“Did you like it?” Rose asked, and I said very much. She had a mole on the side of her left tit, but it didn’t work as a detail to fall in love over.
“You should stay in my bed for the night,” she said as I was putting my shirt back on. “Snuggling is not part of sex, but it is still important to do it I think.”
“Okay,” I said, and she wrapped my arms around her the way she wanted them. After a minute, we heard the cat scream from the hallway and Rose got up to open the door for her before she’d wake her parents up. The cat stormed into the room like she was being chased and needed a place to hide, except the thing that was chasing her seemed to be attached to the bottom of her tail.
“What’s wrong with the cat?” I said, and Rose started laughing as silently as she could.
“This happens sometimes,” she said, “she swallowed one of my hairs!”
I looked at Rose’s hair—very long, straight, brown—and then at the cat’s ass.
“When she takes a shit, it just comes out wrapped around the hair, I don’t know why! All her little balls of shit just come out one after the other along the hair, and the hair is usually longer than the cat has to shit, and so she drags it around, the garland of shit! She’s being followed by her own shit!”
The cat was freaking out. I didn’t know cats shat so dry. The line of little brown balls looked like the clay beads on the necklaces you make in art class for Mother’s Day.
“Are you gonna help her?” I asked.
“Why? No! I’m not going near that. It’s so gross. Not to mention funny.”
“So she’s just going to drag the garland of shit behind her all night?
Rose couldn’t stop laughing. “I love when this happens!” she said. “I’m so glad you got to see it.”
I wasn’t as excited about the garland of shit as Rose was, but she looked truly happy, and that wasn’t something I got to see much. I don’t mean to say that my family was unhappy, but I suspected that their moments of happiness were not sharable, or at least that they didn’t want to share them, that they considered happiness a private emotion, one to go through alone. Watching the cat failing to run away from her own shit and listening to Rose explaining how much she liked it, I thought that we might’ve been reaching a level of intimacy that was greater than what we’d just experienced having sex. I thought maybe I could fall in love with her. But then she decided we were too excited to go to sleep right away and that we should tell each other jokes. She wanted to keep laughing, she said. I told her the 69 joke I’d heard the butcher tell Daphné and she liked it. “I have to tell it to Kevin tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll love it.”
“Your turn,” I said, and I was starting to be as excited as her, because I didn’t actually know that many jokes.
“Okay,” she said. “Do you know why France replaced all of the garbage cans with see-through plastic garbage bags?”
I knew the real reason was homeland security but since it wasn’t funny, I didn’t think it would be the answer to her joke.
“I give up,” I said.
“It’s so the Arabs can go window-shopping!” Rose said, and she laughed even harder than she had at my 69 joke.
I didn’t get the joke. I thought maybe it worked for homeless people, but I couldn’t see the connection with the Arabs. I thought maybe it was because I still didn’t know enough about Arab culture.
“Why is it funny?” I said, even though I knew there wouldn’t be a satisfying answer and I was just ruining the moment.
Not even a week after I lost my virginity, I was told I needed braces. Of the six of us, only Aurore had had to wear braces, so I’d hoped I’d avoid the whole thing. The metal kept spearing through the inside of my lips and cheeks. I woke up every morning with the taste of blood in my mouth.
“I don’t think they fit quite right,” I told the orthodontist on my first visit back. He said that nothing ever really did. He made it sound like he was speaking of things beyond dental gear, maybe, as if it were part of his job to make remarks that vaguely sounded like life lessons, since he mostly dealt with teenagers, and teenagers had to be taught life lessons, like for instance that nothing in life ever fit quite right. I’d noticed, lately, that boys my age couldn’t really say anything to adults anymore without having it turned into something more than what they’d meant. A boy in class asking our teacher, “Is this going to be on the test?” had been sent off to meditate on the inherent uncertainty of all things (“I don’t know, Jules, is a giant asteroid going to hit Earth and wipe us all off the map like it did dinosaurs?”); another inquiring about the relevance of mathematical functions to everyday life had been offered parallels with other useless things people engaged in without too much questioning (marriage, soccer). I was okay with this bluntness—my siblings had never really spared me their brutal observations—but I could tell some kids had a hard time adjusting to it. They didn’t dare speak up as much, aware that any group of words they’d say would only incite the nearest adult to speak an aphorism he’d be forced to listen to. I didn’t know what it was that made grown-ups think teenagers were ready for a reality check all of a sudden, ready to find out that everything that happened or would ever happen to them was or would be either random or exactly normal, their experience no more nor less uncommon than anyone else’s, after having been told the opposite and cautiously spared the truth for the previous thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years. I didn’t know what it was that made adults think, They’re ready to take it all in now. But then I got metal glued all over my teeth and I understood how maybe there was no better time to have a person find out about something horrible than right in the aftermath of another horrible thing’s having happened to them, like having been disfigured by braces, which usually happened around our age. When a child starts looking like a monster and notices it is when you can start unloading the pile of ugly truths on him, and then it’s done. He can become an adult. That’s how it seemed, at least.
