On our last day, we again walked together to the village. It was a small road, with few cars, that wound through vineyards and a shady forest. I spotted a field lit up gold in the early-evening light. Bushes shaded it from the road.
“Now,” I said, and grabbed his wrist and pulled him toward it.
The itchy grass raised small welts on my sensitive skin. A grasshopper landed on my calf, sticky legs springing off again. Gnats aimed for my eyes. Zane was nervous, and it took a very long time and then a very short time. And yet, in that moment, I was thinking, This is a story. A field at sunset in the South of France. He looked into my eyes and seemed to realize for the first time that they were not brown but flecked with gold and green. This, I thought, as he curled his head against my shoulder like a small boy, is a story I will tell my daughter someday. Only later, when my best friend laughed at me, did I realize what a strange thought that was to have.
That evening, as I got ready for dinner, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror to see if I had changed. I was too young then even to know how clichéd that impulse was. My face was flushed, and grass stuck in my hair. My parents did not seem to notice. Their friend did, however. He was a decade older than my father. He stared hungrily across the table. He put his hands on my shoulders to massage them. He told my boyfriend, several times, what a very lucky young man he was. My parents laughed. I pulled Zane away from the table when their backs were turned and we went and sat quietly under a tree.
That fall, my parents’ friend sent a glossy photograph of me taken that summer, with a love letter attached. It was a surprisingly unflattering photo. My eyes were as dull and vacant as a cow’s. My mother sat on my bed to read the letter to me.
“Ew,” I said.
“It’s sweet,” she said. “You should keep it.” She left it next to the plastic pink fairy figurine I had not had the heart to place in the box with my other toys.
A few months later, I stood in the doorway of my mother’s bathroom.
“Maman,” I said, “s’il te plaît! Just let me spend the night at Zane’s house.”
“The answer is no,” she said, leaning into the mirror to adjust a curl.
“But why? His parents already said it was okay. Please?”
“I already said no, Nadja. Stop arguing with me.”
“But give me a reason!”
“I don’t need to explain myself to you. You . . . you don’t want to go getting yourself into situations where you . . . where you will feel pressured to do things that you don’t want to do,” she said.
“Mais, Maman,” I said, exasperated, “you don’t have to worry about that. That’s already happened, and I wanted it to.” I thought this might convince her. It seemed impossible to me that she didn’t already know.
She finally turned to look at me.
“The answer is definitely no,” she said. “And you really shouldn’t tell me these things.”
—
FRANÇOISE DIDN’T REALIZE what had happened until that autumn. The knowledge came to her all at once, a sure and physical thing, like a ball she had caught without knowing it was being thrown. Her breasts were swollen. She slept all the time. She’d missed her period, though that had been easy to ignore, as it had begun only a few months earlier.
She wasn’t nervous about telling Jean-Michel. Wasn’t this what they had daydreamed together all summer long—children, a house of their own? He seemed at least hesitantly happy at her news. But she was terrified of telling her mother.
“I knew it!” Josée spat angrily. “Of course you are. Well. Will he marry you?”
Jean-Michel and his father, Louis, sat stiffly in the living room of the Paris apartment. Françoise had imagined her parents rendered silent by Jean-Michel’s declarations of love—he was a big talker and proud of his eloquence. But now he sat quietly by his father, meek in his too-tight tie and shiny shoes. He kept his eyes on the ground as Louis and Josée worked out the details. Françoise fought a heavy wave of disappointment. It was just another sign, she told herself, just another sign that they needed to escape these parents, these formal rooms, this deadening, stifling atmosphere, and build a home of their own where their voices could carry as loud as they wished.
After Jean-Michel and his father left, Paul pulled Françoise into the dining room and shut the door.
“You’re not marrying him,” he said. He wasn’t going to stand by and watch her throw her future away. She was only fifteen. She hadn’t even passed her baccalaureate.
