“I’ve just come from the Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc,” she said. “And I want to let you all know that one brave activist among us, Françoise Mouly, was expelled for joining our cause.” The crowd erupted in cheers and whistles.
“Mouly! Are you here? Come up onstage!” the girl said. The crowd parted around Françoise as she made her way forward.
“I’m going to call the school,” the girl announced. The crowd quieted as the phone rang.
The school secretary answered.
“Put me through to the headmistress,” the student said. She identified herself as secretary-general of their organization, which had quite an official-sounding name. The phone clicked, and the headmistress picked up, exasperated.
“I’m calling to verify that you indeed expelled your student Françoise Mouly this afternoon.”
“Yes, bien sûr,” the headmistress said. “I warned her not to leave and she left.”
“Is that so?” the girl said. “Because, madame, I am calling to inform you that we will be voting to form a direct action support committee devoted entirely to this cause.” She rattled on in this fashion, sounding threatening. “She used such impressive words!” my mother told me, remembering not the exact words but the hushed awe they had inspired in her.
“Of course, um, the decision has not yet been finalized,” the headmistress said. “There are many factors to take into consideration, and rules, and exceptions, of course.”
“Can you confirm that the expulsion will not go through? Your voice is currently being broadcast to an assembly of six hundred people, and we all stand ready to vote,” the girl said.
“Well, yes, certainly, I have nothing against Mouly,” the headmistress said. A wild cheer ripped through the crowd as Françoise’s savior hung up the phone.
Françoise returned to school giddy with power. For the rest of that spring, whenever the headmistress reprimanded her, Françoise responded with veiled references to her “friends at the organization.” She felt invincible.
But when Josée came to pick up her daughters for Easter vacation, she breezed past Françoise without a glance.
“Viens, ma chérie,” she said to Sylvie. “Oh, how I’ve missed you, you poor dear.” The two of them walked out of the school lobby arm in arm. Françoise stood clutching her suitcase, unsure whether to follow.
—
“WHO WAS GUYOT?” I asked my mother. Three years had passed since she had first begun telling me her story.
I was sitting at the kitchen table while she stood at the counter, chopping a head of romaine with manic speed. Guests were arriving in an hour. She had come home from work later than planned, as usual, and the roast she’d left to start cooking on an automatic timer was burnt to a crisp.
“What are we going to do about the dinner?” she asked me. “There’s almost nothing left of this.” Her voice shook.
I got up to pour her a glass of wine. “We can order Chinese,” I said, handing it to her.
“We ordered Chinese last time,” she said. “It’s embarrassing.”
My childhood memories were dotted with dinner parties in this windowless space with its huge mirror on one wall and skylight above, the wine flowing for hours and the lazy ceiling fan swirling the cigarette smoke. We ate with our elbows on the table and stuck our forks straight into the serving dishes. My mother moved easily between stove and table, nudging me to help her clear plates or pass out dessert spoons. As I grew older, I often thought fondly of that “dinner party feeling,” surrounded by adults and allowed to just listen, coming and going from the table unnoticed, my attention drifting around the room. But gradually I became aware, too, of the bright energy-efficient lightbulb that hung too close to the table, of how cramped it was when we sat eight, of my mother’s underlying insecurity about how these dinners compared to those her friends hosted in return, in formal dining rooms with unchipped plates.
In my new separate life, I’d filled my Brooklyn apartment with plants and thrifted furniture and read articles about how best to create atmospheric lighting. I threw elaborate dinner parties, first using the four recipes—ratatouille, pot-au-feu, choucroute garnie, couscous—that my mother had always made for company, but soon learning how to cook Indian and Vietnamese and how to invent my own recipes as well. For a long time I thought that because these things were feminine, I had learned them from my mother. Now I saw our SoHo loft through a stranger’s eyes, and I realized that I had not. More and more now, my mother turned to me on questions of hostessing, as if I were the authority.
“We can eat on the roof,” I said. “That’ll be special.”
“Yes!” she said, taking a long sip of her wine.
“Will you sit with me for just a few minutes?” I asked softly.
She slid down into a chair with a loud sigh, letting her head fall back so that it rested against the seat. Her eyes closed. “What were you asking?” she said, lifting her head.
“Who was Guyot?”
“Oh, I don’t remember,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t know even back then. But oh, how I wanted him to be free!”
“Is it possible that that’s why Josée was angry with you?”
“That what was?” she asked, tensing.
“That you had been expelled.”
“Of course not! The headmistress tried to expel me twenty-three times! I kept count,” she said with a hint of pride.
“But . . . all the more reason, no?”
“No.” She was adamant. “I don’t think the headmistress even told my mother about Guyot. She understood . . . she knew things weren’t okay between my mother and me.”
“How would the headmistress know that?”
“I had . . . incidents at the school. Related to my mother. I don’t remember the details.”
“Related to your mother? How?”
My mother’s eyes drifted shut as she tried to remember. “There were letters from her maybe, I don’t know. Maybe we talked on the phone,” she said. She slipped off her clip-on earrings and tugged gently at her earlobes. “She hated me. Hated me,” my mother continued. Elle me haïssait, the verb a cry of pain in her mouth. I wanted to reach out to touch her, but she had folded in on herself, hands tucked into her armpits. “I sat in the backseat of that car in silence while she fawned over Sylvie. Oh, ma pauvre petite chérie.” She clipped the earrings together and unclipped them, looking down at her hands as they moved. “I knew I was supposed to be ashamed. And it made no sense. At the time, it made no sense at all.” She sat up slowly, as if each part of her body had to be moved separately.
