Stories We Tell Ourselves

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Stories We Tell Ourselves Page 9

by Sarah Françoise


  The good thing about Maya’s blame was that it got shared equally between him and Lois. Joan only had eyes for him when it came to resentment. Frank enjoyed being a witness to his girls’ healthy rivalry. It was like a game they could play blindfolded: Lois provoked Maya, Maya coaxed provocations out of Lois. They infuriated each other in a vacuum of consequence – in the same way that disliking a part of your body is futile. They had argued about absolutely everything in their lives except the fundamentals. Frank assumed Christmas would be one long, loving joust between them.

  He reminded himself to pay special attention to Wim this year. Wim sometimes got forgotten in the wake of his sisters’ achievements or crises. As kids, the girls would spar for his attention, competing with fake tears for his snuggles and kisses. It usually ended with Wim in tears, overwhelmed with his inability to console both sisters at the same time. There was something extra-pure about that boy’s heart, Frank had always thought. Something deeply allergic to unhappiness. In many respects, this worried Frank. He had difficulty imagining Wim in a managerial role, for example, or having to deliver bad news to anyone, ever. There was having a good heart, and then there was moving through life. He would talk to Wim.

  Frank stood up and followed Maya downstairs, where the wedding guests now lay scattered to the whims of the Gitsy cyclone, their unravelled toilet paper trains torn to shreds all over the floor.

  *

  For many years, the piano room was just a room that was missing a wall and housed someone else’s baby grand piano. It had been intended as the antechamber of a greenhouse: a boxed-in terrace that straddled a half-inside, half-outside concrete koi pond. But Joan, who had seen how frogs took over another of Frank’s intentions – the pool – had stopped the project the only way she knew how, by wearing Frank’s enthusiasm thin.

  For the month during which they collaborated on the design of the French windows they experienced a romantic renaissance, and even though a new dullness had taken over since, Joan thought fondly about Frank every time she opened the door to step into the back garden.

  The French windows overlooked the raw concrete pool, which, true to form, Frank had ignored long enough for it to become an element of nature. The order Joan created stopped at the glass door, and beyond it was all mounds of unclaimed dirt for a rockery, jutting iron rods to hold up invisible but vital structures, and yet another hole of submerged construction materials. In the cold, they looked almost delicate, thought Joan, as she flattened out the creases of a holly-green tablecloth.

  Maya, Gitsy, Nick and Lois were decorating the tree in the next room. Finn and Cole were taking a nap upstairs. Frank had sat in the living room for twenty restless minutes, the spasm in his knee knocking up against the coffee table. Now he was back at his computer, tapping out statements to or about the Germans.

  Joan fetched the bottle of port from the kitchen and put it on a tray with five tiny glasses. She stacked some mince pies on a plate and put those on the tray, too. At Christmas she kept a permanent tray of mince pies on the windowsill, wrapped in a linen dishcloth. She must have made 200 mince pies this year, and still she knew that wouldn’t be enough.

  ‘Look, Grandma!’ said Gitsy, pointing to the wooden parachuting Santa. ‘Mama said this was her favourite when she was a little girl.’

  ‘Really? I remember your mama liking the fuzzy apples with the sparkly leaves,’ said Joan. ‘She used to lick off the glitter.’

  ‘Your mama was a glitter-licker,’ said Lois.

  Joan put down the tray and fetched her Nativity box from the starry chaos cupboard.

  Every year in December, Joan had signed notes from Lois and Maya’s teachers, allowing the girls to join the class field trip to the town’s expo centre, which had hosted the same touring Provençale Nativity scene since Joan first set foot in Annecy from England in the 1970s as an English-language teaching assistant.

  How glamorous it had seemed that first summer. Drinking flimsy glasses of white wine outside a medieval lock-up, watching the tan lines build up between the straps of her gladiator sandals, all those neon geraniums... Being the only one who could sing along to the radio. And then that first winter. The beauty of this place under snow. The winking lights and chocolate shops in Chamonix, and the men falling over each other to teach her how to ski – all of these things made more exciting by the notion that here it was she who was exotic. To come all the way to the Alps for something else, only to realise that you were something else.

