How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  By the time I made it to the train station, around two a.m., the place was deserted save for a few bums sleeping in corners and two travelers in shorts and hiking boots, each reading to the other from a different hard-sounding-language-to-French conversation guidebook. There was no train scheduled for any time before 4:55, so I just sat on a bench by the “Departures” board, where all the platforms started or ended, depending on how you looked at it, and I waited. I could see lines and lines of shiny black train tracks ahead but no trains anywhere. I wondered where they were spending the night.

  “What do you have there?” one of the bums shouted from the corner he occupied. He was eyeing my backpack.

  “Garbanzo beans,” I shouted back. “Bears of honey. Canned tuna. Underwear.” I was trying to remember everything I had packed and give the bum an exhaustive list. I think he was interested in the canned tuna because he started walking toward me after I said I had some. “Soap.” I kept going while he approached, lowering my voice as he got closer. “A flashlight. Orangina.”

  “Orangina?” the bum said, appalled.

  “That’s all we had,” I said apologetically.

  “Wait ’til your mother just refilled the pantry next time you decide to run away, kid,” the bum said, and he sat down next to me. He didn’t smell as bad as other homeless people I’d seen. He smelled like damp cardboard.

  “So you don’t have any kind of weapon in here,” he said after I was done with listing what I had. “If you’re going to be on your own, you’ll need a weapon,” he said. “You can’t just walk around like that, a little boy like you. There are some crazy motherfuckers out there. Fucked-up shit happens to cute little boys like you.”

  “I’m not cute,” I said, and I wasn’t fishing for compliments there, but trying to see if my being a little chubby might protect me from potential killers. The homeless guy took a closer look at me.

  “You’re cute enough for a psychopath,” he said.

  “Don’t they prefer little girls, though?” I said, hopeful.

  “They go for anything, kid. Anything that bleeds, all kinds of children, it doesn’t matter, animals, women—anything.”

  He started scratching a wart on the back of his hand.

  “You should put duct tape on that and leave it alone,” I said. “Just cover it with duct tape, a new piece of duct tape every day, until the wart disappears.”

  The homeless guy looked at me and repeated, “Duct tape!” and laughed, I don’t know if at me or at an old joke he might’ve heard before about duct tape.

  “It really works,” I said. “My brothers and sisters, they’re big swimmers. They all caught warts on their feet at the pool when they were kids, and my mother tried everything—nothing works better than duct tape.”

  “That is disgusting,” the homeless guy said. “Public pools are disgusting.”

  “Now we all wear flip-flops when we go,” I said, so he wouldn’t think I was disgusting too.

  “Flip-flops won’t help you any against fungus…the footbath thing they make you go through before you get in the pool? Ugh. I don’t know that flip-flops protect you any against all that footbath fungus.”

  “People say they do.”

  “People say strawberry is the best flavor of ice cream,” he said.

  I thought that was a clever answer. I thought he might know where the trains came from in the morning.

  “There’s a depot that way, by the stadium,” he told me. “I went there a few times, sneaked inside empty train cars for the night.”

  “Sounds cool,” I said.

  “I prefer being outdoors, actually. A train depot is not such a great place to wake up in. I keep it for when it’s real cold out.”

  I thought I was stupid for saying spending the night in a train depot sounded cool, but the homeless guy didn’t give me a hard time about it. He knew I had a lot to learn, I suppose.

  “Did you say good-bye to anyone before you left home?” he asked me, and I said I hadn’t, that it would’ve ruined the whole thing.

  “Ruin how?”

  “If I’d said good-bye to my sister Simone, say, she would’ve told my mother right away and my mother wouldn’t have let me leave,” I explained.

  “Well, sure,” the bum said. “You don’t say good-bye to a family member. But you have to say good-bye to someone. Someone who can tell the police it was your decision, you know? So your poor mother doesn’t freak out even worse and believe you’ve been abducted and killed when she finds out you’re gone. Don’t you have a little girlfriend or something?”

