“My dolphins,” she called us. “My mermaids.”
—
WE GOT TO THE AIRPORT EARLY, which was rare when traveling with my mother. We sat on high stools in a fluorescent-lit café, drinking espresso from paper cups. My mother glanced at her watch and asked me to go check if our flight had begun boarding. I craned my head to look down the long airport hall and told her that it had not.
“Just go over there and check,” she said.
“I can see from here,” I said.
“Don’t be difficult, Nadja,” she said. “Just go over there!” I sighed dramatically and got up, walked across the vast white expanse and back again.
Later, laughing bitterly, my mother recounted the exchange that had followed.
“Did Nadja just offer to go check the gate?” Josée said. “How sweet of her!”
My mother mumbled that it had been at her request.
“She is so considerate,” Josée said, ignoring this. “All my friends ask me what I did to get such a sweet, considerate granddaughter. And do you know what I tell them?”
“What?” my mother said.
“It’s innate!” Josée said. “It’s just innate.”
On the plane, my mother and I sat next to each other, Josée several rows ahead. We placed a bag on the seat between us. No one came to claim it, and the seat remained empty, the only empty seat on the whole plane. In the hum of the recycled air, we had the first truly private conversation we’d had all week. I apologized for pulling her back into the past. She had followed me, and it had been dangerous.
“It was useful,” my mother said firmly. But she had always been able to see difficulties as challenges, and my conscience was not eased.
“Maybe it wasn’t,” I said. “Maybe it was just hard.”
“It was useful because we survived it,” she said. “It’s all still there—she’s the sweet aging mother whom I can take on vacation and try to please. I’m the adult daughter who built her life an ocean away. And she’s also still that person who can destroy me. I’m also still that little girl with no resources. And now we know that we can go there and return, the fire isn’t going to burn us alive. We can touch those things, and we can survive.”
I thought of the naturally radioactive waters of the spa, how they broke your body down until it relaxed. I hoped that there was some benefit to all of this, and was not sure.
—
STANDING IN LINE at customs in Paris, I leaned my forehead against my hand, tired. I felt a long, hard scratch down the side of my spine. I jumped and turned around, glaring. Josée grinned at me mischievously. She raised a crooked finger.
“Ow!” I said. A look of distress flashed across her face.
“Oh, come on,” she said, composing herself. “That didn’t hurt.”
I realized then that she had meant only to caress me but hadn’t known how.
“No,” I agreed, and meant it. I pulled her, stunned, into a hug. “No. It didn’t hurt.”
epilogue
My mother stopped dyeing her hair. She told me this over the phone. At a party the night before, she said, a woman had told her she admired the “bold” choice. Other women had joined in, piling on the compliments so heavily they stung.
“I look old now,” my mother said sadly.
“So why don’t you just dye it again?” I asked. My mother had dyed her hair for as long as I could remember. Her sadness seemed strange to me when the solution was so simple.
“Oh, chaton,” she said, and I heard the distance she put between us when she knew I could not understand. “I’m turning sixty. I am old.”
Her birthday was only a month away, and this was the real reason for her call. She wanted to mark its passage by organizing a trip that would resemble our time in Ischia two years before. She decided on a weekend in Deauville, that city on the northern coast where Paul and Josée had laughed as they struggled to carry huge buckets of lobsters, water splashing their sandy legs. It was an easy drive from Paris, what the Hamptons are to New York. At my mother’s request, I booked us rooms in the grandest hotel, a day at the spa. “It’s a folly to come to France just for a weekend,” she said. “But I’ll only turn sixty once.”
When she arrived at my Paris apartment, she looked no different to me than she always had. What I noticed was the short purple silk scarf knotted around her neck, girlish and colorful. It was the sort of French foulard that my father had drawn her wearing in Maus but that I’d never seen her wear. She saw me looking and, with a bashful smile, put her hand to it. She told me she had worn it on her first flight to New York, all those years ago. I wondered if this weekend felt to her like an ending as well.
She took off her heavy backpack and headed straight for the table of plants by the window.
“They’re thriving!” she said, impressed, turning their leaves in her fingers. I did not tell her that I had just replaced many of them with new ones from the store.
“I’m so proud of you,” she told me over and over as we sat down to the breakfast I had prepared.
“For what?” I said each time, my intonation fluctuating between curious and dismissive. For everything. For keeping a plant alive, for living in Paris, for making reservations in Deauville, for knowing how to buy cheese. I waved aside her praise. I was embarrassed by how easy my life was, and how little I had done with it. And yet, of course, I also wanted her to continue, and she did. I was filled with the buoying sensation that often came from being with her, that feeling of invincibility.
