A Frozen Woman

by Annie Ernaux

  Being a little girl is first of all just being me—always so big for her age, her face is a mite pale, but luckily she’s got solid meat on those bones, bit of a tummy on her, won’t get her waist till she’s twelve or so. Without suspenders or a tight belt, says the dressmaker, that skirt won’t stay up. “Suspenders, I want her to be comfortable.” All my clothes have to be comfortable, and made of sturdy stuff so they’ll last a long time. I’m completely unschooled in wheedling, affectations, coy smiles, and tenderizing tears. My mother disapproves of “fusspots” and thinks crying is simply putting on an act. “Waterworks? Then you won’t piss so much tonight.”

  A little girl hungry for as much pleasure and happiness as she can find, without a care for the effect on others. Staying in bed on Thursday and Sunday mornings until I feel faintly nauseated in my burrow of blankets, watching myself prance naked in front of the mirror, reading while I eat bread slices spread with hot apple butter at noon on school days without waiting for my lunch, endlessly riding my bike in the courtyard between the beds of asters and the empty crates. My bike, the marvelous dream machine. I feel airborne on the saddle, bumping gently between the shifting ground and motionless sky, reeling off my exotic stories to the rhythm of the whirling footpedals. Playing in the summer with my cousins or some neighborhood girls at those elaborate games that begin in a fever of excitement and joyous cries, pause while we eat our lunch sitting astride the cross-beam of the seesaw, and become bogged down in arguments, fights, or what are prudently described at confession as nasty conversations, in the hope that the voice behind the grating will not demand details. Pretend christenings and weddings where we use up all our energy getting ready to play, and why did we ever start this game, so we lose interest and then it’s time to scamper out into the street in search of new adventures. The most thrilling ones are swiping peaches and pears, and running into some boys we can holler at from a ways off, happily calling them squinty-eyed blubbery nitwits, so that at the first signs of pursuit we can shriek, “Mama, they’re bothering us!” “You started it,” she replies. The ritual climb up the rope in the playground: the rope goes around the right leg, the left foot goes over the right, your whole dress creeps up, you strain to reach the ring at the top of the beam before tumbling back to the ground, the rope burning like fire from ankle to thigh. I spit in my hands and then up I go and down I come again. Never any calm, unhurried games. In company, I talk loud and fast to make up for the solitary murmuring of an only child. As for the natural reserve of little girls, their modest demeanor and supposed timidity, I don’t see any of that in either me or my playmates. The dainty darlings who play dolly’s tea party and pick pretty flowers? We call them fraidy-cats and stuck-up prissies. We enjoy our exuberance, which school, with its staid amusements, its get-in-line-and-keep-quiet, does little to dampen. Screaming, hiding where no one will ever find us, getting all messed up, daring—that’s the big word: I dare you to . . . ring old lady Lefebvre’s doorbell, say that out loud, show your whatever, sneak that peach. I’m unaware that in another language, our high spirits are called vulgarity, bad manners, that properly brought-up young ladies do not shriek like fishwives or hang out in the streets, and that they say fudge or shoot instead of you know what. The bistro’s working-class clientele and the generations of peasant women that came before me are not really conducive to the creation of a Goody Two-Shoes.

  It isn’t always easy to do what is expected of me. My mother gives me lots of dolls, true, but I detect a note of pity in her manner, as though she were making a concession to my tender years. Still, she hands them over with a good grace, since I am the one asking for them. I’m not allowed, however, to go out in the street with those ridiculous items, a baby doll in a carriage. The word for dolls in our local dialect is drouines, and my drouines stay home. A vague memory of invariably curly hair, blankly staring eyes, and lips that are never parted wide enough for me to stick in a morsel of food. A parade of them, lost, broken, and obstinately replaced. For the pride I take in showing them to my playmates, with such a lovely dress, and the crocheted bootees, and she cries! When the admiration dies away, I put her back in her cradle and go off to jump rope. I keep thinking a miracle will occur, that I will love the next one, and knit clothes for her, and not leave her in the back courtyard. Joy at the new arrival, anxious selection of a first name, careful preparations for the baptism. After that, there isn’t much I can do with her. How do you take care of a dolly? I’m not real handy at sewing dresses and bonnets, and whenever I ask my mother for help, she tells me to buzz off. That cold face carefully tucked into her baby buggy makes me sad. Lying there motionless, and me so lively, with a hint of spring in the mild air caressing my arms (bare for the first time since the end of winter), and the taste of mid-Lenten crêpes on my fingers. I look at her, and I can’t think of a single thing to do with her. Lonely child with doll. My dream would be for her to love me back. Her body is hard, her Kiss-Me-Red smile is empty. The only way to put some life in her is to torment her, put her through some of those metamorphoses that can’t help but lead to trouble. It always starts with the hair: braids, shampoo, curlers. Haircut. The fatal progression. Because of that devastated head—poor little baldy—I feel I can do anything, toss her up in the air so she’ll land in silly positions, skirts up around her ears, or hold her hand and whirl her around at the shoulder on the rubber band that passes through her chest. One-armed in two seconds. Then I can commit the ultimate sacrilege, digging out of her belly the salt-shaker thing that still coos “Ma-ma” when I turn it over. With the small naked dolls called bathers, it’s different. They look too much like babies, so any tortures would be obviously criminal. But they can wind up in some unusual situations as well; if only I dared reveal the part played one summer afternoon by my diminutive companion, a baby doll named Michel . . .

