Claire’s mother, Clemence, had never left the snow behind.
It floodlit her beaming smile and sparkled in her skin, which was paler-smoother-younger than any of the other mothers’. And that was about right, considering the fairy-tale childhood she’d spent in her moon-lit Alpine snow globe while her Australian counterparts lay sizzling like char-grilled sausages under their perforated Ozone layer.
Clémence was beautiful, that much was inarguable. She had a magical, pan-European arctic fox aura about her, a kind of French elegance that made otherwise-responsible, fully-adult, married men stumble and stutter. Act like idiots basically. Claire felt herself an arid imitation of her mother’s iridescent charm, so terrestrial in comparison. Uneven tan lines. Salty hair. No boobs yet (hopefully ‘yet’). Reluctantly androgynous. No idea of the right thing to say, most of the time.
The accent was part of Clémence’s charm. Claire knew that, but she couldn’t understand how people could accept it, enjoy it even. It was so fiercely embarrassing to her, in fact, that she avoided any contact between Clémence and her school life – friends, teachers, God forbid crushes – at all costs.
“No mum, the parent-teacher interviews were cancelled. Ignore that letter. Burn it. On that note, actually, did you hear the school burnt down? Yep, I know mum, it’s a shock. Climate change and all that…”
Despite her best efforts, Claire wasn’t always successful. Her attempts to keep her gorgeous and humiliating immigrant mother distinct from her social life was like trying to separate oil from water with her bare hands. It was messy. And doomed. Like one morning, when she saw Clémence standing at the classroom door, Care Bear lunchbox in hand, and Claire felt the staggering weight of all her tightly-clenched efforts collapse in on her at once. She must have forgotten her lunch at home and Clémence must have driven the 15-minute journey to school just so that Claire wouldn’t go hungry. Out of love, probably. No!, thought Claire. But yes. There stood her mother, wiggling the lunchbox, stage-whispering – “mon ange, you forgot your déjeuner!”
And sure enough, for weeks after the incident, the boys followed Claire around, wiggling their hips grotesquely and calling out to her in caricatured accents – “Oh baby, froggy-dear, you forgot your snaaails.” And the popular girls giggled behind their sticky palms, or rolled their Disney princess eyes and did nothing to stop it.
It wasn’t just the accent that infuriated Claire; it was the mistakes. The blunders, the gaffes and especially the muddled-up, near-misses like: ‘as good as cold’ or ‘I cracked up laughing’. To Claire’s utmost horror, she unwittingly adopted some of these errors into her own vocabulary, until the inevitable moment that some moron at school would interrupt her mid-sentence to say “wait a second…what did you just say?”
And Claire would freeze, horrified, and slowly, knowingly, painfully (because she had no choice and because everyone was watching by this point and because she found, to her dismay, that she didn’t actually know the correct phrase), she would repeat: “let the cat out of the…cage?”
And all the boys would crack up laughing (oh no). “Who keeps their cat in a cage, psycho?” – “Do you even speak English?” – “Na na na baguette.”
And Claire’s entire body would burn with shame. Forget the Ozone layer, she’d stab it to shreds herself if she could just “be like the other kids” and Hell, didn’t those climate scientists know that school was its own bitter brand of fiery death? Her eyes stung red on the regular and her heart clobbered at her ribs like horse hooves on French cobblestones as she bit back hot tears of shame. Shame shame shame. She would cart that shame home, like heavy homework, like lies to her mother, bundled tightly in her fists, lathered all over her perpetually sunburnt cheeks, stuffed in her cavernous Care Bear lunchbox. And when Clémence would greet her at the door with her big, beaming, Vogue-worthy smile and afternoon goûter, Claire would have already spent all her strength lugging that weight home that she could no longer restrain herself, and she would yell abruptly and inexplicably (inexplicably to Clémence at least): “I AM NOT A BAGUETTE, YOU ARE!”
***
Long before this, long before Claire was old enough to have learnt the language of shame, she had already taught herself to read English, clever and thirsty for stories as she was. She would lie on her bed, surround herself with children’s books, stretch out like a snow angel, and swear to her mother that she wouldn’t fall asleep until she’d read every single one. D’accord, mon amour. Bonne idée. So Clémence would fold her delicate body around her little daughter and stroke her hair as Claire’s sweet baby breaths inevitably began to lengthen, only three books in. Most of the time, she would ask Claire to read out loud, because Clémence had a big, dirty secret: she couldn’t read English.
She was fluent in shame, though, ne vous inquiétez pas. Don’t you worry. She spoke it like a native speaker and knew every letter of its wild, worldly alphabet as if each one were a hieroglyph carved into her skin long ago. Only she knew by whom.
She never found the courage to ask her daughter for help.
***
As Claire grew older, she became, against all odds, a writer and a poet. She loved the way the English language could quiver and flow, could curl itself around experience, how playful it could be and how a single sentence could occupy her for hours.
Her shame grew older too. Not bigger necessarily, but more mature. She wished that Clémence could connect with her the way her friends’ Australian parents could with their own children – effortlessly, joyfully. She wished Clémence would show an interest in her favourite books, or recommend her own. She dreamt of a mother who could help her with her homework, have nuanced conversations about life and even eventually, read her own writing and relate to it the way other people seemed to. Instead, Clémence read Claire’s stories and laughed at the wrong bits, made sympathetic noises when she actually should have laughed, and when she finished, she would always say, regardless of the quality of the piece: ‘this is beautiful, mon amour, just like you, just like always.’
