How to Behave in a Crowd

by Camille Bordas

  We walked some more, maybe for an hour, until Berenice stopped to look at a map on a board by a subway station. She had no idea where we were, and I could tell that looking at the map didn’t help.

  “Let me see,” I said. I was good with maps. We’d walked through five different arrondissements. As I was figuring out the quickest way to get my sister home, I noticed someone had written “STOP loneliness!” in silver marker on the side of the frame. The writer had run out of room on the right so the latter half of the “loneliness!” was crowded, its letters progressively slimming. Just beneath the message was a phone number.

  “Another isolated initiative,” Berenice said.

  She was exhausted when we got back to her place. I did the dishes and cooked elbow pasta with butter for her while she lay down in bed. When I brought her the bowl of pasta, she was half-asleep and mumbling about how I shouldn’t do the dishes and cook elbows with butter for her.

  “Berenice,” I said. “It’s too late now, food is ready.”

  I wanted to ask her for money, to replace Simone’s. I still had some for the train home, but that would’ve left me with only five or six bills to put back in Simone’s hiding place where there’d previously been fifteen.

  “I’d like to go home with you, Dory,” Berenice said faintly. “I miss home. When we all slept in the same room, remember?”

  “Well, you’ll come visit for Aurore’s PhD defense, right?” I asked.

  “Of course I will.”

  We were both whispering. The pasta was getting cold on the nightstand. It didn’t look worth keeping Berenice awake anymore. I waited ’til her breathing steadied to pull the blanket up to her chin. The old guy from earlier had dropped his wallet at the foot of the bed. At first, I only wanted to take exactly the amount of money that I needed, but then I remembered he hadn’t been too nice to me and took the whole thing.

  “Where were you on Friday?” Denise asked. “I didn’t see you outside at recess, and you weren’t here either.”

  “Here” was the narrow staircase at the end of the hallway, past the restrooms, where I spent recess most of the time. The staircase led nowhere, and no one ever hung out there but me, and Denise sometimes, when it was too cold or too hot outside. I’d sit at the top of the stairs, she at the bottom. We usually wouldn’t talk.

  “I was in Paris,” I said.

  I knew she wouldn’t repeat that. She had no one to repeat things to but me.

  “To see your sister?”

  “Among other things.”

  Denise went up the first couple of steps to where she liked to sit, but she remained standing.

  “Did you check the door yet?”

  The staircase that led nowhere didn’t actually lead nowhere. I guess there isn’t anywhere that really leads nowhere. What it led to was a single door (no landing) that was locked at all times—I checked every recess.

  “I did,” I said. “It’s locked.”

  “What do you think is behind there anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I want it to be the principal’s secret apartment. Or like, an apartment where the principal tells kids who have problems at home to stay for a while, you know, time to straighten things out. Or an apartment where he hides the illegal ones. And it has to be kept secret because otherwise all the kids would pretend to have problems at home or to be illegal just to stay there in the hidden apartment, because it has a big TV and a queen-size bed and a mini-fridge, and no one ever bothers them.”

  “Well, they would still have to go to school, which is the biggest bummer,” Denise said.

  “Maybe they wouldn’t, though. Maybe they would just stay in and hear us all scream at recess from their beds and think about how lucky they were to have problems at home.”

  I pictured myself in the hidden apartment at the center of the school. I checked the door again.

  “Well I think it’s the broom closet,” Denise said. “For the cleaning guy.”

  “Did you see him come out of there or something?”

  “Why? Have you seen illegal kids go in? I’m just guessing is all.”

  “Maybe it’s his apartment. The cleaning guy’s.”

  “Why do you want it to be an apartment so bad? It would be a lousy one anyway. Think about it: no windows. We can’t see windows from the courtyard that match that spot in the building.”

  “But maybe the door opens on more stairs, and these stairs go up to the last floor of the school, where no one knows what’s there either. The last floor has windows. Could be a top-floor apartment.”

  Denise thought about it.

  “I guess it could,” she said.

  “Plus,” I said, “I don’t think it’s very practical to have a broom closet at the top of a flight of stairs. It doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I’ve never been inside an apartment,” Denise said. “Everyone has houses around here. So boring.”

  “Whose house have you been to?” I asked.

  “Why would I go to anyone’s house?” she said.

  “I don’t know, you just said that…”

  “No one ever invites me to their houses. I’m not complaining, by the way, just saying.”

  “No one ever invites me either,” I said.

  “Sara Catalano said you came to her house once.”

  “Sara talks about me?”

  “She said you came to her house once. That you were in love with her or something.”

  “Did she say anything more about it?”

  “No.”

  Denise was lying about that. No girl just talked about how a guy was in love with her and didn’t elaborate on how it made her feel.

  “Well, that was over a year ago,” I said. “I don’t love Sara anymore.”