  I gave it some thought. I liked the Juliette girl from the Let Them Sea video, but we had never met. I guessed Sara Catalano was cute. I’d thought about her many times at night, before falling asleep. Maybe I was in love with her. She was too popular for me to have a conversation with at school, but I knew where she lived; I could probably go say good-bye to her. Thinking about what I would tell Sara, I realized I was relieved I’d forgotten to do something important before running away, something I would have to go home to fix, and that I would get to have a good night’s sleep in my bed before fixing it. The homeless guy seemed to be someone whose advice I should listen to. There might’ve been a flaw in his reasoning, though.

  “But if I say good-bye to someone,” I said, “and people worry less about me, then what happens if, on top of running away, I actually do get abducted? If I’m made prisoner? No one will come looking for me if they think I’m happy living my adventures somewhere.”

  “Well you can’t have your cake and eat it too, buddy,” the homeless guy told me.

  “I don’t see where the cake is, in that situation,” I said.

  “The cake is your freedom,” the homeless guy said. “Eating the cake would be to have people worry about you. You can’t have both.”

  He raised a sad arm and I thought he was going to point at something but the arm fell back on his thigh right away.

  “The rest,” he said, “not knowing what’s gonna happen to you, if you’ll get abducted or raped or killed and whatnot, or if people will leave you alone and you’ll get to be happy, well, that’s like not knowing whether the cake will be good or not.”

  He sounded like he knew a lot. I tried to remember if I’d ever disliked any kind of cake. I knew he’d been speaking of figurative cakes, of course, but I guess I was hungry. None of the foods I’d brought with me sounded appealing.

  “So, you’re going home?” the bum said after a minute. I’d been staring at emptiness, thinking about cakes, but the sound of the bum’s voice made me focus on the first thing ahead of us. It was an ad for a brand of ice cream, Carte D’Or, more particularly for the strawberry flavor. “Voted Best Flavor by YOU!” it said.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I guess you made it clear I was unprepared.”

  “Good,” the bum said. “Now go home, get a weapon, and say good-bye to someone.”

  “I will,” I said, and I got up and extended my hand to shake the bum’s.

  “You’re not gonna need your cans of food back home,” he said. I left him everything.

  Daphné Marlotte had always been the oldest person in town, but she became the oldest person in the country that spring. My mother congratulated her on her achievement when we bumped into her on our way to get groceries. It wasn’t unusual to bump into Daphné. She only lived a couple streets from us, and she went everywhere so slow you could see her once on your way to the store and then again on your way back, only a block or two from where you’d first seen her.

  Daphné didn’t scare me like she did other kids, who thought she was ugly and a witch. I knew she didn’t have superpowers or anything. She was just lasting a long time, and there was nothing more to it.

  “I read that article about you,” my mother told Daphné that day. “I didn’t know you’d been married five times, my goodness! Talk about live and learn!”

  Daphné laughed at this, but it looked painful and she shifted down to a smile.

&nb
sp; “I’ve always been a slow learner,” she said. “After the fifth one died, I thought to myself, You know what, Daphné? Maybe that’s not for you.” She paused to salivate. “Mostly, there aren’t that many eligible bachelors over a hundred years old now,” she said. “And I wouldn’t go for anything younger. I need someone who’s got the experience.”

  “The article listed some pretty old guys,” my mother said. “There seem to be quite a few in Brazil, actually.”

  “That sounds nice,” Daphné said. I knew she’d never left France.

  She looked pensive for a moment and I started actually picturing the things we’d talked about—century-old guys in Brazil—something I never really did unless there was a pause in the conversation.

  “Oh! Let me show you what I got!” Daphné said, interrupting her own reverie.

