I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (8 page)

“Should I take my bike?” I asked my father.

“If you don't, you'll never see it again,” he said. My hands trembled as I undid the lock. My mind felt leaden and would not function. Even then, I did not let myself wonder what was going on. We joined a thick stream of people walking uptown along the pedestrian path by the river. In my memory everyone was eerily quiet, talking in whispers if at all. And then we all stopped and turned.

I do not know how to describe what I saw. There was the World Trade Center, half a mile away. There was only one tower. And then the gray of it peeled off, infinitely slowly, gathering on itself as it rolled down. As the gray descended it revealed a skeleton of red beams. They hung in the air, shimmering. And then they too became powder, became particles, became the air and fell, and everything fell, everything fell.

My mother screamed the name of her friend who lived beneath the towers. A huge white cloud was moving toward us. I watched as my school disappeared. All around us, people turned and began to run uptown. I had grown up in a city of skyscrapers. They weren't supposed to fall down.

“
Run!
” someone shouted at us as he passed. “The smoke will kill you!” And then I was very high up in the air. Somewhere on the walkway below, a girl turned and began walking. From where I floated, I could just make out the words she was saying: “
My friends, my school, my friends, my school!
” Over and over, like an incantation. A stranger offered her water. She didn't respond.

She should take that water,
I thought.
She needs to calm down.

My father took the water and pressed it into my hands. And then I was back in my body. The words were coming out of my own mouth. I forced a sip down my throat.

We turned away from the river, onto Canal Street, and became just the three of us once more. The street was achingly familiar. We had walked this way many times, my family and I. But it was different now, in a way I could not name.

Ahead of us, a man had set up an easel on the sidewalk. He was absorbed in his painting.
Look,
I said, tugging on my father's arm. On the canvas, the towers burned. But past him, in the real skyline above, the towers were gone.

—

I
TOLD THIS
STORY
so many times over the years that it ceased being a memory. On rare occasions, when speaking to a close friend, I could still feel the aftershocks of emotion. But most times I simply felt myself stepping through a series of empty images that I had stepped through many times before. I could not turn my head left or right. I could not see the details I hadn't already told. Once, at a party, a girl said with delight, “
Ooh,
you're giving me shivers!” and I felt the twisted pleasure of doing myself violence.

For the most part, I stopped talking about it. When I did, I never included the man painting on the street. That's my father's
story now, immortalized in the comic he wrote about the day. I wonder, at times, if I can still see that red skeleton of beams hanging in the air or if I only see the drawing he made of them. We'd talked about it, he and I, before he drew the image: how you didn't see that in the newsreel. So you saw it, too, he said, and I had. I had seen it, too. But my memories were so easily overwritten by his. They squared themselves away into comic book panels that contained pictures of me I had not even posed for.

They sent us back to school while the ruins were still red embers. We showed our high school ID cards to the federal guard stationed at Canal Street, downtown still off-limits to most. Our return was televised: the brave students of Stuyvesant High School. Journalists found and called our home phone numbers. Our teachers spoke over clanging metal as cranes lifted pieces of the skyscrapers onto the barges outside our windows. A man in a full yellow hazmat suit stepped into our classroom and told us to ignore him. The small device in his hand went
beep beep beep BEEPBEEPBEEP
. He made a few notes and left silently. A social worker handed out a worksheet:
If Lucy feels alienated from the adults around her, if Lucy has trouble sleeping at night, if Lucy becomes anxious when watching the news, then Lucy has post-traumatic stress disorder
.

My hand shot straight up in the air. “Lucy sounds like a normal teenager,” I said with righteous fury. “Have you
seen
the news these days?”

The social workers begged us to talk to them. We didn't even talk to one another. The hallway walls filled with messages sent from schools nationwide. “Our prayers are with you,” surrounded by multicolored handprints of paint. Why would anyone pray for
us,
we wanted to know. We did not want pity. The smell of death was all around us but I knew no one who knew anyone who had
died. We were fine. We were not damaged. This seemed very important to prove. When tourists began to ask the way to Ground Zero, we told them to walk to the river and jump in. When tour buses passed and pointed at our school, we threw our empty soda cans at them. When the subway stopped in a tunnel without warning, we gripped the poles in silence but did not acknowledge why. It would take me years to realize that not everyone had nightmares about bombs and planes.

