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

  chapter two

  When 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.

  —

  LATE 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.

  For the first decade of their lives, Françoise and Sylvie were each other’s constant companions, if only by necessity, and fractiously. Françoise put chewing gum in her sister’s hair, and Sylvie left huge scratches down her sister’s arms. One evening while their parents were out, they were roughhousing in the medical office below. Sylvie, fooling around in a wheelchair, backed into a glass-front cabinet and broke a figurine. The girls thought it might be an Egyptian artifact. Certainly it was expensive and rare, as all of Paul’s belongings were.

  “Just leave it there,” Sylvie said. “They’ll think it was the maid.”

  “But she’ll lose her job,” Françoise said.

  “Better her than us,” Sylvie replied.

  “Where will she go?” Françoise said with genuine horror.

  “Not our problem,” Sylvie said.

  “If you don’t tell them, I will,” Françoise said, and she did. Both girls were punished. I am Joan of Arc, Françoise told herself. But Sylvie was becoming less and less interested in her stories of martyrs.

  In the space of a summer, a chasm had opened between the two sisters. At ten years old, Sylvie was formed—that was what the French said when a girl first had her period, “Elle a été formée.” In Sylvie’s case, the expression was literally true: she had breasts, she had curves. She looked like a woman.

  That summer, Sylvie was sent away to summer camp. It was the first time the two older girls had been separated. The following fall, Josée sent Sylvie to Paul’s mother, Mamie, in Ussel, a year’s exile.

  “She has jaundice,” Josée declared. “She needs to be in the country.” But it was clear to Françoise that that was not the reason.

  Françoise slept alone now. Josée had made a new bedroom down the hall for Sylvie when she came home. “Sylvie is a young woman now,” Josée said. “She needs her own room.”

  Françoise stared at her unchanging child’s body in the mirror. She didn’t envy Sylvie her year with Mamie. Mamie’s breath smelled bad, she rarely bathed, she was very fat, and her voice quaked like a bleating goat’s when she spoke. In Françoise’s opinion, Mamie wa
s a small-minded provincial woman whose company was to be avoided at all costs. She was nothing like Mina, Josée’s mother, who lived in Paris in a grand apartment, who read, who worked over the weekends on the typewriter in her living room.

  But in Ussel, Sylvie found something she had been longing for. Mamie, lonely Mamie, smothered her granddaughter with unconditional love. She loved big, like this, Sylvie would say, her arms stretched wide. Mamie gave Sylvie a pot of Nutella every afternoon at four. She used a stick of butter in each meal. Sylvie took it all in, the love and the food, insatiable. She returned to Paris on weekends and school vacations, her face growing steadily rounder. After a year away, she had gained twenty pounds.

  Josée’s anger trained itself on Sylvie in full force. There was no space for an unbeautiful daughter in the world she and Paul had made for themselves. “My parents invented superficiality,” my mother told me once. The girls were made to feel that physical appearance was the only measure of worth. Josée had meticulously decorated their apartment for receiving guests, and it was irreproachable, if oppressively somber. Heavy curtains, heavy furniture, heavy carpeting—everything was calculated to give the appearance that they had been rooted in this life for centuries. But now it was as if, in Sylvie’s body, the ghost of their pasts had refused to stay buried. Paul’s provincial roots were showing. His mother’s body had reemerged, uninvited, in his daughter’s.

  Josée claimed for herself the new bedroom Sylvie had barely had a chance to inhabit. She needed her own space, she declared, installing a rigid blue settee barely large enough for one. Sylvie was relocated to the medical floor below, in a small, dark room whose window gave onto a grim interior courtyard. She could hear the floorboards creaking overhead as her family moved around and she knew that she was no longer part of them. During the day, she sidled past her father’s patients in the waiting room, designer heels and bandaged noses, and up the dark servants’ stairs to reach the bathroom. At night, she was the only person on the whole floor. This banishment is what, years later, she would resent most.