“Nothing ever fits quite right,” the orthodontist said, and he gave me some transparent wax to stick between the braces and the parts of my mouth that kept being caught in the wires.
“You have to roll the wax between your fingers for a little while before you cover the brace with it,” he explained. “To soften it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And then you stick it up right on the guilty brace.”
“Okay,” I repeated.
“Nothing ever fits perfectly, son, but we have mastered workaround techniques for nearly everything.”
I stuck little balls of wax in every night before bed. Looking at myself do this in the mirror one day, I thought if I ran away while I had braces, I would have to wear them forever because I could never pay for another orthodontist to remove them. I wondered if anyone had kept their braces on forever. What happened to your teeth if you did. If they just kept retreating back into your mouth until they fell out.
“The setup was much nicer in Paris,” my mother said when we walked into the room where Aurore was about to defend her PhD. She was disappointed, I think, mostly because people from the neighborhood had come to listen to Aurore and she would have preferred them to see the ancient Parisian lecture hall we’d all gone to for Berenice, with the strips of dust-enhancing sunlight.
“If your only concern is for people to be impressed—people who, by the way, no one gives a shit about—” Leonard said, “just wait ’til Aurore starts talking.”
“See, that is exactly why environment matters,” my mother said. “People have to be able to look around, to look at something, when they’re bored.”
“Maybe the bare surroundings will invite them to reassess and reflect on their lives,” Jeremie offered. “As they probably should.”
We all sat in a middle row, like Aurore had requested. The chairs were plastic and uncomfortable. My mother waved politely at women who entered the room and immediately pointed out different seating options at their disposal so that they wouldn’t come talk to
us. My mother wasn’t really friends with any of these women, but they still invited her to weddings and parties, and although she never went anymore, she’d felt an obligation to reciprocate.
“They’ll never come,” my mother had predicted a week earlier, when she’d made the calls. “Who wants to hear about Thucydides?”
It so happened that all the women invited came, some with the grown sons they’d always wanted to marry Berenice or Aurore (the reason why they’d started inviting my mother everywhere in the first place, twenty-something years before, the reason why my mother had stopped going), some with younger daughters who were encouraged to be more like my sisters. One of them came with a boy she’d forced, I assumed, to wear a bow tie. The boy was too young to have been a former classmate of either Berenice or Aurore. His mother probably wanted him first in line for Simone’s attention.
I spotted Martin, Sanchez, and Ohri in the first row. I was only a kid when they’d started showing up at our door in turns, whenever Berenice had missed school, to offer the notes they’d taken in lit class, or chocolates, or feel-better mix tapes, but they’d kept on ringing our bell now and then, years after she’d left for grad school, and I’d gotten to know them a bit. They’d come to “see how the family was doing,” bring my mother flowers, ask the father’s advice on how to invest their money—even though the father had been the last person to ask about things like that. They’d leave saying, “My best to Berenice,” very matter-of-factly, like they’d just remembered Berenice happened to be these lovely people’s daughter. My parents were always nice to the suitors, as they called them, but the minute Martin, Sanchez, or Ohri was out the door, my siblings would launch into what they’d themselves dubbed a “condescension fest,” quoting the audible spelling mistakes one or the other suitor had made, commenting on their laughable ambitions, the lack of self-esteem (or as Martin would say, “self-of-steam”) one had to be plagued with to keep on trying to get the daughter by way of charming the parents, even after the daughter was long gone. After a while, we’d realized the suitors had given up on Berenice and were going for Aurore. Aurore had then declared she wouldn’t be the next best thing and stopped leaving her bedroom to say hello when one of the boys visited. They’d all ceased coming shortly after that. Ohri had been the last to let go. I liked Ohri the best.
The three of them were either engaged or married now, but they still tried to catch a glimpse of Berenice whenever they could. Simone said some people needed to dwell on the past and be reminded constantly of what they’d missed in order to have some sort of inner life. I wanted to believe that it was the opposite, that Martin, Sanchez, and Ohri were trying to have Berenice realize what she’d missed, but I’d seen their faces fold when Berenice had failed to recognize them at the father’s funeral (“They were out of context,” Berenice had later said in her defense), and had to admit that Simone was probably right.
I smiled at Ohri when our eyes met. He smiled back but turned away immediately. He had to know my siblings made fun of him, and he probably believed I did the same. It saddened me that he would think that of me, but then I’d never defended him during condescension fests either, and I knew by then that silence meant consent.
I’d actually enjoyed all our condescension fests, not because I felt superior to those my siblings condescended to, but because the fests seemed to unite my family around something, to bring us all closer. I’d learned a lot about us thanks to guys like Ohri—what we didn’t like, what we had respect for, what was funny, and what was better left unsaid.