  On the day of the field trip Joan gave the girls their allowance, which Maya would spend on mass-produced trinkets in the gift shop. Lois would save hers and deposit it in her New York coin bank – a carton of Weetabix with a picture of the Manhattan skyline glued across it. Nearly twenty years later, when she had just moved to Brooklyn, Lois found the box intact in her parents’ basement. The 107 francs it contained in coins could no longer be redeemed for euros, so Lois flew the cash back with her and emptied it into the East River.

  Joan, who was generally unmoved by French folklore, couldn’t understand why the girls, who had seen the Nativity scene every winter from the age of four to ten, were so excited for the field trip. The idea of walking single-file around a crowded hall to look at hand-painted clay figurines depicting vanishing handicrafts like basket-weaving was not the kind of cultural exercise that made Joan tick.

  The old ladies who lived in expensive lakefront apartment buildings came out in droves for the Nativity scene. They snaked around the hall oohing in their mink capes, reeking of mothballs. The matching rouge and lipstick, the auburn perms, their appetite for complaint as conversation... The people of this town – particularly its women – remained a mystery to Joan, who was known to use her from-awayness as an excuse not to participate.

  Two years ago, the year Wim moved to London to go to university, Joan dragged herself to the Nativity exhibition to follow in the footsteps of her scattered children, and remember them that way. She wanted to watch other small children wind their way around the show like a pleased snake with many heads.

  It was a revelation. Here was a world contained and still, dedicated to the preservation of memory. Of late, Joan felt that she had stopped the active production of memory that kept the family busy for the past twenty years, and tipped into the preservation beat. The figures were fixed, perfect and busy with discreet tasks that embodied not only their lifetime, but probably the lifetime of their parents. The children in the Nativity scene did not go off to America, where they subsequently had nervous breakdowns and no medical insurance. They did not choose to go to university in London and only pick up the phone when they were in arrears of rent. No – they stayed rooted to the spot and had a healthy Mediterranean glow, even in winter.

  Joan unpacked the figurines she’d collected over the last two years, buying two or three every few months from a catalogue or online. The statues were packed in toilet paper and bubble-wrap. There was Jesus, Joseph and Mary, and three Magi from when the kids were small and they’d invested, as good parents do, in the basic supermarket Nativity scene. To these Joan had added a fishmonger, a woman with a bread stand, a woman carrying a tray of cheeses, the neck of a bottle of wine between her fingers, a basket weaver with real wicker props, a dancing bear with a cuff around his leg and his handler. There was a butcher with a necklace of sausages, a flower seller with small bouquets of lilacs in a basket, and a couple of young lovers who looked like they’d been plucked from a ronde.

  The Nativity scene, like Joan at Christmas time, was all about labour. It was about surrounding Jesus with workers, drowning the foolhardy pursuit of heaven or happiness in the fishmonger’s cry for fish and the mother’s cries of pain.

  She’d always remember the look on Frank’s face when she pushed their first daughter out. It was a look of utter devotion and at the same time a picture of obsolescence. ‘What have you just done?’ he seemed to ask, his face struck with a look of awe. ‘What have you just done to me?’ was also a possibility.

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nbsp; Frank had never met his biological father, although he did have to sort through the man’s possessions when he died in 1980, in a rented studio apartment in the South of France. ‘He was proud of you,’ said a neighbour. ‘Proud of what you became.’ Finding out that his estranged father had somehow accessed even the most basic of updates on his life and formed a positive opinion about it sent Frank into a deep depression that lasted the better part of two years.

  Family, to a young Frank, was the number of kids to a bed, scratchy wool coats made from American military blankets, having to walk to school instead of taking the bus, and rationing. His own father had started off relatively rich, the son of a wealthy industrialist who made his fortune in yogurts and crème fraîche. He had left Frank’s mother pregnant and penniless, and later been disowned because of his drinking and gambling. Frank provided for Joan and the kids with a vengeance, and in order to do this left for work before they woke up and often came home late.

