A Frozen Woman

by Annie Ernaux

  So far, so good; I’m eager to continue the trip. A single encounter and the swift revelation of a complicity that has never ceased to move me. There hadn’t been the slightest flicker of triumph in his eyes—there, I got you—or else I haven’t yet learned to recognize it. I’d seen only a boy who didn’t talk much, a face already like a brother’s. Over the next few months we spend about forty hours together; I keep track, as though I were adding to a hoard of special moments. The sun warms my face but the earth is still cool beneath my back. During my walks in the country with my mother, I’d often caught sight, at a distance, of shapes with blurred outlines. Couples. I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off them—whatever were they up to? And here I am in turn. Amazing. I’m living the great dream of my childhood, the scenes of kissing and embracing so often imagined and acted out. Where is the guilt I thought I would feel—and the love? The idea that going out with a boy is some kind of pinnacle of experience is definitely dead, almost laughable. Our two bookbags lie side by side in the grass, but a life together, forget it. For the first time I’m terrorized by the idea of marriage. I’m beginning to emerge, to disencumber myself. Enough of this true-romance foolishness, the love-of-my-life stuff. There’ll be other guys besides Remi. I tackle my classwork with a blunt new energy; I need to pass the first part of the baccalaureat so that next year in twelfth grade I can seek the answers to questions that have been bothering me ever since I began finding this business of love and men less complicated than I’d thought. I read. Sartre, Camus, naturally. How frivolous my problems with clothes and bad dates now seem. Liberating texts that release me forever from serial stories and women’s novels. I ignore the fact that these books were written by men, that their heroes are men as well: Roquentin or Meursault, I identify with them. What do you do with your life? The question has no sex, neither does the answer, and this I naively believe, that year of my bac. I have one motto: don’t ever do anything you’ll regret. Where did I pick up that maxim? I’m not reading Gide yet, and it never occurs to me that this ambition is impracticable for a girl. But it soon will. Going out with my parents or Remi: which would I regret not doing? Easy, so find some pretext, lie nonstop, and bingo! I’m off. Yes but what do I do with this desire that arrives along with summer skirts and the heavy petting sanctioned by two months of dating? I always want to go further. So does he. His hand fumbles behind my back for the first time, a stunning development; I hold my breath, and hear the faint click as the strap is unhooked. But as in those novels I no longer read, “I push him violently away.” Because they come flooding back in on me, all those cautionary precepts for girls, and sweep away my principles of freedom: “No one respects girls who go too far,” “Once you start you can’t stop,” the slippery slope, the downward path so luridly described in Coefidences. And what if I end up like Marine, whom all the boys call One Size Fits All? When her ponytail flashes on the corner of place des Beiges, they all cackle, here comes the Doormat! And the girls giggle too. For years I never hear anyone defend the sexual liberty of girls, and certainly not the girls themselves. Marine has slept with at least three guys, so she’s a slut. I worry: am I maybe a bit sluttish around the edges, as they put it? Liberty, sluttery. I don’t feel strong enough to choose to be a tart. And then the rhythm method, some fine figuring, infallible, we’ve all got it neatly copied in a notebook, but I don’t believe that little calendar can tame the mute, invisible thing, as though the uterus and ovaries didn’t exist, but they’re always waiting, like a baby bird’s beak. Impossible to gauge precisely the strength of this fear. All those Greek and Racinian tragedies, they’re in my womb. Fate in all its absurdity. One sunny day, your life is over in one fell swoop: the bridal veil or a small suitcase and the kid, a miserable fix. Compared to that, Camus’s revolt and philosophical aspirations to freedom don’t amount to squat. I’m fond of my silent companion; we have good times, sometimes, and I’m dying to make love with him. No. I don’t feel like having my future grind to a halt on the twenty-eighth of each month. I’ll never be closer than I am at seventeen to sexual freedom and a glorious sensuality. And I discover immediately that they are out of reach. This first, clearly perceived difference drives me to despair—I feel it will never be abolished. Boys are free to desire, not you my girl, resist, that’s the code. Resistance methods? The usual defensive game of dividing my body into territories from head to toe: permitted area; the uncertain field of current maneuvers; the forbidden zone. Cede territory only inch by inch. Each pleasure is labeled defeat for me, victory for him. I had not anticipated experiencing the discovery of the Other in terms of loss, and it isn’t amusing. My girlfriends and I reveal our “cowardice” with shame, never with pleasure or pride. I prefer to be alone again.

