I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  Even in retelling it now she said, “But you see, I have never understood how to follow the rules.” She told me about showing a new colleague around the building that afternoon. She had gone through a door, then turned and noticed that he hadn’t followed. He stood in the hallway, hesitating. The door was covered in signs that said DO NOT ENTER. It led through the building’s technical core. It was a shortcut to her office. “It had never occurred to me to actually not enter,” she said. “But I suppose to some people it would.”

  This new story that had emerged, however, the story of the fits at school, had not been smoothed. It did not fit neatly inside her. It did not build into the narrative of who she had become. She had told me stories that seemed far more difficult with dry eyes and a steady voice. Perhaps she had not omitted this story from her life because it was painful to recall. Perhaps it was painful to recall because it had been omitted.

  She was glancing worriedly at her watch. She was late for a gala she had to attend with my father. She pushed back the curls from her face and looked at me through the phone. Her gray-green eyes crinkled with love.

  “Let’s talk soon,” she said. She hung up the phone.

  The eerie silence of my apartment rose up around me. I felt, as I often felt, the violence of my project. What right did I have to reach so deep into her past? I had asked my friends, women between twenty and thirty, if they had asked their mothers to tell them their lives in this way. Most said no. Most said they weren’t sure they’d want to know.

  Ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was my mother.

  “Rebecca,” she said, instead of hello. “I was just walking to the elevators and it came back to me: her name wasn’t Alexandra, it was Rebecca. It would have sounded exotic to me then. Now that I think about it, she was probably Jewish. The way she looked . . . it would make sense.” The elevator arrived, and she hung up again.

  I thought of a story my parents often told with amusement. In my mother’s first years in America, when she had been dating my father for several months, she had been surprised to learn that a good friend of theirs was Jewish. The man was so obviously so that my father laughed at her surprise.

  “And him, too? And him? And him?” she’d asked, rattling off the very Jewish names of their friends, men with prominent noses and bushy eyebrows.

  “Yes,” my father assured her. Most everyone they knew was Jewish. It had never occurred to her. I pictured my mother now, as she rode the elevator down through the reinforced core of that gleaming new building. I pictured Rebecca’s face morphing in her mind to fit the many she’d seen since, before settling again, changed, in the deep drifts. I remembered that long-ago dinner party, when my mother said my brother and I were in all of her memories, even those from long before we were born. It was true. I stirred the memories to the surface, and they changed as she told them to me. Bright threads of myself, embroidered upon her past.

  —

  THAT SUMMER, the summer of 1971, my mother discovered sex. All spring, she and Jean-Michel had rubbed against each other in doorways and on park benches, in the back room of the café, but he hadn’t been allowed past the boarding school gate. That summer in Ussel, however, they found their way into the groundskeeper’s cottage at Les Bezièges. It had been abandoned for years. There was no electricity or water, no furniture. They spent entire days on the dusty wooden floor, experimenting. “Like rabbits,” my mother told me more than once. I let myself picture two white bunnies in a toolshed, noses twitching. Afterward, she and Jean-Michel lay on their backs, smoking and dreamily planning their maison du paradis. They would have a real home, theirs alone, filled with children and animals and a real bed, their bed, soft and bathed in sunlight. Curtains. A fireplace. A drafting table where Jean-Michel could work on his architectural plans. He was a year older than Françoise and would begin his studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in the fall. He talked of his grand plans, of how architecture could change society. Françoise listened, her head on the rise and fall of his chest. She knew by then that she did not want to be a plastic surgeon. She wanted to find her own path, but she didn’t know what it would be. As Jean-Michel spoke, a new possible future opened before her. She had always loved to work with her hands. She traded her father’s surgical tools for Jean-Michel’s X-Acto knives, carving new noses for building architectural models.

  In the evenings, when the long summer sun stretched pink rays across the cobwebs and rusty handsaws, they ran back to the main house just in time to sit down at the table, flushed and sweaty and smelling of sex, wood chips in Françoise’s hair. Josée’s perfect eyebrows rose, but she said nothing.

  At the very end of August, when Paul came down from Paris, Josée called Françoise into the formal living room.

  “Your father and I have something to discuss with you,” Josée told her, her voice echoing off the double-height ceilings. “Are you and Jean-Michel having sex?”

  “Of course not,” my mother said with genuine indignation. How could she voice something so private across the expanse of this room? And with her father present! She wasn’t even aware of lying.

  “In front of my father!” she told me, the indignation still fresh years later. “If Josée had talked to me alone, maybe that would have been different.”

  —

  AS A TEENAGER, I knew Prospect Park best by night, when we sat in the dugouts of the baseball field drinking forties of malt liquor. But during the day, amid families enjoying their first spring picnics, the vast lawns covered in colorful blankets, I blinked against the sun and did not know how to orient myself. This was Zane’s park, though, his neighborhood, and I did not worry about getting lost. We paced the looping paths aimlessly, holding hands. I could hear in his voice that he was nervous, and I felt a small flicker of pleasure in my chest. I rarely seemed to make him nervous.

