Contrary to most people’s belief about the aristocrats, my mother’s family was not rich. Their wealth had long dwindled through the generations and vanished in political foibles that sometimes resulted in beheadings or in miscalculated choices of partnership. Marrying outside of one’s ranks was by far the worst offense anyone in my mother’s family could commit. This is what my mother chose to do. Not only had she chosen a common man, but he wasn’t even French; worse yet, he was American. For my grandparents, as is the case for many aristocratic French and even commoners, Americans are by far the most debased and common people one could ever choose. There was, of course, the innate vulgarity of Americans, their almost childlike naiveté, niaiserie, as my grandmother had said to her daughter—this niaiserie that some people somehow found charming. There was also the problem of Americans’ inherent dilution of culture, with their constant intermarriages so predominant in their upbringing. Not one culture ever remained intact and whole.
When my mother brought my father home for lunch to meet her parents, Marguerite Marie later told her daughter that Americans are the symbol of bastardization, everything the de Peussy family abhorred and rejected. My mother recounted that first and final encounter between my father and his future in-laws many times. I’d heard about Rowan’s transgressions countless times, so much so that I’d convinced myself that I had been there that day.
Marie brought Rowan home on a Sunday afternoon. She had not bothered to tell her parents about his presence, an unconscious foible on her part, most probably out of fear of what she knew would happen. The weekly Sunday gathering was sacred ground; it was not to be missed under any circumstance by any of the three grown children in the de Peussy family. They knew, as they did with with many of the unspoken rules of the family, that missing such an occasion could only mean one thing: a life-threatening illness, an accident, or death itself. Bringing an outsider to these gatherings required a great deal of planning, unless that person had already been accepted into the clan by their own clear lineage.
Rowan walked into this battlefield like an innocent lamb. Marguerite Marie opened the door knowing right away that something was terribly wrong. Each of her three children had a key to the house, so she did not understand why Marie Françoise had rung the bell in the first place. My mother had not wanted to force Rowan into the family completely; she thought that by allowing her mother to open the door and admit him herself she could ease his presence in the family. My parents were greeted by Marguerite Marie’s best scornful look. A wry smile with a piercing gaze and the absence of a handshake. Rowan, who had learned that only business people shook each other’s hands was not at all alarmed by this first sign of trouble. My grandfather, Jean, was decanting the wine in the dining room when they walked in.
“Maman, this is Rowan. I told you so much about him. I decided to bring him to lunch so you could all meet him.”
Marguerite Marie may have heard certain things about Rowan but nothing that she cared to remember. When she had first heard about “the American,” she had allowed everything her daughter told her to slip past her into oblivion. Marguerite Marie wanted to know nothing of this boy. My grandmother did not believe in friendship between men and women and so she never considered the possibility of anything but a tragic romance between her daughter and this American farmer’s son.
Frédérique, Marie’s brother was already there. He stood up intrigued and eager to witness the carnage that was about to take place. He smiled at Rowan and extended his hand, giving him a firm shake. This, perhaps, was the first sign in Rowan’s mind that something had gone terribly wrong when he’d walked in a few seconds earlier. Should he have shaken her mother’s hand? The moment had passed. In a matter of seconds, the room was swarmed with the de Peussy family. Jean François walked in with his well-accepted fiancée, Sylvie, on his arm. Her family came from the long line of the de Ségur family, a prominent family in Limoges; there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the upcoming wedding in the spring would be a complete success.
My grandfather came in, carrying a half-opened wine bottle in one hand. He looked at my parents and said:
“I would shake your hand, but as you can see they are occupied at the moment. Shall we seat ourselves for lunch?”
My mother knew in these first few minutes that nothing she or my father could ever say or do would alter her parents’ decision to reject his presence from the family permanently. Rowan seated himself next to my mother when in fact this was Frédérique’s place, and had been since childhood. The honored spot for a guest had always been at the head of the table across from my grandfather, but that spot was not set and had to be prepared catastrophically at the last minute. Rowan did not drink wine, a transgression worse than stealing. He kept his napkin and elbow on the table and occasionally rested his hand on his lap. He had never tasted any of the Roucamadour or Cantal cheeses they were savoring, and worse yet, he’d never heard of Limoges or the Limousin region. My grandmother grew very silent while my grandfather made strange and uncomfortable references to the poverty in Ireland, as soon as he heard about my father’s roots. My uncles asked Rowan a million questions, which only led him faster to his demise.
“What do you think of Notre Dame?” He had not had a chance to visit it.
“Where did you grow up?” In rural Vermont, his parents were farmers. “If you don’t eat escargot, then what do you eat, hamburgers?” Rowan had been killed and buried in one easy afternoon lunch.
