How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  “I’m ready when you’re ready,” she said, and on the tape, you can hear me unfold the list of questions I’d prepared.

  “Do you remember when you got lice in first grade and Mom was going to cut your hair real short in the bathroom and before she did you wanted to save as many lice as possible and asked me if I would shelter them and rubbed your scalp against mine?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I was thinking about it. I’m pretty sure it’s my first memory of you.”

  “Well it’s not going to be a book about you, is it? Next question.”

  “Have you always been the smartest person in your class?”

  “Absolutely. Even in kindergarten, I drew my houses with perspective—”

  “What is your first memory?”

  “I don’t think we were done with the previous question.”

  “No?”

  “You have to leave me some time to answer, to reminisce.”

  “Okay.”

  “So. Yes. I’ve always been head of the class. In every subject. Even now in German, which I’m not particularly good at, I’m miles and miles and miles ahead. People envy me, but there’s a big drawback to being smarter than the rest, and I’ll tell you what it is, because I assume it will be in part responsible for the kind of person I’ll become: loneliness. You know, I happen to be good at everything I try, but it doesn’t mean that I want to be the best, and people get the two things confused. The truth is it would be good for me to have competition once in a while, or even someone to look up to that is not just Berenice or Aurore or the boys but someone my own age. But when you’re first in everything, you have to know better than to say you want competition. That would sound false or spurious to everyone. You have to be humble, you have to be ashamed of yourself, sort of. I guess it’s the same thing when you’re very happy. I’ve never been very happy, but I assume it’s the same. You can’t be too obvious about it. You have to show some restraint.”

  “Did you ever think about failing a test on purpose?”

  “Why in the world would I ever do that?”

  “So people wouldn’t think you’re a freak? To fit in?”

  “I don’t see why I should be the one to make the effort and reach down to everyone else. Why doesn’t it cross everyone else’s mind to reach up to me?”

  “Well, it’s not easy being smart.”

  “Of course it is. You just have to shut up nine out of ten times you think you want to speak.”

  “Do you do that?”

  “Well, not right now. Not with you guys.”

  There’s a few seconds of silence there on the tape.

  “You say you want competition, but you never had any so far, so how do you know you would be okay with it?”

  “That’s an interesting question, Dory.”

  A silence here.

  “So what’s your answer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silence again.

  “There’s a girl, in art class, she’s a pretty decent painter. I mean, I’m a better sketcher, by a long shot, that’s how I stay head of art class, but she’s a better painter, and I have no jealousy whatsoever toward her.”

  Another silence.

  “It’s quite the opposite actually.”

  “Why don’t you try to be friends with her?”

  “I don’t know what to say to her.”

  “Just say you like her paintings.”

  “I don’t really know how to say nice things. When I have something nice to say, I don’t know how to be honest without sounding fake. Or condescending. Are you taking notes? I mean…isn’t this thing recording?”

  “You’re the one who set it.”

  “Plus, I’m sure she thinks I’m pretentious. Everyone does.”

  “I think you’re pretentious sometimes.”

  “I know. That’s because I do talk down to you sometimes. On purpose. But at school, I’m always very careful not to do that, and I still get morons saying I’m full of myself, or calling me pretentious, if they actually know the word. You know what really pisses me off, Dory?”

  “When people misuse words?”

  “Misuse of words. Yes. Sloppy usage. Pretentious has come to define someone who talks about a thing that others don’t understand. But it’s not what it means. Pretension is a form of lying, it’s looking to impress people with knowledge you haven’t really mastered, or giving yourself more importance than you have, but calling me pretentious for actually knowing things, well, that’s a fucking disgrace, that’s a misuse of language. It’s more than that: it’s language abuse. It’s like when people use the word symbol left and right. What’s up with that? Or problematic as a noun, because problem doesn’t sound edgy enough. If I’m not sure how to use a word, I won’t use it ’til I’ve looked up its meaning. It would be pretentious to do otherwise, you follow me? People who call me pretentious, they’re the pretentious ones. I mean, should I surrender and start using words inappropriately the way they do, just to fit in? Dory, why are you taking notes? This thing records everything we say.”

  “I’m taking notes on your body language.”

  Another silence.

  “Even people who talk to you about some idea like it goes without saying that you’d know the idea when they themselves only read about it for the first time that morning…even they are not pretentious. They’re just being polite in assuming you know what they’re talking about, and they won’t make fun of you for not knowing, they’ll explain. Maybe in the process, they’re sizing you up, trying to get a sense of where they stand knowledge-wise, sure, but that’s a different thing. That’s human. You’re taking a hell of a lot of notes, Dory. Do you think we should get a video camera?”

  “Why are you pretentious with me sometimes?”

  “What?”

  “You said you were pretentious with me sometimes, on purpose. Why?”

  “To impress you. That’s the only purpose of pretension.”

  “Why do you want to impress me?”

  “I’m your big sister. You have to look up to me.”

  “But I do already.”

