How to Behave in a Crowd

by Camille Bordas

  “What do you think, guys?” Leonard asked. The spy lady and the spy gentleman had gone to sleep by the fire with their clothes and shoes on. The TV now showed the villain and his wife having dinner. “He murders his wife, or the Mafia takes care of her?”

  “I’d say he does it,” Jeremie said. “He poisons her.”

  “I say he chokes her,” Leonard said.

  “Either way, she has to die in this episode,” Simone said.

  The problem with my siblings’ predictions was that they were always right. It ruined the surprises for me. I never saw anything coming. Never made guesses. Sometimes, Simone tried to force one out of me. I’d say, “I don’t know, I’m not really following this,” but the truth was I was always following, I’d been following for weeks, for months, yet I still never knew who had to die, what had to happen, and why, and when.

  “Why does she have to die in this particular episode?” I asked. I usually didn’t speak, but I happened to not care too much about the scenes with the villain’s wife.

  “She’s of more use to the plot dead than alive now,” Simone explained.

  “Is there only one possible plot?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It’s always the same stories,” Jeremie said. “Only a few variations. Since Aristotle.”

  “Aristotle’s Poetics,” Simone specified.

  Leonard sneezed inside his cupped hands and looked closely at what had landed in his palms, as he always did, and for way too long before he’d get a tissue. No one ever gave him a hard time about that.

  On-screen, the villain and his wife picked the haricots verts from their plates with great care and ate them, one at a time, which struck me as highly unrealistic.

  “Did Aristotle write about what happens to villains’ wives?”

  “Not exactly,” Jeremie said. “But you can always transpose.”

  The villain’s wife did die by her husband’s hand a few minutes later, right before the closing credits. The villain smothered her in their bed with a pillow, just when she was thinking they’d do the monkey business.

  “This show sucks it,” Leonard said, and he turned the TV off. He got up and locked himself in the bathroom with a book about medieval England. Simone disappeared into our bedroom shortly after that, to read something unappealing as well, I assumed. Leonard had left a butt print on the suede, the stain at its center, as visible as possible. I was waiting for Jeremie to leave the couch and the room, so I could resume brushing the stain (or at least so I could brush it once more) back in the direction where it blended in. I’d kept my arms crossed the whole time since they’d made their remarks on my obsessive/obscene/sickly behavior, and I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to stay this way when the stain was the only thing I could think about. But Jeremie didn’t seem to be in a rush to go to his room. Jeremie was more contemplative than the others. He liked to read, like the rest of them, sure, and to be alone, and think, but there was less of a sense of urgency with him. He could do nothing but stare at a wall for hours and not blame himself for his idleness.

  “I might stay here awhile, Izzie,” he said. Jeremie was the only one who called me Izzie, which was really what I wanted to be called, not Dory. “You shouldn’t hold back for me.”

  “Hold back from what?” I said.

  “From doing whatever you do with the couch,” he said. “I really don’t mind.”

  I said I was okay.

  As a kid, I thought actors had to be the smartest people. I believed they spoke all the languages and dubbed themselves in all the countries that aired their shows and showed their movies. I believed they spent their lives traveling around the world to act again, in a new language, what they’d already acted elsewhere. Actors had to speak at least twelve languages, I thought (I’d only come up with that number because twelve different languages were as many as I could think of), and so they had to be geniuses, given that the father only spoke four and people already said that meant he was smart.

  But I never thought actors were inside the TV, as I hear that lots of kids do growing up, and as Simone, who resented explaining to others what they’d missed, used to try to trick me into believing so I’d come downstairs in time for shows’ opening credits. “Hurry, Dory! The actors inside the TV are not going to wait for you to start the episode!” Her logic seemed flawed to me. If the actors really were inside of our TV, it meant they couldn’t be in anyone else’s TV at the same time, and therefore, they were only performing for our household, and I represented an eighth, a sixth, sometimes even half of their total audience: of course they were going to wait for me.

  We lived on a block that went meat market, funeral home, custom-made closets. I’d only ever been inside of the meat market. My mother took me there on Saturdays, because the father usually came home on weekends and he liked a good steak.

  For a while I thought my mother and the butcher were having an affair. She spoke at a higher, dumber pitch when he was working instead of his wife. She laughed at his jokes about meat. Once, I found it unbearable. She laughed too heartily at something the butcher said that I didn’t understand but knew to be dirty (something about tying up the joint real tight). Her laughing too hard was not unusual, but I got extra embarrassed for her this time because her lipstick had left a red mark on her front teeth. I couldn’t watch. She didn’t usually wear makeup, except on Saturdays, and I thought it was for the butcher, when I could as well have thought it was for the father. I left the shop to sulk outside. I thought my mother would come check on me right away, but if she worried, she didn’t show it. She took her time at the counter. I looked inside the funeral home’s window while I waited. Between the “Always in My Heart” and the “Eternally Lamented” decorative stones, there was a crossword-themed tombstone on display. They’d engraved nice words about the deceased person, what she’d been like.

