How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  study of symbolized/institutionalized relationships between individuals within more or less complex contexts, for which the groups studied by the first ethnology give us paradigmatic examples, or, to speak as Durkheim and Levi-Strauss after him, elementary. (Augé)

  Role reassignment

  [The family’s father has been dead eighty-six days]

  At a party the whole family is attending (a town event) (all minus my middle sister), my youngest brother tries to initiate a conversation with a young girl whom he’s probably interested in on a sexual level. I spot him from the other side of the room. Our eyes meet, and before I can think about it, I give him the thumbs-up, which is not something I can remember ever doing before. As I do it, I wonder about the reasons behind this unprecedented gesture. I can’t decide whether I adopted a fatherly posture toward my youngest brother (encouragement of his attempt at establishing contact with the other sex) because our father’s passing has made it my role to take certain of his duties upon myself, or if that was only me acting as an older brother. The rupture caused by our father’s death has made salient certain things we had taken for granted so far; it revealed our previous routines and “ordinary” (cf. Chauvier’s definition of the term) at the very same time that it made it an obsolete frame of reference. My posture within the family group has to be redefined.

  TV night

  [Same day]

  Our predictions regarding the plot have become a less systematic exercise. I sense hesitation on my siblings’ part now when the time comes to share their guesses relative to

  I didn’t turn the page. As I sat at Jeremie’s computer, I tried to think about ways in which Leonard’s “posture” had changed since the father had died. He hadn’t become a more caring older brother, I didn’t think. He hadn’t started doing the dishes on weekends, like the father used to. He hadn’t found God or a steady girlfriend. The only new thing he’d done was that he’d turned our family from a model of academic achievement into the subject of his own academic achievement. I guess, knowing him, it was the best he could have done with a family tragedy.

  I logged in to my dating website account. There was a message from Daniel, apologizing for his performance at dinner with us a few weeks before, asking if we would consider coming to his house so he could treat us all to his specialty, duck in a raspberry-vinegar sauce. The date and time on top of the message indicated that Daniel had sent this a few minutes after having gotten back home from the condescension fest my family had held at his expense. I deleted the account. A window popped up to tell me Rare Pearl was sorry to see me go, and that they hoped this only meant I had found that special someone.

  I wasn’t comfortable using the Internet when my mother had expressly forbidden it, so I wanted to make it quick (she would be back from work soon) and efficient. I meant to fix all the mistakes I’d made. I took a minute to look up strokes, see if it was possible I’d made Daphné’s happen or if she’d had it coming anyway. All three websites I checked seemed to agree that she’d had it coming, and maybe my presence at the very moment it had happened had been a good thing in the end. I hoped Daphné saw it like that. Browsing medical websites took a weight off my shoulders. As did getting rid of Daniel. The Internet was going to help me free myself of all responsibilities. Contrary to Leonard, who needed to see sociological problems behind everything, including the death of the father—as if it weren’t in itself problematic enough—I wanted to simplify my thoughts. And my thoughts had been clouded by the idea that I might have caused Daphné’s stroke and Denise’s heartbreak. There wasn’t much to do about Denise, though. I didn’t know how to make someone fall in love with her for real, and I certainly couldn’t fall in love with her myself, but I thought I could try to take her mind off school and the Porfis of the world for a minute. I went on Juliette Corso’s website and clicked on the “Contact” tab. Juliette said she loved hearing from her fans and gave an address at which one could write to her. There was also a gallery of pictures from which one could choose a photo that Juliette would sign for a mere five euros plus shipping fees. I took note of the address, picked a picture of Juliette I thought Denise would like, wrote the reference number down, and walked away from my brothers’ bedroom as my mother was coming home. I borrowed Simone’s calligraphy set from her top desk drawer (it had, on top of deep black China ink and all sorts of quills, these thick sheets of paper like tapestry that I thought were very refined, and a line guide to help you not write all crooked on them) and applied myself.

  Dear Juliette,

  I wrote,

  I am writing to you on behalf of a friend, who has been a big fan of yours since you appeared in the video for the Let Them Sea campaign when you were probably twelve to thirteen years old (we watched it in school at the time). The reason why I’m writing and she’s not is because she has depression and can’t find much interest in life, and when she does (she’s interested in you!), she can’t seem to get herself to do anything about it. So I was wondering if maybe you could send her (through me) an autographed picture (reference number 808578). I think this might help her see that life can be nice sometimes. I think it would make her happy, or at the very least less depressed. Her name is Denise Galet, but maybe if you just wrote “For Denise,” it would feel to her more personal and warm.

  My own name is Isidore. I wouldn’t mind an autographed picture as well, but your website says you only send one picture per fan mail, so maybe I’ll write my own letter later. What I am most interested in, actually, is knowing whether the Let Them Sea campaign video that you were in was candid footage, or if it was work for you as an actress. In other words: Had you seen the sea before the day you shot the video? Did you have a little brother who had never seen the sea either? If not, if it was all “fake,” can you tell me how you got the idea to look at your brother/actor the way you did in the video, instead of looking at the sea yourself like anyone would expect a girl who’d never seen it before would do (and like all other kids in the video did)? I thought it was very moving. You’re either a very good person or a very good actress. Maybe both!