  “Well, it should stay like that. For a little while at least.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then at some point you’ll stop being impressionable, and my mission with you will be complete.”

  “Do I have a mission with you?”

  “This is not a book about you.”

  “Off the record?”

  She stopped the recording there and you can hear static for a second and a bird chirp. Then the interview resumes.

  “What is your first memory?”

  “I have many. Define an area of interest.”

  “Your first memory of a funny thing.”

  “Grandma’s farting fit at Grandpa’s funeral.”

  “I remember that too…it can’t be your first memory.”

  “You have a great memory, Dory, no one’s ever denied that. And maybe you don’t really remember the farting fit but we talked about it so much that you believe you do.”

  “Your first memory of something sad?”

  “I guess it could be the same one. And also when the father rented a magician for my fifth birthday.”

  “The magician made you sad?”

  “The fact that Dad thought I would like it.”

  “Who do you prefer: Berenice, Aurore, Jeremie, Leonard, or me?”

  “Berenice.”

  “Mom or the father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I’m not sure I was stupid. It’s not that I didn’t understand anything my teachers talked about, it’s that when I did, I doubted I had. I believed there had to be a trick. Maybe I just assumed the world was more complicated than it was. I thought the time-difference thing worked in minutes, for example. The day they explained time zones in school, we were shown a map of Europe: it’s an hour earlier in Portugal than it is in Spain, the teacher said, and I looked at the map, and I thought it h
ad to be roughly half an hour earlier in Madrid than in Barcelona.

  My habit of seeing tricks everywhere could be traced to the day that I, at four years old, started singing “Au Clair de la Lune” out loud in kindergarten and the teacher pulled me by the ear and asked me to stop because I was bothering everybody. It hurt, and I cried, but I kept singing through the pain anyway, and the teacher pulled harder and harder, until I finished the last verse I knew. I thought the ear pulling was a test to see if I’d understood what the teacher had said earlier about how “what has been started must be finished,” but it turned out it really wasn’t, and when I proudly—though in tears—finished my song, the teacher explained the phrase “What has been started must be finished” only applied to vegetables and homework and chores. So it should have been “Everything boring that has been started must be finished,” I thought, but I knew it didn’t sound as good as the real phrase.

  Rose arrived on a Tuesday. The Tuesday activity my mother had planned was going to the pool, and so she dropped us all there (all but Aurore, of course) while she ran some errands. In the car on the way to the pool, Simone refused to talk to Rose. She stared out the window the whole way. Rose kept asking her questions, regarding just about anything, and I kept answering on Simone’s behalf.

  “Have you ever watched synchronized swimming, Simone?”

  “I don’t think she ever has.”

  “Do you like my bracelet? I made it myself.”

  “Simone doesn’t really like jewelry. Or plastic beads.”

  “I can make one for her with other things, like, shells or something.”

  “She never wears bracelets or necklaces, really.”

  Jeremie and Leonard didn’t acknowledge Rose’s presence either.

  Once at the pool, they all headed to the fast swimmers’ lane and I stayed with Rose in the chaotic part of the pool with the kids and the old people. Rose wanted to go to the jets just to hang out and have her thighs massaged. She said the jets were her favorite part of any pool. She said we would know where the jets were once we’d spotted a couple of still old ladies with their backs to the wall and their elbows on the lip. We found the old ladies and waited for them to be done with the jets. While we waited, Rose suggested we try to spot who was pissing the pool. I’d never pissed the pool. I kept my eyes on the water. Rose said I had to attend to the faces, that the faces were what would betray the pissers. I didn’t know what she meant. Simone had told me that when someone pissed the pool, the water around them turned green, I told Rose.

  “Why would the water turn green?” Rose asked.

  “Blue plus yellow,” I said.

  “Your sister is funny,” Rose said. “And pretty,” she added. “I didn’t think she would be.”

  “Why not?” I said. I didn’t have an opinion on the way my sisters looked, but everyone said they were beautiful, so I assumed they were, and I didn’t know how it could surprise anybody.

  “She sounds so smart in her letters, you know? I thought she had to be kind of, whatever looking,” Rose said.

  A couple of three- or four-year-olds with arms wrapped in water wings passed us with a slowness made remarkable by their manic kicks. They were discussing how many dead kids they thought were at the bottom of the deep end of the pool, given that they’d been told that those who swam in the deep end without parental supervision died. “Five thousand!” one kid said. “Five thousand millions!” the other kid said. They were both acting as if pool water kept coming into their mouths by accident and they had to constantly spit it out, but they were really lapping it up.

  “Your brothers don’t look too bad either,” Rose said. I glanced at the fast swimmers’ lane. Leonard was spitting in his goggles.

  The old ladies left the jets. I wanted to tell Rose I was good at holding my breath underwater, but I thought it might be showing off. We didn’t talk much once at the jets. At some point, Rose just turned to me and smiled.

  “Did the water turn green around me?” she said.

