I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (25 page)

She leaned forward, low to the table, and looked into my eyes. “I think that we must never talk to her about this,” she said. “The most awful thing for Françoise would be to suspect that we know.”

I swallowed. I nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“Of course,” Josée said, leaning back again, “it is possible that she herself doesn't know. The very difficult things, sometimes you create a hole in your memory, to protect yourself from them. Like when murderers don't remember having killed people.”

Josée and I had seen a French thriller with just this premise the week before. She had found it interesting, and I had hated it—not simply because of the stale male fantasy at its core, the middle-aged professor aggressively besieged by attractive young women, but because those swirling black holes disturbed me profoundly. It had happened to me once, the unexpected resurgence of a difficult childhood memory. It had made me feel I was losing my hold on reality. It terrified me, already, that I was composed of a past that was so lonely, that was made up of memories and narratives no one else in my family could agree upon. It was too much that it might
be unknowable to myself as well. I wondered often how many other memories lurked within me, dark and alien as cancers.

I believed my mother's version of events. In later conversations, she would repeat to me, her voice hard as steel, that her father had never done what Josée suggested. He had not crossed any boundaries. Her eyes flashed; she did not waver. I had no doubts. Still, I knew that my grandfather had not respected certain limits. When one of my aunts was a teenager and very beautiful, he'd taken her to nightclubs and told her not to call him Papa. But that was a far cry from Josée's suspicions—
Rape! Incest!
—that did such violence to me as I wrote them. They carved this fragile complex history into mountains I barely recognized.

“Anyway, he was an inveterate skirt chaser, your grandfather,” Josée continued, her voice playing from my computer speakers now. “He fucked like a goat.”

It was months before I could bring myself to transcribe this recording. I knew I had to force myself to place the words on the page, if not because they were
the
story then because they were one of the stories, but I fled. I slammed my computer shut. I scrubbed my shower until it sparkled and my knuckles bled.

“Yes,” I heard myself saying in reply. “He didn't seem to understand the limits.”

“It was
him him him,
” Josée said. Said,
Fucked like a goat.
Said,
It wouldn't surprise me
. Said,
We'll never know.

“With me,” I must have said, because there it was in the transcript I eventually made, “there were certain things that were . . . not clear and clean. He didn't always know what was acceptable, especially with his family.”

“With you? But you weren't his type,” Josée said. “You don't look anything like your mother! And lucky for you. He would
have devoured you as well. He was a vulture, voracious. Yes, and I, I chose
that
man as my procreator!”

Later, Josée would mention that afternoon we'd spent together quite often. Not because of the content of our conversation, but because I'd insisted upon scooping the rest of the curry into a Tupperware container and pressed it upon her when she left. “A ‘doggy bag,'” she told her friends in front of me, so clearly charmed by both my thoughtfulness and my foreignness. “She gave me a ‘doggy bag'!”

For me the afternoon lingered briefly, like a mirage, then disappeared from the edges in as soon as it was over. My only vivid memory was of Josée leaning across the table—
We must never talk to her about this, the most awful thing for Françoise would be to suspect that we know—
and my nod in response, the pact signed and sealed, as if in blood.

Though of course I had already talked to my mother about it,
glass in her throat,
and I believed her. Wasn't this something I could just skip over and leave in the past? But here it was. It had been placed in my story and its weight dented the pages. The heavy red crystal ashtray sat beside me as I worked, steadily filling with cigarette butts.

—

W
IND FILLED MY
BACK
like a sail and propelled me down the wide avenue toward Josée's apartment. The world had a hazy, unreal quality to it this morning. I'd seen friends the night before with whom I always drank heavily—vodka tonics, white wine, a sweet liquor whose name escaped me but whose cloying taste lingered.

“
Bonjour mon petit chat,
here take off your . . . thing . . . get comfortable.” I was wearing a long sweater as a coat. I took Josée's lack of direct comment about it as a good sign.

