This Little Family

by Inès Bayard

  Marie gets up awkwardly from the chair to go and get dressed. From behind the screen she can hear Sophia’s exuberant cries: “The champagne’s on me this evening! The first scan!” Another party celebrating the rape. Marie doesn’t remember being this enthusiastic when her nephew or Sophia’s baby was born. It’s as if everyone knows about her assault and wants to make her pay for lying by going over the top with delight about her pregnancy; a simple case of revenge.

  “You do have a little yeast infection that needs treating. Apart from that, everything’s perfectly normal. We’ll have a checkup every month or two.” A yeast infection. The dumb explanation for Paul’s frowning. He prints out an image of the scan as a memento. Laurent wants to frame it. Meanwhile, the real evidence has completely disappeared, the file has been closed with no repercussions. The only thing left to console Marie is the child of that abuse.

  * * *

  —

  “To new life! To my best friend’s baby! To the woman you’ve grown into, whom I’ve loved and admired day after day for fifteen years!” They all raise their glasses. Marie smiles, a glass of Coca-Cola in her hand. She thinks that if Sophia knew the truth, she surely wouldn’t admire her as much. Laurent kisses his wife. The other customers in the Rotonde restaurant congratulate the young woman from a distance. Next week Laurent and Marie will start work in their apartment getting the baby’s nursery ready. Their old study will no longer exist, they need to make room for the child. Marie will have to sacrifice her own space, as well as her time and her body, to ensure the preparations for the new arrival are perfect. It’s a little like organizing a surprise birthday party for her boss. The restaurant is sumptuously decorated. Marie’s favorite thing in Paris is the old brasseries with their Belle Époque atmosphere, the elegance of their agile staff gliding between the tables with their Parisian accents and grouchy temperaments, the simple but delicious French fare always served on plates stamped with the brasserie’s name. All those places she loved to visit before her rape now make her wish she were dead. She’s stopped listening to the conversation, is vaguely aware that they’re discussing the wallpaper for the baby’s room.

  “The duck breast with porcini mushrooms and pureed potatoes for madame.” Laurent asks if he can taste it. She hates people wanting to taste other people’s food, wanting to swap mouthfuls to see the difference and ending up with food envy.

  “With my first it was as easy as posting a letter. My husband had a tougher time than I did,” a tall overdressed woman at the next table contributes to the conversation. Everyone offers their opinion or comments on their own experience. No one notices her silence. The curtain goes up and they each play their part in this absurd performance. Laurent is drunk, hooting with pride that he’ll soon be a father and laying his hand on his wife’s stomach. People smile sentimentally at his happiness—it’s only natural.

  When the meal is over Paul pays the bill and Sophia helps Marie up, lifting her with extreme care as if she’s now paraplegic. The boulevard du Montparnasse is still busy, cars hurtling along the wide, brightly lit street. They decide to take a taxi home. There’s a truck that will be abreast of them in just a few seconds, bowling along quickly. It could kill Marie, crush her outright. She need only take three steps and throw herself in its path to end her torment right now. She moves forward, breaks away. Her leading foot steps off the sidewalk. She’s pulled back by the arm. “What are you doing, honey? The taxi stand on this side. You’re tired, let’s get you home.” Marie is lost, isolated.

  As they reach the taxi stand, she makes eye contact with an elderly lady crossing the street to go into the restaurant. She suddenly feels understood. This woman has the same look in her eye as she does, she’s been raped too, Marie’s sure of it. It’s a mutual understanding, a connection between two women who recognize each other. Marie breaks away from Laurent to go speak to her, claiming that the woman is a good client of hers. Laurent is taken aback but waits next to the taxi and chats with Paul and Sophia, still watching his wife. She runs to catch up with the woman and takes hold of her hand. Marie’s desperate eyes look directly at her. “You know, I can see it, you know what’s wrong with me, what happened to me.” The woman looks at her for a moment, then her face changes. She doesn’t understand, asks her whether they know each other, if she has some problem that needs her help. Marie instantly lets go of her hand. It was a mistake. She’s got the wrong person, a silly mistake, an impression. She apologizes, mortified by her madness which is now out in the open right in front of her.

