I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  She knew she was going crazy. Devenir folle wasn’t just an expression to her. She’d watched her roommate go crazy; she knew what it meant. But she didn’t know how to turn back.

  One day, she was a triangular metal ruler balanced on its point. A woman’s voice sang a wordless opera, holding her in place with its crystalline pitch. She was inside the voice, she was the voice. She knew she was hallucinating and she struggled to open her eyes. But a triangular metal ruler didn’t have eyes. It lasted an eternity.

  Finally, she forced her eyes open and found she was standing on a street corner a few blocks from the loft. She was between a lamppost and a trash can. She was talking to herself. People were staring. She couldn’t remember having left the house.

  She looked around wildly at the people passing by. Their eyes were cold and they kept their distance. The anonymity of New York reared up around her, dangerous. She dragged herself back home. She gathered her courage. She called her father. He didn’t ask questions. He paid for her plane ticket home.

  —

  MY MOTHER FOUND one of the letters she’d written that winter alone in New York. It was on delicate translucent paper. It was in that unfamiliar hand, the one that was no longer hers.

  I am going to tell you New York—I know in advance that I can’t write to you—not now—my head is lost in a storm of sensation—my notion of time reconstructs itself each second—for weeks now I haven’t known how to think—I can’t do it anymore—I don’t know how to write a simple letter—I am going to tell you New York—Nothing that I can say makes sense—it changes at the moment it hits the paper—so I know that what I write is—will be absurd—But I am going to tell you New York—I shouldn’t, but I want to write to you—I found your letter today—I just reread your letter—I line up my words—I place one word after the other—Normally that is a way to write—But all this—and the rest in general—is that I think I can only know that I lost—all this—thinking of writing—could only exist if I hadn’t lost time—For a few weeks now—or months—maybe deep down since New York—but certainly for a few weeks—In this moment—I have only the instant—the instant from second to second, from hour to hour, in days and in nights, up until the weeks and the months—the instant—

  I held the letter carefully. I had recently looked up the etymology of the word “past.” It was from the French pas, for step, from the Latin passus, for a stretch of the leg. In its earliest uses it meant journey. The past, then, was not a fixed place one could visit. It was not static. It was a voyage, constant motion. But this letter, with its manic present tense, reduced that journey to its smallest unit: a single step, a single outstretched leg. It felt like the closest I could get. I pretended it was addressed to me, sent by the girl I’d been searching for.

  —

  PAUL LIVED in a bachelor pad now. The apartment’s wide wraparound balcony overlooked the corner of the Seine where a small replica of the Statue of Liberty stood, facing west toward New York. In the living room there was a large zebra-skin rug and a hidden wet bar that turned out from the wall at the push of a button. Blue lights lit the undersides of the black cabinets. Françoise moved into Andrée’s room. A parade of her father’s girlfriends, all around her own age, greeted Françoise with tousled hair in the mornings as they made themselves coffee.

  Paul was trying to lose weight with new diet pills and he offered them to Françoise. She liked the blitzing rush of energy they gave her, how they cut through the fog. Neither of them knew, or maybe admitted that they knew, that they were taking speed. Françoise wrote manically, filling notebook after notebook. Paul was nearly always gone: at work, at the casino, on dates, on long holiday weekends. Alone in his place, Françoise felt her mind racing, and yet she was unable to outrun her dark thoughts. Everywhere she looked, she saw dead ends. She had lost New York. She had lost everything. She stood on the terrace, looking down at the street below. It was never empty enough. Or perhaps she was simply too cowardly. One May weekend, the answer materialized abruptly. The medicine cabinet. Her father’s sleeping pills.

  She poured the pills out into her hand. Too few would make her sleep, and too many would make her throw up. She based her calculations on how many she’d seen her father take. It was such a clean, such a comfortable, such an elegant way to die. What a beautiful gift she could give herself.

  She stripped down to her underwear and went into her father’s room. She pushed the button that rolled up the heavy metal grates that covered the windows. The afternoon sunlight streamed in. She lay on his bed.

  Do you realize these are the final moments of your life? she asked herself silently.

  I’m just lucky to have such an easy way out, she replied.

  She swallowed the handful of pills and lay down on her father’s bed to die. She wondered about leaving a note. But a note could be dissected, mangled, and reinterpreted. Her parents would use her words to shift blame. And she was exhausted, too tired to write.

  Are you sure you have no regrets? she asked herself sleepily.

  No, she thought. The things I have yet to do don’t exist. No regrets.

  She concentrated on the feeling of the covers against her skin. The sunlight seared her eyelids shut. She drifted off.

  —

  ORANGE!

  Make it stop!

  She was tied down. It was violently orange. It had to stop. She had to move. She could hear herself howling.

  “If you calm down, we’ll untie you.” A nurse’s gentle voice. Françoise could see her in her peripheral vision.

  Make the orange stop! Françoise thrashed as hard as she could against the restraints.

  “Your mother is here,” said the nurse.

  “No! no!” Françoise shouted. She heard the rattling of a gurney’s wheels down the hallway of a different hospital, echoing through the years.

