How to Behave in a Crowd

by Camille Bordas

  When we walked inside of Monte Viterbo, my mother’s heart must’ve broken a bit. The restaurant was two-thirds empty; there’d been no need for a reservation. We were all overdressed, the tablecloth was paper, and nothing on the menu cost more than 19.80 euros (the osso buco).

  “You heard good things about this place, honey?” my mother asked as we sat down.

  “I’ve seen professors come here on their lunch break,” Berenice said.

  “So it’s like a good neighborhood joint. A family kitchen.” My mother seemed reassured at the sound of her own words.

  “You lost an awful lot of weight, Dory.”

  I thought I had, but Berenice was the first to notice.

  “I liked your article,” I said.

  “Oh, did you?”

  Berenice looked relieved, like she’d expected me to say something about her article all along.

  “But I didn’t understand all of your dissertation,” I admitted. I’d read the whole of its 490 pages to our mother as well.

  “You shouldn’t have bothered reading that,” she said, “it’s all a bunch of malarkey anyway.”

  She smiled to change the subject and ordered some wine.

  “How’s your osso buco?” my mother asked the waiter, a sweaty round man in overalls.

  I wanted Berenice to ask me what I’d liked about her article, so I could prove to her that I’d understood it (in part), but she wasn’t in the mood for more Spanish golden age.

  “Get yourself a nice pepperoni pizza, Dory. You shouldn’t be losing weight at your age. Focus on growing some inches.”

  “It’s true he dropped a few pounds,” Leonard said. “What is it, Dory? You have a girl or something?”

  “Leave him alone,” Jeremie said.

  We ordered. Everyone talked about what they wanted to see in Paris the next day, before the train back home. I had no particular request. I trusted Leonard and Jeremie to come up with a nice little tour. Berenice had lived in the city for six years, but she didn’t have any suggestions to make and didn’t seem to know where anything was when Leonard suggested places. He stopped asking her for directions.

  Whenever she wasn’t being spoken to, Berenice looked as worried as she’d been before her defense, but you just had to say her name and she would look at you and glow. That’s how she’d always been. I used to think one of the two states of Berenice had to be fake, but I’d stopped wondering which.

  “What I really want to see is Berenice’s place,” Simone said. “I bet it’ll be in the future Paris guides.”

  “It’s not much of a place,” Berenice said. “It’s just a little room in an attic.”

  “You make a better puttanesca than this, Mom.”

  “I think the waiter wants to take you on a date, Ber,” Aurore said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He keeps calling you la bella donna, like the rest of us are turnip crates.”

  “His accent is terrible by the way. I bet he’s never even seen an Italian movie,” Simone said.

  “Well he’s just saying that because Mom must have told him it was a big day for me.”

  “I told him nothing.”

  “You never realize someone’s hitting on you before they write their number down in the palm of your hand anyway,” Aurore said.

  “In indelible Sharpie,” Simone added.

  We were sitting at a round table. When they all had their hair down like they did that night, my three sisters looked very much alike, as if my mother had only had one mold for girls. I didn’t think it was possible to compliment one of them without complimenting the other two. Us boys were all different shapes, different complexions and hair colors. Whenever we were all out together, I imagined we passed for our sisters’ dorky boyfriends.

  The next day, when we visited Berenice’s room, we had to take turns going in, it was so small. We formed a line outside the door, in the creaking hallway. I was last, and saw my mother and all my siblings come in and out of the room at three-minute intervals, like they were coming back ashore. The ceilings were low; Jeremie caught a cobweb in his hair. Simone wanted to pee but said it could wait when she realized the toilet at the end of the hall was shared with the rest of the people who lived on the floor.

  I went inside behind Berenice. We could all have stood in the room at once if she hadn’t erected a maze of book piles and stacks of paper that left you with only one possible path if you wanted to walk from the entrance to the bed and desk, or from the entrance to the kitchen. (The kitchen was a sink and a hot plate.) Some of the piles of books and papers were used as low tables. There were a few used tea bags in a porcelain plate on top of the pile of books by the bed, red-dotted cotton swabs and a nail polish bottle on top of another pile.

  “I tried wearing some for the defense,” Berenice said, glancing at the nail polish. “It looked like I’d scratched my way out of a rape attempt.”

  “You should’ve gone to a nail salon,” I said.

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “You have to have a conversation about your nails with the manicurist.”

  “I’m sure they’re always happy to talk about something else,” I said.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  I didn’t comment on her studio, as I was sure my mother and the others had asked all the questions and said all the things to say.

  “I’ll teach full-time soon, make actual money,” Berenice said after a minute. “Live in a real place.”

  “I like this one,” I said.

  “You don’t have to say that.”

  But I did like her room. I’d never been to Paris before, and I didn’t think much of it, but I told myself if I ever tried running away again, I would come here and hide on one of these attic floors. It seemed like you could live there undetected.

