Then there was the shame of living in a house that seemed to crumble a little more each day It’s not a house it’s a fucking dump.
In the end maybe what she was trying to say was I couldn’t be a lady if I tried.
* * *
She would tell me, with her voice getting louder and louder as she became more agitated (I’ll have the same problem when I leave and move to the city—my high school friends will always be asking me to lower my voice; I would find myself terribly envious of the calm, self-possessed voices of well-brought-up young men), she would tell me that all of a sudden she felt the need to go to the bathroom It felt like I was constipated, my stomach hurt like when I’m constipated. I ran to the toilet, and then I heard the noise, plop. When I looked, I saw the little kid, and then I really had no idea what to do, I was scared, so like an idiot, I tried to flush, I had no fucking idea what to do. The damn kid didn’t want to disappear so I took the toilet brush to try to get him to go down as I flushed again. Then I called the doctor, he told me to go straight to the hospital, that it might be serious, and he had a listen and it wasn’t anything serious.
She and my father kept trying to have another baby. It was a priority for my father He really wanted a kid, he’s a man, and you know, men and their pride, he wanted a family, he was always the favorite of his mom and his sibs, not his dad of course, because his dad was in jail, he wanted a kid, for sure, he wanted a little girl, but we had you, he wanted to name her Laurenne, it made me groan, no more girls, little miss whatever, and so we had you after we’d lost the other one. Your father took it hard losing the first kid, it took him a while to get over it. He couldn’t stop crying. But it wasn’t so bad, since I get pregnant pretty easily, I even got pregnant when I was using an IUD, and had twins (my little brother and sister), so there you go and, just between us, your dad is hung like a horse.
* * *
That wasn’t news to me.
I often saw my father naked, given how small our house was and the lack of doors between the rooms. All we had were sheets of plasterboard and curtains to separate the bedrooms, we couldn’t afford to install doors or real walls. Then there was my father’s lack of modesty. He would say that he liked being naked, and I held this against him. I found his body deeply repulsive I enjoy walking around naked, it’s my house and I do what I want. In this house I’m the dad, I’m the boss.
My Parents’ Bedroom
My parents’ bedroom was lit by the streetlights outside. The shutters, which showed the wear and tear of many years and of the rain and the cold of the North, let in a dim light in which only moving shadows could be seen. The room smelled of damp, like moldy bread. Thanks to the shafts of light, one could see the dust drifting in the air, floating there, as if moving in a time of its own, a time that flowed more slowly. I could sit still for hours and watch it. My mother and I were close when I was very young: in the way they say little boys can be close to their mothers—that is, until shame came to drive a wedge between us. Before that happened she used to tell anyone who would listen that I was truly my mother’s son, no doubt about it.
* * *
When night fell, an inexplicable fear would take hold of me. I didn’t want to sleep alone. In fact I wasn’t alone in my room, I shared it with my brother or with my sister. A room of about fifty square feet, with a cement floor and walls covered with big black circular stains from the damp that permeated the whole house, from the ponds that were near the village. The awkwardness felt by my mother (I say awkwardness so as not to say shame yet again, even if that’s what it was) when I would ask her why she and my father didn’t install carpeting You know, carpeting is a good idea, we’d like that, maybe we’ll do it. Which wasn’t true. My parents didn’t have the money to buy it, or even the desire to do so. The impossibility of doing it forestalled the possibility of even wanting to do it, which in turn made sure it never entered into the realm of possibilities. My mother was trapped in this circle that rendered her incapable of acting, either on herself or on the world around her We’d really like to install some carpeting in your room for you, but with your asthma attacks, it might not be a good idea, it’s dangerous for asthmatics.
I would hide the moldy patches on the wall with posters of pop singers or of TV heroines whose pictures I cut out of magazines. My older brother, who preferred, as tough guys of course would, rappers or techno, made fun of me Don’t you ever get tired of listening to all that girly shit. (I remember one day, when I was going to the bakery with him, he spent the whole time teaching me how a real boy should walk. I’m gonna show you how you’re supposed to walk, ’cause the way you do is just wrong, if my friends see us with you walking that way, they’re gonna make such fun of my sorry ass.)
The bedroom was taken up with a bunk bed and a piece of wooden furniture with the TV on it. It was so crowded that you bumped right into the bed as you walked in, with only a couple of inches for your feet: all the space was taken up with just the bed and the television. As my brother watched TV all night long, I always had a hard time falling asleep.
* * *
So not just because the television bothered me, but especially because I was afraid of sleeping alone, a few times a week I would get up and go stand in front of my parents’ room, one of the only rooms in the house to have a door. I wouldn’t go straight in, I’d wait by the door until they were finished.
