How to Behave in a Crowd: A Novel - Hardcover

There was a darker brown stain on our brown suede couch. If I swept it one way with the palm of my hand, it almost blended in. I could squint and forget it was even there, but then a swipe in the other direction, and the stain reappeared, darker than I remembered, like I’d just fed it.

Everyone had a different story about the stain. Simone said I’d pissed the couch as a toddler, after running free from our mother’s bundle of towels, just out of my bath. “You went straight for the couch, stood right there on the armrest, grabbed your half- inch wang, and aimed,” Simone said. “I saw it, and Aurore and Jeremie, we never understood what came over you, Dory. It’s like you were on a mission.”

It didn’t, indeed, sound like me at all. First, the number of decisions that was implied, all of them transgressing my mother’s law (running naked and barefoot on the cold living room tile, grabbing my penis in public, pissing on the couch). Add to that Simone's choice of words: went straight, aimed, mission. Hers was the least believable story. Aurore and Jeremie didn't even back it up.

Other stories of the stain incriminated my siblings in turn: coffee stain (Berenice), nail polish (Aurore), jism (]eremie), to­mato sauce (Leonard), paint (Simone). Each initial stain was, in every account, made worse by our mother's attempt to clean it with unfit detergent. One story was actually based on the prem­ise that there had been no stain to get rid of in the first place, that our zealous mother had just wanted to bring a new shine to the couch and had ruined it with a single spray of the wrong thing.

The stain on the couch made me uneasy. It made me think I was the only one to notice things, to care. "Why do you care so much about the stain?" my mother once asked, and the thing is, I couldn't understand why no one else did.

I loved my family, I believe. Even though I'd known no other and couldn't really tell, I thought they were all right, decent people. But oblivious. They got lost in their thoughts. They had no sense of the other-of anyone outside our family, sometimes even me.

One point every story of the stain converged on: the stain was at the very least nine years old. That was a long time to keep a stained couch, I thought. We were not poor.

~

I knew we weren't poor because we went to the beach every summ­er, and I'd learned in school (fourth grade) that being able to go to the beach was a privilege not everyone had. There had been a national campaign to raise awareness of children who didn't get to go away at all during summer. Our teacher, Miss Faux, had shown us clips of kids seeing the ocean for the very first time thanks to the money collected the previous year by the Let Them Sea charity. Some of the kids in the Let Them Sea videos hadn't even believed the sea existed before. They thought it was just a fairy-tale word, "like magic wands, or castles," one of them told the camera. Some of them were older than me. I remember one girl in the video-her name was Juliette, the caption said who'd looked more happy about her little brother's walking on beach for the first time than about her own discovery. She kept looking at him, his reactions. She barely glanced at the water herself. It had made me teary eyed a bit. After the clips, Miss Faux had put a tin jar with the Let Them Sea logo on her desk and encouraged us to put whatever we could in it, even just a penny or a dime. It was important, she'd said, that we realized that the smallest of our sacrifices could make a big difference in another kid's life. A couple of the boys in my class had lied and said they didn't get pocket money at all and sadly could not donate to the cause. During break, though, I'd heard them talk about all the candy they'd buy later, and why should they pay for poor people' vacations anyway, and how those of us who gave money were suckers who fell into the guilt trap like shit into the toilet bowl I'd put the whole of my monthly allowance in the Let Them Sea jar. I had waited for a moment where Miss Faux would see how much I tossed in, but either she didn't pay attention or she didn't think my generosity was worth commenting on.

~

At home, I was always first at the dinner table. My siblings would come down the stairs only at our mother's insistence, and then like drops from a leaking faucet, one at a time, at painful inter­vals. I had to wait for them all to get there to start eating.

"The father won't be coming back tonight," my mother said one evening as she and I were waiting for the others. I thought she meant he was dead, but he'd only been kept abroad by a con­ference and had missed his connecting flight home. She called him "the father" to give him extra substance, I thought. We saw him so little.

Mom ate from blue plates and bowls because she'd read that blue tableware cut your appetite, and she always wanted to lose four pounds. That night, she'd made whitefish, and whitefish you could eat as much as you wanted and not gain an ounce, she said, but still she'd set a blue plate in front of her.

