A Frozen Woman

by Annie Ernaux

  I proudly make a show of following the instructions of the government’s booklet on baby care; the best milk is breast milk, you owe it to your child, but I never get over my apprehension of the second when the gums clamp on to drain me like an insatiable suction cup. But that still isn’t how I begin to understand and feel my own maternity, which comes to me at certain silent moments in the clinic. He’s reading The Brothers Karamazov near the window while I go over some notes, stopping often to bend over the little bed next to mine with a kind of stupefied anguish. I have begun watching his breathing, carrying within myself the possible death of my child. Each morning, I dash half-asleep to the crib. Stories of smothered babies, the covers, the undershirt, fate. Later, I will sit in the movie theater in the evening watching the film through the blurry image of a child screaming with pain in the empty apartment. Pleasure, too: the smooth, warm, pliant skin, the song before words, and all the first times—the toothless grin, the tiny head looking up shakily while he lies flat on his tummy, the hand grasping the sliding bead on the crib rail. Perfect moments. I’ve known others: certain books, landscapes, the warmth of classrooms filled with my students . . . These moments don’t contradict one another.

  First childbearing, then child rearing. “Mothering,” they say, the landlady and my mother-in-law. That’s sweet; mothering, smile for mama, kitchy-coo, nighty-night. Too good to be true. I discover the joys of a day divided up by six diaper changes and six bottles; I try but it isn’t enough, my milk dries up in ten days. At five in the morning, I stare fixedly at the bottle heating in the double boiler. Glassy-eyed. That people are leaving for work at the same hour, that the garbagemen are out there tipping the cans into the truck doesn’t console me; I feel as if we were in different dimensions. Food and shit, food and shit, relentlessly. Obsessed with germs, and gas. Idealize the humble chore, of course, the choice tasks lovingly carried out, etc., the transfiguration of shit. Perhaps there’s poetry in sour dribbles of milk and dirty diapers. On sunny mornings, washing all the little white and blue togs in the bathroom and hanging them on the line, I can see how one might love all that, tell oneself, this is the life . . . Never. If I were to start loving it, I’d be lost.

  Fortunately, as a student, he is often there, he can see all the diapers and bottles and hear the wailing at suppertime. Not something he can wriggle out of anymore, no verbal smoke screens, oh leave your dishwashing and come listen to some Bach, no lovely schedules on paper. It couldn’t have been more obvious: if I were left to take care of Kiddo on my own, it would mean the end of my studies and the girl he’d married, the one so full of plans. He doesn’t want that girl to die. He’s not a narrow­minded bully and would never accept my overnight transformation into a baby-buggy-pusher. He needs to believe that I’m as free as he is; he cannot stomach the brutal picture of a dishrag wife. And of course I’d put up a fight. Suddenly abandon my childhood dream of having a profession, the sometimes vague but never quenched hope of “doing something”—I couldn’t. A diploma, what a fairy tale, it’s laughable, pathetic to cling to the idea of passing a competitive exam, you can be happy without that, fall back on your inner resources, strange that you should have a child and want to run right out to the research library, you have your whole life ahead of you for that, but your child needs you now—arguments and reproaches fall thick and fast. Luckily, on this point I am stone-deaf. What man would have given up classes and notebooks to clean house and take care of a baby? So me neither. And fairy tale or not, the exam is what is going to keep me from being swamped by dirty dishes and diapers, it’s the last sign of my independence, my guiding star.

  We share the mothering. You take the evening bottle, I’ll do the morning one, we’ll take turns rinsing out the diapers in the shower, equal priority on attending classes. Not instant nirvana, not oodles of fun lugging Evian bottles or pacing up and down, waiting patiently for the burp, but bearable, sometimes amusing. Never the resentment of being the only one feeding and wiping, and sharing the shit means there’s less of it. Sometimes it seems like love. He walks carefully between the desk and the wardrobe, stops in front of the window, retraces his steps. Against his shoulder lies a white package with a wobbly little head at the top. All’s right with the world. His hands know how to place Kiddo in the crib as gently as mine; he knows as well as I do how to wipe the milk delicately from the sticky mouth and check the bottle’s temperature by shaking a few drops onto his bare forearm. We have no idea how to do anything; we learn together. I have boundless confidence in his care. Nobody could measure up to him, not the landlady playing peekaboo with Kiddo, not all the nursemaids on earth. This sharing seems quite natural to me, no question of thanking him day and night as though it were some heroic feat, a sacrifice he has undertaken to “allow” me to have a profession; after all, I don’t demand fulsome praise for the shopping, cooking, and dishwashing that have been permanently assigned to me.

