I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  “Maman,” I said at last, my voice shaking, and she turned. I felt that it pained her to look at me and thought that this was both because of my femininity and my lack of it.

  “Oui, mon chat?” she said, beckoning me to come sit by her.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said.

  “What is it?” she asked, concern in her voice, her hand on my knee.

  I wasn’t sure I could find the words. “I’ve been . . . I’ve been . . . I’ve been ripping out all of my hair. You know, all of the hair that grows . . . down there,” I said. For months, for nearly a year, I had been tearing out my pubic hair by the handful, furious with my body. The skin was raw and scabbed.

  I felt her stiffen, saw the discomfort in her posture. I had crossed a line with her, for neither the first time nor the last. I could not seem to learn where she stopped and I began, what I should and should not share.

  “Is this also while you’re touching yourself?” she said, her voice held even.

  “No!” I said, horrified at the idea that my mother would think I masturbated, although I did.

  Perhaps this was the wrong answer, or perhaps my mother felt uncomfortable with herself for having asked. Either way, she shut down, withdrew her hand, went cold.

  “Then don’t worry about it,” she said.

  “But—” I said.

  “I said don’t worry about it. Why is it a problem?” she said.

  “I feel . . . I’m . . . I feel . . . horrible,” I said.

  “Then stop doing it,” she said.

  “I tried. I can’t,” I said.

  “You’ll stop eventually, when you’re ready to,” she said dismissively. I could hear in her tone the disgust I had so feared. My face flushed pink, and I flooded with shame. Tears spilled down my cheeks.

  “It’s really nothing to cry about, Nadja,” she said absently. “It’s not very serious.” She got up from the floor and went to the kitchen, calling my brother in from outside to help her make dinner.

  —

  PARIS WAS ONLY AS BIG as home and school and back again. Françoise knew the butcher and the women at the bakery. She knew the Parc Monceau, with its bright off-limits grass. She knew the sleepy streets where doctors and lawyers lived with their wives and well-dressed children and small dogs. She did not know how to get to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, though she could see it, toy-sized, through the low buildings of the seventeenth arrondissement. She rode the Métro to school, and yet it never occurred to her that the line stretched on past her stop, snaking into uncharted parts of the city.

  But that May of 1968, in the center of the city, a wild fever was spreading. The news came through the radio and the papers. The students, it was said, had laid siege to the universities. The factory workers were on strike. The radio was on constantly, the latest events an increasing buzz at the dinner table. The students were ripping up the pavement. The students were throwing Molotov cocktails. And then the news broke that De Gaulle had threatened a siege of his own. Josée had been about Françoise’s age when the Germans took Paris, and Paul a few years older. They knew what it meant, a city surrounded by an army.

  “Go to the store,” Josée said. Françoise hesitated. Her mother always gave her a list when she sent her shopping.

  “What should I buy?”

  “Everything you can find,” Josée said. “Nothing that might spoil.”

  At the store, the line already stretched down the block. All the neighborhood grandparents were there. They had their baskets; they looked straight ahead. They appeared prepared to wait hours without complaint. It was as if everyone around her had fallen into the steps of a dance that she had never known existed.

  The trains went on strike, the schools shut down. Fresh provisions were becoming scarce. Tanks had rolled up to the city’s perimeter and no trucks were entering. On the radio, the government urged people to leave so that it would be easier to isolate the students. They warned citizens not to stockpile gasoline in their bathtubs, as some had done during World War II.

  It was as if the past three decades had folded up and disappeared.

  All through the neighborhood, the fear was palpable. Josée began to pack. But Paul was not scared. The uncertainty excited him. He announced that he would stay. As a doctor, he got an ample ration of gasoline. If he chose to leave later, he would still be able to.

  Françoise pleaded to be allowed to remain in Paris, “so that I can be useful to Papa.” It was as if she felt the city pulsing, ready to open itself to her.