  She heads back along the boulevard to join Laurent. “So, everything okay? I didn’t know you talked to clients outside of the office.” They climb into the taxi. She was sure there had been a connection. She might never have an opportunity like that again in her life. Laurent watches his wife, the cognac on his breath filling the back of the car with its reek. Marie watches passersby through the window. Who would understand her nightmare? Who’ll be there to help her, to get her out of this dead end? The answer suddenly stabs at her stomach. It’s all so clear: she’s on her own. She’ll be alone from start to finish, she’ll battle relentlessly against her child unaided. If she is to take action, the only thing she can rely on is her own instinct. The long-awaited anger she’s been anticipating finally takes hold of her. Her husband has fallen asleep, his face crushed against the window. The taxi driver is silent. Over the lilting notes of an oriental melody, the softest whispering can be heard: “I don’t have a choice. I don’t have a choice. I don’t have a choice…”

  Marie’s mother always greets them on the front steps to the house, her hands clasped together, a soft maternal glow in her eye, and her pleasure at spending the day as a family written all over her face. Roxane and her husband will be here soon. It’s the fifth month and Marie’s stomach has grown distinctly rounded. Laurent gets out of the car to help his wife out. She’s wearing the maternity dress that her sister gave her; her own clothes stopped fitting her a couple of weeks ago now. “Here’s the beauty! You look radiant.” Obviously, that’s not true. Marie has already put on a lot of weight. She spends her days slumped at her desk, gorging on potato chips and candy. When she arrives home in the evening she likes to make herself big Nutella sandwiches, potato-and-gherkin salads, or olive bread that she finishes single-handed, slouching on the sofa in all her lard. Laurent isn’t concerned about her rampant appetite and thinks it natural for a pregnant woman to eat more than usual. Paul has concurred. Marie and Laurent go to his office every last Friday of the month—she never goes alone, and this lack of privacy means she hasn’t been able to speak to Paul or give him the tiniest indication of her desperate situation. She’s utterly cornered.

  It’s a very large, three-story house. Roxane has come into the living room with her husband, who’s giving the baby his bottle. He warmly congratulates Marie and puts an arm around her. Julien is a good family man, a kind, loving, intelligent, attentive, sociable, and cultivated husband with an interesting job as a project manager for a firm of architects. He’s one of those men with no visible faults, with no problem that might throw things off balance. One of the builders, the beavers, who, day after day, lay down the foundations, the bases for the infrastructure of their own lives. Marie was like that too before. Now she wishes she could bring it all crashing down with one swipe of her hand.

  They move through to sit at the table. Marie’s mother has made scallops in cream, one of Laurent’s favorites. “We saw you on TV last night,” she says as she brings the large steaming dish to the table. “Your husband’s a star! Maybe your baby will be a lawyer too.” A report on the Lancarde case was broadcast on one of the public channels the night before. Laurent gave an interview to the journalist running the investigation. He’s embarrassed but happy to have something of an impact on Marie’s family. “How about you, my darling?” she asks, turning to Marie. “Are you managing at work? Laurent said you were sick last week. Are you feeling better?”

&n
bsp; Last week was the quarterly meeting, run once again by the area CEO, her rapist. When a colleague reminded Marie about the meeting the day before, she hesitated. She’d been thinking about it for a long time, had spent whole nights imagining different scenarios for this encounter. Should she face up to her attacker or avoid him? She chose the second option. There could have been three hundred people in the meeting room, Marie would still have felt the irrational fear of being raped by that man in front of all of them. She hasn’t yet officially informed the bank’s directors about her maternity leave. It’s likely that her CEO is completely unaware that she’s pregnant. And how will he react when he does find out? She has no way of knowing, she’ll have to keep waiting.

