How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  Denise had left instructions for her funeral, though, saying she would “prefer” it if the ceremony could be held in the afternoon, although she wasn’t sure that it was done. She’d written that all people wanted to do after a funeral was sleep, and that having to go to one in the morning just made for too long a day. Her mother booked the latest possible time slot, five p.m. I didn’t go.

  My mother thought the reason why I didn’t want to go was that I was angry at Denise, and she tried to get me to attend by explaining or having my siblings explain to me that I would regret it if I didn’t go say good-bye, that there was nothing in Denise’s decision that I should take personally, that she’d made a choice and that no matter how horrible it was, I should respect it etc. Except I wasn’t angry. I was just too tired.

  At four thirty, Simone tried one last time to get me out of bed. “We’re all here for you, Dory,” she said. “We’re all going.” I said I was glad to hear they were all going to the funeral because the only thing I really wanted was to be home alone. And also to be called Izzie, even though I was kind of starting to give up on that one.

  They all left and I stayed in bed, hoping to fall asleep until the next day, but at five p.m. sharp, the telephone rang and woke me. I let the answering machine pick up but couldn’t hear, from my bedroom, whether anyone was leaving a message. The phone rang again. I dragged myself to the closest handset, in my mother’s bedroom, my duvet on my shoulders hanging behind me like a train. As I picked up the phone, I wondered what had made me bring my duvet along, given my mother had blankets on her bed as well. I suspected myself of making a show of my sadness, except there wasn’t anyone around to see it.

  “Finally!” Berenice said at the other end of the line. “Where is everybody?”

  I said they were at a funeral.

  “Oh, right,” Berenice said. “Your friend. I am so sorry, Dory.”

  “How’s Chicago?” I asked.

  Berenice sneezed and I heard a man in the background say, “Bless you,” and Berenice’s voice stray away from the receiver to thank him.

  “Is that your roommate?” I said.

  “No, I’m not even home. It’s just some random guy in the student lounge. Our phone doesn’t work and I had to get a calling card and come down here to call. I’m not exactly sure how long I have.”

  “Do random people bless you like that in America?”

  “They do,” Berenice said. She made it sound like a terrible thing. “Listen,” she said. “I’m horribly sorry about your friend. I actually started writing you a letter yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, just to cheer you up, you know? Tell you that I think about you.”

  “Why wouldn’t you tell me over the phone?”

  “I’m not as good with direct speech,” she explained, and then she stayed silent for about thirty seconds, as if to illustrate what she’d just said.

  “So how’s life with roommates?” I asked.

  “I don’t think they like me much,” Berenice said. “They’re a bunch of tight-asses, if you want to know what I think. They always have a complaint, like I let things rot in the fridge, or my hair clogs the shower drain.”

  “Don’t they have hair too?”

  “My thoughts exactly. They actually do have hair. But they always assume it’s mine that causes problems. And I mean, they’re probably right, they’re such tight-asses, I’m sure they have personal hair traps that they bring with them in the shower for their own sheddings. I don’t know how they manage to never forget to clean after themselves. They’re impossible to foil. They’re the kind that clean everything before the cleaning lady comes.”

  “You guys have a cleaning lady?”

  “Of course not. What are you talking about? It’s an image.”

  “Do you talk to them at all?”

  “I try to be nice, you know, with them being all over me because of my hair. I offered to do their dishes the other day, for instance. First, it took way longer than I thought it would, and then they didn’t even thank me afterward. And last night, Michelle decided she had to cook some kind of vegetarian something and she realized we were out of whatever sprouts and so I told her I would go get some, even if I hadn’t been the one to finish her sprouts behind her back, and I went to the store and brought her what she wanted…she didn’t offer me any of her dish when she was done cooking. I mean, it looked disgusting, but still. And this morning she complained about my hair clogging the drain again. I thought my being nice would get her to back off a bit. I’m trying here, trying to be selfless, but the responses to my selflessness never really match my efforts, you know what I mean?”

  “Isn’t that the principle of selflessness?” I said.

  “I guess you would know that. You’re the specialist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re always nice. You always want to please everyone. I don’t know how you do it.”

  Berenice took a bite of something crunchy and chewed it right into the phone receiver. She couldn’t possibly have been aware of how loud her chewing was in my ear, or she would have been embarrassed.

  “Do you know Aurore is pregnant?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Berenice said. She stopped chewing, although she probably still had food in her mouth (I hadn’t heard her swallow). “I didn’t think anyone else knew.”

  “You don’t sound too happy for her,” I said.

  “Does she look happy for herself?”

  “Well,” I said, “no. Not yet. But she has to love the baby when it comes, right?”

  Berenice swallowed.

  “There’s not going to be a baby, Dory,” she said.

  I don’t know if it was the fact she’d stopped chewing in my ear or what she’d said about the baby, but Berenice suddenly felt less close to me. I actually pictured the ocean between us.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

  “You’re the one calling,” I said. “Is there something you wanted to tell Mom?”