  Josée warned her that she might find herself all alone. But all alone meant no domestic help, and that’s just as it was on weekends and holidays. All alone sounded wonderful. Besides, Françoise argued, someone would need to help Paul with his medical work.

  And so in the end, the rest of the family left Paris, and Françoise and her father stayed.

  In the middle of that first afternoon, she went for a walk by herself. The shops were closed. The streets were completely deserted. There were no cars, no people. It was spooky, this ghost city.

  But Paul was in extraordinarily high spirits. That evening, he led her to the kitchen. “So!” he said, clapping his hands. “We have to make food!”

  “What do you know how to make?” Françoise asked dubiously.

  “Mayonnaise,” Paul said. Françoise was impressed. She had never seen her father in the kitchen before.

  “We’ll make deviled eggs then,” she suggested, as this she had been shown how to do. She put a pot of water on to boil.

  “You know, before I met your mother, I often cooked for myself,” Paul said. Françoise couldn’t quite imagine this. Paul was upset by her incredulity. “It is very important to know how to make a good mayonnaise,” he told her. He gave her a seminar on the emulsification of oil and egg yolks and the proper quantities of mustard, until somehow, through his bluster, a mayonnaise mounted.

  The following night they ate hard-boiled eggs, and after that he drove them to one of his favorite expensive restaurants, which had managed to stay open through the turmoil. It was the first time they had ever been to a restaurant together, just the two of them, and Françoise felt herself exist in his eyes.

  Many evenings, when he had returned from the half-closed clinic, he suggested they go see what was happening in the Latin Quarter. They had the city to themselves and Paul sped through red lights, the wind riffling Françoise’s short hair. She was not scared. Her heart was full. She was so grateful to her mother for leaving her behind.

  In the Latin Quarter, the lights were on and the streets were crowded. The students had occupied the universities, but the doors were wide open and anyone could walk in. The halls were filled with sleeping bags and mattresses. The walls were covered with posters. BENEATH THE PAVING STONES, THE BEACH! Françoise read each one carefully, inspired by their design. There were no policemen in sight. The whole quarter was en liesse—in a state of communal, collective jubilation.

  The students weren’t hippies, like their counterparts in the United States. The boys didn’t have long hair and the girls didn’t wear flowers. They seemed more passionate about their ideas than about any particular style of dress. In nearly every room she and Paul walked into, an assembly or a heated debate was taking place. The word “solidarité” bounced through the buildings. Each time a new factory went on strike, the news was shouted victoriously from person to person.

  Paul wandered freely through this landscape without pretending to listen to any of the speechifying. He was neither against the students’ uprising nor for it. He was simply the usual jovial self he was with strangers, the kind of man who always tried to make cashiers laugh. For Françoise, though, these students—only six or seven years older than she—were adults. They had brought the entire city to a standstill, and she was awed by their power.

  Back in the apartment, she played secretary
to her father. She took dictation at the typewriter, grateful she had learned to type. She worked the duplicating machine. The mysterious language of medical reports arranged itself into clear, satisfying meaning. She distinguished benign moles from melanomas, surprised at how simple it all was to learn. Paul showered her with compliments. For those few weeks, the two lived in easy harmony. Françoise cooked them rudimentary meals in the kitchen. She sat at the desk his secretary usually occupied. “You do this so much better,” Paul said, his hand on Françoise’s shoulder.

  Françoise was happy, so happy, so happy. As my mother told me this story years later, she choked on “happy,” and it came out as a strangled shout—heu-reuse—as if the word, unable to contain the great many things she felt, had broken in two. Her father finally saw her as an adult. They worked so well together, in perfect synchrony, and this is what her future could one day hold.

  “This is my favorite daughter,” Paul had always said when he presented her to his friends. “She’s going to be a doctor one day, just like me.”

  “It seemed . . . ,” my mother said, then hesitated. “It seemed too beautiful to be true.”