  I don’t play favorites with games, I like them all: skip rope, hopscotch, handball. Pass-the-thimble, where you pass something small from hand to hand; such disappointment when I’m not chosen, such pleasure when I am, feeling the token slip between my palms like a secret proof of friendship. Bike riding with both feet on the handlebars. Steal-the-bacon. Building houses from dominoes. Climbing trees. Some Sundays, in la Gaieté, I go out in the street with my cousins and the neighborhood kids and to my surprise, the boys ignore us girls. They fight among themselves, rolling in the wood shavings around the lumber yard, leaving the girls to watch. So I attack them, tickling and biting, but I cannot make them really play with us. What is it I shout that day? Perhaps one of their own bad words I send back at them in provocation. As I remember the scene, two fourteen-year-olds, big kids, turn toward me. One of the boys shouts to the other, WHAT’S TO BECOME OF THAT ONE! Contemptuously. Threateningly. I have an idea of what he means, because I often listen in on what men talk about in the café, but I can’t think of a thing to say, can’t fathom the hitherto unsuspected connection between liking to fight and saying bad words, as they do, and becoming a slut. I can still see myself, hurt and offended, but worst of all, I don’t understand, don’t even have the heart to jump on him and start punching.

  What will become of me? I will become someone. I must. My mother says so. And to start with, I need a good report card. Saturdays she tallies up my tens in dictation and arithmetic but doesn’t scold me for the inevitable four in sewing and “fairly good” in conduct. She raises her eyebrows at the slightest dip in my grades and won’t let my father make any excuses for his daughter: don’t I have all the time I need to learn my multiplication tables and conjugate my verbs? They never disturb me when I’m doing my homework—or playing my games—to ask me to set the table or dry the dishes. “Don’t you worry about anything but your own little self,” they say. Oh, the greatness of this gift, the beauty of those sacrificed older sisters, the charm of the helpful little girls who bring in the cracker tray when aperitifs are served—that sort of thing doesn’t happen in my house, it’s even frowned on. And a child’s delight at thinki
ng herself useful, the idea that if you keep your room neat and clear the table “nicely” you will be loved . . . Not for me. Responsible only for myself and my future. That’s vaguely terrifying, now and again; it would be so much easier to please people by peeling vegetables and being sweet to everyone than by constantly working hard and doing well in school. Now and again—but not often. The gray, overcast sky of September, men’s voices making a loud hubbub in the café, the asters humming with bees: almost time to go back to school. The future. I’m between seven and ten years old; I know that I was put on this earth to do something. There’s no brother whose prospects would take precedence over mine.

  I now realize that my mother’s attitude was also a calculated one. Just because she doesn’t belong to the middle class doesn’t mean that her girl shouldn’t aim high; she wants a daughter who won’t go toil in the factories as her mama did, who’ll be able to say shit to anyone and live a free life, and to my mother, education is that shit and that freedom. So nothing is asked of me that might hamper my success, no little chores or housework that would tire me out. And it’s important that this success not be denied me because I am a girl. For my parents, becoming someone has nothing to do with gender.

  And it doesn’t require wearing a bridal veil, either. Patiently, persistently, they persuade me—and from an early age—that marriage is only another adventure, like going to school and earning a living, just as it is for a boy. During our walks, my mother provides all sorts of examples for me not to follow: little What ‘s-Her-Name who was such a nice girl and so smart but she failed her baccalaureat exams because she was engaged, and another girl who set her heart on making a good marriage—left in the lurch. According to my mother, the town is swarming with dumbbells who have made a mess of their lives, and I can see that I will have to watch my step. Especially since my neighborhood isn’t oversupplied with good examples. There is Mlle Dubuc, bent double by the weight of her huge briefcase as she gets off the train from Rouen, where she’s in medical school. Mlle Jay, who teaches English at the public school; she buys her milk and a few other items from our store every day. Not a vast throng, true, but they’re “mademoiselles,” not little What’s-Her­Name or the Whosis girl. “You should be well prepared for life before anything else.” So naive, my mother: she thinks that education and a good job will protect me from everything, including the power of men.

