I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (37 page)

She went on, stepping further and further into the past, seeming younger and younger as she spoke. It was as if with each sentence a veil dropped, shortening the distance between my mother and the girl she'd once been.

She thought back to those summer nights when she and Jean-Michel showed up late to dinner and ate quickly, hair tousled and cheeks flushed—
she knew, of course she knew.
She thought back to when her parents had asked her, in that grand echoing living room, if she was having sex—
she already knew it was too late
. She thought back to the marriage arrangements—
she had discussed it with Louis Guérin, two lovers planning to wed their children to each other.

“She
knew,
” she said, “she
knew
I was going to get pregnant. Before it even happened, she
knew.
She
let
me get pregnant. She
wanted
me to get pregnant. She used me as a cover for her affair.
And then . . . and then . . . and all this just to punish Paul, all this just to say: Look, your daughter, the prude,
sainte nitouche,
went and got knocked up.”

She stood, she turned toward me, she staggered and fell into my arms. She sat down again on the bed. She reached out one arm toward me, grabbing my shirt as if to steady herself. I sat next to her. She hugged me, burying her face in my neck, and began to sob. “Oh but what good I did to leave all this, what good I did. What a viper.” Only later would I realize that my mother had never cried on my shoulder that way before. In that moment, I felt she was not my mother but the young girl I had never known.

She took a deep breath to calm herself, then let it out, whispering
ow ow ow ow ow.
She rocked back on the bed and lay on her side. I curled myself around her.

“I'm sorry,” I murmured to her. We fell asleep like that, her body shaking softly until she slept.

—

W
HEN
I
AWOKE
, I was alone in the room. I was getting dressed when my mother returned. She and Josée had had breakfast together and laid out plans for the day. My mother did not mention the night before, but it was there in the fatigue that tugged at her swollen face. I asked her gently if she was okay. She sighed heavily and looked at me hard, narrowing her eyes, though I could see that her gaze was actually turned inward.

“The last thing I wanted to do this morning,” she said, “was to go see my dear little mother and figure out what I could do to make her happy. But I did it. It's done.”

This day passed as easily as the one before, more easily even.
The explosion of the previous evening left almost no trace. It was our last day and we had our routines by now, our favorite pools. Josée appeared happier, relieved—perhaps because neither my mother nor I asked her any more questions about the past. Instead, we each took one of her arms and pulled her on her back through the water, as we had done once on a vacation long ago.

“My dolphins,” she called us. “My mermaids.”

—

W
E GOT TO
TH
E
AIRPORT
EARLY
, which was rare when traveling with my mother. We sat on high stools in a fluorescent-lit café, drinking espresso from paper cups. My mother glanced at her watch and asked me to go check if our flight had begun boarding. I craned my head to look down the long airport hall and told her that it had not.

“Just go over there and check,” she said.

“I can see from here,” I said.

“Don't be difficult, Nadja,” she said. “Just go over there!” I sighed dramatically and got up, walked across the vast white expanse and back again.

Later, laughing bitterly, my mother recounted the exchange that had followed.

“Did Nadja just offer to go check the gate?” Josée said. “How sweet of her!”

My mother mumbled that it had been at her request.

“She is so considerate,” Josée said, ignoring this. “All my friends ask me what I did to get such a sweet, considerate granddaughter. And do you know what I tell them?”

“What?” my mother said.

“It's innate!” Josée said. “It's just innate.”

On the plane, my mother and I sat next to each other, Josée several rows ahead. We placed a bag on the seat between us. No one came to claim it, and the seat remained empty, the only empty seat on the whole plane. In the hum of the recycled air, we had the first truly private conversation we'd had all week. I apologized for pulling her back into the past. She had followed me, and it had been dangerous.

“It was useful,” my mother said firmly. But she had always been able to see difficulties as challenges, and my conscience was not eased.

“Maybe it wasn't,” I said. “Maybe it was just hard.”

“It was useful because we survived it,” she said. “It's all still there—she's the sweet aging mother whom I can take on vacation and try to please. I'm the adult daughter who built her life an ocean away. And she's also still that person who can destroy me. I'm also still that little girl with no resources. And now we know that we can go there and return, the fire isn't going to burn us alive. We can touch those things, and we can survive.”

I thought of the naturally radioactive waters of the spa, how they broke your body down until it relaxed. I hoped that there was some benefit to all of this, and was not sure.

—

S
TANDING IN LINE
at customs in Paris, I leaned my forehead against my hand, tired. I felt a long, hard scratch down the side of my spine. I jumped and turned around, glaring. Josée grinned at me mischievously. She raised a crooked finger.

