“I know what you mean.”
“And my whole life I’ve been aiming at closing the gap between them and me instead of building something with you. I turn to the girls and Leonard and Jeremie for validation, I try to impress them, but you, I’m not even nice to you, I never ask what’s on your mind. I take it for granted that you’re gonna love me no matter what. I don’t do anything for it.”
“Is that why you gave me your biography to write?”
“I don’t know. It’s a way to hang out, I guess.”
“We already share a bedroom. I think we hang out enough.”
“But we’re not close. I’m not close to the others, either, but at least I know what’s on their minds a bit. What they read. What they think about. But I don’t know what goes on in your head. What’s interesting to you, Dory?”
“Well, what do you want to know?”
“I don’t want to know anything right this minute. I mean, it’s not that I’m not interested, but I was just talking about how I was less close to you than the others, you know, for the record.”
“Oh, of course.”
“I think, in a way, if this is stated early on, it will make readers consider your book as objective as it can be, you know, but still coming from a family member. From someone who saw me grow.”
“What will you be famous for again?”
“It’s hard to tell yet. This, what we’re doing, will be a precious document on my formative years. It will make it all look like everything was written and led to the Simone I’ll have become, but for now, we have to abide some mystery.”
Simone paused there and you can hear her crack her knuckles one by one on the tape.
“I think several types of fame will add up, though,” she said.
“Do you think we’ll be closer then?”
“I hope so.”
I feel bad admitting this but sometimes, when I transcribed Simone’s interviews on the computer, I hoped that the father had had other kids, elsewhere, who would come and find me. I guess maybe that was all part of my character coherence.
The rest of winter break, we watched the Martial Arts Channel, at first only because it had no commercials, but then because my siblings agreed they liked Viet Vo Dao, the Vietnamese martial art. It was impossible to know when they’d show Viet Vo Dao, though, on the Martial Arts Channel. I don’t believe they had a schedule. I don’t believe we were supposed to pick up the Martial Arts Channel either—we’d never had premium cable. It was an oversight by the cable company, we thought, and there was an unspoken fear, every afternoon, when Leonard turned the TV on, that they would have realized their mistake and taken the Martial Arts Channel away from us.
“We have to enjoy it while it lasts,” Leonard would say.
I personally didn’t understand the rules of Viet Vo Dao, or any other martial art we watched while waiting for Viet Vo Dao to show, and watching sports, in general, made me sad. Not because I wasn’t good at sports, but because it seemed so useless to be good at sports that watching people devote their whole lives to them felt wasteful. I thought they, the sportsmen, would regret having sacrificed everything to sports, later in life, and that in the meantime, we, the audience, were just taking advantage of their not having figured this out, using their wasted years for our own entertainment.
I don’t think my siblings really understood the rules of Viet Vo Dao either, because they never made comments on anything but the contestants’ faces or what were assumed to be their life stories. They tried, like they did with fictional shows, to invent dialogue and a backstory for them, but I never found it too convincing.
“I want to come on your face,” Leonard said whenever a fighter wrapped his legs around an opponent’s neck (“the scissors,” apparently a classic Viet Vo Dao move), but I didn’t think it was funny at all. The fighters always changed and Simone and Jeremie tried to connect them to one another in different storylines, but it was far-fetched and there was no real follow-up.
My siblings always cheered for the dorkiest-looking contestant. Sometimes, it was hard to tell which one it was.
I missed the spy show. I wanted to try predicting the plot now that Simone had given me an angle of approach. They’d stopped airing it.
On the first anniversary of the father’s death, no one mentioned it. Only Rose, whose letter arrived on the exact day.
Dear Isidor
I hope you are well. I think about you today as the first aniversary of your father’s death aproches near. I will remember my hole life sitting there at dinner with you guys and finding out about your father being dead. I have never met him, but I wish I had, because he and your mom made a really nice little family, all of you, and so I imagine he was a very good man. I hope I will see you again one day. I’m sending these dried roses petals for your father’s grave. Please go disperse them on it with my respects.
Rose
I waited for it to be the weekend so I could visit the father’s grave. I didn’t tell anyone I was going, because it felt like they’d all forgotten about it and I didn’t want to be the one to bring back bad memories. When I arrived though, the stone was covered with things I could link back to each one of my siblings (small evergreen = Leonard, bunch of wildflowers = Simone, a candle = Aurore, white pebbles from our driveway = Jeremie; the orchid had to be from our mother). I assumed they’d all come there in secret and each on their own.
On my fifth attempt to run away, I was on a train to Paris before the school day had even started. I’d looked for train schedules on the Internet, erased my search, made up a lie about having to go to school early to help Herr Coffin set up a presentation on his computer (how my mother managed to believe I could be of technical help to anyone, or what she thought a German teacher would want to present on a screen, I don’t know), and packed a few clothes instead of schoolbooks. It was the first time I tried running away in the morning. I’d never even considered running away as a possible morning activity before a gang of birds had settled in our cherry tree a couple weeks before and made the days a little longer. Their arrival hadn’t been progressive: one morning, there was silence, the next, Simone and I were woken up at five a.m. by hundreds and hundreds of peeps and chirps overlapping, like the politicians speaking in Parliament on TV. Simone found it cute at first, but a few days into it, waking up at five got to her.