  “Oh no?” Denise didn’t believe me. “I thought you were the one who dropped anonymous flowers and gifts at her house over the weekend. She talked about it all morning between classes. How she got Chanel No. 5 on her front porch, and a Hermès scarf, and a bunch of wildflowers from the park. From an anonymous admirer.”

  “Anonymous could be anyone,” I said.

  I’d spent half the money in Berenice’s lover’s wallet on those gifts.

  “Plus, I don’t have that kind of money,” I added. “You know how much Chanel and Hermès cost?”

  “I bet you know exactly how much,” Denise said.

  “I have many sisters,” I said. “There are women’s magazines at home. I know the prices.”

  There had never been a women’s magazine at home, but I had seen a few at the town’s library—a homeless guy who hung out there always had a pile of them on his table and had once lectured me about them. They told you what women really wanted (Hermès and Chanel) while letting you know about what women thought they wanted (to have opinions about culture, to be outraged by the condition of women worldwide). “See,” he’d told me, “women want to be beautiful. Those who are not like to do everything they can to feel that they are. And those for whom the situation is hopeless like to see pictures of beautiful women so that they can criticize society’s objectification of women. These magazines win them all over.” Also, he’d told me that the main perk of women’s magazines was the perfume samples hidden underneath the glossy perfume ads: he could pamper himself for free before a date.

  “Well if the gifts didn’t come from you,” Denise said, “you won’t be too sad to know that Sara thought they were old-women stuff and gave them to her mother.”

  “She can give them to her dog, for all I care,” I lied.

  “Her dog died,” Denise said.

  “How?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “She loved her dog.”

  “Honestly, I don’t think the dog died. I think her parents abandoned the dog on the side of the road before Christmas because they couldn’t find anyone to take care of him while they were away skiing and Sara is too ashamed to admit it.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

 
; “It’s something people do. It’s something people do to their dogs that dogs should do to people.”

  “But people would find their way back home,” I said. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “You always take things very literally, don’t you?” Denise said.

  “I do? I try not to.”

  “Or maybe I always speak too metaphorically…” Denise said. “I don’t even like dogs.”

  The end-of-recess bell rang and Denise didn’t move from the bottom of the stairs right away as she usually did. She waited for me to come down. She eyed the door at the top of the stairs again and said, “Don’t you think, if this was really an apartment for troubled kids, that they would’ve offered to let me stay there by now?”

  I looked at the door, as if someone were projecting my answer on it.

  “Maybe they did, but it’s a secret apartment and you’re not allowed to tell anyone,” I said.

  “But I would tell you,” Denise said.

  My mother eventually heard from the principal’s office and was waiting for me on the couch. She was only pretending to be upset, I thought—she’d been waiting for years to give one of us the line about school’s being important—“What about your future?” etc. It had been a part of parenting she felt my siblings had taken from her. She’d once admitted having been jealous of other parents in the past, when we were in middle school and she came to pick us up. Other mothers complained about their kids’ spending too much time with their friends in the park, always trying to buy a few minutes on the curfew, not studying enough, and my mother was the only person she knew to have the opposite problem. She didn’t want us to be uncivil or dumb, but she’d’ve been happy, she’d said, to hear from the principal once, only once, about one of us picking a fight, maybe, or having insulted another kid (who deserved it, she’d specified), just to make sure we were capable of disobedience.

  “Why did you miss school last week?” she asked me, incapable of concealing her excitement.

  “Heartbreak,” I said, thinking at once that no one would ever reply “heartbreak” right away if it were true. My mother bought it and frowned. I was depriving her of her well-rehearsed speech again.

  “Heartbreak?” she said. “Who’s the little snot?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  This concerned her. She got up to face me and I started looking at my shoes. If she wasn’t able to make eye contact, I wouldn’t be trapped into making up details.

  “But you’re better now?” she half asserted/half asked after a minute. I nodded.

  “I’m sorry I skipped school,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “You know you can talk to me about heartache anytime, right?”

  “I know I can talk to you,” I said, but I knew I’d never want to.

  “Good.”

  “And you know you can talk to me too, right?”

  My mother’s offer to be my confidant having slightly repulsed me, I had no idea why I reciprocated it.

  “Why would I want to discuss heartache with you, Dory?” my mother asked. “What heartache, anyway?”

  “Dad?” I tried.

  Because we never talked about the father—the fact that he was dead, the fact that he’d once been alive—saying the word dad itself felt out of place, or like I might’ve used it wrong.

  “That’s not heartache, honey, that’s grief,” my mother said.

  She sounded as uncomfortable with grief as I’d been with dad. We were only testing out the words for now, each making sure the other one was okay with dad and grief before we went any farther. Dad and grief only being code words at that point, we could still change the subject entirely and retreat without too much damage or consequence.

  “Will you want a new boyfriend, one day?” I asked. I didn’t want to have that conversation but I wanted to have had it.

  My mother raised her eyes to the ceiling. I’d said something stupid.