When people tell you things you don’t want to hear, it is easy to focus your resentment on the moment they choose to speak. It was evening. We’d just left my building and had ducked into a side street. We were walking quickly—we were running late to meet her sisters. I was checking the map on my phone often.
She inhaled sharply.
“I read the beginning of your book,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, stunned. I had not given it to her to read. I had shown it to almost no one. It was still a draft. She had said she would never read it. I had wanted to believe that.
“You left it on the computer in the living room last time you were in New York,” she said.
The memory came back to me: a rush to print, a file forgotten on the desktop.
“I knew I’d have to read it sooner or later,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. There was a sharp pain in the side of my chest. Anger welled as well, a heat at the base of my throat. But I locked my jaw. She had given me her most intimate stories to tell. I did not also get to control when she read them.
“So,” I said.
“It was hard to read,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“It was just strange,” she said. “I didn’t recognize myself.”
“It’s already so difficult to see oneself in a photo, or on film,” I said. “To be written about must be worse.”
“It’s more than that,” she said. “I recognized myself in the parts about my childhood. But as soon as you were in the scene, as soon as I was seen through your eyes, I didn’t recognize the woman you described at all.”
“Oh,” I said.
“For example,” she continued, “you say my lipstick was perfectly applied. But I never wear lipstick! You’re the one whose lipstick is perfectly applied.” This was true, I realized. When my mother put on makeup, she emphasized her eyes, not her lips. She did not own a single tube of lipstick, though I owned half a dozen. I had one specific memory of watching in a bathroom in Paris as my mother put on lip liner, then blended it with lip balm. She had done the same on my face then, her hands cool and soft on my cheeks. But even that was rare. I’d allowed that moment to permeate the years and become a trait she did not have.
“I am a very private person, as you say,” my mother continued. “And these stories about me, I wouldn’t tell t
hem to anyone. But I told them to you. And you wrote them, as I knew you would. It’s a reality I’ll have to adjust to. I’m still not sure how I’ll do it. But I will.”
Having a writer in the family is like having a murderer in the family, I thought. I touched my chest, oddly grateful for the tangible pain there.
“I love you,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “There were so many moments where I wanted to say, That’s not true, that’s not true. But it’s your book. I have to think of it as being about your fictional mother. And there were a few things that did ring true, of course.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“That dinner party where I say my children are in all of my memories. I don’t remember saying that, but I agree with myself. And that story Siri tells, ‘The bear was seen.’ That’s a great line.”
The heron was seen, I thought, but saw the irony in this and did not correct her.
“But then when you say that your weight was always a problem between us,” she continued, “that’s not true. I never cared how much you weighed. It was your father who had a problem with it.”
A slipping vertiginous feeling took hold, one I had felt many times. It still felt as if my mother could talk me out of my memories.
“Maman,” I said, “I cannot have this fight again. I just can’t do it anymore.”
“Okay, it’s just, I always thought you were perfectly—” she said.
And then we were back in it. I could not stop myself. We were each insisting on the same points we’d insisted upon so often, as if somehow this time, this time, this time the other would hear them.
“We can each have our own versions!” I repeated after each accusation I leveled, but I was only trying to end the conversation on my own. If I allowed her to speak without contradiction, even once, I felt the enchantment would be cast and unbreakable. I would never find my way back into myself, the bread crumbs I had so carefully laid out blown away.
“I’m just letting you know what it is that I remember,” she said. And then we had arrived where we were going. I pushed the door open and we smiled for her sisters. There was no time for another word.
The next morning, we went north. Josée rode shotgun. The buildings of Deauville looked sprung from Germanic fairy tales, with their peaked roofs and decorative dark wood beams. It was a city built for tourists: the grand casino, the high-end designer shops, the steaming platters of mussels and fries. The northern seaside was an odd choice for a late October weekend, but my mother liked the romance of chilly abandoned beaches with their folded umbrellas.
We had come mostly for the thalassotherapy. The spa was all blue lights and white floors, more clinic than haven. We bathed in Jacuzzis filled with salt water, wrapped ourselves in seaweed, applied lotions that contained the mineral richness of the sea. Outside, the waves slammed against the sand. It seemed to me a particularly French invention, this signifier of the ocean without the ocean.
The first evening, after Josée had gone to bed, we went to the casino. I tried to imagine the space as it had been in the past, women in sequined gowns, smoke floating from cigarette holders to the high gilded ceiling. Now it had all the aspects of a carnival. Semiclothed girls handed out candy canes, people drank neon-colored cocktails in the flash of neon lights. We did not gamble, just wandered and watched. Time passed strangely, as it was meant to, and soon we had been there for hours. When we left, the streets were oddly calm. It was nearly two in the morning.
“You go on back,” my mother waved. “I want to go down to the beach.”
