I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (6 page)

In math class one day, Françoise's breathing began to come quick and shallow. Her pinky and her ring finger slowly but resolutely curled in on themselves. She stared at her traitorous hands. Between gasps, she asked to go to the infirmary. The heavyset school nurse sat on her chest facing her. She folded Françoise's arms up at the elbows and attempted to pry open her cramped hands, as if by simply forcing her fingers to relax, the rest of her body might follow. Françoise panicked and hyperventilated, her chest fluttering like a hummingbird's.

Once, this happened at home. She lay down on the couch in the formal living room, unable to slow her breath. Her father was out and so her mother summoned the neighborhood doctor. She rarely saw doctors who were not her father's friends. This doctor was calm and kind. He gave her a shot. He spoke to her softly.
Just breathe,
he said,
just relax.
She did, and her fingers uncurled. The fit was caused by a lack of calcium, he said, common in adolescents. He gave the fit a name: it was a
crise de tétanie.
It'll pass, he said, though it didn't. The problem would persist for a decade. But the hysteria stopped. It faded from memory. Now, when Françoise fought with her mother, her breathing went shallow, her fingers curled.

—

T
HE PHYSICAL PAIN
was not enough to stop her dark thoughts. Her father kept a large array of medicines in the bathroom, but she'd read enough to know how easy it was to take too many or too few. Françoise stepped up onto the ledge of the big bay window in her bedroom. The wrought-iron rail came up to her shins. She leaned out over it, her arms braced against the window frame, and looked down the façade to the street below. This was before the city was scrubbed to a postcard-perfect pearl beige. The buildings of Paris were all gray with soot back then.

Françoise's vision blurred, then cleared. Someone had told her—her mother, maybe—that those who jumped off the Eiffel Tower sometimes landed on the people below. But this was a sleepy residential neighborhood, and the street was mostly deserted. The real problem was her own body, the resistance it put up. She swayed unpleasantly, the sidewalk swimming closer.

This was when the events that would unfold after her death still mattered to her. She pictured Josée running down to the street. Perhaps Josée, even the whole neighborhood, would come to life with a siren call of grief. The pain would explode beyond the apartment's walls, beyond the confines of her mind, and become public. Her body would be proof.

Her arms tensed, her knees bounced, but whether to grip the stone or to push off it, even she didn't know. She removed her hand from the window frame, barely aware of how hard it was shaking, and ran it through her short hair. The world around her dulled until there was only throbbing. Her skull was a shrinking cage. Her thoughts sounded as if they were being screamed. Her mother's words:
No one will ever love you. No one will ever love you.

When she could think again, her thoughts were the lyrics of a song. Mina had given her a few old 78s, and there were two records Françoise listened to over and over. One of them was “Un Jour, Mon Prince Viendra.”
One day my prince will come
. She could not understand. Which prince? Which day? Where had he been until now? And then what? How could you hope something so vague would save you? She played it repeatedly, trying to parse the emotion it contained.

But it was the second song that played through her head now. “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”
Not the good things they did to me / Nor the bad—it's all the same to me,
Edith Piaf sang.
JUMP
, she was telling Françoise. The meaning seemed crystal clear.

She stood in the window for a long time. She wasn't afraid of death. She longed for it. Death was blissful oblivion. But even as she saw herself jumping, again and again, her body would not move. It reminded her of the dreams she had early on school mornings, where she woke and brushed her hair, only to find, as she was leaving the house, that her body had stayed behind in bed. Now she felt the sped-up rush of air around her, the shock of adrenaline flooding her veins, the impact of the concrete. But each time, she found she was still there, standing in the window.

No one looked up. Night fell, and she went back inside. Four stories up might not be far enough to die. Her mother might not cry.

