I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (24 page)

“But first I have a small project for you,” she said, as she often did. This time it was to rehang the kitchen clock, which had fallen off its hook. I used a step stool to kneel on the kitchen counter, groping the back of the clock until the nail found the hole.

“There you go,” I said. “Easy.”

“You see,” she said. “It's the simplest things I can't do for myself anymore.”

“Well, I'm always happy to do them,” I said.

Sylvie often helped Josée with these things, but they weren't speaking right now. I wasn't clear on the reasons why. “She came over for lunch, and I said, I don't know what, ‘Pass me the salt,' maybe, and she said, ‘I'm not your damn servant!' and she stormed out!” Josée said with wide-eyed innocence. “You know how she is, Sylvie. She's so volatile. No one can understand her.”

I
mmhmm
ed and set the table.

I knew all too well how good Josée was at deflecting my questions with answers to questions I'd never asked. She often took us on detours into the safer, better-traveled grounds of the past, but today I was determined. “How did my mother change when she became an adolescent?” I asked as we sat down to eat, switching the voice memo app on my phone to “record.”

“What do you mean by adolescent?” she said.

“I don't know—twelve, thirteen.”

“Oh, well yes, those were the years that Sylvie was gone. We all breathed a huge sigh of relief. Françoise was happy then, she finally discovered herself. Before that, the house was a constant terror with those two girls fighting. We all lived in fear of their arguments.”

“Sylvie and Françoise?”

“It was constant! The whole house was dominated by them. And Sylvie was a terror. She hit your mother. She was very strong. And when she left, we could all finally breathe again. I think those were very happy years for Françoise, her adolescence.”

“She described it as a difficult time,” I said.

“Oh, it was horrible!” Josée said.

“But I mean . . . ,” I said. “Even after Sylvie left . . .”

“What year are we talking about?”

“1966 or 1967?” I guessed.

“Ah, but that's exactly when Sylvie was gone!” Josée exclaimed.

“She told me that her relationship with you wasn't easy,” I said carefully.

“I don't know what she's talking about,” Josée said. “She was doing very well in school. That's when she discovered she was nearsighted and went and got contact lenses. We did yoga together, and judo. And May 1968, that's when she discovered the rest of Paris. That's when the world was unveiled for her.”

“But didn't you fight sometimes?”

“She and I? No. I don't remember ever fighting with her. There weren't many motives. Perhaps I scolded her for letting the bathtub run and flooding the neighbors? But otherwise no—she was obedient.”

I persisted. “She told me you sent her to get an encephalogram? Because she was crazy?”

“
Euhhh
 . . . an encephalogram.” Josée thought. “Ah, yes. That was when she was fourteen. That was because she was too smart! It was beginning to worry us. A psychiatrist recommended we get an exam done on her. That wasn't because she was sad!
Au contraire.
We didn't know that we had an overly gifted daughter. There wasn't a word for it then.” Josée gave me a sweet, remorseful smile.

I pushed on. My mother had told me about being so unhappy when they fought that she'd scratched her own face, made herself bleed.

“That's the first I hear about it!” Josée said. She'd seen no such thing, she insisted. It was Sylvie who'd done all the scratching. “But . . . from thirteen until when, did you say? What years does she claim she was miserable?”

I hesitated.
I remember these things geographically, not chronologically,
my mother had said. “Maybe between twelve and fifteen?” I hazarded.

“Ahh!”
Josée said, excited by a new revelation. “I think I see, maybe, what she's alluding to. What she had at the time, which must have perturbed her very much, were her
crises de tétanie
! That was a lack of calcium. It made her roll on the floor.
Ah voilà!
That must be what she's talking about. And yes, in fact, I think that's why we sent her to get the encephalogram.”

Josée's relief that this matter had been squared away was palpable. It was difficult to find in myself the desire to continue.

“Actually, she told me there were two separate things,” I said. “The
crises de tétanie,
yes, but also a certain hysteria when you fought. When she scratched her face.”