“What do birds have to say in the morning that is so fucking important anyway?” she asked one day at the breakfast table, where no one usually spoke.
“They’re just welcoming the new dawn,” our mother said.
Our mother liked the bird development. She’d started believing one was supposed to get up this early.
“You’re way too cheerful about this,” Simone said.
“I’m cheerful because instead of falling back asleep after the birds wake me, I do exactly as they do and get started with my day. By the time you guys emerge, I’ve showered, read yesterday’s paper, done laundry, cooked the night’s meal…” She pointed at a pot on the stove, beef stew, from the smell of it. “All I have to do tonight is reheat some food I just made. I could even read today’s paper if I wanted!”
“It smells of dinner at the breakfast table now,” Simone said. “That’s not right.”
“Poor little thing.”
“The birds made you too positive, Mom.”
“It’s a godsend, these extra hours. It’s a full little day inside of a day.”
“What are you even talking about?” Aurore asked.
Aurore and the boys were not bothered by the birds. Their bedrooms were on the other side of the house, the street side. Simone, my mother, and I, we overlooked the yard, and the tree was right there outside our windows (in the summer, you just had to open the window to grab a pair of cherries).
“We’re talking about what birds have to talk about that can’t wait beyond five a.m. but loses its urgency after a few minutes.”
“Is this a riddle?” Aurore asked.
“Maybe th
ey’re just making sure everyone survived the night,” I said, “taking attendance.”
“Sweetheart, that’s very interesting,” our mother said. No one else thought it was.
“Not everything in the world is modeled on a school day, Dory,” Simone said.
The next morning, I got up with the birds. Unlike our mother, though, I had nothing to do. I got so bored I took two showers. I watched TV, which is something I’d only ever done in the morning when sick. I brushed the stain on the couch. I watched the six a.m. news for the first time in my life. The anchor took regular sips from his coffee cup and looked so unconcerned about the news of the day, it almost seemed like he thought I was the only one watching. I had the lights off in the living room, so the blue square of our TV was reflected in the bay window behind the couch, and it was still so dark out I could’ve watched the reflection instead of the TV and not missed much. Around seven fifteen, light started to wrap the room. The others got up and didn’t say a word at the breakfast table, which I could see and hear from the couch. I watched a cartoon where all the objects in a family’s house came to life at night, while the family was asleep. I was seeing no positive effect in getting up as early as I had.
The main difference between that morning and any other revealed itself when I got out of the house: for once, I was fully awake on my way to school. I saw everything with more detail, like sometimes happens for a minute on winter mornings. I think the cold does that. The lines around things were crisper, the lines around people, between people and things; the colors were sure of themselves. I understood the morning hours could be of use when I reached the school’s gate and felt like running away right then, like I had the energy for it—the desire to run away was usually stronger at recess or at night. I didn’t have a plan, though, so I just went to school. But that night, I stole all of Simone’s pocket money. She had a lot, because she never spent any of her allowance. All she ever wanted was books, and books, no matter how many, had always, as a rule, been my parents’ treat. I’d always thought of the rule as not only unfair—I personally never wanted more books than what school prescribed and didn’t get more money for it—but also senseless, since my mother always complained that my siblings studied too much while she kept feeding them new material to parse. Anyway, Simone never used her money. She just piled it someplace. I know it seems like I’m trying to get myself off the hook here and make what I did sound okay, but she’d told me herself where she kept her dough, in case she died, she’d said (the fact she needed to say it confirmed she hadn’t written a proper will), because she wanted me to have it. I know she hadn’t died, but I was planning on disappearing and so in a way we would soon be dead to one another. I guess it was a stretch. But the next morning, I bought a ticket to Paris with Simone’s money and made it to Berenice’s old building before it was time for recess back home.
Berenice was supposed to have moved out of her attic room to a real apartment close to the university where she now taught. When we’d visited, she’d said that most of her floor was uninhabited, so I’d figured it would be a nice little spot for me to start an escape, figure out my next moves. And if someone asked, I just had to say my sister was letting me stay in her studio. By the time they’d check, I’d be somewhere else. Except Berenice hadn’t moved out and when I pushed open the door to what I thought was her former room, she was there on her bed, interlocked with an old guy. The old guy looked like any one of the old guys who had sat on Berenice’s dissertation defense jury. That day, I’d only been able to tell one professor from another by their clothes, but this one was naked, so I couldn’t associate him with a name. I’d never seen a naked man. Women, only in pictures. I don’t know if they’d had sex already or were just thinking about it. Berenice took a sheet to cover herself and told the old guy to go home, that she would call him. She didn’t look surprised to see me. The old guy got up and was taller than I’d imagined, though I wasn’t even aware I’d imagined things about his height. You don’t see old men over six feet that often. I think maybe tall people don’t live that long. He was close to six foot three, I’d say; he had to crouch down quite a lot to avoid banging the ceiling with his head. It was embarrassing to see him put his pants on, so I waited in the hallway. As far as I know—the walls were thin—Berenice and the old guy exchanged no words. He came out a minute later and acted as if I hadn’t just been in there.
