“Well!” I manage a smile. “You give me too much credit.”
“Not at all. You’re much kinder than you realize,” he says, lightly, and the air wavers, every molecule touching me beneath my heavy, old woman’s cotton.
The Sex Appeal of the French
I told my aunts I was training for an expedition in the Himalayas. I was sixteen, I smoked half a pack of cigarettes a night, and I’d convinced Miss Deyton, the PE teacher back home, that I had my period three weeks out of four so I wouldn’t have to play sports. The aunts believed me. Even Miss Deyton, who didn’t want to bother with reluctant players, had required some finessing: a week of headaches, nine-day periods, five days for my iron levels to go back to normal. Plus, I was salutatorian, which made Miss Deyton more susceptible to my lies. But the aunts were my French aunts and I’m half American. They thought I could barely spell my name, but they believed me about the Himalayas. A skinny sixteen-year-old with no muscle tone, on her way to Kathmandu.
It was the summer of 1976 and I was staying with my aunts on the coast of Brittany for the entire three months of my vacation. The days were tolerable only if I spent almost no time with my mother’s people—Tante Françoise, Tante Chouchotte, and my cousins, who divided their time between waterskiing and studying for national exams. My high school in North Carolina didn’t require studying during the school year, much less the summer, and I hated water sports.
What I liked to do was wander along the cliffs overlooking the ocean, having imaginary conversations. Now and then I’d pause for a cigarette, or take a picture with the used Leica I’d gotten for my birthday; sometimes, I gazed out at the people on the beaches below and imagined what it was like to be them, but mostly I talked to myself. I could fill day after day like that. At home, when my father blew up because he couldn’t find his car keys or something in the house broke down, he always told me I could help the most by staying out of the way. I was happy to oblige. With the cousins, I’d have had to spend a lot of time pretending to get their jokes or failing to understand the waterskiing instructions. I was supposedly bilingual, but in French I couldn’t catch the subtleties and I came across as mildly retarded.
I wasn’t even sure where the Himalayas were, or if Kathmandu was part of them. The best that could be said of North Carolina schools was that they weren’t in Mississippi. But even if we’d lived in New England, in some tony Boston suburb, I would have been clueless about the Himalayas. I could ace a test, but I retained no facts, and have no sense of direction. I can’t consistently say which way is left and which is right. A wire might be crossed in my brain, but when I was young it seemed more profound to me than that: I wasn’t in the world enough to know its shape.
The nice thing about a body of water, of course, is that as long as you stick to the shore, you won’t get lost. All along the coast of Brittany there are small, sandy coves, and above the sand, black cliffs; above the cliffs, winding through pale green saltbush, are miles of dirt paths overlooking the sea.
I was walking along those paths one day when it came to me that I had no idea at any given time whether the tide was coming in or going out. People died at high tide. They wandered down onto the rocks and got stuck, were battered against the cliffs. The way tides worked was the sort of thing, like left and right, that didn’t stick in my mind. Still, I loved the waves, all that water pulling away, dragging the sand deep into the ocean, and then rolling back, rising and slamming onto the rocks, crashing and collapsing in a ribbon of foamy light. I’d tried to capture it on film, I’d sketched it, written poems about it. I wanted to know what the waves meant. Sex? The passionate life I imagined for myself? My fucked-up family with their explosive, circular fights? I was salutatorian mostly because of my grades in English. I loved that everything meant something else, that what was all around me might be a metaphor.
Of course, what I really wanted was a boyfriend. Someone pining for me back home, or someone I was about to meet. Lucy, my best friend at home, my only true friend, said there was nothing wrong with my looks, no reason I couldn’t keep a guy, but I was the one-date queen. I’d hang around some cute boy, let it slip that I was half French, and he’d light up. There seemed to be some confusion in the minds of boys, some crossed wire of their own, so that when I said “French,” they heard “blow job.” Gangly and flat-chested, I could get any boy to ask me out, but the minute he touched me, I froze. I was desperate to lose my virginity, but this was the era of The Joy of Sex, a book I studied almost daily, and all those ways to please your lover seemed like instructions I might mess up.