  Because he worked so hard, he afforded himself moments of selfishness, moments dedicated to the study of things that charmed him, like Hölderlin’s poetry and the names given to French bogs. But to the others, the time spent at work and the time spent in study merged to form a single block of absence, so that Frank became mysterious, even to his own kids.

  It is true he compensated for this with his wild moon chases, foraging expeditions in the autumn and a whole week of presence in the summer, when he took the kids shrimping and fishing, and cycling, and swimming – often past the point of exhaustion.

  Once, Joan managed to convince Frank to see a shrink.

  ‘Tell me about your father,’ the therapist asked, on their first appointment.

  ‘I don’t have a father,’ Frank said.

  ‘I guess we’ll start there, then.’

  Joan blew dust off the brown crêpe and artificial-moss barn, and placed baby Jesus in his too-orange manger in the centre. She put his virginal mother beside him. Like Jesus, Frank had been a prodigal son. Joan unwrapped the last of the figurines, looking for Joseph. Like Frank’s father in the months following the birth of his son, he was nowhere to be found.

  With her Nativity scene as complete as it could be, Joan started to arrange her collectible, hand-painted French workers into semicircles around Jesus. For fun, she moved Mary out and replaced her with Boules Player Jeanot. She stood Mary beside the butcher, with his blood-smeared apron and his stand of sausage links. The woman with a marrow on her head she paired with the wise man, and turned them so that they had their backs to baby Jesus. And so Joan formed her union, from the ground up to the heavens.

  In the next room, Gitsy was putting all the baubles on one branch, which was drooping so low it almost touched the floor. Maya was busy rearranging the decorations, spacing them out and tucking the fairy lights deeper into the branches.

  Last night, Joan had caught herself thinking that maybe, just maybe, her heart wasn’t in it this year. Women in magazines wrote about that time they didn’t do Christmas but found cheap flights to Madeira instead, or just read a very long book. She’d banished the thought from her mind, and reminded herself that they all relied on her. That family milestones don’t just mark themselves.

  Even Frank, who at times seemed to want to write her out with his self-isolation, needed her. He owed her his life more than the kids, she thought. Without her, Frank would live off bread and cheese, and become one of those hoarders you see on television. He would surround himself with maps and books and mountains of hi-res printouts of German paintings, until even his children would stop visiting him.

  The tree was decorated. Cole plugged the blinking star into the garland of fairy lights. Gitsy clapped as it winked white and then gold. Finn looked at his big sister and joined in the clapping.

  *

  As long as they remembered, there had been a poinsettia at Christmas. The poinsettia must have preceded the joke about there always being a poinsettia at Christmas, but no one could be sure.

  This year there were two poinsettias – one blood-red, the other white. There were also bowls of nuts in their shells, painted nutcrackers with cotton-wool beards, and red and green doilies that only came out in December. Lois envied her mother’s ability to make a Christmas, to excel in the categories of food, decoration and gifts. She recognised the same ability in her sister, although Joan was her own workforce, and Maya tended to outsource. Joan had always been an executor. Maya delegated or procured. Either way, the yule log turned out perfect.

  Lois rubbed a velvety leaf of the white poinsettia between her fingers. Next to her was a bottle of wine Frank had brought up for her earlier. It was one of Frank’s concerns that Lois and Maya did not have access to good wine in the US. It was one of Joan’s concerns that Lois drank too much. Lois drank her glass clean and went to pour another. She sensed Maya tallying how many drinks she’d had from across the room.

  She had assembled two more poems that afternoon, shrinking her source material. The main difference between these and the travel plaza poems was the topic of death. Aside from the odd hyperbole about service station coffee, death was largely absent from travel plaza reviews.

  Last autumn there had been a reading of her chapbook in a bar in Bushwick. Nick and the Historian both showed up. As Nick negotiated the strange room and a world that was his only by invitation, Lois felt the Historian’s advantage. He mingled as though a poetry series were his natural habitat. When Lois read he stared right at her, communicating with her still. After the reading Nick stepped out to smoke, and the Historian purchased one of the chapbooks. ‘Dedicate it to me,’ he ordered, opening it up at the title page. And she had. The next time she met the Historian was one of the few times they had sex. Introducing a little bit of Nick into the equation had made their situation a little more untenable, a little more desirable.

