I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (4 page)

For the first decade of their lives, Françoise and Sylvie were each other's constant companions, if only by necessity, and fractiously. Françoise put chewing gum in her sister's hair, and Sylvie left huge scratches down her sister's arms. One evening while their parents were out, they were roughhousing in the medical office below. Sylvie, fooling around in a wheelchair, backed into a glass-front cabinet and broke a figurine. The girls thought it might be an Egyptian artifact. Certainly it was expensive and rare, as all of Paul's belongings were.

“Just leave it there,” Sylvie said. “They'll think it was the maid.”

“But she'll lose her job,” Françoise said.

“Better her than us,” Sylvie replied.

“Where will she go?” Françoise said with genuine horror.

“Not our problem,” Sylvie said.

“If you don't tell them, I will,” Françoise said, and she did. Both girls were punished.
I am Joan of Arc,
Françoise told herself. But Sylvie was becoming less and less interested in her stories of martyrs.

In the space of a summer, a chasm had opened between the two sisters. At ten years old, Sylvie was formed—that was what the French said when a girl first had her period, “
Elle a été formée.
”
In Sylvie's case, the expression was literally true: she had breasts, she had curves. She looked like a woman.

That summer, Sylvie was sent away to summer camp. It was the first time the two older girls had been separated. The following fall, Josée sent Sylvie to Paul's mother, Mamie, in Ussel, a year's exile.

“She has jaundice,” Josée declared. “She needs to be in the country.” But it was clear to Françoise that that was not the reason.

Françoise slept alone now. Josée had made a new bedroom down the hall for Sylvie when she came home. “Sylvie is a young woman now,” Josée said. “She needs her own room.”

Françoise stared at her unchanging child's body in the mirror. She didn't envy Sylvie her year with Mamie. Mamie's breath smelled bad, she rarely bathed, she was very fat, and her voice quaked like a bleating goat's when she spoke. In Françoise's opinion, Mamie was a small-minded provincial woman whose company was to be avoided at all costs. She was nothing like Mina, Josée's mother, who lived in Paris in a grand apartment, who read, who worked over the weekends on the typewriter in her living room.

But in Ussel, Sylvie found something she had been longing for. Mamie, lonely Mamie, smothered her granddaughter with unconditional love. She loved
big,
like this, Sylvie would say, her arms stretched wide. Mamie gave Sylvie a pot of Nutella every afternoon at four. She used a stick of butter in each meal. Sylvie took it all in, the love and the food, insatiable. She returned to Paris on weekends and school vacations, her face growing steadily rounder. After a year away, she had gained twenty pounds.

Josée's anger trained itself on Sylvie in full force. There was no space for an unbeautiful daughter in the world she and Paul had made for themselves. “My parents
invented
superficiality,” my
mother told me once. The girls were made to feel that physical appearance was the only measure of worth. Josée had meticulously decorated their apartment for receiving guests, and it was irreproachable, if oppressively somber. Heavy curtains, heavy furniture, heavy carpeting—everything was calculated to give the appearance that they had been rooted in this life for centuries. But now it was as if, in Sylvie's body, the ghost of their pasts had refused to stay buried. Paul's provincial roots were showing. His mother's body had reemerged, uninvited, in his daughter's.

Josée claimed for herself the new bedroom Sylvie had barely had a chance to inhabit. She needed her own space, she declared, installing a rigid blue settee barely large enough for one. Sylvie was relocated to the medical floor below, in a small, dark room whose window gave onto a grim interior courtyard. She could hear the floorboards creaking overhead as her family moved around and she knew that she was no longer part of them. During the day, she sidled past her father's patients in the waiting room, designer heels and bandaged noses, and up the dark servants' stairs to reach the bathroom. At night, she was the only person on the whole floor. This banishment is what, years later, she would resent most.

“Why didn't you take the room below for yourself?” Sylvie asked Josée at dinner one night, nearly fifty years later, not for the first time. Now it was Josée who scooped crème fraîche onto her carrots and Sylvie who scolded her for it, but the helpless little girl was still there in her voice. “It would have given you a very private access.”

