Divide Me by Zero

by Lara Vapnyar

  Our favorite outings were to see ballets at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. The morgue-like palace was specially built for Communist Party conventions, but between the conventions, the space was used for various performances, usually ballets, usually set to music by Tchaikovsky. I loved walking toward the Kremlin down the chilly and brightly lit street, and then across the square paved with special stones that had ears.

  “Mom, why does Uncle Grisha always say that our country is sick? How can a country be sick?”

  “Shh! These stones can hear!”

  What a thrill it was to enter the palace and catch a glimpse of myself in the enormous mirror, in the crowd of smartly dressed, loud, excited people. I was the smallest, the youngest, the brightest. I was in the theater while all the other kids were home watching Good Night, Kiddies. Everybody was looking at me, everybody was impressed.

  Next we would go to the festive cafeteria with all those wonderful items normally reserved for big party bosses, like smoked fish sandwiches, and mushrooms in cream sauce baked in individual metal cups, and whipped cream. By the time the performance was about to start I would have gorged myself silly. I didn’t see the point of watching the ballets, but I loved to scan the space through the tiny theater binoculars and hunt for things to laugh about. “Mom, look, that violinist blew his nose!” I would whisper. “Mom, look, that dancer is about to fart.” “Mom, look, that woman to the right is using her nose like a conductor’s baton!”

  My mother would take one look and start laughing like crazy. People would hiss at us, but we wouldn’t be able to stop. This was like a disease that we shared—the lack of control over our laughter. We truly couldn’t help it. My mother came close to losing her job because she started to laugh during a Marxism-awareness session at the ministry, when the presenter said “the great teaching of Kax Max.” I came close to being suspended from school because I laughed during a news screening, when a classmate whispered that Brezhnev looked like an old iguana. (Well, he does. Check for yourself!)

  The fun lasted until the middle of the first act, when I’d feel the first waves of nausea, which would grow stronger and stronger every time the music swelled. Those mushrooms and smoked fish refused to play nicely with the whipped cream in my stomach. I would try to hold it in for as long as I could, but by the end of the first act I felt that something heavy and unstoppable was rising up my esophagus, about to erupt. My mother and I had to squeeze past all those indignant music and dance lovers and run for the bathroom. The performance of Swan Lake was the worst, because that time I didn’t make it to the bathroom and had to release half-digested whipped cream and cream sauce all over the beautiful red velvet carpet and my good shoes. It was still worth it though. You hear me, Len? Worth it!

  The most annoying thing about these fights is that when your internal dialogue gets going, you can’t stop it. You keep finding solid arguments to prove your points, hours, days, weeks after your partner has forgotten about the fight altogether.

  “So you consider it perfectly normal that you went everywhere with your mom, that you didn’t have any friends your age?” Len would ask in my head.

  I was hoping to make friends when I started first grade. On the first day, the teacher asked us to count up to the largest number we knew. Most kids could barely count to three. I was the only one who counted to one hundred and stopped only when the teacher told me to stop. My triumph didn’t last long. As soon as the teacher left the room, the boy sitting next to me knocked me off my little chair. And as I lay on the linoleum floor that smelled like modeling clay and pee, another boy whispered: “Don’t be such a smartass!”

  Soon afterward, I started going to an orthodontist who fitted me with the first in a series of scary braces, and then I had to conceal not only my intelligence but also my ugliness, so I mostly kept my mouth shut.

  The orthodontist appeared in my life as part of the endless parade of doctors I had seen since I recovered from pneumonia. All traces of the disease were gone, but my mother’s fear and guilt weren’t. Who knew what other diseases lurked in the dark depths of my neglected body? Hadn’t my father been perfectly healthy too, and he went and died? What guarantees did she have that I would be spared? My very health spelled danger, because whatever was wrong with me must be hidden. In the year before I turned seven, I was subjected to countless blood tests, EKGs, and endoscopies, until we stumbled on that orthodontist who finally found something wrong with me. In his opinion, the worst mistake you could make was to wait for baby teeth to fall out. They had to be extracted. He promptly discovered that all my baby teeth were the wrong size and shape, which spelled disaster for my permanent teeth and my overall health. I had twelve remaining baby teeth. Twelve extractions. Then my permanent teeth started to grow, and it was getting obvious to him that my mouth was too small for so many teeth. So there were more extractions. Followed by years and years of highly experimental braces.

  Note to a concerned reader. Now, before anybody decides that the guy was a crook, I have to say that in the Soviet Union, orthodontic services, like all medical services, were free, so he couldn’t have been after our money. His interest in me was purely scientific. A tad sadistic, but mostly scientific.

  Years later, my mother confessed that my orthodontist’s ordering extractions made her feel relieved. There was something wrong with me after all, and it wasn’t something truly awful, it was just my baby teeth, and she was eager to offer them up as a necessary sacrifice. I was eager to offer them up as a sacrifice too, not for the sake of my health, but for the sake of having my mother back.