“I’m getting old,” she said. “My whole body aches now.”
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“No but it’s . . . it’s sort of wonderful, actually,” she said. She looked at me as though she knew that I could not understand and yet wished I would.
“I’m old,” she said. “Finally.”
“No,” I said. “Maman.” As though I could prevent this.
“No,” she agreed gently, and put her hand on mine. “Jamais. T’inquiète pas.”
The doorbell rang.
“Americans!” my mother said angrily, looking at the wall clock. She had never stopped finding it rude when people arrived on time to dinner. But by the time they’d made it up our four flights of stairs, she was beaming as she kissed their cheeks. I stood behind her, wondering if they could sense the faint disturbance our conversation had left in the air. I turned to grab the tin plates we always used for Chinese food and she turned with me, reaching for the wineglasses, so that we moved with one movement, as if unfurling a tablecloth over all that was scratched.
—
“SO YOU WERE in the school’s courtyard, urging the other girls to join you, and the college students were waiting outside?” I was asking. Two more years had passed. I had called her on her cell phone at work
and she had turned on the video function, as she often did, even when we were both walking down the street.
“Look at that! Can you see that?” she asked, swinging her phone toward the window.
“I can’t see anything. I see a corner of your window frame.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed like a child. “The clouds just descended on the skyline. It was so fast. Everything turned white.”
“I see the white,” I said.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” she said. A few months before, The New Yorker had moved into 1 World Trade Center, the building we had watched rise, bit by bit, from the ashes of 2001. While her coworkers spent months carefully packing their offices, my mother had piled on so many new projects that she staggered from the stress. She did not say she was afraid. She only moved faster and faster, until she became a blur. She barely slept. Sometimes she sank to the floor in public, leaning against a wall until she found the energy to keep working. She packed her Times Square office in two sleepless nights. But when I asked, now, about the new building, she would only tell me cheerfully about how nice it was to bike to work along the river.
She sat back down at her computer, the camera trained up at her face under the fluorescent lights, and I wondered when she had become so completely unself-conscious. The thick streaks of black eyeliner had blurred below her eyes, as they often did by afternoon. She looked tired—more than tired, exhausted—but I knew she heard this often enough and trusted me not to say so.
“So you were in the courtyard,” I prompted once more, and the story unspooled from her easily yet again.
“What did the school look like?” I asked. At her suggestion, we both called up street-view images of her boarding school onto our computers.
“The entrance is so majestic!” I said. I had not pictured it like this: Gothic arched cathedral windows, mini-turrets, white and tan tiles decorating the exterior.
“Majestic?” my mother said. “It was hideous! It was so sordid. But look how white the buildings are now.” She held her phone up to her computer as she spoke, to show me the buildings. I saw the psychedelic radial lines that appear on a screen within a screen, as if they are revealing images invisible to the naked eye. The grand entrance was used only by the parents as they picked up and dropped off their daughters in the cool calm of the high-ceilinged lobby. The students themselves used a small gate on the other side of the complex to access the oppressive, Soviet-style buildings where classes were held and boarders were housed. My mother showed me the dorms that had been hers. She clicked through the streets. I watched her face and I could see new memories begin to rise.
The hall supervisor wasn’t like the other teachers, who were all small-minded women who had lost their enthusiasm decades before. She was young and pretty, and she was posted at the Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc for just that year, while she completed her training. Her name was exotic, though it escaped my mother now—Alexandra, perhaps. A gentle name that rang of faraway places.
“She was very kind to me,” my mother said, “even when she didn’t have to be. Especially . . . during those difficult incidents.” She said this last in a mumble, with a wave of her hand, as if to brush aside the words she had just spoken.
“What incidents?” I said.
“I told you,” my mother said, looking straight at me through her phone. Her look was clear: a pleading.
“You didn’t,” I said.
“I thought . . . ,” my mother said, and looked up and away. The silence buzzed between us, a thick digital static.
“I told you this,” she repeated. “I thought . . . I can’t . . .” I let the silence grow, filling the rooms we were in like slowly rising water. My mother sighed and looked toward her closed office door. She blinked and wiped at her eye with the back of her palm.
My chest clenched, but I said again, more softly, “You didn’t tell me.” She had told me every story two or three times by then. I hadn’t known that there was more to tell.
“I don’t remember what set it off,” she began, her voice hesitant at first. As she spoke, she forgot the phone she was holding and the image drifted toward her lap until the screen went black, so that I heard only her voice, muffled, from above.
Françoise was in the hallway, hitting her head against the wall. Her hands were at her face as if she might be able to open her body and step free of it. She was screaming. And then she was lifted, still flailing, and transported by strong arms to the infirmary. Hands struggled to tie her down.
The headmistress came in. She was a tight-lipped blond woman about Josée’s age. Some part of Françoise watched everything with clear eyes even as her body fought and flailed. The headmistress had good intentions. She just wanted Françoise to quiet down. Françoise was rooting for the headmistress. She willed her to find the right words. If only the right words could be spoken, the spell would break. Until then, her own mouth could do nothing but scream.
“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 Françoi
se 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.
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