“I wasn't about to go sleep somewhere else in my own home,” Josée replied, indignant.

“So you thought it was
normal
to send an eleven-year-old—”

“Well, who else was going to go down there? I suppose your father could have . . . but otherwise, yes. You sent the kids.”

“And you thought it was—”

“Now that you say it, yes. We could have sent Paul.”

“Because you figured that for a child—”

“His whole medical office was down there. It would have been convenient,” Josée acknowledged with a beatific smile and a shrug. “And I could have taken his room then! Well, I've only thought of that just now. No luck for you.”

—

“I
HAVE ALWAYS
LOVED
both my children equally,” my mother said to me when I was an adult, with unwavering conviction. That my mother favored my brother was for me one of the most basic facts of our shared past. She tended carefully to his minor scrapes and bruises. When he bit me on the back and drew blood, she scolded me for provoking him. My brother was a cherubic child with a halo of soft curls and long-lashed brown eyes. But when he was angry and we were alone, he curled his fingers and let loose a long, breathless wail so intense his face went red and his head shook. Then he lunged, clawing and punching and biting. He looked just like her, my mother used to say. When I'd asked who I looked like, she'd said, “your paternal grandfather.”

One summer, at a city pool with a particularly inattentive babysitter, my brother held me underwater so long the world went black. He held me by my growing breasts. He had learned that this caused me so much pain I could not fight back, and so he used the tactic often. I came up gasping, terrified, convinced I had almost died.
When I reported on this later to my mother, certain that this time I would find sympathy, she looked at me stonily. She sent me
away and called my brother into her room. When they emerged, she told me that she wouldn't punish either of us. I must learn to stop trying to drag her into our arguments. “But you should be ashamed of yourself for what you did,” she said to me. “You know exactly. Now, end of discussion.”

I clung to the moment one of her friends pulled me aside and told me that the imbalance in our treatment wasn't normal. It was the only proof I had. Neither my mother, my father, nor my brother remembered things the way I did. I tried to remind myself we could each have our own versions. My mother's was not more real than my own. But I never quite believed this was true.

—

W
HILE HER F
AMILY
SLEPT
, Sylvie crept up the servants' stairs to the kitchen to raid the refrigerator. She ate fruit in syrup straight from the can. She stole money from the grocery wallet. She bought herself bags of candy at the
boulangerie.
She bought roses by the dozen and gave them away to strangers in the street. At the girls' communion, a fancy affair where they had been instructed to say hello and politely stay out of the way, Sylvie drank so heavily she wound up flat on her back under the table.

Françoise watched her sister with horrified awe. Sylvie's year in Ussel had left her unprepared for her return to Paris, and her grades failed. Rather than repeat the year and thereby fall behind her little sister, Sylvie was sent to a series of boarding schools and local private schools, a rarity at that time even for well-to-do Parisians. Sylvie was friends with boys. She went to parties; she drank and smoked. Françoise was never invited along. She spent most of her time alone in her room, with her unchanging body and her perfect grades.

Sylvie had sanitary napkins. Sylvie had a bra. When Sylvie had
cramps, Josée would lie in bed with her “
pour lui donner ses fesses
,” curling herself into her daughter's abdomen so that the warmth of her buttocks would ease the pain. Françoise's stomach clenched with jealousy. She was tired of being a boy. The jealousy was the same in the more difficult moments. Françoise stood outside Josée's locked bedroom door, listening to the thwacking sounds intercut by Sylvie's cries of pain. At first Josée used her hand, then a hairbrush.
When my turn comes, I won't give her the satisfaction of crying out,
Françoise resolved
.
Now when she snuck into her mother's bedroom, she hit herself with the hairbrush. She tried hard to make it hurt and to stay silent. She watched herself in her mother's mirror, practicing a stoic mask. But her turn never did come, and that hurt most of all.

