I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (3 page)

“But that's very sweet,” Siri said.

“Is it?” my mother said. “It seems a bit sad to me.”

But I do not think my mother meant that she remembered only her life after my birth. I think she meant what she said: that we were in all of her memories, even though we could not be. The narratives were part of my mother's power. The past shaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past.

—

O
UR REL
ATIONSHIP CHANGED
abruptly when I went away to college. It was as if my mother had been molding me my whole life, and now suddenly she stepped away, as if I were complete, as if she
liked what she saw. The absence of her anger terrified me as much as the anger itself had. I still felt far from complete. The year I left, my mother added a second full-time job to her first. She began her own children's book publishing company in the ground floor of our building. She told me she knew my brother would be leaving a too-short four years later, and she refused to allow her life to feel empty without us. She made time for me whenever I called but very rarely called me first. Sometimes we went two months without speaking. I felt the free-floating horror of freedom. It took two years before I stopped jumping up from my seat in my too-quiet dorm room, hallucinating her screaming my name.

My junior year, I moved off campus at the last minute and found myself in an apartment with no furniture. The school year hadn't yet begun, and other people's parents were driving them to Ikea in their SUVs. I called my mother in a panic.

“What do I do? I don't even know where to start!” I said.

“You figure it out, Nadja,” she said. She was busy, she had deadlines, she had an artist sitting in her office. “It's not that hard. You don't need much.”

“But where will I sleep tonight? How does one even buy a mattress?” I said.

“I don't know,” she said. “Borrow an air mattress. Sleep on the floor a few nights. I have to go.” I wound up on a friend's doorstep in hysterical, self-serious tears. The next weekend, my mother stopped by on her way to the country. She had strapped a sofa bed to the top of the car. She furnished my apartment in two hours flat.

While other people joked bitterly about becoming their mothers, I longed to. I didn't even understand how she had become herself.

—

T
HE WINTER BEFORE
my last semester of college, my mother and I were having dinner in a sushi restaurant in Paris. I was anxious about my upcoming graduation, unsure what I would do next or who I would become. My mother met every worry with an unshakable certainty that I would be fine. Right then, I wanted only her sympathy.

“Well, of course you don't get it,” I said bitterly. “You've always known who you were.”

My mother shook her head. And then she began to tell me about a time, a time before. I scrambled for my digital camera, hoping to use its movie function to record her voice. I didn't want to miss a word.

“I think,” I told her a few weeks later, unsure how to broach the topic, “that I would like to write about you. About your coming of age.”

“I'm flattered, but . . . are you sure?” There was a sadness in her eyes that I couldn't place. She wouldn't meet my gaze. I told her that I was ready. I wanted her to think so. I didn't want to be protected anymore.

My mother did not agree right away. She thought about it carefully. And then, having decided, she held nothing back. The boundaries between us fell, and fell suddenly. She let me in. There was nothing I couldn't ask. She answered me with a searching honesty rare even in the privacy of one's own thoughts. She made time for me in her overcrowded life. We talked at our kitchen table, in her downstairs office, on the couch. We talked until early-morning light streamed through the skylight and the cars started
honking again on Canal Street. We went away together, just the two of us, to a country cabin and talked for days. I graduated from college, I moved into my parents' house, I moved out of my parents' house, I took my first job and then my second. We talked for years.

Early on, my mother prodded me carefully. “You know . . . what we're doing, it's a lot like
Maus.
Like what your father did when he interviewed his father.”

“Of course,” I replied, surprised that she thought I had not noticed. “That's part of it. I want to write, and I can't do it until I address what he did. I'm doing something parallel and yet it's completely different. And also, I suppose, I'm doing the one thing he could never do.” My father's own mother had killed herself when he was twenty. His father had burned her diaries.

“That was the moment,” my mother told me later, “when I knew I could trust you. I trusted you to know you were ready.”

At first I used my laptop, the waveform spiking up and down on the screen as she spoke. Then technology changed and I used my iPhone. I didn't trust myself to remember. Many of the stories were so difficult to listen to that I would wake up disoriented the next day, a vague blackness in place of our conversation.

