Beyond the beach of topless young women was a fully nude beach, and I sat on one of the benches along the path to settle in. Only the women were naked—the men wore Speedos—but from where I stood (close enough to study the shapes of breasts, too far to hear much of anything), I understood that this beach was all about sex. There were no children, and the women stood straight, flat-bellied. The men watched. One man pushed a woman into the water, laughing. I might tolerate the cold and the salt and the waves, I thought, if I had a boyfriend to tease me that way, and then I thought of the parable we’d read in English, about the hermit who lived on a hill overlooking a village. He never went down to the village, but when, because of some trouble or another, the villagers moved to a new valley, far from the hermit’s hill, the hermit packed his belongings and traveled until he found them, whereupon he climbed a hill and built a new hut overlooking the new village. I loved that story.
I got up again, and was suddenly mortified by my halter top and jeans cutoffs. Frenchwomen never wore cutoffs or Indian-print halter tops. What had I been thinking? I should have spent a few days in Paris before I came to Brittany, asked my mother to take me shopping. She didn’t object to shopping in Paris the way she did in the States. You rang a bell to be admitted into a store, suffered the disapproval of the shopkeeper whose afternoon you’d interrupted, and bought a single, beautiful item that would last your whole life. I had asked her if I could go to Monsieur Schwarz’s before I went to the beach, if he’d shape my eyebrows and give me a nice haircut. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I suspected he was more than her beautician, but I still wanted to believe he had a salon in his back room, that he was primarily a beautician. She snapped at me in a way she’d never done before. “You do your eyebrow by yourself,” she said, her eyes glittering. “The young people anyway—they prefer the natural look, no?”
My throat felt tight, but I didn’t want to walk all the way back to the house to change. Into what? All my clothes were obviously American. This was how the world got you, grabbing you by the ankle and pulling you under. You were walking along, talking to people in your mind, having a fine time, and suddenly you realized how stupid your outfit was. The world turned watery around me and then I imagined Lucy, with her American sensibilities, cringing at all the nakedness, and I was fine again.
Beyond the beach of naked women was the beach of naked men. This was even more fascinating, but the view wasn’t as open. I would have had to lie down on the rocks with my head hanging over the beach to see much of anything, and I tried to draw the line at obvious, deliberate spying. The path wound away from the cliffs, into the dunes, so I left it to climb the rocks. I loved jumping from rock to rock, coming upon the sudden clear pools, the narrow coves you could leap across. I wasn’t worried about the tides. To be afraid of death, you must be convinced of your own existence.
In English class, when we got to all the world being a stage I’d thought, Yes, picturing myself in the audience. At the center of the stage is my family’s living room where my mother sits, telling the story of how her mother and baby sister were killed. Pete and Louise are trying to kick each other without anyone noticing, but Evie leans toward my mother, as if she means to lay her head on my mother’s lap, unaware that this is not the right moment to do so: my mother is lost in her own world, and we must not disturb her. My father, bored by the actual story, has closed his eyes to better hear the cadence of my mother’s voice.
As my mother speaks, she gazes down at her palms. She seems to hold the events of June 6 in her hands, as if D-day were inside a snow globe: There is her family’s house, there are her mother and sister. When she shakes the globe, it isn’t snow but rubble that rains down and now she can see it, what she missed that day by being out of town, how the house was crushed; she can make sense of it, can stop and start the crumbling at will.
I sit breathlessly in the audience. I can’t tear my eyes from the snow globe, though I’m just as terrified of Pete’s and Louise’s kicking, Evie’s longing, my father’s indifference. Those are real lives, I think, strutting their hour upon the stage.
* * *
After a while, I found myself in the sand; the tide must have been going out while I was rock-hopping. I had no idea how I’d gotten there or where I was, but when I looked up, I saw that I was on the beach of naked men. All around me were Frenchmen—so much finer and slenderer than Tom Selleck—lounging, strolling along the beach, staring out at the horizon. I couldn’t breathe. Before I could figure out how to get back up on the cliffs, a bald man with a goatee wheeled around and asked what I was doing. His penis rose faintly from the tight nest of his pubic hair, and I said, Je cours. I’m running.