“Oh, hello there,” he said. He said I had to be Berenice’s brother, with these cheekbones.
“And you must be her PhD adviser,” I said. I thought it would be polite to at least try to place him, but he stiffened.
“Berenice is not a student anymore,” he said.
Berenice was all dressed when I came back in, and she’d made the bed, opened the skylight. The water was running undisturbed on a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, like it could take care of dried sauce and tea stains without Berenice’s intervention. She was stacking books back on shelves at the other end of the room.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” she said. I’m sure she had a specific detail in mind.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve heard of sex before.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“I’m twelve and a half,” I said, but she didn’t seem to think that made it okay. She blew a cloud of dust off a bottle of perfume and sprayed some in the room.
“Do you want some coffee?” she said. She kept not asking what I was doing in her apartment.
“Sure,” I said.
“Let’s get out of here then.” She went over to the sink and turned the water off. “Dishes are not done yet.”
We walked to the closest café and sat at a table outside, on a narrow sidewalk.
“Don’t tell Mom I didn’t move out,” she said, after she ordered her coffee a certain way and I asked for the same thing without knowing what it meant—I’d never had coffee before anyway. “She thinks I have this nice little apartment in the Fifth.”
“Do you not have a job either?” I asked.
“Not as good of a job as I told her, no. Not at the moment.”
The coffees got to our table and Berenice sipped hers in silence, the saucer held near her heart, the cup moving from there to the lips, her eyes looking nowhere in particular.
“I don’t like teaching,” she said after a while. “I don’t like people. Young people especially.”
“You don’t have to like them to teach them,” I said. “I don’t think any of my teachers like me.”
“I sort of insulted one of my students,” Berenice interrupted me. “I’ve been suspended.”
I said nothing.
“It will be fine though,” she said. “It was nothing too bad. I’m just not sure teaching is for me at all.”
Her phone rang. She stared at it until it was done ringing and put it back in her pocket.
“I don’t like to pretend I’m interested in their future, you know?” Berenice went on. “I’m barely interested in my own already.” Her eyes swelled with tears, but nothing came out. I didn’t know whether to acknowledge this or not. I’d been hoping that I could somehow go on with my escape after coffee, but I understood then that I would have to take care of Berenice and go home.
“Are you working on new articles?” I asked. “I really liked the one you wrote about humorism, you know?”
“You’re the sweetest,” Berenice said, and her eyes deflated a bit.
“It made me want to live in the sixteenth century,” I said.
“How so?”
“Well, this doctor you write about, who thought he could examine you and determine what you should do in life…I don’t know. It sounded easier back then.”
“Not having a choice, you mean?”
Her phone rang a second time. She didn’t look at it but let it be done before she spoke again.
“You might be right,” she said. “I would definitely want to hear what he had to say about me.”
Maybe Berenice believed I’d come all thi
s way to check on her.
Around twelve thirty, the waiter set the tables for lunch and told us the café was reserved for diners for the next couple of hours. If we didn’t plan to eat there, we had to leave and make room for them, even though no one had yet arrived.
“Let’s just walk,” Berenice said, not even asking if I was hungry.
She had no destination in mind but walked so fast it was hard to have a conversation. No one on the street looked too happy. We passed a few arguments, stood beside withdrawn women at intersections.
“Why did you insult your student?” I asked. We’d had to stop for the green light.
“She was being difficult,” Berenice said. “She wanted me to agree with her that Don Quixote was impotent, and that that was really why he was so melancholy and saw windmills—which she claimed were evocative of erect penises—as monsters. I just couldn’t get behind that.”
“What did you call her?”
“I told her just because no one could get it up for her didn’t mean the great classics needed a new reading. Something like that. Maybe I said a new interpretation.”
“I guess the main problem was not with that part anyway.”
“I thought it was funny.”
“It is,” I said.
“But no one laughed. And then I realized that I was in class. And that I was teaching that class.”
“I’m sure Simone and the boys will find it funny.”
The lights changed, but Berenice didn’t start walking. She turned to me and made me promise not to tell anyone she’d been suspended, and promise again not to say anything about the apartment.
“I know Mom can’t stand the thought of me living in that room, but I like it. It’s so small…it’s almost like living with someone. You hear the neighbors get up and use the bathroom on the landing at night, the shower early in the morning…it’s like at home, you know?”
How to Behave in a Crowd Page 9