A Frozen Woman

by Annie Ernaux

  “Mama is a careful housekeeper; she cleans house very carefully”: double the I and add a y. What are they talking about? Housecleaning where I live is the Saturday tornado: the smell of Javel water, the café chairs upended on the tables, and my mother standing in a flood of water, her hair hanging down in her eyes, shouting at me not to walk on the wet floor. Around Easter time, it’s the stale, chalky odor of roughly scrubbed walls, bedclothes piled in a corner, furniture pushed aside and stacked into shaky pyramids, and my mother on all fours scrubbing the parquet with steel wool. I can see her pink garters, and for days afterwards the chairs stick to our thighs. My father and I are intimidated by this tumult of water and polish, and all the commotion seems to exhaust my mother as much as it does us. Luckily I enjoy burrowing in the tunnel of rolled-up mattresses. And best of all, we go through this only once a year. The rest of the time, the cleaning is quite casual: a sheet to be ironed, the shop bell, a customer, and it’s anybody’s guess whether the sheet and the iron will still be cluttering up the kitchen table at the end of the day. At five in the afternoon she’ll exclaim, “I’ve got a few minutes, I’ll pull the spread up on my bed!” Her only obsession, as far as I know: the unmade bed. That and the obligatory laundry on Tuesday, when business is slow. A frightening ceremony that begins the day before with water lugged in from the outside pump so that the colored wash can soak in tubs all night. Then, disheveled and gummy with sweat, she toils as though possessed in the steam of the laundry room, and no one is allowed to go near her. She reappears around noon, wreathed in the sweetish smell of washing, mute, the personified hatred of I don’t know what. But dust doesn’t exist for her, or rather, it’s something natural, not a problem. I feel the same way: it’s just a dry veil powdering my cozy, a trail of lace when I take a book from the shelf, motes dancing in the sunbeams, something to be wiped off a vase or notebook with one’s sleeve. Between twelve and fourteen years old, I will be amazed to discover that it’s ugly and dirty, this dust I don’t even notice. “Say, that hasn’t been done in a long time!” remarks that snake Brigitte, pointing at a spot low on the wall. I look. “What hasn’t?” My girlfriend shows me the thin top edge of the baseboard, all gray. She’s right. You mean to tell me we’re supposed to clean there, too? I’d always thought that was normal dirt, like fingerprints on doors and the yellow smudge over the stove. I’m vaguely humiliated by the realization that my mother is failing in one of her duties, since apparently this is one. Even later on, I’ll be stunned to learn that we’re also supposed to scrub the gas burner, the undersides of the sinks, the backs of the fridge and stove that no one ever sees—there’s all sorts of stuff in women’s magazines like Femme pratique and Bonnes soirees about how to make everything whiter and shinier, how to change your home into a bottomless pit of cleaning. And you’re supposed to think it can be done quickly, in a twinkling. My mother’s version of “quickly” is eating soup and then meat from the same dish to cut down on the washing-up, announcing brightly that this sweater doesn’t look too dirty so why don’t I wear it another day, letting everything get quietly dusty and worn.

  She doesn’t fool away time, as she puts it, on endless knitting. Occasionally, on a winter Sunday, as though seized with remorse, she tries to buckle down: the two of us laboriously count the moss stitches of a scarf that will never grow beyond twenty centimeters. The kitchen, that’s his department, except for the inevitable pudding-from-a-package on Thursdays and the crêpes or fritters on holidays. The house smells festive from top to bottom, and the scent of spring is often in the air, too, since it’s Shrove Tuesday or mid-Lent. The crêpes fly all afternoon as she offers them to the café regulars; my hands are glazed with sugar, my stomach is all upset, and we skip dinner that night. Or there’s the cake mix for women in a hurry: “Clear your schoolwork off the table so it doesn’t get filthy,” and the mounds of powder collapse into the yellow sea of eggs. I am allowed to stick my finger into the batter for a taste. She lets me have half the raisins, and we both scrape the creamy bottom of the mixing bowl. During the next two weeks she won’t crack a single egg. Cooking and cleaning are always the exception with her, depending on how she feels; you never know when she’s going to do some polishing or wash down the walls, or maybe make a cake for a nice surprise.