“Well no. Hysteria! Maybe when she fought with Sylvie. But
never with me.” And then something came to her. “Oh! I know what she's talking about now! Yes, I see. That was around the time when she discovered a passion for Andrée, and she took care of her as if she were her own child, her own baby. I thought it was strange, and I told her to ask her friends about it—at thirteen, fourteen, I think she had at least one friend. And perhaps I talked to a psychiatrist about it as well. And so I forbade her from spending so much time with her sister. It wasn't healthy. Françoise hadn't liked that one bit—that must be what she remembered.”

“Because Andrée was calling her
maman,
right?” I said, hoping to find neutral ground.

Josée gave me a wide-eyed double take. “
Maman?
No, Andrée was seven years old then. I should hope she knew who her mother was!” She laughed.

“So,” I said, “you don't remember the
crises de nerfs
?”

“Well, perhaps that's what we called the
crises de tétanie,
before they were diagnosed. But that she mutilated herself . . . No, I'm sure that didn't happen. Or perhaps I just didn't notice. You see, I am a bad mother after all.” Josée smiled at me ruefully. But behind the smile, I saw the exhaustion in her eyes. I let the conversation drop. What was I trying to prove?

—

A
NOTHER TIME
, I asked Josée if my mother had ever cooked as a girl. When she said no, I asked if she remembered the lemon pie.

“Oh yes, no. That's not quite the story,” she said. “Paul didn't fetch a chain saw. A handsaw maybe, or a very big knife.” She told me the story again and it was much the same. Except for the ending, which was completely different.

“She set the pie down on the table, and we were saying
Ai-ai-ai
,
how will we even cut it. And just then, an extraordinary thing happened—a thing that saved us all. An avalanche. It exploded the window in the girls' bedroom and came all the way into the kitchen. It stopped short right at our feet.” I set my fork down and stared at my grandmother amazed.

“And we all said—
oof!
” she continued. “First of all because we weren't dead and second of all because we wouldn't have to eat that pie! And then we must have told that story ten, a hundred, times to all our friends. And because she has a very poor sense of humor, your mother, and a lot of pride, it stayed on her stomach. The pie, luckily, did not stay on ours, because we never ate it.”

“But it's incredible,” I said. “How stories change. How differently we remember.”

“Your mother must agree that was the very first recipe she ever tried!” Josée was instantly combative.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “But she never—”

“She says she tried to cook again after that?” Josée interrupted. “No. That's just not true.”

“No,” I said. “The avalanche! She never mentioned the avalanche.”

“Oh!” Josée said. “Everyone remembers it that way. Ask Sylvie!” I saw my mother's memory as I had always imagined it—the family seated around an elegant wood dining table, forks raised, the yellow pie illuminated by cool winter light. And then I saw the image fill with snow.

—

“L
OOK AT WHAT
I found the other day,” Josée said to me.

She handed me a white plaster cast. It was the face of a young girl. Her closed eyelids were barely delineated from her
cheekbones, as if they had never been able to open. The nearly straight line of her wide mouth was now a smile, now a frown, depending on how you looked—a Rorschach blot of emotion.

“What is it?” I asked, turning it over in my hands. It felt both heavy and fragile.

“It's your mother,” Josée said. “I was learning to make plaster casts for your grandfather's practice, and I tried my hand on her. Don't you recognize her?”

“No,” I said.

“Look at her eyebrows—you can see how hairy she was,” Josée said, laughing. “They nearly touched.”

I held my mother's face gently in my hand, reverent. On her cheek there was a circular crack where the plaster had broken and been glued. I traced it gently with my thumb.

—

J
OSÉE CAME OVER
for lunch. It was a rare occasion; she hated driving into the city center, where there was often traffic and no parking. I cleaned the apartment from top to bottom. I put on some soft jazz and set the Ikea table carefully, forks on folded napkins. It was midwinter now, February, and a cold gray light streamed in through the tall windows. I had made a chicken cashew curry, which I hoped was foreign enough that Josée would find its quality difficult to judge.

