Prologue
There was this kingdom once where everybody lived forever. They’d discovered the secret of eternal life, and because of that, there were no cemeteries, no hospitals, no funeral parlors, no books in the bookstore about death and grieving. Instead, the bookstore was full of pamphlets about how to be a righteous citizen without fear of an afterlife.
The problem was that because of this life spurt, the kingdom was very crowded. The women kept having more and more babies, and the babies had no place to sleep because of the fourteen great — great — grandmothers and great-great- grandfathers that were crowding up all the bedrooms. All the old people were getting older and older, and there was no respect for elders because the elders were just like the youngers; there wasn’t really a whole lot of difference anymore. Space was the real problem. So the king, getting crowded out of his own castle by the endless royal lineage, is sued a decree.
“Everybody in my kingdom,” he said, “please pick one person in your family to die. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it goes. If you don’t want to do it, please leave.
We will have a mass execution on Friday, and it will bring forth much more space and everyone will forever honor those who gave up for the cause. ” So on Friday, the town congregated. A few folks had packed up their bags and left, but most stayed on the land they loved. The remaining families had spent the week choosing their offering.
This wasn’t as hard as might be expected; to be forever honored was ap, pealing, and plus there was an unspoken curiosity in the town about dyinVit was sort of like going on a trip to an exotic place no one had ever been before, and just having to stay there for good.
So that afternoon, each family that showed up in the town square had chosen one martyr to die for the cause of greater community space. There was a lot of weeping and praising going on, and finally everyone pushed forward a volunteer; that is, all except one family. This family simply could not pick. First the mother had said she would die, and then everyone in the family protested, and then the father said he would die, and everyone protested, and then the daughter said she would, and no one liked that idea, and the son offered, but that was no good either, and then the baby cried and they thought it meant she would, but she was the baby and that didn’t make much sense at all. The whole family was arguing and crying and volunteering and pushing and shoving and finally the mother moved forward and said to the king’s executioner: “We cannot pick, so we would all like to die together.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” said the town executioner.
“Then there will be none of you left. That spoils the whole point.”
The rest of the town was irritated as well. They didn’t want the whole family gone. This family ran the bakery and was particularly adept at making a fine sausage roll, with ground-up meat and nutmeg inside, so delicious it tasted like dessert.
The family took off to the sidelines to discuss. The rest of the families waved tearfully at their martyred volunteer, who each waved back, hands shaking with goodwill and terror. Finally, the difficult family stepped forward.
“Well,” said the father, “how about this. We would like to offer a piece of each of us. With all these pieces combined, it will be as if one less person lived in town.”
The town executioner cocked his head.
“Continue,” he said, interested. The mother stood forward, and said, “You may have my leg.” The father said he’d gladly cut off an arm. The daughter said she’d remove her ear. The son said he’d cut off all his hair, and perhaps a foot, too. They let the baby be.
“We need a head,” said the town executioner.
“Fine,” said the father.
“I will also deliver my nose.”
This seemed to satisfy the executioner, so after all the other people were killed, the family was cut up and the pieces were laid out on the ground in their correct places to make a partial person who was the sacrifice to the kingdom’s population control.
The town dispersed, disoriented, unsure how to mourn their losses.
The cut-up family, after recovering, still made their sausage rolls, but no one could stand to buy them anymore because it was so disturbing to go into the store and see the noseless father, with that strap around his face, or watch the legless mother hop in to ring up the cash register, or to have to shout the order at the daughter since she only had one ear left. The family, broke, was forced to leave. They moved to the next town, which wasn’t so bad after all, and opened up a new business, and since no one there had ever seen them whole, here they accepted the family of pieces without a problem and bought sausage rolls day after day.
Each family member lived a long long time, and only the baby, who was complete, contracted any disease. When she did, at age twenty, they nursed her and nursed her until her leg fell off with gangrene, and then they had a party to celebrate her arrival.
That’s the story my father told me at bedtime on my tenth birthday.
On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax.
This was the best gift I got in a decade. Before I saw it, shining on the wall of the hardware store like a lover made from steel and wood, I’d given up completely on the birthday celebration.
On my nineteenth, my mother had kicked me out of the house. On my eighteenth, I had a party of two people, and after an hour, both claimed allergies, and went home, sneezing.
On my seventeenth, I made myself a chocolate cake, but since I didn’t really want to eat it, stirred bug poison in with the mix.
It rose beautifully, the best ever, and when I took it out of the oven, a perfect brown dome, I just circled the pan for a few hours, breathing in that warm buttery air. Some ants ate the crumbs on the counter and died.
On MY sixteenth, MY aunt sent me a beautiful scarlet silk dress, which smelled and felt as delicate as the inside of a wrist.