  And she still has the time, despite her bookkeeping and her customers and the shelves to be stocked, to get up at five when the mild weather begins so she can loosen the soil around the rosebushes and the sweet William, and she rubs my face with May dewdrops when I wake up. “It makes your cheeks bloom.” Above all, any time, any place, buried in a book. That’s where I find her superior to him, since he reads only the daily paper after dinner expressly to catch up on the local news. I envy her that strange, faraway look, withdrawn from me, from us, and the silence that envelops her, the absolute stillness that suddenly comes over her body. Afternoons, evenings, Sundays, she brings out a newspaper, a book from the public library, or sometimes even one bought in a bookstore. “I’m talking to you! How can you stand all those novels!” hollers my father. “Let me finish my story!” she answers back. I can’t wait to learn how to read, so I can understand those long tales without any pictures she finds so enthralling. The day comes when the words in her books stop droning on and on and the miracle occurs: I’m not reading words anymore, I’m in America, I’m eighteen years old, I have black servants, my name is Scarlett, and the sentences are racing toward a last page that comes all too soon. Gone with the Wind. “How about that,” she exclaims to her customers. “She’s only nine and a half!”And to me she says, “It’s good, isn’t it?” I answer, “Yes.” Nothing else. She is never able to explain much about what she feels or thinks, but we understand one another. From that moment on we share those imaginary lives my father ignores or despises, depending on his mood. “Wasting your time on lies, that’s all it is.” She informs him that he’s jealous. I lend her my Bibliotheque verte series of classics, Jane Eyre and Alphonse Daudet’s Le Petit Chose; she slips me LaVeillée des chaumières. I sneak the ones she won’t let me read from the cupboard: de Maupassant’s Une vie or Anatole France’s Les dieux ont soif. Together we windowshop at the bookstore on the place des Beiges; sometimes she asks, “Want me to buy you one?” It’s like standing in front of the patisserie, gazing at the meringues and nougatines: the same longing, and the same impression of extravagance. “Tell me, would you like one?” The only difference from the pastries is that the bookstore owner does the picking and choosing, obviously, because outside of the popular romances of Delly and Daphne du Maurier, she’s in unfamiliar territory. The store smells dry, a trifle dusty, pleasant. “Give it to my daughter,” she says before paying. She promises that later on I can read a wonderful book, The Grapes of Wrath, and she either doesn’t know how or doesn’t want to tell me about the novel, leaving it for “when you’re more grown-up.” It’s splendid to have a beautiful story waiting for when I’ll be around fifteen, like my period, like love. One of the reasons I’m eager to grow up is the right to read any book I want. Neighborhood Bovarys, silly women lost in their idiotic daydreams, they’re all hopelessly romantic, it’s a fact—but why does it bother men so much, even my father, and later on, when my husband sees me sitting idle in the evening, he’ll want to know what the hell I think I’m doing, dreaming my life away like that. Papers to correct, the kid to put to bed, barely five minutes left for reading before it’s time to sleep. How can I keep on dreaming . . . It’s true that I’ll feel guilty, as though I were being lazy by not being “busy.” No, my mother doesn’t confuse her store with the coast of California, and the serial-story magazines she slips under the ironing when the shop bell rings never keep her from doing her bookkeeping. I know that soon I’ll have to follow in the footsteps of those sweet, well-brought-up young ladies of La Vie en fleurs, and the Brigitte series in twenty volumes, to be continued, all those slaves or queens whose stories begin at eighteen and end with marriage at twenty, even my indefensible Scarlett with he
r scads of dresses and beaux. At the other end of the spectrum are those lurid, large-print, true-life confessions in magazines like Corifidences: unhappily married women, seduced and abandoned girls, the massive chain of inevitable feminine tragedy that fascinates me terribly when I’m around ten years old. Women’s reading: the bizarre idea that you have until you’re twenty to succeed in life—perhaps that’s why I’ll prove so spineless on the terrace of the Café Montaigne and later on. No. I think the way people look at you is stronger than any old books, and I hate that insult men use: “You’re letting yourself get carried away, you’re just imagining things,” poor girl—a good way to disguise all sorts of dirty tricks, to excuse missed rendezvous. “No, I’m serious, you’ve really got way too much imagination. “Well, I could never wish for a mother whose face would not light up over books and magazines and newspapers, who wouldn’t treat herself every week to a little vacation worlds away from the canned goods and the customers on credit, all that cold packaged grub, a mother who would think that reading was just plain rubbish. My mother tells me, eyes shining, “It’s good to have an imagination.” She prefers to see me reading, talking to myself in my games, writing stories in last year’s school notebooks rather than cleaning up my room and endlessly embroidering a dish towel. And I remember her favorite reading as an opening on the world.

