I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
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Mealtimes were no better. The food the guests left on their plates was scraped back into a big vat to be served again the next day as a stew or a shepherd’s pie. Françoise and the girl were instructed to help themselves to those same leftovers. They worked from six a.m. till eleven p.m., for fifty cents an hour.
“This is exploitation!” Françoise said to the other girl. “It must be illegal!” She needed a raise if she was ever going to make enough for a ticket to New York. If they both threatened to quit, their boss would be forced to listen, Françoise said. They’d unionize!
The girl was afraid of getting fired. Her parents would never understand.
“Just follow me,” Françoise said. She went to find the manager.
“The working conditions are unacceptable,” she began, her speech carefully prepared during hours of changing sheets.
He cut her off. How dare she complain, the little ingrate. There were a thousand other girls who would be happy to take her place. “Pack your bags,” he said. “I want you gone by tomorrow.”
He turned to the farm girl. Did she have a problem, too?
“No, no, sir!” she said. “I’m happy here! Thank you!”
Françoise packed her bags with shaking hands, willing herself not to cry. She had to call her mother to pick her up. As she waited, she braced herself for the lecture she was sure to receive.
To her surprise, Josée took her side. “You did the right thing,” she said. For a brief moment, there was solidarity.
Josée helped Françoise find a job at another hotel, in the town where she lived. There was no room or board, but the pay was three times as much and the hotel was clean. Françoise moved into the guest room of Josée’s summer home. She never stopped feeling she was living among someone else’s strange pretend family. Her relations with Louis Guérin were strained and stiff. And although he fawned over Josée’s every move, it was clear to Françoise how little respect Josée had for him. Josée loved well-educated men of strong opinions and beautiful speech, men who could match her wit and make her laugh. Louis Guérin was doting but dull. Satisfying though the pain she’d inflicted on Paul might be, with Louis himself she was bored and curt. And with Françoise, who dragged herself through the house in a bleak cloud of heartbreak, Josée fought constantly. But by the end of that summer, Françoise had a plane ticket to New York, for the beginning of September.
Here my mother’s story wavered. She couldn’t remember how she’d earned that much money or where she’d bought the ticket. And she acknowledged that Josée had recently mentioned having paid for the ticket herself. “So maybe that’s what happened,” she said, clearly skeptical.
“We got into a terrible fight one night,” she told me, “and she said to me . . . she said, ‘As if it’s not enough that we feed you, you have to piss us off as well.’ She twisted her knife into the most painful part of me. I’d had no one but her to turn to, nowhere to live, and she resented me for the food I ate? I left that night.”
“What could you have done to make her say that?” I asked.
She was silent for a while before she answered. “I don’t know.”
On the table between my mother and me lay three small notebooks that she’d found in the back of the closet, notebooks she’d kept from 1974 to 1976.
“Oh, look!” she said as she thumbed through the pages. “I wrote that line down.”
In clean round print, completely unlike her handwriting now, she’d written: “Dimanche 25 août, vers 9h30—après ‘Comme si ça ne suffisait pas de te nourrir s’il faut en plus que tu nous emmerde,’ je suis partie.” She had remembered it word for word.
—
SHE WALKED ALONG the road away from her mother’s house. As night began to fall around her, she realized she had no plan. She was too scared to face hitchhiking alone at night. She slept outdoors instead. She had no blanket, and the woods were cold and filled with strange sounds.
In the morning, she brushed herself clean and walked back to the edge of the road. She stuck out her thumb. She made it to Paris by early evening.
The city surged around her, Paris in August, a ghost city of closed doors and shuttered storefronts. She wouldn’t go to her father’s or Jean-Michel’s. Everyone else she knew was out of town.
She headed for her mother’s houseboat. It would be locked, the drawbridge up, but she could sleep on the grassy embankment that led down from the sidewalk. It was safer than the city’s parks. She climbed over the low wall that separated the riverbank from the street and began to make her way down. She froze. All the lights in the boat were on. She heard faint music and laughter. The front door opened, framing a familiar silhouette.
“Sylvie?” she called.
“Françoise!” her sister yelled back. “What are you doing here? Come in!”
Sylvie was giggling and swaying as she explained. Josée had asked her to watch the boat once and she’d secretly made copies of the keys. They were having a party! What did she want to drink?
Sylvie presented Françoise to the assembled friends with a sweep of her hand. Françoise recognized Éric, the older of the two brothers from Ussel, with his girlfriend sitting between his legs.
Invading her mother’s home uninvited made Françoise deeply uncomfortable. She wondered if she wouldn’t have preferred sleeping outside.
“I’m really tired,” she told Sylvie. “I’m going to bed.” There were only two places to sleep on the boat, Josée’s bedroom and the delicate, perfect little-girl’s room, the shrine to Andrée. She chose the latter, closing the door against the music.