  For dessert they move through to the conservatory, harshly illuminated by the bright white light of the day. Marie devours the chocolate mousse her mother has made. She’s not allowed any champagne, just a small glass of sweet cider. She has a peculiar respect for Paul’s instructions: not to drink any alcohol, do a few exercises in the morning, sleep at regular hours, drink a lot of water, attend to her body with little massages. A real sort of therapy, an unnamable hypocrisy. She doesn’t want anything to do with this baby—not the nausea, the permanent tiredness, the diarrhea, the acid reflux, the cellulite massacring her once smooth, firm body, the hot flashes of stinking sweat that soak her bedsheets, the greasy skin constantly dotted with red patches, the lank hair, or the dog’s breath. The suffering’s pointless, it’s the sort experienced by pregnant women in the early days before they have an abortion. Their bodies are already changing, but their minds stay the same. They experience no happiness as the child grows inside them, they know it will never live.

  Marie forgot to check her blood pressure this morning. Paul has asked her to check it every two weeks just as a precaution, after it dipped slightly last week. She has to go up to the second floor to fetch the monitor. “No, I’ll get it darling,” Laurent says. “You stay there.” Marie snaps at him. She’s not a child, she’s had enough of being treated like an invalid. Laurent backs down but asks her to take good deep breaths as she goes up the stairs.

  Being nostalgic by nature, Marie’s mother chose not to touch her daughters’ bedrooms after they left home. Every single thing has stayed in its allocated place, like a museum of memories; a large poster of horses, yellowing here and there, is still Scotch-taped above her bed, and there are photos of her vacations with her parents and sister, childish drawings that her mother lovingly framed, the little bedside light that she made herself at a summer camp, and the old oak desk that her father found at a flea market in Saint-Ouen, and where she sat and studied for all her exams. She’s horrified by her reflection in the mirror on the large wardrobe. A few days ago now she decided to take down every mirror in her apartment so that she didn’t have to suffer seeing her own image. She eyes her woman’s body bitterly, disgusted by her heavy breasts, fat belly, chunky thighs, and dry hands. When did she stop being a little girl and become a woman? She vividly remembers her first period and how anxious she had been when her mother explained that she would bleed down below. She was twelve. It came during a math class. The first pain down there, the first sensation of wet panties, the first sight of that long thread of blood flowing slowly from between her legs into the toilet bowl. She remembers bringing the toilet paper up close after she wiped herself to inspect the red blotches that had seeped into it, the little black clots, running her finger over her vagina to feel the hot cloying blood, first smelling that strong whiff of iron that hung over the restrooms. She waited several days before telling her mother and secretly washed her slacks in the bathroom basin to get rid of the bloodstains. She was ashamed. Filled with a shame that grips women from the start to the very end of their lives. Never changing. Shame for bodies that are imperfect, not spotless, condemned by collective virtue. Bodies that suffer, groan, contort, bleed, change, evolve, grow fatter and thinner, penetrated their whole lives, impregnated, opened, emptied, closed up again, inflated and deflated as a result of successive ordeals, rammed full of acetaminophen and ibuprofen to force them to calm down. Marie knows, she knows that the serene phase of childhood that she now fantasizes about is over. The voice of innocence has fallen silent.

  She looks through her bag for the blood pressure monitor that Paul gave her and suddenly feels dizzy. Only slightly but bad enough for her to need to lie down. After resting on her bed for a while she makes up her mind to go back down and rejoin her family. The tall risers of the staircase feel unmanageable. Her feet come down slowly on the carpeted wooden treads, her hand grips the banister and edges gradually downward. She knows she won’t fight or call for help. Her head feels heavy, these dizzy spells are getting worse and more frequent, her mind is slipping away. Her body lets itself fall down the huge spiral and crumples on the floor at the foot of the stairs. She was perfectly aware, she could just have sat down or waited a moment and called her husband. The whole family comes running into the corridor. Marie’s body is sprawled, almost grotesque. Blood seeps from her forehead, one of her legs is bent out of shape from the fall. “We need to call an ambulance! Quick, quick!” They want to save her. She’s not asking for that. All Marie has wanted for months is silence. She’s finally achieving her aim, can no longer make out a single sound, but is still dimly aware of what’s going on around her. Her husband wants to carry her to the sofa in the living room. Roxane screams at him, whatever they do they mustn’t move her before they know what’s happened, an internal hemorrhage and it would all be over. They argue, Laurent yells. He’s worried about his wife. And about the baby. They must save the child.

