We stared at each other for a while. Then she came over to me and sat at the table. She touched my hand, sending a bolt of terror and warmth up my arm.
When Anouk sent me to summer camps and people didn’t know anything about my life, I pretended I had a father who lived with us. Over a bowl of hot chocolate, as we all dipped bread into the liquid until the crust fell apart, I invented a different life for my new friends. My father was a professor who left papers scattered in the apartment. He was a businessman who traveled the world. He was on unemployment, a lazy man who couldn’t even provide for his family.
Don’t you want to grow old together? I asked.
She shook her head. There you go again with your fairy-tale life. No one is ever happy in private.
You’re wrong, I said. Look at you. You always seem happy.
That is your interpretation. Her eyes sparkled and she let go of my hand.
3
I last saw Father a week after my birthday. That day I had woken up before Anouk and stood in the doorway of her bedroom, watching her sleep. Her body faced away from me, covered in a white sheet. I knew the shape of her beautiful legs beneath the sheet, the delicate slope of her calves, although from where I stood, they rose like a fat vein on an arm, a formless tube. She rarely slept later than I did, but she had gone to bed past midnight the night before. I called out her name and she rolled toward the sound of my voice. She opened her eyes. She didn’t seem to register who I was, and for a moment her face was blank.
She smiled at me. You are so grown up, she said. I noticed she had forgotten to remove her eye shadow before going to sleep, a green powder that made her eyelids seem porous.
At your age I was in boarding school, she reminded me. She made herself mustard and mayonnaise sandwiches and waited for her mother to write her letters, but they never came, and so instead she ate and gained weight. She ate her friend’s portion of spaghetti because all the other girls were guarding their figures. They were nourished by the letters they received from their parents during mealtimes.
Her brother, who was two years older and had been her confidant throughout her childhood, had graduated the year before and was studying to be a doctor in Lyon. He was too busy to come home during her breaks and so she often returned to an empty house.
The summer before her last year at school, she had swallowed all the pills she could find in her mother’s cabinet.
I made myself vomit right away, she told me, and then I fell asleep in broad daylight on the floor of my bedroom. When I woke up the next morning, life had gone on as it always had. My mother never found out. We had been growing apart for a while, but her negligence in that moment struck me especially hard. How couldn’t she see my cry for help? Didn’t she find it strange that I’d slept for twenty hours without interruption? Instead we ate toast and drank coffee like any proper family.
This was the first I’d heard of the pills. I studied Anouk’s face for a clue.
Did you really want to kill yourself? I asked.
I thought I did.
Her answer surprised me. She took such good care of herself and seemed to relish her life. I tried to imagine her at my age, less joyful, not in control. It was hard to picture.
I should have gone to therapy, Anouk said, but instead I became an actor.
I felt a tender pain in my gut. My instinct was to shut out her voice. Was she telling me this to excuse the kind of mother she was to me? And what kind of lesson did she want to teach me?
Why was she like that with you? I asked.
My mother? Anouk paused and rubbed her temples. Let’s see, maybe because she was self-involved, didn’t care, or wasn’t happy in her marriage.
I understood the subtext: You are more fortunate than I was.
Anouk pulled the pillow from behind her head and leaned it against the wall. Her hair curled around her neck. It shone a copper red, while mine was brown and flat. I saw her age in the purple veins running over her arms and the creases around her eyes and mouth. Her skin was looser but also softer than mine. My skin was tight and shiny across my face as the fan spat hot air onto us.
I’m going downstairs, I announced. I closed the door behind me and climbed down the stairs.
The previous night, a few of Anouk’s friends had stayed over. They were asleep on our two couches. I dreaded cleaning up after them. They dampened our towels and ate our food. Sometimes they hid cigarette stubs behind the cushions on the couch. I had seen them refill a bottle of vodka with water, as if we couldn’t tell when it froze overnight. Don’t be a snob, Anouk always said. Many of them worked on a seasonal schedule and weren’t lucky like us. Théo and Mathilde were different. They were like family; they cooked and helped us put away our things, and they preferred to sleep at home, even if it meant taking a taxi late into the night.
The morning light pushed through the closed blinds of the living room, striping it with yellow ribbons. I made my way to the kitchen and stood by the sink, the window slightly ajar, a cool breeze sweeping across my face. I waited for everyone to wake up and leave. Father would be here in an hour.
Our apartment was empty by the time he arrived. Anouk was upstairs on the phone with her brother, a cardiologist who now lived in Strasbourg with his wife, while I waited in the kitchen. I heard his keys jingle in the lock and the sound of his footsteps in the entrance. He had arrived at last, and I was light-headed with anticipation. I pictured him taking off his shoes and placing his briefcase on a chair. I waited for him to walk through the entrance hallway and find me.
The moment I saw him, a wave of euphoria surged inside me and spread along my skin. I touched my neck, cooling the red splotches with my fingers. He came over to me with a smile. I stayed seated at the table as he kissed me on both cheeks. I pretended indifference, as though we did this every morning, but it was hard to hide the excitement I felt each time I saw him. As soon as he entered the apartment, I had to stop whatever I was doing. I became distracted by the sounds of him untying his shoelaces and putting away his coat or jacket and could no longer focus on the task at hand.
There was Father: stout around the chest but not particularly fat. He had a large nose with cavernous nostrils and a skin tinged gray from years of smoking, although he had stopped long before I was born. His nostrils were hairless despite being so impressively big. He was of average height, barely taller than Anouk. His teeth were square and evenly shaped, and his eyes a pale hazel bordering on yellow, just like mine. Mathilde once described him as classically attractive, a man who hadn’t gone unnoticed by other women at the time of meeting Anouk in his thirties. I thought it was less a matter of looks and more about the way he presented himself, with precision and care. The opposite of slovenly. He wore an ironed cotton shirt tucked into dark blue trousers. I admired that he was always elegantly dressed and clean-shaven—even on weekends, in case he had to run into the office.