  Thank you for your answer,

  Isidore Mazal

  I felt good about the letter when I was done, as good as I felt whenever I put some order into my bedroom. Or rather: my side of the bedroom. I felt as good as I did whenever I put some order into my side of the bedroom and before I looked at Simone’s. Simone’s was always in disarray. Her bed was unmade at all times. I don’t think she’d ever folded a piece of clothing in her life. I always hoped tidying my side of the room would inspire her to do the same with hers, and since it kept not happening, I’d once taken it upon myself to do it for her. I’d heard about it for weeks. “What the hell have you done?” she’d complained. “I can’t find anything anymore!” She’d said her apparent disorganization was how she kept things organized, that she’d mapped it all out in her head, and that I should never again mess with other people’s messes. I didn’t think I had messed with Denise’s mess by writing a letter to her childhood crush. But the more I grew up, the harder it became to tell the difference between what was mine to organize and what wasn’t any of my business at all.

  Berenice came to visit for my birthday in May. She got me a bilingual edition of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I knew right away I would never read and bequeathed back to her when I updated my will later that night. I also included Denise in the new version, extending my will to people outside the family for the very first time. Denise would get my backpack if I died. There was nothing special about my backpack. It was a black version of the same backpack almost everyone had at the time, but Denise had mentioned liking it once, and Denise never really mentioned liking anything. She’d said she liked that it was black and unaltered, when all the other kids picked weird colors or added stickers and pins to theirs to express their uniqueness. She’d missed school for two weeks already. When I’d called her house again, after mailing my letter to Juliette’s fan club, Denise’s mother had told
me she might not come back at all the rest of the school year. They’d had to commit her to a clinic so she would gain a little weight, she’d told me. The teachers had stopped marking her as absent on their attendance-control sheets.

  Berenice was supposed to only stay for my birthday weekend, but Monday came and went and she didn’t head back to Paris. My mother asked if she didn’t have a job to get back to. Berenice didn’t say exactly what had happened with her contract, her school, just that she couldn’t work there anymore. I assumed that meant her superiors had confirmed her suspension and cut away all forms of income, but she presented her situation as an affair that had everything and nothing to do with her at the same time.

  “I might be too charismatic to teach,” is what she said.

  “Are those your superiors’ words?” my mother asked. “Did students complain about your charisma?”

  Berenice dismissed questions about her charisma by saying she was tired of explaining, as if she’d had many other people to explain her problem to over the previous days. If she had, we’d never heard of them.

  At night, she often went out with Aurore, and they would come home tiptoeing and whisper-laughing in the wee hours of the morning and fall asleep in Aurore’s bed. Aurore had defended her PhD almost six months before, but she didn’t seem to be looking for a teaching job. I think Berenice was trying to convince her to get a second PhD instead.

  In the afternoons, Berenice monopolized the house computer to look for an apartment in Chicago, where she wanted to move as soon as possible to familiarize herself with American English (hers was British English; I didn’t know what the difference was) and American culture before school would start. She also looked forward to taking advantage of the University of Chicago Library, which she assumed would be deserted in the summer. I was secretly hoping she would never find an apartment and never move away from our house again. She had this mix of older-sibling sweetness and authority (I don’t know if that’s what she called her charisma) that made us all want to be on our best behavior around her. Everyone seemed less sad when she was home.

  Denise missed about a month and a half of school and came back mid-June, a week before the end of the school year. She was fatter than I’d ever seen her, which was still not fat at all, but I knew it was too much for her and didn’t comment on it. She had cheeks now, not just cheekbones, and I tried not to stare at them.

  “You look good,” I said, slightly worried she might find it insulting, but she thanked me. She sat on her usual step, but then got up right away and said it was nice enough out to go feed the birds. I didn’t expect she would want to expose herself to all the kids on the playground on her first day back at school, but I thought maybe this meant she was cured and I followed her outside. We sat on the bench under the poplar, where everybody could see us, though some, like Porfi, pretended they didn’t. Denise took a chocolate-covered candy bar out of her backpack. It was the first time I’d ever seen her holding such a thing. She usually brought day-old bread when she wanted to feed the birds.

  “You’re going to make these pigeons very happy,” I said, looking at the chocolate bar.

  “Are you crazy?” Denise said. “Chocolate kills birds. Don’t you know that?”

  Then she handed me some stale bread to crumble, unwrapped her chocolate bar, and started sucking on it, as if that was the way people ate them.

  “I always wanted to try one of these,” she said.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s pretty good. Although I’m not sure it’s worth the amount of calories.” She looked at the nutrition facts on the wrapping paper and informed me that three of those bars contained enough calories to get you through the day.

  “You’re supposed to bite through it,” I said, “to get all the textures at once. Try it like that before you reach a final verdict.”

  Denise seemed hesitant, as if we were on a plane and I’d just asked her to do a parachute jump. She took the smallest possible bite. It wasn’t even a bite, really, more a careful dissection of the outer chocolate that exposed the layers inside of the bar, none of which had met with her teeth.