  Marie wishes she would never open her eyes again. Her mother’s face appears to her more and more clearly. She’s gently stroking her hair, telling her to take her time, not try to do anything too quickly. “Don’t worry, my darling. Everything’s okay, just a broken leg and a cut on your head. The baby’s fine, in perfect health. You’re safe now.” It’s still alive. This baby’s hanging on, almost surviving its mother, still tarnishing the fibers of its mother’s womb, proudly developing while she’s dying of misery and pain in this hospital.

  Laurent comes into the room, murmurs something, and launches himself at Marie to kiss her. He reeks of alcohol. “I was so scared! When I saw you on the floor I thought I’d die…The baby’s fine, it’s good and strong, a fighter.”

  Marie wants to get up but pain shoots up her leg. A blue cast paralyzes part of her right calf. Her whole body is immobilized, pinned to this hard bed. She can’t even feel the mattress supporting her or the sheets covering her. She’s dead, yet fully alive.

  Paul arrives wearing his brightest smile. He gives her positive news about the pregnancy, shows her the ultrasound he did the day before, an x-ray of her leg, and the results of a blood test. Marie wonders whether there’s an order of medical priorities in cases like hers. She’s in France, a civilized, protective country that guarantees women their right to safety. Not once since her rape and the announcement of her pregnancy has anyone asked her whether she wants to keep this baby. Every pregnant woman should be asked that question at least once during the first gynecological consultation. Conjugal harmony is never adequate to assure genuine happiness or a sincere desire for motherhood. The woman might be under pressure; a wife could be beaten, she could be raped, attacked once or several times, or she could be morally or physically cowed. No one ever really knows what’s going on in a woman’s mind. Here too, after tumbling downstairs, the first news Marie is given is about her unborn child, not herself. She’s simply a womb. The child is prioritized, almost sacred.

  “They’ll keep you in here another couple of days to be sure everything’s okay. In some cases there’s a risk of the placenta detaching, so it’s better to be cautious. The surgeon who operated on your leg will be here in a few minutes. For now it’s rest, rest, rest!”

  She won’t be able to work at the bank. She’s condemned to staying in bed and watching her growin
g belly all day long, to being absolutely sure she can feel the baby move and come to life inside her free from any danger. There won’t be a single distraction now to spare her from thinking about this disaster. Paul wants her to rest. She needs to get her strength back. Her mother and Laurent both kiss her. Roxane and her father stayed outside the room to keep things quiet for when she woke up. Everyone leaves the room and the silence she longed for descends at last. The huge picture window next to her bed is open a little way, letting in a light cool breeze that caresses her face. The windows can be opened only one-quarter of the way. She hears the leaves on the trees shiver under the gray sky, children playing, nurses laughing out loud in the corridor. The ringtone of her cell.

  She turns around to reach for her bag and the needle on her drip hurts her; she hates how she feels, tethered by it with every move she makes. She’s received a message: “I see you didn’t have the courage to speak out. Just like on that wonderful evening together in my car. Keep going like this, in silence, like a good girl, and everything will be fine.” He knows. He’s proud of her, of her determination to keep it secret. Marie drops the phone. An indescribable anger snaps her awake, constricts her stomach. Her breathing accelerates. He’s challenging her with that message, using the word “courage” is like the final victory for his brutality.