  “I wanted to tell her about the meeting we had yesterday, with the whole program’s faculty and all the students who are going to be in my class.”

  “Do they look nice?”

  “Hard to tell. I didn’t speak to anyone really, but guess what: they’re all only getting their first PhD and I’m still younger than any of them! Can you believe that?”

  “That’s great!” I said. I knew that kind of thing was important to Berenice.

  She made a strange throat sound, like she was swallowing something too big for it.

  “Are you withholding a sneeze so that the guy doesn’t bless you once more and you don’t have to thank him again?”

  “What? No, what are you talking about?”

  “You are!”

  “It’s just…it makes me uncomfortable. The familiarity.”

  “What else do Americans do that’s weird?” I said.

  “Well, I knew they wouldn’t let me smoke anywhere but no one told me about the booze situation. It’s a dry campus, can you believe that? How horrible does that sound?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had a drink.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You got laid before you ever had a drink? How is that even possible?”

  “How do you know I got laid?”

  “Mom told me.”

  “How does Mom know?”

  “I don’t know, Dory. Did you tell Simone? Simone repeats everything. Anyway, your friend just died. Now is the time to start drinking. Have a cognac or something. Mom always keeps a very good bottle for the harder times. It’s in the bottom drawer of her dressing table, with all the makeup and powders and creams she never uses, hidden behind them.”

  She sneezed and got blessed and thanked the person.

  “What did your letter say?” I asked.

  “What letter?”

  “The letter you started writing to me.”

  “Do you want me to call you back and read it to you?
It’s just a draft so far.”

  “No, I want you to tell me.”

  “It was just ideas, an outline. I didn’t really write anything yet.”

  “Give me the outline, then.”

  “I was going to tell you about this friend Lea I had in grammar school. I was like six years old and she was maybe eight or something? You weren’t even born yet.”

  “What about her?”

  “She was one of these people, you know, they decide to be your friend like it’s only up to them? You mind your own business, you don’t ask for anything, and the person just sits next to you in class, follows you around at recess, wants to know what foods you like, and colors and such?”

  “Sure,” I said. I couldn’t tell whether that was what Denise had done—decided for the both of us that we would be friends.

  “Well anyway, we became sort of buddies. I even went to her house for playdates, and she came to ours a few times—I didn’t like that too much, to be honest, but Mom said we had to reciprocate. She always messed with my stuff. Anyway. At the end of that school year, teachers recommended I skip the next level, and I thought Lea would be sad that we wouldn’t get to be in the same class anymore, but all she said was that it didn’t really matter, and I thought she would come up with ways that we could remain friends or something, but you know what she said? She said it was okay, because the only reason she’d picked me as a friend in the first place was that I always had the best grades and that if she sat by me in class she would get to copy from me during tests.”

  There was a silence there that meant Berenice’s story had ended.

  “I don’t see how that relates to my friend’s suicide,” I said.

  “Well I was really hurt by that.”

  “I’m not hurt,” I said. “I’m sad.”

  “I can relate to that too. I just don’t have as tragic a story to draw on as a parallel to yours.”

  “The father dying is a much more tragic story than the one you just told me.”

  Berenice cleared her throat and ignored my comment.

  “All I aimed to say was that you never know exactly what goes on in anyone else’s head, but then when you do get to find out and uncover a tiny little piece of it, it’s very likely that it’s going to hurt or make you feel horrible.”

  “I didn’t find out Denise was suicidal the day she jumped,” I said. “I knew it from before.”

  “There’s nothing you could’ve done,” Berenice said.

  A gust of wind burst through my mother’s bedroom window and slammed the door shut. I got up from the bed to close the window and watched the branches of our cherry tree brush against the glass for a while. I was still holding the receiver against my ear, but I’d left my blanket behind. I don’t think Berenice said anything.

  “What happened to your friend Lea?” I heard myself ask.

  “I don’t know. Last time I saw her she was coming out of a meditation class on Main Street. I think she became new-agey in college.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “For a minute, yes.”

  “Did she ever apologize for what she said to you in grammar school?”

  “Honestly, I don’t think she remembers any of it,” Berenice said. “I think that, in the end, people’s brains only pick something like five memories to keep from all of their grammar school years. This one mustn’t have made the cut for her.”

  Five sounded like too low a number for the memories one kept of a whole period, one that had seemed so long to me, but then I thought about my own time in grammar school, not so long before, and very few images came to mind: the Let Them Sea campaign in fourth grade, Porfi’s crying because I’d called him myopic, the teacher pulling my ear because I wouldn’t stop singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” The rest, hundreds of days and thousands of details, all gone, or rather, all balled up in a corner of my head under the label “grammar school,” every specificity crushed and replaced by the sense-memory of what it had felt like to be in grammar school—clueless and uneasy. And I was supposed to be the one with a great memory.

  “How many memories do people keep from junior high?” I asked Berenice.

