When Berenice went back to grad school, though, the sleep alliance broke. Aurore took her mattress back to her room and Simone figured it was time for her and me to do the same.
Sleeping got more difficult. Nights became a bathroom ballet of sorts. Every half hour, I’d hear a different sibling, or our mother, get out of bed to go take a piss. We all stopped drinking water after dinner, and that solved the problem for my brothers and sisters, but my mother still got up every night. She didn’t leave her room, though. I just heard her get up to turn all her lights on and walk back to her bed. After nights and nights of this, I went to see what she was doing. We were usually not allowed in her bedroom at night. All of us, as kids, had heard her tell us that after ten p.m., she wasn’t our mother. She needed time to herself, she’d say, to read and recharge her mother batteries during the night, otherwise she wouldn’t even be able to be our mother during the day. I’d tried going to her room once after ten with what I believed was a good excuse (Simone wouldn’t turn her reading light out), but all my mother had said was, “Can you see the clock, Dory? Can you see what it says?” and I’d had to go. We’d all learned to deal with insomnia on our own, to wait for the morning to describe our bad dreams. We’d all learned to give our mother the post–ten p.m. privacy she requested. We wanted her to remain our mother. But that night, around one in the morning, I knocked on her door and she let me in. The radio on her nightstand was on, at the lowest audible volume.
“I like to be talked to before sleep,” she said. I knew she’d called the father from her bedroom phone the nights he wasn’t home, but I didn’t think they had actual conversations.
“We can talk a little while,” I said, and we did. I sat by her in bed. Everyone in the house was asleep, so we whispered. She said, “Tell me something I don’t know about you, Dory,” and I said I wanted to be a German teacher. We talked about it without reference to the father, which was sort of an achievement, given that he’d been the only person we knew who saw the point of the German language. The closet facing the bed was half-open and I could see his clothes hanging there, the jackets and the shirts. I knew clothes didn’t have emotions but they seemed to understand that the father had died and that they would never be worn again. They looked embarrassed not to have disappeared with him, to just be there reminding us of his absence, resigned, prepared to meet their fate and be discarded when my mother was ready. She asked me to tell her about good memories I had, and I talked about our vacation in the south a couple years back, with the lightning bugs. I did most of the talking. Every time I left a space for her to share a memory of her own, or to offer a reaction, she would just say, “Please go on, I’m listening,” but her eyes were shut and I don’t think she really cared about what I said, and it went on like that until I left a space she didn’t fill at all.
The Defenses
At school, Denise Galet told me she was sorry for my loss, but she looked mostly jealous. I didn’t particularly like Denise, but because no one else did either, we often sat together in class. She asked for details about the funeral, like open casket or not, and I told her everything she wanted to know, mainly about what happens to a dead body. I knew Denise was dark. She told you about not liking life or anyone in it every chance she got. Her and suicide, though, it was like me and running away: she kept failing. She’d tried to slit her wrists the previous winter but hadn’t cut nearly deep enough. She’d taken twenty of her mother’s sleeping pills a few weeks after that, but they were placebos, so no one was sure whether it had been the real thing or a cry for help. She had therapy sessions every day of the week after class. She ate meds in front of a psychiatrist and couldn’t take the bottle home. At recess she sat on a bench and fed pigeons in spite of its being forbidden. I’d never thought I could do anything to help her. Denise belonged to a different stratum of humanity, I believed, and there could be no real communication between us.
“I wanted to come to the funeral,” she told me, “but my parents wouldn’t let me.”
“It’s nice of you,” I said.
“I want to know how it goes, you know? I’ve never been to one.”
“It was my fourth,” I said, and Denise looked impressed.
“Grandparents?” she asked.
“And an uncle,” I said.
I told her the family had to pick clothes for the dead person, give speeches if they could, dress in dark colors, and that no one should bring inappropriate things to the ceremony, like a newspaper or a snack. Denise said she knew all that already. She wanted to know more about the body.
“Who dresses it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Who puts it in the casket?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are there smells?”
“What do you mean?”