French people did not jog in the 1970s, and in that way I was wholly French. I was instantly winded, but once I’d made a spectacle of myself—a badly dressed American girl loping through a gay men’s beach—the only thing to do was to move on as quickly as possible, which wasn’t quick at all. My feet slipped in the sand, and though I tried to keep my eyes on the shoreline, I seemed to see them all, those fine-limbed men with their sinewy muscles, their dark blurring genitals. It wasn’t a big beach, but it took me days, it seemed, to cross it, and the whole time, I was ashamed the way you can only be ashamed in dreams, as if I were the naked one, and everyone else were fully clothed. Every last man stopped what he was doing and stared as I ran past.
I slowed down a little when I reached the beach of the naked women. Among the men, I’d been an outrage; here I was just a misfit. Two women, one almost as flat-chested as I, the other with breasts the size of her head, stared at the fringe on my shorts, but no one froze at the sight of me, or no one froze for long. I glanced enviously at all the lovely collarbones, the slender hands, the unembarrassed breasts, and wished more than ever that I looked French. This will be funny later, I thought, trying to console myself, and I pictured the crowd I could entertain with my story. Then a better image presented itself to me: I was opening my locker at school, and a boy was leaning in to hear what I was saying. Sure. I’ve spent time on nude beaches. Of course. In France.
A nun in full habit was walking toward me, conversing with a man in a wet suit. The nun smiled at me, and I smiled crazily in return. I was on the regular beach now, where the fully clothed and the half naked coexisted; there was no farther beach to run to.
I imagined Lucy touching my arm as I leaned over to catch my breath. Honest to God, she laughed, I cannot take you anywhere.
Stairs were carved into the cliffs leading up to the dirt path, and I headed straight toward them. Two couples were sunbathing near the base of the steps, a picnic basket at their feet. One of the couples lay quietly, but the other was flirting, the boy pulling at the girl’s bikini top while she batted his hand away. An ordinary teasing couple, I thought, and I stopped, transfixed: the girl raised her head, the boy motioned out toward the beach as if to say, See? Lots of women have taken their tops off. She lay back down. He pulled a strap down one shoulder. When he fumbled with the clasp, she shrugged him off, pulled her strap back up, and they began again.
My eyes stung. This was what I wanted. Not to go topless, not even to look French, but to have a boyfriend who flirted with me, who’d repeat the same preliminary gestures over and over. A boy with infinite patience.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Every time she shrugged him off, he bent and kissed her neck, and I was sure he knew her more intimately than any other boy knew a girl. I walked straight toward them, as if I meant to stand right above them. Men and women kissed everywhere in France; it didn’t occur to me that they might want privacy.
But something was wrong. The boy was older than I thought, hair on his back and shoulders; the other couple was a mother and her preteen son. Just as I realized it was the girl’s father flirting with her, trying to take off her bikini, she lifted her head. I stood three feet away. She looked at me with an expression of pure rage, wild black eyes in an acne-covered face, and I ran.
* * *
I wasn’t winded anymore. It seemed I could run for the rest of my life, and never grow tired, but still, at the top of the stairs, I stopped. Lucy, I thought, but there was no one there: only the murmur of voices from below, and the wind in the saltbushes.
Once, the aunts had taken my cousins and me to a farm somewhere. An electric fence surrounded a herd of cows and when the aunts weren’t looking, we dared each other to touch it. I hated the way it felt, and I loved it, too: that sudden, dark, wounding surge. I kept touching the fence after the others stopped and it made them laugh, as if my love of getting shocked were a crazy American thing, like my accent, and the way, jet-lagged, I slept for days after my mother dropped me off with them. What I craved was the way I could feel my whole body, all the way to the edge of my skin.
I sat on one of the stone benches along the path and stared at nothing. Something was wrong with me, with the day, with my whole stupid plan of finding a boyfriend, but I didn’t know what it was. Old people strolled past with their dogs, and now and then a family made its way down the steps, carrying beach chairs and umbrellas. None of them would even glance at the girl and her father, I thought. They had what they wanted. Why should they waste time gawking?