Stroking it in my lap, I sifted through the phone book, finally picking out the name of a woman who lived at an address with i 6s in it. Then I mailed the dress to her. Red is not my color.
On my fifteenth, fourteenth, thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh birthdays, my mother and I went shopping, and each year, by the end, one of us was in tears of frustration because I didn’t like anything, and I said I really didn’t want anything, except, maybe, a new math workbook. You had to send away for those. They came from a big number barn in the South. My mother shook her head; she refused, flat-out, to buy me math supplies for my birthday, so finally we just put the money in the bank instead.
The year of my tenth birthday was when my father got sick, and that’s when I started to quit.
I’d always loved the sound of pianos, so I signed up for lessons and took them for six weeks, and at the end of six weeks we had a recital. I wore a dress and played a minuet and my two hands were doing two different things at the same time and when it was over I drank juice and got hugged and the melody crooned inside my head. I walked my piano teacher to her car, and she smiled at me, proud. The sky clamped down. I lowered my voice: Listen, I said, urgent. You are never, ever to set foot near this house again.
Her eyebrows pulled in, puzzled. Mona? she asked. What? Thanks, I said. But this is the end of the line.
I told my mother it was too bad, wasn’t it, that the one piano teacher was leaving our small town of no opportunity to become a rock star in the big city. Her eyes widened and she picked up the phone and my heart started pounding, but to my huge relief the piano teacher’s machine picked up and my mother’s message was vague, something like: Good luck and wow! and we wish you all the best.
Three weeks later, they ran into each other at the market. What they talked about, I have no idea.
I took dance class ten times, and on the afternoon of my first leap, donated my ballet shoes to charity. I had one boyfriend and within two months had hardened into a statue in bed. I ran track like a shooting star and shot myself straight out of orbit.
I quit dessert to see if I could do it-of course I could; I quit breathing one evening until my lungs overruled; I quit touching my skin, sleeping with both hands under the pillow. When no one was home, I tied ropes around the piano, so that it would take me thirty minutes with scissors to get back to that minuet. Then I hid all the scissors.
I did not stop knocking on wood, which I did all the time, as a way to seal each quit into roots and bark; listen: I tell the wood look at what I’m doing here. Mark this down. Notice.
No piano. No dessert. No track. Nothing. I am in love with stopping.
It’s a fine art, when you think about it. To quit well requires an intuitive sense of beauty; you have to feel the moment of turn, right when desire makes an appearance, here is the instant to be severed, whack, this is the moment where quitting is ripe as a peach turning sweet on the vine: snap, the cord is cracked, peach falls to the floor, black and silver with flies.
I had one boyfriend. He was distracted most of the time but we stood in his front doorway on a warm summer night and his lips moved over my skin like a string quartet and I could feel that peach ready to shake off the tree.
I quit going to the movies.
I quit my job at the local diner when the chef kept going on and on about what a good runner I’d been.
I quit egg salad.
I quit flipping through atlases.
I’d long quit the idea of living away from home when, on that nineteenth birthday, my mother threw me out of the house. She closed the town tourist office that she owned and ran, came home early, and said: Mona, happy birthday, my present to you is this.
Putting her hands on my shoulders, she marched me out the front door, and stood me on the lawn.
I love you, she said, but you are too old to live here. But I love it here, I said.
Her hair blew around in the air. You’re lying, she said, and what’s worse is that you don’t even know it.
I wasn’t sure if she was adamant or just a lot of talk until she rolled my bed into the front hallway. My father, confused, just sidled around the sloppy pillow and comforter, and for two nights, I dreamt in the space where wall nearly met wall. On the second morning, I woke, went to the bathroom, came back, and found the bed was gone again. And the front door was open. My mother stood in the doorway, her back to me, shoulders lifting and lowering from laughter at the sight of it, covers rumpled, standing in the middle of the front lawn like a cow.
So I’ll sleep out there then, I said, heading toward it.
She caught me in her arms and held me close. I could feel the laughter, warm in her arms and her chest.
I went apartment hunting that Saturday. My mother was off at work, but before I left, my father called to me from the living room. He was feeling feverish, and lay on the couch, a washcloth sprawled on his forehead like the limp flag of a defeated country. Central heating, he advised. Do you need anything? I asked, but he shook his head. And Mona, he said, make sure you get a place with a toilet that flushes. I nodded. I brought him a glass of water before I left.
