How to Behave in a Crowd

by Camille Bordas

  “Did your mother tell you that you could keep the change if you went grocery shopping by yourself?” Daphné asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “For my efforts.”

  “What else is on your list?”

  I showed her.

  “Skip the greengrocer,” Daphné said, after analyzing the list as if it were a complex document. “No one will miss those Brussels sprouts. Tell your mom they were out of them, or that they were all brown and mushy. You’ll get to keep an extra euro or two.”

  The butcher asked if I wanted anything else and when I said the roast was all, he turned to Daphné.

  “Instructions for the pork roast, Daphné?”

  “How heavy are we talking?”

  “About three pounds of it?”

  “Forty minutes in the oven, three hundred fifty degrees,” she said, eyes closed.

  The butcher turned to me and nodded deeply.

  “What a great memory she has,” he said.

  One night, it came up again, “What about you, Dory? What do you want to be when you grow up?” and it struck me right then that the answer should be that I wanted to be a German teacher. It was Sunday, and the father had just spent two hours helping Simone with her German homework. He’d helped all my other siblings with their German over the years, not that they were bad at it, they just weren’t as good as they were at everything else. When they’d had papers to turn in, they’d always run them by the father. He was happy to help, and since German was the thing with which he felt he could be of most use to his children, he discussed every little translation choice they made in more detail than my siblings were comfortable with. Only because my father excelled at it was German mandatory in our family. He tried to make us believe that German was important—the language of Hölderlin and other people like that—but I think what he liked about it was really that he understood it and that it was more impressive than English or Spanish—which he spoke as well—because everyone spoke English and Spanish. German teacher was the perfect answer, I thought. An achievable goal. Respect would pour forth from all around the table.

  I’d yet to start studying German—I would only have my first class the following year—but I had the hope that I could be good at it, and I looked forward to spending time with the father discussing German subtleties on Sundays, like the others had done before me.

  “I know what he’ll be!” Simone announced before I got the chance to share my last-minute vocation. “He’ll be my biographer!”

  She wasn’t being sarcastic.

  “People will fight to write books about me one day, but yours will be the only authorized one, Dory, I swear, we can make a pact about it right now.”

  The father thought it was a great idea.

  Simone’s plan for the future was unclear, but it involved changing the world without making a big deal about it. None of my siblings were too interested in taking part in society (they all wanted to be hermits and think), but our father was the opposite. He would get upset about wars and epidemics and elections like there was anything one could do about such things, and though Simone didn’t believe there was, she still wanted to make him happy and find a way to save the world from all its problems while working on her novels (which would be her most important task), so the father could stop feeling sad about the news.

  It had only happened once that the father hadn’t been made upset by the news: the night Jacques Chirac had announced on live TV he’d decided to dissolve Parliament. That had kept the father laughing for a while. I couldn’t understand why he thought it was so funny, but I laughed with him anyway.

  The father was an idealist, though. He said there should only be Buddhists in the world, “and chiropractors,” he added some days, when his back gave him a hard time. He voted for other idealists who had no shot at winning any election and was still disappointed when they didn’t. Leonard once asked him why he didn’t vote for one of the parties that always won, for a change, just to see what it felt like to not be on the losing team, and it was a joke, but the father was cold to him for weeks. Mom said he was worried he’d failed to give us a proper moral compass, and I was convinced a moral compass was an object and couldn’t understand why no one would step up and go buy one and put an end to the silent war between Leonard and the father.

  The only thing in the news my siblings ever got all up in arms about was the government’s talk of banishing homework for schoolkids.

  “As if everyone wasn’t dumb enough already,” Simone said.

  “But there’s a rise in teenage suicide,” my mother said.

  “That has nothing to do with the load of homework,” Simone said. “Kids want to die because no one likes them, and you can’t pass laws against that.”

  Homework or not, I didn’t care either way, but when I tried running away for the fourth time and Simone caught me—my hand on the doorknob, my backpack and helmet on—and asked what the hell I was doing, I told her I’d planned on running away to protest the homework ban. She said I was stupid and told me to go back to bed. I thought that she’d bought it, my poor excuse, but then she didn’t bring it up in front of the others for a laugh the next day, or any other day.

  Simone was lying on our bedroom’s carpet and breathing loudly through her nose. She called it yogic breathing, even though she’d never taken a yoga class in her life. Her stomach was tense, and when she’d exhale, it barely deflated. She applied a certain pressure on it with the palm of her hands—she called it kneading the pain. She had the doomed face of her period days.

  “You feel like shit?” I asked.

  She looked in my direction and made sure I understood the effort it required. She was a good actress, Simone. She could control her ocular tension so that her eyes would be on you without seeing you. She gave you the flabby eyes.

  “You want me to get you the hot-water bottle?”

  “It’s very nice of you, Dory.”

  “Don’t call me Dory.”

  “You’re too nice.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean it. You’ll never get yourself a girl.”