  Saved. My girlhood is marked by magic words that help me to live, summing up events in a kind of ethics in action. Saved. Not so much my virginity, that mute and tiresome scrap of skin; I have never managed to persuade myself that it’s worthwhile. At most, it’s useful, the last parry, a mealymouthed argument for refusal: no thanks, I’m a virgin. But I rediscover the happiness of walking really and truly alone through the streets, looking at other men without feeling guilty, laughing heartily in class instead of whispering secrets and passing notes under the desks, all that sentimental mush that girls indulge in over boys. Weeks stretch out ahead of me, clear of routine dates. Saved from a dependence that had been settling in without my noticing it. I want new things, to pass my bac exam and escape the good sisters to spend my senior year at the lycée, a year I know will be a revelation—I can’t let religion wreck it for me. And I long for the big city, too, for anonymous streets lined with tall old houses: Rouen, the reward-city of my childhood, the festive city, will finally become my everyday city. I will leave the small-business life behind, the omnipresent smell of coffee that seems to have soaked into the very walls, the voices chanting about the weather, the cost of living, and death. Am I strong enough? My father says nothing; my mother thinks it over and exclaims, “Leave if you want to—a girl’s not meant to be tied forever to her mother’s apron strings!”

  I pass my bac and prepare to move to a room in the girls’ hostel in Rouen. Brigitte has gotten married. There they are, the both of them, sitting next to each other at a table in the café, paying me a visit after their honeymoon. I don’t know what to say to them, as though there were no longer anything in common between a couple and a single girl. What should we talk about, anyway, when our former conversations were devoted to love and boys? Now that she’s taken care of in that department, she can just sit there and smile. I watch her beaming excitedly, we’ve found an apartment, I’ll keep working for a while until we’ve got our furniture. So many cockeyed plans, so many songs crooned by Mariano, so many dreams—to end up with this guy, who looks so clumsy sitting next to her, and who replies, to my what­are-you-having, with “a glass of umbrella juice.” It’s just not fair. The first one of us to betray—I don’t know what, exactly: the hopes of our childhood, our taste for adventure. Some light has gone out in her, she’s so careful, a nice lady on her best behavior, watch out don’t say anything dumb, he’s listening. The awkward reserve of a young couple. Each time I feel as though my girlfriends have died and left me still alive.

  But not saved once and for all. That would have required looking at every boy with empty eyes, forgetting the warmth and nearness of another’s body—thank you, Remi, for those gifts. Three months after him, already someone else, then the same feeling of dependence. The straight line of liberty is something I admire, without being able to walk it. Years of unbelievable complications and compromises lie ahead of me. There are lots of those girls you see alone for months, they’re so serious, almost haughty, and one fine day you catch them off in a dark corner with someone. Loud surprise and disapproval, you never would have thought that of them, and then they’re alone again. They must be cracked. And I’m one of them.

  I had believed in the lycée, as a land of liberty, equality, frate
rnity. Now, here in class, the twenty-six girls in pink smocks seem absolutely foreign to me, more strange than all the boys I’ve ever met in my small town. Some of my fellow students still seem like children, without any affectations or sense of style, but when they take off their smocks they slip on well-cut jackets of butter-soft suede. Other girls wear makeup and short skirts that are fashionably but discreetly full. There are no bubbleheads or clowns, as there had been back in the convent school. In this senior class, the popular type is the wholesome girl, straightforward, in a navy blue blazer. The twenty-six of them are right out of the Brigitte series, from the nicer neighborhoods of Rouen, Bihorel, Mont-Saint-Aignan, but I don’t recognize them immediately. I find their casual attitude toward everything chilling; they carp at the teacher and make fun of a scholarship student from the countryside around Dieppe who still uses words in the Norman dialect. They talk seriously about sexuality, about Freud, with no laughter or obscenities; they seem oblivious to boys and any interest in sleeping with them. I feel dirty and cheap next to them. And their self-confidence astonishes me, they never seem to work—just imagine, I got fifteen out of twenty and I didn’t even crack a book until ten last night—it’s so cool, being brilliant without even trying, I can’t get over it, because where I come from, everyone looks down on slackers. And they’ve all got unheard­of ambitions: psychiatrist, poli sci, hypokhâgne. Faced with their self-assertiveness, their confidence, I take my doubts and my habit of working as little as possible for signs of a real inferiority. We’re all the same sex in our final year at the lycée Jeanne­d’ Arc, but not of the same social background. My sisters, those girls? What a strange idea. They’re a much greater obstacle to my future than the boys are. Everything my mother ever said to encourage me—you can be whatever you want to be—is collapsing; the young ladies from Bihorel are stifling my ambition. When I go home on Saturday, I seem to notice fewer people in the store; the supermarket is stealing away our customers, so how can I be greedy, when I feel responsible for the canned goods gathering dust on the shelves? Professor, librarian, such a long and difficult path. Schoolteacher, I’d start earning money right away. The girls in my class talk about going to university as though they’d already reserved their places. Not me. Hypokhâgne, what is that, exactly? She looks at me pityingly, Annick, well if you don’t even know that . . . I can see some girls are more free than others. Not one friend.