  When we came out of the room, Simone asked if there was a bus that went straight to Montmartre.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Berenice said.

  That Christmas, my mother got a gift for the house. What she called “gifts for the house” were just home appliances or things that would belong to all of us. I think it came from when the father had given her a sewing machine for her birthday and she’d said it wasn’t a gift for her but a gift for the house and it didn’t count. She’d always gotten books or jewelry on her birthdays after that.

  The gift was a computer. We had two computers in the house already, but one was Aurore’s and the other was Jeremie’s, and Aurore and Jeremie weren’t good at sharing. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t even sure what people used computers for.

  “This is the house computer,” my mother announced. “It will be in the living room for you to use in the afternoons only. Each of you gets half an hour a day on the Internet for fun or personal edification. If you need more Internet time, you’ll make a special request to me. The request has to be well motivated. Then, the computer will be available to type anything you want: schoolwork, your memoirs, a novel…you each get an hour a day. Here’s a logbook.”

  “Can we trade? I’m sure Dory won’t want most of his word-processing time,” Simone said.

  “How would that work?”

  “He gets my Internet half hour and I get half of his word-processing hour.”

  “I’m not really interested in an extra half hour of Internet,” I said.

  “You can do anything as long as it’s fair,” my mother said.

  My first Internet half hour came. I wrote down my name (actually, I wrote down “Izzie”) and the time in the logbook. I didn’t know what to search for. I wanted to be sure either it was really impressive and important or that I could make all traces of having searched for it disappear. I wanted to look up something neutral first, in case I didn’t find a way to erase it. I stared at the screen, and the small particles I could sometimes see floating inside my own eyes appeared. I typed

  little floating particles in the eyes

  I clicked on the first result but wasn’t too interested in knowing what those
particles actually were (people called them “eye floaters,” which sounded repulsive to me), so I only read one paragraph about them (pretty much everyone had them and they were innocuous, but the apparent incapacity to focus on them could become a source of obsession and increase anxiety in a depressed subject) and clicked the browser history tab. Simone had looked for different biographies (deleuze, kierkegaard, kurt cobain), Leonard for things I knew even less about (caporetto battle, mad dog theory). My search for little floating particles in the eyes was there at the top of the list, so all I had to do was check the box on its left and click “clear” to make it vanish. Then I searched:

  how does it feel to have a heart attack

  Then found a link to:

  famous heart attacks (Louis Armstrong, Charles Darwin, William Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Lucky Luciano, Augusto Pinochet, Pope John Paul I, Elvis Presley, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles)

  Then I searched:

  how many times a week should one shower when one is a boy

  what age can you start asking for blow jobs when you’re a boy

  isidore mazal (me) (there was no result)

  berenice mazal (links to her article, announcements of her PhD defense)

  jeremie mazal (a couple of pictures from the last conservatory concert, Jeremie on cello)

  aurore mazal (mentions of her participation on a panel titled “Pericles’s Funeral Oration: Inferences of Thucydides’s Underlying Politics”)

  leonard mazal (someone with the same name who’d been arrested for counting cards in a casino on the coast the previous March)

  simone mazal (mentions of Simone’s winning a local spelling contest three years in a row)

  denise galet (nothing)

  humorism

  I cleared all searches but the last one.

  Simone called for her next interview around the New Year.

  “We haven’t been very diligent,” she said in a way that blamed us both equally. “This biography isn’t gonna write itself.”

  She said I should really start carrying a notebook around at all times. She said one could never know when revealing moments would take place, and that such moments weren’t even necessarily revealing right away but would only show their relevance after the fact, in the grand scheme of her lifetime.

  “It sounds like I should take note of every little thing you do or say, then,” I said.

  Simone thought about it.

  “Definitely err on the side of taking too many notes, yes.”

  Because I hadn’t prepared any new questions that day, she said I could just listen to her think out loud and ask questions as they came.

  “The New Year is my least favorite holiday,” she began. “There’s never anything good on TV.”

  “You hate TV.”

  “I hate it when all it shows for entertainment is people with negative IQs counting down from ten. Otherwise, I find it pretty enlightening.”

  “You don’t find it enlightening. You always know what’s going to happen, in all the shows and all the movies we watch, before it happens.”

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy watching them. It’s good to know in advance, sometimes, what’s gonna happen. The surprise element is overrated, if you want to know what I think. Which I guess is the point of these recordings. Knowing what I think. As you grow up, you come to enjoy repetition. In certain things at least.”

  “You’re only eighteen months older than me.”

  “It’s a skill I like to practice, stating in advance, and in the right order, what will happen in shows and movies. It’s reassuring. It’s like a rehearsal.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the rules of fiction.”

  “Aristotle’s?”

  “Who else’s?”

  “Why do you need to rehearse them?”

  “ ’Cause they’re also the rules actual people live by. Not only Aristotle’s, but all the Hollywood subrules. People live life as a fiction. I’m sure I do, in a way, and you, for sure. You’d never have thought about running away from home if you hadn’t seen a bunch of movies about runaways, for instance.”