“The body, does it give off smells in the church or whatever?”
“My father’s ceremony was at the cemetery,” I said. “Open-air.”
“And the other funerals you’ve been to?”
The question of smells seemed to be the most important to Denise. It was the first time I could recall being asked something that really mattered to the person I was talking to.
“There’s definitely a smell,” I said, after pretending to think about it.
I’m pretty sure Denise held her breath after that. She tightened her lips, which she usually kept ajar (I’d wondered many times if she was capable of really closing her mouth). She didn’t try to kill herself again for a couple of years.
Rose’s letter came one week after the father died. It was addressed to me, not Simone. She hoped I was good, admitted she only said that because she knew no other way to open a letter but was pretty sure I didn’t feel good at all, more like miserable. She said she thought about me and my lovely family a lot, to give them all her best. I didn’t give anyone her best, because I knew they wouldn’t reciprocate, or care.
“Love letter?” Simone asked. When she looked at the back of the envelope with Rose’s name and address, she furrowed her brow.
“You can land better than her,” Simone said, and though it was the first time I heard the verb land in that context, I immediately understood what she meant. Simone, as I said, was only thirteen and already in tenth grade. I knew she had no understanding of how or why people in her class would want to form couples, but she’d mastered the vocabulary. I knew of Simone’s lack of interest in couple-forming because we shared the same bedroom and I’d been on the lookout for the first signs of a need for independence and/or privacy on her part since she’d had her first period a year earlier. I paid attention to her body language, sighs, fidgeting, the smallest displays of restlessness. I tried to be in our bedroom a lot so that she could get irritated by my presence. I thought if she asked for her own bedroom it would cause our parents to move to a bigger house, where I would also have my own bedroom to think about girls in the privacy of—I, for my part, understood the urge for couple-forming. Maybe we could get rid of the old stained couch in the process, I thought. But Simone never asked for her own room. As far as I could tell, she enjoyed my company. Sometimes, before bed, she picked her clothes for the next day and asked me what I thought when she made the smallest changes to her regular combinations of blue jeans and plain long-sleeved shirts. When she had a presentation to give in class, she rehearsed it in front of me and had me ask questions about it so that she could be prepared for an interaction with a misinformed audience. I was of use to her. Sometimes, when I despaired that she would ever show any desire to gain her independence, I wondered if she looked for signs of my adolescence, dreading the moment they would appear and we would have to go our separate ways.
“It’s not a love letter,” I told her, and it was true. Rose, like me, had skipped zero grades, which made her a normal age for grade ten: sixteen. I knew she had no interest in an eleven- (almost twelve-) year-old boy who didn’t even have his own bedroom. “It’s just a nice letter,” I said.
“Whatever you say,” Simon
e conceded, after staring at me for a few seconds. “It’s none of my business anyway.”
That was so unlike her it reinforced my fear that she was keeping my growing up under close watch.
Rose wrote me a few more letters after that. Simone didn’t ask about them again. Nor did she ever write to Rose. When the time came for her class to visit Rose’s, she simply didn’t pack and didn’t go.
Every birthday, I updated my will. I’d written the first draft at age eight, after finding out about the existence of wills in American movies. It seemed mandatory to have a will, in American movies. When someone died, a will was uncovered, and complications and tensions could arise from a nonupdated version. That’s why I went back to mine at least once a year, to check its accuracy and, if needed, make minor changes. If I broke something, though, I wouldn’t wait for my birthday and would just take my will out of its binder and cross out the thing I’d broken without necessarily reassessing the whole document.
When I turned twelve, I removed the father from my inheritors list, obviously, and reallocated what I’d wanted to go to him (desk lamp, pencil cup) to other family members. As I did every year, I added my new possessions (essentially what I’d been gifted that very day) and drew new arrows:
Desk lamp → Berenice
Letter opener → Aurore
Pencil cup → Leonard
Flik Flak Swatch → Jeremie (he might not like it, but I didn’t know what else to give him)
Etc.
