I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  “So when was the climax of your life, you wizened old cynic?” he asked.

  “When I was fifteen,” Françoise replied, “and ready to die for the right to smoke in the courtyard.” This time she refused to smile at his gentle mocking.

  “And now,” I asked my mother, “now how would you answer that question?”

  “When I became a mother,” she replied without hesitation.

  —

  IN HIGH SCHOOL, I unraveled New York for myself. It did not occur to me that my mother had walked these same downtown streets that pulsed with a wild, lawless silence at three a.m. It did not occur to me that my transgressions were not revolutionary. I drank wine and smoked cigars on the Brooklyn Bridge, peeing down through the wooden slats onto the cars below. I stole brandy out of my photography teacher’s supply closet and threw it up in Park Slope. I cut class to smoke pot on the piers that overlooked the Hudson River. When I stumbled home drunk, my mother gave me tighter and tighter curfews. She insisted I was asking for boundaries. I insisted I was discovering where my boundaries were.

  One Valentine’s Day, two friends and I convinced a man outside a liquor store to buy us a bottle of tequila. We bought limes and salt from the corner deli by my father’s studio and wandered through the winding streets of the West Village, rotating the three—we’d suck the back of our hand between thumb and index finger so that the salt would stick, sprinkle it on, suck it off, swig the tequila, then bite into a wedge of lime. The bottle was finished before we knew it, and then we were staggering through an Indian restaurant, patrons staring, so that we could throw up in the bathrooms, and then we were sitting on the sidewalk, one friend bent over my shoes, gagging, and then we were in a cop car, sirens blaring, my friend throwing up all over the inside of the door. Our other friend came in a separate cop car, a policeman sitting in the back with her, massaging her inner thigh. They kept us for hours in their precinct office, one friend cursing violently enough to get herself handcuffed to the chair, the other sobbing that now she would never get into college. I refused to give them my mother’s phone number.

  “If you were my children . . . ,” the cop who manned the phones kept saying. “If you were my children, I would whip you bloody black-and-blue with a studded belt until you’d learned a damn lesson.”

  We all gave them the phone numbers in the end. It was that or spend the night in a cell. Still, I trembled when the cop told us that our parents were in the other room.

  “Can’t see them just yet,” he said, sneering. “We’re showing them how to use the belt.”

  But when my mother saw me she hugged me, hard. She pulled me under the cloak of her fierce love and swept me out of the precinct. We piled into the car with my sleepy little brother.

  “You’re not mad?” I asked. “I’m not punished forever?”

  “No,” she said. “I think you’ve gone through enough for one night. And I don’t think you’ll make that mistake again.”

  Years later, I told her how grateful I’d been, and also how confused. A bottle of wine stolen from the kitchen had led to screaming fights that left us both hoarse. But about this, she had never been angry, not even the next day.

  She laughed. “Your friend’s father was furious with me,” she told me. “In the waiting room, he kept implying that my terrible daughter had corrupted his innocent one. And I knew that maybe he was a little bit right. You hadn’t simply followed along with some other girls like a sheep. You were always your own person. I was . . . I can tell you now . . . I was a little bit proud of you.”

  —

  I’D THOUGHT IT would be embarrassing to go to college never having kissed a girl, the way other people might have thought it important to lose their virginity. The gay boys and lesbians were the coolest kids in my high school, with their pink and blue hair and candy necklaces. We all considered ourselves a little bit gay. Even Zane had had a crush on a boy and joked about it often, not really joking.

  I was still nursing the heart he’d broken when I learned that a girl I’d rarely spoken to had a crush on me. This was a novelty for me, that someone might find me appealing from afar. She and I began talking on AIM at night and passing notes during the day. One day, we walked together down to the first floor, where the stairwell widened. She asked if I had ever kissed a girl before. I said I hadn’t and shuffled my feet. I knew she had kissed many. She talked vaguely about “the right moment for things.” She said, “Well then, I guess . . . I’ll just . . .” The kiss shot through my body like a sugar rush.

