The rest of the night I stuck with my mother. People walked along the timeline that showed Daphné’s development parallel to the world’s and made comments about what had gone on in their own lives at this or that time. We stayed by Daphné’s date of birth, at the end of the nineteenth century. It was the best spot to enjoy some “personal space,” my mother said (she was uncomfortable in crowds), because no one had memories or much to say about the end of the nineteenth century, and without an anecdote to share, people tended to go on their way. Some stopped a few seconds to say things like they didn’t have phones back then, or hot water, but that was pretty much it. I saw Simone leaning against a wall opposite us, trying to look lost in thought, but I knew she was really eavesdropping on the conversation between her French teacher, Mrs. Fondu, and someone I assumed to be Mr. Fondu. Simone looked bored by their exchange. She couldn’t help eavesdropping on people when she had the opportunity, but she was dissatisfied 95 percent of the time. “People have no storytelling skills whatsoever,” she’d complain, like it had been their role to entertain her without knowing and they had failed. Simone gave the Fondu couple a few more minutes to say something interesting and gave up. “People have no storytelling skills whatsoever,” she told my mother and me as she joined us in our corner.
We stood between one end of the stage and an exit door hidden in the side wall. I stared at the stage until the mayor appeared and said in many different ways what an honor it was to greet the state secretary for the elderly. The state secretary thanked the mayor but didn’t mention being honored. He gave a speech about how horrible it was to be old in general but how lucky we were, here in France, that, on average, our old people enjoyed healthier days than in other places, and also had more money in their pocket for buying power, which allowed them to be fuller members of our society. Then someone rolled Daphné onstage—she could still walk then, but probably too slowly for a crowd to bear—and she got up and another person lowered the microphone to her level. Daphné thanked all the classes and professors of Birch Elementary who’d set up the lovely timeline about her life. By that point, the secretary of state had already snuck out through the discreet exit by which we stood. A car was waiting for him in the parking lot, with the engine running.
The person who interviewed Daphné onstage was trying hard to act amazed by the timeline of her life without reminding her that death would be the next big step for her. He made it all about the past. There were questions about how the town had changed over the decades. About her favorite TV shows of all time, and he kept repeating how “of all time” was not an exaggeration since Daphné had been born before TV. He couldn’t curate the questions the audience would ask, though, and the first one was pretty straightforward.
“Are you afraid of death?” someone asked, and the interviewer stiffened and squinted and actually put his hand over his eyebrows to try to spot the person who’d dared to ask such a rude question.
“Of course I’m afraid,” Daphné said.
Everyone must’ve been hoping for a different answer because the crowd froze and ceased looking around to see what was being set on the buffet table to focus on Daphné instead.
“Fear of death is the only thing that doesn’t abandon you as you age,” Daphné insisted, humidifying her lips with her tongue every five seconds or so. “On the contrary, I would say. Death gets scarier every day. I’m so much more diminished now than even last year…this physical degradation…it’s all a preview, you know? And the movie doesn’t look good!”
There were a few forced laughs, but the couple closest to us got pissed. “Why is she saying this?” the man asked his wife, as if she’d been the one writing Daphné’s answers for her.
“Do you remember your mother?” someone else asked Daphné, and Daphné said it was a valid question, given her mother had been dead almost a hundred years.
“But I’m not senile yet,” she added. “Of course I remember my mother. I think about her every day, as all of us should think about our mothers every day, dead or alive.” The interviewer thought Daphné was done talking about her long-dead mother and got ready to take another question from the audience, but Daphné went on. “She was a very shy, very modest woman,” she said. “To the point that it could be painful for me. How she would always talk about us as little people. She never thought she was worthy of anything—even amidst her worst bouts of delirium, she believed she was persecuted by priests and vicars, and I remember thinking, Poor woman, poor woman. Even completely lost to paranoia, she can’t see herself as important enough for bishops or cardinals to bother. It was always lower clergy. Only lower clergy. The only ones who oppressed her were priests and vicars. Vicars and nuns. Only ever lower clergy. The lower clergy plagued her. Why them? Why not the Pope? If not the Pope, why not a bishop? Why not a cardinal? Why always lower clergy?”
I thought Daphné would repeat the words lower clergy until the end of time but she suddenly seemed to remember where she was and thanked us all for coming to her birthday party and announced it was time to eat and dance.
Denise and I were not in the same class that year, I think because I’d picked German as a second foreign language (the first foreign language was English for everyone) and she’d picked Chinese.
“My parents said it would be more useful to know Chinese,” she told me at recess the day school started, “for the future.” She said future as a joke word, with a little snarky laugh on the F. Denise’s nickname—I’m not sure she was aware of it—was “Sunshine.”
“They’re probably right about that,” I said. “I only picked German because I want to be a German teacher.”