  “Do you get the feeling the word fun shouldn’t be where it is?” my mother asked, looking over my shoulder. I hadn’t heard her come out of the meat market.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s quite unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate,” she repeated, “now, that’s one they should’ve put on there.”

  I didn’t even smile. I was still mad at her for flirting with the butcher.

  “That’s one grim list of words,” my mother said as she inspected the stone some more.

  “You have lipstick on your teeth,” I said.

  My mother lit a cigarette and only after taking a couple of puffs did she attend to the lipstick trace, as if rubbing her front teeth with her finger was part of the act of smoking.

  “Don’t blow your smoke in my face,” I said, even though she wasn’t blowing her smoke in my face and I wouldn’t have minded if she had been. I usually didn’t give her a hard time about smoking, the way Simone did. She said she needed it and I believed her. When Simone complained about her addiction, my mother blamed it on journalism school. “It’s the first thing they taught us back then,” she would say, to defend herself. “They told us we had to be able to smoke a lot and hold our liquor. ‘Go smoke with the people, with your informers: that’s when you get the best quotes.’ That’s what our teachers said.” “But you’re an accountant now,” Simone would respond, and add “for a local newspaper,” in case she hadn’t been hurtful enough. “Well that wasn’t always the plan,” my mother would say. No one ever asked what the original plan had been. I would have, but it looked like it might make my mother sad to think about it.

  “Is the stain gone?” she asked me, showing all her teeth. I felt bad she’d thrown away her cigarette because of what I’d said.

  “You’re all good,” I told her.

  On the Sundays the father wasn’t at home, my mother went to church. She wasn’t a believer, but she said that being surrounded by Christians made her feel at ease. She couldn’t explain why. I went along with her once. We couldn’t tell anything about it to the father or the others, she had me promise, because they wouldn’t understand. Si
mone particularly had a thing against religion. She was furious when people assumed we were Catholic, which happened a lot because of how many we were. My mother said we couldn’t blame people for thinking we were Catholic because we did fit some of the clichés, but Simone countered that if they really wanted to reason in clichés, they could at least assume we were Jewish, given how smart we were. Promising my mother I wouldn’t tell about Mass made me nervous I would witness something terrible there. People always made you promise before you knew what they were getting you into.

  What followed, though, was not really surprising to me. I didn’t understand what the priest said, but that wasn’t unlike most of my classes, and I’m pretty sure my siblings would’ve managed to make sense of it, contrary to what my mother had said. Unlike the kids I went to school with, the adults in the church looked friendly, and sad, and all in all it was a good experience. I’d always thought I was the saddest one in my class (except for Denise Galet), and to see that sadness might become a normal trait with age left me feeling hopeful.

  After the service, my mother talked to old Daphné and a small group of people she called by their first names.

  “This one here’s Isidore,” she told them, and the women showed admiration.

  “So he’s the youngest one, right? The little prince?” one of them said.

  “They’re all little princes and princesses,” my mother said, and everyone nodded.

  “How many more do you have already?”

  “Five more,” my mother said. “Two other boys and three girls. All by C-section.”

  She always specified C-section, which I didn’t know how to feel about.

  “Dory is the worldliest one,” she added, and she smiled at me. “He’s the only one who’ll come out with me in the open, not entirely ashamed of his old mother.”

  “Not yet!” someone said, and all shared a laugh.

  My mother had her hands on my shoulders, and little by little, she dragged me closer, placed my body in front of hers, the way villains do in movies with the hostages they take for protection as they retreat. I don’t think my mother liked people as much as she said she did.

  The father rarely said anything to us, or me, at least. Sometimes at dinner, after Simone or one of the others had given a lecture on how they envisioned their future, he’d ask what it was I planned to do in life. It made me nervous when he asked. I’d mumble something about not being quite sure yet. I thought I only had one shot at the answer, that coming up with the wrong one could loom over the rest of my life.

  I tried to get serious about coming up with a vocation, for the next time he put the question to me. At the school library, I went through a guidebook that listed all the professions in existence. It actually said “all the professions” on the cover, but then there was a warning on the back, in small print, that said new professions were invented on a regular basis and that others disappeared, but that the reader should nevertheless rest assured the ones listed in the booklet should at least have a good twenty years of existence ahead. The list was four years old already. It bore 443 items, I counted, in alphabetical order. I tried to guess which ones would expire. Cartography sounded like a doomed business. Anthropology did too. I thought places and groups of people only existed in a limited number, and that once you’d studied a particular land and mapped it, or spent some time with a tribe and written about it, there was nothing to add, you’d done the job and crossed something off the list of places to map and people to study, and that the list had to be extremely short by now, if there was anything left on it at all.

  Each professional title appeared in italics and was followed by a brief description of what it entailed, what kind of education you needed, how many years. I imagined the longest descriptions had to be for the most impressive jobs, and I skipped them.

