Bye Bye Blondie

by Virginie Despentes

  She’d pulled hard on the joint, enjoying the burning thrill in her throat and a lungful of nicotine.

  “But how did you manage to find this place? I haven’t had such a good time since, well, since I got here . . .”

  “It’s my Boy Scout training, be prepared . . .”

  It was a long time since she’d been able to smoke and she found his remark funny enough almost to make her roll on the ground laughing. Once she’d calmed down, she breathed deeply with pleasure. She passed the joint to Eric and surprised herself smiling at him in a dopey way. Next moment, he had a coughing fit, and it set them both off in gales of laughter. They returned to the refectory for lunch, freezing cold, but ecstatic. Gloria was relieved he hadn’t tried to put his arm around her to keep her warm. She didn’t need someone who clung to her. He looked at her with wide eyes, finding she looked disturbingly like Greta Garbo. Every time she made some feeble joke, he’d fall about in delight, in fits of laughter. He was beyond in love with her. It was passion.

  In other circumstances, she’d have avoided him. He was just too precious, physically and intellectually. He lacked seriousness, toughness, virility. She couldn’t care less about guys who camped it up, except when they wanted to make love to her. Which, paradoxically, happened to her quite often. But she’d learned to be wary since one boy like that had really shaken her by jumping out of a second floor window, just to piss her off. At the time, she’d refused to feel guilty about this. It had even taken several other people to hold her back from running over to lay into him when he was lying on the ground. But since then, she’d avoided vulnerable-looking homosexuals because she was sure they’d get her into some inextricable trouble.

  But for now she was only too glad to be able to talk to someone who’d heard of Stray Cats, Joy Division, and the Cramps, too relieved to be able to talk about what interested her. To have confidence in someone else’s judgment. Eric was reattaching her to the world she loved. He knew about music. And that was fine by her.

  They would stay in her room, with the door wide open, otherwise the staff would go ape worrying they were sleeping together. His own room was occupied by four people, one of them an old man who wandered and never spoke, but occasionally broke out and became violent without a word, which was much more impressive than if he’d been yelling. Without a word, he’d head straight for a glass door and demolish it by crashing his head against it. She’d seen him do it once. In later years, she often modeled her style on his. For instance, if she really wanted to disrupt an evening, she’d adopt the old man’s tactics and break a window—using some object so as not to hurt her head, but not saying a word.

  Hervé, one of her mates from her “gang,” was one of the few who came to see her, but they wouldn’t let him in—he was too drunk. Never mind, just to hear him chanting in the courtyard, “Let Gloria out, let Gloria out!” from two floors up, had cheered her spirits. Then he had taken up a position under her window, a stroke of luck, and played Macadam Massacre at top volume. She’d clung to her window bars, singing along at the top of her voice, hoping he could hear her. And since indeed that was the case, it had taken the police to get him away. He must have said to himself, since I’ve come all this way, might as well really mix it.

  Lying across her bed, Eric listened to her stories. She wasn’t usually talkative but she had some leeway to make up, weeks of silence, and above all she wanted to tell him more about her life outside, before, the kind of girl she was before this happened to her.

  From the moment she and Eric got together, she forgot to spend all day raving about when they’d let her go and started playing jokes instead. For instance, following one of the attendants with her questions, especially if he blushed easily: “Tell me, would sodomy damage the brain?” Eric adored this, he had a talent for pushing her to do silly things. He made her talk, be funny. He was like the answer to a prayer, this boy arriving in the chamber of horrors.

  But one afternoon, his parents finally found out where he was. Eric and Gloria were both in her room. They were listening to Wunderbach, she was humming, lying on her front, as she watched him draw on the cover of a notebook, squares inside triangles. He was telling her he’d seen Stray Cats live in concert. She replied she had this school friend—she wore a green-and-white Teddy jacket, this girl from her old school—she’d taped two whole cassettes for her of Stray Cats and drawn pretty covers for her, not bad at all. A doctor had come to fetch Eric. He didn’t even warn them they should say goodbye. It must have been one of their therapeutic principles: never confuse an interned being with a human being.