“I went to war against all the women of Paris to get us a roast chicken on a Sunday,” I told her. “None of the butchers would sell them until one on the dot and five minutes later there wasn't a bird left on the whole street.” I'd prepared the sentences on my walk from the train.

She laughed distractedly. “So this storm!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“There are fast winds tearing through the north of France,” she said. “And even here.” I listened and heard the wind whistling into her kitchen, saw the trees swaying outside.

“Oh,” I said. I hadn't noticed the storm. I grasped for something to say.

Around Josée, I had two ways of being, neither of which was myself. Most of the time, I spoke to her in my squeakiest polite-little-girl French, shy and eager to please. Occasionally, often after returning from a trip, I was brash, so excited to have something to say that I spoke too loudly, with little confidence that I would be listened to, and choked on my words. I sensed that Josée preferred the quiet version and that was certainly how I felt myself to be today. Small and buried deep inside, like a child in a huge winter coat. Lines from a letter I'd recently found, from a thirteen-year-old Françoise to Mina, taunted me.
I would so like always to remain the Françoise I am with you,
my mother had written to her grandmother.
It would be so much more agreeable for everyone.

I carved the chicken, trying not to use my hands. Carving was a man's job. Josée had taken pains to show my brother how to do it one Christmas, her hands guiding his. I'd watched attentively, doubly eager to learn any task not meant for me, but I still hadn't figured out how to use the knife to seek out the soft cartilage between the bones.

“We have an excellent cheese for afterward,” Josée told me, lips pursed, not commenting on my carving. “I had to put it on the windowsill.”

On the ledge outside her window, a half-moon of cheese floated in water.

“Oh! He got rained on,” Josée said. “We'll have to dry him off.” She drained and unwrapped the cheese, and an intense odor filled the room, sharp and bodily. My stomach flipped.

“Your mother sent me that new book about her,” Josée said. “It's terrible. I called her to tell her right away.”

“That new book” was a biography of my mother written by comics scholar Jeet Heer. I hadn't seen the finished book but I'd read most of the text in manuscript and found it smart and competent, although I'd had to push aside the selfish desire that my mother be my subject alone. The last time I'd spoken to my mother, she'd told me that Josée had criticized the cover and said the book was printed on bad paper and full of typos.

I was surprised Josée hadn't liked the book—I remembered the four scant pages on my mother's childhood as being filled with praise for Josée.

“She says that she was an unwanted child,” Josée said, “which isn't true at all! Of course she was wanted.”

“But . . . you didn't mean to have a second child so soon,” I said.

“She wasn't planned, but that doesn't mean she wasn't
wanted,
” Josée said.

“But also, you'd hoped for a boy. I think that's all she was trying to say,” I said.

“No, she was wanted. She was loved. She was our little
chouchou
when she was born.”

“But it's in context,” I said. “The book says she ‘made her
unwelcome entrance into the world.' She's only trying to say that she was unwelcome in the moment.”

“
Non!
” Josée said in a burst of anger. I looked up at her. “
I
was the unwanted child, not her.” There was that brief lull in conversation, the silent pause.

“And then it says that she ran away to New York because she and I fought all the time. And that, really, no! We had one fight that I remember, but other than that . . . No. I don't remember ever fighting with her. It just isn't true.” And she launched once again into her familiar narrative of those years, of her daughters fighting like wildcats and herself at wits' end, struggling to keep the peace.

In a later conversation, Josée criticized the book again, this time claiming that Françoise had called her a frustrated housewife and nothing more. When I offered to go get the book to remind her of the actual text, she replied that to set eyes on it again would make her feel sick.

Here is what the book says: “While [Josée] would eventually reinvent herself, with great success, as an art book dealer, real estate agent, ghostwriter (with at least one bestseller to her credit) and interior designer—an unusual career arc that would also inspire Mouly—mother and daughter had an occasionally nettlesome relationship. (Spiegelman says that when he first met his mother-in-law, she took him aside to make fun of Mouly for lacking sufficient cooking and domestic skills.) Mouly needed to get away from France.”