  I still have loads of illusions. I never imagine that he will soon find it beneath his dignity to take my place occasionally at the babyfood dish, and that later on, no, he won’t be sorry he fed and changed Kiddo, but he’ll think of it as a quaint little episode from our relatively unsettled and impoverished student days.

  It’s true that we haven’t taken our proper places in society. My tutoring students in Latin doesn’t seem like real work, the cheap food at the restau universitaire fills in on days when I fall down on that job, the curtains can stay filthy and the furniture unpolished, since they aren’t ours. It’s pouring on the cours d’Albret, nothing but furniture in all the store windows as we go from one to another, hand in hand, avoiding the puddles. Looking for an armchair. The material’s too bright on that one, and the modern style looks tacky. The first piece of furniture we have shopped for together, the first of our very own. It’s fun. The saleslady informs us, in a confidential and respectful tone, that it’s mahogany, made in England. She strokes the leather of the seat and armrests. And now a slightly haughtier air: in what style is the rest of your furniture? We hesitate; well, there is none. An English armchair fits in with everything, absolutely everything. I’m wearing an old blue raincoat with a hood, his hair is slicked down by the rain. You can pay on the installment plan, of course. She despises us, a gullible young couple, and she’s trying to stick us with her armchair. Enough of this. We exchange looks: we’ll think about it, good-bye. Outside, laughing in the rain, quick, Kiddo’s home all alone, and then he remembers seeing a rustic armchair for three hundred francs at the Manufrance department store. Tomor row. Lower-middle­class couple fitting themselves out, following a well-trodden path. It doesn’t feel at all like that to me: I still see us as free spirits traveling light, and the armchair, just an extravagance, like a record, only a bit more expensive, not the purchase of a staid couple settling into their niche in society. I feel we’re still living an adventure, so I can imagine our future together without wavering. Soon we’ll be leaving the furnished rooms in the suburbs of Bordeaux—for what city? He has just finished his exams, and the positions advertised in Le Monde have all the charm of a catalogue of vacation spots, at least for the first month. Personnel director in Bourges, community center administrator in Fontenay-aux-Roses, university graduate, Martigues, Versailles, Aix-en-Provence . . . The names fade from the map, along with our hopes; it’s not as easy as we’d thought to find a real job. The only thing left is an executive position in a city I envision as completely white, surrounding a slate blue lake set among glittering mountains. The excitement of packing—adieu Bordeaux, vive Annecy. Of course I blow the CAPES, that’s no surprise, everyone told me so, insane even to have tried, you asked for it. So what. “He passed, and that’s the main thing,” and I think so, too. I’m counting on him. I’ve stopped taking complete charge of myself. I’m convinced, however, that I haven’t lost any of my former freedom, aside from some selfish bad habits that probably aren’t worth worrying about. We’ve been living together for a year and a half.

 
Annecy, lake and mountain, snow and sunshine, swimming, skiing. A tourist paradise. On the last Sunday of October, we don’t see any tourists—they’re long gone. Nobody in the streets, except for the ones by the cemetery. Our apartment building is not far from the main gate. As I unpack the luggage in F3, our second-floor apartment, I can see cars stopping at the flower shop where hundreds of pots of chrysanthemums are set out. North Africans in balaclavas and shabby jackets pass by as well, carrying bags or hampers of food. On the sidewalk below, across the street from the florist’s, there are some benches and a concrete urinal. I go shopping an hour after we arrive because it’s the first thing to do, we have to eat. Find a grocery store, a butcher’s shop, a bakery. I don’t have time to look around at my new neighborhood. My first memory of Annecy is standing on line in the store, did I forget anything, butter, salt, everything seems more expensive than in Bordeaux, and the merchants all look so sullen. I return with my purchases amid a throng of people carrying chrysanthemums. The steaks are tough; he tells me we’ll have to find a different butcher. It isn’t until the afternoon that we drive out to the lake. There are swans on the shore, as in the postcards, but the mountains look bald without any snow. To the right of a stretch of lawn before the lake sits a big plastery casino, obviously closed. You can take walks here with Kiddo, it must be nice when it’s sunny.