My mother never said she missed her family, and yet it was in the way she evoked them that I knew their absence defined her. When I was a little girl, she liked to speak of the long, endless afternoons spent at her mother’s family chateau, sitting outside with the entire family; sipping cool drinks: Pastis, Absinthe, or Cointreau; watching the light shift as an afternoon lingered on into a sweet evening. Cool air would descend on the family as darkness approached, and everyone would move into the house to make a fire in the fireplace. There would be naps and long strolls through the long and narrow alleyways of around the chateau. In the fall, they picked girolles mushrooms and made a feast in the kitchen. Weekends were spent in the company of a good wine, aged at least ten years, and conversations about art. Art was, by definition, something that had been created by someone who had died long ago. It was something that lived in a museum; art connected us to God and the higher plane of our existence; art did not exist within.
From the tunnel of my thoughts, I looked at my mother standing in my kitchen. Her face was not as I had remembered it. She looked older, more fragile, and vulnerable. I noticed a new line on her face. Right between the eyes. In the third eye. The place that sees all. She has gained wisdom there.
“I wish you had called me earlier. I could have taken care of you.”
“I’m OK. It’s not like I’m sick or anything. I just got a little tired. That’s all.”
“I know, it’s just that I hate to think of you up here all alone. The reason I’m here is that I really want you to come home with us. It would do you some good. And with your leave from school, you have no obligations holding you back.”
I was trying to count the number of hours since my last dose. Where was my medication?
“Did you hear me?” My mother interrupted my thoughts.
“Yes, I heard.” I answered coldly. “I can’t come with you. I have things to do.”
“Things? Like what things?”
My mother had always been the expert on the scales of importance in everyone else’s life. Work came at the top of the list, even though my mother did not work. And second were community activities.
“I’m a volunteer interpreter for African refugees from Rwanda.” My mother perked up. I noticed her sit up straight in my tiny and rusted metal chair, the one I bought at Walmart four years earlier when I’d moved into the apartment. It had spent an entire winter rusting on my porch long after barbeque season ended.
“An interpreter? That’s wonderful! They speak French, then?”
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“Yes, they’re from Rwanda.”
“Oh, that’s that terrible place where they started killing each other, isn’t it, a few years ago? What are the tribes’ names again?”
“Yes, the Hutus and Tutsis. The Hutus killed one million Tutsis by hacking them to death in just 100 days. Did you know that the weapons were supplied by the government of France?” This last bit had slipped out of me.
“Well, no. Are you sure? I mean, why would France do such a thing?”
“Why wouldn’t they? There is a lot of money to be made in giving people a chance to kill each other.”
“When did you become so cynical?” My mother’s body looked strangely overgrown sitting at my narrow kitchen table. She was keeping her arms and hands away from the table sitting perfectly straight. It reminded me of my childhood dolls, stiff and straight-legged, in their perfect lifeless postures.
“I’m not being cynical. I’m just telling you how it is.”
I thought about how I was beginning to sound like my college friend Joey and it brought on a feeling of uneasiness. Calling something out required sticking my neck out and I’d spent my whole life learning how to blend in, how to live my life unnoticed. Somehow, I knew in that moment of clarity that I had—not with much conscious thought, however—planned out my entire life as one long rehearsal of absolute homogeneity. My genetics had always betrayed me; simply walking into a room sometimes became a political statement, rocking the sometimes pastoral, quiet atmosphere of a room filled with whites; when suddenly I was the Indian girl, filling the quotas, spotting the social landscape of a world otherwise uniform in color. I was sick of being colorful. I had never asked for the difference that marked me. I just wanted to confound myself in the voice of the masses; I wanted my narrow, angular “bird face” (as my mother liked to say) and the color of my skin to suddenly smooth into the paleness of pink champagne. I wanted my looks to round out into the palette of my father’s Irish ancestry, into the aristocratic lines of my mother’s family. Why had I been placed with them if I could never, no matter how hard I tried be just like them? How cruel.
And then there was Joey. Joey and I were twins of opposition. Joey pushed his way through life, sticking his neck out in every place nameable and taboo. Joey was loud, brash; he cut his way through silence brutally, and he enjoyed watching people squirm. I remembered meeting Joey in college, in a political science class. He had just started to take testosterone and transition from being a girl to becoming male. Like everything else in Joey’s life, being trans was not something he ever tried to hide.
“Hi, my name is Joey I used to be called Michele when I lived in a body without a dick,” he announced to our Poly Sci class on the first day of class. A friendship with Joey was not for the faint of heart. Knowing about Joey’s gender of origin had left little impact on me. I hadn’t changed the way I had perceived him. Joey was a guy and that was that.
Joey was the voice that never stopped. He raged his way through the semester, slamming his ideas into our classroom, pounding his way into the professor’s own limitations. He finished the semester with a C minus.
