How to Behave in a Crowd

by Camille Bordas

  “I’m not saying I wouldn’t go to Dory’s funeral,” Aurore said.

  “I’ll go with him,” Simone offered.

  “But the ceremony is going to be in a church,” I told her.

  “Of course it’s going to be in a church. Everyone’s bloody Catholic around here. So what?”

  “Nothing. I thought you’d mind. You hate churches.”

  “I hate the Church, it’s different,” Simone said. “People can go to church though, obviously, as long as they don’t try to sell it to me.” She paused there and added, matter-of-factly, “Mom goes to church sometimes. Who cares?”

  My mother didn’t say anything. I didn’t know when her churchgoing had stopped being a secret. Maybe it had never really been one.

  We were still eating when Berenice called to say she’d been accepted into a PhD program in Chicago. My mother picked up the phone in the kitchen all cheerful but her face turned to worry right away. “But you already have a PhD,” we heard her say into the phone, in the same tone actors used in movies when their character couldn’t make sense of someone’s death and said, “But he was so young!”

  I don’t know what Berenice’s response to that was exactly, we couldn’t hear her part, but the way the phone call was summed up to us when my mother sat back at the table was that Berenice had said American PhDs were much more competitive and prestigious than French ones. Aurore didn’t pick up on that. Leonard didn’t either, even though he was in the middle of writing his own dissertation. There was a moment of silence. We all looked down at our noodles.

  “Climbing back up the funnel,” Simone said. She said it to me, specifically, but loud enough that everyone around the table could hear, yet no one asked what funnel Simone was referring to. Maybe they were all familiar with the funnel image and were just picturing themselves in it, how close they were to the noose.

  “Why am I still eating this?” Aurore said after a while, under her breath. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “What time’s that funeral at?” Simone asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Sometime in the morning.”

  Simone noted it would be the first time she’d skip school for a reason other than being sick. “I guess it’s about time,” she said.

  She only had two months of high school left.

  The funerals I’d been to before hadn’t lasted more than half an hour, but Denise’s grandmother’s was near PhD defense in length. Everyone had something to say about her, and then there were prayers and songs. I tried to pay attention when Denise went up onstage for her eulogy, but her voice was so frail, and Simone and I had sat so far back, almost by the church’s door, that it was hard to follow. She talked about how her grandmother would never know the end of a soap opera she’d been watching every day for more than twenty years, and how painful that was to think about. About how no matter how old you were when you died, you always left unfinished tasks behind. I glanced at Simone while Denise spoke, to see whether she was repressing laughter or rolling her eyes. Simone’s physical reactions to speeches usually helped me know what I should think of them. Simone was actually involved in Denise’s words. When Denise said that her grandmother, knowing she didn’t have much time left, had stopped reading new books because she couldn’t stand the idea of dying in the middle of one without ever finding out how it ended, and that she’d spent her last weeks rereading the books she’d loved, Simone even nodded.

  When we gathered around the hole for Denise’s grandmother, the grave diggers were on their cigarette break, ten or so graves away, waiting for us to leave to finish the morning job. I wondered if they were ever told about the people they dug holes for—how old they’d been and how they’d died—and if that determined the distance at which they thought it was okay to take their cigarette breaks. They hadn’t stood that close to us at the father’s funeral.

  “What should I tell Denise?” I whispered in Simone’s ear as the undertakers lowered the casket with ropes. “Condolences or congratulations on her eulogy?”

  “That guy is not doing it right,” Simone said, looking at one of the four pallbearers. “He’s standing parallel to the grave. He should be diagonal. He’s going to throw his back something nasty.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Or throw himself down in the hole with the coffin.”

  She seemed disappointed when nothing dramatic happened to the pallbearer. She clicked her tongue behind her teeth and glanced at her watch. She could still make it to philosophy class, she said.

  “You’re supposed to stay with me and make sure I’m okay,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. I said I was.

  After Simone left, I went up to Denise and told her how much I’d loved her eulogy.

  “Won’t bring Grandma back,” Denise said. She was in worse shape than when she’d just found out about her grandma’s being dead.

  “It didn’t smell like anything,” she said, and at first, I didn’t understand what she meant. “You said there were dead-body smells that came out of the coffin, but it just smelled like church and incense.”

  I’d never seen Denise cry and, like I said before, wouldn’t have bet on its being possible. She wasn’t shy about crying though, didn’t wipe her cheeks or hide her eyes—she kept them open and fixed on me. I put a hand on her arm. I could’ve closed my hand around it and touched index finger to thumb it was so thin. She didn’t like the contact and shook it off.

  “I thought I saw your sister,” she said.

  “She couldn’t stay. She told me to give you her condolences.”

  “How sweet of her.”

  People started leaving the cemetery but Denise wanted to stay and watch the grave diggers fill the hole. I sat with her on the next gravestone, that of a man who, according to the engraving, had died on a cruise. As the four men shoveled soil into the hole, I noticed Denise’s lips were moving, and when they stopped moving I asked what kind of prayer she’d just said.

  “What do you mean what kind?” she said.

  “I mean, what was it? What did you ask for?”