  I hate Annecy. That’s where I get sucked in. Where I live the difference between him and me day after day, floundering in this shrunken woman’s world, choking on petty tasks and problems. Awash in loneliness. I become the guardian of the hearth, in charge of supplies and maintenance. What had come before was a picnic. Annecy, the ultimate apprenticeship in the role. Years of just the basics, without any of those comforts that help you bear up: a grandmother to babysit, parents who get you out of the kitchen every once in a while with a little dinner invitation, or enough money to pay for a cleaning lady or a mother’s helper. Me, I have nothing beyond the essentials: a husband, a baby, an apartment—enough to discover the difference between the two of us in its pure state. The words “house,” “food,” “education,” “work” no longer have the same meaning for him and for me. I begin to see in these words nothing but burdensome, oppressive things from which I can free myself only a few days, or at most a few weeks, every year. “Want to give your wife two weeks off from kitchen duty? Call the Club!” And freedom, what is that starting to mean? Oh well, sniff the kind souls of this world, you shouldn’t get married if you can’t take the consequences, men get their wings clipped too, you know, and just look around at those who don’t earn more than the guaranteed minimum wage, who weren’t lucky enough to get a good education, who make bolts all the livelong day—no, it’s too easy to spout all sorts of pitiful tales to keep a woman from speaking up, so I just keep quiet.

  That first morning: I’m alone at eight o’clock in F3 with Kiddo crying, the kitchen table littered with breakfast dishes, the bed unmade, the bathroom sink ringed with shaving scum. Papa goes to work, mama does the housework, rocks baby, and prepares a tasty meal. And I’d thought that first-grade refrain would never apply to me. We’d had long periods together during the day until then; he wasn’t peeling the potatoes but he was there, and the potato peeling had seemed to go faster. I look at the bowls, the full ashtray, all the morning mess to clean up. How quiet the apartment is when Kiddo stops singing. I see my reflection in the mirror over the dirty bathroom sink. Twenty-five years old. How could I ever have thought to find fulfillment in this?

  The bare minimum, and nothing more. I’m not going to let myself be had. Plonk the bowls into the dishpan, wipe off the table, draw up the bedcovers, feed Kiddo, bathe him. No sweeping, absolutely no dusting—the last vestige, perhaps, of my reading of The Second Sex, the story of an inept and hopeless battle against dust. Anyway, there’s not much furniture yet, beyond what we need for sleeping and sitting down. Grimly, I return to my books, without daring to consider my chances of success, without thinking about the near—so near—future when Kiddo will be crawling all over, getting into everything, sleeping only during his afternoon nap. I plunge into French phonetics, reciting paradigms with the fervor of those who chant novenas in hopes of seeing their desperate dreams come true.

  I don’t hold out long.

  “But nothing’s ready! It’s twenty past twelve! You have to organize things better than this! You should finish feeding the baby before I get here, I’d like to relax while I’m home for lunch. I’m WORKING, you understand, it’s not the same life anymore!” And what about my life? Impossible to take any courses, there’s Kiddo, the shopping and cooking, and so on—a run-of-the-mill domestic squabble. Later we eat steak and spaghetti, without a word, while the radio fills in the silence. Voices come and go, playing some kind of stupid word game called Tirelipot. I wash the dishes. He’s still sitting at the table. “It’s not possible,” he says, in a weary, subdued voice. No, not possible to imagine such moments before marriage. I don’t excuse him, I don’t want to fall into the trap of always understanding, of feeling guilty for not having greeted him with a smile, piping hot dishes on the table, and the annoying baby tucked out of sight. When I start working “outside the home,” it would be a fine thing if I even suggested that I was entitled to the same privileges he demands. But he’s right, it’s not the same life. He’s caught up in the system: work from eight to noon, from two to six plus overtime, slaving away to prove he’s indispensable, competent, an “executive of real ability.” There’s no room anymore within that agenda for Kiddo’s cereal, still less for cleaning the bathroom sink. A routine in which it is also better to have the table set, the wife smiling in welcome, providing peace and quiet for the man of the house, so that he might depart refreshed at a quarter to two, ready for the fray. I don’t know which rubs my nose harder into the difference between us, him or the system.