  So you see, Len? It’s not true that my mother treated me like a guinea pig. She was simply overcompensating for the months of neglect that followed my father’s death. And she would always let me pick out a small toy after a visit to the orthodontist. I loved that, Len!

  There was a store ten minutes away from our house, belonging to a chain called Cult Goods, which didn’t have anything to do with cults, but possibly something to do with culture. They sold everything from lightbulbs to notebooks to musical instruments, and they also sold toys. “Something that is priced under a ruble, please,” I would tell the salesperson. “You see, I’m having many many extractions, and we can’t afford a toy for each tooth, if they are over a ruble.” The salesperson would react with a stunned expression, which I took for her being impressed by my grasp of math and economics, when she was clearly taken aback by my slurred speech and the pink saliva trickling from my mouth.

  Making friends while trying to keep my mouth shut was very difficult, if not impossible. Sasha, Rita’s youngest boy, was the only one who didn’t make fun of my braces, but I refused to see him as a friend. I didn’t choose him as a friend, he was forced on me by circumstance, so that made him more of an unwelcome family member. He was getting bad marks in math in his school, and Rita begged me to tutor him. At seven years old, I was a patronizing, dogged, and cruel teacher. “No, Sasha,” I would say. “Not even close.” Or, “Okay, fine, your answer is correct. But look how long this problem took you. I would’ve solved it in seconds.” Our lessons often ended in tears, the tears streaming down Sasha’s long twitchy face onto his scrawny chest.

  Not that I needed any friends, Len. I had my mother!

  I was about to put the “evidence” box back when I happened to see a thin stack of my childhood photos buried on the bottom of the box under the letters. I hesitated before taking them out—I had an inkling that they might ruin the happy version of my childhood, but I couldn’t resist.

  I would hate to admit this to Len, but both my mother and I do look a little crazy in the photos. My mother with her white hair framing a young face, sharp features, thick, pitch-black eyebrows, and an expression changing from cagey to murderous. And I, dressed as a boy, with a boy’s hairdo, squeezing my lips so tight because of the braces that they look glued together.

  My mother told me that long hair was too much trouble and a breeding ground for lice, and buying girls’ clothes w
as a waste of money because I could have Rita’s boys’ hand-me-downs for free. I wore boys’ clothes all the time, except to school where I wore the girls’ uniform—a brown dress with a black pinafore. But my mother always insisted that I wear pants under my dress during the cold months. “You don’t want to chill your ovaries,” she said.

  Outside of school, people often assumed that I was a boy, but that didn’t bother me. I think I even enjoyed it. Once, when we were riding a train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, and I stuck my body out the window too far, the conductor yelled: “Ma’am, get that boy off the window right now!” I didn’t mind. I thought that concealing my gender was part of an adventure, that my mother and I were fooling everybody. Kind of like the way we did when people took her for my grandmother.

  “You have to listen to your grandma!” some lady would say, and my mother would snap at her: “What? No! I’m her great-grandma!”

  “That’ll shut the bitch up!” she would whisper to me and then give the woman a glowering stare.

  The thing is that even though my mother came back to me, she never regained her old Sevastopol self. At work, she seemed to be fully together. She resumed working on her textbooks, she had a good standing at the ministry, and a few years after we arrived in Moscow, she was offered a great teaching position at the university. She took me with her a couple of times, and I was in absolute awe of the power she projected. She stood at a podium addressing hundreds of students, brimming with confidence. From my seat in the back of the room I could see them eagerly following her with their eyes, trying to catch every word so they could write them down with their scratchy pens, laughing at her jokes. The girls sitting next to me in the back would sometimes turn and say: “Your mom is amazing!” and I would nod at them, polite but reserved: “I know.” And they would laugh and say: “You are just like her.” Which was the greatest compliment anyone could give me.

  Outside of work, however, my mother revealed a less stable side. Every time we traveled somewhere together, she would push through a subway crowd like a torpedo, she would snap at strangers. One time she squeezed by a large woman and said in a deliberately loud whisper: “She should pay double fare with that ass!” Another time she pointed to a sweating man in a fur hat and said to me: “Hey, doesn’t it look like that cat on his head just peed itself?” Moscow commuters were a tough crowd, you couldn’t assault them without expecting retaliation. My mother’s behavior was dangerous. Once, as we were running down a subway platform, I tripped on a huge duffel bag being dragged by a huge gloomy man. My mother helped me up and kicked the bag. “Watch it!” the man yelled, but my mother only laughed and asked: “Why? What do you have in there? Your chopped-up parents?” The man swung his arm as if about to punch my mother, but managed to stop himself. It was probably my presence that stopped him, but back then I thought it was my mother’s glowering stare, which revealed the real magnitude of her meanness. I felt both frightened and protected by that stare. I thought that meanness was my mother’s source of power, and wanted to draw up some of it for myself.

