I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (10 page)

“You're acting crazy,” the headmistress said.

She said, “Calm down, or I'll have to tell your mother.”

The headmistress was her mother. The three or four women around the bed were her mother. The unpleasant nurse was her mother. Françoise howled. A door inside her opened and gave way to pure force. She nearly succeeded in throwing the women off. She wanted to say,
The more you try to tie me down, the more I have to fight.
She wanted to say,
Just leave me alone, please, just leave me alone and I'll calm down.
But the quiet part of her knew that they
were all trapped. They could not leave her alone until she calmed down, and she could not calm down until they left her alone. She wanted to stop screaming with such desperation that she screamed louder. The headmistress shook her head and left the room. A needle slipped under her skin. Blackness fell.

Later, the headmistress asked to see her in her office. She gestured to Françoise to take a seat in the chair that faced her desk.

“You're unhappy,” the headmistress said. “What's wrong? Please, tell me what's going on.”

From her tone, Françoise understood that the headmistress was trying. But the desk loomed between them, creating an interrogation chamber. If only the headmistress would sit beside her. If only she would take her hand. Françoise shook her head and looked at her feet.

“I can't help you if you won't talk to me,” the headmistress said gently. Maybe if they stood, maybe if they both stood and the desk was no longer between them. But the woman remained behind her desk, her hands clasped in front of her. It was impossible.

“You're leaving me with little choice but to expel you,” the headmistress said. “Maybe that's what you want? Do you want to be back with your parents? Do you miss them?”

Françoise's eyes snapped up to meet hers in mute terror.

“No,” she said. “Don't send me home.”

The headmistress sighed. Françoise was not expelled. Not then, and not on the many other times her expulsion was threatened. On the national exams for literature, administered at the end of the year, she received one of the highest scores in all of central France.

“I bet she was glad she didn't expel me then,
la connasse,
” my mother said. She had picked up her phone and I could see her once
more. Her anger swelled and strained her voice. The headmistress had not known how to save her. How dare this woman, who was an adult, who was supposed to know all things, have failed her. It was an impossibly young anger, the anger of the helpless.

Françoise was terrified that she was going insane. There was no one she could talk to. Not Sylvie, not her friends. Certainly not the headmistress, who loomed in her mind like a diabolical version of her mother. The more she worried about her sanity, the more she felt it slip away. She sensed that the adults were afraid of her, and that made her still more afraid of herself.

But the young hall supervisor was not afraid. She saw the pain underneath the violence. She knew to come find Françoise in private. She spoke to her softly. If Françoise could not confide in her either, it was only because she herself didn't know what was wrong. And the young woman did not say, “Everything will be okay.” She did not say, “This will pass.” Instead, she held Françoise when no one else dared to. She caressed her forehead.

The image wavered as my mother pushed the heel of her palm roughly against her eyes. I felt our distance acutely, and it lanced my heart. I wished I could throw my arms around her, though it was unclear to me if I wanted to comfort her or to be comforted.

According to neuroscientists, when we stir up a long-term memory, it floats in our consciousness, unstable, for a window of approximately three hours. During this time, the memory is malleable. The present infiltrates the past. We add details to fill in the gaps. Then the brain re-encodes the memory as if it were new, writing over the old one. As it sinks back down into the depths of our minds, we are not even aware of what we have gained or lost, or why.

Pure memories are like dinosaur bones, one neuroscientist
wrote, discrete fragments from which we compose the image of the dinosaur. They are only flashes: the examining room table in the nurse's office, the soft hand against the forehead. But memories we tell as stories come alive. Tendons join the bones, muscles and fat and skin fill them out. And when we look again, our memories are whole, breathing creatures that roam our past.