My mother and I spoke in French, the language so natural to me with her that I only noticed I'd shifted to it when I spoke to her on the phone in front of my friends. When I was three, she'd urged me to go join the children in a playground in the Jardin du Luxembourg. “
Mais Maman!
” I'd replied, wrapping myself in the wings of her long coat. “
Je ne parle pas français!
” It took me years to realize that the private language I spoke with my mother was a language other people could understand. But although I could speak French, I never learned to write it properly. So I transcribed our interviews in English, translating as I typed. My mother's
words rolled through my head in her language and out through my fingers in mine. Her memories became my own. One evening, she told me that there was no one else she could talk to this way. Not my father. Not her friends. By that point, she could reference any moment in her life with barely a hand gesture. I sometimes felt I knew her past so intimately that I could read her thoughts.

“But with you,” she said, “you're so close. Like when you were a baby. I don't . . . I can't worry about how you'll see me. You're a part of me.”

For her, the stories dissolved us into one. I was the infant she'd never put down, whose cries she heard before my mouth had opened. But for me, the stories gave me the distance I needed to see her whole. “I'll tell you when you're older,” she'd said, and now I was old enough. It would take a long time before I would understand the sadness in her eyes when I'd first
asked.

W
hen she was a child, my mother was a boy. Her father brought her to his barbershop, where they cut her hair as short as his. Her mother dressed her all in blue, polo shirts and shorts. Most of the time, Françoise didn't mind. She was lithe and athletic. She scaled fences, jumped off jungle gyms.

My mother's older sister, Sylvie, was fourteen months old when Françoise was born, still nursing and barely walking. Josée had believed she couldn't get pregnant while her breasts were still full of milk. She hadn't wanted a second child so soon after the first. Unaware that she was pregnant, she'd gone on vacation, riding camels across the Egyptian desert. But she'd been stubborn, my mother, even then. She took root and held on.

A second daughter. Her father left the Paris hospital moments after her birth, his face such a mask of grief that nurses came to check that the child was still alive. He disappeared for a few days to a casino on the edge of Paris and came back just in time to legally declare the birth.

He insisted on naming her Françoise, his grandmother's name, common and down-to-earth, not Catherine, as Josée had wanted and expected. This child was his. The lines were drawn early.

“You were the ugliest baby,” Josée liked to tell Françoise around
the time of her birthdays. “Your nose was squashed flat against your face and your head was long and oval, like a suppository.” But she'd grown into a beautiful child, one that strangers stopped to exclaim over in her stroller. She had her father's dark curls, her father's intelligent, combative gaze. “Brown eyes just like Paul's,” Josée told me once, although my mother's eyes were a piercing gray-green. I supposed she meant that my mother's eyes weren't blue like hers.

Andrée had followed six years after Françoise's birth. Another man's child, Paul claimed. The product of a conjugal rape, insisted Josée. An attempt to save their failing marriage, I was once told. The final
e
was appended in the maternity ward, when it was discovered that this child had also refused to be a boy. Andrée's birth was often used to mark time in family stories. It coincided roughly with the beginning of Paul's major professional and financial success, with the moment when he and Josée were able to purchase the floor below their own for his medical practice. Before, they had been relatively happy. After, there was far too much money.

For the most part, the older girls learned to be invisible. On the many nights when their parents held dinner parties in the dining room, the children ate in the kitchen, handed out peanuts and olives in their pajamas (blue for Françoise, red for Sylvie), then went obediently to their room. In the bed they shared, Françoise whispered gruesome stories about martyrs. She had decided that she would grow up to be Joan of Arc. She couldn't see herself becoming a woman like her mother, with perfectly done nails. She would dress in men's clothes, die for a cause, change the history of France.

Sometimes the girls found moments of sisterly closeness. But
most of the time, tensions between them ran high. They felt like the racehorses on which Josée and Paul placed bets each Sunday. Sylvie was her mother's horse and Françoise her father's. Françoise nearly always won—she couldn't help competing and couldn't help winning. She learned to swim the same year Sylvie did, her small arms straining to keep pace. She loved school and always came in first in her class. She skipped a year and shared classes with her sister. With each of Françoise's small victories, Josée's rage seemed to grow, and Françoise felt stinging regret.

Françoise admired her father. She liked the way people's eyes grew wide when she told them about the work he did—pulling the skin of her face back with her palms, explaining about smaller noses, smaller breasts. Paul was one of France's first cosmetic plastic surgeons, the profession's handsome spokesperson. She forgave him the embarrassment he caused by flirting with each shopkeeper or waitress. He was extraordinarily charismatic, and on the days he was in a good mood, his loud singing filled the house and no one, not even Josée, could keep from smiling. It went without question that Françoise was her father's daughter and would one day take over his practice. But it was her mother she truly worshipped.