In those nightmares, I was not afraid. I was in the cool lucid place beyond fear. In all of them, I had a small child with me. In one, I drove us through a road filled with land mines. In another, I hid us in a basement while men with guns shot anyone who moved. When the shooting stopped, I crept out and found us water. My dreams were not about death. They were about survival. They diminished in frequency, but they never stopped. One morning in my late twenties, I awoke with the realization that I was also the child. The building had fallen and split me in two. The world moved on too quickly for me, looking back before the moment had even passed. Part of me had stayed frozen, floating above the West Side Highway. The self that had kept walking, had found water, was a different me, profoundly altered.

I avoided all media related to the event, until avoidance became a deeply ingrained habit. Footage of the towers falling never ceased to feel like an assault. It felt obscene to watch.

On the one-year anniversary, I came across a magazine on our kitchen table. On the cover was a glossy photo of people standing in the windows of one of the towers, poised to jump.

“Maman?” I said.

“You didn't know?” she said, surprised.

Even a decade and a half later, I would find it intolerable that
a memorial had been built, and a new tower. How dare they reconcile that event into an ordered past. It was still happening. It was still incomprehensible.

The morning it happened, my parents had gone out to vote in the mayoral primary. They had just left our house; they were on our street. My mother saw a plane fly low overhead. She followed it with her eyes. She watched it leave a hole in the tower.

My mother counted the stories. The tower had been breached. The top might fall. She saw it in her mind's eye, falling. She saw the radius around it, saw my school. My father had gone upstairs to check the news. My mother screamed his name in the street, wild with fear. Onlookers stared. She called his cell phone frantically until he came downstairs. She dragged him into the heart of the chaos that others were already fleeing. For nearly an hour, my parents searched the school building for me.

It is posed as a theoretical question, whether a mother would run into a burning building to save her child. It is not one that many people know the answer
to.

R
ecently, an old schoolmate of my mother's sent her two class photos. Blown up to well beyond their original size, they were grainy and unfocused.

“If I hadn't seen these,” my mother said, “I would have told you that I was always like this.” She pointed to the first photograph. “That I was always shy, invisible, a little girl. Miserable.” In that photo, she sat with her legs crossed at the knee, hands in her lap, looking up at the camera sweetly. But in the second photo, her eyes locked confidently with the camera. Her shoulders were thrown back and her spine was straight.

“Your father found me right away on the second one. He said, ‘Oh, you were already yourself!'”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don't know,” my mother said, and paused, her finger lingering on the paper. “I suppose I became myself.”

—

I
N THE SUMMER
OF
1970
, in Ussel, Sylvie began a small romance. Jean-Michel Guérin was a local boy. He was not particularly handsome. He was not very tall and his strong features
fought for room on his face. But his unflappable self-confidence lent him an air of mystery. It was as if he knew he possessed a special destiny that no onlooker could divine. His parents deferred to him with a mixture of pride and fear. As often as possible, he broke free of them and hung out with the other local teenagers. They drank and danced and drove too fast down the curving country roads. Sylvie, during her year in Ussel with Mamie, had been accepted as an honorary member of their gang. Françoise was still regarded as a summer visitor, a haughty
parisienne.
She watched Sylvie come and go from afar.

The romance began as an innocent flirtation in the August heat, barely sullied by kissing. Jean-Michel delivered grand compliments—
your eyes, the stars
—that sounded new and adult to sixteen-year-old ears. Sylvie, freed for brief moments from being the family's ugly duckling, warmed to him with a radiant new beauty. It was a small, sweet romance, a romance that even in the present tense of that summer the two of them did not take entirely seriously. But the terrible calculus of the family was such that any love given was love elsewhere taken away. That small romance would have a heavy cost.

That fall, back in Paris, letters began to arrive for Sylvie, instantly recognizable by the pictures Jean-Michel had doodled all over the envelopes. Josée snatched them from the mail and called to her eldest daughter. The two of them disappeared into Josée's room, where they collapsed in girlish giggles over Jean-Michel's amorous declarations, rendered in the highest literary French. It was jarring to Françoise, this sudden complicity, and she felt even more adrift. She had a boyfriend of her own that year, a sweet, dull young man she had met skiing. In fact, her quiet,
intense self-sufficiency regularly drew admirers. But unless they had the courage to step right in front of her and ask her to dance, as this boy had, she rarely noticed them. Josée approved of this boyfriend, mildly—his mother was a famous journalist—but she did not take Françoise into her room to read his letters. In fact, she paid very little attention to what passed between him and Françoise at all, and it was only thanks to his mother's early return home one afternoon that Françoise was still a virgin. Now Françoise listened to the laughter drifting from behind Josée's closed bedroom door and her stomach twisted with a familiar jealousy.