  Whenever we saw her, Daphné would show us what she’d bought at the market. “Let me show you what I got,” she’d say, like she’d found something extraordinary. She opened her caddy for us and we leaned over to see. “Carrots,” she said, “potatoes, parsnips.” Her fingers were all crooked at different angles, which is why people thought she was a witch, but it was really just arthritis. Sometimes I caught myself wanting to put rings around her fingers just for fun (the rings would have to follow all the sharp turns; it’d be like navigating a maze), but then I’d realize it was a weird thing to want to do. Daphné shifted things around to show us a piece of beef shoulder for her pot-au-feu. “I cook it for so long it just melts into your mouth,” she said. “It’s the last meat I can manage to eat, ’cause I can’t really chew anymore.”

  “Sounds good,” my mother said.

  “Even the pot-au-feu meat is too much, actually. I just let it sit in my mouth and press the juices out and spit it out.”

  “Sounds really good. I might go for pot-au-feu myself.”

  My mother often pretended that Daphné’s sharing of her caddy’s contents inspired her meal ideas, but she never bought the same things that Daphné had. She designed her meal schedule a week in advance.

  “And look,” Daphné said, all excited (she always saved the best for last). “These beautiful oranges…They gave them to me for free today! Because of the article in the newspaper!”

  She was really happy about the free oranges. I personally didn’t understand how people liked oranges, even less how they could talk about oranges like they were candy. She gave me one. It was amazing to me that she’d think I’d like it.

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. Marlotte,” I said. “I hear oranges have lots of good vitamins.”

  “But mostly, they’re delicious,” Daphné said.

  She was going to say more things about oranges but my mother congratulated her again on being the most senior citizen in the country (“Third in Europe!” Daphné said), and then we split. My mother’s enthusiasm about Daphné’s old age deflated the second we made our turn around the block. “Poor old Daphné,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “All alone in the world. These oranges are her last pleasure. She has to rely on a storekeeper’s kindness to decide a day has been good. Did you know her three sons moved back to town one after the other to take care of her and all of them died of old age before she did?”

  “That’s sad,” I said.

  “That’s horrible, is what it is. To raise all those kids and still end up alone.”

  “Well, you had six,” I said. “I’m sure one of us will survive to take care of you and Dad.”

  “What are you talking about? All of you will survive me and the father, and well beyond. Maybe even forever.”

  I didn’t worry about it too much, but it was still comforting when my mother said there was a chance we wouldn’t die.

  “As for taking care of me and the father, when we’re Daphné Marlotte-old and can’t chew our meat, or even follow a TV movie anymore, I can’t imagine your brothers and sisters stepping up to help. No offense to them but…they’re not really good at caring for anyone. Not too sensitive. The opposite of you, really.”

  I knew my mother thought that of me. That I was kind, and good at reading people’s emotions. What I didn’t understand was why she thought it was a good thing. “A gift,” she even said. To me, all it was was I had a good memory for things the rest of my family didn’t pay attention to or had trouble with—people’s names, their kids’ and grandkids’, the relationships and the diseases they’d had. I could always make small talk in place of my mother if she got trapped in a conversation with someone I knew she didn’t remember a thing about, or take the reins when she ran out of juice. I don’t think it meant I cared, though, remembering all these details about people. But maybe it did.

  My mother turned to me and pointed her cigarette at my face. I assumed she meant it to be an extension of her index finger.

  “Don’t go and repeat to your brothers and sisters what I just said,” she said, “about them being insensitive.”

  “Of course not,” I said, though I was pretty sure the news wouldn’t much upset them.

  The second time I tried running away, I’m not sure it counted. I did leave at a moment when I should’ve been home, but like the first time, no one noticed, and I didn’t meet anyone new. I got disheartened before I could.

  I decided to take the bum’s advice and pack better food, and a kitchen knife for self-defense, and to say good-bye to someone outside the family unit. And so on my way out of town forever, I knocked on Sara Catalano’s door. Her father answered.

