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 7th 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.