In October, Sylvie began campaigning to be sent to the girls' boarding school in Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial town an hour from Ussel. Ussel had no adequate high school, and so many of its students were sent to Clermont-Ferrand to continue their education. The girls' school was across the street from the boys' school Jean-Michel attended. Françoise was surprised by Sylvie's request. For Parisians, boarding school was a punishment reserved for those too unruly to keep at home.

Paul immediately opposed the plan. He had spent his own boyhood in boarding schools and he hadn't come this far only to send his daughter back there. Besides, the semester was already under way in Paris. But Josée was tickled by the idea of Sylvie continuing her
petite aventure
with Jean-Michel. She quickly set about convincing her husband to change his mind. She and Paul had a monthlong trip to Australia planned for that winter. It would be convenient if the girls were already situated elsewhere. Soon, Françoise, too, began to see the virtues of the scheme. Home was becoming intolerable, and she had no desire to be left there to bear the full brunt of her parents' rages. She joined Sylvie's cause.
She pleaded with her father. Strings were pulled. The girls entered the boarding school in November.

The Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc faced the Lycée Blaise-Pascal, each of them occupying a city block of Clermont-Ferrand. Of the thousand or so students at Jeanne-d'Arc, only about two hundred boarded. Most of the boarders came from small farms and villages in the region, too far to commute. Sylvie and Françoise shared their dormitory with fifty other girls, in row after row of bed-nightstand-bed-nightstand configurations. They were given beds far away from each other, Sylvie near the door and Françoise against the back wall.

Only a few of the other girls had heard of the Beatles. None of them had ever been on an airplane. Françoise had flown alone to Morocco when she was eight years old. She knew about the Beatles
and
the Rolling Stones, though she preferred Boris Vian and Georges Brassens. She felt her sophistication rolling off her, a new sense of cool that she had never conceived of having. That the Mouly girls had been sent here from Paris, in the middle of the school year, meant that they must be very bad and very dangerous. That their parents were going to Australia, a place so far away as to be spoken only in a whisper, only added to their aura.

Françoise began to fit herself to her newfound reputation. In Paris she had always been a model student, sitting quiet and attentive in the first row. At boarding school, she became the kind of student teachers warned one another about. She asked questions constantly. She demanded to know the reasoning behind the school's strict and arbitrary rules. She shot spitballs at a substitute until the woman left the room in tears. She snuck a banana peel out of the dining hall and dried it on the bathroom windowsill for weeks,
then scraped off the pith and rolled it in a strip of waxy brown toilet paper and lit it, showing the other girls how to inhale deep into their lungs and hold down the smoke.

When Françoise and Sylvie were allowed off the school grounds on Thursday afternoons, they did not linger with their classmates. They followed Jean-Michel and the other Ussel boys from Blaise-Pascal to a café near the university where the college students gathered, and the coolest of the lycée students spent their free hours. Occasionally they ran into two brothers from Ussel whose parents knew theirs. Éric and Christian were a year and a half apart, just like Sylvie and Françoise, and their parents had often joked that their daughters would marry the two boys. By this logic, Françoise knew that she was destined for Christian, but she harbored a secret crush on the older Éric. He was handsome and reckless, and his disregard for women made them flock to him. But although Françoise hung on his every word, he treated her with the same dismissive kindness as he had when she was a child.

Françoise watched Jean-Michel and Sylvie carefully in the café. They rarely touched, beyond cheeks pressed together in hello and good-bye. But there was little time in which to observe. A few weeks after they arrived, Sylvie's privileges were revoked. She had smuggled a bottle of liquor into the school and invited another student to drink with her in the bathroom, one of the few places in the institution with a door that locked. The girl, not as adept at drinking
,
drank so much that she had to be sent to the hospital. Sylvie, the clear instigator, was no longer allowed to leave the grounds.

Now Sylvie watched from the window as her little sister came and went on Thursday afternoons. Françoise walked out the big main gates of the campus and headed to the café alone. She
packed a book in her bag and sat reading in the back room until people she knew arrived. The café was a place that would come to mark a time in her life. She loved the pinball machines and the
demi panachés.
She loved the casual hours spent around others almost as painlessly as if she were alone. But most of all, she loved the fervor of the political debates. The college students crowded around the small tables, plotting the uprising of the working class. They slammed their fists so hard their drinks spilled. They leapt up so swiftly their chairs fell over. They reinvented the world. Here, finally, was her very own May 1968. Here were the student demigods who brought cities to a halt. And here, finally, far from Paris, she was in the heart of it all.