  Zane had too-short hair and a crooked grin, a long thin nose and long lashes. He wore T-shirts with political slogans, and his pants were so torn from climbing trees that they seemed about to fall off his body. He carried around a beat-up copy of On the Road. I had a crush on him so big it flew out of me and above me like a helium balloon. Everyone knew. I’d memorized all of Howl, hoping to impress him. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, I mouthed to myself, as if each word were its own love song.

  He asked me to hang out with him after school one day. We wandered to SoHo and sat on a public bench, watching the giraffe-legged models walk by to their photo shoots. In a roundabout way, he answered the question I hadn’t asked. I was too young. Too sweet. Too nice. He didn’t want to hurt me. I nodded, lips firmly pressed. I swallowed the hard knot that rose in my throat. “Peace love and anarchist applesauce,” he said with a goofy grin as we hugged good-bye. It was his thing, that phrase, how he always said good-bye.

  That evening, I sucked the insides of my forearms till they were covered with purple bruises. I did not want to be nice. N always stood for “nice” when friends made acrostics of my name. “Banish ‘nice’ from your vocabularies,” my English teacher said that year. “It is the most meaningless adjective.” It would take me years to unlearn that. To realize that nice was rare.

  My mother arched an eyebrow in the morning, taking in my arms. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said. “It looks very unappetizing.” I glared at her. What did she know of pain? But I tugged down my sleeves.

  We were the same age, Zane and I, but I was young for a New York City fifteen-year-old. I had gaped when my new friends passed around a joint on our lunch hour, and I worried my naïveté would not be easily forgotten. Only two years earlier, in middle school, I had somberly cut and pasted a collage of blackened lungs and placed it on my mother’s bed. SMOKING AGES YOU PREMATURELY, it read. Now I slid a cigarette out of the pack of Gauloises in her nightstand. My best friend and I sat on my fire escape and learned how not to cough. We plotted our path to the p
oets and stoners with military precision.

  We were a high school of the uncool, and our standards were strange. Entry to Stuyvesant required a score in the top 3 percent on an SAT-like exam and nothing else. There were autistic students who wandered the hallways whistling to themselves, Russian kids who sold stolen graphing calculators from the inside pockets of their trench coats. We organized ourselves into separate constellations, based largely on ethnicity—Asian or white—with social hierarchies that did not overlap. The football team was called the Peglegs and lost nearly every game. It was cool to get good grades, though cooler still to get them without working hard. It was not uncommon for a student to cry in the halls over a bad test score.

  And yet in my world, it was all about the beat poets and Audre Lorde. It was about protesting the Afghanistan war and wearing T-shirts to school that read FUCK BUSH. It was about the Great Books course with the charismatic teacher where we wrote our own versions of The Sound and the Fury and Pale Fire. Even the girls from the Upper West Side dyed hidden locks of their hair purple.

  It seemed important, in those high school years, to knock off firsts as quickly as possible. First kiss, first hangover, first cigarette, first class cut, first joint rolled, first blowjob, first ride in a dealer’s car. But at fifteen, I had never kissed anyone. Not even at summer camp.

  My best friend and I went to CBGB. It was long past the punk rock luster of the 1980s, but it was one of the few places with live music that did not card us at the door. In the bathroom, we tried to open the bottle of wine I had stolen from my parents with the backs of our earrings, with a pen, with a safety pin, while heavy metal shook the walls. In bodegas, I bought us beer by speaking in fractured Franglais. “Twenty-one?!” I would exclaim. “In my country, it’s sixteen!” It worked about half the time.

  In the basement of the Brooklyn townhouse where the permissive parents filled the upstairs bathroom with marijuana plants, I spent long stoned evenings grabbing for my cell phone, sure my mother was calling and sure that I had forgotten how to speak French. My friend and I bought a glass pipe on Canal Street, but we had nothing to put in it, so we unrolled cigarettes and shoved the tobacco in the bowl. The first time I bought pot, I said “twenty dollars’ worth” to the dealer on the phone, and my friend went gray with embarrassment. We cut school one day to practice rolling joints until they were perfect cylinders. I learned to ask for “a dub” or “a dime.” I learned to say “trees” and “bud” instead of “pot.” I learned to say “word, he’s mad chill” as I watched Zane disappear around corners to kiss other girls. I learned to make it all roll off my tongue, like so many exhalations of smoke. All of this happened very fast, though it felt long then. A few months, maybe. I shed childhood with a vicious shake.

  Then, once or twice, he waited for me outside my math class, pulling faces through the window in the door. My exhilaration could have ripped the world in two. In college, a girl told me that she already knew she would never in her life be as happy again as the first time she tried cocaine. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the same with love.

  And then, miraculously, we had a date. He asked me out to the Film Forum, to see a documentary about the music of apartheid. I floated to the movie theater. When I arrived, his mother, father, little brother, and grandmother were there. I tried to hide my surprise. We all went out to a diner for greasy burgers afterward. Under the fluorescent lights, I memorized a particularly unflattering angle of his nose, just in case. His family was kind. I hugged them all good-bye. I was a few blocks away and halfway home when I heard footsteps running behind me. I turned and he kissed me. My cell phone rang, my mother calling.

