A Woman's Story

by Annie Ernaux

  Sometimes she saw her own daughter as a class rival.

  I longed to leave home. She agreed to let me go to the lycée in Rouen and later to London. She was ready to make any sacrifice if it meant a better life for me. Better than she had known. She even consented to make the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me. Away from her scrutiny, I rushed headlong into everything she had forbidden. I stuffed myself with food, then I stopped eating for weeks, until I reached a state of euphoria. Then I understood what it was to be free. I forgot about our arguments. When I was studying at the arts faculty, I saw her in a simpler light, without the shouting and the violence. I was both certain of her love for me and aware of one blatant injustice: she spent all day selling milk and potatoes so that I could sit in a lecture hall and learn about Plato.

  Although I didn’t miss her, I was always pleased to see her again. I usually came back home after an unhappy love affair, which I couldn’t talk about to her, even if she whispered secrets to me about the local girls (who was going out with whom, who had just had a miscarriage, and so on). It was somehow agreed that, although I was old enough to hear about these things, they would never concern me personally.

  When I arrived home, she would be serving behind the counter. The customers would all turn round. She would blush faintly and smile. We would embrace in the kitchen, after the last customer had left. She would inquire about the journey and my studies, adding, “You must give me your washing” and “I’ve kept all the papers since you left.” We behaved towards each other with kindness, almost shyness, as is the case with people who have stopped living together. For many years, my relationship with her consisted of a series of homecomings.

  My father underwent gastrointestinal surgery. He tired easily and hadn’t enough strength to lift the crates. She took over and did both their jobs without complaining. She seemed to enjoy the responsibility. After I left home, they argued less and she grew closer to him, affectionately calling him “Pop” and showing more indulgence for his little ways, like smoking: “After all, he’s entitled to a bit of pleasure.” On Sunday afternoons, in summer, they went for a drive in the country or dropped in to see relatives. In winter, after vespers, she visited the elderly. She came back through the town center, stopping to watch television in a shopping arcade where the local teenagers gathered when they came out of the cinema.

  The customers said she was still a handsome woman. She continued to wear high heels and dye her hair, but now she had bifocals and a touch of down around the chin, which she burnt off in private. (My father noted these changes with secret amusement, pleased to see her catch up on the years that separated them.) She gave up her flimsy, brightly colored dresses and took to wearing grey and black suits, even during the warm weather. She stopped tucking her blouse into her skirt, so as to be more comfortable.

  Until I was twenty, I thought I was responsible for her growing old.

  Nobody knows that I am writing about her. But then, in a sense, I feel I am not writing about her. It’s more like experiencing again the times and places we shared when she was alive. When I am at home, I occasionally come across things that used to belong to her, like her thimble, the day before yesterday, the one she always wore on her crooked finger, the result of an accident at the rope factory. Suddenly the reality of her death overwhelms me and I am back in the real world, the one where she will no longer be. In these circumstances, to publish a book can mean nothing except the definitive death of my mother. How I long to curse the people who ask me with a smile: “And when is your next book coming out?”

  Until I married, I still belonged to her, even when we were living apart. When relatives or customers asked after me, she would reply: “The girl’s got plenty of time to get married. At her age, there’s no great rush.” Seconds later, she would take it all back, protesting: “I don’t want to keep her. It’s a woman’s life to have a husband and children.” She blushed and started to shake when I announced one summer that I planned to marry a political-science student from Bordeaux. She tried to find excuses, showing the same provincial distrust that she condemned in others: “The boy’s not from our part of the world.” Later, she relaxed and felt happier about my situation. After all, she lived in a small town where marriage said a lot about one’s social status and nobody could say I had “ended up with a worker.” We entered a new period of intimacy, revolving around the pots and pans to buy and the preparations for the “big day” and, later, around the children. From then on, these were the only things that brought us together.

  My husband and I had the same level of education. We discussed Jean-Paul Sartre and freedom, we went to see Antonioni’s L’Avventura, we shared the same left-wing views, and yet we weren’t from the same background. In his family, they weren’t exactly rich but they had been to university, they were good conversationalists, and they played bridge. My mother-in-law was the same age as my own mother: she still had a good figure, a smooth complexion, and carefully manicured hands. She could sight-read piano music and knew how to “entertain.” (She was the type of woman one saw in drawing-room comedy on television: in her fifties, disarmingly naïve, a string of pearls on a silk blouse.)

  My mother had mixed feelings about my husband’s family. Although she admired their style, their manners, and their education, and was naturally proud to see her daughter fit in, she feared that beneath their icy politeness they held her in contempt. The feeling that she wasn’t worthy of them, a feeling which in her eyes applied also to me (perhaps it needed another generation for this to pass), was blatantly obvious in the advice she gave me on the eve of my wedding day: “Make sure you’re a good housewife, otherwise he might send you back.” Of my mother-in-law, she once said a few years ago: “Anyone can see she wasn’t brought up the way we were.”

  Because she feared people wouldn’t love her for what she was, she hoped they would love her for what she could give. She insisted on helping us through our last year at college and was always asking what we wanted as a present. The other family had originality and a sense of humor. They felt they owed us nothing.

