I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman Read Free Book Online
Authors: Nadja Spiegelman
their summer home. Françoise pored over the architectural plans, marveling at Josée’s ability to create glamour from ruins. It seemed to her an incredible magic trick. But then something happened. The plans for the
pressoir
were abandoned midstream. The building was resold. The family was no longer to summer there. Françoise suspected her father’s increasingly out-of-control gambling, but the reasons were not explained to the children, nor would it have occurred to the girls to demand answers.
    Now, Paul decided, the family would summer near Ussel. His parents had left him a farm four miles from his hometown, where his mother still lived, and Josée would renovate it. It was an appealing image—his beautiful wife and fancy cars, the luxurious vacation home they would create. What better measure of his own success than the envy of his former schoolmates?
    Les Bezièges, the home was called, and Josée, with far less enthusiasm, drew up a new set of plans. In Ussel the sun didn’t shine with the gold heat of the Mediterranean or the cool blue light of the north. It was gray, always gray, over the small and unbeautiful homes in the town. Josée drove in at the start of each summer, daylong drives of listening to the girls squabbling in the back of the hot car, while Paul stayed behind to work. The longest stretches of time Josée spent alone with all three children were likely those car trips that bookended each vacation, and years later she would complain about them often.
    The arrival of the Parisians raised the local eyebrows. Ussel was a tight-knit community, and the disdain was immediate and mutual. The renovations on the farmhouse proceeded. It had a double-height ceiling, a mezzanine, a grand formal living room. Josée had a patch of land by the barn flattened for a tennis court, the only true tennis court in the region. Jacques Chirac, not yet president but already on the National Assembly, came over to play doubles. But often the house echoed emptily unless friends from Paris made thelong drive. Josée would walk straight to the front of the line at the butcher’s shop and order thirty of the finest lamb chops for her visiting guests. When she had a stand of trees razed for their new driveway, the town gossiped that she was building a helipad.
    In mid-August, Paul drove down from Paris in his Porsche. He stayed only a few days, soaking in the praise that the butcher and baker bestowed on his lovely wife and his three healthy girls. Then he was off again. His patients awaited him in Paris, he told his family lightly, though there seemed little doubt that he was headed for yet another casino, yet another woman’s arms.
    Josée had created two bedrooms for her three daughters—a young lady’s room for Sylvie and a children’s room for Françoise and Andrée to share. Françoise did not mind sharing a room with Andrée. Her love had settled easily on her inexplicably cheerful little sister, who sang to herself each night even after Paul, unable to sleep, stormed into her room and broke her bed. When Andrée had walked her first stumbling steps into Françoise’s outstretched arms, Françoise nearly cried out with pride. It was only decades later, when she had children of her own, that she realized children learn to walk without ever being taught.
    Andrée, Josée had declared, was anorexic. It was true: she often refused to eat. Josée had insisted that someone (rarely herself) sit and coax Andrée bite by bite, late into the night, until a reasonable amount of food had been consumed. The popular parenting advice of the time held that to be potty trained, children must understand the relationship of food to their bowels. Baby Andrée was seated on a plastic potty at the dinner table and encouraged to eat and eliminate in tandem. Françoise suspected that this arrangement was the major cause of her refusal to eat, but still, she was

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