  The electricity cut out more and more often. The portable radio, their only source of news, ran on batteries, and there was no way to replace them. They no longer kept it switched on all the time. In the Latin Quarter, the inherent paradox of students on strike showed through the ragged places where fervor wore thin. Who but their own parents cared if the students refused to attend classes? And yet the siege continued. Each day became a victory for its own sake. They could not stop now. They had already gone this far.

  One evening toward the end, when the electricity had been off for longer than usual, the atmosphere in the Latin Quarter was festive and tinged with wildness. The restaurants, the contents of their freezers in danger of spoiling, were serving free meals on the street. Paul and Françoise seated themselves at a table. The waiters came with course after course, unasked for. Wine flowed. Spirits soared. It could not hold but they did not care. It was the feast at the end of the world.

  —

  ON MY SECOND or third full day of high school, I was making use of my morning free period to complete my math homework in the library. Stuyvesant was a beautiful high school, the jewel of New York City’s public education system. I was eager to leave behind the person I had been in my small private school and reinvent myself in this incoming freshman class of eight hundred students. The building’s ten stories were linked by escalators. A million-dollar pedestrian bridge arched from the school over the busy West Side Highway. The library was lined with windows that looked over the Hudson River and the downtown skyline.

  A crowd was gathering by the library’s windows. One by one students left the round tables where they were working and pressed their noses to the glass. I kept my back to them, focusing on the neat row of numbers that unspooled before me. A thud reverberated through the walls like a sonic boom. I remember the unruly diagonal line my pen made on the graph paper.

  “Someone must have dropped a weight in the gym upstairs,” said the librarian. She laughed too loudly at her own joke.

  The bell rang to signal the change of classes.

  “Nadja,” someone said as I was leaving, “did you look out the window?” I said I didn’t want to be late and kept walking.

  “Go look,” the person said, catching my arm. “Really, just go look.”

  I went, elbowing my way through the crowd. It was the most elaborate movie set I had ever seen. A painted version of the skyline had been hung over the skyline itself, obscuring it entirely. A hole had been cut in the World Trade Center. A flap of fabric hung down. Billowing smoke, from a hidden dry-ice machine, came through the tear. That is really what I saw.

  “There was a second plane,” said one boy to another, his voice giddy and cracking. “It’s a terrorist attack.”

  Boys, I thought to myself, with a huff through my nose. They watched far too many movies.

  Over the loudspeaker, the principal announced that we would not, then that we would, then that we would not be allowed out for lunch that day. The next time I looked out a window, I looked only down. I saw men and women in business suits, talking on cell phones, swarming the streets. I had never seen so many people in the park by the river, though I’d played there often as a child. I noted to myself that the area was busy at lunchtime and did not allow myself to wonder further.

  Our English teacher, a pretty young woman with a soft, lilting voice, abandoned the lesson plan she had prepared for the day. Instead, she asked us to talk about our mornings.

  Then the building shook again. The lights flickered off, then back on again. I stared at my hands. They were gripping the edge of my desk. My knuckles had turned white. Why were my hands doing that? I felt on the brink of a realization.

  “It’s just interference from a plane passing overhead,” the teacher said, tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear, “like cell phone static when you walk under a bridge.” My fingers loosened. On the loudspeaker, the principal announced that we would not be following our regular schedules. We were to report to our homerooms to be counted. I felt a flicker of annoyance—my math homework, now complete, would not be collected.

  I do not remember running into my best friend in the hallway, but she told me later that I had. She was a friend from childhood, one of the few people I knew in this huge, unfamiliar school. She told me I had been delighted to see her. She told me I had not noticed that she was sobbing.

  My homeroom was several flights up. A new friend of mine had her leg in a full cast. The administration had shut down the escalators and the elevators. As my friend negotiated each step, I held her crutches. My emotions focused into fury that they had shut down the elevators. We pushed open the door of the stairwell on the tenth floor. A girl stopped and stared.

  “Nadja!” she said. “Your dad has been looking everywhere for you.”