“You do?”
“But aside from teaching German, I don’t know that knowing German is good for anything.”
“It’s such an unusual ambition.”
“What do you want to be?” I asked.
She knew I knew she wanted to be dead when she grew up, so she was free to invent something else.
“I’d like to have my own bookstore in Paris,” she said.
“That’s it? That would make you happy?”
“Who said anything about being happy?”
“I don’t know…you’re just so smart, I thought you’d want to be a doctor or something.”
“Doctors don’t know anything.”
One of the recess monitors interrupted us there to tell Denise feeding pigeons was not allowed on the school premises. She’d gathered a dozen pigeons at her feet, around her crumbled ten o’clock snack (I’d mixed some of mine in, too).
“I have special authorization,” Denise said.
“I don’t think we do that,” the monitor said.
“It’s tacit.”
“There’s no such thing as a tacit authorization,” the monitor said. “Tacit is only said about agreements.”
“Well then the principal and I have a tacit agreement,” Denise said. “And you’re wrong about tacit. It’s a far more malleable word than you think.”
The monitor stamped his foot and the pigeons flew away and then he left to forbid other kids from doing other things.
“You’d get along with my sister Simone,” I told Denise.
“I don’t get along with anyone.”
“She doesn’t either.”
The pigeons came back. A couple sparrows joined the feast and showed more audacity. They went for the crumbs that had fallen closest to our feet.
“Isn’t your sister in high school already?”
“But she’s only a year and a half older than us,” I said.
“That must suck for you.”
I looked at my watch, and at the birds again, and around the playground. I’d never understood recess, why it had to exist and be so long. I usually spent it alone in a staircase, pretending to be finishing some homework at the last minute, but that didn’t work on the first day of school. That’s why I’d gone out to sit with Denise beneath her poplar.
“Look at the new kids,” she said.
; Denise and I were only starting seventh grade, but it seemed she looked at the new fifth graders with a lifetime’s hindsight.
“This one came with porno mags and a bag of marbles. He didn’t know what kind of playground it would be.”
We looked for the versions of our former class’s leaders and assholes in the new batch of kids. It was hard to do. The first few days of junior high, kids kept a low profile. We didn’t admit it, but I think Denise and I both looked for new versions of ourselves, too. I didn’t spot a new Denise. I looked for the main characteristics: tired eyes; awkward posture; one more layer of clothes than necessary; a dry sadness, like all the tears had run out long ago. Denise was the saddest person I knew, but it didn’t seem like she could ever cry, whereas any other kid on the first day of school looked like you could shake a pond out of them if you tried for a minute. I guess that’s because Denise was actually more hopeless than sad. Those without expectations don’t find much to cry about.
For the new version of me, I tried to single out a kid who, were he to suddenly disappear from the playground, would go unnoticed. I realize it might sound a little dramatic to sum things up this way, but I really thought back then, and with no particular bitterness, that nothing would be disrupted if I were to disintegrate. I’d never been part of a group, or willing to join one (try and fail: that’s when you got singled out for loserdom), and I was fine with that. If you’re part of no group, you’re not really worth anyone’s while. You can be picked on for a minute, sure, if you encroach on someone else’s territory by accident, but if you withdraw right away, no contest, you’re all right again. In the end, everyone knows making fun of nobodies is too easy. I didn’t find a new version of myself in the new kids, though, because trying to spot an unnoticeable kid is just as hard for another unnoticeable kid as it is for regular people. It’s not like we can “see each other” or whatever. And even if we did, we would probably not want to hang out together and double up on our transparency. Only people like Denise would want to get sucked into that.
I started reading rather than talking my mother to sleep—I didn’t have many stories of my own. I’d never been a big reader before, I only ever went through what school assigned, but to my mother I started reading anything: novels, poetry, biographies. I even read from my schoolbooks and German vocabulary lists the nights before tests. When Berenice’s first article got published, I read her that. That I actually read several times, because I wanted to understand it. My mother said she wanted to understand it, too, but night after night she fell asleep halfway through.
“Should we pick up where we left off?” I’d ask, but she always wanted to go back to the introduction to make sure she wouldn’t miss a step of Berenice’s reasoning.
One of the keywords on top of the article was humorism, which I’d assumed to be a kind of humor in the Spanish golden age (Berenice’s area of expertise) but wasn’t. Humorism was something doctors had believed in in the old days.
“Doctors from the old days thought the human body was composed of four different fluids,” I summed up one night, when my mother realized that if we kept going back to the beginning of the article, she’d never hear the end of it. “Blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. They believed that every single person in the world was born with more or less of each, and that the one fluid they were born with in surplus determined their temperament.”
“That sounds familiar,” my mother said.