  “Maman, Papa!” I said, bursting into their bedroom one morning a few days later. “Guess what? I have a girlfriend!” They had gay friends. They had watched me mope for months. It didn’t occur to me that they’d be anything other than pleased.

  My father slowly folded down the top of The New York Times.

  “How modern of you,” he said, eyeing me coolly over the paper. My mother said nothing at all.

  Wendy wore boxers and walked like a boy, which I liked, although I also liked how small she was in my arms, how soft her lips were, how big and cartoonish her eyes became when she looked up at me. When she touched me, I discovered, through her hands and mouth and desire, a body I had not known I had. Sex with her made my thoughts stop. I walked around in a fog. I slipped into cosmetics stores just to smell the men’s cologne she wore. I never questioned whether my attraction to her meant I myself had changed.

  I did not come out to my friends; I simply began holding Wendy’s hand in the hallways. A few people tried to ask me about it, hesitant questions filled with ellipses. There were several openly gay students, but we were the only couple. Yes, I said firmly. I’m dating her. I willfully ignored their real question.

  One afternoon early on, Wendy brought me to the LGBTQ center on Fourteenth Street, where she had spent a lot of time. Under fluorescent lights in a grim upstairs room, we were asked to go in a circle and say why we were proud to be gay. My heart raced. I did not think of myself as gay. I did not see why I should be proud.

  My pediatrician had her hand on my abdomen, pressing down. She casually asked me if I was sexually active. I said yes. “Are you using protection?” she asked. I said no and she pulled her hand away in surprise. I mumbled that I was dating a woman. She sat me down in her office chair and looked at me seriously, arms on her knees. “I know people who are gay,” she said. “And I’ve known you since you were a child. You are not gay.”

  I suspected that this was how my mother felt as well. She rarely slipped in what she said to me, but her discomfort was palpable. I quickly learned that whenever I said I was going to see Wendy, she found a reason to keep me home. I began to say I was seeing other friends, tossing their names out in rotation, but in truth I saw my friends less and less. Wendy loved me with a ferocity and neediness that I found bracing. I had worried that I had too much love inside me, that I would drown people in it until they pushed me away. But with Wendy, I poured and poured. It was never enough. She hinted at notebooks filled with poems written about me before we’d ever spoken. She worried that I was straight, and so I hid my own worries and reassured her. When we fought, red cuts appeared on her forearms the next day. Her parents had very little money, and she often implied that I thought she was not good enough for me for this reason. I found myself trapped in endless loops of “No, I love you more,” unable to hang up the phone. We both knew she loved me more.

  One evening, we were doing our homework together in my room. I heard the front door slam shut, the beleaguered “Bonsoir” shouted through the loft as my mother shifted her heavy backpack off her shoulders. I braced myself. Usually, I instinctively made Wendy leave before she returned. But this evening I hoped to prove myself wrong.

  “Hi, Wendy,” my mother said as she walked into my room, her tone far from friendly. “Nadja, can I talk to you alone for a minute?”

  In the kitchen, she told me Wendy could not stay fo
r dinner. I was to go tell her to leave right now. We fought loudly in French but I did not win. I walked Wendy to the train. When I returned, there was a note on my computer. “I just wanted to write my essay in peace (without dinner) but alas I have been booted off the island,” it read. I sighed, feeling besieged from all sides, and shut the document.

  “Nadja,” my mother called me back into the kitchen. “When you walk her to the train . . . you don’t kiss her on Canal Street, right? Please promise me you never will.”

  “The world has changed,” I said. “It’s not the seventies anymore.” When my parents thought I was not listening, I could hear them discussing the phase I was going through.

  “It’s better not to add fuel to the fire,” I heard my father tell my mother gently one evening.