“
Ow!
” I said. A look of distress flashed across her face.

“Oh, come on,” she said, composing herself. “That didn't hurt.”

I realized then that she had meant only to caress me but hadn't known how.

“No,” I agreed, and meant it. I pulled her, stunned, into a hug. “No. It didn't
hurt.”

M
y mother stopped dyeing her hair. She told me this over the phone. At a party the night before, she said, a woman had told her she admired the “bold” choice. Other women had joined in, piling on the compliments so heavily they stung.

“I look old now,” my mother said sadly.

“So why don't you just dye it again?” I asked. My mother had dyed her hair for as long as I could remember. Her sadness seemed strange to me when the solution was so simple.

“Oh,
chaton,
” she said, and I heard the distance she put between us when she knew I could not understand. “I'm turning sixty. I
am
old.”

Her birthday was only a month away, and this was the real reason for her call. She wanted to mark its passage by organizing a trip that would resemble our time in Ischia two years before. She decided on a weekend in Deauville, that city on the northern coast where Paul and Josée had laughed as they struggled to carry huge buckets of lobsters, water splashing their sandy legs. It was an easy drive from Paris, what the Hamptons are to New York. At my mother's request, I booked us rooms in the grandest hotel, a day at the spa. “It's a folly to come to France just for a weekend,” she said. “But I'll only turn sixty once.”

When she arrived at my Paris apartment, she looked no different to me than she always had. What I noticed was the short purple silk scarf knotted around her neck, girlish and colorful. It was the sort of French foulard that my father had drawn her wearing in
Maus
but that I'd never seen her wear. She saw me looking and, with a bashful smile, put her hand to it. She told me she had worn it on her first flight to New York, all those years ago. I wondered if this weekend felt to her like an ending as well.

She took off her heavy backpack and headed straight for the table of plants by the window.

“They're thriving!” she said, impressed, turning their leaves in her fingers. I did not tell her that I had just replaced many of them with new ones from the store.

“I'm so proud of you,” she told me over and over as we sat down to the breakfast I had prepared.

“For what?” I said each time, my intonation fluctuating between curious and dismissive. For everything. For keeping a plant alive, for living in Paris, for making reservations in Deauville, for knowing how to buy cheese. I waved aside her praise. I was embarrassed by how easy my life was, and how little I had done with it. And yet, of course, I also wanted her to continue, and she did. I was filled with the buoying sensation that often came from being with her, that feeling of invincibility.

When people tell you things you don't want to hear, it is easy to focus your resentment on the moment they choose to speak. It was evening. We'd just left my building and had ducked into a side street. We were walking quickly—we were running late to meet her sisters. I was checking the map on my phone often.

She inhaled sharply.

“I read the beginning of your book,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, stunned. I had not given it to her to read. I had shown it to almost no one. It was still a draft. She had said she would never read it. I had wanted to believe that.

“You left it on the computer in the living room last time you were in New York,” she said.

The memory came back to me: a rush to print, a file forgotten on the desktop.

“I knew I'd have to read it sooner or later,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. There was a sharp pain in the side of my chest. Anger welled as well, a heat at the base of my throat. But I locked my jaw. She had given me her most intimate stories to tell. I did not also get to control when she read them.

“So,” I said.

“It was hard to read,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“It was just strange,” she said. “I didn't recognize myself.”

“It's already so difficult to see oneself in a photo, or on film,” I said. “To be written about must be worse.”

“It's more than that,” she said. “I recognized myself in the parts about my childhood. But as soon as you were in the scene, as soon as I was seen through your eyes, I didn't recognize the woman you described at all.”

“Oh,” I said.

“For example,” she continued, “you say my lipstick was perfectly applied. But I never wear lipstick!
You're
the one whose lipstick is perfectly applied.” This was true, I realized. When my mother put on makeup, she emphasized her eyes, not her lips. She did not own a single tube of lipstick, though I owned half a dozen. I had one specific memory of watching in a bathroom in Paris as my mother put on lip liner, then blended it with lip balm. She
had done the same on my face then, her hands cool and soft on my cheeks. But even that was rare. I'd allowed that moment to permeate the years and become a trait she did not have.

“I am a very private person, as you say,” my mother continued. “And these stories about me, I wouldn't tell them to anyone. But I told them to you. And you wrote them, as I knew you would. It's a reality I'll have to adjust to. I'm still not sure how I'll do it. But I will.”

Having a writer in the family is like having a murderer in the family,
I thought. I touched my chest, oddly grateful for the tangible pain there.