  “I never thought about running away from home.”

  “Right, Dory. Come on. I read your note. All I’m saying is that it’s normal. You feel like you have to do something prohibited in order for people to notice you, because you think, for some reason, that they don’t. Your behavior makes perfect sense.”

  “Does it?”

  “You’re a very coherent character.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “I can’t tell for sure that it’s a good thing in real life, but because you seem to be interested in things beyond your own life, yes, character coherence is a very good thing. It is the first step to predicting a movie plot.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, the tensions, the twists…they’re all there for the audience to get to know the characters, how they react in such and such a situation, almost like chemical elements, you know? You get to know the characters through the things they’re faced with and what their responses to these things are. And with that knowledge, you can pretty much infer what they’ll do. The coherence of a character is itself part of the plot, so nailing it down is the first step to plot predictability.”

  “But sometimes you know how a whole movie will unwind within the first few minutes. You don’t even need time to find out about the characters.”

  “That’s Hollywood movies. Hollywood scripts use telegraphed moves. What I call the big ropes. The big ropes, I don’t really know how to explain to you. They just start appearing to you, very obviously, once you’ve read enough or heard enough stories. Big ropes are culture. Because you don’t have much culture, though, you can’t see the big ropes yet, you’re still very detail oriented. That’s why you have problems predicting plots. No shame in that.”

  Silence. Then I resumed.

  “What do you do at recess?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “You said to ask questions as they came.”

  “I read, usually.”

  “On the playground?”

  “No, I stay in the classroom. I mean, if there’s no classroom change after recess. Otherwise I go read by the next classroom’s door.”

  “And no one makes fun of you?”

  “Of course people make fun of me.”

  “But you do it anyway.”

  “What else am I gonna do? Go down to the playground and make friends? By taking a side or another in a mindless conflict? Find out about their personalities?”

  “Do I have a personality?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sometimes I think I don’t. That other people do and I don’t. That they’re more real than me, or something.”

  “Are you depressed, Dory? What do you do at recess?”

  “This is not a book about me.”

  “Dory, I think you’re depressed and it concerns me.”

  “Why is Berenice your favorite of us all?”

  “It’s all the more worrying that testosterone is supposed to be a natural antidepressant. Your testosterone levels should be skyrocketing these days. Or soon. You shouldn’t have brain space left for sadness. Maybe you have a deficiency? Do you have armpit hair yet? I don’t even know.”

  “I’m twelve.”

  “You’re right, you’re right. Maybe the testosterone hasn’t kicked in yet. We shouldn’t worry.”

  “I don’t worry.”

  “And also: personality is overrated. I can only ever use the word as a joke. It’s a good thing to believe you don’t have a personality and a mistake to try to build one, I think. That’s how people become fake. That’s why I feel the opposite of you, see? That I’m real and everyone else on the playground is fake.”

  “But you have tons of personality.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “You pay no mind to what people say about you, you stick to your guns—”

  “
That’s not personality. That’s admitting to a personal preference. Enjoying books more than recess and acting on it.”

  “Why do you prefer Berenice to any of us?”

  “Do I?”

  “You said last time.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You changed your mind?”

  “No, I didn’t. I like her more because she’s brilliant.”

  “You guys all are.”

  “Yes, but she came first. Sometimes I wonder if we’re not just following her lead, if any of us would’ve skipped grades if she hadn’t skipped four, things like that. She set a strong example for all of us.”

  “I never skipped any grades.”

  “Well, you’ve always been slow. I mean, a slow learner. You know, all of us, we talked very early, but you, Mom was worried, you didn’t say a word until you were three years old, can you imagine that? But then it was all complete sentences. Right away, ‘Be careful on the ladder, Daddy,’ or something like that, you said. It was a relief for everybody.”

  “So you’re saying by the time I start college I’ll be as smart as you all were out of high school, except the normal age?”

  “I’m saying you’re not stupid.”

  “I didn’t think I was.”

  “Of course you think you are. I feel guilty about it sometimes. Like I’m neglecting you, or sending the wrong signals…we’re only a year and a half apart and I’m closer to college than you are to high school.”

  “I don’t take it personally, you know?”

  “I’m pretty sure I was an accidental baby,” Simone said there, with no particular emotion but after a longer silence. “Mom won’t admit it because she thinks it would hurt me or something, but I figured it out. I mean, I’m seven years younger than Jeremie. They’re all a year or two apart, and then here I come, seven years after the last one? It can’t have been part of the plan. And what happened with you I think is that Mom decided to have another baby right after me, so I would have company. The other ones were so much older, Mom must have thought we wouldn’t get along…I mean, for a while I thought Berenice was my mother, for Christ’s sake. And her and Aurore, you know, I feel like you and I are their niece and nephew sometimes. More than their siblings.”