How to Behave in a Crowd

by Camille Bordas

  Victor high-fived Porfi as Porfi descended the stairs. Kissing Denise with tongue must have been the last part of his hazing. All the kids went the way they’d come without another look at us.

  “He didn’t even open the fucking door,” was the first thing Denise said.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She was still chewing her gum.

  “Of course I’m okay,” she said. “That prick just took me for a ride, that’s all. No need to dwell on it.”

  I could tell she was embarrassed to have been played like that, but it was hard to determine whether she was also hurt, because she always looked hurt. She was staring at the bobby pin Porfi had left behind, still dangling out of the unpicked lock.

  “Do you still want to go to Paris after school?” I asked.

  She did not.

  Back home, I found Simone lying in bed on her stomach, swinging her legs back and forth at a pace I knew meant she was in a good mood. The leg movements drew half circles in the air, connecting her ass cheeks and the mattress—the knee joints being the center of the circle.

  “Will you hand me the cold cream?” she said without even looking at me as I came into our bedroom. The cold cream was on the nightstand between our beds, closer to her than to me at this point, but for some reason, Simone always wanted me to hand it to her. I suspected she waited hours sometimes, in desperate need of the cold cream she could see but not reach without interrupting her reading, until I would come into the room and pass it to her.

  Simone slathered her elbows with cold cream about a million times a day. Her elbows were constantly frayed and reddened from the amount of time she spent rubbing them against carpets and bedsheets while she lay on her stomach reading. She tried other reading positions now and then, to give her elbows a rest, but she always ended up on her stomach a few minutes later. She couldn’t help it. For a whole month, she’d thought she’d solved the frayed-elbows problem altogether by buying a pair of those elbow pads that roller skaters and cyclists wear, walking around the house with them at all times, taking them off only for school, shower, and bed, but she’d developed an allergy to the neoprene that lined them. “There goes my roller skating career,” she’d said after her dermatologist appointment, and resumed usage of the good old cold cream. I liked the way the cold cream made our bedroom smell, even though I pretended to find it too sweet and girly. I handed her the tube.

  “I got a letter this morning,” Simone said as she rubbed the cream into her cracked elbows, and for a second I thought the letter would be from Rose. “I got into the prep school I wanted in Paris.”

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Looks like you’ll have the bedroom all to yourself next year.”

  I didn’t know if Simone wanted me to be happy about that or start reciting a list of all the things I would miss about her constant presence. She had a way of making me feel like I was being tested sometimes.

  “Looks like it,” I said conservatively.

  “What are we going to do about my biography?”

  “I guess you’ll have to send me written reports of prep school life,” I said.

  “What about calls? Do you think I could call you, like, every week or so?”

  “I thought prep school was all about work work work,” I said. “You might not have that much to report.”

  “Will you miss me?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I miss Berenice.”

  “But Berenice has been away more than half your life at this point,” Simone said, apparently offended. “You’re not as tight with her as you are with me! I think it is going to be way harder for you than you think when I’m gone.”

  I started unpacking my school bag on my desk, all of it, the cans of beans and the cookies and the kitchen knife. It didn’t matter that Simone saw it.

  “Did you run away for like five hours again?” she asked.

  “I wish,” I said, and then I crawled into bed, planning to only get back up when my mother called us down for dinner.

  “What’s wrong with you, Dory?” Simone asked.

  I told her about how Porfi had made Denise believe he was in love with her only so he could kiss her in front of Victor and his minions as a dare and how humiliating it all was for Denise, even though she hadn’t said anything about being humiliated. I said people like Victor were the dregs of humanity.

  “Actually,” Simone said, “the most horrible people really aren’t the ones the majority would recognize as objectively horrible. I think the worst are those who look up to objectively horrible people.” Then she thought about it a second and added that the same exact thing went for dumb people.

  “So Porfi is the worst guy in this story?” I said.

  “Well yeah. He didn’t even come up with the idea to break that poor girl’s heart, he just thought it was worth his time and went along with it.”

  “But you could argue that because it wasn’t his idea, and because he might never have come up with such a mean prank in the first place, then maybe he’s inherently less bad than Victor, who was the brains of the operation.”

  “At least the other one had a brain,” Simone said. “Even if a fucked-up one.”

  “So the problem with any dictatorship,” I said, following Simone’s argument, “is never really the dictator himself but the people who agree with him.”

  “Exactly,” Simone said. “There could potentially be a good dictatorship—I don’t see why the public could only be sheep for horrible leaders—but the problem is that good people never want to be dictators.”

  “That’s a bummer,” I said.

  “All good people want is to be left alone and help those around them. The problem is good people lack ambition.”

  “You don’t lack ambition,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not sure I qualify as a good person,” Simone said, without any kind of emotion. “I don’t have much patience.”

  She was still massaging the cream inside the cracks of her elbows. They were so red.

  “Maybe you should be the dictator,” she said, like it was the best idea she’d had in a while.

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with power,” I said.