  That night, I jumped up and down on my bed like I had when I was a child. I did not care that my head nearly hit the ceiling.

  He held my hand in the hallways and rested his head on my stomach when we lay in large groups by the lockers. He kissed me between my classes, and though kissing was not like I had imagined—more invasive, less sensual—I liked it anyway. We went to protests and he fought with the cops. During the morning Pledge of Allegiance, a new post-9/11 policy in New York’s public schools, he stood and said a “pledge of resistance” instead. He was reprimanded for it and continued. I traced his name with my finger in the article in the school paper, flushed with pride. I filled notebooks with the intense peaks and valleys of emotion I felt each time he smiled at me or didn’t and tried not to let him see. It did not seem to occur to either of us to actually get to know each other. He told me about his childhood once or twice, only happy things. Mostly he told me the plots of movies I had not seen, acting out the parts.

  He dropped acid after school even though I’d asked him not to. I was worried that it might change him and did not want anything to change. My father had told me a story about a man who dropped acid only once and now spent his days in front of a supermarket, slowly swallowing and then disgorging the same long length of rope. But then again, my father had also told me that hallucinogenics were the only drugs worth trying, back when he thought I would never grow up. Zane took acid anyway, which did not surprise me, then apologized, which did. He did not become a man who swallowed rope. He continued to be my boyfriend, a miracle so monumental it never ceased to leave me dizzy. I was newly uncertain about all my deeply held convictions. Two years before, I had been making antismoking collages. Now I smoked on my way to school. Were all the things I had once thought taboo supposed to be swept away, one by one?

  We had been dating for five or six months when we took that walk in Prospect Park. Our intimate conversation felt perfectly private in the anonymity of the city. He named the two other couples who already had. He asked me gently if I felt ready. Somehow, I was surprised. It hadn’t quite occurred to me yet that this was a thing that we might do. Blowjobs seemed complicated enough. A friend who was very proud of having already given one tried to show me in the school hallway. “One finger or two?” she asked, grabbing my hand for demonstration. None of my close friends had had sex yet. There was some competition about which of us would be first. But no one, including me, had thought it would be me.

  I wanted to forge myself into a girl who was fast, rebellious, fearless, but I was not she and never would be. I liked the fumbling times Zane and I fooled around. I liked the terrible poem he wrote for me comparing my orgasm to a tsunami, liked it so much I did not tell him I had never had one. And yet, virginity was something one lost, and I was not sure I wanted to lose anything just yet. I sensed that he expected me to hesitate, and so, gratefully, I did.

  Shortly after, my mother asked me if I would like to invite Zane to join us in the South of France that August.

  “Really?” I asked, once again in awe of her gift for thinking of wonderful, impossible things. I had brought friends on family vacations to France before, their presence balancing the volatility of our nuclear four. But to bring Zane! To be with him, just him and me, far away from school, for days on end!

  “Yes,” she said, bemused. “Really.”

  But Zane did not seem eager. He told me that he planned to go to Cuba with a group of American activists that summer, as an act of resistance.

  “You could come after,” I said. And I also said, though it makes me cringe to remember it, “If you came, you could bring condoms.”

  His parents wanted to meet my parents first, which my parents found amusing. They planned a Fourth of July picnic in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The air was filled with fireflies. Zane and I played with our little brothers while our parents talked. I looked across the river at that strange, changed skyline. I realized, as I looked at that still jarring gap in the air, that there was no going backward. Some of the things I had put down so hurriedly could never be picked up again.

  On the day Zane arrived in France, we walked together to the small medieval village on a hillside. He pointed out the graffiti on the abandoned cement structures by the path. FUCK YOGURT, one said in a scrawl, and we laughed. Then he to
ld me that in Cuba he had kissed a girl.

  “It was mad whack of me,” he said. “If it makes you feel any better, my friend punched me in the face after.”

  “Oh no,” I said, glancing to make sure he was not bruised. “Okay. That’s okay, I guess.” I was not going to let this small thing derail my joy.

  My mother set up the pullout couch in the small cabin we had rented. My brother and I slept in twin beds in the same room down the hall.

  Could my brother sleep on the couch? I asked. And Zane in our room?

  Absolutely not, my mother said.

  But my brother had said he wouldn’t mind.

  “Isn’t it already enough that you have your boyfriend here, without making your poor little brother sleep on the couch?” she said. Why should my brother mind the couch? I thought. It was bigger than our small beds.

  “I’m sorry my parents are so lame,” I told Zane.

  “Now?” he asked, when we were kissing in the lit-up pool that night. But the pool was open to all the cabins, and people could appear at any time.

  “Now?” he asked, in the middle of the afternoon, when my family was out. But they were coming back any minute.

  “Now?” he asked, the night he and I babysat for family friends who were staying in a hotel. I could hear the children tossing in their sleep in the room next door. I looked at the bed, at those white hotel sheets.

  “No,” I said. I could sense his growing agitation. I worried that I had made a promise I’d be unable to keep. But I wanted a moment with magic. I wanted a moment worth remembering.