  When he comes home at noon, he finds the table set, Kiddo in bed for sleepy-byes, and the transistor radio next to his plate. The sink cleaned, the ashtrays emptied, the folds of the bed­spread nice and straight. The bare minimum is putting on weight. Part of it is to please him, to avoid his reproaches. But that’s nothing compared to the idea that begins to seem more and more obvious to me: it’s a shame to neglect such a pretty little home.

  Society does its work well. Guess what the young couple buys with its first earnings: a Spanish lamp stand of lathe-turned wood, an old mirror, a card table, a secondhand piano, sheer voile curtains. One by one, objects come into our lives, arranging themselves around us. Still hand in hand, here we are again in front of the store windows. Living rooms, bedroom suites, available on the installment plan. We like things that are “gently used,” reasonably priced antiques, bargains in the homey and unobtrusive style favored by the magazine La Maison de Marie-Claire. Saturday, step by step, hours spent looking, comparing, discussing, not big enough, wrong color, more bronzy, shinier, without the fringe, rather blah, too expensive. Look at that lamp. Did you see the price . . . Next month. Do you think they’ll still have it? It would look really nice in the living room, you know. We float home with the lamp. He tries it out right away. An iridescent lamp shade; faint shadows on the ceiling, a circle of light on the mahogany table. He puts a leather-bound book down inside the circle, moves it a touch to one side, replaces it with an ashtray. Perfect. We look at each other, smiling. Of course we know that happiness is not to be confused with the possession of things, we know all about the difference between being and having, and Marcuse, and we’re perfectly aware that things are alienating shit. But really, it would be crazy to live in an empty F3, and we don’t buy just any old junk, we have taste and we put a lot of thought into our purchases, it’s almost an art, so I feel that our esthetic attitude frees us from any taint of consumerism.

  And we move on to the stove so spotless you don’t dare fry an egg, the gleaming fridge with a floor pedal so you can open the door when your hands are full. To the dump with the gas cooker! I feel disoriented in fron
t of these brand new appliances, but they’re fun, too: the window in the oven door, the temperature­control knob, the broiler . . . “Madame, with your Laura (she even has a name, this stove) you will easily be able to prepare all sorts of tempting dishes for your family.” Hogwash. Still, I am not displeased to watch the first souffle of my life rising in the oven, and he is astonished, a real success, bravo. Childish, but harmless, I think. Even a subtle link between us, the souffle gaily shared, the mirror we just bought, which he hangs carefully on the wall, pass me the picture hook, and the hammer. A charming little nest for the three of us. What a change from the nondescript furnished apartment of the previous year, however did we stand it? Innocent joy. But what’s behind all this is that insidious entrapment at the store windows. The imperturbable logic of the system getting its claws into us. Sheer voile curtains, your own furniture that costs you an arm and a leg, for which you go into debt, how can you not “take care” of these things, how could you let them grow ugly and filthy from daily use? Dust sheep gamboling under the bed, the russet tracery of boiled-over milk on the burner, that was then, but this is now: the beauty of our surroundings must be maintained. Harmony must be preserved. Don’t I have a fancy new vacuum cleaner with a raft of gadgets to suck up even invisible dirt specks? I’ll make an effort—so what if getting the dingus out of the closet and switching around all its silly attachments and stuffing it back where it came from takes three times as long as a brisk pass with a broom. No, I don’t enjoy it, galloping furiously from one room to another, from one outlet to another. I feel I have to. Or else we would have to live differently, so differently that I can’t imagine it. Annecy is “a position with good prospects for the future.”