  I walk along the boulevard de l’Yser to the hostel, 113 francs per month, meals included, three times less than what a suede jacket costs. The lycée students’ table, the technical college table, hairdressing apprentices’ table. Neither contempt nor animosity; absolute indifference. Definitely not all one happy family—different social backgrounds, first of all. In my tiny cell, I can hear the girl on my right gobbling cookies, the one on my left slamming drawers and endlessly whistling “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Often, at night, in the bathroom, I stand up on the toilet to reach the ventilation window: the great rumble of Rouen, the sirens in the harbor, sometimes, and countless lights. The anguish of solitude, the loneliness that will claim me one day. Just across the street, families are at dinner; it’s like a series of paintings. A woman flings back her shutters; I can make out green plants, armchairs, feel the warmth. And tonight I’ll be reading The Critique of Pure Reason. The ten o’clock evening slump. I don’t know what it whispers to an eighteen-year-old boy, but to this girl, between paragraphs of Kant, it slips the same old story: why don’t I just drop all this studying, take some lousy teacher’s job, and then one day I’m bound to wind up with a real family of my own. At moments like that, the categorical imperative, existentialism, and every book Simone de Beauvoir ever wrote mean zip to me. After all, my philosophy teacher is married, so it must have seemed “rational” to her at one time. The next day, I feel guilty. What’s the point of soaring in the sublime realm of philosophy, expatiating on the immortality of the soul, only to revel in an ideal straight from Echo de la mode and secretly dream of settling down? I’m no better than Brigitte. Out in broad daylight on the boulevard de l’Yser, I consciously reject the fate glimpsed through the bathroom window. I stare and stare at girls barely older than I am trundling baby carriages, and I feel completely repelled by their larval, slimy little darlings. One afternoon in May, my mother and I stroll from stand to stand at a trade fair. She’s not buying anything and I’m bored. Neither of us has said a word in ages. What am I doing here in front of these endless dining rooms, bedrooms, vacuum cleaners, electric mixers, while demonstrators are grating carrots in every corner and frying eggs in miraculous pans? None of this has anything to do with me. Suddenly my mother turns to me. Her face powder is flaking off and she’s pale with fatigue, but her eyes sparkle. “Don’t worry,” she smiles at me, “you’ll have all this one day!” At first I don’t understand. This, the pink bathroom, the television, the mixer. This, which never comes without attachments, necessarily supposes a husband, and children for good measure. So she’s thinking about it for me as well, except she has it postponed until after I’ve settled into a profession. How sad . . . We keep plodding through the dust and the brochures, and I feel as though I were in the backstage labyrinth, cluttered with props, of a play that appalls me even though it isn’t scheduled to be put on until much later. So many contradictions.

  Those of us at the Lycée, who board in the hostel often gather in groups of three or four in someone’s cubicle, eating candy, chatting about teachers, clothes, vacations, dates. Sometimes we’ll go crazy, scrambling over the partitions, tussling over a piece of chocolate. Horsing around, for laughs. Viviane and I fall onto her bed; she keeps on laughing, and her eyes almost disappear into her flushed cheeks, so red, too red. The same expression Brigitte used to have in the bathroom, but then it didn’t bother me, on the contrary, and I felt like touching, but now I get up again as casually as I can. That’s the end of that. No more curiosity about a body like mine. The sanitary napkins in the garbage cans make me feel sick. I don’t know when or why I lost interest. Perhaps I was simply afraid of becoming abnormal. Baudelaire’s lesbian femmes damnees; how frightened I was at fifteen.

  So it’s still boys. De Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe is a real eye­opener. Prompt resolutions: neither marriage, nor even love, with someone who sees me as an object. A brilliant plan, on the way to the lycée. But where is he, this brother, as I call him, with whom I’d like to make love without having to go through all that folderol, “You’ve got great hair, cute tits, just the way I like them,” someone with whom I could laugh and share things? No more fear of contempt, of “I took that one around the block,” but confidence, equality. A rare bird, surely, out of the ordinary. I hold on, I wait, then the blundering starts all over again that year, and later on—I’ll spare you the details, the same old runaround. I’ll think I’ve found him, this brother, for an evening, a week, a month. In reality I’m falling into the most obvious traps. The flattering comparisons: you look a little like Annette Stroyberg, Mylene Demongeot, the list is endless. The first name bit: a face like that, you look like a Monika. The poetry scam: “Qyand le ciel bas et lourd . . .” Baudelaire, Verlaine, Prevert—how well I know that trio of pimps. And all my efforts to be agreeable, to understand him, share his interests—I really do my best. What I go through to communicate with him, with them: jazz, modern painting, even bird songs with an ornithologist, even the pilgrimage to Chartres, prayers and blistered feet, for an R. C. Just to be nice. After all, what’s so terrible about seeing El Perdido instead of L’Année dernière à Marienbad, he can like Westerns if he wants to, I’ll go see the Resnais without him. Because reciprocity, zero. And I change my appearance to suit them, I like you in black, wear your hair up, you’ll look good in a purple dress. Docile, dumb, but still inclined to backtalk, aggressive, I want to let them know that they’re not fooling me, I’ll do what you want, wear my hair up and so on, but it pisses me off and your Westerns eat shit. As far as being a pill goes, you can’t do better. Things always tur
n sour between me and my “brother.”