I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (5 page)

Françoise wore the bra home. She held her back straight, her chest pushed out. Josée never noticed.

—

I
N 1966
, J
OSÉE
AND
P
AUL
purchased a slope-side triplex apartment in Avoriaz, a ski resort in the French Alps. Both Françoise and Sylvie loved to ski, and the girls were enrolled in regional races. Françoise passed the gold-level tests before Sylvie had even passed the bronze. Sylvie soon lost her taste for skiing. Françoise went on to train with the junior Olympic team.

One afternoon, Françoise announced that, as a treat for the family, she was going to make a lemon pie. The announcement was met with skepticism. It was a known fact that Sylvie could cook and Françoise could not, though Françoise had never tried.

It took some effort—the new home was high up the mountain, and the lemons had to be brought up by ski lift from the town below. Françoise worked in the kitchen all afternoon. She had no cookbook, so she invented a recipe. She mixed flour with water until it formed a dough, rolled it out, covered it in sliced lemons and sugar. “What is this ungodly thing?” Josée teased as she passed by. “I've never heard of a pie that takes all afternoon to prepare.”

The family gathered for dinner. Françoise leapt up several times to check on her pie. When it was time for dessert, the family sat waiting.

“Françoise has decided to poison us all and yet we're going to die of hunger before it even arrives,” Josée said.

Françoise emerged from the kitchen and placed the pie in the center of the table. Paul took a knife and tried to cut it.

“It's too hard,” he declared. He exaggerated his difficulty, grimacing, pantomiming, until Josée, Sylvie, even baby Andrée collapsed in giggles.

“We need a hammer,” Paul declared.

“We need a saw!” Josée chimed. Sylvie laughed hardest of all.

Paul rose to fetch a saw. Everyone collapsed in merriment—everyone except Françoise. No one ate the lemon pie, though to this day they still talk about how awful it tasted.

My mother's mouth became very small as she told me this story. She cast her eyes downward, her voice hollow with hurt. I could see on her face the same expression she must have had that evening, the little girl appearing under the thick eyeliner.

Although we knew how much my mother hated to be teased, my father, brother, and I regarded as entertainment our periodic missions to empty the fridge of bright green cheese and sour cream long past its expiration date. “Filet of celery, anyone?” my father would say, holding a stalk so limp it flopped toward the floor. My mother tried to laugh with us, but as soon as our laughter exceeded hers, her mood darkened. She would grab a knife and stomp to the counter, roughly chopping the mold off the cheese in order to make us sandwiches.

“It's perfectly edible,” she'd say. “It's you kids that are spoiled.”

And so we learned to clear the fridge in secret. We rarely teased my mother and she never teased us.

Some weekends, my brother and I baked cake. It was a game I thought I had invented. Under my direction, we concocted recipes with whatever we found—unsweetened cocoa powder, oatmeal,
dried apricots, entire jars of ground cinnamon. I knew we needed flour and eggs, but I guessed wildly at the quantities. We baked our creation at any temperature we pleased, until it became solid. The cake would emerge as a dense brick, somehow having shrunk in volume rather than rising. I would turn it out on one of my mother's fancy cake plates and adorn the wet lump with strawberries. It almost always tasted like pencil erasers and sawdust, barely sweet. We would call my mother from her room and proudly serve her a slice.

My brother and I ate happily. We were starved for sugar and eager to eat it in any vehicle possible. My mother would slather her piece in fat-free vanilla yogurt and eat with us at the dining table. “Mmm,” she would say every time. “Truly delicious. The best one yet.”