  I have to say that there’s something missing from her directions for living. Little girl raised in a permissive atmosphere, provided with a glorious self-image . . . Well, not quite. I’m on my own when it comes to my thingy, more warm and alive than my legs or belly; she calls it my “nooky.’’ In my head I write out nucky/mucky/yucky. Dirty, something to hide. “Will you stop parading around in your slip—go cover your bottom!” To be washed quickly, with a stern expression. Floundering alone in the dark with my fear, and later my shame and the need to go after what feels good. I want to know, learn, understand, and I keep my ears open for any peculiar expressions the grown-ups use. I still feel disgusted when I think of my body when I was a little girl, my dreams and conversations with other children. I have completely blocked out that period, ever since adolescence. At fifteen, set on the idea of offering a boy my complete innocence all tied up in a ribbon: heart, body, and soul, and he, like a god, will enter me as though he were entering an empty house. Determined to forget those fumblings and childish games and to believe that pleasure will begin with him. Actually, the first time is in a dream, before I’m five. The church they sometimes take me to when there are grand processions is vast, dark, and I am alone. I feel like peeing in a nice way, tingling and sweet. I crouch at the foot of the big gleaming pulpit, and I want to go so badly that it burns inside me, but it doesn’t spurt out. Then I notice the priest staring at me, in his two gowns, the black one and the very short one of lace. My desire becomes excruciating. Night falls.

