I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This Read online

  But when my mother drove us to school in the morning, the air was charged with a different energy. She slapped the steering wheel in frustration. Her French exhalations, her arghs and pffs, crowded the air like comic book sound effects that left no room for speech. And yet she insisted on driving us. She didn’t want us to be made to go to school alone, as she had. It seemed strange, once I knew the full story, that this was the only part of her childhood that she allowed herself to resent.

  I tried to picture her young, but I saw her exactly as I knew her. I’d seen not a single photograph of her between eight and eighteen. As far as I knew, none had been taken. She’d told me she drank coffee as a child. I tried to imagine her making it for herself in careful silence in the gray light of a Paris morning while the rest of her family slept. Seeking a road map to her, I petitioned for years to be allowed to drink coffee as well.

  Outside our home, my mother’s name was almost always appended to my father’s. “An impressive woman in her own right,” the articles said. My father’s graphic novel Maus about his parents’ experiences in the concentration camps, won a Pulitzer Prize when I was five. The spotlight of his fame projected a larger-than-life version of him to the world that even he often struggled with. But inside our home, it was my mother who loomed large.

  “Françoise takes care of reality and I take care of everything else,” my father often said, jokingly. And even though it was true that my mother handled the finances, the plumbing, the carpentry, our education and our vacations, while my father often disappeared for weeks at a time to his studio, I saw her wince when he said this, not taking it as the compliment he intended.

  “My girlfriends and I talk about how much we hate you,” a friend of my mother’s once told her. “You’re French, you’ve got the best job in New York, you’ve married a successful man, you’re beautiful, you’re thin, you’ve got two wonderful children. It’s not fair. You’re perfect.”

  My mother wasn’t perfect. My mother was intense. Things didn’t happen because they were possible, they happened because she decided they would. She once fit a couch through a door frame that was several inches too small simply by pushing with all her strength and saying, “Couch, go in!” But, as anyone who has read a fairy tale knows, all spells come with a cost. The magic pulled on hidden sources. My brother referred to her exertion of will as “the fireball technique.” She could set the universe aflame, but she used herself as fuel. Somewhere inside, the earth was scorched.

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON, when I was eight years old, my mother caught me sharply by my wrist as I wandered back to my room from the kitchen. She was furious. I stared at her in surprise.

  “You can’t walk around naked when the plumbers are here!” she said. The bathroom door was still open and the plumbers working there could hear, though they didn’t speak French. I spent a lot of time naked as a child. I had never been scolded for it before. But now I burned with a sudden and vivid shame. “It’s indecent!” she said, and I could see in her eyes the real shock that I had not already understood this. I understood it then, all at once.

  A woman’s body was a private thing. My body was a private thing. My body was a woman’s body. My mother was a woman. My mother was a private thing. There were dangers. There were secrets. There was something to guard.

  I had thought that my shame had seared the memory deep only for me. But when I brought up this incident twenty years later, my mother nodded in recognition. I felt a small thrill. There were so few memories that we actually shared.

  “Yes, there were these big men in the house that were strangers, and you . . . ,” she said. “That was when I knew that something was really off. You never had . . . modesty.” I burned with shame all over again.

  My mother was a ferociously private person. She did not gossip and never betrayed secrets. She did not easily forgive these things in others, either. She did not go through my drawers or read my diaries. It never occurred to me that she would. She never asked questions of my friends or tried to remember their names. She talked disdainfully of American mothers who put themselves on the same level as their children. The boundaries between us were clear: the parents in the front seat, the children in the back. They were the source of her power. I tried to break them. I told her too much about myself. I told her about my crushes and my petty fights with friends. I told her all the things she would never ask.

  I knew she expected me to respect her privacy in return. The older I got, the more difficult it became. When she wasn’t home, I spent hours in her walk-in closet, touching her clothes and going through her boxes. I found her old diaphragm, her love letters from my father, her lingerie. I felt guilt only about how little guilt I felt. It wasn’t until I read the papers in her desk, letters from long ago, that I stopped, sleepless with questions I could not ask.

  —

  AS I HIT PUBERTY, and my body began to change, a dangerous new tension arose between us. My mother thrust Rollerblades at me in the morning and insisted I get myself to school, get some exercise, while she drove my brother and his friends. On weekday evenings, when the huge industrial skylights went dark and night fell in our living room, I knew better than to be on the couch when she came home. I gathered my books and comics and went to my room. I knew in the way one knows the things that can never quite be said that it made her furious to see me sitting still. I would listen for her “Bonsoir!” hurled from the door like a warning flare. It was only a matter of moments before my bedroom walls shook with the sound of my name. “NAA DJAAA!” Two guttural cries of frustration. I sat braced for this and yet I jumped each time. My heart raced. “Can you at least help set the table?” she would say, tears of exhaustion in her eyes, when I appeared in the kitchen doorway. And if the table was already set, if the dinner was already made, then it was a sock I had dropped in the bathroom, or shoes I had left in the hall, or something else I had done or not done that sparked her fury. Sometimes I roamed the house before her return, trying to guess the thing that would set her off and correct it. But the patterns were etched deep and felt inescapable. I felt it was not the sock or the shoes or the house but my body itself that refused to meet her expectations.