I didn’t think I possessed anything really interesting, and most of what I had, I suspected my siblings wouldn’t care to inherit anyway, either because it had already been theirs in the first place, or because it would be too childish or small. My biggest paragraph, therefore, was a list of things I wanted to go to charity. “Unless,” I specified, “a member of my direct family wishes to keep any particular item for sentimental value.”
I, on the other hand, envied my brothers and sisters many things (Leonard’s bike, Aurore’s leather backpack, Jeremie’s sound system), and I’d assumed all these years that they’d been writing and updating their wills, too, and I was curious to know what they’d set aside for me. I didn’t want my brothers and sisters to die, of course, but writing one’s will was a nice thing to do, I believed. It showed the people you handed something down to that you’d thought about them specifically. When the father died, though, there wasn’t a will. I was the only one disappointed, it seemed, and I didn’t say anything about it. I came to understand that the others were probably not keeping a will either, and for a while I thought about giving mine up, or at least ceasing to update it. But then my birthday came, and I didn’t question the habit. It didn’t matter what my siblings did or didn’t do, what the father hadn’t done. If I died, I still wanted them to know I’d thought of them.
Daphné’s next birthday—the first after she became the oldest person in France—was an event in town. The mayor had banners hung from trees and street lamps. “Happy 111th!” they said. The grape-harvest dance was pushed back a week so that a party could be held at the community center. The state secretary for the dependent and elderly was due to make an appearance. People feared Daphné would die before the party, the way they feared it would rain on the Bastille Day parade every year.
Everyone my mother greeted on the street planned on attending, but most didn’t care about Daphné, hadn’t even known how old she was before her nomination. They wanted to come, my mother said, to stock up on gossip and pretend they didn’t like their photo being taken. She wasn’t sure the whole family should go. She thought maybe it would all be too phony for my siblings, that maybe just she and I going would be better. Because none of them had friends or dates or places they went to after school (except for Jeremie with symphony practice), my mother wanted my siblings to go out in the world a bit, but she didn’t want to impose any outing too easy for them to criticize. The goal was to make them like going outside. She had to pick her fights carefully.
“Aren’t the best parties supposed to be phony, though?” Leonard said, to our mother’s surprise.
“I believe the best parties are the ones where one enjoys oneself,” my mother responded diplomatically.
“Exactly,” Leonard said. “By finding a small crowd with which to make fun of the larger crowd.”
“Well, as long as you find yourself a crowd, I guess. That’s all I want for you,” my mother said.
“No need to find a crowd,” Leonard said. “Jeremie and Simone will do just fine.”
And so we went, all of us but Aurore. It was the perfect occasion to run away, as everyone in town was gathered to get drunk in the same place, but I wanted to see the party, so I didn’t take advantage. It wasn’t often that we had anything going on in town.
The community center was decorated with a timeline that went over all the major world events that had happened during Daphné’s lifetime. Pinned over the timeline were pictures of Daphné herself, at different ages, that let you know what she’d looked like when those events had unfolded. Those events she’d witnessed, it said, like she’d actually been on the first commercial aircraft or in a concentration camp. Daphné was so old that the timeline started on the wall just right of the stage and went all the way around the room, a room that fit four hundred people (standing), to the other side of the stage. I spotted Sara Catalano right away. Sara still showed no sign of knowing who I was, but it had to be an act. I thought maybe she found me more interesting now that my father was dead but couldn’t admit it and that it was my role to reach out to her. She was looking at the part of the timeline where Daphné was already old but Sara and I had just been born.
“Hey, Sara,” I said.
“What’s the Berlin Wall, exactly?” Sara said, pointing at a picture of it. I thought I should never tell my siblings she’d asked me that, but then I didn’t really know what the Berlin Wall had been either.
“It was a wall between the communists and the capitalists,” I said, and it seemed to be enough. At least, Sara nodded like I’d cleared the matter up.
“We were in the same class last year,” I said, because it was, to my knowledge, the only thing we had in common.
“I know,” Sara said. “Your father died.”
“He did,” I said. I didn’t want to sound too cheerful but I was glad she could place me.