  Recognizing his parents at the end of the corridor, he’d simply said hello to them. Without pretending to be happy, or surprised, or furious, or not to remember. No fuss, but plenty of style. He was surrendering. He waved from the end of the corridor to Gloria, then quickly put his hand on his heart.

  She looked at his parents, bourgeois, serious, looking out of place in this setting and appalled to find themselves there. The mother with her ponytail and casual clothes, the kind of woman who does her own gardening, and the husband who could have come straight off a golf course. Pathetic and very upright. Relieved to see him there and safe and sound—his mother had wanted to pat his forehead and he had just shied away and stared at her, quickly.

  Gloria didn’t understand exactly whether it was seeing him standing there looking so cold and dignified, or whether it was because he was leaving, but for the first time, she regretted having always managed to avoid sleeping with him. She liked him, that was the truth.

  She didn’t want to be there without him. She preferred not to hang around watching him walk away and realizing what was happening. Alone again in the institution, for a time always unspecified. A day, a lifetime . . . it depended on other people.

  He’d left her his Walkman when he went. She put the headphones on and began to cry.

  SHE FINALLY GOT out of the hospital about five weeks after him. The whole time she remained there, he’d written to her every day. He sent her little pellets of dope, hidden inside cassettes, cigarettes, or detective novels, which she read at once, it made the days go by quicker. Once he had left, she fell head over heels in love.

  Every morning, a letter would arrive from him. At first she’d played casual, just looking for the gift. But soon she really wanted to read the letter and admitted it readily. She replied every day, he’d sent her envelopes and stamps, everything she needed. He was funny on paper, much more so than in the flesh. His writing was small and regular, sloping, very clear, a bit feminine, not too much, just enough to be seductive. He’d started talking dirty in his letters and that wowed her, it made her chuckle, all alone. She masturbated several times a day, thinking what they would do when she got out.

  Overall, Eric provided her with a shield against the place, a shield against her pain. She thought about him when she woke up, the worst moment of the day: when she remembered where she was. He accompanied her virtually, helping to drive away the horror and anguish of the possibility that she might never get out.

  Life went on. Every therapist she saw was just like the others: all self-satisfied and simpleminded. “And what do you think about it?” they would say, looking penetratingly at her. They liked to screw up their eyes as if they were deep in thought. But it was obvious they understood nothing. She felt like taking them by the shoulders and booting them outside. “Get a life! Meet people, travel, listen to music, read something, get your own mind sorted out, you might be ready after that to come back and meddle with other people’s.”

  The anger grew thicker inside her, took root in her heart, went in deep.

  And then one day, the head doctor simply announced she was leaving. She bit back the comment: “Oh yeah, so you think I’m cured now, do you?”

  Her father had brought two big sports bags to carry the stuff she’d acquired in four months. She felt blank as she packed up. Not anxious, not happy, not excited. Blank, as if broken.

  In the car on
the way back, the twenty kilometers to Nancy. Trees along the road, it wasn’t yet a double highway. A few big stores, furniture, DIY warehouses. The snow had melted. It was spring already, with the first colors appearing. She and her father didn’t exchange a word. She was no longer furious, or sad, or guilty. She was blank, as if in suspended animation, drained. She’d gone to earth, retreated inside herself somewhere. As if she’d been at the edge of icy water, or a polluted stream from which one has to retreat carefully. Her father seemed the same, as if scalded. She’d always known him with a beard, ever since she had been born he’d had a beard. Now he’d shaved it off, it made him look younger, naked, almost indecent. Vulnerable too. But if in her there was a glimmer of desperate tenderness for him, and if in him there was a twinge of regret or anxiety, neither one of them showed the slightest emotion. Two strangers, sitting very calmly in a spotless white Renault, going home a few days before Easter.