  This book, Lois decided, she would dedicate to Nick. The previous book had been a trick; this one would be an exercise in salvation.

  Men, women:

  all of us volunteers.

  All of us volunteers.

  Spell it out for me:

  I thought I would die

  without you.

  Joan had gone to bed at the same time as the children. Frank was in his office, writing about the structure of branches in Friedrich’s work for his blog. Lois had spent the day looking for more signs of her father’s affair. It was shocking to think that, underneath his predictable front, the quiet routine of his trademark obsessions, Frank was moved to love. Again. If anything, Lois noticed, her mother seemed less affected than normal by his need to retreat to his office the minute dinner was over.

  Cole was catching up with work in his bedroom, and Nick had fallen asleep in front of the television, watching The Shop Around The Corner dubbed in French. Simon was sitting at Lois’s bare feet. His fur covered her toes, and when she nudged him in the ribs he purred like a contented cat.

  ‘Don’t you find it weird,’ Lois asked Maya, ‘the way Dad tries to get him to do tricks for us?’

  Maya put down her magazine and came to sit at the table.

  ‘Why is that weird?’ she said. ‘It’s what people do with dogs.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just, he never did that with us, so why would he do it to his dog?’

  ‘What – ask us to fetch?’

  ‘No, I mean, show us off, make us perform for people. It’s like he’s unlearned how to raise kids.’

  ‘It’s a dog, Lois.’

  Simon rolled out the tip of his tongue so it would touch Lois’s big toe. He could taste her woollen sweat. The taste of her zipped through him like the smell of food.

  Lois poured Maya a glass of wine.

  ‘No, I’m OK. I’m not really...’

  ‘What, you’re not pregnant again, are you?

  ‘God no,’ said Maya. ‘But I’m still breastfeeding. Well, kind of.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  After the miscarriage, the doctor told Lois that motherhood had only been postponed.
That there was always a reason. That a healthy, viable baby would be on its way in no time. But the fact was, she wasn’t getting pregnant.

  Lois had asked the doctor how long before she could start trying again for another baby. ‘That’s a question for you and your husband to answer.’ The answer came back, blatant and unhelpful. She was talking about risk, but all the doctor seemed interested in talking about was feelings. Feelings were a risky business, too. But statistics, probability, dates, time codes, diets, studies... there had to be evidence. She wanted to know whether it would happen again. If there would be another pill to fetch from the pharmacy, delivered in a white paper bag, along with a tube of hand-counted Vicodin. If she’d have to call her mother again to have a conversation that ended right then and there, one of those stupid talks that has nowhere else to go. ‘The body bounces back, Lois. What we need to make sure of is that your mind...’

  Lois saw her mind bouncing up Fifth Avenue, towards Central Park; a gelatinous clear blob shaped like a water balloon that jumped from car to car in slow motion. People in offices looked out as her mind waltzed past their windows, light and supple and visible to all.

  ‘There’s this theory that you can’t get pregnant by someone if you’re emotionally engaged with someone else,’ said Maya.

  Lois was familiar with this theory. Nick had said the same thing after he found out about the affair. He also called her crazy, and said it was fucked up to want to get pregnant while she was carrying on with someone else. Wanting a baby overlapped with wanting Nick’s baby, but that wasn’t the whole story. ‘I have this fantasy of getting you pregnant,’ the Historian told her once. It was possible that, by calling it a fantasy, he had jinxed the whole thing. Later, she hated him for that.

  ‘Who are you emotionally engaged with?’ Lois asked.

  ‘You’re going to be shocked,’ said Maya.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Lois pushed the stem of the glass closer to Maya.

  ‘Have one. It’s Christmas. One bottle of formula isn’t going to affect his chances of getting into an Ivy League school.’

 

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