoon, she answered the door more quickly than I had expected. I hadn't had time to prepare myself for the transition from the self I was when I was alone, drifting around my body with loose grand thoughts, to the little girl I became when I was with her, compact, passive, polite. The first few moments between us were often strained, and this was part of why I never arrived empty-handed.

“I brought you clementines and pears,” I said, thrusting the bag between us.

“Wonderful,” she said. “Go put them down in the kitchen.” She didn't tell me then that she hated pears. Later I would learn that they'd been left to ripen over one of the beds of her childhood, and that the smell made her ill to this day.

“I'm starving,” she said. It was four in the afternoon, and though I'd told her I couldn't make it at two as she'd requested, she'd waited for me for lunch.