A Frozen Woman

by Annie Ernaux

  Eight days, nothing; strange how I don’t believe it. The alarm goes off one February morning. Six hours of classes ahead. Incredulous, I discover that nausea has grown in my stomach overnight like a mushroom. Vomit or weep? Now I see what kind of an adventure I’ve chosen. The romping of those first years, the walks with one hand pushing the carriage, Kiddo holding on to the other. Farewell to teacher-training courses, the union, the snowy slopes that give him a playboy tan all winter long. Endless Sundays with two children to watch instead of one. Bravo, what imagination. He’s taken aback by this pregnancy plotted on the sly, doesn’t seem to approve at all, as though he thought the initiative ill-advised. Immediately, a prudent distance: “You’re the one who’ll have to deal with it, chum.” No need to say more; I know that in nine months, I’ll be the only one fiddling with powdered formula and sterilizing bottles. No more playing around at papa-baba like the first time, ah youth, now the role is sacrosanct, how could he, he works all day, etc. What a silly idea, me whining at him, with that wonderful maternity leave I’ll be getting.

  My belly starts blowing up again; less of a shock, I’m already used to it. A humid summer in the apartment, the sleek heat of the esplanade by the lake where Kiddo plays with his ball, home through the shady streets; I feel completely sluggish, holding my hand out to keep tourists from bumping into me, weighted down with a heaviness that isolates me from the world and the future. In spite of everything I am in no hurry to go stretch out one night on the torture rack at the Clinique Beaurivage. I want to enjoy as long as possible my last moments with only one child. My whole story as a woman: going down a flight of stairs, and hanging back at each step.

  From my bed I can see a blue thread of lake and fat autumn flies bouncing off the windowpane. He’s perfect, round, a little glutton. These are golden afternoons; I doze, nodding over my breasts, which blossom regularly and turn lumpy. Curled up in the plush landscape of childbed. Take advantage, old girl, snooze away, let the buzzing ladies of the clinic tend to the huge queen bee, and above all, don’t worry about questions that might prevent—it’s true—your milk from welling up into the little mouth. Just play with the stretchies and the doll sweaters that are pouring in, and write those triumphant birth announcements: number two is here! And ten times an hour, bend over the cradle to study that tiny new mug and check on his breathing. Really appreciate what you’ve chosen in the way of adventure. Because it’s the last time. I call a truce: I’m not playing anymore. The illusion of a voluntary decision. All I did was produce the ideal family, the one that Brigitte, Hilda, all of them imagined on those days of dreaming of the future: two, that’s just right.

  Just right—in other words, the threshold of saturation, the impossibility of getting deeper into the shit in the literal and figurative senses of the word. Seen from the lycée and my big belly, maternity leave looks like one big vacation. You become less and less picky. Ear-splitting wails at five in the morning, first batch of milk, drop off to sleep, rough awakening at seven, family breakfast, get Kiddo ready for nursery school, second batch, then housework, then cooking—a dizzy pace, not one minute to myself. But how sweet that is of him to do the shopping, “on top of” his job, thanks, thanks. To keep awake until the last bottle I watch television with him. Fatigue. Solitude. But what does it look like from the outside? Oh what a banal image: a young woman waiting at the front door of the nursery school with a cute baby carriage and an adorable child, fast asleep. I don’t complain; when my leave is over, things will get worse. I’ll go back to my students, who’ve been temporarily taken over by another teacher, to evenings spent correcting their papers and preparing classwork; a stranger will be taking care of Banky, and I’ll have to give her instructions every day. This infancy is the real thing, the one I’d been spared with Kiddo: I am completely on my own, obsessive, finicky, and nothing escapes my eye—ah, this one isn’t going to marinate in his own peepee like his brother, during those student years; I’ll take him for leisurely walks in the park, I’ll be a mama like the one in I’m Raising My Child, which has been resurrected for the occasion. I’ll have my moment of gratification every week, weighing him on the baby scales. The washing machine is ruminating on its cargo of laundry, the living room smells pleasantly of lemon oil. In the soft lighting of the apartment in the early evening, I build Lego houses with Kiddo, and I say, quick, it’s time to give your little brother his bottle, Papa will be home soon. Papa kisses the children, tickles Banky to make him laugh, and settles down with Le Monde. After doing the dishes, I join him in front of the TV. One big happy family. When the weather is nice, I go placidly off to the park without running anyone off the sidewalk with my baby carriage. I sit on a bench, next to the old folks and the women with young children. I wait until it’s time to pick up Kiddo at nursery school. This must be what life is like. I’m twenty-eight.

  You get into a panic, frighten yourself silly; it’s astonishing how much endurance a woman has—they call it heart. I manage to bring up that second child, and teach three French classes and do the shopping and the cooking and replace the broken zippers and buy the boys’ shoes. What’s so amazing about that, since—as he keeps reminding me—I’m one of the privileged few, with that mother’s helper coming in four and a half days a week. But then, what man doesn’t belong to a privileged class, with his favorite housekeeper constantly on duty? Naturally I’ll have even less time for professional interests and hobby clubs, things that men and single women can enjoy. Perhaps later. And why stay in a lycée, which eats up my time as a mother with papers to correct, classes to plan? I, too, will gladly take advantage of that convenient refuge for married women who teach and want to manage everything: collège, grades six through nine, where the work is a lot easier. Even though I like it less. “Pursuing a career,” that’s another thing best left to men, and my husband is doing quite well for himself, so that’s enough. Differences, what differences, I don’t notice them anymore. We eat together, sleep in the same bed, read the same newspapers, listen to political speeches with the same skepticism. Our plans are made in common: a new car, a different apartment, or an old house we could fix up, trips to take when the children are older. We even express the same vague desire for a different way of life. Occasionally he remarks with a sigh that marriage is a mutual restriction, and we’re content to agree on that.

  My years of apprenticeship come to an end without my noticing it. Habit takes over from there. Inside the home, a series of unobtrusive noises—coffee grinder, saucepans—and outside, a teacher, discreet and sensible, an executive’s wife who wears Cacharel or Rodier. A frozen woman.

  We return home at Kiddo’s pace, walking along the wintry streets of Annecy. In the square in front of the railroad station, water no longer splashes down the statue in the center of the fountain. All bundled up, Banky leans out of his stroller, trying to catch the pigeons zigzagging around the basin. I feel as though I no longer have a body, and have been reduced to a gaze directed at the façades of the buildings around the square, the gate of the Ecole Saint­François, the Savoy Cinema where they’re playing . . . I can’t remember the film.

  Just on the verge, just. Soon I’ll have one of those lined, pathetic faces that horrify me at the beauty parlor when I see them tilted back over the shampooing sink, eyes closed. In how many years? On the verge of sagging cheeks and wrinkles that can no longer be disguised.

  Already me, that face.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France’s most important literary voice. She won the Prix Renaudot for A Man’s Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  LINDA COVERDALE holds a Ph.
D. in French Studies from the Johns Hopkins University and has translated over seventy books. A Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she has won the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the 2006 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize in both 1997 and 2008. She lives in Brooklyn.