“One Spanish doctor from the golden age, Huarte, even said that the kind of fluid the person had in excess, combined with the one type of intelligence he was born with, determined what the person would be good at in life and what kind of job he should look for.”
“What are the types of intelligence again?”
“Reasoning, memory, and imagination,” I said. “And you can only be good at one.”
“I know which one you’re best at, Dory.”
A great memory sounded like the most useless of the three skills listed by the Spanish doctor from the golden age.
“I should ask Berenice if she knows what kind of jobs are suitable for people with good memories,” I said.
“I’m sure memory’s the best for those who want to become German teachers,” my mother said encouragingly.
I’d read the beginning of Berenice’s article so many times, with the descriptions of each temper associated with each fluid, that I was starting to think I could’ve been a great doctor in the Spanish golden age. Diagnosing people back then seemed easy. I could tell that Simone, for instance, had a surplus of yellow bile: she was ambitious and short-tempered. Leonard was all blood. It made me sad to admit it, but I was obviously phlegmatic. Phlegm and memory, the most boring of all combinations, I thought. Being black biled and melancholic just sounded better. Certain melancholics had a special type of black bile that the Spanish doctor called “burned,” and it made them particularly smart, he said, so smart in fact that they were the only people to be good at two things instead of only one. “Those whose black bile has been burned,” Berenice quoted, “have both a powerful understanding and a vivid imagination. […]Although they lack memory, their imagination itself serves as memory and reminiscence.” I thought this had to be a really nice thing, to have an imagination so strong it could serve as your past.
“But then if imagination replaced your memory, you wouldn’t care about us,” my mother said. “You would imagine a better family and forget about this one entirely.”
I tried to imagine a better family for a minute, or even just another family. I tried to replace Simone with Rose as a sister, see how that would work, but my near-perfect memory of Rose’s face kept shifting into Simone’s features the second I thought the word sister.
“Then I guess it’s lucky I have no imagination at all,” I said.
The other keywords at the top of Berenice’s article were Juan Huarte, Cervantes, Don Quixote, ingenium, homeopathy, Siglo de Oro, and melancholy.
My first German teacher was Mr. Coffin. We had to call him Herr Coffin. He would only talk to us in German, no exceptions, and that’s why I learned the words Ruhe bitte and zum Beispiel first. After that, the first words I remember learning were Dichtung, Leiden, and Briefe, as we mainly studied poems and poets with Herr Coffin.
The school library only had a handful of books in German, young adult for the most part and a couple Kafkas in bilingual editions, and I borrowed them all to read to my mother at night. At first, I’d bring two books to my mother’s bed, the one I was currently reading to her in French and the one I’d borrowed in German to read for myself after she’d fallen asleep, but one night she asked why it was that I never read to her in German and when I said it was because she didn’t understand German she said it didn’t matter.
Berenice defended her PhD in Paris, on the top floor of her university (a spectacular building, my mother noted), in a room made almost entirely of windows on its east and west sides. Berenice and the five professors in her jury talked about her work for so long that I had time to watch the sun go from one set of windows to the other.
After the defense, we went to Monte Viterbo, an Italian restaurant of Berenice’s choosing. As a family, we only ever went to restaurants when we absolutely had to, like when we took road trips or after funerals. My mother was against families eating in restaurants. Restaurants, she said, were for lovers and friends and, if really needed, business lunches. We were staying in Paris that night, though—we’d arrived early morning by the Corail train—and Berenice didn’t have much of a kitchen in her attic room, let alone space to have us all for dinner.
Weeks earlier, my mother had started brainstorming with us about what would make Berenice happiest on her big day. “An original edition of something,” Aurore had said—but Berenice didn’t care much for precious things. “A nice fountain pen”—but Berenice was very public about preferring disposable Paper Mates. She didn’t care for clothes or makeup or jewelry. “A round-trip to Madrid?”—but she had no boyfriend or frien
d to go there with and would only take the opportunity to work some more. Finally, my mother resolved to call Berenice and ask her directly. It seemed all Berenice wanted was for us to be together and “have a good time.” My mother encouraged her to recommend the best restaurant she could think of. “Something fancy,” I heard her say on the phone, “something extravagant. Don’t even think about cost.” Berenice called the next day to say we’d go to Monte Viterbo, and my mother got really excited about the name. She started picturing a Roman villa at sunset, elegant waiters carrying sun-gorged vegetables and tender meats and chilled white wine. She took me shopping for a new dress for herself and a button-down for me. When the salesgirl asked her if she needed the dress for a specific occasion, my mother said her daughter was defending her PhD, and I thought this was going to confuse the girl more than anything, but she didn’t raise an eyebrow. “What will your daughter be wearing?” she said. She just wanted to make sure my mother and Berenice would look good together. That was her job.
How to Behave in a Crowd Page 7