The stories we use to create our sense of self—the stories we tell new lovers at five a.m. so that they can understand who we are—are also the ones over which we have most heavily embroidered. They have been altered by the moods and settings in which we have told them. They have been altered by what we needed them to mean each time. The story involving poor forgotten Guyot, for example, had been pressed and shaped, through entering and leaving my mother's conscious mind, into a smooth block that lay at her foundation. It was one of the first she ever told me about her adolescence, and she had told it to me many times since. Even so, when I questioned her, certain details came loose. How was the phone call to the headmistress broadcast to an auditorium, I wanted to know. By pulling a rotary phone on a long cord onto the stage and holding the receiver to the microphone, she told me with certainty, though this did not strike me as fully plausible. Somewhere along the way, the episode had passed from memory to story to myth.

Even in retelling it now she said, “But you see, I have never understood how to follow the rules.” She told me about showing a new colleague around the building that afternoon. She had gone through a door, then turned and noticed that he hadn't followed. He stood in the hallway, hesitating. The door was covered in signs that said
DO NOT ENTER.
It led through the building's technical
core. It was a shortcut to her office. “It had never occurred to me to actually not enter,” she said. “But I suppose to some people it would.”

This new story that had emerged, however, the story of the fits at school, had not been smoothed. It did not fit neatly inside her. It did not build into the narrative of who she had become. She had told me stories that seemed far more difficult with dry eyes and a steady voice. Perhaps she had not omitted this story from her life because it was painful to recall. Perhaps it was painful to recall because it had been omitted.

She was glancing worriedly at her watch. She was late for a gala she had to attend with my father. She pushed back the curls from her face and looked at me through the phone. Her gray-green eyes crinkled with love.

“Let's talk soon,” she said. She hung up the phone.

The eerie silence of my apartment rose up around me. I felt, as I often felt, the violence of my project. What right did I have to reach so deep into her past? I had asked my friends, women between twenty and thirty, if they had asked their mothers to tell them their lives in this way. Most said no. Most said they weren't sure they'd want to know.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was my mother.

“Rebecca,” she said, instead of hello. “I was just walking to the elevators and it came back to me: her name wasn't Alexandra, it was Rebecca. It would have sounded exotic to me then. Now that I think about it, she was probably Jewish. The way she looked . . . it would make sense.” The elevator arrived, and she hung up again.

I thought of a story my parents often told with amusement. In my mother's first years in America, when she had been dating my father for several months, she had been surprised to learn that a
good friend of theirs was Jewish. The man was so obviously so that my father laughed at her surprise.

“And him, too? And him? And him?” she'd asked, rattling off the very Jewish names of their friends, men with prominent noses and bushy eyebrows.

“Yes,” my father assured her. Most everyone they knew was Jewish. It had never occurred to her. I pictured my mother now, as she rode the elevator down through the reinforced core of that gleaming new building. I pictured Rebecca's face morphing in her mind to fit the many she'd seen since, before settling again, changed, in the deep drifts. I remembered that long-ago dinner party, when my mother said my brother and I were in all of her memories, even those from long before we were born. It was true. I stirred the memories to the surface, and they changed as she told them to me. Bright threads of myself, embroidered upon her past.

—

T
HAT SUMMER
, the summer of 1971, my mother discovered sex. All spring, she and Jean-Michel had rubbed against each other in doorways and on park benches, in the back room of the café, but he hadn't been allowed past the boarding school gate. That summer in Ussel, however, they found their way into the groundskeeper's cottage at Les Bezièges. It had been abandoned for years. There was no electricity or water, no furniture. They spent entire days on the dusty wooden floor, experimenting. “Like rabbits,” my mother told me more than once. I let myself picture two white bunnies in a toolshed, noses twitching. Afterward, she and Jean-Michel lay on their backs, smoking and dreamily planning their
maison du
paradis.
They would have a real home, theirs alone, filled with children and animals and a real bed, their bed, soft and bathed in sunlight. Curtains. A fireplace. A drafting table where Jean-Michel could work on his architectural plans. He was a year older than Françoise and would begin his studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in the fall. He talked of his grand plans, of how architecture could change society. Françoise listened, her head on the rise and fall of his chest. She knew by then that she did not want to be a plastic surgeon. She wanted to find her own path, but she didn't know what it would be. As Jean-Michel spoke, a new possible future opened before her. She had always loved to work with her hands. She traded her father's surgical tools for Jean-Michel's X-Acto knives, carving new noses for building architectural models.