  We moved to Bordeaux, and then to Annecy, where my husband was offered a senior executive position. What with cooking the meals, bringing up a young child, and teaching at a lycée in the mountains forty kilometers from home, I too became a woman with no time to spare. I hardly thought about my mother, she seemed as far away as the life I’d had before I married. I replied briefly to the letters she sent us every fortnight. She started with “My dearest children,” and always apologized for not being able to help us, living so far apart. I saw her once a year, for a few days in summer. I described Annecy, our flat, and the ski resorts. In my father’s presence, she remarked: “The two of you are doing fine, that’s all that matters.” When I was alone with her, she obviously wanted me to confide in her and talk about my husband and our relationship. She seemed disappointed by my silence because it offered no answer to the question that was probably foremost in her mind: “Does he at least make her happy?”

  In 1967 my father had a coronary and died four days later. I cannot describe these events because I have already done so in a different book and there can be no other narrative, no other possible choice and order of words to explain what happened. All I can say is that I remember my mother washing my father’s face after his death, easing his arms into the sleeves of a freshly laundered shirt and slipping him into his Sunday best. As she dressed him, she lulled him with soft, gentle words, as if he were a child one bathes and sends to sleep. When I saw her neat, simple movements, I realized she had always known he would die first. The first night following his death, she lay down beside him in bed. Until the undertakers removed his body, she popped upstairs to see him between customers, just as she had done during his four-day illness.

  After the funeral, she looked sad and weary and confessed to me: “It’s tough to lose one’s man.” She continued to run the business as before. (I have just read in a newspaper that “despair is
a luxury.” The book I started writing after my mother’s death—a book that I have both the time and the ability to write—may also be seen as a form of luxury.)

  She saw more of the family, spent hours chatting to young women in the shop, and kept the café open till late because the local youth had taken to meeting there. She developed a keen appetite and put on weight again. She had become quite talkative and was inclined to share her secrets like a young girl. She was flattered to tell me that two widowers had shown an interest in her. During the events of May 1968, she exclaimed over the phone: “Things are happening over here too, you know!” Later that summer, she sided with the Establishment. (She was furious when the leftists vandalized the top Parisian delicatessen Fauchon, which she saw very much like her own shop, only bigger.)

  In her letters, she said she was far too busy to be bored, but in actual fact she hoped for only one thing, to come and live with me. One day she ventured: “If I moved into your place, I could look after the house.”

  In Annecy, I thought of her with a guilty conscience. Although we lived in a large, comfortable house and had a family of two, none of it was for her benefit. I imagined her leading a pampered existence with her two grandsons. I felt sure she would enjoy this sort of life because she had wanted it for me. In 1970, she sold the business as private property—no one would buy it as an ongoing concern—and she came to live with us.

  It was a mild day in January. She arrived with the moving van in the afternoon while I was still out teaching. When I got back home, I caught sight of her in the garden, her arms clasped around her one-year-old grandson. She was keeping an eye on the men moving the furniture and the last remaining boxes of groceries from the shop. Her hair had turned quite white. She was laughing, bursting with energy as usual. She shouted to me from a distance: “You’re just in time!” Suddenly my heart sank when I realized: “From now on, I shall have to live my whole life in front of her.”

  At first, she wasn’t as happy as we had expected. All of a sudden, her shopkeeper’s life was over. No more financial worries and long working hours, but on the other hand, no more familiar faces and chatting to customers. Worst of all, maybe, she no longer had the satisfaction of earning “her own” money. In Annecy she was just a “granny.” Nobody knew her in town and she only had us to talk to. Her world had suddenly shrunk and lost its sparkle. Now she felt she was a nobody.

  Living with her children meant sharing a lifestyle of which she was proud (she would say to relatives: “They’ve done so well for themselves!”). It also meant remembering not to dry the dishcloths on the radiator in the hall, “taking care of things” (records, crystal vases), and “observing personal hygiene” (blowing the boys’ noses on a clean handkerchief). We discovered that the things we considered unimportant meant a lot to her: everyday news items, crime, accidents, being on good terms with one’s neighbors, and trying not to “trouble” people. (We even laughed at her attitude, which upset her.) Living with us was like living in a world that welcomed her and rejected her at the same time. One day she said angrily: “I don’t think I belong here.”

  And so she wouldn’t answer the phone when it rang next to her. If her son-in-law was watching football on television, she would make a point of knocking on the door before entering the living room. She was always asking for work—“Well, if there’s nothing to do, I might as well leave then”—adding with a touch of irony, “After all, I’ve got to earn my keep!” The two of us would argue about her attitude and I blamed her for deliberately humiliating herself. It took me a long time to realize that the feeling of unease my mother experienced in my own house was no different from what I had felt as a teenager when I was introduced to people “a cut above us.” (As if only the “lower classes” suffered from inequalities which others choose to ignore.) I also realized that the cultural supremacy my husband and I enjoyed—reading Le Monde, listening to Bach—was distorted by my mother into a form of economic supremacy, based on the exploitation of labor: putting herself in the position of an employee was her way of rebelling.

