A Frozen Woman

by Annie Ernaux

  One always leaves less of it, however, than one thinks. Especially since it’s difficult, even impossible, to figure out all the connections involved, like the one between that admiration they instill in us for the Virgin, the mother of us all (and the Church is our mother as well), and the respect we owe to “your dear mama.” I hope that you help out at home, girls, because you could never show her enough gratitude! Who does the cleaning? She does. Who irons your dress? She does. And the meals, and so on. And on. It’s a heavy burden, the maternal iconography dispensed by the good sisters. “When you distress your mama, she goes off all alone and cries.” The two streams of tears running down the Virgin’s cheeks. “Whatever would become of you without your mama?” The teacher’s tone grows threatening. I imagine the earth as a wasteland where I wander blindly, alone in the world. I still feel a cloying anguish when I recall the singsong of those voices, so horribly sugary and tragic. Do your very best to show your gratitude. Embroidered doilies, raffia baskets, sashes of corded cotton—we start getting ready right after Easter, spending the end of every afternoon busily working on our Mother’s Day presents. The whole thing is a joke to me, a kind of school holiday; needle in hand, I have a wonderful time listening to stories and telling some myself, taking a stitch about once a minute. Suddenly, the icy reprimand: “Mademoiselle, I have my eye on you. You aren’t doing a thing and you will never finish your doily in time!” I feel like blurting out the truth, of which I am quite certain by the age of eleven: my mother doesn’t care a hoot for her present, she will spend the entire morning of the Sunday in question running from one end of the shop to the other, and the small package placed between her napkin and the plate of canned sardines will embarrass her no end. “Oh, how sweet of you. Let me give you a little kiss!” And then, “Let’s put it away so it doesn’t get dirty.” That’s the end of that. No question of me reciting the short poem we’ve all been taught—the two of us would feel absolutely ridiculous. I’d never dare admit such things, especially when the teacher announces in front of the whole class, “If you don’t finish your doily, it means you do not love your mama!” I beaver away at my embroidery, convinced that I’m a monster, even if Mother’s Day in my house is a load of poppycock.

  On such occasions, I have the disquieting feeling that my mother isn’t a real mother, one like all the others. Neither weepy nor coddling, still less house-proud, she is someone I do not often recognize in the composite picture provided by the teacher. That spirit of self-sacrifice, the perpetual smile, and that deference toward the man of the house—imagine my surprise and skepticism (but not too much embarrassment yet) when I don’t see any of these traits in my mother. And if the teacher only knew that she uses bad language, and sometimes leaves the beds unmade all day long, and tosses customers out of the café when they’ve tied one on too tightly! And it’s so irritating, the way the teacher whispers “your ma-mah”; at home and all around my neighborhood, we say “ma-ma.” Big difference. That ma-mah stuff is for other mothers than mine. Not the ones I know well in my family or among our neighbors: always in a complete snit, griping about how children don’t come cheap, walloping kids right and left to keep them in line—it’s just unbelievable how much they lack that “inner glow” so characteristic of the ma-mahs our teacher describes. I see them after school, when I go to meet my father, who waits for me with his bike. Elegantly dressed, refined ladies. The kind referred to in fashion magazines as “the mistress of the house,” who simmer delicious dishes in their cunningly decorated homes while their husbands are busy at the office. I see the ideal mother as part of a way of life that has precious little to do with ours.

  Marie-Jeanne isn’t a very good friend of mine, but one day in June she invites me to her nice house, with its small garden, to have a glass of lemonade. We are going to sell raffle tickets together on her street. The dark hall, hung with paintings, opens onto a gleaming white kitchen like the ones in catalogues. A slender woman in a pink blouse moves quietly between the sink and the table. A pie, perhaps. Through the open window, I catch a glimpse of flowers. The only noise: tap water running gently over strawberries in a sieve. Everything is clean. Bright. Neat. A woman light-years from my mother, the kind of woman to whom a child could recite a Mother’s Day poem without feeling silly. A sleek woman, and happy, I think, because everything around her seems lovely to me. In the evening, Marie-Jeanne and her brothers will calmly eat the meal prepared for them, like a scene of domestic harmony from the moralizing poetry of Sully Prudhomme, without any shouting or the anxious counting of money on a corner of the table. Peace and quiet. Paradise. Ten years later, I will be the one in a silent, sparkling kitchen, with flour and strawberries: I have stepped into the picture, and it’s killing me.

  Anyway, until my adolescence, it doesn’t strike me as strange that my father washes the dishes and my mother lugs around bottle-racks. Cooking, sewing, and ironing are not high on my list of values, or anybody’s, for that matter, since at school they send the hopeless dummies dozing in the back of the class off to “home economics,” in a classroom up under the eaves. The ten-year-old ballerinas in their tutus give me a brief pang, but out in the courtyard I fly high on my swing and ride my bike while I dream my dreams. I have energy to burn, my mother says. Doesn’t matter if I’m pretty or ugly, graceful or not: I love to watch myself in the mirror in my Rosebud panties and slip, capering around to music only I can hear. Soon I will be twelve years old. One summer night, unable to sleep, my face pressed to the window, I see the sun rise for the first time. When the darkness has paled to the light of day, I fall asleep in the astonishment of a strange and precious discovery, as though I have done something forbidden. Still happy and free, that year.