  We were not allowed television (ours played only VHS tapes), so I escaped into books. I read in the bath, in the car, walking down the street, in the corner during adult dinner parties. Mostly I read books about ordinary girls in ordinary worlds who suddenly discovered their magical powers. But there was one book that I read often and kept hidden on my highest shelf. I had not wanted to return it to the library and so had paid the fine from my pocket money. Don’t Hurt Laurie! It was a slim pink book with too-big type about a girl who was abused. Laurie’s mother’s anger was vicious and unpredictable. Laurie’s mother told the nurses at the hospital that Laurie had fallen down the stairs. I knew my mother would never hurt me. She had left tiny pitchers of milk and bowls of cereal in the fridge when my friends slept over when we were five. My mother kissed me good night each evening and praised the stories I wrote. But I recognized something familiar, though grotesquely exaggerated, in Laurie’s mother: the outbursts that made the house tremble and just as quickly disappeared. And I envied Laurie. I envied her black-and-blue marks and her bandaged wrists. I envied her clear-cut proof that something had actually happened.

  —

  THROUGHOUT MY ADOLESCENCE, my mother’s reality threatened to overpower my own. One evening might pass without incident, then the next she would call me to the kitchen, shaking with fury, and accuse me of opening a second container of milk. It did not matter that the first had spoiled. It did not matter that I hadn’t. When my mother was angry, the anger consumed her. Her gray-green eyes turned a lethal black. “Just apologize,” she would say. And yet I was incapable of apologizing for things I had not done, no matter how small. I could not admit to throwing away all the spoons, to moving her papers, to hiding the mustard. I knew that to cede even this much
ground was to lose all sense of myself. I would go to my room and scream at the top of my lungs, hoping that she would hear the intensity of my pain, how wronged and innocent I was, and come running with apologies. But my room, which had once been my father’s office, was soundproofed, and my mother could not hear me from the other side of the loft.

  Soon afterward, those fights had never happened. “You’re exaggerating, Nadja,” she would say, a week later. “How could I have kicked you up the stairs?” I’d wonder, shakily, if she was right. I developed a code in my sporadically kept diaries—a big circled R on each page that detailed a fight with my mother, a reminder to myself that these events were “REAL.” Often, it was easier to allow the past to become a blur.

  Most families retell anecdotes, reinforcing their legends to draw closer: that time she overturned the game board, that time he gave the dog a haircut. We did not. Instead of anecdotes, we had narratives. My mother condensed whole swaths of our shared past into a sharp tool with which she explained and ordered our present. Reminiscing led to bitter arguments. Memories that contradicted my mother’s narrative were picked apart in their details. That babysitter had not worked for us during the summers. We had stopped visiting that cabin in 1998. I felt myself clinging to my version of reality as if some essential part of my selfhood might get washed away. But when proof could be produced—a restaurant receipt, a map, a diary entry, a Google search—my mother simply shifted the subject. Like many couples, my mother and father could not tell a story about their shared past without arguing about which street corner they had been standing on. Once, during a particularly drunken dinner with the writers Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster, Siri attempted to diffuse an argument between them with an anecdote of her own.

  “One morning in the country, while Paul was still sleeping, our daughter and I saw a bird—it was a vision—through the window. A heron, majestic. I held her and we watched it in silence,” Siri said. “Later, I overheard Paul tell the story at a party—but now he had seen the heron. He had held Sophie. I hadn’t been there at all! Because of course we had told him all about it.”

  “I really thought I had seen it,” Paul said with a gravelly laugh, an open sweep of the cigarillo in his hand.

  “And I believe him,” Siri said, leaning forward, her blue eyes wide and earnest. “And it doesn’t matter. The point is: the heron was seen.”

  I served myself again from the Chinese takeout cooling on the table, even though I was no longer hungry. My mother was the only other one still eating. She never ate, then she ate like a wolf. I put the food in my mouth without tasting it. The heron was seen. How blissful to be able to find that kind of peace with the past.

  “I have a terrible memory,” my mother said then. She sounded tipsy, which surprised me. She drank wine every night, but she rarely got drunk. “All of my memories,” she continued morosely, “all of my memories have my children in them. Even the ones from before they were born.”

  “So your life began twenty-three years ago,” Paul said. That was my age at the time.

  “I guess so,” my mother said.

  “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.

  —

  OUR RELATIONSHIP 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.

  —

  THE 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.