  “Oh my darling girl, it’s so wonderful to see you awake,” Josée said.

  Françoise’s hands pulled against the restraints.

  “I saved you, you know,” Josée said. “I found you just in time.”

  “You killed my baby,” Françoise said. “You killed my baby.”

  —

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the day before Mother’s Day, Josée had been on the roof of her houseboat, gardening. Françoise had tentatively agreed to stop by for dinner on Friday evening but had not come. Josée thought little of her absence. In those days, Françoise often made plans she didn’t keep. But as Josée bent to trim a branch, she froze, the shears locked open.

  “Maman!” she heard Françoise’s voice calling her.

  “Did you call me?” Josée turned to ask Andrée. But Andrée was downstairs in the shower.

  “Maman!” Françoise’s voice called again. It was crystal clear. Josée ran inside.

  She pulled Andrée from the shower, her hair still sudsy with shampoo. She made her dial the number of Paul’s concierge, then got on the phone herself.

  “Is Françoise’s motorbike in the courtyard?” Josée asked.

  “Yes,” the concierge said.

  “Go up to the apartment,” Josée demanded. The concierge had Paul’s keys.

  A few moments later, the concierge rang back. “There’s no one there,” she said. She had shouted Françoise’s name into the apartment and no one had answered.

  “Go back and look around,” Josée demanded. She paced anxiously as she waited. She dialed the concierge again. The phone rang and rang.

  “Oh, Madame!” the concierge said, finally picking up, out of breath. “She’s not! She’s not dead!”

  Josée dragged Andrée to the car. The paramedics were on the scene when they arrived. There was very little time to spare, they said. Françoise had been dying since Friday afternoon.

  My mother’s eyes flashed with anger and disbelief as she told me this last part. I could feel her aching for an explana
tion.

  Josée believed in the supernatural. She once told me that ever since a near-death experience waterskiing she’d had a deep connection to the afterlife. Some of her experiences were with the spirits of departing mothers who hadn’t been able to say good-bye to their daughters. Sometimes, they were able to tell her their daughters’ full names. Josée would call them. Invariably, she’d learn that they’d recently lost their mothers. “She wanted me to tell you she’s always been proud of you,” she’d say to them.

  Andrée would later tell me that after leaving the hospital that day, Josée took her to a movie. There was time to kill before Andrée had to catch her train back to boarding school. They went to see Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. “What a film to see on such a day,” she told me bitterly. “What a film to show your child.”

  I had not seen the film, so later I looked it up. It was released in France that final week of May 1976. It begins with two people meeting around the hospital bed of a woman who has just attempted suicide. As they flirt, the dying woman, unable to communicate, screams her last. The couple leave the hospital room and go to the movies.

  I believed without question in Josée’s powerful magic. I was grateful to her. But I knew better than to express this to my mother.

  —

  “LAST TIME I was in France,” my mother told me at our kitchen table in New York, “I rifled through a book on adolescent suicide in a bookstore.” The authors had defined adolescence as the state of being ripped apart by two desires of an equal intensity: to be rid of your parents and to be loved by your parents, to become an adult and to remain a child. And suicide, suicide was the perfect paradox that allowed you both. On the one hand, it was the ultimate autonomous act. It was taking control. But after your death, your parents threw themselves on your body. You were allowed to remain a child forever.

  “We’ve all been through that phase,” Paul said cavalierly when he came, newly tan, to visit Françoise in the hospital. Her pride was wounded. It was almost as if her father was disappointed by her lack of originality. But maybe, my mother told me, maybe it was the best thing he could have said. She ceased hoping her parents would care. And then she was free.

  “Do you ever . . . ,” I asked, “do you ever still consider it?”

  “Things change,” she said with a sigh, leaning back. “I’m in much more of a . . .” Her hand planed through the air like a bird as she searched for the word. “There are people who depend on me now. I still have moments when I feel . . . lost. But never as lost as before. It’s like there’s a big ocean and I still fall in from time to time. But then there are all these . . .” She pressed her thumb against her fingers like a shadow-puppet duck and made dots in the air between us. “There are all these things I can catch onto.”

  She turned her hand against her mouth, fingertips and thumb pressed against her lips, and then allowed it to collapse. She spoke through her fist for a moment, then her hand was in motion once again.

  “It’s the collateral damage of the human condition,” she said with a heavy sigh. “I think therefore I am. Sometimes I envy very small children. You’ll see, when you have them. Until a certain age, they live purely in the moment. It’s magic. All these states of the soul, this despair, all of that doesn’t exist when you’re in the present. When I was younger, I didn’t know how to listen to the rain. I didn’t know how to take hold of my breathing. I didn’t know how to stop the rushing thoughts in my head. I didn’t know all of these things.”

  —

  AFTER SHE WAS RELEASED from the hospital, Françoise recovered, moved back to her loft in SoHo, met my father, fell in love. But although she answered all my questions about events up to that point with candor, she insisted on stopping when she met my father. There are some things I should never know, she said.