  In a few years I will become a girl emptied of herself, swollen with romantic ideas in a world reduced to other people’s expectations. My defenses crumble. I remember the summer when I was twelve, and I can already see the first signs of this collapse: my growing interest in the love stories my mother reads and the most sentimental songs on the radio, the melting “Etoile des nei9es,” and “Bolero,” with guitars singing beneath a red and black sky. Then there is my discovery that men are interested in girls who are “curvaceous,” and especially interested in their thighs when they’re wearing shorts. When Claudine goes down the street, the workers on scaffolds whistle, and she’s only two years older than I am. I worry. Will I be considered curvaceous? I’m putting off reliving my adolescence. I can already tell that I’ll be cheating, praising everything that seemed so unspeakable and lousy at the time (my real body, pleasure, my fleeting realization that I am not a truly feminin e girl) and ridiculing all that I found so wonderful, like being noticed by boys, having a certain look or style. I’m going to say that the romantic daydreams that filled my thoughts during math class are so much twaddle. I’m writing myself and can do as I please: I can turn myself in any direction I like and easily put new words in my mouth. But if I’m trying to show clearly the path I took to become a woman, then I shouldn’t spit on the great lump of a girl weeping with rage because her mother won’t let her wear stockings and a revealingly tight skirt. I should explain. Without calling myself a fool. Are those years even over? It probably goes back to when I was fifteen, that fear I have of seeing myself in a mirror before I’ve had time to adjust the eyes and smile, putting on my best face. I’m still looking for the reflection of an imaginary body, the one that began to dance before my adolescent eyes, a slender, beautifully proportioned body with an attractive bust and an alluring face . . . Which look, which mask should I pick? I’ve just got to get that body. Or else I’ll never have a boyfriend, no one will ever love me, and life won’t be worth living. The beauty factors are charm and love, the result is the meaning of life: that equation moves right into my brain (and a lot more deftly than ax2 +bx+ c=0 ever did). The formula is written everywhere. In the novels serialized in my mother’s newspapers. In the stories the bookstore owner recommends as suitable for a fourteen-year-old.
The popular romance collections of Delly, Magali, and above all, the “My Daughter’s Library” series with Elisabeth, Mme Bernage and her Brigitte books—all works with “high moral standards,” and it isn’t hard to figure out that this means the girls in these stories will get married without ever having made love beforehand. Still, they do lead enviable lives as pretty, polished young ladies: chaste, educated when necessary, often with their baccalaureat, but no profession afterward because they’re supposed to get married. Nurses during wartime, of course. Girls living freely off on their own? There are some: black sheep who wear too much makeup, bad girls who pay for their loose ways with sorrow, remorse, illness, and poverty. I have a real fondness for those bohemian types, tough and adventurous, but obviously not heading in the right direction like Brigitte, who makes a fine marriage, is well-off, and winds up the happy mother of six. These antiseptic goody-goodies, I find, are always connected to the middle-class way of life, and if I feel that the good girls end up in better shape than the reckless ones, it’s because they live in a shimmering dream of security and harmony. In the summertime, such women make jam in sprawling country houses with birdies twittering everywhere, while the ones who thought they could live just as they pleased are coughing and spitting off in a garret somewhere. I prefer happiness, naturally.