***
There was a cultural crevasse in this family, there was no denying it. They loved each other, though they didn’t know how. What lay between them was more than a language barrier; their births were separated by several seas, and by all the dusty plains of the planet. They were separated by headlands, coastlines, state-lines, phone lines and fault-lines, time, tectonic plates, weather aberrations, whole families of sea creatures, the invisible strokes of cyberspace whizzing over oceans through hot air and birdsong. Between Claire’s sunburnt homeland and where and when Clémence was born lay an entire generation and a culture; lay the gains of second-wave feminism, educational opportunities for women, and the decomposing remains of Clémence’s alcoholic father – another big, dirty secret, who died early, but not nearly early enough. Claire’s own father was in that space somewhere too, maybe, but who knew?
So, the whole world separated them just as much as Clémence’s grammatical faux-pas. Only, Claire had never left home and didn’t understand how big the world was yet (hopefully ‘yet’). And all of this distance translated into misinterpretation and resentment.
Clémence was a mystery to her daughter, who, in turn, was an enigma to her. This little sea monster who ran wild in the sand and the sun, who had never seen snow, and who refused to learn French “on principle”. This child she would have died for (indeed this child she nearly died for), who spoke a language of hard Rs and drawling nasal As, who rolled her eyes with impatience and didn’t understand her jokes. Those spiky side-eye glares of incomprehension and irritation were wounds to Clémence. In those moments, she felt that Claire was an extension of her, a beautiful southern sub-species, or an exact manifestation of what Clémence might have been in another, easier life. A thought-experiment. A woman who might have made different choices. Simultaneously, she felt as if Claire was someone else’s child or, her child but adopted by a foreign country. Stolen by the sea that she had crossed to escape. Poached by her own flightless migration all those years ago. So, in a way, it was her own fault.
Wasn’t it?
***
Life has a funny way of circling back. It turns us into the things we scorn, or maybe we were always those things and that’s why we scorned them. It’s complicated, Claire resolves, as she sips her café au lait and contemplates the sandstone square around her. The church bell tolls. Pigeons take flight.
Claire left Australia at twenty-eight. A “quarter-life crisis”, she called it at the time, though now she thinks she was just burnt out. Coincidentally, twenty-eight was the same age Clémence was when she left the French Alps.
And where did Claire end up? It would be too convenient, too coincidental, wouldn’t it, to say Annecy? That small Alpine town in south-eastern France? Thank God, that wasn’t exactly where Clémence grew up, or Claire might have felt like she was living in one of her own stories. She pauses, and wonders if Clémence would laugh at that last line or make a sympathetic noise. She’s less and less sure of herself these days, about what is or isn’t an appropriate reaction to things.
Like when the waitress asks her if she would like anything else, and Claire orders une croissant (a feminine croissant!?), and the waitress looks at her like she just murdered a puppy with her fork. Claire has an excellent accent in French, thanks to Clémence, and that is where the trouble lies. She sounds like a French woman, who makes mistakes that even French babies wouldn’t make. In other words, she sounds like an absolute idiot. All the time.
And that, she decides, is a good thing. It’s humbling. Just like navigating an entirely new culture is humbling. Basic life administration is confusing and complex and energy-sapping, and the feeling of being far from home never really goes away. Claire is a child again. She misses her mother. And she senses the way people look at her, like this waitress with the croissant, as if she were ludicrous and stupid.
It reminds her of this: Clémence on the beach, younger, eating an ice-cream and telling her thoughtfully that the hardest thing about being an immigrant was that, as long as you kept your accent (which was forever, probably), people would mistake it for idiocy. And that sometimes, that barely disguised assumption in the eyes and tones of others was so persistent and so honestly-held, so genuinely pitying, that she began to believe it herself.
Claire winces, hands tightening around her coffee cup, not because of the waitress’s look; she doesn’t really care what she thinks. She winces because she recognises herself in that patronising glare. She recognises the way she used to look at Clémence, and she feels something surge in her chest, something between guilt and regret.
Claire sighs and sets her cup down. Life can be heavy.
But she also feels love. Powerful, overwhelming, cosmic love that stretches across the globe and reaches through time, and through all that other stuff, for her mother’s hand. She has never been so far from Clémence, and they have never been so close. She understands her finally, and the barriers between them have collapsed through awakening and ironically, through the (re-)crossing of geographical borders. Like migratory birds returning home in the spring, this story is a love letter; one that requires a balancing act – a double-traverse of borders to un-knit the past. They are in equilibrium now. Little idiots in, it turns out, a very big world.
And these little idiots write to each other every week. In French, of course, to catch up the years lost to imbalance. Claire is the stupid one, finally, and happy to be. She discovers worlds in Clémence that she had dismissed years ago. There are so many beautiful things about this woman, who Claire now realises she had never really met before, though she had loved her her whole life, through the shame and through everything else. She sees the beauty and the bravery in her struggle. She discovers that Clémence too, is a writer. After 30 years in Australia, she still speaks English as if she just arrived. But her French is magnificent, and she’s a force to be reckoned with.
All the way on the other side of the world, Clémence sets the letter down and smiles to herself. The sound of lorikeets squawking accompanies the searing, salty evening breeze, which she has, after all these years, finally learnt to enjoy.
This is beautiful, she thinks, just like her. Just like always.