“I love you,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “There were so many moments where I wanted to say,
That's not true, that's not true.
But it's your book. I have to think of it as being about your fictional mother. And there were a few things that did ring true, of course.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“That dinner party where I say my children are in all of my memories. I don't remember saying that, but I agree with myself. And that story Siri tells, ‘The bear was seen.' That's a great line.”

The heron was seen,
I thought, but saw the irony in this and did not correct her.

“But then when you say that your weight was always a problem between us,” she continued, “that's not true. I never cared how much you weighed. It was your father who had a problem with it.”

A slipping vertiginous feeling took hold, one I had felt many times. It still felt as if my mother could talk me out of my memories.

“Maman,” I said, “I cannot have this fight again. I just can't do it anymore.”

“Okay, it's just, I always thought you were perfectly—” she said.

And then we were back in it. I could not stop myself. We were each insisting on the same points we'd insisted upon so often, as if somehow this time, this time, this time the other would hear them.

“We can each have our own versions!” I repeated after each accusation I leveled, but I was only trying to end the conversation on my own. If I allowed her to speak without contradiction, even once, I felt the enchantment would be cast and unbreakable. I would never find my way back into myself, the bread crumbs I had so carefully laid out blown away.

“I'm just letting you know what it is that
I
remember,” she said. And then we had arrived where we were going. I pushed the door open and we smiled for her sisters. There was no time for another word.

The next morning, we went north. Josée rode shotgun. The buildings of Deauville looked sprung from Germanic fairy tales, with their peaked roofs and decorative dark wood beams. It was a city built for tourists: the grand casino, the high-end designer shops, the steaming platters of mussels and fries. The northern seaside was an odd choice for a late October weekend, but my mother liked the romance of chilly abandoned beaches with their folded umbrellas.

We had come mostly for the thalassotherapy. The spa was all blue lights and white floors, more clinic than haven. We bathed in Jacuzzis filled with salt water, wrapped ourselves in seaweed, applied lotions that contained the mineral richness of the sea. Outside, the waves slammed against the sand. It seemed to me a particularly French invention, this signifier of the ocean without the ocean.

The first evening, after Josée had gone to bed, we went to the casino. I tried to imagine the space as it had been in the past,
women in sequined gowns, smoke floating from cigarette holders to the high gilded ceiling. Now it had all the aspects of a carnival. Semiclothed girls handed out candy canes, people drank neon-colored cocktails in the flash of neon lights. We did not gamble, just wandered and watched. Time passed strangely, as it was meant to, and soon we had been there for hours. When we left, the streets were oddly calm. It was nearly two in the morning.

“You go on back,” my mother waved. “I want to go down to the beach.”

“Now?” I asked.

“I haven't touched the water yet,” she said.

“Can I come with you?” I asked. She nodded. The night air held the sharp reminder of approaching winter. I shivered under my light sweater.

“You know,” my mother said, noting my shivers, “some of my happiest moments have been on the beach alone.”

“Do you want to be alone?” I asked.

“No, it's okay,” she said.

We walked in silence. As we reached the sand, we slipped off our shoes. My mother was barefoot but I was wearing tights. I placed my foot tentatively, braced for the damp, but the water was still a long way off. It was the widest beach I had ever seen, the ratio of sand to water reversed. They say that the town of Deauville is closer to Paris than it is to the ocean. Where we stood, the water was still so far away from us as to be nearly invisible, a thin black strip below the black sky.

Halfway there, we stopped. Deep puddles from high tide caught and fractured the light. I did not want to step through them in my stocking feet.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I'll wait here for you.”

“It's okay,” my mother said. She linked her arm through mine, and we looked up at the sky.

“We're in the stolen hour,” I said. It was the evening that the clocks got set back, creating earlier winter dawns, earlier winter sunsets. At three a.m., the hands would turn back to two. This hour would disappear.

My mother turned to hug me, her breath in my hair. Then she pulled away and walked off toward the water.

“You're going in?” I said to her receding form. She did not answer.

She was several feet away before she turned around. She walked back toward me. Without a word, she handed me her shoes and her bag. Then she took off toward the water at a run. Her scarf whipped in the wind. Her bare heels caught the moonlight. She became smaller and smaller across the endless sand. She became a white dot. She disappeared.

I felt the night air on the back of my neck. I felt the cool sand underfoot and the weight of my mother's purse. I listened carefully and heard, beyond the waves, the distant rumble of a solitary car. I looked straight ahead. Through the layers of darkness, I could almost make out my mother's shimmering
form.