More generally, I had picked up the habit (at least until I was ten It’s not normal, my mother would say, there’s something wrong with this kid) of following my mother all around the house. Whenever she went into the bathroom I would wait outside the door. I’d try to force the door open, kick the walls, scream, cry. When she used the toilet, I’d insist that she leave the door open so I could keep an eye on her, as if I were afraid she might just evaporate. She got into the habit of always leaving the door to the toilet open while she did her business, a habit that later I would find repulsive.
She didn’t give in immediately. My behavior annoyed my older brother, who called me Sprinkler because of my crying. He couldn’t stand the idea that a boy could cry so much.
If I insisted, my mother would always give way in the end. As for my father, he preferred yelling and being strict. It was as if they had divided up the roles that were both imposed by social forces larger than them and also consciously assumed. My mother: If you don’t stop your crying I’m gonna tell your father, and, when my father didn’t respond appropriately: Jacky at least act like a father for fuck’s sake.
* * *
Standing outside my parents’ room on those nights when, frozen with fear, I was unable to fall asleep, I would hear their breaths coming faster and faster through the door, their muffled cries, their gasps audible because the walls were so thin. (I would carve little phrases into the plasterboard with a Swiss Army knife, Ed’s Room, and even, absurdly—given there was no door—Knock on curtain before entering.) My mother’s moans, Oh yeah, that’s it, don’t stop, don’t stop.
* * *
I always waited until they finished before I went in. I knew that sooner or later my father would give a loud, deep groan. I knew that groan was a kind of signal that I could enter the bedroom. The bedsprings were no longer squeaking. The silence that followed was a part of the groan, and so I would wait a few more minutes, a few more seconds: I would hold back from opening the door. The smell of my father’s groan hung in the air of the bedroom. Still today when I notice that smell I can’t help thinking of these repeated scenes from my childhood.
* * *
I would always start by making excuses, claiming I was having an asthma attack You know that someone can die from an asthma attack, like what happened to Grandma, it’s not at all impossible, not unimaginable. (I didn’t say it exactly like that, but some days, as I write these lines, I’m too worn out to try to reconstruct the language that I spoke back then.)
M
y father would explode with anger and insult me. He didn’t believe a word of these stories about asthma and my grandmother, they were just pretexts, shit you made up, I was simply scared of the dark, like a little girl. He would start asking himself questions out loud. He would ask my mother if I was really a boy, Is he a fucking boy or what? He’s always crying, he’s scared of the dark, he can’t really be a boy. Why? Why the fuck is he like that? Why? I didn’t raise him like a girl, I raised him like the other boys. What the fuck? You could hear the despair in his voice. The truth—not that he knew it—was that I asked myself the same questions. I was obsessed with them. Why was I always crying? Why was I afraid of the dark? Since I was a little boy, why couldn’t I really act like one? And most of all: Why did I behave the way I did, with my strange airs, the huge gestures I would make with my hands as I spoke (big queeny gestures), feminine intonations, my high-pitched voice? I didn’t know where whatever it was that made me different had come from, and not knowing hurt.
* * *
(Throughout these years, when I was around ten, there was one idea I could never get out of my head: One night when I was watching TV—as I would often do all night long when my brothers and sisters were spending the night at friends’ houses—I saw a news story on a weight-loss clinic for the obese. The young obese people had a support team that held them to a drastic program: diet, exercise, and a regular sleep cycle. For a long time after having seen this, I would dream of a similar kind of place for someone like me. Haunted by the specter of those two boys, I imagined teachers who would beat me each time I let my body do something feminine. I dreamed of getting coaching for my voice, for my way of walking, the way I would meet people’s gazes. I searched and searched for such a program on the school computers.)
* * *
Words like affected or effeminate could always be heard in the mouths of adults around me: not just at school, and not only by the two boys. They were like razor blades that would cut me for hours, for days, when I heard them, words I picked up and repeated to myself. I told myself over and over that they were right. I wished I could change. But my body would never obey me, and so the insults would start up again. The adults around the village who called me affected or effeminate didn’t always mean it as an insult, didn’t always say it in an insulting tone. Sometimes they would just say these things out of surprise Why does he talk like a girl, why would he want to act like a girl when he’s a boy? Your son is a strange one, Brigitte (my mother), the way he’s behaving. Their surprise made my throat tighten and tied my stomach in knots. People would ask me the same kind of question Why do you talk that way? I’d still pretend not to understand, I wouldn’t speak—then came the desire to scream, but I couldn’t, the cry stuck like a kind of foreign body, burning in my throat.
The Lives of Girls, Mothers, and Grandmothers
Between the hallway at school, my parents, and the people in the village, I was trapped. My only reprieve was in the classroom. I liked school. Not the school itself, not school life: the two boys were there. But I liked the teachers. They never talked about pussies or dirty faggots. They explained that differences should be accepted, they voiced the discourse of the French educational system, that we were all equal. People were not to be judged by the color of their skin, their religion, or their sexual orientation. (That way of putting it, sexual orientation, would always make the group of boys at the back of the classroom snicker, we called them the boys at the back.)