On the contrary, it was perfect timing, Françoise said. She’d have the baby in May, which would leave her a whole month to study for her exams.
No, Paul said. She’d have an abortion, not a baby.
Françoise was adamant—she could already feel the baby kicking inside her, she told him—but Paul stood his ground. She was still a minor. Her parents got to decide. There were clinics in England that would take care of it.
“You’ll have to force me,” Françoise said. “I won’t go willingly.”
Françoise was not ashamed of being pregnant, nor did she particularly care whether she got married or not. She was proud of herself for calculating the months of her term and saw no flaw in her plan. She argued firmly and rationally. This child was her ticket out. It was the only way she saw to escape her family.
Finally, her father gave in. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. You can have the baby. But you’ll live at home and raise it here.”
Françoise agreed to the abortion.
—
DECADES LATER, when I kicked inside her, my mother realized she couldn’t have felt anything so early on in her pregnancy. But she had been telling the truth then—the baby was real to her, and she was certain she had felt it kicking.
I tried to imagine the older sister I’d never had. I reached back through the years for her barely formed foot but it slipped my grasp. This ghost child was conceived in August, to be born in May, just like me. Her birth would have prevented my own. I felt the strings that connected me to my mother’s past pull tight.
They flew to London on a Thursday, Josée, Françoise, and Jean-Michel. Later Josée would tell me, laughing, how Françoise turned on her heel in front of the hospital and ran down the street. How Josée and Jean-Michel had to catch her. How Jean-Michel came as far as the hospital entrance, then turned around to begin the journey back to Paris. He couldn’t afford to miss a quiz he had in school. “A quiz!” she hooted, the childish insignificance of it hilarious to her.
My mother didn’t remember any of this, didn’t remember that Jean-Michel was there at all. She remembered only the waiting room, only her mother.
“Maman, will you tell the nurse?” Françoise asked. “Will you tell her now?” The hospital rumbled around her, unintelligible and menacing.
Josée went to speak quietly in English with one of the doctors, gesturing over at her daughter. Françoise watched them carefully. She’d had only one request, which she was desperate to communicate. If she was going to kill her baby, she wanted to be there. She wanted to feel the pain, and she wanted it to be excruciating. She wanted to know the moment when the baby left her. She didn’t want to be sedated.
The nurse came over.
“Follow me, please,” she said to Françoise. She told Josée to wait in the reception area. She led Françoise to a room painted in soft tones with suffused lighting and told her to relax. Françoise lay on the hospital bed. The light was not strong enough to read by, but for once she did not mind. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts. The nurse prepared a needle.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Françoise asked. She recoiled with her whole body, her hands waving in front of her. No.
“Yes, yes,” the nurse said. Françoise recognized the word “mother,” the word “yes.” The nurse took her arm and slipped in the needle. Then she left, and Françoise was alone, alone with the st
range silence of the hospital, the hum of machinery and the muffled voices out in the hall, alone with the gentle kicking of the child she felt inside her.
Two nurses entered the room, with Josée just behind them. The nurses had her lie down on a gurney. The hospital floors were roughly tiled. The rattling metal wheels shook deep in her bones, echoed off the walls. Her vision began to swim. The noise fell away and the walls of the hospital receded. She was falling and floating, all at once.
“What’s happening?” she said. “What’s going on?” The words fought their way out from deep inside her. Her lips were rubbery and her mouth felt filled with cotton.
“Shhh,” her mother said. “It will be easier for everyone this way.”
The nurse said something in English, and she could not understand. But she understood.
“NON!” Françoise shouted. She gripped the sides of the gurney until her knuckles turned white, trying to pull herself back into the world. She fixated with wild concentration on the ceiling, on her mother’s hand. She tried to force her eyes to stay open. She screamed at the top of her lungs, though she couldn’t hear if she was making a sound.
“Espèce de salope!” You whore! she tried to shout at her mother. But the words were lost deep inside her. She tried to grab the nurse’s sleeve but her arm was already gone, asleep. The blackness slid up over the rest of her body, steady and unrelenting.