  In later years, I would find fast intimacy with many new friends through exchanging our coming-out stories. Their stories, filled with pain and courage, moved me deeply. My own—my father’s folded newspaper, his quip—seemed cavalier in comparison. My friends often asked me then a second question, one I did not know how to answer: When did you come out to yourself? I told them I had not. I had felt no moments of anxiety. I had been granted—by my parents, my city, my high school—the easy fluidity of a girl raised without shame. I knew how precious it was, that freedom to fall in love with whomever I pleased, and I was grateful for it. I did not want to limit myself to categories. My identity had never changed.

  But one evening in my late twenties, as I sat on the floor of my childhood bedroom, journals and diaries piled around me, I discovered a completely different narrative. There, in a diary from middle school, an unhappy entry about my crush on my best friend. There, copied out lovingly in my thirteen-year-old hand, the lyrics to a song in a lesbian movie I now remembered sneaking into a stack at the video rental store. There, in the notebook I had obsessively kept while I was dating Zane, forgotten words scrawled across two pages: Who are you trying to fool? I had written to myself. YOU’RE GAY. I tucked that version of my past back into the boxes with my notebooks. I continued to tell my story as I always had.

  I kissed Wendy on Canal Street. I kissed her in the school hallways and on the subway. Teachers who had smiled benignly when I kissed my boyfriend now stopped to ask us why we weren’t ashamed. On the subway, a group of women began to chant, “Dicks not chicks, pussies are disgusting.”

  “I’m sick of this homo shit,” one screamed from across the train car as we continued to kiss each other.

  “It’s just internalized oppression,” Wendy whispered to me, because these were women, and people of color. I blinked back tears and kissed her again.

  One spring afternoon, Wendy and I were sitting on a downtown stoop with our knees touching, holding hands. I grinned at something Wendy said and she leaned over to kiss the dimple in my cheek. I looked up. A beautiful older woman in overalls had turned her head to stare at us as she walked past. She had long gray hair to her waist. She was beaming. I held her gaze. It was a smile like I had never received from a stranger. I didn’t understand, and then I did. I understood what it meant to feel proud.

  —

  FRANÇOISE WANDERED ever further downtown. After responding to a flyer on a lamppost, she found herself cast in a play by the avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman. She stood still for hours onstage, shifting poses only once or twice, repeating lines from novels. She had three jobs now—cigarettes in the mornings, architecture in the afternoons, Foreman in the evenings. Her father lent her the key money to rent a loft in SoHo. I have her letter to him from then, the SoHo she exuberantly describes totally different from the SoHo I grew up in, with its high-end designer shops. “It’s 2,000 square feet (180 m2) and $250 a month—which is relatively cheap,” she wrote. “Some of the other spaces I visited were $400!”

  Françoise’s loft had been a sweatshop, and you could see straight from the set of three windows on one side to the other set half a block away. It was only barely legal to live in the abandoned factories downtown, and though she paid rent to the Italian man who owned the lumber shop next door, she kept the windows covered with cardboard at night. She had a mattress, a hot plate, and a radio. There was a big industrial sink and toilets in stalls, one of which had been converted to a shower. She left at five every morning, and when she came back at eleven each night, she set about making a new floor over the old one, with planks her landlord sold her. She was happy. She felt herself living.

  —

  “IT WAS DIFFICULT for me when you started growing up,” my mother told me. “I wanted to freeze time so I could keep a baby version of you in my pocket. I remember a conversation I had with my father. He told me to be excited. He said there was a whole new phase to enter when you begin discovering your children as people.”

  My mother employed, over the years, a long string of recent college graduates. As I grew up, her assistants went from being breathtakingly cool older girls, on whom I took field notes in an eight-year-old scrawl in my diaries, to friends of mine, hired on my recommendation. My mother ran her children’s book publishing company from the same dusty book-piled office out of which she and my father had once created their underground comics magazine, RAW. It was on the ground floor of our building. The machinery was still there—the massive paper cutter with a steering wheel and guillotine, the typesetting drawers, the light table—amid the new iMac computers. The furniture had barely changed since the early 1980s. My mother functioned with a very small staff, training them thoroughly, paying them modestly, resigned to letting them move on after a year or two.