  Too young to identify with eighteen-year-old heroines, I invent some family connection or acquaintance that allows me to traipse after them—off to those castles and exotic places and torrid tropical climes—as my very own self, with which I’m quite satisfied. Books: travel and foreplay. Delly’s Le Secret du Koo­Koo-Nor turns my parents’ bedroom into a Chinese boudoir, thanks to blankets and spreads draped over the chairs and window, while pillows piled on the linoleum become “voluptuous” cushions. My corvette is about to sink in a storm at sea, the chair balanced on the bed is tipping dangerously, and I’m Pedro, the little emigrant. My mother comes in, takes a look at the messy bed, at her Sunday dress dragging around my ankles, and says laughingly, “You ‘re playing? That’s good, have fun.”

  Reading, playing, dreaming, but every Sunday, and sometimes on Thursdays, also going off to explore the streets and sights around town. Not forgetting people, as though we don’t see enough characters every day as it is. My mother feels the need for more, all sorts of pathetic wrecks, losers, old folks, invalids who will never get better, who got a foot caught in a machine, who cracked up on a bike in a drunken stupor. My mother has no idea that children should be protected, cocooned, that their tender sensibilities should never be bruised, that ceaseless vigilance against marauding germs is required. She takes me everywhere with her, to visit old Alice who has no sensation in her legs all wrapped up in a blanket, and a faith healer may well have told her she’s on the mend, but I doubt she can even feel herself pee. Old man Merle in his one room with grubby sheets on the bed and cats clustered around a dish of scraps. The mothers of newborn children in the neighborhood, women secretly ravaged in mysterious ways. It’s nice to go into strange houses where there are always funny things to look at, oval engravings of Lourdes, odd-looking vignettes on painted wood, a cuckoo clock, dolls won at the fair, collections of those little animals that come free in a packet of coffee. Lots of smells, too. I’ve no need to learn from a dictation exercise that “each house has its own odor,” which sends my classmates into a flutter: what, you’re kidding, you mean it stinks? In my opinion, they don’t know diddle. Our visits last a long time, so I get restless, wondering why they don’t turn on the lights at nightfall, watching their faces gleam in the shadows. Once outside, my mother grips my hand. You can’t see your own feet on those roads without any streetlights. “It’s as dark as a blackamoor’s bum!” she says, and I laugh. The nursing home is interesting, too, with the chapel and those big staircases like the ones in castles. The best way to live would be off in a trailer, all by itself on the outskirts of town, near a quiet bridge where nothing ever crossed, neither cars nor trains. An old woman holds my mother’s hand for a long time; then they play cards. On the way back I find out she was having her fortune told, how marvelous.

  He hardly ever comes with us, our stay-at-home, and when he does he drags his feet, without even glancing at anything around him because he hates taking a walk for no good reason. And it’s often for no good reason, just to look, to get a breath of air, have a chat, talk off the top of my seven-year-old head that my mother and I set out “hooked up,” arm in arm. Off to the woods, to see the daffodils. Along nameless streets, puzzling streets (there is no school on the rue de ]’Ecole, and why name the rue de l’Enfer after Hell?), city streets full of children who stop playing to stare as we pass, streets with lovely houses haunted by invisible beings behind lace curtains. Keeping our eyes open for something new and different: half-demolished buildings with their rooms open to the sky, advertisements painted on walls, bull’s-eye windows in rich people’s houses. Streets downtown at Christmas time, where we gaze ravenously at the creche scenes and fir trees, finally sinking our chattering teeth into the delicate shell and swirling frosting of a chocolate eclair. There are exceptional days of astounding discovery: the trip to Rouen. We spend the morning in perfumed palaces—those huge department stores, le Printemps and Monoprix—and the afternoon in churches that are green on the outside, black on the inside. Near the cathedral, we stop in front of a store selling books about the devil and Ouija boards. I walk along the slippery pavement and for the first time I have the feeling I’m not myself anymore. “Look up,’’ she says: a gargoyle stretches out its neck. Here we are on the stairs in Joan of Arc’s tower, or in the basement of the musee Beauvoisine, the only ones viewing the disappointing mummies, or down in crypts gaping respectfully (and trying very hard not to laugh) at row after row of tombs belonging to people we’ve never heard of. And now here we are ordering unfamiliar dishes in a restaurant, waiting anxiously for my first coquilles Saint Jacques, and what if I don’t like it and can’t clean my plate, then the trembling island of scallops to be explored with spoon and tongue, followed by the fear we won’t be able to pay for all this, but she calmly gets out the money, don’t worry we’re rich today. My father nods without a word when I tell him of our exploits in the big city. What is it that drives her out and about, always going to exhibitions, prowling through the quaint parts of town? Why does she act like some well-meaning social worker dropping in on loonies, cripples, and derelicts? Shouldn’t a woman stay demurely at home with her husband and children? As though I would ever ask myself such questions, when I am convinced she is perfect. She teaches me that the world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed, and that there is absolutely no reason at all to hold back.

