Read Online I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nadja Spiegelman
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deodorant (which she considered too American), although I did not ask very often. I chewed the candy methodically, late into the night, reading young adult novels about ordinary girls who could freeze time, until my teeth ached and wrappers spilled out from beneath my mattress.
I gained fifteen pounds in a year. I had always been in the ninety-fifth percentile for my height and weight, but now my pediatrician worriedly charted my weight up into the ninety-sixth, ninety-seventh, ninety-eighth. I dreaded stepping on scales. It seemed to me that magic was involved here, too, that the right thoughts and shapeless prayers before a weighing might bring the needle back down. But it always rose, and that too felt controlledby magic, a punishment for some far broader badness than eating. I suppose itâs clear with hindsight that I ate to bury my curves, to slow this precipitous womanhood, to become invisible. But back then nothing was clear. My weight gain felt to me as unstoppable as the blood that began to flow, as the hairs that began to appear. Even while I ate compulsively, I dreamed at night of unzipping my body and stepping out of it, svelte and smooth and flawless.
It seemed to me that in those years my mother only became more and more beautiful. My heart swelled with pride on the rare occasions when she came to school. Short skirts and black turtlenecks, tailored red skirt suits with padded shouldersâeverything hung perfectly on her frame. And yet despite her long thin legs and her high cheekbones, she never embarrassed me with her beauty. She wasnât the kind of mother the boys in my class might whisper about. She was the kind the other girls envied. Men stammered around my mother, but they knew she owed them nothing. She carried herself with elegance, intelligence, self-possession. Adults treated me with new respect after they had met her.
Our bodies were different in every way possible, her broad shoulders and my broad hips. She went braless in the summertime and I wore thick one-piece bathing suits (not because I was deemed too young to wear a bikini but because, as my mother said, how could I want to?). She was photographed for spreads in
Vogue
and interviewed for a book titled
French Women Donât Get Fat.
I was asked to model for
Teen People
only to find out they wanted me to model the âcurvyâ body type in âReal Jeans for Real Bodies.â
I felt that my mother was ashamed of my weight. Throughout high school, it seemed to me that my body was the main battleground between us.
One of those summers in the South of France, my mother and Idrove into town to buy baguettes for dinner. They were still warm from the oven as I held them in the passenger seat, and I ripped off the end of one and took a bite. My mother told me not to ruin my appetite, but I took a second bite. She grabbed the baguette from my hands and beat me with it as hard as she could while still driving.
My body didnât look like my motherâs, and it was clear even then that it never would. But still I believed that she, not I, was what a woman was meant to be. It seemed to me that either I would become like her, spare and androgynous, or never truly become a woman at all.
One weekend around that time, we were in the cabin in Connecticut. My brother was out front playing in the weeds that grew wild there, and my mother and I were sitting in the wood-paneled living room, with its cathedral ceiling and the smell of mice in the yellowing foam cushions. She was sitting by the fireplace on the dusty wooden floor, working a puzzle my brother and I had abandoned. I watched her back as I gathered my courage. I was going to tell her. My mother was a woman of solutions. For any problem, large or small, concrete or existential, she provided step-by-step advice with the efficiency of a doctor scrawling a prescription.
âMaman
,
â I said at last, my voice shaking, and she turned. I felt that it pained her to look at
I gained fifteen pounds in a year. I had always been in the ninety-fifth percentile for my height and weight, but now my pediatrician worriedly charted my weight up into the ninety-sixth, ninety-seventh, ninety-eighth. I dreaded stepping on scales. It seemed to me that magic was involved here, too, that the right thoughts and shapeless prayers before a weighing might bring the needle back down. But it always rose, and that too felt controlledby magic, a punishment for some far broader badness than eating. I suppose itâs clear with hindsight that I ate to bury my curves, to slow this precipitous womanhood, to become invisible. But back then nothing was clear. My weight gain felt to me as unstoppable as the blood that began to flow, as the hairs that began to appear. Even while I ate compulsively, I dreamed at night of unzipping my body and stepping out of it, svelte and smooth and flawless.
It seemed to me that in those years my mother only became more and more beautiful. My heart swelled with pride on the rare occasions when she came to school. Short skirts and black turtlenecks, tailored red skirt suits with padded shouldersâeverything hung perfectly on her frame. And yet despite her long thin legs and her high cheekbones, she never embarrassed me with her beauty. She wasnât the kind of mother the boys in my class might whisper about. She was the kind the other girls envied. Men stammered around my mother, but they knew she owed them nothing. She carried herself with elegance, intelligence, self-possession. Adults treated me with new respect after they had met her.
Our bodies were different in every way possible, her broad shoulders and my broad hips. She went braless in the summertime and I wore thick one-piece bathing suits (not because I was deemed too young to wear a bikini but because, as my mother said, how could I want to?). She was photographed for spreads in
Vogue
and interviewed for a book titled
French Women Donât Get Fat.
I was asked to model for
Teen People
only to find out they wanted me to model the âcurvyâ body type in âReal Jeans for Real Bodies.â
I felt that my mother was ashamed of my weight. Throughout high school, it seemed to me that my body was the main battleground between us.
One of those summers in the South of France, my mother and Idrove into town to buy baguettes for dinner. They were still warm from the oven as I held them in the passenger seat, and I ripped off the end of one and took a bite. My mother told me not to ruin my appetite, but I took a second bite. She grabbed the baguette from my hands and beat me with it as hard as she could while still driving.
My body didnât look like my motherâs, and it was clear even then that it never would. But still I believed that she, not I, was what a woman was meant to be. It seemed to me that either I would become like her, spare and androgynous, or never truly become a woman at all.
One weekend around that time, we were in the cabin in Connecticut. My brother was out front playing in the weeds that grew wild there, and my mother and I were sitting in the wood-paneled living room, with its cathedral ceiling and the smell of mice in the yellowing foam cushions. She was sitting by the fireplace on the dusty wooden floor, working a puzzle my brother and I had abandoned. I watched her back as I gathered my courage. I was going to tell her. My mother was a woman of solutions. For any problem, large or small, concrete or existential, she provided step-by-step advice with the efficiency of a doctor scrawling a prescription.
âMaman
,
â I said at last, my voice shaking, and she turned. I felt that it pained her to look at
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