But it obviously wasn’t contentment that would keep the other beachgoers from looking. It was a sense of propriety. If a man was violating his daughter, they mustn’t watch.
I pictured myself going back down the stairs, scooping up a handful of rocks and throwing them in her father’s eyes. I’d grab that girl and take her far away. I ran through the scene over and over, as if I could wish it into being and the next step—what the girl and I would do next—would reveal itself, but nothing came to me.
Keep me company, Lucy would say, when she failed an exam. It didn’t change anything—she still wouldn’t get into college—but I always stayed with her. You can always keep someone company.
I went down the stairs then and took a spot on the beach near the girl. The tide was way out, wet sand almost to the horizon, littered with seaweed and driftwood. No one swam at low tide; they spread out far from one another and lay still beneath the burning dome of the sky. Her father might tell me to leave—I sat so close to them I could hear their breath, I imagined they could hear mine—but the only indication he gave of my presence was to stop his hand in the middle of his daughter’s back.
For the rest of the afternoon, I sat with my knees pulled up to my chin, willing the girl to know she was not alone, willing her father to die of shame. I didn’t want to gape at the girl, but I didn’t want to look away, either, so I pretended to search the horizon for boats. I kept hoping to see Jean out on the water again, as if, in the midst of skiing, he might sense me here, drop everything, and what—? What could he do?
Later, I knew, the girl’s father would finish what he’d begun—he’d take her top off, her bottom, too, maybe—but as long as I sat with her, he wouldn’t move. The tide would stay out, the sky hold still above us.
Les Mutilés
Where are the signs instructing us to give up our seats for the war-wounded? Priorité aux mutilés de guerre. There’s the little picture of the rabbit getting his fingers pinched, to warn children about the train doors closing, but nothing for the war-wounded. Nothing to remind us of our manners.
I like giving up my seat. It’s such a small thing to do: a nod, a moment of eye contact, if the man still has his vision. You who hold our suffering in your body. Please, sit.
Hundreds of us hurtling together beneath the city, and no one seems troubled that the signs are missing.
But I’ve lost my mind. This is a new train, they don’t post the signs anymore. There are grandmothers who can’t remember the war. All that’s left are the anniversary celebrations. Twenty-five years. Fifty years. Sixty, sixty-five, seventy. Poster-sized photos of the Liberation all over Paris and coffee-table books with those snapshots of people dancing in the streets. My son, Pete Junior, told me that at the war memorial in Caen, you can buy a box of D-day candies. This was an aside. His main point was that I should visit the memorial. I haven’t been back to Caen since ’44. Why would I want to see what they’ve built upon the ruins? He told me about the different rooms of the memorial, how interesting it was that the whole thing was underground, and I felt myself flow out of my body, as if I were relieving myself in the street, which I have done. At the end of the war, I stood on rue Soufflot in broad daylight, nineteen years old, my mother, sister, grandmother dead, and the pee streamed down my leg, so warm it felt good.
I looked up at Pete Junior, at his handsome head of gray hair, as he described the exhibits, and thought, I have taught you nothing. I used to tell the children stories, over and over, the same ones: my home, bombed on D-day, my sister’s shattered body. The children gathered around me the way they gathered around their shows on television, loving the violence, the excitement. I believed my stories were instructive: Give thanks for your good fortune; if the Nazis are at the door, lie. But they learned nothing, squabbling over who got to sit next to me, who got the last cookie.
The missing signs. For a moment, I was confused, forgetting what year it was. I wouldn’t say I’m senile, unless it’s senility to slide around the decades, lose track of where you are on the time line. Ninety-one next month. I’m tired. (But so impressive, my doctor says, since he has nothing to offer me for the exhaustion. You still ride the metro! Imagine that!) I still know who I am, who the others are. But here is an interesting development: I can no longer subtract. I have to ask someone—a neighbor, a grandchild, whoever happens by—to balance my checkbook. I can add, but I cannot take away. You’d think it would be the reverse, that at the end of my life, with everything falling away, subtraction would be my only skill. That test for senility, the backward counting, I’d fail it, but what does that tell you? I am still myself, if bereft of certain words, of a child’s skill with numbers.