She listened. She grew bold enough to challenge others' ideas and form her own. She returned to the lycée, her head buzzing with revolution. But when she opened her mouth to share her excitement with her sister, Sylvie's glare froze the words in midair. The resentment was so strong that it nearly had a smell. The exact nature of the reproach remained unspoken, but it was clear. Françoise had usurped her world. “If you had invited me drinking that day,” Françoise told her through tight lips, “I gladly would have come.”

Françoise tried to tell herself that she had done nothing wrong, but guilt bubbled uneasily in her stomach. She spent her study hall periods devising her sister's escape. In the library's broom closet, unseen by the monitor, she scraped at the mortar in the brick wall with a spoon. The bricks came loose one by one. On the other side of the wall was the street. After Françoise had removed a few, she brought her sister to the broom closet and showed her what she'd done. She offered her a second spoon so that they could work side by side.

“And what will I do when the hole is big enough?” Sylvie asked angrily. “Just pop out into the street in broad daylight? Hope no one notices? What if I lose my weekend privileges as well?”

Françoise kept scraping. But she also kept going to the café alone.

It didn't take long for her to fall in love with Jean-Michel. He filled the small bar with his voice. He noticed how Françoise quietly followed his movements with her deep, intense eyes as he spoke. They spent hours chain-smoking and talking. Françoise smoked Gitanes with filters, like her doctor father, because she knew about the latest advances in health. Jean-Michel smoked Boyards, so strong they made nearly everyone nauseous but were worth it, because the thin corn-paper stuck to your lip and the cigarette hung there as you talked, the very epitome of cool.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Jean-Michel asked Françoise one Thursday as he walked her back toward the boarding school. The next Thursday, he leaned across the table in the café and kissed her.

It seemed to Françoise thrilling, unbelievable, that anyone so charismatic should find her interesting. But she pictured Sylvie, bitterly pacing the confines of her dorm room. Perhaps this was a one-time thing, she thought. Perhaps she didn't have to tell. But the following week, Jean-Michel kissed her again.

“What about my sister?” she asked him, pulling back.

“What about your sister?” he said. He assured Françoise that it was over between him and Sylvie. It had never even begun. He had simply wanted a recipient for his poetry. Sylvie had sent him far more letters than he had sent her. They had just been friends.

“I have to tell you something,” Françoise told Sylvie soon after, her voice shaking. “Jean-Michel seduced me.”

“How dare you!” Sylvie replied. She was angry, but then again, my mother commented as she told me this story, Sylvie was always angry. She preferred to be angry. And, she pointed out, Sylvie hadn't said, “How dare
he
!”

“Maman is going to be furious with you,” Sylvie said. And they both knew that this was true, and that this was the real problem, though neither of them could explain why.

On the rare afternoons when the girls called home, Françoise hung anxiously by while Sylvie murmured into the receiver. “She was late for a dinner,” Sylvie would say, hanging up. Or, “Her voice was tired, she didn't feel like talking anymore.” Even at a distance, Françoise felt the force of Josée's anger like a physical thing. It hunched her back and made her hands shake. She had to keep moving. She carried the fervor of the café back within the high walls of the school. There was a new wild look in her eyes. She was ready to sacrifice herself to the first cause that presented itself, like a woman compelled by a spell.

The students were allowed to smoke in the dorms and toilets and study hall but not outside in the courtyard. Françoise declared this a staggering injustice. She had begun smoking two years earlier, at thirteen years old. In Paris, she kept ashtrays in her bedroom. She was scolded only when the concierge tattled that she had seen her smoking in the street. “Only loose women smoke in the street,” Josée told Françoise angrily. Now, for the right to smoke in the school's courtyard, Françoise staged a hunger strike that lasted twelve days, sucking on sugar cubes and her pride.

The headmistress was at a loss. Françoise was impossible to punish. Most girls fell into line as soon as the school threatened
to contact their parents. But letters and phone calls to Josée were met only with sighs. Françoise was an
enfant terrible
. She took after her father. Josée had never been able to keep her in line.

“
Libérez Guyot!
” Françoise cried one spring day to the girls gathered for recess in the courtyard, cupping her hands around her mouth. “If we all leave, they can't punish us all! Unite! Take back the power!” Local activists, college students she'd met in the café, stood just outside the boarding school gates, cheering the girls on. They'd rerouted a protest march past the high school at Françoise's suggestion.