An Invisible Sign of My Own

by Aimee Bender

  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.

  You can find all the letters of atheist in the word mathematics, but if you ask me, it’s just the opposite.

  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 pentagrams, 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 flag 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: only 22 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.

  2

  I 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 gasless 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?

  I laughed.

  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 rooftops, 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 15. Only 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 2. 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 2, 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 5. We 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 row of portraits, a tiny docent.

  Don’t like 2, she said. I like the yellow 9 a lot. I don’t like 7. I like the 4. Don’t like the 1.

  Sit, I said.

  Gun boy found the drawers I’d filled with counting devices—buttons and paper clips and rubber bands.

  Our last math teacher ha
d a nervous breakdown, said Mimi Lunelle, sitting at her desk with curls that made perfect whirlpools, like she was constantly spinning down a drain.

  No, I said. She went to Paraguay to become a revolutionary. I’m Ms. Gray.

  Paraguay? Mimi asked.

  You already said your name, muttered the sour-faced girl next to Mimi.

  Paraguay’s a place, I said. Now, let’s start with a game! First, tell me your name and favorite number!

  No response.

  Gun boy stuck a button in the crotch of a rubber band and pulled it taut.

  Lisa Venus raised her hand.

  Sit please, I said. She leaned on a chair.

  I’m Lisa Venus, she said again. My favorite is a billion.

  One to ten, I said. Hi Lisa.

  Three, she said. Nine. Seven.

  Come be three, I said. Do I have a second volunteer?

  Gun boy aimed his rubber band right at me. Elmer whimpered under the table. The sour-faced girl twisted her lips with her fingers.

  I hated teaching, suddenly.

  My favorite is five, said John Beeze from his desk.

  I had John and Lisa come up to the front and told them to physically form the numbers—Lisa sticking out her butt to get the second arch of the 3, John kicking up a heel to finish 5.

  There! I said. So what’s the total of Lisa and John?

  The group groaned.

  8, announced Lisa, head down.

  Anyone want to be 8? I said.

  To my surprise, gun boy raised his hand at the back of the room. He snapped the rubber band at the wall and the button tumbled down.

  My favorite is 8, he said evenly.

  And what’s your name?

  Danny O’Mazzi, he said.

  His T-shirt sleeves stopped high on his shoulders and there were biceps showing in his arms, already, at age seven. After putting away the button and rubber band with unexpected neatness, he walked to the front of the room, and without any cueing from me, turned out his feet, bent his knees, and clasped his hands over his head.