  “Is Sara home?” I asked.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “We’re in school together,” I said. “Isidore.” I said I believed Sara had accidentally packed my math book at the end of our last class, which was a lie. We’d never sat side by side in class, even by accident.

  “You could’ve called to make sure,” her father said, but he still went in to get her.

  I assumed Sara didn’t know I liked her. We’d never spoken, so it was a reasonable bet. I hadn’t considered she might not know who I was.

  She came to the door and I rolled out the heartfelt speech about my feelings and my decision to leave, a speech I had spent three nights writing and two more memorizing. I sped things up toward the end, because I could tell I was losing her attention. When I got done, I had to announce I was done so she would turn her gaze back to me. I don’t want to believe that I thanked her for listening, but I’m pretty sure that I thanked her for listening. “Have a good one,” she said, and smiled, and shut the door on me.

  I went back home. That weekend, I tortured myself over how stupid I must have looked. Over what Sara would think of me on Monday when she realized I hadn’t run away like I’d said I would.

  She didn’t seem surprised to see me back in school the following week, though. In fact, nothing in our relationship changed.

  I was brushing the stain on our couch the way it showed less. I’d petted that small part of the suede so much over the years it had become the smoothest thing I knew—and I’d tickled babies’ armrolls before, and fishes had brushed past me in the Mediterranean. Leonard combed the stain the wrong way, just to mess with me.

  “What are you now? Goldfinger?” he said, and he sat right there on the spot, between me and Jeremie.

  “Yeah, stop fondling the couch, Dory,” Simone said. “It’s obscene.”

  Jeremie said to leave me alone, that maybe I had a compulsive disorder of some sort.

  I said nothing. In a few seconds, I’d been made ashamed of a thing I’d been doing as long as I could remember, a thing I thought no one really noticed and about which everyone, it turned out, had a joke to make, an idea, a diagnosis. Maybe they talked about it when I wasn’t around. I crossed my arms high on my chest.

  We were watching this one spy show where the spy lady keeps her feelings for the spy gentleman to herself, and the spy gentleman does the same, because they work together, and a romance between them would jeopardize the quality of their spying team, and they’re both very professional. As a
result of their professionalism, though, they’re lonely at night, in between missions. Many of the shows we watched, I’d noticed, made a big deal out of the professionalism issue, out of the wrongness of people who worked together having romantic involvements (the same thing as in the spy show went on in the cop show and in the political show, for instance—in the medical shows, however, the doctors could all sleep together and it didn’t affect their work). My mother explained to me that it was because the shows we watched were American that they talked about professionalism so much, that Americans had a different culture and that the work environment was more important to them than anything else.

  “I’ll light us a fire,” the spy lady said to the spy gentleman on TV (they’d gotten lost in a forest in Eastern Europe and night was about to fall).

  “Well, I’ll light a fire right in your pussy,” Leonard said, impersonating the spy gentleman as his face appeared in close-up and he tenderly admired the spy lady for her ability to light a fire with just two logs and a handful of twigs. We all laughed a little, not too long, because we didn’t like to miss actual dialogue.

  Dubbing shots of meaningful looks and—better yet—meaningful silences with obscene lines was one of my siblings’ favorite activities. I liked it, not only because the gap between a character’s composure and Leonard’s or Simone’s or Jeremie’s coarseness was funny, but also because I integrated the lines into the story, and it made all the characters seem more human. It was as if the spy gentleman, no matter how gentlemanly and well educated he presented himself as, could really be thinking this, I’ll light a fire right in your pussy, as the spy lady labored for their survival, and it looked like he felt ashamed about it, like he’d been exposed again, had failed to hide his true nature from us. My brothers’ and sisters’ dubbings were, to me, as much a part of the show as the explosions and the twists, and so were their comments on the set, or on a character’s clothes or features (“Do you think Ralph thinks about how pointy his ears are every morning?”). All in all, they were a nice crew to watch TV with, except for their habit of making prognoses about the plot.