  She burped and pretended it was part of yogic breathing.

  “Take note of this, for my biography,” she said. “Take note that I was always a great big sister who gave you precious advice on how to get a decent girlfriend.”

  We heard our mother come home, the rustling sound of plastic bags. She walked into our bedroom without knocking.

  “Simone, look at what I found at the mall, for Rose…you think she’ll like it?”

  She unwound from its bubble wrap a mug with Brad Pitt’s face on it. Simone folded both her forearms on top of her face and screamed.

  “Didn’t you tell me Rose was a Brad Pitt fan?” my mother asked, now unsure. “Just look at it, will you? Do you think Rose will like it?”

  “Why do you keep saying her name?” Simone said, and it came out muffled from behind her arms.

  Rose we didn’t know yet. She was Simone’s pen pal. Simone’s French teacher had come up with a project, at the beginning of the school year, to have her whole class correspond with another class at the other end of the country, to help teach them the basics of epistolary literature. Simone had never met her pen pal, but she despised her already. She also despised her French teacher, for that matter. She said educational projects of this sort were crutches for the incompetent. She said back in the day (Simone often spoke as if she’d lived there before ending up with us), one was taught Les Liaisons Dangereuses and that was good enough for the epistolary genre—which she, on top of everything, liked less than any other.

  “I don’t give a fuck if she likes it or not.”

  “But, I bought it for her,” my mother said, “for her to feel a bit at home when she comes and visits, don’t you think it’s a good idea?”

  The climax (that’s what the paper Simone had our parents sign called it) of the pen pal project was to have each student meet their pen pal in the spring. Rose was going to come spend a
week with us, Simone a week at her house after that. No one in our family was excited about having Rose over, except my mother. She’d already started planning meals and activities for Rose’s stay.

  Simone unfolded her arms and looked at the mug with disdain.

  “It’s hideous,” she said. “And I don’t particularly want that girl to feel at home here. If she feels too good, she’ll keep on writing to me even after school is out.”

  “Would it be so bad?”

  “Mom. Please.”

  “I don’t understand why you have to be so negative all the time, Simone. I don’t understand why you decided that you and Rose can’t get along. You don’t even know her.”

  “I didn’t decide anything. I just have no desire to meet this person. Our desires are not controllable.”

  “Of course they are.”

  My mother was very calm as she declared our desires to be controllable. My mother was always very calm. She’d decided a long time ago that she knew what was best for her children and would never let go. Her life was dedicated to making us happy and sociable, to making us understand the two adjectives were married, and the fact that none of my five siblings were either never discouraged her.

  “What do you think, Dory?” my mother asked, regarding the mug.

  “Meh,” I said.

  “All right then. I’ll return it to the store, if everyone hates it.”

  “Yeah, do that,” Simone said. “And please, please don’t get her anything else. She doesn’t deserve the lousiest gift. Our correspondence didn’t teach me anything. Anything at all. She’s lucky enough I kept answering. It’s the only gift she’ll ever get from me.”

  “I’m sure you have more in common than you think.”

  “She’s illiterate, Mom.”

  “Don’t be silly. She wrote you ten letters at least.”

  “Oh, her letters! Let’s talk about them! Her spelling is hopeless. For a whole line it seems like she understands a basic grammar rule, and then in the next sentence, she makes the mistake she just avoided…she doesn’t even reread herself. She relies on pure chance. Worst kind of human being.”

  “So because she occasionally spells something wrong, your friendship is doomed?”

  “Of course it is!”

  Our mother started rewrapping the mug in bubble paper. She sighed.

  “Sometimes, I feel like I brought up a batch of little misanthropes,” she said. “You’re all so intolerant. You only look up from your books to criticize the rest of the world.”

  She turned to me at that point and said, “Except for you, Dory, honey, of course.”

  Simone didn’t like to be called intolerant. It was her weak spot and her paradox: always teary eyed when the time came to quote the French Revolution (she found opportunities), and always the first to rank her classmates on merit, intelligence, and culture (she was first in all).

  “What do you want me to do, Mom? For sure men are born and remain free and equal in rights, but if they decide to grow up and never open a book, nothing says I have to endure their conversation.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything, honey. I just wish, in general, you would be more open, and I say this for your own good. I wish you would leave your bed and your books sometimes, go out and meet people…”

  “People?” Simone spat, outraged. “But I know so many already.”

  My mother didn’t let this undermine her. She saw, on the carpet, the pack of NurofenFlash pills Simone took when she had her period.

  “I see you’re not feeling well,” she said. “We will talk about this later.”

  Simone had me look at a couple of Rose’s letters and a draft of her response to the first one. She said it was in preparation for the biography I would later write of her, but I believe our mother’s calling her intolerant had affected her and she wanted confirmation that Rose was not smart.

  Dear Simone Mazal,

  I hope you are well.