  “I’m too old, Dory. Boyfriends are for young women.”

  I didn’t know how old my mother was exactly, so I didn’t argue.

  “What about a husband, then?”

  “What’s the difference? A husband needs to meet his wife when she’s young, too. That’s how a marriage lasts. The man has to be able, years into it, to cling to memories of a prettier, more fun woman. Weigh them against the daily annoyances and pregnancy stretch marks.”

  “You’re still pretty,” I said, though about that, I didn’t exactly know either.

  “It’s your memories with the person that become your love for the person, you know? And building memories takes time. A lot of time, actually. I don’t think I can do it again. I don’t believe I have enough time left to do it again.” It sounded like she might have had a rehearsed speech about love as well. “When people talk about love, Dory, they call it love because it is a festive word, like champagne. You hear the cork pop just saying champagne. But what they’re really talking about when they say love is attachment, ties, which are, admittedly, less glamorous words. And when they say you only love once,” she went on, “they don’t mean it in a cheesy romantic way or anything, you know? It’s very practical, in fact: there is no time in life to get to really know and…tie yourself to more than one person.”

  “That’s a lot of pressure,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “That you only have time in life to love one person. What if you set your mind on the wrong one and waste years on her?”

  “Well, then you’re fucked,” my mother said.

  I sat on the couch and started brushing the stain, which I’d refrained from doing in front of anyone for months.

  “Don’t worry, my Dory,” my mother said, sitting on the armrest beside me. “You have plenty of time ahead. You will learn to recognize the girl for you.”

  I wasn’t worried about girls. I didn’t want to be the last one to live here with my mother was all. Aurore was about done with her dissertation. Who knew where she would teach next year? Leonard maybe had a year left on his, Jeremie was about to be done with his master’s, and Simone only had a few months of high school left. Soon they’d all be gone, and I’d be stuck here, unable to ever move out and leave my mother alone.

  “You’re not even gonna try to fall in love again?” I asked. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be love exactly but…companionship?”

  “Companionship?” my mother said. She repeated the word twice more, putting the stress on pan the first time and then on ship the second. “Where the hell does a child learn the word companionship nowadays? Is this the moment where you tell me I should post an ad on the Internet and seek recently widowed men?”

  I hadn’t thought about it.

  “What would be wrong with that?” I said.

  “Well, I would have to hear everything about the dead first wife, for starters—and the romanticized version, of course, how she was when she was young and pretty—”

  “But then you could talk about the father as well.”

  “No man wants to hear about his woman’s exes.”

  “Do women want to?”

  “Of course not. But they can manage, so it’s different.”

  “What about the butcher?” The butcher had gotten divorced a few months before. “You’ve known him awhile, you have a few memories together already…it wouldn’t be starting from scratch.”

  It took a little bit out of me to suggest the butcher. He’d behaved with dignity since the father had died, true, he’d put the dirty jokes on hold some, but still: I didn’t think he was a good match for our family. My mother’s only reaction to the butcher idea anyway was to shake her head no until I said something else. She wasn’t going to help me help her be less lonely, I thought. The father’s having died had provided her with an irrefutable excuse to give up on men.

  “Maybe you’re aiming too high,” I said. “Maybe you should start with just building a couple of good memories with new people, you know, in a nonromantic way. See what each day bri
ngs.”

  “The memories you make as you get older,” my mother said, “they’re not as bright, you know? They’re more like memos. They have a certain flatness. And a veil.”

  “A veil of what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know…a veil,” she said, and she slid a flat hand through the air in front of her face to emphasize veil. “You’ll see.”

  For a while, we remained silent on the couch, me brushing the stain now and then, but without conviction. I didn’t know whether the conversation was over or not. I knew if we let too much time pass without reviving the important words we’d used so far, they would lose their charge and not come up again for a very long time. I looked for things to say about the father before the time to talk about him was up, but all I could think of was that I missed him, and it seemed too obvious and useless a statement—one there was nothing to reply to.

  Before my sixth attempt, I pulled a map of Rose’s neighborhood from the Internet and drew it on a piece of paper. There was no direct train to where she lived, so I took the same morning train to Paris I’d taken before, and from there hopped another to Rose’s town. There had been bombings and bombing attempts in several European cities over the past few months, and I noticed they’d replaced all the opaque garbage cans in and around the train stations with metallic structures—a bar bolted to the ground, and a circle attached on top like a basketball hoop—from which only translucent plastic bags were hung, so that if someone dropped a bomb in the garbage now, people could see it and warn the authorities. Prerecorded voices enjoined us to be “watchful together.” I looked through all the garbage bags I saw hanging, but I wasn’t sure what bombs looked like exactly. In the spy show, it had looked like they came in all sizes.

  By noon, I was waiting across the street from Rose’s house for her to come home. She didn’t look surprised when she saw me, even though I hadn’t warned her I was coming or answered any of her letters.

  “You been here long?” was all she said.