In a photo from the early days of her marriage, Josée looks the part of the perfect 1950s housewife, a string of pearls on and a bouquet of flowers in hand, eyes tilted demurely upward at my grandfather behind the camera. But that was not the sort of woman she was cut out to be. When she threw dinner parties, as she was expected to do, they were lavish and extreme—oyster-eating contests, a rack hung with dried sausages in the center of the buffet, whoopee cushions on the seats, forks that bent in half when you tried to use them, trick glasses that spilled wine down starched, monogrammed shirts to her guests' raucous delight. When she
made herself beautiful, as she was expected to be, she was one of the most beautiful women in Paris, with her wasp waist and legs for miles and her gaze that could lure a man from across a room. When she dressed well, as she was expected to do, she set the fashions. When her husband cheated on her, as he was more or less expected to do, she had wild affairs of her own. But when it came to being a mother, she did not have the time.

Josée came home in the evenings laden with shopping bags that she dropped by the door as she ran to the bathroom.

“I haven't even had time to piss!” she'd exclaim. Young Françoise watched her dash by with wide eyes, deeply impressed by the busy schedule this implied. In retrospect, it was not exactly clear what took Josée's time. She got her hair done nearly daily. She bought antique furniture and restored it herself in the building's courtyard, frequently enough that the concierge thought she was an antiques dealer. She helped organize the international plastic and reconstructive surgeons' conferences. She planned the dinner parties, recording in a notebook what was served and which of the stuffy surgeons was seated next to which of their wives. She made annotations such as “P arrived late” or “JM prefers rosé to white.” She noted her own outfits, careful never to repeat them.

Neither Josée nor Paul had been born into money. Paul had been raised in a small town in Corrèze, an insular region in the center of France, the only child of a veterinarian. When Josée first visited her in-laws, their bathtub was filled with potatoes. Josée's own upbringing was darker and more complicated, and the details of it were murky to her daughters. It was never discussed in public. Still, the two of them had seduced and charmed their way into the staid circle of the upper class. They had retained their pasts only as the weapon they used to cut each other deepest.

Their fights were constant, intense, violent. More than once, the police were called.

“I have always been able to cry on command,” Josée commented one Sunday afternoon, as her husband and children were gathered around a towering pile of seafood. They turned to watch as tears began to roll down her face. Then she stopped as abruptly as she had begun, fixing her husband with her impenetrable blue eyes. His face turned red and he shook with rage. “Don't smirk at me, with your dirty little bastard's smile,” he said. His dinner plate whizzed past her ear, shattering against the wall. Josée barely blinked.

They were most at peace when they were getting ready to go out in the evenings. They knew what a glamorous couple they cut. They were as proud of each other's looks as they were of their own. Paul sang to himself as he arranged his thick black curls, sprayed his cologne. Françoise hovered silently as Josée added false eyelashes, pinned to her head the extra ponytail of blond hair. Françoise felt she would explode with love. Her admiration for her mother burned so bright that she was sure it must be visible, a strobing light that pulsed from her chest. But Josée never seemed to see her small, boyish daughter glowing behind her in the mirror. As Josée put on her shoes, as Paul extended his elbow to her, Françoise edged closer, hoping for a kiss good night. But then they were gone, the sound of their laughter on the stairs, a faint trace of Shalimar in the air. After they left, Françoise snuck into Josée's closet and pulled the dresses around herself.

“If I go to bed now, will you come and tuck me in and kiss me good night?” Françoise begged Andrée's nurse. “Just this one time?”

“I can't,” the woman said. “I have children of my own.”

Françoise wanted only to be allowed to love her mother. She brought her offering after offering—drawings covered in hearts, an ashtray, a clay vase she had made in school. If only the gift was good enough, beautiful enough, it would capture all the love she could not communicate, and Josée would be forced to notice that her daughter was madly in love with her. But Josée was used to people being madly in love with her. She tossed each object aside with some vague criticism. The clay vase remained on the mantel of the formal living room for a few days, and Josée laughed as she demonstrated to guests how water poured into it dripped right back out through a hole in the bottom.