  “It’s not like that,” Denise said. “You don’t ask for things.”

  “I see,” I said, although her answer confused me. I’d always thought the point of believing in God was that you got to ask him things and see if you’d done good by him, if he loved you back and if your faith was real depending on whether he gave you the things you’d asked for or not. I took a little box of dental wax out of my pocket and started to roll some between my fingers. The inside of my lower lip felt ripped, rough and salty; the braces kept getting caught in the flesh.

  “Did everyone tell you to be strong, after your father died?” Denise asked.

  “No one really told me anything,” I said. Images of the father’s toothless period started rushing through my head. I pushed them away as I stuck the wax to my lower braces.

  “It’s such bullshit,” Denise said. “They say ‘don’t be sad,’ and ‘it’s the way of life’ and all, that I should be strong, and that ‘it’s so easy to let yourself go’ while it takes courage and strength to choose to be happy and hold on to the small pleasures of the present…as if suffering was something weak people did, you know? I don’t get that.”

  “They worry about you,” I said.

  “Courage my ass. It doesn’t take courage to be in the moment. What really takes guts is to live each day as if you were going to hang around for the next ten years at least. Account for something. Live up to something. Now, that is hard. That requires a little more pondering and reflection, a little more strength.”

  The wax provided immediate relief. Not only did it protect my lower lip from more brace spearing, but it numbed the preexisting pain right away. The box said it was the cold-mint flavor of the wax that did that. Very few things in life provided immediate relief, I thought.

  “Simone—she also thinks the present is dumb,” I said. I refrained from telling Denise about the funnel theory.

/>   “Of course it’s dumb. What’s there to enjoy?”

  “Well I guess you don’t like eating much, so that takes a lot out of it,” I said.

  The grave diggers were working at the hole cautiously, like there might be a chance Denise’s grandmother would wake up and complain about the noise.

  “You could run away with me next time, if you want,” I said. I didn’t mean it. “We could go to Paris or something.”

  “Really? We would stay at your sister’s?”

  I tried to drown the offer I’d just made under a lot of words, to divert Denise’s attention.

  “Berenice is moving to America next year,” I said. “She’s going to get a second PhD.”

  “But if we go to Paris before summer break,” Denise said, “she would still be living there, right?”

  “Her apartment is very small. A bedroom, really. She doesn’t have money for more. She lied about having a good job. I mean, she got fired from her good job a long time ago.”

  It was the first time I told anyone a secret I’d promised to keep, but I didn’t feel bad about it. My family’s secrets were not really interesting.

  “Well, we’ll find somewhere else to stay then,” Denise said. “When are you going next?”

  I mumbled something about Easter. It seemed far enough away. I didn’t think Denise would forget my invitation by then but I was pretty sure she would chicken out, realize she needed her therapist and her meds, and in the meantime, there was no harm letting her dream of a Paris trip a little.

  “I’m sorry I lied about the smells,” I said.

  Most of the replies I got to my Internet ad were from older men who thought the ad was for a whole family to adopt. One of them couldn’t have children, he explained. He’d been left by the love of his life twenty years before because he “couldn’t conceive.” I wondered if that meant he was impotent. It felt insensitive to ask.

  His name was Daniel, which I thought was boring, but in a good way, like he would be fine doing the crosswords while my mother read the rest of the newspaper. He wanted to see a picture of her and I described her the best I could—there was a picture of her on the Internet now, because she’d been featured in an article on the city hall website about what people randomly picked on the street thought about the new bike lanes in the center of town, but the picture didn’t do my mother justice, I thought, and I preferred not to send Daniel the link. I told him she was ready to date again but didn’t know it yet, and that he should wait for her outside her office one day (I gave him the address) and pretend he and I had never corresponded. I told him my mother liked orchids, any movie by Jacques Tati, and the color black. The ball was in his court.

  Later that week, my mother came home from work with him. I immediately understood that she’d figured I’d dug him out of the Internet and brought him back to teach me a lesson, but Daniel thought she’d invited him over out of genuine interest. He couldn’t believe how well his moves were working.

  “Dory, this is my friend Daniel,” my mother said. “Daniel, this is my youngest son I was telling you all about.”

  “Very nice to meet you, young man,” Daniel said, and he actually winked at me.

  “I invited Daniel for dinner, I hope you don’t mind.”

  Daniel looked older than he’d said he was. I guess my mother, to him, was young.

  My mother called all my siblings to join us in the living room and welcome our guest.

  “Daniel, why don’t you tell my kids all about the book you mentioned working on while I go fix us some drinks?” she said. She disappeared into the kitchen and left us alone with Daniel. Daniel did as he was told and talked about his passion for photography and his ongoing project, a whole book made of pictures he’d taken and compiled over the years of clouds assuming all sorts of poetic shapes.

  “What the hell is a poetic shape?” Simone asked, but Daniel only offered her a little laugh for an answer, as if Simone were being cute, too young to possibly understand the term poetic.

  “I suppose you must be a great Ansel Adams fan,” Jeremie said.

  “Well ain’t that funny!” Daniel marveled. “That is exactly what your mother said! I’d better check that fellow’s work…You gotta keep an eye out for the competition.”

