I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman Page B

OF 1970 , in Ussel, Sylvie began a small romance. Jean-Michel Guérin was a local boy. He was not particularly handsome. He was not very tall and his strong featuresfought for room on his face. But his unflappable self-confidence lent him an air of mystery. It was as if he knew he possessed a special destiny that no onlooker could divine. His parents deferred to him with a mixture of pride and fear. As often as possible, he broke free of them and hung out with the other local teenagers. They drank and danced and drove too fast down the curving country roads. Sylvie, during her year in Ussel with Mamie, had been accepted as an honorary member of their gang. Françoise was still regarded as a summer visitor, a haughty
parisienne.
She watched Sylvie come and go from afar.
    The romance began as an innocent flirtation in the August heat, barely sullied by kissing. Jean-Michel delivered grand compliments—
your eyes, the stars
—that sounded new and adult to sixteen-year-old ears. Sylvie, freed for brief moments from being the family’s ugly duckling, warmed to him with a radiant new beauty. It was a small, sweet romance, a romance that even in the present tense of that summer the two of them did not take entirely seriously. But the terrible calculus of the family was such that any love given was love elsewhere taken away. That small romance would have a heavy cost.
    That fall, back in Paris, letters began to arrive for Sylvie, instantly recognizable by the pictures Jean-Michel had doodled all over the envelopes. Josée snatched them from the mail and called to her eldest daughter. The two of them disappeared into Josée’s room, where they collapsed in girlish giggles over Jean-Michel’s amorous declarations, rendered in the highest literary French. It was jarring to Françoise, this sudden complicity, and she felt even more adrift. She had a boyfriend of her own that year, a sweet, dull young man she had met skiing. In fact, her quiet,intense self-sufficiency regularly drew admirers. But unless they had the courage to step right in front of her and ask her to dance, as this boy had, she rarely noticed them. Josée approved of this boyfriend, mildly—his mother was a famous journalist—but she did not take Françoise into her room to read his letters. In fact, she paid very little attention to what passed between him and Françoise at all, and it was only thanks to his mother’s early return home one afternoon that Françoise was still a virgin. Now Françoise listened to the laughter drifting from behind Josée’s closed bedroom door and her stomach twisted with a familiar jealousy.
    In October, Sylvie began campaigning to be sent to the girls’ boarding school in Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial town an hour from Ussel. Ussel had no adequate high school, and so many of its students were sent to Clermont-Ferrand to continue their education. The girls’ school was across the street from the boys’ school Jean-Michel attended. Françoise was surprised by Sylvie’s request. For Parisians, boarding school was a punishment reserved for those too unruly to keep at home.
    Paul immediately opposed the plan. He had spent his own boyhood in boarding schools and he hadn’t come this far only to send his daughter back there. Besides, the semester was already under way in Paris. But Josée was tickled by the idea of Sylvie continuing her
petite aventure
with Jean-Michel. She quickly set about convincing her husband to change his mind. She and Paul had a monthlong trip to Australia planned for that winter. It would be convenient if the girls were already situated elsewhere. Soon, Françoise, too, began to see the virtues of the scheme. Home was becoming intolerable, and she had no desire to be left there to bear the full brunt of her parents’ rages. She joined Sylvie’s cause.She pleaded with her father. Strings were pulled. The girls entered the