  She didn’t know it yet, but it takes time for critical events to register, developing like a plant in the soul, bearing their fruit and declaring themselves part of reality. To allow the symptoms to manifest themselves, as they would say in the hospital. Gloria would say, “The time it takes for it to hit.”

  Nothing would ever be the same again. And at the back of her mind always the question, Who would I have been if this hadn’t happened to me?

  Her mother, waiting for them at home, had cooked fries, Gloria’s favorite, especially when she was little. She liked peeling the potatoes onto a newspaper spread across her lap, taking care not to peel too much off, but also trying to make a single peeling from one potato. Then wiping the potatoes with a clean tea towel—you had to take one from the drawer, next to the cutlery drawer under the tabletop. Then you put them in the wire basket to make the fries. The rest her mother did, handling the pan.

  But this time she hadn’t been there to help prepare everything. And she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She hadn’t thought properly, not at all. She had imagined this day, coming out of the hospital, thousands of times. Everything she was going to do the minute her nose was outside, the people she’d call, all the stuff she’d find in her bedroom. She would play a 45 on the record player, find her old clothes, put on makeup, telephone her friend Florence. Even taking a bus had seemed like something special when she was locked up.

  Only now she was back home, it felt like nothing at all. Tomato ketchup on the little kitchen table, just big enough for the three of them to eat at. Nothing, ever, the same again. Her mother had prepared this celebration meal, but her features were drawn, she was avoiding Gloria’s eyes. She was ill at ease. Nothing ever the same again. No appetite, just enough to nibble a few fries.

  She felt confused, as if drained, neither aggressive nor amused, observing things almost automatically. Her parents looked tired. She would have preferred them to be full of energy and hostile to her, so that she could start hating them. But it wasn’t so simple. In families, things are rarely cut and dried.

  There was a new fridge. The old one had been on its last legs for a while. Life had gone on.

  She found the courage to say, “No thanks, I’m not hungry,” when she was offered the chocolate cake, a little overbaked, which her mother had made. This false birthday meal reminded her of the tea parties in the hospital, oddly enough. Full circle. When she saw her father’s face on hearing she had no appetite, she’d immediately said, “Oh well, perhaps just a little piece.” As if she couldn’t “do that to them,” refuse them the pleasure of seeing her eat what they had prepared.

  She had been away four months, and on her return it was spooky, she found everyone both exactly the same and changed, all the people she’d been dreaming of seeing. Everything seemed kind of disjointed, she was out of sync. At first, coming out of the hospital, her feeling was fury at everything she’d been missing. But while she had been making herself sick thinking this way, of all the good times she’d lost out on, nothing had really changed. People she’d adored just “before,” now seemed boring and stupid. Superficial. This word, which would never have occurred to her six months earlier, now kept occurring apropos of everything. Superficial. She’d lost her flexibility and tolerance for her immediate group of friends. She was damaged. Nothing was as she had hoped and imagined for four months.

  In town, she’d bumped into Frédérique, a young bisexual well known in the district, bold, brilliant, often funny, and usually surprising. He came from Haut du Lièvre, a low-income neighborhood, and was intriguingly beautiful. He could make music with a washing machine and sing without opening his mouth. Naïveté, thinking it was decadent, the insouciance of the 1980s . . . His voice was always husky, and he cultivated an air of vagueness. Everyone knew he spent hours cruising around Place Carnot, looking for men. He’d thrown his arms around Gloria and given her a big hug. He was a sufficiently odd person for her not to resent him for never writing to her, and anyway they didn’t know each other that well. But at last, someone seemed to understand where she was coming from. A sad place. So he hugged her, this guy who was always sarcastic, a crook really, with absolutely no moral sense. But he was the only fucking person who offered her some tenderness, right there in the street, who saw she needed something to hang on to. Hold me, never let me go.

  To celebrate, he’d pulled out a little matchbox, two tabs of acid and slipped them into her hand: “To help you get your bearings, good to see you back, big girl.”