  I want to sweep away all shame, speak triumphantly of my discoveries, admire how cunningly I deceived the adults around me, the stubborn way I resisted the ideal of the angelic little girl and the inquisitions of the priest (a different one, not the one in the pulpit) whose breath stank in his confessional-box. Because it isn’t sad or bad to have hunted instinctively for the secret of that mysterious longing by exploring the little red house enclosed within two white shutters, so disturbingly smooth and fragile, as though it had been flayed. A hidden picture. My uneasiness years later in front of those triptychs in the Prado, with their half-open panels. Red, white. The queen pricked her finger and blood fell upon the snow. Open the shutters. Cautious examinations, sometimes involving tea parties with the dolls, and when I look at them on other days, they seem to remember. Amid the commotion of the classroom when our first-grade teacher isn’t there, Chantal twirls in front of drooly old Genevieve, her “feely-finger” pressed to her temple; flipping up her skirt, she pulls aside the crotch of her panties and quickly spreads the wings of her secret place. Down flops the skirt. “Come on, Genevieve, do it!” Genevieve, who’s not quite all there, shakes her head, won’t play the game. “Mustn’t, it’ll bleed.” She’s close to the truth; I also think it’s an open wound right in the middle of the body, but one that neither hurts nor bleeds. Until I’m about nine, this image has no depth to it in my imagination. “Mine,” as my girl cousins and playmates and I call it, never looks exactly like “yours.” Some girls show, and others look; some let themselves be touched, others do the touching. I’m not sure which group I should be in; the second, probably, because I’m often the youngest in these sessions and haven’t any novelties to show off. Brigitte has a pointy chin and gives fascinating and meticulous lessons in anatomy, her eyes flashing from beneath her constantly tumbling ringlets; she loves that, showing and telling about the real red that will come, the black already starting to appear. We don’t know many names and never suspect that there could even be serious words for these things in the dictionary. Everything is “it.” Soon we would get “it,” we’d be “well-developed,” as the grown-ups say, and later we could “do it.” How scared we are of being discovered by our parents in the middle of one of these instructive sessions. I bet they’d send us to reform school! And we laugh bravely. Impossible to resist this curiosity about our bodies. Where in all this is the “nothing” allocated to us, although I do not yet know this, by boys? Everything, on the contrary. The seat of a marvelous story that comes to me in small fragments not easily glued back together, but do I even really try, since I’m not bothered by weird or incredible things—after all, it couldn’t be a simple matter or adults wouldn’t be making such a fuss about it. I make progress, thanks to whispered nuggets of information, furtive games, and the inquisitive contemplation of couples locked in each other’s arms in public parks. It’s impossible to separate the awakening of my body from this disjointed body of knowledge. My charming, well-bred friends of later years will tell me how they were taught everything all in one go: the little flower, the seed, sitting on mama’s lap, and she calmly draws a pretty picture, everything is harmonious, and geometrical, too, it all fits together, description of the parts and detailed explanation of the schedule of operations. I don’t envy them. They didn’t get the personal instruction sheet, either, the only one that counts. My earliest memory, when I am four: a neighbor boy my age is standing next to me, hosing the wall, and someone whisks me away from this vision. The revelation of a tormenting difference that would later delight me at the age of eight, when it can be benignly studied—from afar—on a statue, the famous satyr of la Gaieté, or closer up on the younger brothers of cheeky playmates: “Fwancis, show us your widdler.” Don’t have to ask twice, whenever you want, except the game gets tiresome after a while. But giggles, always, when looking at the boys’ thing­ummies, whereas the sight of ours turns us more serious than catechism class. Just mentioning theirs was hilarious: willie weewee, piddling peter, “pid” for short. And it was funny to slip it into harmless songs, as a challenge. “I betcha I will!” “You
won’t!” “Just listen!” Singing on the swing: “If he had a dick he’d be a lot more slick, but there wasn’t any more so I showed him the door!” A curiosity, a plaything, almost ridiculous. My mother calls it the same name as those scraggly plants that grow in windowboxes, “miseries.” “Cover up your misery, Grampa Milon, there are children around.” For a long time, it seemed to me a useless thing, pure difference. Because men make babies with their fingers. The first version of the story to be acted out. The problem is, how long does it take, a minute or an hour? Never determined, not even when I reach the next version and learn what the misery is for. And all those marvelous doubts . . . A huge poster on the way to school intrigues me: a woman, lying down, with a man’s head buried in her lap: “Confidences, the weekly family magazine.” My mother announces in the store that ads like that are a disgrace. Can a man do it with his head, too? And this knee grown-ups joke about, playing kneesies under the table; that smooth surface says absolutely nothing to me, but still, you never know. For a long time, everything takes place on the surface, as far as I’m concerned, and I never suspect any penetration can go farther than that tiny groove behind the closed shutters. Even my “period” I imagine to be a series of minute red polka dots that will one day spot my skin. Brigitte’s lessons must not have been too clear. The next version of the story is quite startling. Do I guess or does someone whisper in my ear? The memory is muddled now. It’s the moist peepee­hole, the one babies come from, that is used, not the little red house. No more play-acting: the experience would be useless and painful. For a while, I am perturbed by this discovery that the important part of my “mine” is a hidden tunnel where I’ve never felt anything, a silent and invisible hollow. The difference now becomes clear, logical, and disconcerting. I curb my astonishment, as usual. During my childhood, for as far back as I can remember, nothing ever shocks or worries or disgusts me. I must have accepted the new arrangement and ignored any uneasiness I felt over this unknowable part of me inside my body so that I might think only of the promise of pleasure. “Doing it” can’t be anything else, the most important thing in the world, an act that I unconsciously disassociate, naturally, from the terrible consequences that are inevitably involved: having a baby. A skip-rope rhyme popular in the fourth and fifth grades, the year of our solemn communion: “First comes love / Then comes marriage / Then comes me / With a baby carriage.” Never mind, first the pleasure! always erase the rest of it in my fantasies. Childbirth, the only thing that fascinates me with horror because I learned about it in Gone with the Wind: the ropes, the hot water, and screaming your head off while you clutch the bars of the bed. Torture and terror. Dire rumors of difficult births requiring forceps, probably something like the pliers my father uses to get the tube off the wheel rim when he has to fix a flat on my bike. I always thrust aside that episode of my story, preferring to concentrate on more cheerful developments, the appearance of breasts, hair, and blood, marvels I watched for with keen curiosity. And it takes so long, especially for the last metamorphosis, this miracle that arrives without warning. For you know neither the day nor the hour, it just happens, and like all the things that are supposed to happen in my body, I never imagine any afterward. One day I’ll be a girl with my period, I’ll strut about in a halo of red glory, I’ll go to sleep with my new self, and life will be close to reaching perfection. Except for childbirth, which resembles a punishment, I think of all my transformations as celebrations. I don’t believe in the pain that makes some girls wince every month; my mother never complains, and I cannot associate the happiness of finally having “it” with stomach cramps. I am sure I will not suffer. And also that I will like to “do it.” It isn’t simple, the business that lies ahead, and I don’t know much about boys, but I’m sure it will be fun. The bicycle bumps along over the dark ground in the courtyard where no grass grows, as I wind my way around the crates, drawing ever closer to my imaginary India and Argentina with every turn of the pedals, but closer as well to that glorious body of tomorrow for which everything will be possible. To travel and make love—I don’t think anything seems more wonderful to me when I am ten.