"The father won't be coming home tonight," she repeated to Simone, then Jeremie, then Leonard, as each showed up. No one asked for details.

Aurore was particularly hard to lure downstairs at the time, or to even see outside of her bedroom. She studied permanently. She and Berenice were both writing PhD dissertations, on different subjects and in different cities. Berenice lived in Paris and didn't come back home too often.

"Will someone see if Aurore plans to eat with us tonight?" my mother asked, and she was looking at me.

"Aurore," I said through her door.

"Is this a life-or-death matter?" Aurore asked.

"It's dinnertime," I said. "We're all waiting for you." "Don't," she said. "I can't be interrupted right now."

"Do you want me to bring up a plate for you?" "You're an angel, Dory."

When I went to bed that night, Aurore still hadn't touched the whitefish and potatoes on the tray I'd left outside her door. The potatoes had started turning purple-gray. I ate a couple. I wasn't even hungry.

Sometimes, Mom hooked me up with a blue plate too.

~

Every August, Berenice came home from Paris and our parent put the six of us in the van and crammed suitcases in between our seats and at our feet. The van had no trunk. We used the suitcase as ottomans and armrests. The drive to the beach was about three hours, and we usually listened to the traffic news radio station the whole way. It was pretty repetitive, but at least when they played music between bulletins, it was songs we all knew, which my mother thought was nice-not that we sang along to them or anything. It brought the generations together.

I don't know why we went to that beach every summer. I don’t think anyone had particular affection for it. None of my three sisters would leave our bungalow (the same one every year) before five p.m.-they were all very light skinned and feared getting sunburned-and when they did go out, it was only to keep doing what they'd been doing indoors, which was reading or when their eyes got tired, talking to each other about what they' read. Leonard looked at people and took notes all day. Jeremie liked digging holes in the sand and lying down at the bottom of them. Summer after summer, the holes got deeper. At some point, it became impossible for Jeremie to get himself out of the holes without outside help, but he didn't seem to mind. He knew someone would come check on him eventually. He just liked to lie there on his back and look at that rectangle of sky he'd framed for himself, and once, when our mother informed him he could lie on the beach with her and me, at sea level, and see exactly as much sky, more sky, even, she believed, Jeremie agreed with her but added that he would also have to see a bunch of strangers in bathing suits.

The father and I were the only ones to actually go in the sea. He swam while I threw myself at oncoming waves, not too far from the shore, waiting for him to swim back to me. That's as close as I could get to sharing something with him, even though I was scared to go far out like he did. I wasn't exactly sure what the father did for a living but he did it away from us. Germany, China, Spain. Some sort of engineering. When teachers in school asked what our fathers' jobs were, I said mine traveled, and it seemed to be accepted as a valid occupation. Like any kid whose father didn't have a cool-sounding job, I assume, I hoped that mine was actually a spy. It had to happen sometimes that these fantasies turned out to be true, and I believed my chances were in fact higher than other kids' because my father traveled abroad a lot, so there was, at least, potential for covert missions and se­crets, whereas the spydom of other fathers was unlikely, given that they worked in town, where nothing much ever happened.

We didn't see the father much, but when we did, on week­ends, or in the summer, it seemed he couldn't wait to get away from us again. He swam a little farther every day. I'm not making that up to sound dramatic or anything. He did have this device he wrapped around his wrist that measured his progress, and he would announce a new record distance to us each morning.

My siblings loved swimming at the pool back home. They were all great swimmers and had bodies that proved it, athletic and lean, but the idea of swimming in the sea disgusted them. My mother claimed she couldn't swim, and it worried me. I wanted her to learn. "What would happen if I started to drown?" I'd ask. "Would you just watch me die?" She'd say that if I drowned probably one of my siblings would go in the water to help me out She'd always rush the pronunciation of the probably, but never once did she forget to say it.

