Floating away

I often feel like I have wasted my life. That is probably the understatement of the year. It is probably linked to my doting mother reminding me of it every time she can. I guess it is the only thing that brings her any kind of joy, nowadays.

Well, she will die soon enough, I dare say, finally leaving me and my boring little life behind. I cannot wait. In the meantime, I find solace in blaming her, for she has doomed me from the start. What kind of woman would name her daughter with a French name when she has never set foot further south than Greenwich, and never intended to? I mean, Geneviève is already a most ridiculous name for any French person, in my opinion, so why name someone who is not destined to speak any kind of foreign language with such a preposterous name? “It sounds good” she says, “it was all the rage at the time”she says. Right. How would she know? She cannot even pronounce the thing properly. I cannot even pronounce it properly. My own bloody name. How silly is that?

I think my mother believed that if she gave me what she thought was a posh name, I would naturally be graceful and sophisticated, and so would she have been, by extension. Well, that was a failure, and, as I was to be reminded continuously, a very big one. Such a big one in fact that her, who always had motherly instinct, and wanted to have at least five children ended up giving up on the idea altogether. Which had nothing to do with the fact that no person in their right mind would be able to stand being next to her for more than five minutes.

Anyway, my point is: if I had been named differently, I would have had a more fulfilling life.

At school, I used to tell my little friends to call me Mary-Ann. Of course, they never did. They preferred to call me “Fat whale” “You, the ugly cow” and of course, my personal favourite, nothing at all. I liked my invisibility. Well, it would be more accurate to say I like my invisibility, since, you know, few things have changed since then. Of course time passes, days turn into weeks and months and years and decades and before you know it, here I am, 39, single, friendless. Not even a cat.

Then again I hate the damn things – why would anyone want to get any of these so-called “pets” is beyond my imagination. Dogs are loud, dirty, follow you everywhere, but at least they do give you some affection (if their constant “me-me-me-me-me-look-at-me-love-me-love-me-love-me” can be called this way). But cats! They just sit there, looking pretty, and won't come to see you unless they need something. I rather get dolls, really, and so I do.

I have an ever-expendable collection of 586 porcelain dolls. They all have a name (but none of that silly French name nonsense, thank you for asking), and they all sit in my room, watching quietly. I have some very fine ones that I bought through catalogues, and online, but my favourite one is the one that my grandmother Lucy gave me for my 7^th birthday. I named it after her. She has the brightest blue eyes, the loveliest little mouth, long, curly, silky blond hair and the prettiest flower dress you can imagine. If you were to close your eyes and imagine a perfect flower dress, full of lace, and ribbons, with a petticoat underneath, the image you would see would not be half as pretty as my Miss Lucy's dress. That's how pretty that dress is.

When I was ten, I asked my mother to make me the same dress. She laughed. That was her only answer. “What would you do with such a dress?” she said “Wear it to go to school? Don't be ridiculous Geneviève, please.” And that was that. I never had a pretty flower dress. I could have bought it for myself when I was older, but I knew others would point at me in the street and laughed the way Mother did. So I tried to forget my dream of lace and ribbons, and focused on admiring Miss Lucy.

Often I imagined that I was the porcelain doll, the inanimate object and she was me, it would have made everyone happy, to have such a pretty little girl – my mother, my teachers, the other kids. She would have been smarter than me (one would point out that it is not very difficult, which would probably be true enough), funnier than me, her who was already so much prettier. She would never have made a mess, and she would never answer back. The perfect daughter and friend she would have been, Miss Lucy, for she would have been for the others just as she is for me.

But the world is unfair: Mother didn't give birth to a porcelain doll.