Anyway, the French didn’t think it was sexy to be half American, and I wasn’t likely to lose my virginity on the coast of Brittany. The incredible thing, more surprising than any lie I got away with, is that I’d chosen to spend the summer with the aunts. I could have done any number of things—a couple of things, anyway: ring up groceries at the A&P, spend the summer in Paris with my mother—and I had chosen this. A pair of gulls flew up past me, vanishing into the glass-blue sky, and then dove suddenly toward the waves, cawing and screeching as they plummeted. This is the most beautiful place in the world, I thought, but I wished I had stayed home.
When I was little, my mother had left me in Brittany every summer. She wanted me to enjoy the seaside, the way she wanted my older siblings, sent to relatives in the mountains, to enjoy hiking. She herself spent every summer in Paris. After nine months in America, where no one understood her accent, she needed the cafés and streets of her youth, she needed her own beautician. Our father stayed home in North Carolina and played his cello. Every summer, I wept for days, insisting that I didn’t need the salt breeze, I didn’t need to be a good swimmer, I just needed my mother. I outgrew the weeping eventually, and the aunts found me a little less intolerable—nothing since the war was worth crying over—but they still thought I was gloomy and slow-witted.
Then, when I was fourteen, old enough to get a summer job, my parents said I didn’t have to go to Brittany anymore, and I applied for work at the A&P. Mr. Burnett, the manager, gave me raises every month, said I was the best cashier he’d ever had. I might be working there still if Joel Caruso, the pimply stock boy, hadn’t kept trying to touch me. I wanted a boyfriend, but talking to imaginary boys had given me impossibly high standards. Joel, sidling up between the crates of produce and brushing against me, was not what I wanted. When I turned sixteen, I asked to go back to France. Come to Paris with me, my mother said, now that I was old enough to make my way around the city on my own, and I said, Yes. And then: No. It hit me, I want to say, like a wall of water. I thought it would be easier to find a boyfriend at the beach, easier not to have my mother looking on. I must have sensed, too, that Paris would break my heart, that three months alone with my mother, in her own world, would be too much.
* * *
“Why the Himalayas?” the aunts had asked that morning.
“It’s a part of the world I’ve always wanted to see,” I’d answered, wondering again where the Himalayas were.
“And you have a group to go with?”
“Yes,” I said. “A group. An international expedition group.”
“Why not the Alps? Why do you need to go to India?”
India, I thought, and said, “Oh, the Alps, too. I’d love to go to the Alps. Actually, I think the group is planning a trip to the Alps next.”
I never stumbled over lies the way so many people do. They flowed out of me, a parallel life. I lied because it was easy, and much more interesting, to move between two story lines. I never felt as if the official story—the “real” one everyone might agree on—was any more deeply true than the imaginary one.
I reached a little promontory that jutted way out over the beach, and I stopped, picturing myself at the top of a snowy peak, lean and sunburned, carrying an old rucksack. On the cover of National Geographic, an old, grainy, black-and-white photograph of me, alone, on a needle-thin peak. Polly Miller, the first woman to climb Mount ____. She was acco
mpanying her lover, the photographer Tomas Seligman, as he fled from the Nazis. Tomas Seligman perished soon after this photograph was taken, but Polly pushed on alone, braving the elements and the altitude so she could publish his work posthumously.
Tomas had loved me so much. He had brown hair and a mustache, much like Tom Selleck, and no one understood him the way I did. He couldn’t believe how beautiful I was.
Kids at school asked me if I ever got my stories confused, but, really, how could you? They didn’t know about Tomas Seligman or our flight from the Nazis, but they knew about the excuses I made to get out of things, and the stories I made up just to see what people would believe, and my capacity for deception did a lot to make up for my being salutatorian, and flat-chested, and still a virgin.