“Bullshit patriarchal reminder of white male domination and the mediocrity that ensues when trying to come against it. In other words, the asshole is trying to put me back in my place. Yes massa’, yes massa’.” I’d never really heard anyone use the word “patriarchy” on a regular basis. Joey had a stable of words he pulled out of his militant hat. They were his tattoos, his scars, his birthmarks of choice. There was something about Joey that I envied. It was the same thing that made me recoil and sometimes frightened me. This passionate, almost suicidal nature that pushed Joey to the edge of everything he encountered. Joey was, by definition, a fearless creature, actually, a fearless man. There was nothing creature-like about him except his marginal nature and the way he liked to drag people to the edge with him. Some came kicking and screaming only to marvel at the depth of the precipice, the void to which he had brought them. Others—like me—came quietly, almost catatonically, like moths drawn to light. The disorientation that came with such a compliant response to Joey’s rants could lead to one thing and one thing only: absolute metamorphosis or complete destruction. What if the moth mutated and suddenly became light? What if it no longer craved the single ray of light that always led it to its own death? This was the solution.
In our Poly Sci days, Joey wore his hair in a mass of brown curls that framed his pretty face. Joey was the androgyne at its best. His body was angular, muscular, and lean, without any trace of the femaleness of his birth. He worked as a bicycle messenger delivering packages to the biggest corporations in the city. He liked to sneak what he called propaganda leaflets into his customer’s deliveries and slip back into oblivion “with the rest of the proletariat,” as he liked to call himself. Joey had a face full of freckles sprinkled on his amber skin, offset by two jet black eyes. Being white, black, and Lakota, Joey referred to himself as multiracial. Joey had always been proud of being able to name his exact Native American ancestry.
My father came into the kitchen interrupting the flow of my memories. He paced around, examining every corner absentmindedly. He looked like a disinterested tourist in a bad museum.
“Where shall we go for dinner?” He asked, finally stopping by the kitchen counter.
“Oh, Rowan, she’s not well enough to go to dinner. We’re going to order something to be delivered here.” The thought of my being ill was something I could not tolerate and yet I knew that if we went out, we risked running into school colleagues. After all, I was on sick leave and couldn’t exactly be seen gallivanting around town.
“What’s a good place where we could order food? Do you have a Chinese place, or Mexican restaurant in the area? I can’t bear to do pizza. Too much grease.”
We ordered Chinese food from the place on the corner. I tried not to look at my mother who held her breath in between syllables, as if she were holding back a piece of herself.
We were pushing back the inevitable. Keeping the distance between us at bay. If we could lose ourselves in the everyday details of life, in the mundane connecting us to each other by a thread, then I wouldn’t have to listen to what she had to say.
Growing up, I remember my father like a shadow in our lives. He came home from work and listened to NPR news. He read the paper and worked in his office for hours, even on the weekends. My parents rarely argued, but when they did, it was always my mother who yelled and cried. And when it was over, my father looked as he always did: impassive and still. I came to fear my father. When I was a baby, my mother later told me that I sought my father’s attention. But unable to find warmth, I began to drift away from him. An absent and silent man is all I know and remember of my father. I don’t remember the years when I sought him out. I don’t remember wanting anything from him. Or maybe the wanting is so large and omnipresent that I don’t see it anymore. I came to fear him like one fears stillness in a place of great noise. My childhood was still and quiet in his presence. I showed him my grades and talked to him about my classes. Not about school per se or anything outside of the realm of academics. I didn’t tell him about my friends or my fights with people. I didn’t tell him about people calling me names in school or why my shirt was torn. I just learned that the grades and my successful performance in school were all that he was interested in. Maybe I learned to excel because I knew that it was the only thing that could link me to my father. I remember bringing a C home one day. My father stared at the grade and said nothing. He returned to reading his paper and didn’t scold or lecture me on mediocrity the way I’d heard other parents do. He just retreated into his silence again. That was the last time I ever got a low grade. When I brought him As and Bs, he would smile and praise me. He would see me. He even took me for ice cream at Dairy Queen behind my mother’s back because she said soft ice cream was unclean. When I was in second grade, he bought me an enormous dictionary. These moments of sharing excellence is what I remember best about my fat
her. The rest of the time, my father retreated back into his silence.
My father taught business to MBA students. I grew up watching him work in his office. He’d have countless piles of papers and well-labeled files. I knew early on, that I would never go into business. My mother was also a teacher. She was the one who connected me to the world, with emotions. She was a thread that pulled me back into something vaster than my father’s silence. Growing up with these two distinct people, I was always pulled between the two worlds: the realm of feelings and the realm of silence. I think of myself as a sociable hermit. I am perfectly well versed in the social rules and the ways to smile and carry on civil conversations. But at the same time, the sound of the phone sends me into a panic. I could remain for days without seeing anyone for long stretches of time. In the end, both worlds completely terrified me. People could not be contained, even if that is all they tried to do with me, to push through the vast erasure of myself, an infinite landscape of barrenness that always called for something external in the end. This was an endless loop; a sociable hermit like myself always would need to go back to the world of people only to find that silence is the only soothing element that makes relationships bearable.
One String Guitar Page 3