—

F
OR A SHORT
TIME
, there had been happy summers in Deauville, on the Normandy coast. It was only two hours north of Paris, and Josée and Paul's social circle flowed easily between the two cities. They entertained in lavish rental homes and danced in the ballroom of the grand casino. Haute couture designers gave Josée samples of their dresses to wear. Paul drove up to join his family most weekends. The best restaurants produced their best tables at the mention of
le grand docteur
Mouly. Josée bought an abandoned
pressoir,
where apples were crushed for cider, just outside the city limits, with the intention of renovating it into their summer home. Françoise pored over the architectural plans, marveling at Josée's ability to create glamour from ruins. It seemed to her an incredible magic trick. But then something happened. The plans for the
pressoir
were abandoned midstream. The building was resold. The family was no longer to summer there. Françoise suspected her father's increasingly out-of-control gambling, but the reasons were not explained to the children, nor would it have occurred to the girls to demand answers.

Now, Paul decided, the family would summer near Ussel. His parents had left him a farm four miles from his hometown, where his mother still lived, and Josée would renovate it. It was an appealing image—his beautiful wife and fancy cars, the luxurious vacation home they would create. What better measure of his own success than the envy of his former schoolmates?

Les Bezièges, the home was called, and Josée, with far less enthusiasm, drew up a new set of plans. In Ussel the sun didn't shine with the gold heat of the Mediterranean or the cool blue light of the north. It was gray, always gray, over the small and unbeautiful homes in the town. Josée drove in at the start of each summer, daylong drives of listening to the girls squabbling in the back of the hot car, while Paul stayed behind to work. The longest stretches of time Josée spent alone with all three children were likely those car trips that bookended each vacation, and years later she would complain about them often.

The arrival of the Parisians raised the local eyebrows. Ussel was a tight-knit community, and the disdain was immediate and mutual. The renovations on the farmhouse proceeded. It had a double-height ceiling, a mezzanine, a grand formal living room. Josée had a patch of land by the barn flattened for a tennis court, the only true tennis court in the region. Jacques Chirac, not yet president but already on the National Assembly, came over to play doubles. But often the house echoed emptily unless friends from Paris made the
long drive. Josée would walk straight to the front of the line at the butcher's shop and order thirty of the finest lamb chops for her visiting guests. When she had a stand of trees razed for their new driveway, the town gossiped that she was building a helipad.

In mid-August, Paul drove down from Paris in his Porsche. He stayed only a few days, soaking in the praise that the butcher and baker bestowed on his lovely wife and his three healthy girls. Then he was off again. His patients awaited him in Paris, he told his family lightly, though there seemed little doubt that he was headed for yet another casino, yet another woman's arms.

Josée had created two bedrooms for her three daughters—a young lady's room for Sylvie and a children's room for Françoise and Andrée to share. Françoise did not mind sharing a room with Andrée. Her love had settled easily on her inexplicably cheerful little sister, who sang to herself each night even after Paul, unable to sleep, stormed into her room and broke her bed. When Andrée had walked her first stumbling steps into Françoise's outstretched arms, Françoise nearly cried out with pride. It was only decades later, when she had children of her own, that she realized children learn to walk without ever being taught.

Andrée, Josée had declared, was anorexic. It was true: she often refused to eat. Josée had insisted that someone (rarely herself) sit and coax Andrée bite by bite, late into the night, until a reasonable amount of food had been consumed. The popular parenting advice of the time held that to be potty trained, children must understand the relationship of food to their bowels. Baby Andrée was seated on a plastic potty at the dinner table and encouraged to eat and eliminate in tandem. Françoise suspected that this arrangement was the major cause of her refusal to eat, but still, she was happy to take on the task.
The two of them stayed at the table long after the end of each meal, Françoise pressing forkfuls of food against her sister's smiling, firmly closed lips. Andrée delighted in the attention. She became Françoise's toy. They spent hours playing school, and Françoise tried, with great patience, to teach her too-young sister to read.

Françoise enjoyed her first quiet summer with Andrée. She did not have to compete with the nanny for her time, as she did in Paris. Besides, in Ussel, Sylvie ran wild with the friends she'd made in her year at Mamie's, while Françoise had no friends there of her own.

But the following summer, Josée announced casually, “You're not to play with Andrée anymore.” Françoise stared at her, speechless with shock.

“I've asked Renée's little girl to come stay with us so that Andrée will have a friend her own age,” Josée continued.