  “I’d help you! I have a few ideas for a better society.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said, “but how would you telling me what to do be different than actually being the dictator yourself?”

  “Dictators have advisers, you know? No one would expect you to come up with all the laws.”

  “What do you think should be my first measure as a dictator?” I said.

  “If I were your adviser,” Simone said, “I would make commenting on the Internet illegal. I don’t think people should express themselves as much as they think they should.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  “Obviously, you should leave this exchange out of my biography.”

  Denise didn’t meet me in the staircase the next day, or the one after that, but this time I knew she couldn’t be flirting with Porfi and I got worried. I walked by the classroom where she had Chinese lessons in the mornings and took a look at the attendance sheet each teacher had to fill out at the beginning of their classes and stick outside the door for the monitors to collect and bring to the principal’s office. Denise’s name was in the “Absentees” column. I rushed to my own classroom before Herr Coffin would mark me as missing, but he hadn’t yet taken attendance—he often forgot and the monitor had to interrupt our class for him to do it. Herr Coffin was trying to interest my fellow Germanists in a Hofmannsthal poem when I walked in.

  “Who can think of another way the word Erlebnis could have been rendered by the translator of this poem?” he asked. No hands were raised.

  Coffin was of the opinion that a translation, when well done, could be better than the original version. He said that the original contained the idea of what the poem aspired to but could never fully be, whereas a translation of said poem went straight for its essence and could ca
rry out its potential while getting rid of the first empirical layer—whatever that meant—in the process, bringing it closer to its “truth.”

  To me, in German or French, Hofmannsthal made no sense at all.

  “Herr Mazal?” Coffin asked as he handed me a Xerox of the poem we were looking at. “Do you know of any other ways to translate the word Erlebnis?”

  I looked down at the sheet of paper in case the answer had been written on it.

  “ ‘Adventure’?” I tried.

  Coffin was pleased, and I thought he would leave me alone for the rest of the hour. Except I was the only one who had any interest in German, and when Coffin was tired of attempting to catch the others’ attention, he pretended the class was just composed of the two of us.

  “And why is it you think the translator decided to translate Erlebnis as ‘experience’ and not ‘adventure’ here, in the particular case of this poem?”

  “I would have to read the whole poem,” I said, “to get some context.”

  “Please do,” Coffin said.

  I scanned through the poem, trying to spot the verbs first. Filled, seeping, glowing (twice), fathom, sailing, gliding. Not a single useful verb. Not one verb that helped me see what Hofmannsthal was talking about. Then nouns: valley, dusk, chalice, lilac. That’s why I wasn’t making any progress, I thought. Daphné Marlotte was right. Poetry was of no help when you wanted to learn actual German.

  “I think adventure would have implied that something in the poem was going to happen,” I said, “whereas all the narrator talks about here are sensations and feelings and images. So the word experience, being more static, was more appropriate, I suppose.”

  “You do not think death could be referred to as an adventure?” Coffin said, and I read the poem again. I guess Hofmannsthal was indeed talking about dying, but he wrapped it in so many flower names I had been confused.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if death should be called an adventure or an experience. I guess the fact that one only dies once would tip the scale in favor of adventure, in a way, because the word adventure implies a sort of uniqueness, when an experience can be repeated many times. Potentially.”

  “I think experience is just more poetic sounding,” I heard Victor say from the last row. “And Hofmanstool was a poet, so he had to use the most poetic words. Adventure sounds more like it would be for an action movie title, maybe.”

  “Action movies were not too popular in Hofmannsthal’s time,” Herr Coffin said. “And we’re talking about the translator’s choices here, anyway, not the poet’s.”

  “Oh,” Victor said. “Right. Entschuldigang.”

  “Sure,” Coffin said. “No problem. Let’s take a look at the first verse now.”

  He went to the blackboard and wrote down a couple of words I knew from previous poems we’d studied but he thought maybe the rest of the class had forgotten.

  “We’ve been over these words already,” I said, and Herr Coffin turned and looked at me above his glasses.

  “Repetition is at the root of all worthy pedagogy,” he said, and he went back to dusk and valley.

  “I just can’t think of a way I could use these words in a normal conversation,” I interrupted him. I felt a wind of energy rise in the rows behind me, as if my classmates had been woken from an enchanted sleep: something was actually happening in German class. Coffin walked to my table and took his glasses off, which I knew was something old people did sometimes to see better.

  “And what words do you think might be more suitable to a normal conversation?” he asked me. I looked down at my table and proceeded to list what was on it.

  “Pencil,” I said, “pencil case, pencil shavings, eraser, graffiti.”

  “Well these sound like the roots of a very promising exchange, don’t they?” Coffin said. The whole room laughed politely, which encouraged him to keep going.

  “I didn’t know you were such a conversationalist, Herr Mazal. You must have many friends.”

  “He doesn’t!” Victor said, in an attempt, I assumed, to get my roast under way and waste a few more minutes of German class, but which had the opposite effect of putting Coffin back on my side (Coffin couldn’t have had that many friends growing up) and his glasses back on his nose.