My grades weren’t very good. The bedrooms at home had no lights and no desks, so schoolwork had to be done in the main room, where my father would be watching television or where my mother would be cleaning a fish at the same table and mumbling You shouldn’t be doing your homework at this time of day. In any case, I didn’t like doing homework, I never mastered what they call the basics because of my frequent absences, because of the language my family spoke at home, which was therefore my language, marked by frequent errors and the use of the Picardy dialect that we sometimes spoke better than standard French.
Still, I grew attached to my teachers, and I knew that to please them I had to get good grades, or at least show them I was trying despite my difficulties. There was something suspicious about the way I would obey them: being an obedient student at school was considered girlish.
But only in the early grades, after which the girls began to hate school too and to make trouble for the teachers. It was just a matter of time. Their elimination from the system simply took a bit longer.
* * *
When my sister was in school, at first she wanted to follow a training program to become a midwife, but then she let us know that she was going to become a Spanish teacher so I can make lots of money. For us, teachers seemed solidly middle-class and my father would get angry whenever the teachers’ union went on strike They make money hand over fist so what have they got to gripe about.
She was sent to one of those regular meetings with a guidance counselor and she explained that she wanted to become a Spanish teacher in a middle school But these days, young lady, careers in education are hard to come by, everyone wants to be a teacher so there are fewer and fewer spots, and the government allocates less and less money to education. You should pursue something where you have a better chance, something less risky, like a career in retail, and in any case, when I look at your transcript your grades aren’t stellar, I have to say, they are barely average, you’d be lucky to succeed at the baccalaureate exams.
* * *
She came home one night annoyed after one of these sessions, put out by the guidance counselor’s attempts to modify her plans I don’t know why he has to be such a ballbuster, that man, I just wanna be a Spanish teacher. My father Don’t let some nigger tell you what to do. (The guidance counselor was Martinican.)
* * *
My sister resisted for a while. The counselor called her in several times to talk to her. When she was in ninth grade she was supposed to do an internship somewhere and the counselor recommended the village bakery. A few weeks after the internship ended she explained to my mother (who was disappointed: We would’ve liked to see her get a better job) that she no longer wanted to be a teacher, but rather a salesclerk. She was sure of her choice, the guidance counselor had been right. An apprenticeship would guarantee her a paycheck, which she wanted so she could afford all the things she’d been deprived of throughout childhood because our parents had no money.
* * *
As I watched the schoolyard monitor, I would try to imagine what she might have wanted to become as a little girl, before she was a monitor.
I never spoke to her. I did everything I could to keep her from seeing the blows I took from the two boys. To keep her from knowing that some people might think, did think, that I was a girlish boy who deserved to be beaten up. I didn’t want her to find me in that hallway, curled up into a ball, my face begging for mercy—though, as I’ve said, I usually tried, without always succeeding, to keep smiling when they hit me Why the fuck are you smiling moron, you think this is funny? For then she might worry and ask me Why do they do this to you? And then I’d have to reply.
I have kept no memory of her name. It might have been Armelle or Virginie. All I remember are the nicknames people tagged her with Looney Tunes, Batty. She would talk to herself in the schoolyard or in the hallways as she kept watch. Mainly she talked about her grandmother, she talked and talked about her grandmother, obstinately, even when kids would say to her Stop talking, no one cares, she wouldn’t even think of punishing them.
Her grandmother’s story was the same as my grandmother’s, a common story for grandmothers in the village, where there wasn’t much room to be different.
* * *
Her grandmother suffered from the cold as winter approached and the days got shorter. She told her this the same way my grandmother told it to me: without really complaining, just making the observation
sadly when she mentioned the cold that crept into the house, and her painful toes frozen by the cold.
My grandmother, who told herself that owning a house, being a property owner, as the ad campaigns or the politicians would say, would give her a higher social status, a better life, slowly realized that nothing had changed since she bought the house, and that everything might even have become more complicated because of the mortgage she had taken out and now had to pay off.
She’s cold, but now she can’t afford the payments for deliveries of wood. The fellow whom my father called Buddy, who delivers wood to everyone in the family—he would drive through the streets with a small tractor loaded up with a few cords of wood—had stopped delivering to her ’Cause I have children, you understand, ma’am, I can’t keep delivering if you don’t pay, I have mouths to feed, I have a family. As for the monitor’s grandmother, she said that she used lots and lots of blankets to stay warm but it did no good, the cold got under the blankets, they were like blankets of ice, colder than the cold wind itself.
The End of Eddy Page 5