  Daniel retrieved a piece of paper from a pocket and seemed happy to take note of the name, unaware that Jeremie’s spelling A-N-S-E-L for him was the last time he would ever hear his voice.

  “So when you say you have a passion for photography, you mean you’re passionate about using a camera, the technology of it, but you’re not that interested in the history of the medium,” Leonard said.

  As far as I could tell, Leonard wasn’t trying to be mean, but his remark made Daniel uneasy. He glanced at me for support. I had nothing.

  “Well I do enjoy the work of certain contemporary photographers,” he said, “like uh, from National Geographic and such.”

  “Would you say your approach to photography is more autobiographical or metaphorical?” Simone asked.

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” Daniel admitted.

  “Well it’s obviously not documentary oriented. What gets you to take a picture of one cloud and not another?”

  Daniel seemed to pull himself back together a bit, like he’d heard that question before and had worked out an answer over time.

  “I find myself more attracted to cumulonimbuses,” he explained. “They draw the most dramatic shapes, whole scenes even, sometimes, if you look closely and keep an open mind.”

  “So it’s some sort of an imaginary approach,” Simone said, more like a note to herself than anything else. Daniel looked satisfied to have a new word to talk about his artistic process and agreed with her.

  “And have publishers shown any interest in your work yet? Galleries?” Aurore asked.

  My mother came back before Daniel could answer, carrying a bowl of Provençal olives and a couple of golden drinks. Daniel seemed relieved to see her and moved to his right on the couch as she handed him his drink, to make some room for her, but she didn’t notice and went back to the kitchen to grab two extra chairs, one to serve as a table for the drinks and olives, the other for her to sit on.

  Daniel went at the olives like they could provide him with clever answers to my siblings’ questions. Every time he was asked something, he took an olive from the bowl and ate it before he would give a response. He tried to shift the conversation at some point and asked us all if we had boyfriends or girlfriends. He seemed delighted to find out none of us did. It gave him the opportunity to slide in a fact he thought we’d find witty and amusing.

  “Aha!” he said. “All smart and good-looking, and yet all single! I guess the great misunderstanding between the sexes hasn’t skipped a generation! Did you know that in some Indian tribes, men and women actually spoke different languages? I’m not kidding you guys.” No one had accused him of such a thing. “They couldn’t even agree on grammar!”

  There was hope, I thought. Daniel knew something, and it was something that I’d personally never heard before. Different languages for men and women, within the same society? That sounded quite promising. Maybe we could last all dinner on that topic and have a good time.

  “Yes,” Leonard said. “Some tribes do have different languages for men and women. Except they understand each other and the men address the women in the women’s language, which also happens, most of the time, to be the maternal language. The presence of two different languages doesn’t necessarily mean incomprehension between people, or inability to communicate. Think about those regions where everyone speaks two languages, like Catalunya, for instance. Kids are just raised bilingual. If anything, it is a tremendous advantage for them on a cognitive level. And you could actually argue that men and women learning all about the subtleties of the other sex’s language helps them reach a better understanding of each other.”

  Daniel grabbed another olive and thought about Catalunya.

  “I gue
ss I’d never looked at it that way,” he said.

  “Where did you go to school?” Simone asked.

  With that, my brothers and sisters regained control of the conversation and Daniel swallowed another olive. The olive situation was reaching a critical point. A few years before, Berenice, who was then already fluent in Spanish, had introduced us to a saying Spanish people had about the last slice of pie in the dish, the last piece of bread on the table, the last olive in the bowl: they called it the slice, or the piece, or the olive, of shame. Shame is what you were supposed to feel if you grabbed and ate the last piece of something, and the only way to make it less shameful was to acknowledge that you were conscious of grabbing the shameful item, or to publicly state your intention to do so in order to allow a chance for someone who wanted it more than you to make him- or herself known, which was something that never happened because most of the time people were happy to let another person deal with the shame. My parents had loved the idea. “Shame is a good thing,” the father had declared, “people should feel more of it more often,” and we’d adopted the Spanish saying without reservation. Something we had only considered vaguely impolite became shameful through the magic of a foreign proverb. One that Daniel was obviously not familiar with. Everyone was looking to see if he would eat the olive of shame without mentioning it. If he asked whether one of us wanted the olive, he would get a pass, I thought, but I wanted him to make a joke about it (the father, for instance, would’ve sliced the olive in two to let someone else get the half olive of shame), because a joke would surprise my siblings and possibly raise my mother’s interest. When he took the last olive in the bowl, he only looked disappointed there weren’t more. Simone shook her head judgmentally, and there were some unspoken I knew its around the living room. All Daniel saw was that the end of the olives meant it was time for dinner.

  I didn’t say a word at the table, remaining a silent witness to my siblings’ catastrophic evaluation of Daniel. They inquired about his politics, his taste in books, his hobbies. I wanted Daniel to shine, to have anecdotes about once meeting a famous writer, invent one if needed, but he seemed incapable of sharing anything of interest. I wondered if one could really reach Daniel’s age and not have a single compelling story to tell.