The whole idea of moving made me nervous, so I kept company with the number 19 as I walked around town by myself. 19: the third centered hexagonal number. A prime. The amount of time alive of my chin, my toes, my brain. I wandered through the tree lined streets, to the edge of town where the gray ribbon of highway dressed the hills in the distance like a lumpy yellow gift. I did pass a few FOR RENT signs, but the apartment I finally chose was only three blocks from my parents’ house, sparkled with color, came with a toilet so powerful it could flush socks, and had an address that I liked: 9119.
The day I moved in, I placed my furniture pretty much where it had been at home. My bed, formerly grayish from the dimmed atmosphere of my parents’ house was already picking up its old pink tones. I hadn’t seen it pink for nine years, and it looked like the color ads in newspapers that retain a steely quality of black-and white even though they’re newly splotched with reds and blues.
I called my mother when the phone was hooked up. I’m here, I said. What now?
She was eating something crunchy. Decorate, she told me. Have a party.
The blank walls loomed white and empty. I ran through the rooms and said my name in each one.
Mona, I told the kitchen.
Mona, I whispered into the hall closet.
When it hit eleven o’clock, I put myself into the bed I’d slept in my entire life, in a room I’d never slept in, ever, and switched off the lights. The shadows made moving dark spirits on the walls, and I reached over to the potted tree my mother had given me as a housewarming present, and knocked on the trunk. I knocked and knocked. I didn’t knock just a few times, I knocked maybe fifty.
One hundred knocks. More knocks. One hundred and fifty. More. I stopped and then something felt wrong, my stomach felt wrong, so I knocked some more.
The new place held its own around me, learning. This is me, I wanted to tell it. Hello. This is me protecting the world.
I knocked until midnight. I’d finish and then go back for more.
This is how I imagine drugs are. You close in on the wood, pull in your breath, and you want to get it just right and your whole body is taut, breath held, tight with getting it just right and awaiting the release-ssss-which lasts about five seconds and when it’s over it’s not right again yet, more, you need to go back. Just one more time. just one more time and I’ll get it exactly right this time and be done for the rest of my life.
Once I was all settled in, and each drawer had a purpose, and the bathroom was well-stocked with toilet paper and window cleaner, I invited my mother over for lunch.
My father sent his apologies, but didn’t come with her; he was feeling off again; this happened. I served turkey sandwiches using the same brands of mayonnaise, mustard, and bread that my mother bought. After we ate, she brought a bag of cherries from her purse, and asked if I wanted to initiate the apartment by spitting cherry pits out the window. I said no thanks. Years ago, we used to go into their backyard in summertime and perch on the grass and spit cherry pits as far as we could. My mother’s spits were badly aimed and ricocheted off to the left; my father was the better spitter, but my learning curve was sharp and I watched him close as those reddish ovals went flying. After he got sick, I did some spitting by myself, which was not very fun, and spit with my mother, which was not very challenging, and once I got him to join me and for some reason he breathed in too quick and the pit went backward and got lodged in his throat. Cherry pits are small, and so it was just three or four seconds of that thick labyrinth breathing but enough to scare us both into shaking. I stopped popping whole cherries in my mouth and took to biting down to pit and eating around that. My father cut his food into tiny pieces.
Before she left 9119, my mother put those cherries, bright as blood cells, on the counter, took out a camera, and snapped some photos of the rooms to show my father later.
I had sex with that one boyfriend. Once. Twice. All at his place.
His skin was a buoyant ship over mine, and he kissed silver into the back of my neck, and was fine with my insistence on having lights ON at all times. I like to see what’s happening, I explained. Cool, he said, picking at his elbow. After the third time, when we were just starting to get the hang of it, I came home one morning to my new empty apartment; I checked my messages to see if anyone had died while I was out in the world having sex but no one had or at least it was unreported so I sat on the couch and kept a knock going on the side table when I thought of how his eyelashes made a simple black rim when he looked down.
The clock said noon so I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator but the food inside looked too complicated and I peered into the cupboards but I didn’t want turkey soup, or garbanzo beans, or tuna, and I wandered into the bathroom and without even really thinking about it unwrapped the spare package of soap that I kept in the cabinet beneath the sink.
I bought the same brand my mother did. A bright white bar, rocking on its back, friendly. I brought it to the living room couch, and held it for a while, smelling it, and there was a knife sitting on the side table from the previous day’s apple, which seemed convenient, and after a few minutes of just holding and smelling, I picked up the knife, balanced the bar on the arm of the couch, sawed off a portion, set it sailing in my mouth, and bit down.
Slide! Slip! It careened around my tongue. Gave like chocolate under my teeth. I cut another piece. My mouth crammed with froth.
Mmm. I cut again. My hand slipped. I steadied the knife, cut again.