  And then, in class, in the street, there are girls who saunter around with conceited expressions, fetching smiles; they make their skirts dance and pull their sweaters tight to show off their swelling breasts with a confidence that surprises me. And they’re the ones who have a boyfriend waiting for them in a street near the school, who are all excited on Saturdays about the teen party that evening, who turn up on Monday with new slang picked up from the boys, “I really crammed for that math test but I flunked it anyway.” Dreamers, too. I feel that they live life intensely. “Zero, mademoiselle! You did not even open your geography book! Sometimes I wonder what goes on in your head!” Sly smiles from the friends in the know, curious looks from the others. And the unprepared student? Not one bit flustered, even proud, as though she were in possession of a secret compared to which the world’s oil production is just so much kid stuff. Sitting down again with a superior air, she casually fluffs up her blond bangs with a forefinger. Supreme freedom. I admire girls in love before I join their ranks. What a sinking feeling when one of those privileged creatures leaves me with a “So long” when school lets out, crossing the street to join the boy who has just appeared on the opposite sidewalk. I go on home through a desert. Sometimes I meet Claudine, sashaying along on her high heels, a real vamp, terrifically cheap-looking, but trailing admirers. I can’t help envying her. While I do my homework in the evening, I listen to the radio. “One day, you’ll see, we’ll meet and you’ll belong to me . . .” I, too, will be chosen. But how? By throwing the whole business into gear. By energetically creating a seductive image for myself. With what servile diligence do I latch on to all the outward signs of the right femininity, the come-hither kind, and how tenaciously I try to prove I am a young woman at the age of fourteen. But as I see things at the time, those stockings, that straight skirt, those high heels aren’t supposed to change me into a “sex object,” but to make me happy by getting me chosen. Plus, when I can finally parade around with stockings and an appropriately busty sweater, I will have the impression of proclaiming my freedom. A bra? My dream. It doesn’t occur to my mother to buy me such a thing; she is a country woman, and has never worn one. I don’t dare mention it to her, because that would be an admission that I want my breasts to show, but what’s the point of being “stacked” if it’s not properly “packed”: look for the Lou label wherever fine lingerie is sold. Luckily, a pal slips me one of her bras, and I am saved. My wish finally fulfilled. Girl talk in the recreation yard, and even later, in the cité universitaire: “Mine are a disaster, I’m sure she wears falsies, her boobs are so big she looks like a cow, you’re as flat as a pancake, what you want is just enough to fill the hand of an honest man.” A major concern. I admire myself in front of the mirror wearing those little cloth cups on my chest: front view, profile, shoulders back, arms raised. It’s like a game. Yet men’s remarks are already more or less accepted in advance. “What kind are you wearing, the white ones with lace are the sexiest, nice set you’ve got there.” Why feel humiliated, they’re just breasts like any others. Twisting and turning before the wardrobe mirror at fourteen, I am already reduced to my appearance in my own eyes; all that is missing is the gaze of the Other. In composition class in eighth grade, Marie-Therese likes to study herself in the dark reflection of the open window, running through a series of barely perceptible motions: she lifts her chin, lowers her head, thrusts out her breasts, pulling on her pendant at the same time to make them stand out. All those girls who can never get enough of looking at themselves, anywhere, in shop windows, between the pairs of shoes and the mannequins in their dresses, girls who always have a comb and mirror in their pockets. A quick pass with the comb, a pretext for checking your face while softly stroking your hair. In the girls’ room, each one in front of her mirror, changing her mouth, her eyes. Obscene. I do it, too—hypnotize myself with my own reflection.

  Brigitte, my bra-provider, says that she’s too skinny, I’m a bit chubby and too tall, and men don’t like tall women. She complains of being “obliged” to wear falsies. She has a habit of twisting her hair around a finger, and she smiles with her mouth closed because her teeth are crooked. Hard to do, given the hysterical laughter that comes over us out of the blue. We’d lost track of each other since the time of those instructive sessions in the bathroom; two years older than I am, she has quit school and is taking shorthand typing classes. We become friends because it’s useful on Sundays: with two of us, we can go to the movies, to the motocross, or to the shop sales.

  She is my instructor, because of the two years she has on me and because her entire small and determined self makes what she says so vivid that it seems indisputable. She arrives around two on a Sunday afternoon in a flutter of excitement. “So you ‘re wearing your pleated skirt today,” and then the critical appraisal, “It makes your legs look fat,” followed by, “Did you notice, I washed my hair, it’s all electric.” Next we compare outfits, try on each other’s things, a favorite pastime, and how do I look in this or that? One day when I’ve tied a cotton kerchief around my head, I await her verdict. A little smile and suddenly, in her affected movie-star voice, “You’re a perfect wallflower.” Annihilation in five seconds. But in her gloomy moments, she is equally hard on herself. “Beauties we’re not, just standard issue.” Not one square inch of flesh escapes her expert eye, not a single toe can wiggle freely, no legs are idly crossed. She’s constantly calling me to order: “Hairy legs are ugly. You should wear polish on your toenails. You show too much thigh when you sit down. “The body under constant surveillance and restraint, abruptly shattered into a heap of pieces—eyes, skin, hair—that must be dealt with one by one to reach perfection. Not an easy task, since a single detail can spoil everything: “Did you see that one, with her droopy butt!” Most of the time Brigitte is able to persuade me that she has a personal style, perhaps something along the lines of the actress Françoise Arnau!, attractive and mysterious, but definitely not too flashy. It’s frightening how well she knows the code: be as cute and desirable as you like, but whatever you do, don’t let anyone think you’re “easy,” one of her words. Unbeatable at detecting what looks “tarty”—a frizzy permanent, too bright a red, high heels with pants—or “country bumpkin”: a slip showing, wearing green and yellow together. She skillfully avoids these twin perils. At her side I sometimes feel like a bloated eyesore, since my mother is still choosing my clothes and she’s unaware of all these subtle distinctions. Even I am hard put to believe that black pants make you look cheap while the same ones in gray are fine. Looking back on all this, I now realize that Brigitte was trying not to look like a factory worker. An office job—that’s different, and her dream is the simple, fresh,
natural look that will land her a good catch: sober, hardworking, but preferably not working class. She would like to have love affairs (with the crooner Luis Mariano, she wouldn’t hesitate), but they never work out. In the romance novels and photo-stories she lends me, the women are all treated like doormats, their lives are a shambles, and then wham: happiness. That doesn’t work out for Brigitte, and I don’t believe in it anymore. Her devotion to the idea of complete self-sacrifice doesn’t suit me either; she says that when you love a man, you’ll take anything from him, even eat his shit. Later I will hear other women, more cultured and refined, go on about passion, losing oneself in the Other and so on, but it’s basically the same thing.