The green waves turned white in the sun, cresting and collapsing. A thin, dark-haired man stood in the surf up to his knees, smoking a cigarette, flicking the ashes into the water. He looked twenty, maybe older, and I thought he was the sort of man I’d like, quiet and observant. I imagined us together: how we’d sit side by side, our feet dangling over the edge of a cliff, passing a cigarette back and forth. My stomach tightened, registering the awkwardness and thrill of our first encounter. Then he dropped his cigarette in the water and swam out toward a trio of bobbing heads. The four of them returned to shore, and I saw that he was the father, herding his three little girls to gather their things and go home. I kept walking. I had no desire to go down into the water. It was cold and I didn’t like the sticky way you felt when you got out, and I didn’t like being inside the motion of the waves. Besides, I was a terrible swimmer. Too weepy when I was little to jump in the waves with my cousins, I’d sat up on the beach, filling buckets with sand because the aunts didn’t like idle children.
A motorboat roared past, pulling a skier, water rising behind him like an enormous, foamy wing. The skier was too far away to recognize, of course, but I thought it must be my cousin Jean. The boat was red. I was pretty sure my cousins’ boat was red, and Jean was a champion skier. I liked Jean. I’d had a crush on him when I was little, and still hoped he thought well of me. Good-looking and capable like all my cousins, he was a couple of years older than me, and nicer than the rest. Once, he told the others to leave me alone when I was crying, and sometimes he encouraged me in a friendly way to join them in the water. He even talked to me about my mother. My mother used to ski, and he admired her skill. When she brought me to the aunts, she’d spend a couple of days with us, working on her tan and going out on the water. She’d lean back one-handed, laughing, an angel in all that glittering spray.
I never saw my mother laugh in America. Our pleasures baffled her. Peanut butter, for example, that greasy, gluey staple. So much excessif! The shopping centers, the packaged snacks, my father’s long nights in his studio. My parents didn’t fight, but they didn’t need to. My siblings—Pete, Louise, Evie—did it for them. Once, Pete busted Evie’s jaw, and Louise and Evie regularly scratched the skin off each other. Still, none of their fights compared to my mother’s homesickness or my father’s coldness.
My father hated the seaside the way my mother hated the States. What’s the point? he asked. People broiling like pigs on a spit. He might have enjoyed walking along the cliffs the way I did—he liked exercise—but he was the principal cellist of the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, and he had no patience for ordinary life. It amazed me that he knew what people did at the beach. There was a sign on the door of his studio, only half-joking: Silence—Genius at Work. When had he had time to observe a crowd of beachgoers? When he wasn’t playing his cello, he was composing or reading; he rarely joined us for meals. We were too noisy, he said, implying that our mother couldn’t discipline us, which was true. The older ones were always clamoring for things. A color television, a freezer full of ice cream, trips to Belk’s for new clothes. My mother dressed beautifully, but if you have lived the war, she said, you do not waste. She had a single, exquisite, black-lace bra she wore every day, two silk scarves, a pearl necklace and an amber one, three or four dresses and sweaters, a diamond ring. Still, she’d give in to my siblings’ demands. Afterward, she’d be in a terrible mood, insist that one time they give her peace, but they couldn’t. They’d fight over the rights to every new purchase, getting louder and louder, until my mother shut herself in her room. Even now, with my siblings grown and living on their own, they dropped by on the weekends and started right in, fighting over whose version of some childhood memory was correct, who was going to inherit our mother’s ring.
An old, topless woman on the beach was handing out sandwiches to a group of children, and I watched them awhile, wishing I’d brought a snack for myself. Near the picnickers, a younger woman—the children’s mother?—lay sunbathing in an orange two-piece bikini. Only the old seemed to go topless, I thought; the young women all lay quietly in beautiful two-pieces. The smallest of the children ran toward the young woman, calling to her to look at something, but she waved him away and rolled over onto her stomach.
The only thing that kept my siblings quiet was my mother’s war stories. Sometimes even our father would stick around for those. “A Frenchwoman speaking English—now that’s a pretty sound,” he’d say, standing in the doorway.
We asked for the same stories over and over: the danger of listening to the radio; the proper way to skin rabbits and sew their pelts together for coats. How to make coffee from corn. After the war, she told us, she’d sifted through the Allied soldiers’ garbage for food. Her voice was soft and musical, and I’d think how special we were, with our mother, who had lived the war, and our father, who was so brilliant. I might joke with Lucy about my crazy, fucked-up family, but I meant crazy and fucked-up like the Greek gods. We would have been all right if we could have remained suspended in those stories forever, but America, with its plentiful stores, its blinking lights, its jingles, kept calling us down.