I’d chewed half the bar before I realized that it tasted strange, that the feeling it left in my mouth was not right, that there was something about the swallowing part that was wrong. By then it was making me gag and I went to the bathroom where the mirror revealed lather gathered around lip corners in clusters. Sticking the remains of the bar in the shower, I gulped glass after glass of water, spitting up foam into the sink, and the rest of the day I thought very little of the boyfriend, and instead wandered the rooms, burping clean burps, evaluating how badly I felt: Should I just relax? Should I get my stomach pumped?
When I woke up the next morning, slightly dizzy but not dead, I stumbled into the shower and stood in the spray.. meek, naked, distant. I used the straight bitten end of the soap to clean myself, but before I put it back on its shelf, I took one mildly interested nibble. The smell slammed back through me. In an instant, my stomach heaved up and I crouched down, water sticking in my eyes, and threw up down the drain, all whiteness and foam, soap rushing in waves back through me.
Then I took that remaining bar, complete with the paneled markings of my teeth, and dumped it into the trash.
I couldn’t use soap for months after that-had to wash my hands with shampoo. A week or so later, when I next saw the boyfriend, he took his hand up my shirt and clicked my bra, releasing my breasts, but I stepped away and told him no. Peach fell off the tree, dead. He blinked; oh, he said, okay. If I had any doubts, if I felt the warmth rising when he touched the corner of my lips with the tip of his finger, when he kissed the nape of my neck, turning my entire back into perforation, I just excused myself, went into the bathroom and washed my hands. He used the same brand of soap I did, and the smell did the trick right away. I left his house before midnight, underpants wet, stomach roiling, knocking every sidewalk tree. We broke up about three weeks later. He kept saying he was sorry. I held my clean fingers to my nose, nodded.
After all that, the one thing I loved but never quit, could not seem to give up, was, of all things, math. I tried to stop thinking about numbers but found myself, against my will, adding my steps and multiplying the people in the park against one another, knocking on wood in a careful rhythm, counting endlessly: sheep, students, parents, age, heartbeats. Mix up some numbers and signs, and you get an equation for the way the wind shifts or an axiom for the movement of water, or the height of someone, or for how skin feels. You can account for softness. You can explain everything. Even air is just an arrangement of digits, and with just the right balance-poof! We breathe.
I’ve spent entire afternoons thinking about one number, flying down its long onyx tunnel, opening up the trapdoor that it is.
Take 5. Seems regular-five — dollar bill, five-minute break-but five is also the sum of two squares, and a prime, and penta grams and my sixth-grade math teacher told me that the Pythagoreans thought 5 was about marriage because it was 3 (their first odd) joined with 2 (their first even). For my parents’ anniversary that year, I made them five small cakes. They seemed puzzled (maybe because it was their twenty-first anniversary) but my mother praised the frosting, in chocolate peaks on her fingertips.
I noticed the 31 Rag they gave me at the sandwich shop, so then I knew how many sandwiches I had to wait for before I ate my own. I used the 60–90 dial on the heat thermometer to calm my goose bumps or cool my sweat. I poked the little squares 1–9 on the telephone keypad to dial up the world; I knocked 15 times on the potted tree before I fell asleep. 2-hour parking signs told me how to avoid tickets, and I memorized the capacity warning in the elevator: onlyzz allowed. Beautiful. Clear. To quit numbers would be to pack in a bustling group Of 25 people, eager to get where they’re going, let the metal doors shut, and plunge straight into the basement cement, swift and hard as a comet.
heard about a woman who got a job reordering an entire town. The numbers were off because the mayor had a counting problem, and she’d been hired to come in and reintroduce 8. It’d been missing in some clocks. She’d also needed to go over the books and see if the adding was correct (which of course it wasn’t, without 8) and to check all the signs. Drivers were apparently getting off the highway, following the sign that said GAS: 2 MILES, to find nothing but dusty roads. The sign was supposed to say 88. It was a whole industry, townsfolk dashing over to gas less cars with cans of portable petrol.
She was called a number doctor. That was my dream job.
But I was still intrigued and humbled when I got a call from the elementary school principal asking me if I wanted to be the new math teacher. At the last minute, the previous math teacher had flown off to Paraguay. No one knew where she was until her resignation arrived, four days before school began, in the form of a postcard with very green trees on the front. Sorry, she’d written, but I have decided to become a revolutionary. Please send my final paycheck to this address.
It’s dreadful, the principal said to me on the phone. You have no idea how hard it is to find a math teacher.
She said she was sleepless with worry until she remembered, in a dreamlike flash, a summer years and years before when she was in the park and happened upon me, curled up by the duck pond, sipping lemonade, doing long division.
You’re it, she said.