  Granville Road, Kenver Avenue, I’m improving my English, not much, but I walk miles on the outskirts of London, Highgate, Golders Green, I sit alone in milk bars drinking Bovril, I’m twenty years old, dazzled by this change of scenery, and there’s more, strolling on the via Tullio, in the gardens of the villa Borghese—and here they are already, those rude jerks, those dream-spoilers, getting in the way with their “Fraulein, hey Miss, oh mademoiselle, oo-la-la! French, francesa,” but all paths are still wide open. Like the ones after my exams, faceless roads stretching into the distance, where I savor a delicious feeling of absurdity. And then there are those orderly gardens in the suburbs where I walk to try and shake off our first quarrel: I’m not setting out in search of adventure anymore, but running away. A laughable flight lasting a few hours, the pretense of a grand departure that will only lead me back to the stable. Later on I won’t be able to go out anymore if I suddenly feel like enjoying some fresh air—I couldn’t possibly just leave the baby in his crib, and still later on, there will be no point in even thinking about running away, because it wouldn’t do any good, and I’m stuck in the kitchen, shedding hot tears over a hot stove. A well-broken little horsey.

  No, my childhood was not one long idyll; I remember the slaps she gave me when I tore my dress, my lies, wishing
she were dead, choking with rage, the boredom when imagination flagged, thinking if only I had a sister, the desolation in the air at the end of days when we hadn’t had too many customers, those fickle, wily creatures you often have to keep your eye on. All my fears of dying. But when I look back from womanhood to girlhood, I know that I was spared at least one shadow over my youth, the idea that little girls are gentle and weak, inferior to boys, and that they have different roles to play. For a long time, the only world I know is the one where my father cooks and sings nursery rhymes to me, where my mother takes me out to a restaurant and keeps the family accounts. No question of masculinity or femininity, words I would learn later on—just the words, without really understanding what they mean, even if I have been persuaded that what you’ve got in your pants makes a big difference, what a laugh, but no, seriously, did I ever pay for it, raised in that outlandish fashion, without respect for conventional roles.

  I admit, I’m rather pleased to be a girl. Because of my mother, of course. And then, I get a good look at what a man’s world is like, in the café. Four-fifths of them drink too much, talk nonsense, and kill themselves working at tough, dirty jobs on construction sites. Shouting, gesticulating, ready to take on anything and anyone, tongue-tied until they’ve had a snootful but afraid of no boss on earth once they’re in their cups, their conversation is just hot air. The bad ones beat up their wives, the good ones hand them their pay envelopes and in return get their Sundays off to go chase after their youth at the bistro or on the soccer field. What women do, I can see for myself in the store, is much more important: they shop for all the food, for sewing thread, for a pencil and double-sided ruler when it’s back-to-school time, never any wild extravagances—a can of crabmeat demands some serious thought. And to top it off, gripes my mother, they’re always comparing prices so they can pinch every penny, but easy does it, because they’re the ones who hold the purse strings, and when they buy a big box of butter cookies, they want to get their money’s worth. A sense of responsibility. At least in the ones who “keep a proper house.” I must have heard it a hundred times, this phrase that means so many things: not throwing money out the window, scrubbing the children’s faces before sending them to the store on an errand (at least on Sunday), but also keeping one’s man on a tight rein, not letting him drink up his wages or change jobs at the drop of a hat. And I vaguely sense that almost all women’s problems come from men. I don’t brood over this, since my role model is my mother and she’s nobody’s fool.