When Aurore started her presentation, my mother looked at me and squeezed my hand like we were about to skydive. “We can do it!” her eyes said. She’d taken energy boosters to not fall asleep. We’d agreed to go listen to the defense before I would read her Aurore’s dissertation. “Maybe if we hear about it first, we’ll understand her writing better,” my mother had said, but Aurore started talking and we were immediately lost. I must’ve glanced at my mother two thousand times—I’d promised I wouldn’t let her nod off. Berenice took notes the whole time. She’d arrived from Paris that morning and we’d both acted like we hadn’t seen each other there a few months before, and I’d thought she’d be impressed by my having kept her secret and would comment on it later, when it would just be her and me, but then it had only been her and me in the kitchen and she hadn’t said anything.
After the jury announced that Aurore had passed the test with the highest distinction, they acknowledged the presence of an audience for the first time in five hours and invited us to the next room for a friendly get-together.
“I like how they always specify ‘friendly,’ ” my mother said.
“That’s because all academics hate each other,” Berenice explained.
Everyone attending seemed to have fought a violent fight against sleep, and to not be quite certain they’d won it yet, and they looked at each other in disbelief, making sure it was okay to go eat and drink. They went to the buffet in small steps, cut their cake and poured their wine cautiously, as if they had to relearn the simple gestures of civil life. Some stretched their limbs. The professors in Aurore’s jury, though older than everyone else, were in much better shape. They ate vigorously, laughed heartily, as if nothing had happened. Maybe that’s what made academics academics, after all: a higher resistance to boredom. Or maybe they needed more boredom than regular people in order to enjoy the small pleasures of life to the fullest, the way you need to travel once in a while to fully appreciate the comfort of your own bed.
“You must be so proud,” a woman said.
My mother responded by apologizing for the food and decor, as if it were Aurore’s wedding and the groom’s family had planned the whole thing without consulting her.
“As long as there’s wine!” another woman said, and then there were laughs and polite conversation.
My brothers were talking to some girls. Simone was inquiring about Aurore’s dissertation adviser’s own current work. Behind her, the woman who’d brought the kid in a bow tie was waiting to introduce them, and I suspected Simone was not so much interested in Aurore’s professor’s career as she was in avoiding an encounter with someone her age.
I had no one to talk to, but that kind of thing didn’t make me uncomfortable at the time—I still wasn’t sure that people could see me. Ohri desperately needed to put up a front, though, so I went over to him.
“Where are Sanchez and Martin?” I asked.
“We’re not exactly friends, you know?” Ohri said. He seemed insulted anyone would think they were.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I see you together a lot.”
“Ever thought they might be following me everywhere?”
I’d assumed Ohri would be relieved to have found someone to talk to, but he kept looking over his shoulder for better conversation opportunities.
“How’s married life?” I asked. I didn’t really care about married life but I knew adults asked about it.
“I’m not the one who got married,” Ohri said. “That was Martin.”
“Oh, sorry. I thought my mother told me you had. But you’re engaged, right? Isn’t it roughly the same?”
“I don’t know,” Ohri said. “I sure hope not.”
“Is she giving you a hard time?”
“She’s pretty jealous. She says it’s insecurity, you know, bad self-image, stuff like that, but I don’t know. Maybe marriage will give her confidence.”
“Why didn’t you bring her along?”
“Well, that’s the thing: she’s so insecure she says she doesn’t want to embarrass me in social circumstances, but then when I tell her she won’t embarrass me, she doesn’t believe me and it turns into this fight because, according to her, I didn’t really mean it, and she knows she’s not as pretty or as smart as my ex-girlfriends, and then it becomes this whole thing where I’m the asshole and she wouldn’t want to stand in the way of my catching up with old ‘friends,’ and she air-quotes friends, too, like…sh
e doesn’t believe in male-female friendship, for instance. She doesn’t understand that your sister and I are just friends now.”
“As opposed to when?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said you and Berenice were just friends now.”
“So?”
“Well, you were never anything else.”
And it was already nice of me to let friends fly.
“Oh, give me a break, dude,” Ohri said, and he looked over his shoulder again. It was still not a good time to go congratulate my mother on Aurore’s success, so he turned back to me. “You know what I mean,” he said.
“You mean wanting to be someone’s boyfriend and actually being someone’s boyfriend are pretty much the same thing, right?”
Ohri told me to go fuck myself and I said that he shouldn’t talk to me that way. “I always say hello to my sisters for you when you ask me to,” I said. “Not everyone does that.”
I went outside where I knew I’d find Aurore and Berenice. They’d taken their drinks to a bench in the university’s courtyard and were smoking pink cigarettes.
“Someone left a pack half-full of that shit,” Aurore said. “Guess what flavor it is.”
They both blew their smoke my way. It smelled of burned caramel.
“Strawberry?” I tried.
“Chocolate,” Berenice said, and she handed hers to me. “You smoke it, I need a real one.”
I let the cigarette smoke itself between my fingers and tossed it. I didn’t know how to smoke. I thought smoking would be like when my mother had tried to clean my nose with a neti pot. Like drowning.
“Is everyone in there talking about how impressive I was and how all these years of hard work were completely worth it?” Aurore asked.
How to Behave in a Crowd Page 12