“Now?” I asked.
“I haven’t touched the water yet,” she said.
“Can I come with you?” I asked. She nodded. The night air held the sharp reminder of approaching winter. I shivered under my light sweater.
“You know,” my mother said, noting my shivers, “some of my happiest moments have been on the beach alone.”
“Do you want to be alone?” I asked.
“No, it’s okay,” she said.
We walked in silence. As we reached the sand, we slipped off our shoes. My mother was barefoot but I was wearing tights. I placed my foot tentatively, braced for the damp, but the water was still a long way off. It was the widest beach I had ever seen, the ratio of sand to water reversed. They say that the town of Deauville is closer to Paris than it is to the ocean. Where we stood, the water was still so far away from us as to be nearly invisible, a thin black strip below the black sky.
Halfway there, we stopped. Deep puddles from high tide caught and fractured the light. I did not want to step through them in my stocking feet.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll wait here for you.”
“It’s okay,” my mother said. She linked her arm through mine, and we looked up at the sky.
“We’re in the stolen hour,” I said. It was the evening that the clocks got set back, creating earlier winter dawns, earlier winter sunsets. At three a.m., the hands would turn back to two. This hour would disappear.
My mother turned to hug me, her breath in my hair. Then she pulled away and walked off toward the water.
“You’re going in?” I said to her receding form. She did not answer.
She was several feet away before she turned around. She walked back toward me. Without a word, she handed me her shoes and her bag. Then she took off toward the water at a run. Her scarf whipped in the wind. Her bare heels caught the moonlight. She became smaller and smaller across the endless sand. She became a white dot. She disappeared.
I felt the night air on the back of my neck. I felt the cool sand underfoot and the weight of my mother’s purse. I listened carefully and heard, beyond the waves, the distant rumble of a solitary car. I looked straight ahead. Through the layers of darkness, I could almost make out my mother’s shimmering form.
acknowledgments
Thank you to my editor, Becky Saletan, whose talent and extraordinary efforts made this book possible. She illuminated my Paris apartment through late-night Skype sessions and, on top of it all, became a mentor and a friend. Thank you to Anne Fadiman, who knew what it meant to be a daughter and saw me as myself. The project began under her wing. Thank you to Rebecca Nagel for finding the perfect home for my work. Thank you to Jynne Dilling and Katie Freeman for their extraordinary promotional powers. Thank you to Karen Mayer, who took this book to heart. Thank you to Megan Lynch, who first pulled me into the Riverhead fold. And thank you to the rest of the Riverhead team—in particular Grace Han, Gretchen Achilles, Amy Ryan, Janice Kurzius, and Geoff Kloske—for all the work they have done behind the scenes.
Thank you to CJ Hauser, Snowden Wright, and Ruth Curry who, in New York, convinced me I could start writing a book. And thank you to Jacqueline Feldman, Kate Kornberg, Ian Dull, and Isidore Bethel who, in Paris, convinced me I could finish one. Thank you to Lynda Barry for the flash cards that summer. Thank you to Andrew Wylie.
Thank you to my friends, without whom I’d be lost, too many to name without forgetting one. Thank you in particular to those who sat by me while I worked: Jasmine Roudenko, who always knew when I was on the Internet, and Rosa Rankin-Gee, who made me laugh loudly in libraries. Thank you to Yelena Moskovitch for her inspirational text messages, and to Daniel Fromson for being my writing partner when this all began. Thank you to Lindsay Nordell, who taught me how to love. Merci à Sarra Kherrat, qui m’a aimée mieux que je n’aurais su le lui demander. Thank you to all those whose lives were folded into this book and who will be impacted by its publication. Thank you in particular to my aunts, who have always extended a loving hand. I know you each have your own different versions to tell.
Thank you to my brother, who asked to appear little here but looms large in my heart. I am so grateful for you. Thank you to my father, who never meant to be the tree that cast the shade, yet in whose shade I grew. His work informs this book. His love informs everything else.
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Thank you to Josée, who took a chance and loved me, and allowed me to fall in love with her in return. She is much more than a character in a story. I am so grateful for the sharp, witty, caring woman I came to know, and more grateful still that she happened to be my grandmother. I will carry the moments we shared forever. I hope there are many still to come.
And thank you, more than thank you, more than words, to my mother, who gave of herself without reserve. I know that there is still so much of you I do not know, and that you will never be fully captured by my writing. But the more I learn about you, the more I love you. You never asked to be admired by me but, at the risk of sounding like a second-grader, you are my role model and my hero. And regardes, Maman. I can fly.
about the author
Nadja Spiegelman grew up in New York City and now divides her time between Paris and Brooklyn.
*Nadja Mouly Spiegelman. Born 5/13/87.
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