  Just a little acid and bingo—all the joys of a really bad trip. Before it had even started working, she’d walked away from her friend Laura without warning. Bursting with overvivid ideas, she felt on the point of exploding, bombarded with crazy absurdities, images, and concepts, all visually unbearable. She was wearing her high-laced Doc Martens and they began to make her freak out, she was walking along the street and the sun was beating down and the Docs seemed to have a will of their own, as if some Nazi punk spell had been cast on them and they were going to force her to cut children’s throats. Where they led she would have to follow.

  Luckily they were content simply to take her back home, but the comedown was terrible. With the sun as well, brilliant, blinding, full in her face, scouring out the back of her eyes. On the way, she’d hallucinated she kept meeting the same guy, disguised as a painter, an office worker, a little boy, but always the same individual who stared at her and tried to make her understand—nonverbally of course—that some very bad stuff was about to happen. He was carrying a ladder, then two streets farther on she saw him with a briefcase, next, at the bus stop, the same man was standing with a baby clasped to his chest, and later there he was again, carrying a traveling bag. Told like that, it sounds like nothing, but at the time it was a nightmare. Luckily when she got home no one was in, she’d curled up in a ball in a corner of her room, and then, a false good idea or a real flash of intuition, she’d put on a 45 of the Béruriers, “Nada Nada,” on her record player, an old one, you just had to put the needle arm in the high position for the record to keep replaying as long as you wanted. Until night fell and her parents came home from work, “Nada Nada” on loop, a needle penetrating her brain, her guts, all her white corpuscles, loading them with fear, stifled anger, hate. Since then, every time she’d tried to drop acid, it hadn’t been good. Yet it was something she’d really liked doing, acid trips. Simply a sign that all her neurons were poisoned with anguish.

  Generally, once she was out of the hospital, she found the whole world disappointing, without daring to admit it or complain.

  Almost as soon as she was back home, she’d written to Eric, but as it was the Easter holidays, he was away. This was in the days before mobile phones, so if someone wasn’t there, you just had to wait for them to get back, nothing else for it.

  She’d been enrolled now as a boarder in a school twenty minutes from Nancy by train. She’d have to go there without seeing him again. In the end, that suited her. She felt somehow embarrassed by their idyll. Like memories of exotic countries, fantastic in real sunshine, pathe
tic when you see them on TV. Out of its setting, their story lost much of its charm, and she felt apprehensive at the thought of seeing him in the streets of her hometown.

  She’d thought obsessively about him for days. She’d written pages and pages to him, laying bare everything about herself, without being afraid of his opinion. She’d read his letters, she knew him better than any of her childhood friends. And he was crazy about her. That felt nice. He often spoke about the way she threw spectacular tantrums. Good, she thought, just as well, because I won’t disappoint him on that score. But it was astonishing—both tempting and terrifying—to be loved precisely for what she was most afraid of in herself. He spoke about what he was listening to while he wrote. Since they’d met, he’d started following more youth music, punk and psycho. There were a lot of things she liked about him, his laid-back quality, his ability to pick up on codes and issues, to come up with a view about different bands. But she didn’t want to introduce him to her friends or go to concerts with him, or anything really. It had been a little hospital love affair, not something for the broad light of day.

  The fifth day after she came home, she became a boarder in Lunéville, out in the sticks. She’d arrived at her new school with an orange crew cut, a safety pin in one ear, four piercings in the other, a heavy chain around her neck, wearing an army surplus coat with NUCLEAR YES PLEASE on the back in bleach and her old trainers—she’d given away the maroon Docs the day after the bad trip.

  So after the Easter break, Gloria found herself sitting in the Lunéville train, on her way to school. The carriages hadn’t changed since the 1950s: a musty smell, torn seats, black-and-white photos of landscapes above your head. There was no heating, so early every Monday morning she had to huddle in her seat. The windows were covered with icy condensation. She preferred to get up at dawn rather than take her time on Sunday night, because then the train was full of soldiers and she hated being in a compartment with a group of boys.