I’ve never taught math before, I said. I’m only nineteen. So, she said. Know how to add?
Ilaughed. Or an octagon, she said, how about octagons?
What about them?
What are they? she asked.
I leaned against the counter. I’m not an idiot, I said. I’m practically married to the stop sign, I said.
And can you start Monday? she asked. Because you’re hired, Mona Gray.
She hung up before I could answer.
The elementary school was a quick brisk walk from my apartment. I went to look at it that weekend, passing the red mouth of the fire station, striding by the house with the dumb iron geese on the lawn, trudging through an overgrown empty lot. Above the roof tops, leaving a diamond of bluish shadow on the cement, loomed the large blue-glass hospital, the town’s most unusual building.
But that marked the other end of town. On one end: kid school.
Other end: people coughing and dying and weak.
The school was a modest white box on a corner. Inside was a kitchen for the staff, a lobby area for lunch boxes and jackets, a big
activity room, and a hall lined with doors. Each had a subject card on it: READING in red, SCIENCE in yellow, and mine said mATH in big black letters. I spent a minute with the word, proud, and then took a breath and went inside.
I was very disappointed to see that the math classroom had no windows and was the width of a hallway. Also it smelled like concrete. ART and SPELLING were squarer, and windowed, and scented with sunshine, so I figured math gets the shaft in classroom selection because the math teacher is the dentist of the school curriculum. It’s a miracle if there are kids in the class who don’t hate you.
Except me. I had loved all my math teachers. I’d loved my arithmetic teacher with the giraffe face who made up word problems that rhymed; I’d loved the woman who wept when she explained quadratic equations because, she said, their beauty was so true it was what fashion magazines should do their photo shoots on; I’d loved the eager substitute with the paint splattered ties who held a contest for finding a perfect circle in nature that I won by pointing to my pupil.
I’d loved my high school algebra teacher the most-the man who now ran the local hardware store instead. Mr. Jones had been a huge presence to me, growing up, a young girl, attracted to numbers. He lived next door to my parents, and I’d never seen him without a wax number hanging from a string around his neck. They varied, according to his mood-he’d go higher if in a better mood, lower if he felt lower. Generally he hung steady around 15only once did I see it go up to 37, and that same day a woman exited his door in the early morning, and they kissed long in the doorway and he seemed like a stranger, a dashing shadow of himself. Only a few times did it go so low as lz. On those days he just went outside to take out the trash, and that’s all I saw of him.
He was in the house, probably wearing that lz, for several weeks. His classes had math substitutes the entire time, and all testing was postponed until Jones felt better.
He’d been the best and worst of them all.
So that weekend, to honor all math teachers, I transformed my ugly classroom into a beautiful museum of numbers, but on the first day of school, the kindergarten and first grade ignored everything. They were cute enough in their overalls and hair bows, and a couple of them called me mom by accident, but they didn’t even glance at the walls and notice the carefully framed construction paper numbers I’d slaved over all weekend: Demure blue 2! Fun red 5! Noble black 10! The Rules of the Universe laid out in front of them! Just, as of yet, unorganized. Two peed and one thought he had a hurt finger and I thought it looked just like a regular finger but he wanted very badly to go to the nurse who turned out to be his aunt so I let him.
My own enthusiasm was sinking when the bell rang for third period and no one came in.
This wasn’t a bad thing. I thought it was nice to have a break. I checked the schedule but it said no, I had the second grade now.
I read the roster, in my boss’s well-slanted cursive:
SECOND GRADE:
John Beeze Ann DiLanno Elmer Gravlaki Mimi Lunelle Danny O’Mazzi Lisa Venus Ellen (last name?) The last was written in an embarrassed scrawl. I practiced the names. The second bell rang. I erased the board.
After five minutes, I opened the door and peered into the hall.
Bingo. Right outside the classroom was a clump of seven seven year-olds, laying on the floor.
Are you the second grade? I asked. Come on, I said. I have you for math now!
A ratty-haired girl poked her head off the ground and looked at me. The rest rolled back and forth. Only three were wearing the requisite first-day name tags.
I cleared my throat and was about to start the year with a bang by sending a couple of them straight to the boss when they jumped up and went straight in to my wall of numbers.
The girl with ratty hair pointed to big purple 3. I’m Lisa Venus, she said. This one’s the best.
Her friend, name tag stating John Beeze, touched the foot of red 5We smiled at each other.
Good morning! I said. I’m Ms. Gray, your new math teacher. Let me tell you, I said, math can be a wonderful subject One boy with a name tag, Elmer Gravlaki, dove under the table.
Another with no name tag and a cap of black hair made his hands into guns and shot everybody.
Lisa Venus walked the ro...