And then she was awake. Her lower body felt numb. She was alone, alone in an unfamiliar hospital room, and alone in her body. She felt an emptiness so deep she hadn’t known it could exist. It was as if a new sense had been granted to her, only to be lost again. And then she began to shake, and she felt her body fill again as she flooded with impotent rage.
chapter four
Without me, you would be nothing,” Paul spat at Josée in anger one spring evening. This was the mythology of why she’d left him. This was the line she always quoted.
Divorce was still uncommon at the time, and it was especially unusual for a mother of three children, with a wealthy husband and no career, to initiate it. Yet only twelve-year-old Andrée was truly surprised. Josée and Paul hated each other with a passion. Josée and Paul each hired lawyers. They planned the details rather calmly. At first it seemed as if the divorce would be amicable. Paul’s gambling addiction had barely dented their finances, and the money still flowed like water.
Josée was gone by July. She took Andrée and a suitcase. She first rented a houseboat just outside of Paris, far from the doctors and lawyers she had lived among for the past two decades. In a city with a finite amount of space, where laws against noise where often enforced and neighbors tiptoed around one another, the boats presented a rare kind of Wild West lawlessness. Some were hooked illegally to the city’s power grid. Some were little more than planks of driftwood and garbage bags nailed together into makeshift squats. Josée’s first boat was more like a country cabin, wooden and cozy, with bay windows in the living room that opened onto a floating terrace.
Sylvie had more or less run away from home by then. She was living on the street, in the maid’s room above a friend’s house, in a commune down in the South of France. Françoise remained at home, but she had made herself as invisible as possible. She came home late and shut herself in her room to study. She spent what little free time she had with Jean-Michel, who was enrolled in his first year of architecture school in Paris. She planned to enroll in the same school in the fall. Her father was profoundly disappointed that she would not go to medical school, and his disappointment emerged masked as anger.
“You would have made a good assistant,” he told her angrily. “But you never would have been more than that.” Maybe she would have been okay in a laboratory, but she lacked the human touch that made a great doctor. Still, at least she might have married one. She might have given Paul a son-in-law to take over his practice, he told her. He never warmed to Jean-Michel.
That August, Jean-Michel and Françoise traveled to Afghanistan for two and a half months. When they returned, everything had changed.
While they were away, Paul had gone to the houseboat with flowers.
“This is great,” he told Josée. “It’s peaceful here! It’s different! I’ll move in with you.”
She’d shut the door in his face.
On his lawyer’s advice, Paul hired a private investigator. Josée had been given a job by the real estate agent who had helped her buy her various homes. Now she managed construction sites, beating the workers there in the morning and not returning home until late in the evening. The private investigator tailed Andrée as she walked herself to school and back, the key to the boat hanging around her neck. She made her own meals, rowed the rowboat up and down the Seine by herself.
The private investigator followed Josée as well. He threw open the door of a hotel room. He snapped photos. He had caught her in flagrant delicto.
It was no longer to be a no-fault divorce. With a charge of adultery against her, Josée had no claim to her husband’s fortune. But it was not the fact of the affair that made Paul go mad with rage. Josée had had affairs before. What drove Paul to madness was the man in the photos. Paul recognized him instantly. It was Louis Guérin, Jean-Michel’s father.
Josée, with deadly accuracy, had managed to wound Paul as deeply as anyone could have ever done. She struck him in his pride. The two men looked alike, with a bearlike sturdiness and curly hair, but Paul was handsome and Louis was not. Louis was one of the local businessmen in Ussel. Paul was a surgeon, he’d “gone up” to Paris. Paul was tormented by memories of the summers in Ussel, how he’d driven down the main streets in his convertible, basking in his success. The grand doctor Mouly, returned for August with his beautiful wife and his three daughters. They praised him to his face, complimented his perfect family. But behind closed doors, the whispers must have been jumping from ear to ear. His wife had been sleeping with a local businessman. Everyone in town must have known. Everyone except him and Louis Guérin’s wife. When she heard about the affair, they said, she grabbed a shotgun, went into the backyard, and killed the ducks and chickens. And with each echoing shot she’d screamed: “Josée! Françoise! Josée! Françoise!”