Françoise kept trying, crawling into her mother's bed in the mornings when Josée was still sleepy and soft, kissing her cheek. “Go away,” Josée would say, tossing onto her side. “I don't like to be touched.” One Mother's Day morning, Josée's face was swollen by a particularly agonizing toothache. Françoise overheard her complaining. Josée refused to leave the bed, unwilling to show her face to the world. But Françoise still found her mother heart-wrenchingly beautiful. She went into Josée's room with a song she had prepared: “
Maman, Maman, c'est toi la plus belle du monde,
” Luis Mariano's popular hit at the time. She had memorized all of the lyrics. She sang it with such passion that she felt her lungs might burst. “Beautiful mother,” Josée scoffed as she pushed Françoise out of the room. “Now there's an oxymoron.” She locked the door.

It was two in the morning when my mother finished telling me this story. We were curled together on the couch, her legs across my lap. The skylight overhead had long since gone dark. There were no windows in this part of our loft but it took visitors a minute to notice, because the ceilings were high and the walls were
covered in framed pictures, original comic book pages and lithographs given to my parents by friends. There was a large stop sign my mother had found in the street. There was a mural painted straight on the wall, dating back to the days when my parents had used this space to self-publish their underground comics magazine. And hanging directly in front of us were four paintings I'd made one weekend when I was twelve, unremarkable portraits of four female faces, each with a different color hair. The blue-haired girl wore a T-shirt that said
HELL.
People noticed them immediately when they walked in. I used to blush when my parents' friends felt compelled to bestow some faint praise on them. In the kitchen, large-scale kindergarten paintings of a witch and a devil hung above the table. In my mother's bathroom, a beautiful glass curio cabinet contained my brother's clay sculptures. The entire wall by her desk was covered with doodles, poems we had written about her, letters we had left for her. On her mirror, a note I'd written in glow-in-the-dark pen, a misspelled “
je ta dore maman
” surrounded by hearts, had never been erased.

I nestled my head into my mother's shoulder, trying to get comfortable. She laid her hand on my head.

“Remember when you were little and we cuddled in the mornings?” my mother asked. “‘It's all hard!' you'd say, jabbing my shoulder.”

“It's still hard,” I said, laughing.

“I can't help it!” she said with genuine hurt.

I grabbed a throw pillow and placed it on her chest.

“It's okay,” I said. “I can fix it.” We lay there a moment in silence, her hand in my hair. I listened to her muffled heartbeat through the pillow and smelled her faint, familiar scent of Shalimar.

—

L
ATE INTO THE
NIGHT
Françoise read in the bathtub, where no one would scold her for keeping the light on. She often became so absorbed that she forgot the running tap and flooded the downstairs neighbors. Much of her education depended on rote memorization and she could recite whole plays after one or two readings. Her father ran a tab at the
papeterie
across the street, and she read through the entire bookstore alphabetically. Her collection of paperbacks overflowed her bookshelf and began to creep across the radiator. But when the time came in eighth grade for her to choose a track in school, her parents decided Françoise would opt for science. They even came to her school, rare and vivid visions, to speak with the principal. It went without saying that Françoise would be a doctor like her father. That there were extraordinarily few female surgeons worried no one. Françoise felt a slow-growing discomfort. It was not so much that she did not want to be a doctor—plastic surgery held little appeal but other branches of medicine might have interested her. It was the creeping realization that there were choices, big choices, being made about her future without her.

Sylvie, on the other hand, was encouraged to paint. She would make a good wife, her parents agreed. Or perhaps she would be a masseuse. Her mother liked to point out her big strong hands. “
Brave
Sylvie,” her parents said, shaking their heads sadly. Sylvie was a good cook, she was creative and artistic, she was kind and
serviable,
she was what women were. Françoise, it was agreed, was intelligent, ruthless, sullen, and mean.

“Look,” Josée said laughingly to Françoise, “even baby Andrée starts to cry when you walk into the room!” Françoise scowled and
walked back out. At least their older daughters had one thing in common, Josée and Paul agreed: neither had any sense of humor.

The roles were cast and there was no escaping them. It didn't matter that Andrée always smiled when she saw Françoise—that she was, in fact, the only family member who ever seemed happy to see her. Some things were said so often that they became true. Françoise practiced smiling in the mirror, her father's wide open grin, her mother's come-hither smile, but she couldn't shake the dark cloud that seemed to follow her from room to room.