  “Enough already,” he yelled Victor’s way. Herr Coffin never yelled, and I understood why when he did. Someone must have told him how his yelling sounded like an old lady’s as she was being mugged. He turned back to me and forced his voice down to a deeper pitch than usual.

  “And what do you suggest would be a proper vector to teach you more ‘normal’ words, Herr Mazal?”

  “Maybe we could watch movies?” I said. “Movies in German?”

  Coffin didn’t reject the idea right away but didn’t seem to know what I was talking about either.

  “Movies,” he repeated, as if the word represented some complex concept he was trying to remember from college.

  “Yes,” I said, “movies where people have everyday conversations.”

  “Like Dirty Dancing!” said Emilie, who sat next to me.

  “That doesn’t sound very German,” Coffin said.

  “Does it have to be?” Emilie bargained.

  “I can’t see what the pedagogical use would be otherwise.”

  “Maybe the movies would only have to be dubbed in German?” she said.

  I thought this would ruin any chance we would ever have of Coffin’s agreeing to show us a movie in class, but it got him thinking. He admitted he hadn’t seen a new movie in a long time, and that he didn’t even know who today’s stars were (Coffin called them “idols”).

  Emilie started naming movie stars, and Coffin stopped her at Brad Pitt. He didn’t believe Brad Pitt could actually be anyone’s name. He thought we were pulling his leg. I wondered what Coffin did when he was alone. Several of my classmates confirmed Brad Pitt existed, but Coffin looked at me for confirmation. “It really is a name,” I said.

  “Has he been in any good movies?” Coffin asked.

  “Legends of the Fall,” Victor said, which surprised me a little. I wouldn’t have gotten away with Legends of the Fall, but Victor was a popular guy, so no one made fun of him.

  “Well I’ll tell you what,” Coffin said. “If all of you participate in class today, and by participating, I mean saying something not too dumb about this Hofmannsthal poem, and trying to do so in German, I will look for a version of Legends of the Fall dubbed in German.”

  Everyone suddenly had something to say about Hofmannsthal, and I thought they would all thank me for coming up with the watching-a-movie idea, but after class, the boys gathered around Victor and the girls around Emilie to show gratitude and share their excitement about Legends of the Fall.

  I called Denise’s house. Her mother said she couldn’t come to the phone. I asked what was wrong, if Denise was sick. Her mother said, very politely, that Denise had anorexia and depression, like I might not have noticed. It felt insensitive to tell her I knew all that already and ask if there wasn’t anything new with her daughter. It seemed like enough illnesses for one person already.

  “Will you tell her Isidore called?” I said.

  She said sure and thanked me for calling, and for my concern, which would make Denise very happy. I knew it wouldn’t, and for a second I understood why Denise’s mother drove her so mad.

  I didn’t like calling people. I was okay with picking up the phone (I liked it, actually; Simone said I’d make a great receptionist) but I thought I had to have a very good reason to be responsible for a phone ringing in someone else’s house. I think it is because the ringing of our own phone seemed to bother our mother immensely most of the time. She’d sigh and say, “Who the hell?” when it rang, but then she always picked up with a warm hello. I thought a ringing phone had to annoy everyone as much as it did my mother, and that there would be no way to know that you’d annoyed them because, like her, they would always pretend they were happy to answer. I’d p
ondered calling Denise for a while. I’d decided that if I could come up with four questions to ask her and a story to tell that she might find entertaining, it would be enough to justify a call. I’d struggled to find four questions but I hadn’t given up, which I thought meant I really wanted to call Denise. My story was going to be that of having convinced Herr Coffin to show us Legends of the Fall in German class. I’d written all of it down, the questions and the key story points, on a piece of paper. I wondered if I could reuse it as a model for future phone calls. I wondered if I was the only one who needed excuses to call a friend.

  From the living room where I sat I heard Leonard come down the stairs and rummage through our walk-in pantry.

  “I killed the Oreos,” I said, in case that was what he’d been looking for.

  He came into the living room.

  “I thought you were watching your weight,” he said.

  “Not really,” I said. “Berenice says I won’t grow much if I diet in my teenage years. I don’t want to be a midget.”

  “When did you drop the diet?”

  Leonard asked this with what seemed like scientific interest more than sheer curiosity.

  “Is that relevant to your academic research?” I asked. “Do you think my losing weight was a mourning strategy?”

  “Forget about it,” Leonard said.

  “Are you going for a swim?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking down at the duffel bag he’d once let a wet swimsuit go moldy in. “I’m going crazy up there writing all day. I need to spend some energy.”

  I apologized about the Oreos and he left. I realized Jeremie was at symphony practice and that I could go upstairs and use his computer now—and without having Leonard watching over my shoulder.

  The boys’ bedroom smelled like old water in a vase. On Leonard’s desk, one of his many notebooks had been left open. I knew I wouldn’t dare to turn the notebook’s pages—my siblings had a secret way to know if someone had been through their things—so I hoped Leonard had left it open to an interesting one.