I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This Read Online Free Page B

evening, she told me that there was no one else she could talk to this way. Not my father. Not her friends. By that point, she could reference any moment in her life with barely a hand gesture. I sometimes felt I knew her past so intimately that I could read her thoughts.
    â€œBut with you,” she said, “you’re so close. Like when you were a baby. I don’t . . . I can’t worry about how you’ll see me. You’re a part of me.”
    For her, the stories dissolved us into one. I was the infant she’d never put down, whose cries she heard before my mouth had opened. But for me, the stories gave me the distance I needed to see her whole. “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” she’d said, and now I was old enough. It would take a long time before I would understand the sadness in her eyes when I’d firstasked.

chapter two
    W hen she was a child, my mother was a boy. Her father brought her to his barbershop, where they cut her hair as short as his. Her mother dressed her all in blue, polo shirts and shorts. Most of the time, Françoise didn’t mind. She was lithe and athletic. She scaled fences, jumped off jungle gyms.
    My mother’s older sister, Sylvie, was fourteen months old when Françoise was born, still nursing and barely walking. Josée had believed she couldn’t get pregnant while her breasts were still full of milk. She hadn’t wanted a second child so soon after the first. Unaware that she was pregnant, she’d gone on vacation, riding camels across the Egyptian desert. But she’d been stubborn, my mother, even then. She took root and held on.
    A second daughter. Her father left the Paris hospital moments after her birth, his face such a mask of grief that nurses came to check that the child was still alive. He disappeared for a few days to a casino on the edge of Paris and came back just in time to legally declare the birth.
    He insisted on naming her Françoise, his grandmother’s name, common and down-to-earth, not Catherine, as Josée had wanted and expected. This child was his. The lines were drawn early.
    â€œYou were the ugliest baby,” Josée liked to tell Françoise aroundthe time of her birthdays. “Your nose was squashed flat against your face and your head was long and oval, like a suppository.” But she’d grown into a beautiful child, one that strangers stopped to exclaim over in her stroller. She had her father’s dark curls, her father’s intelligent, combative gaze. “Brown eyes just like Paul’s,” Josée told me once, although my mother’s eyes were a piercing gray-green. I supposed she meant that my mother’s eyes weren’t blue like hers.
    Andrée had followed six years after Françoise’s birth. Another man’s child, Paul claimed. The product of a conjugal rape, insisted Josée. An attempt to save their failing marriage, I was once told. The final
e
was appended in the maternity ward, when it was discovered that this child had also refused to be a boy. Andrée’s birth was often used to mark time in family stories. It coincided roughly with the beginning of Paul’s major professional and financial success, with the moment when he and Josée were able to purchase the floor below their own for his medical practice. Before, they had been relatively happy. After, there was far too much money.
    For the most part, the older girls learned to be invisible. On the many nights when their parents held dinner parties in the dining room, the children ate in the kitchen, handed out peanuts and olives in their pajamas (blue for Françoise, red for Sylvie), then went obediently to their room. In the bed they shared, Françoise whispered gruesome stories about martyrs. She had decided that she would grow up to be Joan of Arc. She couldn’t see herself becoming a woman like her mother, with perfectly done nails. She would dress