Simone was the one who disliked summer holidays the most My other siblings were already in college or grad school, so I didn't really make a difference to them where we were: they always had "research" to work on. But Simone still needed to be assigned work, and was of the opinion that school breaks were a waste of time. She'd skipped any number of grades over the years (she was only thirteen, a year and a half older than me and already in high school) but she would've done the rest of her curriculum nonstop if that had been an option. She always got strangely nostalgic, though, when the time came to pack the car and go back home. Any other time, she was fine being in the middle, but she demanded a window seat for the ride back. She said looking at the seashore fade away through the window was good way to get a grasp on her melancholy, and that being able to pull from a store of melancholy was what made great artists. "Car trips make great artists?" I asked, making sure I understood what my sister had said. "Car trips back," Simone specified.

The summer after I found out about kids who never got to see the ocean, I tried to be less bored, to look around me through their eyes and be amazed like I'd seen them be in that video. I found it hard to marvel at the water, though, and the waves, without encouragement. I wondered if a person needed to be looked at while enjoying something in order for that person to really enjoy it, and whether that was why that girl Juliette had only been looking at her little brother looking at the sea when they both saw it for the first time-to make sure he understood he had to enjoy it. I watched Simone being melancholy all the way home, but it didn't seem like she needed an audience.

~

My parents didn't look very much in love to me, and I thought it was my fault. I guess it's what happens when you're the only one to notice a thing: you feel responsible for it. They didn't really kiss, just a dry smack on the lips in the mornings when the father left for somewhere. They only seemed to exchange practical information about appointments or taxes, sometimes us. I thought they were waiting until I was old enough to move away to get a divorce.

~

I once went a whole week without seeing Aurore. Our bedrooms faced one another, but she rarely left hers. When she had to, for mandatory family dinners (one birthday or another), she looked out of place. I won't say much about our house because I'm really bad at picturing three-dimensional spaces, let alone describing them. I could never tell whose bedroom was the one right over our kitchen, for instance. I'm not good at drawing either. But basically: we had a living room, a kitchen, and a dining room we never ate in on the first floor, and then four bedrooms and on bathroom upstairs. I shared a bedroom with Simone. My parents’ was next door. My brothers' and Aurore's were across the hall from us.

I missed Aurore's bedroom. When I was smaller and she was writing less important papers for school, she'd let me sit under her desk for hours. It was a panel desk, so I was enclosed on three sides. The fourth side opened onto Aurore, who worked with her legs up and folded half-lotus. All I saw of her was knees and bare feet, and I had all the space beneath the desk to myself. She never asked what I was doing under there. She had total respect for my privacy. I was so silent she sometimes forgot about me, though. She'd start stretching her legs for blood flow and I'd say, "Hey!” and she'd apologize and fold her legs back up.

Most of the time, I did nothing at all under there. I'd started drawing a mural in Crayola on the underside of the desk, but I only worked on it sporadically. I could never really see what I was drawing anyway, it was so dark. One day I started adding boogers to the mural, for texture. I felt guilty about it, but couldn't stop.

When Aurore decided I'd gotten too big to sit under her desk it hurt. I begged for one last afternoon, mainly so I could scrap off all the dried boogers from the mural. At the end of the day Aurore could tell I was sad and she said, "I'll get a bigger desk for us one of these days," but she never did.

~

I believed if I ran away from home, it would make my mother happy. She always complained we weren't adventurous enough, and while my siblings usually met her remark with the same in­ difference they granted statements of personal opinions in gen­eral, I, the youngest of the six of us, took it to heart. I didn't want to be blamed for the others' quirks. I wanted to be my own man. To be different. I mean, I had no choice but to be different (I wasn't as smart or as good-looking as my brothers and sisters), but I had no particular idea what kind of person I should be ei­ther. I thought I could at least try what my mother had in mind and be adventurous.

It was unclear, though, what an adventure was. Jeremie, the younger of my brothers, had been offered chances to tour Eu­rope with two different philharmonics: those would've been adventures, according to our mother, if Jeremie hadn't declined both opportunities, stating he preferred keeping cello a hobby. But when my other brother, Leonard, had begged my parents to let him go spend the tenth and following grades in boarding school, my mother hadn't thought it qualified as adventure, even though Leonard had tried hard to sell it as such. He'd said board­ing school w...