Annie Ernaux - A Frozen Woman

ANNIE ERNAUX

TRANSLATED BY LINDA COVERDALE

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

NEW YORK

Copyright 1981 by ditions Gallimard
Translation 1995 by Seven Stories Press

First trade paperback edition 1996.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ernaux, Annie, 1940
[Femme gelee. English.
A frozen woman / by Annie Ernaux; translated by Linda Coverdale.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-888363-38-8 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-60980-220-2 (e-book)
Ernaux, Annie, 1940Biography.
Authors, French20th centuryBiography.
Coverdale, Linda II. Title.
PQ2665.R67F4713 1996
843.914dc20 96-31400 CIP

A FROZEN WOMAN

F ragile and vaporish women, spirits with gentle hands, good fairies of the home who silently create beauty and order, mute, submissive women search as I may, I cannot find many of them in the landscape of my childhood. Not even in the next-best model, less elegant, more frumpy, the ones who work miracles with leftovers, scrub the sink until you can see your face in it, and take up their posts outside the school gates fifteen minutes before the last bell rings, all their housework done. Perfectly organized unto death. The women in my life all had loud voices, untidy bodies that were too fat or too flat, sandpapery fingers, faces without a trace of make-up or else slathered in it, with big blotches of color on the cheeks and lips. Their cooking skills did not go much beyond stewed rabbit and rice pudding, they had no idea dust was supposed to be removed on a daily basis, they worked or had worked on farms, in factories, in small businesses open all day long. There were the old ladies we visited on Sunday afternoons, with their boudoirs and the bottle of eau-de-vie to sweeten their coffee, wizened women all in black whose skirts smelled of butter going rancid in the pantry. No connection with those sugary grandmas in story books who wear their snow-white hair in a neat bun and coo over their grandchildren while they read them fairy tales. My old ladies, my granny and my great-aunts, they werent nearly that chummy and didnt like it when you jumped all over themtheyd lost the habit. A peck on the cheek was all, at the beginning and end of the visit, so after the inevitable Youve gone and grown some more! and Still studying hard in school? they really had nothing more to say to me, too busy talking with my parents in patois about the high cost of living, the rent, the lack of living space, the neighbors; theyd look over at me every once in a while, laughing. On Sundays in the summertime, we visited Aunt Caroline, biking along bumpy roads that turned into quagmires at the slightest shower, bound for the back of beyondtwo or three farms and their pastures lying out on a plain. Caroline was never home, so after a perfunctory knock on the door, wed check with the neighbors and eventually find her tying up bunches of onions or helping out with a calving. Shed come home, poke at the fire in her wood stove, break up some kindling, and fix us a light meal of soft-boiled eggs, bread and butter, and parsnip wine. A real wonder, that woman. Youre still bursting with health, Caroline! Arent you bored, out here? She thought that was funny. What do you mean, shed protest, theres always things needing doing. Ever get scared, you know, all alone? That really surprised her, put a twinkle in her eye. What could anyone get up to with me, at my age... I didnt listen much, and slipping past the blind wall of the house, edged with nettles taller than I was, Id go off to the pond to pick through the broken plates and tin cans my auntie dumped down there, all rusty and full of water teeming with bugs. Caroline would walk a little way along with us when we left, a good kilometer or so in nice weather. Then our bikes would leave her behind, a tiny dot in the fields of colza. I knew that this eighty-year-old woman, swathed in blouses and skirts even in the worst of the dog days, needed neither pity nor protection. No more than did Aunt Elise, swimming in her own lard but full of bounce, and a lousy housekeeper: when I crawled around under her bed my dress picked up dust pom-poms, and Id inspect the dried crud on my spoon for a moment before daring to plunge it through the wrinkled skin of my poached pear. Whats the matter with you, youre not eating? shed ask, and her puzzlement would explode into a huge guffaw. That itty-bitty pear isnt going to plug up your fanny-hole! Then there was my grandmother, who lived in a crummy prefab between the railway and the lumber yard in the neighborhood called la Gaiet. Whenever we arrived, she would be gathering greens for the rabbits or doing some mending or washing, which irritated my mother. Why cant you take it easy, at your age? Reproaches like that exasperated my grandmother, who only a few years earlier had been hauling herself up to the railroad tracks by gripping clumps of grass, so that she could sell apples and cider to the American soldiers after the Normandy invasion. Shed grumble a bit, then bring in the pot of boiling hot coffee threaded with white foam and pour a drop of eau-de-vie on the sugar stuck to the bottom of the cups; everyone would swirl the brandy gently around. Theyd talk, nattering on about the neighbors, a landlord who wouldnt make repairs, and Id be a touch bored, as there was nothing to explore in that little house without a proper yard, and almost nothing to eat. My grandmother would slurp greedily at the dregs in her cup. Her high cheekbones were as shiny as the yellow boxwood egg she used to darn socks. Sometimes, when she thought she was alone out in her scrap of a garden, she peed standing up, spreading her legs beneath her long black skirt. And yet, she had come in first in the canton on the exam for the primary school certificate, so she could have been a teacher, but my great-grandmother had said not on your life, shes my eldest girl and I need her at home to raise the other five. A story told a hundred times, why her life hadnt come up roses. Once shed been like me, running around, going to school, with no idea what was coming, and then disaster struck: with five youngsters to hold her back, she was finished. What I didnt understand was why she later had six of her own, without any dependents allowances, either. You didnt need a map to figure out early on that kidschicks, everyone I knew used to call themput you truly in the hole, just buried you alive. And at the same time it seemed irresponsible, careless, the sort of thing youd expect from poor people who had no common sense. Those large families I saw all around me meant swarms of runny-nosed brats, women pushing baby carriages and staggering along with bags of groceries, and constant griping at the end of every month. Granny had fallen into the trap but you couldnt blame her, back then it was normal to have six, ten children; weve come a long way since. My aunts and uncles were so fed up with big families that my cousins are all only children. Im an only child, too, and an afterthought as wellthats what they call children born late in life, when a couple who hadnt wanted any (or any more) change their minds. I was their one and only, period. I was convinced I was really lucky.