When my daughters turned twelve I initiated them into the mysterious powers with which women of my family line have since time immemorial been endowed. Mysterious not so much in that they didn’t know those powers existed, that I’d kept them secret (I hid nothing from my daughters, since we were of the same sex), but rather in that, having grown up dimly and apathetically aware of the powers’ reality, they no more understood the need to care or to suddenly somehow master them than they had any interest in learning to cook the dishes I served, the products of a domain just as remote and unenticing. Nonetheless, they never thought of rebelling against that tedious instruction. Not once, some sunny afternoon, did they invent a pretext to get out of it. I liked to think that this docility in my undocile daughters, my unruly, impulsive twins, was born of a recognition that, in spite of everything, they had a sacred obligation to uphold. 

We met in a spot well away from their father’s eye, down in the basement. The neighbor children’s shouts and laughs that came to us from the nearby lawn and the sunlight that slanted through the window and fell onto the concrete where we sat seemed to be trying to distract Maud and Lise from a dutiful concentration the point of which they couldn’t quite fathom but which they refused to give up, their brows obstinately furrowed, their little faces, equally diligent and intent, raised toward mine with a confident patience⁠—certain and indifferent as they were, from earliest childhood on, that their turn to possess my powers would come. When a session ended, off they ran, identical and brown in their striped rugby shirts, after giving me two perfunctory, sweetly condescending kisses on my sweaty brow. I knew they’d never speak to their playmates of what I’d just taught them. My daughters considered the secret of their powers strictly private, as well as fundamentally uninteresting. “You know, the gift can be a useful thing to have,” I told them, in hopes of appealing to their taste for efficacy. But my own talent was slight, apparently just strong enough to keep the gift going, to pass it along; I couldn’t name one time when it had come in handy. I had to work hard to glimpse insignificant details that revealed nothing at all: the color of an outfit, the look of the sky, a steaming coffee cup in the hand of the person fixed by my clairvoyant gaze … What, then, was I supposed to convince my skeptical daughters of? 

“Promise me one thing,” I went on. “If you ever have daughters, do with them as I’ve done with you for the past year.” 

But they only laughed, shrugging their sharp little shoulders. I found them so fierce, so resolute, so solidly asexual in the grimy jeans hanging loose around their slim hips that once again I let the matter drop, embarrassed to have let myself slip into sentimentality before that gruff little pair.

Still, it bothered me to think that the powers might be passed on no further. Their grandmother had grudgingly taught me, even though she so hated her own far mightier power that she never made use of it. She wouldn’t discuss it, probably did her best not to believe in it, considered it just one more in a whole hodgepodge of superstitions handed down by her illiterate mother. But she taught me what I now know, in bits and pieces to be sure, and with a palpable distaste that made me squirm in my chair. Perhaps her lack of faith was responsible for my limited abilities. In my daughters’ case, I could see that they would never feel obliged to obey any law whose violation entailed no serious consequences, that they would soon forget that passing the gift on was a law at all. How could I blame them? 

On the day Monsieur Matin came to dinner, my daughters sighed in gladness that after eleven months, they’d finally come to the end of the lessons. They each gave me a hurried kiss on their way out of the basement, and it occurred to me that when their father kissed them upon coming home from work that evening, he might somehow realize that my lessons had borne fruit. He must surely have guessed what sort of exercise my daughters and I were regularly engaging in downstairs. Maybe he’d been hoping, absurdly, that Maud and Lise would prove so unreceptive to the discipline he knew the process entailed that I would soon give up on the idea. How would he react that evening? He wouldn’t say anything about it to me. He would maintain the discretion tinged with contempt that he’d always shown concerning my powers. But I feared he might suddenly feel the same irrepressible aversion to Maud and Lise as he felt for me, an aversion his overworked mind didn’t see but which I saw all too well.

It wasn’t the girls I was worried about, convinced as I was that no change in the nuances of his amorphous displays of affection would affect their focus on promises and hopes well beyond the little their parents had laboriously attained. No, that would never touch them, not, at least, coming from their minimally interesting, irascible, overstressed father. My fear, as I climbed the basement stairs, was simply that adding even a touch more repulsion and resentment to the overstuffed baggage of my husband’s feelings might turn the quietly disharmonious atmosphere of the house overtly oppressive. 

“Oh hello, Isabelle,” I said at the top of the steps.

The stairs opened straight into the kitchen, so Isabelle had seen me come in with the harried look that the exercise of my paltry gift inevitably left on my face. As always, she’d made herself perfectly at home in our house, though she was scarcely more than a neighbor. She’d brought along her four- or five-year-old son, who had a vaguely American first name. Looking out the window, I spied him in the yard with Maud and Lise.

“So what did you see?” Isabelle immediately asked. 

When we’d first come to this city, two years before, I’d made the mistake of telling her about my powers. Isabelle had seemed a person of some importance whom, I thought at the time, I had to win over. She reigned uncontested over our little subdivision, her authority based on no objective virtue⁠—for Isabelle was neither pretty nor intelligent, hardworking nor thoughtful⁠—but rather imposed as a historical fact duly imparted from neighbor to neighbor. It was from Isabelle that we learned what had to be known of this or that neighbor’s ways to keep from upsetting the general entente of the neighborhood. Proud, obtuse, and inquisitive, her hair bleached, she strode from house to house, one hand tugging along her son, never failing to berate him copiously if he stumbled or fell, if he whimpered with fatigue; if, in short, he got on her nerves in any way.