—

A
T THIRTE
EN
, I was still a child, much more a child than any of my peers, with their lip glosses, their first kisses, their boyfriends. When all the other girls began wearing tight jeans with brand names emblazoned on the back pockets, I still wore the stretchy floral leggings my mother picked for me. When my mother,
brother, and I went for walks in the forest surrounding the cabin we rented in Connecticut, I looked for archways formed by falling trees. I knew they were doorways to the fairy world, which looked suspiciously like ours and yet wasn't. I counted each arch I walked under, entering and leaving, so that I could be sure which world I was in. On the crumbling stone walls that crisscrossed the landscape, the remnants of boundaries between cornfields long since overgrown, I built pyramids of twigs and pinecones as offerings.

I was still a child then, but my body kept a schedule of its own. Each morning I awoke to new betrayals. Now, as I rode home from school on the public bus, men sat next to me and asked where I was going. Now, when I stayed after class to ask questions, male teachers stared at my chest.

“That one there in the orange,” one balding man said loudly to his friend as I walked by, “I'd like to fuck her brains out.” I could imagine only the violence of this, my brains spilling out on the floor.

“Breastfeed me sometime
mamacita
!” another man said as I walked past, and again the image was disturbingly literal.

When I tried to talk to my mother about these incidents, she told me to act as if such comments were compliments.

“I always say thank you and smile,” she said. But then she saw my face, and understood that perhaps I could not do as she did. “Or ignore them,” she said then. “Don't give them the satisfaction of a response.”

My father's friends, men who drank heavily, men who spent their days exploring and drawing their sexual depravity, men who had come of age in the free love of the sixties and had laughed at the new wave of feminists, began to treat me very differently. My parents, overhearing them, laughed as if their comments were only the jokes
they appeared to be on the surface. But I felt the menace underneath. My body was whispering to the adults around me in a language I did not understand. It was promising unkeepable promises.

I felt as if I had awoken on a remote island and found myself wearing the body of a native. They recognized me as their own, yet I had none of their culture. It would soon be discovered that I was an intruder. There would be anger at my deception. There would be consequences. I did not want to be there, but I could not leave.

My body was dangerous not only to me but to others. I saw this in the wariness with which my mother had begun to treat me. More and more now, she became enraged at my closeness with my father. If I walked arm in arm with him, if I tried to sit between them at the movies, if he and I laughed at a joke that she had not heard, she became angry and frustrated, sometimes to the point that tears sprang to her eyes. Between my father and me, the innocent closeness that had always been there remained unchanged. But my mother's anger provoked in me the deep confusion of an answering guilt.

As fully as I knew that among adults my body was dangerous, I knew that among those my own age I was neither feminine nor desirable. I had always been a heavy child, not fat but solid, with rounded limbs and too much strength. I'd envied my girlfriends whose mothers insisted that they eat. Now my body changed further and faster than theirs, and the gulf between us grew infinite. In one strange middle school health class, we sat in a circle on the floor and were made to list the qualities we found attractive in the opposite sex. The boys invariably listed petiteness and fragility, blond straight hair. I longed to be one of those girls, with bones like glass and legs still perfectly smooth, who could be picked up and spun around, who was still small enough to make a twelve-year-old boy feel like a man. I could have picked up and spun all
of the other girls in my class, and many of the boys as well. In schoolyard jokes, in the pop culture I absorbed through my skin even though I wasn't allowed television, I learned that there was nothing more shameful for a man than to be associated with a woman who wasn't thin. At school dances in the cafeteria, where girls and boys solemnly placed their hands on each other's shoulders and swayed, an arm's-length apart, I knew that if I asked a boy to dance I would humiliate him. I found no power or pleasure in my changing body, only the deep unease of being found desirable when I didn't want to be and undesirable when I did.