Minutes later, there was a knock. Éric pushed inside, his body up against hers, and closed the door behind him.
“You’re all grown up,” he said.
She stepped back, pleading exhaustion. But he grabbed her shoulder and pulled her to him in a kiss.
“Your girlfriend,” she said.
“She doesn’t mind,” he said, pulling at her clothes.
“But I do,” she said, more forcefully now. He backed her toward the bed.
“Shh,” he said. “I know you’ve always been in love with me.”
“The idea of you,” she said. “Please, let me keep my illusions.”
“You’ll enjoy it once we begin,” he said.
But she didn’t. She kept her head turned to the side. Her eyes were on the nightstand, on her ticket to New York.
chapter five
Françoise stood alone on the sidewalk on West Thirty-Fourth Street, suitcase in hand. Her mother had warned her never to take a taxi in New York—thieves would open the door at red lights and cut off her hand with a machete to steal her rings. With about forty dollars to her name, Françoise had thought there was little danger of her taking a taxi. But the woman who’d sat next to her on the plane had insisted on giving her a ride in her cab from the airport.
On the flight over, the woman had peppered Françoise with questions. Where was she going? What would she do in New York? Did she have a job? Did she have a boyfriend? In turn, the woman disclosed so much about herself over the course of the plane ride that by the time they landed, Françoise knew as much about her as she knew about her closest friends. Françoise had been shocked by the immediate intimacy. Why would a stranger ask her if she had a boyfriend or volunteer that she herself did not? Those were private matters. But she’d done her best to answer, in her staggered English. No, she had no plan in New York, no boyfriend, no job, no permanent place to stay. She watched the woman’s eyes grow wide with worry, and the reality of her journey settled around her for the first time.
The woman explained how the city worked. The avenues went up and down, even numbers up, odd numbers down, and the streets went sideways. “Except in Greenwich Village,” she continued. “You must go see Greenwich Village! It’s a little like Paris.” Why would she want to go see something that looked like Paris, Fran�
�oise thought, when she wanted to get as far away from Paris as possible?
She’d circled the cheapest youth hostel in her guidebook and written a letter requesting a reservation. “Dear Sir or Madam,” it began, followed by phrases she’d copied diligently from a textbook.
Now, standing on the sidewalk before it, she craned her neck and the building stretched above her, disappearing into a point, like in the movies.
Inside, a dingy hallway. Men loitered, looked up at her in silence as she passed. To the left were service windows with bars across them, like in a post office. There was no lobby. This was a strange sort of hostel, she thought. She walked up to a dour black woman sitting behind the counter. She had been practicing what she would say for weeks now; this was as far as she had planned her journey.
“Hello, I have made a reservation for a room. My name is—”
“Whaddayawan!” the woman interrupted.
“Hello, I have made a reservation for a room—” Françoise began again.
“Gway!” the woman said.
Françoise tried to show her a carbon copy of the letter. The woman glanced at it, pushed it back.
“Notteere, gway,” she said, shooing Françoise toward the door.
“Euh, I have made a reservation for tonight?” Françoise repeated.
The woman called a balding white man out into the hallway.
“What seems to be the problem here?” he said. He seemed to be the manager, and yet he was not wearing a suit. Françoise repeated her carefully rehearsed speech.
“This. Is. Not. For. Women,” he told her, putting his hands on top of each other and slicing them sharply apart to punctuate the word “not.” “This. Is. The. YMCA. The YMCA.”
“Yes,” Françoise said, pulling out her guidebook and showing him that she’d circled it.
“There. Are. No. Women. Here,” he repeated. “No. Women. Go somewhere else.”
The streets were dark. It was too late to find another hostel. She had made a reservation. “I stay here,” she said. “I have no place to go. I can pay for one room.”
“We have one floor for women,” he said, holding up a finger, “but it is full tonight. We cannot give you a room there.”
“But I must stay tonight,” she repeated, making it true.
“Okay,” he said, conceding. “Okay. Maybe we will be able to move you to the women’s floor tomorrow. Tonight, we are going to put you on a floor where there are usually no women. What we are going to have to do is, we will have to lock you in the room and you cannot go into the hallway or the bathroom. Okay?” He turned an invisible key in the air as he spoke.
The manager left and returned with two armed guards. They walked Françoise down the hallway to the elevators. At the tenth floor, the manager pushed the emergency button and blocked the doors open. “Wait in here,” he told her. The guards began to pace the hallways, barking orders to the men on the floor to go into their rooms, locking their doors behind them. When the territory had been cleared, the manager walked Françoise to her room. There was space only for a single bed and a desk. A barred window looked down onto a sliver of alleyway.
“Put your suitcase down,” the manager said. “I’ll take you to the bathroom now.”
They took the elevator to the women’s floor. The three men waited outside the bathroom.
