By the time Hans and Margret Rey went to the bicycle shop, the only one left was a bicycle built for two. It was June 11, 1940, in Paris. The radio was announcing that the city would not be defended from the approaching Nazi army. The couple didn’t have a car; none of the trains were running; two million Parisians had already fled. Hans and Margret tried out the tandem bike but realized that they couldn’t manage. They instead bought spare bicycle parts, which cost them as much as they had been paying for a month’s lodging at a nice hotel—the manic inflation of exodus. Hans somehow built two bicycles that night. The couple left the next morning porting some food, a little clothing, and the drawings for a children’s book about a perilously curious monkey.
Two hours later we found our mother in the room, the curtains drawn. She was lying on a bed low to the ground, the mattress thin as if for camping, a mat on each side in case she rolled out. She couldn’t roll anywhere. She could barely move. She could barely breathe. Her eyes were closed, and every few minutes we heard the throaty rattle that everyone says is true. A vein on her neck pulsed frantically. Her head was turned to one side, her mouth wide open and forming an O, as if desperate for oxygen. Her hands—the brittle bones, the purple-black skin—gripped the sheets. Her legs were raised, almost as though she had been sitting in a chair and then become frozen before they put her back on the bed.
My brother checked her feet.
“They’re cold,” he said.
A carer came in and propped her up with pillows. Were they trying to make her presentable for viewing? Mum began saying, “Yellow blue, yellow blue, yellow blue.” An hour later, she started saying, “Nothing, nothing, nothing…” An hour after that, she opened her eyes, looked at my brother and me, and said in her authoritative voice (it had sometimes scared us as children), “This is ridiculous.”
Ultimately, “Patsy” is a deeply queer, sensitive and vividly written novel about a woman’s right to want and a child’s right to carve her own path; it is also, as Patsy expresses late in the book, about this hard-won nugget of truth: “Never let anyone define you. Always know that you matter. Your thoughts, feelings, and your desires matter. Your happiness matters.”
More my shadow than my shadow,
it is mute, as it must be.
I walk it along the world’s wide road,
chanting its reticence; what I think it might say
if it could, or wished to.