  After college, I took a job at a Jewish newspaper. I was unhappy there in the way presumptuous young people often are in their first jobs. I believed I could see all of the company’s dysfunction and the solutions to it. Yet, despite my extraordinarily clear memos, my superiors refused to let me overhaul the organization. The offices were in the Financial District, an area of Manhattan I hadn’t known well before. I disliked the constant throng of men and women in business suits, the abundance of grim, quick lunch places, the narrow streets and tall buildings that blotted out the sky. Sometimes, after work, rather than returning to my apartment in Brooklyn, I would walk uptown to SoHo, the sky opening up along an underdeveloped stretch of Broadway, and have dinner with my parents. Over Chinese food, my mother would respond to each of my complaints with suggestions that I now thought of, in my new work vocabulary, as “actionable.” Occasionally she provided me with the precise tactful wording for an email while I scrawled in a notebook. She piled me high with praise. I left feeling invincible, wrapped in a glowing cocoon. But the next morning, back under the fluorescent lights of my cubicle, the feeling would inevitably fade.

  A year and a half after I had graduated, my mother offered to hire me. It seemed a simultaneously wonderful and terrible idea. At the newspaper, I asked for a raise I strongly suspected would be refused. “It warms my heart to see a young woman asking for a raise,” said the female editor in chief. “But no.” I quit.

  In comparison, working for my mother was idyllic. She loaded me with as much responsibility as I could handle. I was assigned tasks that ranged from helping to shape the stories to negotiating the price of paper in China, and I felt I was learning constantly. She listened carefully to my suggestions, praised me only when I had worked very hard, and scolded me on days when I hadn’t. I had heard the complaints from friends who had worked for her before me—that she was volatile, that her anger was often out of proportion to the mistake—but I was used to these things in my mother.

  There were days when the purple under her eyes was deeper than usual—when, say, all the fall books were due at the printer and, on top of it, The New Yorker cover was going through a last-minute change. She let out huge French huffs of frustration, slammed the table with her fist when a pen fell on the floor. The other employees became skittish. But I knew how to calm her. I spoke gently, put a cup of coffee in her hand, hugged her unt
il we got back on track.

  There were days when she pulled out my old baby clothes at morning meetings and told stories about my bowel movements, and days when she scolded me like I was fifteen for not emptying the grounds from the coffee machine. But later, privately, she listened to me and apologized. More often there were days when we sat side by side in front of manuscripts, each with a red pen in hand, riffing on each other’s ideas, each of us feeling the excitement as a story fell into place. I learned a new kind of awe for my mother. She knew how to edit images with the same ease that others could tweak sentences. She would alter small details and, as if by magic, the meaning of a picture would snap into focus. She shaped each project around each artist’s strengths, so that their visions shone through and her own efforts remained invisible. She worked constantly with her hands—printing, cutting, taping manuscripts in place. She gave of herself to her projects without any sense of self-preservation. She never settled for good enough. She drew on every last reserve of her energy until each book was best-it-could-be, and knew, too, when that was. Often the staff came into the office in the morning to discover that overnight she had made entirely new designs, new layouts, new covers. She would lay out our assignments for the day, then leave for her job at The New Yorker. When she returned, at seven or eight p.m., she would again sit for hours, tweaking and fixing our work, always easy with her praise, always in places it felt deserved.

  I began to understand why, when my brother and I were young, coming home to a dinner still unmade, a table still unset, my socks on the bathroom floor had made her explode into such fireworks of frustration and fury. I envied how few minutes she lost of each day. Even her train rides to and from her Times Square office were time she spent thinking about her work. I struggled to imitate her and yet could not stem the slipping away of my own hours into periods of blankness, lapses of mindlessness when I blinked to discover I had overspent my lunch hour on our stoop, staring into the sunshine, watching the models and tourists walk by, merely happy to be alive.