  “So?”

  She brought her hand to her mouth and made a sign like she would answer me once she’d finished chewing, except I didn’t understand how anyone could actually chew so tiny a bite of food as the one she’d taken. I saw Herr Coffin cross the playground, and Victor and Emilie run after him. I assume they asked him if he’d brought us a movie, and I assume Coffin said he hadn’t, because both Victor and Emilie looked disappointed and went their separate ways to bring news to their respective groups.

  “It is better that way,” Denise said.

  Coffin had gone weeks telling us he couldn’t find a version of Legends of the Fall dubbed in German and that if we kept complaining about how he wasn’t holding to his promise to show us a movie, he would cease looking for Legends of the Fall at once, or worse, bring us an actual German movie of his choosing. He didn’t say “or worse,” but people heard it anyway.

  “You know what else is good?” I told Denise. “Ice cream.”

  “I remember ice cream,” Denise said. “I think it’s overrated.”

  She resumed sucking on her chocolate bar instead of really eating it.

  “Have you talked to Porfi recently?” she asked. I said I hadn’t and couldn’t think of a reason to.

  “Well I doubt he’ll ever dare talk to me again,” she said, “but if he comes to you, will you please tell him I never gave a shit about him? I would like him to know that.”

  “Why don’t you tell him directly?”

  “I tried to just catch his eye this morning on the way to class, but he won’t even look in my direction. I think it would be more powerful coming from you anyway,” she said. “Boys never believe a girl when she says she never cared. He would think it’s pride or something.”

  “I would believe it,” I said.

  “You have many sisters. You don’t count.” She looked pretty certain I didn’t qualify as a boy in this particular instance. “Will you tell him?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

  The birds at our feet didn’t once look up to see where all the bread was coming from, as if crumbs falling from the sky wasn’t a mystery worth investigating. But maybe they already knew that bread crumbs always came from humans and weren’t too interested in figuring out in what specific ways I differed from the others. The monitor who had forbidden us to feed the birds before gave me a look from the other side of the playground but didn’t come our way. The principal had probably instructed him to let Denise do whatever she wanted, and the small privileges her mental illness brought her must have, in his mind, extended to me.

  When the bell rang, I told Denise I was glad she was back. I’d pondered telling her I had missed her but decided not to go that far, even though it was the truth.

  “I’m glad too,” she said, and then she dumped the rest of her chocolate bar, which was pretty much the whole of it, into the garbage can by the bench.

  About ten minutes later, as Herr Coffin was going over the subtleties of the word Geist, I thought about how I should have told Denise to hold on to the chocolate bar. The garbage can on the playground didn’t have a lid, and I feared the birds would dive in and have a taste of chocolate and die from it. I decided I would go down and retrieve the chocolate bar from the garbage can as soon as German class was over, but then I started to worry it might be too late. I was about to ask Coffin for permission to leave the room (at the risk of having everyone believe I had a small bladder) to sneak down to the playground and snatch the chocolate bar when we heard a thud, coming from the main hall. I didn’t think it was a particularly alarming sound, but Victor took it as an opportunity to interrupt Coffin’s class. “What was that?” he said, already up and ready to go out and check. Coffin said it was probably nothing and we ought to go on with the poem he’d brought us that day, but then we heard a woman scream and no one waited for Cof
fin’s authorization to rush out of the room. Miss Da Ming, Denise’s Chinese teacher, was holding on to the guardrail overlooking the school’s entrance hall four floors down. “Someone call an ambulance,” she said, but everyone wanted to see what an ambulance was needed for before they would do anything. “She just said she needed to go to the bathroom,” I heard Miss Da Ming whisper as I elbowed my way through the students gathered around the rail. Denise was lying facedown on the tile floor thirty feet below, her arms bent at angles they shouldn’t have been. For a whole minute, I think, I wondered how she’d managed to fall over the rail. It wasn’t even a rail, more a concrete wall the height of a rail. “Check out that dent on the lockers!” a kid said. “She must’ve bounced on it on her way down!” “Maybe it softened the fall?” a girl said. I didn’t understand how bouncing on the metal lockers could have softened anything. Denise wasn’t moving, but there was no blood around her or anything. I thought it was a good sign. After the paramedics took Denise to the hospital (she was still breathing), I went downstairs and took away the chocolate bar from the top of the garbage can. It didn’t look like the birds had touched it.

  After Denise jumped in the atrium (which is what the teachers started calling the entrance hall that day, as if a suicide attempt created the need to use fancier words, or else, perhaps, to rename everything), classes were canceled for the rest of the day. Berenice was reading on the couch when I came home, and I startled her, as if I’d walked in on her in the middle of a very private activity. Which I guess was how she thought of reading.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” she said.

  “No school today,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain that Denise had tried to kill herself after recess without having to have a whole conversation about it. I was still holding the barely eaten chocolate bar. It had melted a bit on the way home. Berenice folded her legs to make some room for me on the couch.