“You've transformed my cheetah bag into a couch accessory,” Josée said, noticing that I'd draped it over the armrest. “You should put a pillow inside it,” she said. “I have one, I'll give it to you.”

She exclaimed over the curry and I listed the ingredients for her, trying to sound casual. Then I attempted to ask questions that would pull us into her past, but once again we kept sliding forward
in time. The windows were open against the dry heat of the radiator, and a breeze filtered through. I let go of my agenda and allowed her to lead. She gravitated to the moment of her divorce. It was Paul she wanted to talk about today.

“Those were the most difficult years,” she said. People she'd trusted told outright lies in court. Paul had taken Andrée away from her and then, right after, he'd thrust the girl into boarding school. The women she'd once believed to be her friends turned their backs on her. They thought she must be crazy to leave her handsome rich doctor husband and go live on a boat. And at forty! Several of the acquaintances she'd had as a married woman were surprised to run into her years later. Paul had told them all that she had died.

“I left with my hands in my pockets,” she told me. “I didn't ask for a cent.” Which, I was fairly sure, was not entirely true. But it was a phrase she had repeated to me so often, sliding her hands over her own pockets as she did so, that I had a clear image of young beautiful Josée, strolling away, whistling.

When the divorce finally went through, she'd stood on the roof of her boat and dropped the pages of paperwork into the Seine one by one, then watched them float off. It had been the worst moment of her life, that divorce. Worse than her breast cancer the year following. Many women develop breast cancer after a contentious divorce, she told me parenthetically, and I wondered if there was anything terrible that wasn't somehow Paul's fault. It had been worse, even, she said, than the very difficult moments her daughters had put her through.

“Which difficult moments were those?” I asked.

“Your mother, she left me. I bought her a plane ticket for New York and she disappeared for a year, no news. When she
came back, she went to live at her father's. And then there was her suicide attempt, of course. I saved her life and she spat in my face.”

And then Josée told me the story of that day as she remembered it—the telepathic cry of “Maman,” Andrée pulled from the shower with shampoo still in her hair, the rush to Paul's apartment, Françoise's anger the day after. The details were surprisingly similar to my mother's version. Then I realized that my mother had been unconscious and had had only her mother's version to tell.

“Why do you think she did that? Tried to kill herself?” I asked, wondering if this would be the question that would at last allow me in.

“She said it was a love pain, that a boy had broken her heart,” Josée said. “But I . . . I don't think so.”

“Then what?” I said softly.

“I think that your father . . . he conducted himself very badly with her.” Josée leaned back from the table and refolded her napkin carefully. It was common in our conversations for her to slip-slide through the generations, referring to my aunts as my sisters and my grandfather as my father. Often she did not catch herself and I did not correct her, though the effect these incorrect words had on me was strong. “His secretary told me they kissed on the mouth in the break room, and you know, in a hospital, everyone is naked under their scrubs. He had such an adulation for Françoise,” Josée said with a heavy sigh, her voice measured and low.

“You think that there was something . . . unhealthy about their relationship?” I asked.

“Oh, more than
unhealthy.
I hope he didn't rape her. I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me. Your mother, she'll never talk about it. And him, he's dead now. He was sexually attracted to her, yes, that much was clear. Because for him—he was such a
narcissist. And in Françoise he saw himself as a woman. It was the ultimate fantasy. He'd re-created himself in her and then sacrificed her, consumed her whole. It's why she left for New York, I think, to escape him. I've spent a very long time analyzing all this, you know.”

I put down my fork. I could feel my body shutting down, organ by organ. Even later, writing this, my hands at first refused to move.

“You asked me why she tried to kill herself. I think it was that,” Josée continued. “She had gotten into his bed, after all. There must have been something sexual. I hope that it didn't go all the way. But I don't know. I'll never know.”