  I am very happy to meet you and that our classes are going to make that correspondance. I don’t know the town where your from but my mother went to Ardèche once for holidays and she says it’s not far from where you live and it’s a beautifull part of the country.

  I introduce myself: my name is Rose (like in the movie “Titanic”…I’m lucky, because it is my favorite movie!!!). However, I dont like the flower rose, I like sunflowers as favorite flowers. I have a cat Popcorn and two brothers Raphael and Romeo. My favorite actor is Leo of course, do you love him? I have a lot of posters with him.

  The teacher Mrs. Duchesne explained to us when we have a pen friend we have to tell her what my life is like, what music I like and food, and also we have to show intrest in our pen friend and ask you questions about your life, so I will now ask you questions. Can you answer them in your next letter?

  Thank you so much!

  Questions:

  1/ what is your favorite color?

  2/ do you have brothers and sisters? If yes, how many? are they nice?

  3/ do you have a pet?

  4/ what is your kind of music you like to listen to?

  PS: my best friend is Laetitia, she’s pen-pal with Alice in your class. Do you like Alice? My second best friend is Marie, she is penpal with Virginia.

  Sincerely,

  Rose Metzger

  Dear Rose,

  It is interesting you mention Titanic since it aired last month on Channel 2 (I assume you watched it again on that occasion). I, for my part, had never seen it before, and it brought about a few questions I’d like to share with you: do you think we are supposed to believe the paintings Kate Winslet has in her suite (Picasso, Monet) are the authentic works? Is James Cameron implying that the MoMA and the Musée d’Orsay only have copies of those paintings? Or is he just abstracting himself from reality in portraying Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as having sunk down into the Atlantic with the ship? I believe all he wanted was to signify that his main female protagonist had extremely bold taste in art for her time, and that using world-renowned paintings was the only way he could come up with to do so. I find it a tad too easy. It would’ve been more interesting, in my opinion, if Cameron had taken this opportunity to put in his movie works by more obscure artists who’ve been unjustly forgotten. That would’ve been taking a stand. It would’ve made Kate Winslet all the more interesting, I think. On another note, I found the husband-to-be character to be way too much of a caricature, but that’s just a personal opinion. I’m not denigrating your taste in film.

  I personally love Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. I assume you haven’t seen those.

  Also, I wanted to tell you that Ardèche is not at all close to where I live. Anything is relative, of course, and depends on what reference point we decide on to distinguish the near from the remote, but let’s say we’re talking on the scale of the country: Ardèche is, inside of metropolitan France’s limits, pretty far from where I live. It still is closer to me than where you live, but as the crow flies, it is pretty much as far from my city as my city is from yours, for instance. I think it would be helpful to look at a map of our country, so I’ve attached one to this letter. I circled your town, mine, and Ardèche in red, in order for you to locate all these places in relation to one another. In green, you’ll find the main mountain chains; in blue, the most important cities, from an economic viewpoint; purple, our main rivers; yellow, a few of the many places recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. My choices to circle one place and not another might look arbitrary to you, but I think, seeing as you don’t seem to know too much about geography, that this map is altogether a good way to start and will give you a general idea of how our country works. My advice is you should memorize it once and for all.

  Cordially,

  Simone

  Dear Simone,

  I hope you are well.

  I dont really know how to anser your letter because you don’t really ask any questions. Like, I don’t understend what you say about “Titan
ic”?

  Thank you for the map of the country, I pined it over my desk.

  My mother is sorry she mistook Ardèche for another place, but now she dosn’t remember what place she meant to say.

  I never saw “City Lights” or the japanese one (is it a film of violent contents? I dont like violence) but I will ask my father to look for them next time he goes to the videoclub.

  Today I am happy because I scored 18 out of 20 on my biology exam, and I am happy because I want to be a doctor later and you need good grades in sciences. My father is a doctor as well, and he was very happy as well.

  What do you want to be later?

  What do your parents do?

  You can also answer the questions from my first letter in your next letter if you want. Its not too late!

  Please ask me questions in your next letter.

  Cordially,

  Rose

  At some point Simone decided taking notes for her biography was not good enough and we ought to start doing interviews.

  “Observation is a good thing, but there’s about thirteen years of my life that will never be covered if we don’t artificially revisit them.”

  “What questions do you want me to ask?” I said.

  “What do you think this is? Stalinist Russia?”

  I didn’t know who Stalin was at the time, though Leonard and Simone referred to him now and then, and so I did what I did when I didn’t understand something, which was pretend I hadn’t heard it.

  “You pick the questions,” Simone said. “After all, you were around for most of those thirteen years, I’m sure you have a perspective on my life that I couldn’t possibly imagine.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “It wasn’t meant that way,” she said. “But sure.”

  Simone borrowed Jeremie’s Dictaphone the next day. It worked with little cassettes. Jeremie supplied two he said could be erased because he’d uploaded the bird sounds he’d recorded on them to his computer. Simone tested the Dictaphone and placed it on the night table we were supposed to share but that had always been all hers.