In the evenings, when the long summer sun stretched pink rays across the cobwebs and rusty handsaws, they ran back to the main house just in time to sit down at the table, flushed and sweaty and smelling of sex, wood chips in Françoise's hair. Josée's perfect eyebrows rose, but she said nothing.

At the very end of August, when Paul came down from Paris, Josée called Françoise into the formal living room.

“Your father and I have something to discuss with you,” Josée told her, her voice echoing off the double-height ceilings. “Are you and Jean-Michel having sex?”

“Of course not,” my mother said with genuine indignation. How could she voice something so private across the expanse of this room? And with her father present! She wasn't even aware of lying.

“In front of my father!” she told me, the indignation still fresh years later. “If Josée had talked to me alone, maybe that would have been different.”

—

A
S A TEENAGER
, I knew Prospect Park best by night, when we sat in the dugouts of the baseball field drinking forties of malt liquor. But during the day, amid families enjoying their first spring picnics, the vast lawns covered in colorful blankets, I blinked against the sun and did not know how to orient myself. This was Zane's park, though, his neighborhood, and I did not worry about getting lost. We paced the looping paths aimlessly, holding hands. I could hear in his voice that he was nervous, and I felt a small flicker of pleasure in my chest. I rarely seemed to make him nervous.

Zane had too-short hair and a crooked grin, a long thin nose and long lashes. He wore T-shirts with political slogans, and his pants were so torn from climbing trees that they seemed about to fall off his body. He carried around a beat-up copy of
On the Road.
I had a crush on him so big it flew out of me and above me like a helium balloon. Everyone knew. I'd memorized all of
Howl,
hoping to impress him.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
I mouthed to myself, as if each word were its own love song.

He asked me to hang out with him after school one day. We wandered to SoHo and sat on a public bench, watching the giraffe-legged models walk by to their photo shoots. In a roundabout way, he answered the question I hadn't asked. I was too young. Too sweet. Too nice. He didn't want to hurt me. I nodded, lips firmly pressed. I swallowed the hard knot that rose in my throat. “Peace love and anarchist applesauce,” he said with a goofy grin as we hugged good-bye. It was his thing, that phrase, how he always said good-bye.

That evening, I sucked the insides of my forearms till they were covered with purple bruises. I did not want to be nice.
N
always stood for “nice” when friends made acrostics of my name. “Banish ‘nice' from your vocabularies,” my English teacher said that year. “It is the most meaningless adjective.” It would take me years to unlearn that. To realize that nice was rare.

My mother arched an eyebrow in the morning, taking in my arms. “I wouldn't do that if I were you,” she said. “It looks very unappetizing.” I glared at her. What did she know of pain? But I tugged down my sleeves.

We were the same age, Zane and I, but I was young for a New York City fifteen-year-old. I had gaped when my new friends passed around a joint on our lunch hour, and I worried my naïveté would not be easily forgotten. Only two years earlier, in middle school, I had somberly cut and pasted a collage of blackened lungs and placed it on my mother's bed.
SMOKING AGES YOU PREMAT
URELY,
it read. Now I slid a cigarette out of the pack of Gauloises in her nightstand. My best friend and I sat on my fire escape and learned how not to cough. We plotted our path to the poets and stoners with military precision.

We were a high school of the uncool, and our standards were strange. Entry to Stuyvesant required a score in the top 3 percent on an SAT-like exam and nothing else. There were autistic students who wandered the hallways whistling to themselves, Russian kids who sold stolen graphing calculators from the inside pockets of their trench coats. We organized ourselves into separate constellations, based largely on ethnicity—Asian or white—with social hierarchies that did not overlap. The football team was called the Peglegs and lost nearly every game. It was cool to
get good grades, though cooler still to get them without working hard. It was not uncommon for a student to cry in the halls over a bad test score.