  Though of course I knew the origin story of my parents’ romance, had always known it in the way of things you don’t remember learning. My mother first met my father shortly after moving back to New York, in the fall of 1976. It was at a dinner party thrown by a couple she’d met in the downtown art scene, part of the circle that radiated outward from her days in Richard Foreman’s plays. He’d had a Jewish girlfriend at the time, a short-lived romance born from a sense of compulsion. Françoise had seen him as easily cowed and had not been impressed.

  Later, she came across a four-page strip he had published in an underground comix magazine. It was black-and-white, jagged angry lines, raw emotion etched so strong and ragged it seemed strange the paper wasn’t torn. It was about his mother’s suicide. It was about his anger.

  She called him. They spoke for hours—all night, in some retellings—ignoring the mounting phone bill. Her English was limited and speaking on the phone was difficult. But she had a pressing need to understand.

  “How could you?” Françoise wanted to know. “How could you publish something so intimate about your mother?”

  I don’t know how he answered her questions. I could ask, but my parents are no longer the people they were then. The question would be answered the way they would answer it now, with all the filters of time and my father’s ensuing fame. However he managed to respond, it was during that conversation that they fell in love.

  —

  ONCE, WHEN I was well into this book, my father told me that my mother, when he’d met her, was not the person she’d become. Yes, I said knowingly, she was not as confident then. I’d seen the photographs. I was proud that, in her twenties, my mother was not yet the striking beauty she was now. I hoped that I, too, would only grow more beautiful with age. In old photographs, there was a timid set to her mouth, a guardedness to her eyes, a face hidden behind a halo of frizzy hair. That girl wasn’t my mother. My mother could get dressed in ten minutes flat for a swanky party uptown. She could make a thirty-dollar dress look straight off the runway. In recent photographs, my mother’s eyes met the camera with a startling frank intelligence that made you stare.

  But my father had furrowed his brow at my answer and shook his head and said Um, which was rare from him. “She was very . . . broken,” he said slowly, then stopped, biting back more words. He’d had to raise her, he said. He’d had to guide her through an accelerated childhood. A teddy bear was involved.

  “Is it true that Papa had to raise you?” I asked my mother.

  “Your father is rewriting history,” she said. “To his advantage. As usual.”

  “And the bear?” I asked. A cross-eyed teddy bear named Gladly. Gladly, my cross-eyed bear. Gladly my cross I’d bear. I remembered the pun being explained to me once, one of the first I ever understood. I remembered, vaguely, seeing it in my mother’s arms, in my mother’s closet.

  “What bear?” she said.

  “The one in your closet,” I said.

  “That was your bear,” she said. And it’s true that when I decided I was too old to keep my teddy bears in my room and yet still too young to give them away, my mother put them on a high shelf in her closet. They were still there, mixed with my brother’s, the cross-eyed bear among them.

  chapter six

  I have always known what it means to be a character in someone else’s story. My birth was marked by an asterisk in Maus.* As I emerged into the fluorescent lights of St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village (it seems strange, to use “I” for that self I cannot remember), some other part of me fell through my father’s black tear of ink on the page. Or rather, not one page, not one asterisk, but hundreds of thousands in books being opened for the first time, being printed for the first time, even now. And later, in other strips and other stories, there I was, at four, at fourteen, my stretched face drawn straight from my high school ID card photo.

  “How’s Nadja’s book going?” an acquaintance of my mother’s asked her once, while I was sitting next to her. “Has it been published yet?”

  It had not. At that point, I had been working on it, on and off, for nearly s
ix years. My father told people about my project with pride. My mother resented him for it. She became angry when anyone asked her about it. “It has nothing to do with me,” she told me when I asked why. “It’s your book. I have to think about it as being about someone else, some other girl who shares my name.”

  “Not yet,” my mother said to her inquiring friend. “It’s a little like being on death row, awaiting my lethal injection.” They laughed.

  “Is that how you really feel?” I asked her later. “Death row?”

  “Oh, mais chaton!” she said. “They treat people very well on death row. Last meals and all that.”

  “Having a writer in the family is like having a murderer in the family,” my father told me wryly, and often, in reference to both himself and me.

  My mother had told me that even in the hospital she refused to let the nurses take me from her arms. Each time they tried to slip me from her grasp—so you can sleep—her eyes snapped open. I can’t sleep without her. She checked herself out of the hospital the day after I was born and never put me down. But I could not remember a time when I was small enough for my mother to carry. I didn’t know how it felt to be aloft in her arms. Was that me any more real than the versions drawn and printed?

  My paternal grandparents were a book. I learned to know them only in its pages. My father had closed away a painful part of his past and left it there for us, for anyone, to find. It wasn’t until I read Maus at fourteen that I discovered that his mother had killed herself. I was sitting on the carpet in a corner of my bedroom, the house strangely quiet, each of us behind our own closed doors. I was so absorbed that I had sunk to the floor. This is the grandmother I never had, I thought. Here she was, in a book so many other people had read before me. My father’s grief howled from the page, uncut by time. The anger and pain was as raw and unfiltered as it had been in 1972. I hadn’t told him I was reading the book now. I hadn’t planned to read it. I had tried several times before and slammed the pages shut.