That was the last time I saw Jenny, and I don’t believe I’ll be seeing her again, since she’s dead. Her parents wrote to tell me they’d found her lifeless in the bed she slept in as a girl. Evidently she killed herself with an overdose of prescription drugs, but her parents didn’t say if it was a mistake or a deliberate act, and I myself have no idea. Am I overinterpreting certain turns of phrase, certain wordings, or is there really relief in the old couple’s tone, in their way of saying, for example, “So that’s that”? Granted, Jenny had done everything in her power to tyrannize them, after exhausting and defeating them with her many failures.
* * *
I stopped off to say hello to them, one day when I happened to be driving past their house, not sure why I was taking the trouble, why I should go to such lengths. No, the fact is I didn’t happen to be driving by their house, absolutely not. I had to make a sizable detour to get there. It was the middle of summer, and I’d never come there before at that time of year, so I nearly didn’t recognize the place, once so dreary, now heavy with ivy and honeysuckle. Ruddy and round in their light summer clothes, Jenny’s parents welcomed me almost jovially. They were drinking coffee on the flower-bedecked terrace, in the company of a tall brunette woman with dark green eyes. She was about the age Jenny would have been, around fifty-three, and wearing a short, straight dress with little green and white checks. The two old people were happy, even jolly, joking. I shouldn’t have come, I told myself, deflated by the prospect of having to meet someone new, and because the parents clearly had no need of my compassion.
“Well now,” the old woman said to me, “this is Ivan’s wife.”
And I ask:
“So Ivan’s remarried?”
She doesn’t answer. She pinches her upper lip between thumb and index finger and tugs it right and left, a gesture I remember as her way of expressing unease.
I never saw those two old people and that green-eyed woman again.
* * *
How strange it is, after you’ve spent some forty years alongside your own mother, after you’ve butted heads with her on all manner of questions but most often and most violently on the inertia, the grayness, the deadly smallness of her existence, which, no doubt wrongly, you thought darkened and depersonalized your own, how strange it is that this woman you can no longer bear to know so well should suddenly metamorphose on her own into a green woman, and one of that type’s most alien and troubling forms. In the year 2000, my mother was forty-five years old and living with my two twenty-year-old sisters in a grim, well-kept suburb that she never left, because she worked there as well, in the neighborhood school. And that’s all there was to her life in those days, a round little woman, virtuous, unfailingly solemn, trotting along toward her workplace each morning, never glancing left or right for fear she might glimpse something that looks vaguely or unmistakably like adventure or novelty, for fear she might glimpse a bit of the face of someone she knew, someone she couldn’t deny not knowing, who might tell her some troubling story, might reveal some intimate secret. She covered her hair with a dark gray shawl, which also enveloped her cheeks, her chin, her shoulders and chest. She had a proud, almost swaggering ugliness — such, then, was my mother at age forty-five, and such had she been for a very long time, ever since my father left her, her and my sisters, to take up with my childhood friend, ever since she’d resolved, so it seemed, to confront my father’s juvenile arrogance with a kind of saintliness, with an equally arrogant withdrawal from the world. I went to see them only rarely, and then I stopped altogether, convinced that my visits were disagreeable for all three of them, forcing them to play host — to make tea and ladyfingers, to chat, to make a fuss over some child of mine, facing the ever-present danger of a question they might find deeply upsetting, however harmless it might seem to me. Two years went by, then, without my seeing or hearing of them. Were my sisters in school, had they married? I had no idea, and little by little I forgot those two sisters of mine. I heard stories of one’s addiction to drugs, of the other’s alcoholism. Nevertheless, uncertain that these stories did indeed involve my two sisters, I paid them little mind. Besides, I said to myself, suppose it’s so? Is it my affair to keep watch over my sisters, look after them, show them affection? No, that is not my affair. Raised in an ambiance of confrontation, jealousy, and acrimony, we can’t wipe that vitriol from our memories and love each other, even now that we’re adults. We can meet and be cordial, but we certainly can’t love each other. And so two years went by, in distance and indifference. Inevitably, I thought, something must have come along and altered my sisters’ existence, for, although unnaturally faint-hearted, they were still young enough that any trivial decision about their future would bring with it a change, however miniscule, in their fanatical routine. That my mother’s life might have strayed from its course, on the other hand, I never once dreamed — because how can you even die, simply that, when you live a life of stone, unchanging and immobile?
In late 2002, pregnant with my fifth child, my thoughts full of the stories told to me by my new friend Katia Depetiteville, or the woman who takes herself for Katia Depetiteville, I receive a postcard from Marseille signed “Maman.” I first assume there’s been some sort of mistake, but the card is indeed addressed to me. Next to the stamp is another stamp, a mock stamp with a tiny photograph of a baby, and an arrow pointing to that baby with the scrawled words “Your new little sister.” This leaves me stunned to the point of terror. Without a word to anyone, I bury the card in our neighbor’s chicken pen, close by our house. But Christmas is coming, and remorse gnaws at me. If this is all real, I tell myself, my mother deserves an answer. But what if it isn’t? Is there no danger in behaving as though it were? One evening when the moon is round, I straddle the chicken pen’s fence and dig up the card, just long enough to note the address my mother has written down as her own, then bury it again, deeper. On the other side of the pen, the geese have spotted me, and now, frightened, they’re squawking in their horrible, broken, strident voices. I flee, not certain I haven’t been seen. Suppose they’d released the dogs, convinced there was a thief on the prowl?
I write my mother a dishonest, overjoyed letter, and, pretending to believe her, offer my delighted congratulations. She answers immediately with an invitation to come see her in Marseille. Not one word on my own children, on the health of this child or that — the one soon to be born she knows nothing about. I recognize my mother’s handwriting: the dots on the i’s are oversized circles, every sentence contains several startling mistakes, signature mistakes in a way, unique. She suggests, almost demands, that I come see them for Christmas, claiming she’ll be leaving immediately after to visit her husband’s family. Radically incompatible with my mother, that word husband leaves me distraught. The squat woman with the gray edge of a shawl always encircling her face, the woman with the hollow, yellow cheeks, with the thick glasses in black plastic frames, the desperate, inflexible woman who never spoke the name of any man after my father left, how can that deeply isolated woman now speak of a husband? And a child? I calculate her age: forty-seven. Possible, perhaps, but not at all plausible. And isn’t it unseemly to invite me down for Christmas, me alone, without a word concerning her grandchildren, as if she suddenly had none, or didn’t recognize them?