“It was known,” Josée told me once with great pride. Oh, how the news of her affair spread. It was known all over France.
Paul had expected that Françoise would break up with Jean-Michel immediately out of filial duty. The boy had never been good enough for her anyway. When she didn’t do so of her own accord, he ordered her to. She refused. He slammed his fist down on the table. The only explanation he could find for his daughter’s stubbornness was that Françoise must have known about Josée’s affair all along. He was wounded to his core, lonely, losing his mind with hurt and anger. Every night he came into her room and sat down on her bed.
“Your mother’s a whore,” he would tell her, jumping up to pace the floor. “Nothing but a dirty whore. When I married her, I thought she would be eternally grateful.” Who else would have married a bastard girl? He should have listened to his parents. Look what she’d done to him! Look how she’d repaid him, the pétasse!
I recognized this as the continuation of the story my mother had begun all those years before. “My father used to come into my room and . . . I’ll tell you when you’re older.” I let out a sigh of relief, and my mother glanced at me curiously before continuing.
“That’s my mother you’re talking about,” she would remind her father, but he would not listen.
Françoise shook from the fallout of her father’s hurt. It was more than she could bear. She packed her suitcases. Paul tore through her room, trying to unpack them.
“You can’t leave me,” he said. “You can’t leave me here all alone.”
He followed her down the stairs, screaming at her, while Françoise tried to float outside of her body. Out on the street, Jean-Michel was behind the wheel of an idling car. Louis Guérin h
ad offered to rent a studio apartment for his son, as was standard at the time. It embarrassed Françoise to have Louis pay the bill, but she could no longer live with her father and she had nowhere else to go.
“You’re just like her,” he was saying now as he tried to wrest the suitcase from her hands. “Please. Don’t you leave me too.” Jean-Michel twisted in his seat and looked worriedly over his shoulder. He had never stood up to her father. She threw her suitcase in back and slammed the trunk. Paul was so close beside her that it clipped him on the forehead. He reeled back and punched her.
Then she was lying in the street, looking up at parts of faces at unfamiliar angles. A metallic taste filled her mouth. Her hand came away bright with blood. Her father kneeled and helped her up. She leaned on him. He brought her back upstairs to the medical office. He reset her broken nose. When she was able to think again, there was only one relentless, pounding fear: What if this means I can’t leave? But her father was meek now, ashamed. He let her go, his eyes on the floor.
“Were you angry with your mother?” I asked my mother when she told me this. “For sleeping with your boyfriend’s father?”
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, and there was a long silence. “Angry? I don’t know what it would mean to be angry with my mother. That wasn’t possible for me then. I still can’t imagine what it would be, to feel anger toward her. I was angry with my father, for talking to me about her that way. That was easy. But my mother? She made me suffer. But being angry would have meant believing she could change.”
—
IT WAS SOMETIME during my junior year of high school that my mother discovered the cookies were missing. One day some months before, she’d announced, “I’ve bought some snacks for your brother and I’ve hidden them.” It sounded like a speech she had rehearsed in her head. “They’re not for you. You don’t need them. Okay?”
“Okay,” I’d mumbled, grateful that she seemed willing to let the conversation end there. I hated talking about my weight. My body felt undefined. It seemed to shape-shift by the second. As long as no one mentioned it, I held on to a hope that perhaps I wasn’t fat. But when my mother talked about my body, I immediately felt myself expand, the increased pull of gravity. Each second was excruciating. So I was willing to pretend with her that I didn’t already know that in the low cabinet by the fridge was a stash of beef jerky, fruit roll-ups, cookies, and chips.
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