  “About the same as from grammar school, I’d say.” She thought about it a little. “Actually, maybe even less.”

  The rain started to fall hard, drops ricocheting from the tree leaves to the window. I hoped Denise’s funeral was still going. I thought she would’ve liked to know she’d had a rainy one, and decided right away to never think again in terms of what Denise would or would not have liked. I knew I could decide something like that and hold myself to it.

  “What time is it by you?” I asked Berenice.

  “It’s about ten thirty in the morning.”

  “Is it raining?”

  “No. It’s been nothing but blue skies since I arrived. I don’t think it rains much here.”

  “That’s no good,” I said.

  “I fully agree. Sunny places make for overly optimistic people. I hope that the winters are horrible enough that it evens things out.”

  The leaves of our cherry tree seemed to be sorting the raindrops, which ones would get to pass through and fall to the ground, which would stay, which would bounce to the window and eventually dry and leave dusty smears on the glass.

  “Did your friend Lea tell you why she went to meditation classes? When you bumped into her?”

  “I must admit I didn’t ask, Dory. Why do you care?”

  “I don’t really understand what meditation is for,” I said. “Denise’s doctors told her to try it, but I don’t know that she ever did.”

  “Well, I tried it,” Berenice said. “I didn’t take a class or anything. I don’t understand how it would be possible to think about nothing with other people around.”

  I knew Berenice was lying. Not about meditating but about the reasons why she wouldn’t take a class to learn how. She would never risk taking a class in something she might not be the best at.

  “How do you do it?” I asked.

  “I just sit on the ground and I stare at something,” Berenice said. “Then I try to visualize my own body, the inside of it I mean, organ after organ, the ones I know where they are at least, then tongue, muscles, nails, brain, etc., and then I try to have each part I visualize recede somewhere and disappear until I can’t feel it anymore, and then I’m all light. At some point, my body is like an empty shell and I can feel currents of air gushing through it. It’s very peaceful.”

  “What kind of meditation is that?” I asked. “It sounds unpleasant.”

  “It’s not any particular kind,” she said. “It’s a mix of things I read in books. It’s the Berenice kind.”

  “Why do you need to stare at something in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think some people just close their eyes.”

  She started saying something else but we got disconnected. I kept the phone to my ear anyway, as if Berenice’s voice might just emerge again from under the dial tone and go on describing meditation or her new life in America. I went to my mother’s dressing table and found the bottle of cognac where Berenice said I would. There was a little shot glass turned upside down over the tip of the bottle. It was a bit sticky, both inside and out. I wondered if my mother ever cleaned it. I poured myself some cognac anyway, because I’d never drunk straight from a bottle before and it felt too dramatic to start now, or like I was either too young or too old. I didn’t like the taste. Rather, I couldn’t taste anything, the cognac just burned the little cuts in my mouth, which I’d given up on trying to protect from the braces. I poured myself another glass to see if the cuts had been cleaned enough by the first shot that I could taste it better. I could. It tasted like marzipan set on fire. I hung up the phone and waited for the alcohol to have an effect, maybe make me a little less miserable. Because I was staring at something already, the branches and the leaves wiping the window, I thought I might as well try to meditate, but it was hard to focus. The image mov
ed too much. I poured myself another shot of cognac and sat in what I thought was the lotus position in the middle of the bed, facing my mother’s closet. The father’s shirts and jackets were hanging in the same order they’d always been in, from black to light blue, going through grays and all shades of navy. I stared at the jacket in the middle of the rack and tried to visualize my body and then forget it, as Berenice had said. My mother never closed her closet door.

  The next time I saw Aurore’s stomach, the baby was gone, like Berenice said it would be. She was trying on clothes in front of the only full-length mirror we had, in the bathroom, and she’d left the door wide open so she could come and go between there and her bedroom, where more clothes waited to be rejected. Nothing seemed to satisfy her.

  “What are you dressing up for?” I said, even though Aurore wasn’t trying anything fancy right then. The fact that she was giving any thought to what she was wearing was sign enough that she was getting ready for something special.

  “Nothing special,” Aurore said. “I’m just considering my options.”

  “Your options for what?”

  “My options to not look like a history professor.”

  “What’s wrong with looking like a history professor?”

  “Men don’t like it.”

  She said this angrily, like I was responsible for men’s taste in general.

  “Since when do you care what men like?”

  “Why do you have to ask all these questions all the time, Dory? Is it because you miss interviewing Simone?”

  Simone had just started school in Paris.

  “I’m just interested in you,” I said.

  “Well, go ask Leonard. He’s the foremost specialist on our family now. He must know why I do the things I do better than myself.”

  The night before Simone moved out, Leonard had broken the news to her, Aurore, and my mother that his PhD ethnographic study was about us. They hadn’t taken it well. Aurore and my mother, particularly. Simone had just been worried that it meant Leonard would use episodes of her life that she therefore couldn’t use herself in her fiction.