My sister Evie had had it the worst. Pete shoplifted what my mother did not give easily, and Louise, beautiful like our mother, always had a boyfriend to buy things for her. Only Evie didn’t know how to game any system. She’d wanted TV and ice cream and she’d wanted our mother’s love, too, and she never understood that it was one or the other. Evie looked like me, or I looked like her—all pale angles and freckles—but she didn’t know how to lie. She didn’t know how to play the heroine in her own imagination.
Much younger than Pete-Evie-Louise, who’d been born in a three-year rush, I learned by watching them, and asked for nothing. I didn’t need to—by the time I came along, the color TV played all day long, the freezer was stocked with ice cream, Sara Lee, Tater Tots. You are nice, my mother said, stroking my hair, and I leaned into her. Beneath her Nina Ricci, she smelled salty, like the waves, the wet, black rocks.
* * *
Until I was five and a half—much older than Pete-Evie-Louise when they were sent to the mountains—she kept me with her in Paris for the summer. We’d lie together in the sunny bed in her stepfather’s apartment, voices from the street filtering in through the balcony, and that was all we needed for entertainment, the sunlight, the scraps of conversation, my body curled into hers. We’d get up late, go to the Luxembourg for the merry-go-round and then to her beautician’s. Monsieur Schwarz, who ran his salon out of his apartment, was the best beautician in all of Paris, my mother said. I loved his apartment, full of American luxuries: soft toilet paper, a refrigerator, a television. He laughed when he saw me, gave me a bag of candies, and said my mother was his most beautiful client. I waited in the living room while my mother and Monsieur Schwarz went in the back room, where he waxed her legs and eyebrows and fixed her hair. Sometimes, I sat by the door, listening to her strange, soft grunts—the waxing was very painful, she said—until she came out, her skin oiled, hair down her back.
* * *
The path curved again. There were no more old women down on the beach, but now the young women were topless. I tried to see if anyone was flat and bony, but they all had deli
cate bodies with full, barely fallen breasts.
Lucy, who’d slept with six guys by the end of junior year, teased me for gawking at people. Apparently, I walked through the halls of our school, staring at everyone, so absorbed my mouth nearly hung open. I swear to God, I can’t take you anywhere, she’d say. Between the talking to yourself and the gawking, you’re like someone who never got properly socialized. Then we’d both laugh about how inappropriate I was and that might lead to how stupid everyone else was when you thought about it, and we’d give up on school for a while and go smoke behind the gym. Lucy was pretty much at the bottom of the class, despite all the times I stretched back in my chair or dropped my paper so she could look at my answers. Despite how truly smart she was. She said the problem was not that I had imaginary friends, the problem was I thought I was imaginary; I didn’t realize people could see me, all bug-eyed and gaping.
My mother had been a watchful, solitary girl herself—a serious violinist, which was how she’d survived the war. Her family home in Normandy was destroyed on D-day, but my mother was in Paris, auditioning for the conservatory. It was a mild, breezy day all across France, a good day for a bombing raid, and as she drew her bow down for the first note, she was overcome with nerves, but she kept playing. It took her a month to learn that her mother and one of her sisters had been buried in the first round of Allied bombs. They dug up her mother’s body, but all anyone could find of the little sister was an arm.
She met my father a year after the armistice, in a church near Notre Dame, at a performance of a Mendelssohn string quartet. They’d both heard the concert from the street and slipped in at the end of the first movement. By the beginning of the third, my father, towering over her in the back of the church, had taken her elbow as if he’d known her for years.
* * *
The topless women sat in beach chairs, reading, smoking, dozing. Now and then they looked up to scold whatever children were nearby—Allez! Arrête! Ça suffit! Go on! Stop! That’s enough! I felt their irritation all through my body, as if I had a slight fever, as if I were five and six and seven again, and they were my aunts. But these women paid no attention to me, up on the cliffs, and after a while the feeling vanished.
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