“I knew him,” Sara said. “He came to the practice a couple years ago. I used to do my homework in the waiting room. My mother fixed his front teeth.”
I’d been trying hard to forget about that time the father had gone around without his front teeth. He’d come back from work one day missing them, and his excuse (“I fell”) had seemed so stupid to me I’d thought it had to mean he was a spy and couldn’t say in what specific fight for world peace he’d been damaged. I’d been very excited about the father’s showing signs of being a spy, but then he’d taken too long to get his teeth fixed. A few days with that gap under his gum, sure, I thought, maybe he had to look goofy for a bit, so people would never suspect he was a spy. But weeks? It couldn’t be that his boss was on board with having one of his agents looking homeless (unless his cover was being a homeless guy? But then he could’ve just painted his teeth black). He’d ended up making an appointment with Sara’s mother to get new teeth only because my mother had insisted he should, for their anniversary dinner, at least try to look a little like the man she’d married.
I asked Sara if she’d talked to the father that day.
“He just asked me what kind of homework I had,” she said. “He was very sweet. He looked sort of scary, or dumb, maybe, without his teeth, but I mean, at least you knew what he was at the dentist’s for. Some people, I think, they just show up to have my mother’s fingers in their mouths. Men are really fucked up.”
Sara took a step to her right and looked at a picture captioned “Gulf War” and the photograph of Daphné that matched the year. I crossed my fingers she wouldn’t ask about the Gulf War. Or even just the gulf.
“I think he thought I was in your sister’s grade or something. He talked about her homework, how smart she was and all. Simone? Is that it?”
“Yes,” I said.
I wished they’d spoken about me, how great they both thought I was.
The room had filled up and I saw Denise Galet walk in, flanked on either side by her parents. I smiled at her, even though I knew she wouldn’t smile back—she never did. I still thought it was worth a try.
I was glad to be talking to Sara, and to be seen with her in a public place, but then I couldn’t help wondering what my siblings would think of her. I scanned the room and spotted them, Simone and the boys, looking at me talking to Sara. Leonard gave me the thumbs-up.
“Your father is the first person I actually knew who died,” Sara said, and she looked upset, like maybe I should apologize for it.
“Do you want to go somewhere quiet?” I said, having no such place in mind.
“Are you taking advantage of me?”
“What?”
“I start opening up to you and right away it’s let’s go somewhere quiet? What a perv.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought we were having a conversation and this place is getting kind of crowded—”
“Well, enjoy the party,” Sara said, and she turned away very dramatically, to walk as far from me as she possibly could while still staying in the same building. I didn’t want to, but I turned my head to the corner where my brothers and Simone stood, as a reflex. They all avoided my gaze and pretended to have been looking at something else.
The reason I wanted to forget about the father’s toothless period was that memories of his face at that time were too easy to summon when crying was required and tears were hard to come by. Not that crying was ever required of me, but I’d felt I had to cry at the funeral, and at least a bit every day for a month or so after the father died, in order to honor him, and so I’d started setting time aside to do that—when Simone was in the shower, for instance, and I had the bedroom to myself. I wanted to think about details I’d miss about the father, his voice, about how I’d never have a chance to make him proud, important things like that, but even though it all made me sad, it was never enough for tears to be produced and I had to revert to images of his looking stupid, like when he was missing his front teeth, or when he’d stepped in dog shit and hadn’t noticed and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. That worked every time, focusing on these moments when he’d looked weak. And even if I always felt better after crying, like I’d done my duty, I knew it wasn’t fair to him. It was the opposite of honoring him. That’s why, a few weeks earlier, I’d decided to push back the ready-to-cry images when they popped in my head, and I did it that day, when Sara told me about my dumb-looking father, and I’ve done it ever since. I’ve done it so diligently, actually, that when I started writing about my father’s teeth earlier, I thought I’d pushed the image back for so long that I’d managed to erase it completely from memory, but it came back within seconds, and with all of its original power, before I had time to decide whether I should be happy or disappointed about having let it go.
How to Behave in a Crowd Page 6