  I wanted to come up with something conceivable, not too showy, something my siblings wouldn’t right away try to discourage me from pursuing. On the other hand, too modest a pick would expose me to their mockery. They despised salesmen and politicians, as well as anything too useful (like plumbing, for instance) or concerned with precious things (flowers, jewelry, stationery, babies).

  I thought I would read the whole booklet and find a vocation in one sitting, but by D I got bored and headed home. I didn’t see the rush in making a decision anymore. I was still pretty young. I could wait for the booklet with the new professions to come out.

  The only thing I was good at was holding my breath. In fact, I’d had a brief taste of what the rush of athletic performance might be during gym class when I’d held my breath underwater for the whole length of the pool. It impressed my classmates, I could tell. When I resurfaced at the other end, they all stood small in the distance and didn’t say anything. All of them had gone up for air midlength. Though I hadn’t saved anybody’s life or done anything of importance, and though I’d always despised those who stuck out their chests, I walked back to them like a hero, in my flip-flops (I left a different pair at each end of the pool), and, halfway there, realized that, had I been gifted any real talent, I would probably have been a terrible person.

  By the next time we did free-diving exercises, however, my classmates had come up with an explanation for why I was good at holding my breath: I was on the fat side, so I had to have bigger lungs than them, and a bigger asshole as well, and bigger feet that must have worked as fins, bigger everything, in fact, but the one thing boys wanted to have bigger than everyone else—they wouldn’t grant me that. That was in fact made smaller than average by the bigness of everything else, they said. I wasn’t usually paid this kind of attention.

  The following weeks, I started going up for air before I needed to.

  The third time I tried running away, there were no good-byes—I left a note. Just a couple of miles from home, though, I realized I’d forgotten my helmet and turned the bike around to get it. The whole way back, I felt vulnerable to injury. If I died in an accident, my mother would begin a road safety campaign in my name, I thought. I made it home all right, of course, but was too tired by then to attempt leaving again. I tore up the note I’d left on Simone’s nightstand and fell asleep in my clothes.

  One Saturday morning, my mother was stuck at home waiting for a call and sent me out to run the weekend errands by myself. I went to the meat market first, because I hated the butcher and wanted to be done with it. Old Daphné Marlotte was there standing in line behind another woman who ordered veal ribs and chops authoritatively. Daphné turned to me and shook her head in silent disapproval of the woman’s attitude.

  “Will that be all for you, ma’am?” the butcher said.

  “If you don’t forget to pack the duck-fat beans like you did last time, yes, sir, that will be all.”

  “I am, again, really sorry about that, ma’am,” the butcher said.

  “Sure you are,” the woman said.

  The atmosphere lightened the second she left the shop.

  “Some case of a stitched asshole on that one,” the butcher told Daphné.

  “You’re supposed to—what?” Daphné said. “Slit your wrists over her duck-fat beans?”

  The butcher smiled. It’s true the woman had been sort of snappy and rude, but I always believed people had reasons to behave the way they did, and so I wasn’t ready to side with the butcher. The fact that Daphné did, though, it made me wonder. Being the oldest person in the country, she had to know something about how to judge people.

  “Shopping on your own like a big boy, Dory?” the butcher asked me.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “What can I get you?”

  I glanced at Daphné. I thought they were trapping me into being impolite.

  “Oh, go ahead, kid, I’m not in line,” Daphné said. “I’m just looking.”

  She was looking at a pork roast wrapped in bacon behind the counter window. When I asked the butcher to pack it for me, she said, “Excellent choice, kid,” and moved a couple inches to her left to stare at another
piece of meat, hands clasped behind her back.

  “Hey, Daphné?” the butcher said as he was wrapping my roast. “You know the sixty-eight joke?”

  Daphné looked up at him and readjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose.

  “Let me readjust my glasses,” she said, “I’ll hear you better.”

  “So. Husband and wife are in bed, right? And the husband goes, Hey, honey, you up for a sixty-eight? And the woman says, Sure, babe, but what’s a sixty-eight? and the husband says, You blow me, and I owe you one!”

  Daphné laughed, and I understood that the butcher didn’t only tell dirty jokes to my mother, but to anyone who’d listen.

  “Are we making this kid uncomfortable?” Daphné asked him.

  “Nah,” he said, looking at me. “You got the joke, kid?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “See?” he told Daphné.

  I knew what a sixty-nine was (in theory), but it still took me a few months to make sense of the sixty-eight. Sex jokes in general, I didn’t get. All I got was that they were dirty, the same way I understood racist jokes were racist, but nothing much beyond that. Arabs were the butts of most of the racist jokes around here, and I thought maybe it was because I didn’t personally know any Arabs that I didn’t understand the jokes about them. Also, maybe it was racist of me to think that there could be a way for those jokes to make sense in the first place. Maybe all kids are racist, as a side effect of wanting everything to make sense.