I picked anxiously at my food, thinking about “occasionally nettlesome,” thinking about the book I was writing.

“This chicken is delicious!” Josée said, even though it was too dry. “I had a feast. You see, I hate speaking when I'm eating and look at how much I've just told you.”

The only other mention of Josée in the book reads, “Mouly says now that her appreciation of beauty is very much tied to her sense of her mother as a ‘truly beautiful, graceful, elegant and glamorous person.' Even as a child, Mouly wanted to create art beautiful enough to suit [Josée]: ‘A lot of my early memories as a kid have to do with making objects and paintings for her.'”

In my own book, I knew, I would complete that sentence—the vase that leaked, the gifts tossed aside without a glance.

I felt queasy. It wasn't just the cheese, which tasted even more powerful than it smelled, or my hangover. It was watching Josée smile at me beatifically and urge me to take another bite, how cozy it was in her kitchen that day as the wind howled outside. I could only imagine how angry with me she would one day be.

—

A
FTER LUNCH
, I took the coffee Josée made me to the living room. I'd brought an external hard drive with home movies that my mother had had digitized. Most were from my own childhood—endless footage of my brother and me tearing open presents and eating cake. But there was one file, mysteriously named “
Cahiers du cinema,
” that was copies of old Super 8s from the late fifties that showed my mother taking her first steps, Sylvie on a high beam at the beach, a glimpse of Josée in a thick fur collar.

Josée peppered me with questions as I tried to get the files up and running. I plugged the drive into one of the USB ports on her fancy new flat-screen TV, swapped out the batteries on her remotes, and began switching through inputs. I felt Josée's admiration on me like a heat lamp. In a rare moment of physical intimacy, she put her hand on my shoulder and rested her forehead against mine.

“I just have such confidence in your intelligence,” she said, her voice a purr. I rocked on my heels, my shoulders pulling back.

The first images flickered on. Five-year-old Sylvie slid down a long white pole in a playground by the sea. My grandmother staggered in front of the screen, crying out.

“Ah! That's Sylvie! That's Deauville, where we spent the summers. There's my friend Catherine! She's dying now. Oh! And there's your mother! Look, she's trying to keep up with her sister. Aha! Even then. Look how happy and full of life Sylvie was!”

Black spots licked at the screen. Sylvie, all in white, ran away from the camera into blinding white light. The TV let out a textured whoosh of static silence. It was the quality of film often used in contemporary movies to signify the past, and it was hard not to see every instant imbued with the poetry of its own degradation. Features, faces, whole bodies disappeared into the soft blur. A few days earlier, I'd watched
“Cahiers du cinema”
alone in my apartment. I'd hoped for a clear, unfiltered window into those moments of my mother's life, but the camera was so present—everyone looked at it, everyone smiled. It felt more like a mirror, like I was being watched and watching in self-canceling measures, until nothing was seen. But now I sat and watched Josée watching. She stood rooted to the ground in front of the TV, electrified and transfixed. She narrated every instant to me.

The clips were out of order; my mother bounced between two and five years old. In one scene, a hand offered her a bottle of milk, then pulled it away as she tried to grab it. My mother smiled slyly, grabbing it firmly the second time.

“There's your mother, that air in her eyes! I recognize her, that's exactly her. Do you recognize her?”

I didn't. My mother looked like a boy. She moved like a boy. Her cheeks, which were now gaunt under her high cheekbones, puffed out in perfect chipmunk circles. She had a men's haircut, so short her curls didn't show. She wore a blue striped polo shirt with a collar.

“Maybe you never knew her like that,” Josée said before I could answer. “Oh my Nadja, you've made me so happy! What pleasure you've brought me!”

She stood a few feet from the TV, rocking from foot to foot. I urged her to come sit by me on the couch and she backed up toward me, hands outstretched behind her, refusing to turn her head from the screen.