It was in those years that I began, secretly, to buy Halloween-sized bulk bags of candy. I stole money from the grocery wallet or fudged the count on the change my mother gave me to get home. I was amazed to discover that candy cost very little. I shoplifted as well, for a brief time. Other girls shoplifted with friends, giddy with giggles and adrenaline, but I stole alone, slipping lip glosses from chain pharmacies into the pockets of my backpack. I gave out the lip glosses in the cafeteria, explaining that my mother had bought me too many. My mother did not buy me any makeup, or even deodorant (which she considered too American), although I did not ask very often. I chewed the candy methodically, late into the night, reading young adult novels about ordinary girls who could freeze time, until my teeth ached and wrappers spilled out from beneath my mattress.

I gained fifteen pounds in a year. I had always been in the ninety-fifth percentile for my height and weight, but now my pediatrician worriedly charted my weight up into the ninety-sixth, ninety-seventh, ninety-eighth. I dreaded stepping on scales. It seemed to me that magic was involved here, too, that the right thoughts and shapeless prayers before a weighing might bring the needle back down. But it always rose, and that too felt controlled
by magic, a punishment for some far broader badness than eating. I suppose it's clear with hindsight that I ate to bury my curves, to slow this precipitous womanhood, to become invisible. But back then nothing was clear. My weight gain felt to me as unstoppable as the blood that began to flow, as the hairs that began to appear. Even while I ate compulsively, I dreamed at night of unzipping my body and stepping out of it, svelte and smooth and flawless.

It seemed to me that in those years my mother only became more and more beautiful. My heart swelled with pride on the rare occasions when she came to school. Short skirts and black turtlenecks, tailored red skirt suits with padded shoulders—everything hung perfectly on her frame. And yet despite her long thin legs and her high cheekbones, she never embarrassed me with her beauty. She wasn't the kind of mother the boys in my class might whisper about. She was the kind the other girls envied. Men stammered around my mother, but they knew she owed them nothing. She carried herself with elegance, intelligence, self-possession. Adults treated me with new respect after they had met her.

Our bodies were different in every way possible, her broad shoulders and my broad hips. She went braless in the summertime and I wore thick one-piece bathing suits (not because I was deemed too young to wear a bikini but because, as my mother said, how could I want to?). She was photographed for spreads in
Vogue
and interviewed for a book titled
French Women Don't Get Fat.
I was asked to model for
Teen People
only to find out they wanted me to model the “curvy” body type in “Real Jeans for Real Bodies.”

I felt that my mother was ashamed of my weight. Throughout high school, it seemed to me that my body was the main battleground between us.

One of those summers in the South of France, my mother and I
drove into town to buy baguettes for dinner. They were still warm from the oven as I held them in the passenger seat, and I ripped off the end of one and took a bite. My mother told me not to ruin my appetite, but I took a second bite. She grabbed the baguette from my hands and beat me with it as hard as she could while still driving.

My body didn't look like my mother's, and it was clear even then that it never would. But still I believed that she, not I, was what a woman was meant to be. It seemed to me that either I would become like her, spare and androgynous, or never truly become a woman at all.

One weekend around that time, we were in the cabin in Connecticut. My brother was out front playing in the weeds that grew wild there, and my mother and I were sitting in the wood-paneled living room, with its cathedral ceiling and the smell of mice in the yellowing foam cushions. She was sitting by the fireplace on the dusty wooden floor, working a puzzle my brother and I had abandoned. I watched her back as I gathered my courage. I was going to tell her. My mother was a woman of solutions. For any problem, large or small, concrete or existential, she provided step-by-step advice with the efficiency of a doctor scrawling a prescription.

“Maman
,
” I said at last, my voice shaking, and she turned. I felt that it pained her to look at me and thought that this was both because of my femininity and my lack of it.

“
Oui, mon chat?
” she said, beckoning me to come sit by her.

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

“What is it?” she asked, concern in her voice, her hand on my knee.

I wasn't sure I could find the words. “I've been . . . I've been . . . I've been ripping out all of my hair. You know, all of the hair that grows . . . down there,” I said. For months, for nearly a year, I had
been tearing out my pubic hair by the handful, furious with my body. The skin was raw and scabbed.