  “My dad?” I said. And there he was, coming down the hallway toward me. His face flashed like a kaleidoscope: relief, anger, terror.

  “There you are,” he said and wrapped me so tightly in his arms I could not breathe. I had never seen my father look scared. He grabbed me by the hand and we ran back down the stairs.

  My mother was in the lobby, her face streaked with tears. We squeezed awkwardly out through the doors, my mother unwilling to let go of me.

  “Should I take my bike?” I asked my father.

  “If you don’t, you’ll never see it again,” he said. My hands trembled as I undid the lock. My mind felt leaden and would not function. Even then, I did not let myself wonder what was going on. We joined a thick stream of people walking uptown along the pedestrian path by the river. In my memory everyone was eerily quiet, talking in whispers if at all. And then we all stopped and turned.

  I do not know how to describe what I saw. There was the World Trade Center, half a mile away. There was only one tower. And then the gray of it peeled off, infinitely slowly, gathering on itself as it rolled down. As the gray descended it revealed a skeleton of red beams. They hung in the air, shimmering. And then they too became powder, became particles, became the air and fell, and everything fell, everything fell.

  My mother screamed the name of her friend who lived beneath the towers. A huge white cloud was moving toward us. I watched as my school disappeared. All around us, people turned and began to run uptown. I had grown up in a city of skyscrapers. They weren’t supposed to fall down.

  “Run!” someone shouted at us as he passed. “The smoke will kill you!” And then I was very high up in the air. Somewhere on the walkway below, a girl turned and began walking. From where I floated, I could just make out the words she was saying: “My friends, my school, my friends, my school!” Over and over, like an incantation. A stranger offered her water. She didn’t respond.

  She should take that water, I thought. She needs to calm down.
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  My father took the water and pressed it into my hands. And then I was back in my body. The words were coming out of my own mouth. I forced a sip down my throat.

  We turned away from the river, onto Canal Street, and became just the three of us once more. The street was achingly familiar. We had walked this way many times, my family and I. But it was different now, in a way I could not name.

  Ahead of us, a man had set up an easel on the sidewalk. He was absorbed in his painting. Look, I said, tugging on my father’s arm. On the canvas, the towers burned. But past him, in the real skyline above, the towers were gone.

  —

  I TOLD THIS STORY so many times over the years that it ceased being a memory. On rare occasions, when speaking to a close friend, I could still feel the aftershocks of emotion. But most times I simply felt myself stepping through a series of empty images that I had stepped through many times before. I could not turn my head left or right. I could not see the details I hadn’t already told. Once, at a party, a girl said with delight, “Ooh, you’re giving me shivers!” and I felt the twisted pleasure of doing myself violence.

  For the most part, I stopped talking about it. When I did, I never included the man painting on the street. That’s my father’s story now, immortalized in the comic he wrote about the day. I wonder, at times, if I can still see that red skeleton of beams hanging in the air or if I only see the drawing he made of them. We’d talked about it, he and I, before he drew the image: how you didn’t see that in the newsreel. So you saw it, too, he said, and I had. I had seen it, too. But my memories were so easily overwritten by his. They squared themselves away into comic book panels that contained pictures of me I had not even posed for.

  They sent us back to school while the ruins were still red embers. We showed our high school ID cards to the federal guard stationed at Canal Street, downtown still off-limits to most. Our return was televised: the brave students of Stuyvesant High School. Journalists found and called our home phone numbers. Our teachers spoke over clanging metal as cranes lifted pieces of the skyscrapers onto the barges outside our windows. A man in a full yellow hazmat suit stepped into our classroom and told us to ignore him. The small device in his hand went beep beep beep BEEPBEEPBEEP. He made a few notes and left silently. A social worker handed out a worksheet: If Lucy feels alienated from the adults around her, if Lucy has trouble sleeping at night, if Lucy becomes anxious when watching the news, then Lucy has post-traumatic stress disorder.