  On Wednesday we went to the movies. My mother let Rose pick the movie, a comedy about teenagers who go to a party. Aurore came along, to everyone’s surprise, after deciding she needed to get some fresh air, and declared as the end credits were rolling that we should never let her out of her room again if it was to see such a terrible piece of shit. Rose liked the movie, and I didn’t really, but I understood why she did and so I wasn’t as mad as everyone else. On the walk back home, we saw a kid screaming and his mother dragging his body along the sidewalk by the arm, because he refused to get up until she would agree to take him to McDonald’s. We walked by them silently and without staring, as we’d been taught to do when passing fighting couples or car wrecks, and then my mother turned to us and proudly said what she always said when a kid threw a tantrum nearby: “None of you ever did that to me.”

  On Thursday, the school bus that was driving Simone’s and Rose’s classes to the science museum got into a small accident. Only Rose was injured. The window by which she was sitting shattered as the bus made a turn into too narrow a street. Rose got a couple of light cuts on her right arm and two stitches on her forehead.

  “Are you okay?” my mother asked Simone when she picked her and Rose up, and Simone said yes, of course she was okay, she’d been sitting at the other end of the bus when it happened.

  So there was no activity on Thursday. We just watched TV and Rose fell asleep next to me on the brown suede couch.

  On Friday, after school, Rose and I made cookies for the family. I’m not sure Simone had spoken to her at all yet, but Rose didn’t seem to mind too much. At dinnertime, while we waited for everyone to come down to the table, Rose inquired about the blue plate my mother was always eating off of and asked her if she was on a diet, because she sure didn’t need to be.

  “Oh, how nice of you to say that,” my mother said, and then she asked Rose how she knew about blue plates cutting your appetite and Rose said they used blue plates in fat camps, and my mother asked her if she’d ever been in a fat camp and Rose said no, but both her brothers had.

  “How interesting,” my mother said, and then she asked me to make sure Aurore came down to sit with us tonight because she really wanted to have us all around the table. Once we were all gathered, my mother said, “The father won’t be coming home tonight,” and this time it was because he was dead. He’d had a heart attack. Simone said she didn’t believe it for a second, but it looked like she did. Jeremie and Leonard and Aurore and I said nothing.

  “I am so so so so so so so sorry,” Rose said, “so very sorry,” and she started crying, long before any of us did. She cried loudly, and my mother had to get up to wrap her arms around Rose’s shoulders while we, her actual kids, the actual children of the father Rose had never met, stared blankly at the swordfish steaks my mother had placed at the center of the table, swordfish steaks we would later declare to have been our father’s favorite dish, though none of us could really be sure about it, the father always having expressed the exact same enthusiasm for everything our mother cooked.

  Berenice came home early the following morning. She called me Isidore when she saw me come down the stairs, and in doing so confirmed the seriousness of the situation. She was sitting with my mother in the kitchen, her fingers crossed in front of her on the table, as though she was praying. My name is all she said. I went and wrapped my arms around her neck, and she leaned her head against my shoulder, but her hands stayed on the table.

  I asked where Rose was.

  “Simone’s teacher took her for the rest of the stay,” my mother said.

  “When did she go?”

  My mother looked at me like I was asking for details from years ago. I hoped Rose was all right but knew it wasn’t appropriate to say so. I wanted to eat the cookies she and I had made the day before, but that also seemed uncalled for.

  The others came down and had cookies and milk and hugged Berenice just as I’d done. No one said a thing for a while, until Aurore asked Beren
ice how her dissertation was coming along. Berenice said she’d been solicited for an article about her research for the next issue of a philosophy quarterly. She said she’d probably send them her third chapter, which almost made sense on its own. We said congratulations.

  I was usually the one to take the least amount of time in the bathroom, but the morning of the father’s funeral, I looked at my naked self in the mirror for a while, and Leonard knocked on the door to make sure I was all right.

  “Well,” I told him, “I’m fat.”

  I heard Leonard laugh a little through the door.

  “You’re not fat, Dory, you’ll grow it away.”

  The second part of his sentence indicated that I was, indeed, fat. For the next few weeks, I barely ate, and everyone thought it was out of grief.

  After the father died, we all slept in the same bedroom for days but didn’t talk about why. We dragged mattresses into the boys’ bedroom, because it was the biggest. We brought in bottles of water, books, bedside lamps, and changes of clothes we kept rolled in bunches at the feet of our beds. I look back upon these nights very fondly. I slept a lot, and better than I ever had before. It was in the days following the father’s death that I learned to sleep in late, and realized days didn’t have to be as long as they’d always been. We barely left the room. Berenice worked on her article; the others read, or slept, or ate in bed; and I would just look at them all and fall back asleep feeling safe.

  I don’t want to sound insensitive and give the impression that my father’s death didn’t affect me. It did, of course, but everyone knows that death is tragic, while there’s not much focus on the upsides of losing someone you loved, the main one being, you sleep pretty well. No counting sheep, no too-hot pillows, no bad dreams. No dreams at all, in fact. Just a blank, heavy sleep.