“But
why
?” Françoise asked as the news sank in.

“Your attachment to her is unhealthy,” Josée said. “She calls you
maman.
”

The two girls continued to share a room, but now Josée monitored them closely during the day to make sure they remained separate. For Françoise, it was the beginning of a permanent sense of isolation from her family. The days stretched out, impossibly long. Sylvie pointedly did not invite her to join her friends in their mysterious teenage mischief. Françoise was alone, with only her books and her increasingly unhappy mother, who insisted Françoise strip and sand antique furniture until her knuckles ached. Andrée barely seemed to notice the shift. She was delighted to have a playmate her own age. It did not take long for her to stop calling Françoise
maman.
Françoise, on the other hand, felt the loss acutely. Long after I myself stopped being a child, my mother would often accidentally call me Andrée.

—

I
N THE FALL
OF
1968
, Françoise turned thirteen and began to lose control of her body. It was not in the way she had hoped, not in the way that Sylvie's body had performed its quiet overnight transformation—the curves, the cramps, the spots of blood. Instead, it was around that time that the fits began.

“Make your bed,” Josée said, angrily flinging open the door to Françoise's room. It was an arduous process, to transform the bed back into a couch.

“But why?” Françoise said. “This is my room now. No one else comes in here.”

“Don't talk back to me,” Josée replied. She was capable of saying things so terrible they blacked out the sun. “No one will ever love a girl like you,” she might say. “How could you expect them to? A disagreeable, insolent, unpleasant girl like you?” The words shot darkness over Françoise's future and blotted out all hope. She was miserable. She would always be miserable. There was no escape.

When Françoise fought with Sylvie, she wasn't afraid of her own anger. She hit her sister as hard as she could, she pulled her long hair. But when she fought with her mother it was different. The pain was unbearable. It grew inside her, like an object with a physical shape. It expanded her chest and jabbed into her rib cage. Her hands trembled.

Françoise began to hit her head against the wall, rhythmically, so hard that her ears rang and the room spun. She clawed at her face until it opened and bled and there was skin beneath her nails.

She wanted her mother to see how much she was hurting. She wanted the pain to stop.

“You're out of your mind,” Josée said. “You are crazy. On top
of everything else.” She dragged Françoise roughly to the bathroom and put her under a cold shower. She pinned her wrists and slapped her across the face. Françoise, shivering and gulping water between huge, heaving sobs, calmed down.

But the fits continued.

Crises de nerfs,
Josée called it.
Hystérie.
Françoise knew her Greek. She put her hand to her uterus. The fits only happened around her mother.

“She's crazy,” Josée told her husband. “Something's wrong with her.”

They brought Françoise to a neurologist. He performed an encephalogram. Cold white electrodes were placed on her scalp until her whole head was covered. All around her, a halo of wires. It looked like something out of a bad horror movie, but it was advanced technology then, and the doctor was proud of it.

“With this machine,” he told her, “we can read your brain.” Françoise was terrified. What terrible things would he find in her thoughts? She tried to make her mind as blank as possible. She watched the needle jerk up and down over the scrolling paper, drawing a shaky chart. The doctor frowned at the results.

The machine read only electrical energy. If it had any use at all, it was to detect epilepsy. The doctor called Josée into the room and gravely told her that he couldn't figure out what was wrong.

“You should send her to a psychiatrist,” he suggested.

The psychiatrist was an unpleasant man. He made Françoise feel very small in his dim office.

“Tell me about your parents,” he said.

“My parents?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is this confidential?” Françoise asked.

“Strictly,” he said. “Absolutely.”

Two days later, Josée walked into Françoise's bedroom and slapped her.

“How dare you tell that man those things about me,” she said. Françoise barely remembered what she had said. She began to skip her appointments with the psychiatrist, using the time to read in the park. The psychiatrist didn't mind. He said nothing to her parents and continued to bill them. By the time her absences came to light, it no longer mattered. A second kind of fit had begun.