  After a while, she grew accustomed to her lifestyle, channeling her energy and her enthusiasm towards looking after her grandsons and helping to clean the house. She wanted to relieve me of all the household chores. She regretted having to let me do the shopping and the cooking, and start up the washing machine, which she was afraid to use. She resented having to share the only part of the house where her talents were acknowledged and where she knew she could be of use. As in the old days, she was the mother who refuses to be helped, using the same reproachful tones when she saw me working with my hands: “Leave that alone, you’ve got better things to do.” (When I was ten years old, this meant doing my homework; now it meant preparing my lessons and behaving like an intellectual.)

  We had gone back to addressing each other in that particular tone of speech—a cross between exasperation and perpetual resentment—which led people to believe, wrongly, that we were always arguing. I would recognize that tone of conversation between a mother and her daughter anywhere in the world.

  She adored both her grandsons, to whom she was devoted. In the afternoon, she strapped the younger one into his stroller and set off to explore the town. She visited the churches, went for a stroll round the old part of town, and spent hours in the amusement park, returning only at nightfall. In summer she took the boys to the heights of Annecy-le-Vieux, showed them the lake, and satisfied their craving for sweets, ice cream, and rides on the merry-go-round. She got talking to people in parks and would meet up with them regularly. She became friendly with the lady who ran the local baker’s shop. She invented a whole new world for herself.

  Now she read Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur, showed an interest in antiques—“It must be worth a lot”—and dropped in on friends “to take tea” (“I don’t like the stuff, but I haven’t told them that,” she would remark, laughing). She was careful not to use bad language and tried to handle things “gently,” keeping a close watch on herself and a tight rein on her temper. One could even say that she was proud of acquiring late in life the knowledge that most middle-class women of her generation had been taught in their youth, that is, how to “manage a household.”

  Now she never wore black, only light colors.

  In a photograph taken in September 1971, her face is beaming, crowned by a head of snow-white hair. She has lost weight and is wearing a Rodier blouse printed with arabesque motifs. Her hands are resting on the shoulders of her two grandsons, who are standing in front of her. They are the same broad, folded hands to be seen in her wedding photograph.

  In the mid-1970s, she followed us to a new town that was still underdevelopment, located on the outskirts of Paris, where my husband had been offered a better job. We lived in a house that was part of a new residential estate built in the center of a plain. The shops and schools were two kilometers away. The only time we saw the neighbors was in the evening. On weekends, they washed the car and put up shelves in the garage. It was an empty, soulless place where one drifted aimlessly, devoid of thought and emotion.

  She never got used to living there. In the afternoons she would wander along the deserted roads, named after familiar flowers: Daffodil Lane, Cornflower Grove, or Rose Walk. She wrote many letters to her friends in Annecy and to the family. Sometimes she walked as far as the huge shopping center that lay beyond the motorway, treading rutted lanes where the passing cars splashed her legs with mud. She came home with a strained expression on her face. She resented being dependent on me and the car whenever she needed to buy something—a pair of stockings—or go somewhere—the hairdresser’s, Sunday mass, and so on. She became irritable and would complain crossly: “I can’t spend all day reading!” When we bought a dishwasher, so depriving her of an occupation, she felt humiliated more than anything else: “What am I going to do now?” She spoke to only one person in the housing estate, a West Indian woman who worked in an office.

  After six months, she decided to return to Yvet
ot once more. She moved into a small, ground floor flat for elderly people, not far from the town center. She was happy to be independent again. She enjoyed seeing her youngest sister (the others had died), former customers, and also married nieces who invited her to confirmations and other family gatherings. She borrowed books from the local library and in October made the pilgrimage to Lourdes together with the other parishioners. But gradually, without an occupation, her life fell into a forced routine and the fact that all her neighbors were senior citizens annoyed her intensely (naturally, she refused to have anything to do with the “old people’s club”). I am sure too that she felt secretly frustrated: the people of the town where she had spent fifty years of her life, the only people who really mattered to her, would never witness the success of her daughter’s family.

  The flat in Yvetot was to be the last place of her own. It consisted of a rather dark room, a kitchen area giving on to a small back garden, a niche for the bed and bedside table, a bathroom, and an intercom connected to the caretaker’s lodge. The atmosphere there seemed to stifle one’s movements. Not that it mattered, there wasn’t anything to do except sit down, watch television, and wait until dinnertime. Whenever I went to see her, she would look around her, muttering: “I’d be a fool to complain.” I felt she was still too young to be there.

  We sat facing each other over lunch. At first we had so much to talk about that we kept interrupting each other: our health, the boys’ school reports, the new shops that had opened, the coming holidays, and so on. And then, suddenly, silence. As usual, she would try to pick up the conversation, venturing, “Oh by the way …” It occurred to me on one of these visits that her flat was the only place where she had lived without me since I was born. Just as I was leaving, she would produce some administrative document that needed explaining, or start searching for a cleaning or beauty tip she had put aside for me.