In place of the signs, the brightest of advertisements. We might as well be in the States. I never think of myself as an American, though after the war, I married one. Lieutenant Peter Miller. We had known each other for a month. A tiny wedding in a tiny church on rue Saint-Jacques, with my stepfather giving me away, his gaze as empty as a POW’s. He’d looked that way since D-day. It was 1946, Paris cleared of barbed wire and debris, but the streets still full of beggars. Children and amputees. The morning after the wedding, I boarded a ship with Peter, and five days later, I found myself in a land of supermarkets and state fairs. I thought of the empty stores back home and my mouth filled with bile. It took me fifty years to become a U.S. citizen, and I only did it, finally, because Peter insisted. For inheritance purposes, he said. Dying of cancer and he was worried about my future! Maybe he did love me, I thought. I felt the way I had in the fifties, when he put a bomb shelter in our backyard. Who would want to survive an atomic bomb? But I thanked him anyway. He had meant the shelter as a kindness to me. Besides the bomb shelter and the inheritance business, there wasn’t much—we barely spoke to each other—but I sometimes think of those two things, wonder if I misjudged him.
Rémy was furious that I’d become an American. It made me laugh. I spent every summer in France with Rémy; Peter was glad to be rid of me for a while. “Rémy,” I said, “I’m still French. It’s just for the house, so I can sell it.” But I shouldn’t have laughed. His face fell, and all day I couldn’t comfort him. “Rémy, I have loved you all these years. Only you.” When the children were small, I took them with me to France and sent them to the countryside to stay with relatives. June to September, Rémy and I had Paris to ourselves. “Rémy,” I said, “what does it matter, a piece of paper? You are the man I love.” I was only a dual citizen, it wasn’t as if I’d given up being French.
He was too angry to answer, and for a moment—I’m ashamed to say it—I thrilled to his disapproval as though I were a young girl. Standing in his kitchen while he opened a plate of oysters for us, I thought, He wants me all to himself. You’d think I would have had enough of other people
’s anger, after all those years of the children fighting like animals and Peter in a perpetual silent rage because I couldn’t control them, but it was different with Rémy. I’d never seen his temper. He sliced the edge of his thumb and kept right on prying open the shells, blood streaming all over the oysters’ gray, slippery bodies, and then he popped the whole dozen, one after the other, into his mouth, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and left the room.
He’d always been so reserved, so proper, that I’d half thought he didn’t care deeply about me. What an idiot I was! He held doors for me, pulled out my chair, walked on the outside of the sidewalk—courtesies Peter would have laughed at—and when the children were still young and Rémy drove us to the airport each September, he squeezed my hand, but he did not kiss me good-bye in front of them. I told the children he was my hairdresser. I should have said a distant cousin, because then I had to go on pretending for years that there was nothing strange about a woman’s hairdresser accompanying her to the airport. I built it up—There is no one more important in a woman’s life than her stylist!—as if all I cared about in this world were a good cut and color. I would have gone gray in my thirties if I hadn’t been so busy maintaining the illusion of myself as a French beauty. Even now, I rinse my hair with vinegar to keep the white from yellowing.
“Rémy,” I said. “I don’t love Peter.”
There’s nothing to stop Rémy and me now from joining our resources and moving in together. Peter’s been dead for twenty years and I divide the year equally, six months in North Carolina, where the children and grandchildren can visit me in my handicapped-accessible retirement complex, and six months in Paris. But Rémy has his own apartment off Avenue Émile Zola and I have a fifth-floor walk-up on rue Casette. I don’t know what the children would say if my Paris address changed. They’re still so volatile. They think I only come here for family, and even that unnerves them. They have very particular ideas about how I should be cared for. Stay home, Mama. Mama, you can’t keep going to France, the trip’s too much for you. The Meadows has everything you need. The Meadows! A horror of look-alike bungalows, each with its own wheelchair ramp.
News of Our Loved Ones Page 15