—

“A
BRA
?” Josée said when Françoise finally mumbled her request. “A bra for what?” She shouted to Paul and Sylvie. “Did you hear that? Françoise wants a bra!” Sylvie laughed loudest.

Josée had slipped into the 1960s with ease—miniskirts and Brigitte Bardot bangs. Her body was made for the era—the breasts she spent a lifetime complaining were too large, the waist so small two hands could nearly fit around it. Françoise grew fixated on the maxi-coat her mother wore over her shortest skirts. If only she had a coat like that, she thought, she might be seen as a woman. But she was still dressed by her mother, in school uniforms and utilitarian clothing designed not to fade or tear. Occasionally Paul might take Françoise shopping, flashing rolls of cash in Paris's most expensive stores. But she was only his prop then, trying on a parade of preppy outfits as her father boldly flirted with the saleswomen. He would never buy her a fashionable coat like her mother's.

Instead, Françoise gathered her carefully saved pocket money. She bought a cheap department store raincoat. She cut it and sewed it, then put it on and twirled in front of the mirror. It wasn't the coat she'd envisioned, but, Françoise thought, if she moved like this, swayed like that, one might mistake it for elegant, one might forget its uneven hem and plastic sheen. She swooshed through the house in it, imagining the admiring looks.

“What is that supposed to be?” Josée said. “You can't seriously want to leave the house in that!” Françoise looked down and watched the spell transform her Cinderella gown back into plastic. She never wore it again.

Every Sunday, on her way to the racetrack with Paul, Josée dropped Françoise off at her mother's house. Often, she pulled over only long enough for Françoise to climb out of the car. Sometimes she stopped in quickly to give Mina her hand-me-downs, designer dresses past their season, in a stiff exchange that was more payment than present. Mina's house was filled with faded luxuries from a different time. She loved fine things but she sewed her own clothes or repaired Josée's old ones, preserving her threadbare elegance as best she could. Françoise never thought to wonder why Josée never sat down in her mother's house. The two women existed in separate worlds. Despite the tinted photograph of a young Josée on Mina's wall, it never occurred to Françoise that Josée might once have lived there. Josée didn't exist in Mina's world, and Mina didn't exist outside of it. Mina was never invited over to Josée and Paul's house, not even at Christmas, when Paul's mother and Josée's father, the mismatched grandparents who seemed to get along beautifully, sat in the living room, eating the chocolates the patients had left as presents.

Françoise loved being with Mina. Here she wasn't a sister or a
daughter, a child or a woman. Here she was finally at ease. After she'd had her bath, Mina would perfume her, tickling her all over—
une friction d'eau de cologne
—while she squirmed with pleasure, delighted to be touched. As she grew older, she and Mina talked for hours, though very rarely about the family. Instead, Mina taught Françoise to sew a button or clean a kitchen, things that at home were done by the help. Mina often brought her secretarial work home over the weekends. Françoise was very impressed by her grandmother's job. She could not imagine becoming a wife, like her mother, or a plastic surgeon, like her father. She convinced Josée to buy her a practice book and an old typewriter, and she taught herself how to type like Mina.

One afternoon Mina said, “What a nice chest you're developing!”

Françoise puffed with pride. “Oh really?” she said. “Do you think so?” She arched her back, showing her fuller left profile.

“Yes,” Mina said, “absolutely.”

Françoise caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and her face fell.

“You're going to need a bra soon,” Mina said, and when she caught the spark her words set off, “in fact, you must have one right away.”

It was not possible simply to go into a store and try on clothes. Everything had to be asked for and fetched from beautiful shop clerks who looked down their noses at little girls. Françoise was terrified of the ordeal buying a bra would entail. Surely the saleswoman would laugh. Surely she'd throw them out. But Mina strode into the store with her back very straight.

“My granddaughter needs a bra,” Mina announced. The woman glanced at Françoise, her eyes flicking down to her chest.

“Something with a lot of
support
,” Mina said in a tone that left no room for questions. The woman pressed her lips together and nodded. She pulled several padded bras off the wall.

“Yes,” Mina said. “Precisely what we were looking for.”