A few older women stood at the sinks. One was blow-drying her hair, which she seemed to have washed in the sink. Were there no showers? Another, dressed in rags, sang to herself loudly and tunelessly as she scrubbed at a pair of underwear with a toothbrush and toothpaste. Did they have special toothpaste in America? Did these women live here?
The doors to the toilet stalls ended a foot short of the floor. Françoise felt exposed. Her feet showed and the sounds she made drifted out into the room. Were all the bathrooms in America like this?
“It was like going to the bathroom in an open stall on an airplane,” my mother told me. “Americans are so prudish and the French walk around stark naked, but at least we close ourselves into a room to piss and shit.”
The guards led Françoise back to her room. Were they worried that she was some sort of nymphomaniac? They closed the door behind her and she heard the key turn in the lock. Merde, she thought, flooded with fear. What was she doing here?
I need to write this down, she thought, but her arm was too heavy to reach for her notebook. She was exhausted. She fell asleep clutching the only comforting thought she could find: Don’t worry, you’ll remember this.
And she did. When my mother told me about arriving in New York, her narration broke through a fog. Those first forty-eight hours—the manager’s faded yellow T-shirt, the creaking of the bedsprings—were crisp and clear.
The next morning, the manager moved her to the women’s floor and gave her her own key. There was a cot, a worn and dirty dresser, a small window that looked out on all the other windows. Lost women, each in their small cells. What now? she thought after she had unpacked. Now I go outside, she told herself. Outside, she hesitated. Right or left? She turned right and walked west toward the Meatpacking District, with its low-slung industrial buildings, toward the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Turning left would have brought her to Fifth Avenue, with its huge, glossy shop windows, but she didn’t know that then. The sun was fierce and sharp shadows cast the city into vivid relief. The sidewalks were wide and the streets were filled with potholes. Taxis sped down the broken asphalt, careening and chaotic. The few people she passed walked briskly, their heads down. The phrase time is money, time is money kept pounding through her head. Paris was a city of café terraces and sidelong glances. There, the sidewalk was a constant runway. Here, no one looked at her. She was invisible. The anonymity filled her with her power. I could die, she thought, and no one would know for months. She had spoken to no one and was carrying no ID. It would be difficult to connect her body to the room at the YMCA. She could die, and her mother would not know. She felt elated. If she chose to live, it was only for herself. She carefully retraced her steps back to her room.
—
FRANÇOISE UNRAVELED NEW YORK—pecan pie, the Staten Island Ferry, coffee out of paper cups, waitresses who called you “honey,” and strangers who asked for directions without saying hello. She’d imagined a city like Frankfurt, smooth and modern, but New York was held together with rubber bands and Scotch tape. The subway rattled so loudly as it pulled into the station that you could scream and no one would hear you. She fell in love with the city, in all its grittiness and anonymity.
After ten days at the YMCA, she found herself a shared room at the Markle Evangeline Residence for young workingwomen in the West Village. Her roommate helped her find a job selling candy and cigarettes from a street kiosk.
The Greek who owned the kiosks was named Dimitri, but he told everyone to call him Dennis. Too late, Françoise realized that she could have picked a new name for herself here as well. Dennis showed her how to lift the heavy metal grate and work the cash register. She worked mornings, six to noon, quickly moving up from Dennis’s Twenty-Third Street kiosk to his most heavily trafficked corner in Grand Central. Soon she realized she was putting her hand on the right cigarettes before customers even told her which brand. Construction workers smoked Lucky Strikes, other blue-collar workers smoked Parliaments, secretaries smoked Mores. Françoise spoke to almost no one all day long, and her powers of observation sharpened.
In the afternoons she worked in a Japanese architecture firm, making Plexiglass models. Within a few weeks, she had enough money to move out of the Evangeline into a small room in an apartment that she found through The Village Voice, an apartment without curfews or vigilant matrons. Her roommate was a young woman from the Midwest who taught middle school in the Bronx. She had faded blond hair and heavy bags beneath her eyes, but she appeared fairly normal at first. Over the next months, however, she became crazier and crazier.
Eventually, Françoise would retreat to her room and close the door. She could hear her roommate outside, calling the toll-free numbers listed on infomercials and telling her story to the operators until they hung up on her.
“You should go home,” Françoise would tell her. “You should go home.” But her roommate wasn’t listening.
The only person Françoise could express herself to was a thirty-year-old German architect named Meister, who taught at NYU; one of her professors in Paris had given her his number. Meister had an aristocratic nose and spoke perfect French. Françoise narrated her life to him once a week over lunch. When she told him how she’d arrived at the YMCA he laughed, forcing her to laugh at the story as well.
“My whole life is downhill from here,” she told him one afternoon. “There’s nothing left for me to discover.”
“How old are you again?” he asked.
“Almost nineteen,” she replied, “and I know it sounds funny to you but it’s true. I’ve passed the climax of my life and all I can do is repeat myself.”