A Woman's Story

by Annie Ernaux

When she put on lipstick, she always started with the heart-shaped bit in the middle.

I knew every detail of her body. I thought that I would grow up to become her.

I believe we were both in love with my mother.

With him I had fun, with her I had “conversations.”

She told me nothing about the facts of life and I would never have dreamed of asking her.

In those days, curiosity carried the seeds of vice.

Sometimes I imagined her death would have meant nothing to me.

For many years, my relationship with her consisted of a series of homecomings.

(perhaps it needed another generation for this to pass),

Because she feared people wouldn’t love her for what she was, she hoped they would love her for what she could give.

“From now on, I shall have to live my whole life in front of her.”

We had gone back to addressing each other in that particular tone of speech—a cross between exasperation and perpetual resentment—which led people to believe, wrongly, that we were always arguing. I would recognize that tone of conversation between a mother and her daughter anywhere in the world.

“Dear Paulette, I am still lost in my world of darkness.”

I started to cry because she was my mother, the same woman I had known in my childhood. Her chest was covered in tiny blue veins.

She slowly slipped into a world without seasons, warm, gentle, and sweet-smelling, where there was no notion of time, just the inevitable routine of eating and going to bed.

“I did everything I could to make my daughter happy and she wasn’t any happier for it.”

I see her more and more the way I imagine I saw her in my early childhood: as a large, white shadow floating above me.