  Perhaps Len was right, and I ended up extracting too much.

  I shoved the box back into the drawer and didn’t open it again until three years later, when B. asked me to show him my childhood photos. This was about three months into our affair, when the headiness of the first weeks had gone, we weren’t “kissing like mad” or “talking like mad” anymore, we became clearheaded enough to see the wrongness of what we were doing and to feel a premonition of still worse things to come, but our interest in each other remained as intense as ever.

  I took a few of the photos out of the box, put them into a manila envelope, and brought them to our next date in the park by the river. The day was uncomfortably cold and we were both shivering in our coats.

  I handed B. the envelope, but as he reached inside, I felt a surge of panic. I had already told B. all kinds of stories about my relationship with my mother, but hearing all that was one thing, and seeing was another. I was about to find out whether B. would see my mother and me the same way that Len did, as a witch and her guinea pig.

  He squinted his right eye and peered into the photos. A wisp of graying hair fell over his eyebrow and he blew it away. His eyes were brown, but much lighter brown than either mine or my mother’s. His stare was devoid of meanness. I wasn’t sure yet if he was kind or only appeared to be.

  “Were these hand-me-downs?” B. asked about my clothes.

  I was relieved that he offered a simple practical explanation for my wearing boys’ clothes and told him that my mother’s friend Rita had two boys, so naturally the hand-me-downs were boys’ clothes. It was harder to account for the shorn hair. I didn’t think B. would buy the “lice-protection” version.

  B. sensed my anxiety and said: “I’ll bring you my pictures next time. You should see what I wore. My grandmother claimed to be the best seamstress in Vilnius, and fuck, was she creative!”

  I asked about the very worst thing he had to wear.

  “Lederhosen!” he said with great certainty. “I was the laughingstock of my entire preschool.”

  We both laughed, then B. turned serious again and went back to my photos.

  What looked cute in my early childhood photos started to seem more and more bizarre. There was a rare photo of me with my mouth open—somebody must have caught me unaware. The enormous braces were probably the first thing that jumped out at B., but the rest of me didn’t look much better, what with the boy’s hairdo accentuating my painfully thin neck, and that short brown dress with the pinafore bunched up over my wide woolen pants.

  “You went to school dressed like this?” B. asked.

  I nodded and hurried to say: “Sometimes I wonder if my mother consciously wanted to make me look ugly.” B.’s expression told me that this thought had already crossed his mind, and he’d thought it would hurt less if I were the one to say it out loud.

  B. looked at that picture for a moment or two, then switched to the one of my mother and shook his head.

  “Could it be that she wanted to protect you?” he asked. “From love. So you wouldn’t be hurt like she was?”

  This explanation had never occurred to me. And even though I knew that it was too sweet and simplistic for B. and that he couldn’t believe it, I was still grateful to him for this kindness.

  B. reached for me and wrapped his arms around my back, and it felt so good that we stayed like that for a long time, not caring about our students or colleagues.

  FIVE

  Don’t push too much math on your child? Really? By the time I was fourteen, it was certainly too late.

  Anyway, I didn’t rebel because of math, I rebelled because my mother betrayed me.

  The first disturbing signs of something amiss came in the form of books. Once my mother came home with a book—she said a colleague had lent it to her—went straight into our bedroom, plopped onto her bed, and proceeded to read it. Didn’t even come out for dinner.

  I asked her what the book was. She said: “It’s a novel.”

  But hadn’t she said that she hated novels? Hadn’t she said that novels that dealt with either love or death were unbearable, and all the others weren’t worth reading? Hadn’t she made a point to scoff every time she saw my grandmother with a novel? Hadn’t she chuckled approvingly when she caught me scoffing in a similar way?

  A perfect product of this upbringing, up until I turned fourteen, I hardly read anything except for math textbooks. I wasn’t reading them for fun either—it was my job. Shortly after I turned ten, my mother received a huge and prestigious assignment to write a series of math textbooks for every single elementary school in the country. I was enlisted to help.

  This coincided with me failing the so-called Gauss test meant to ascertain whether I was a mathematical genius. There was this problem that the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss solved when he was nine. Apparently, his lazy teacher wanted peace and quiet so he asked the kids to add all the numbers from one to
one hundred. That’ll give me a few hours for a nap, he thought. Well, he underestimated little Carl, who was done with the problem in minutes.

  One day, my mother offered the same problem to me. For the life of me, I couldn’t see a simple solution.

  Finally, I said that I could add up all the numbers that ended with zero first, then all the numbers that ended with five. This must make the task somewhat easier, right?

  My mother said: “Good, that’s good,” but I could sense how disappointed she was.

  Note to a confident reader. By all means, go ahead and solve the problem. But please, don’t offer it to your kids. There is a substantial chance that they’ll fail, and your conspicuous disappointment will hurt them.

  So here is what that obnoxious German boy did. He imagined all the numbers in a long row, snapped that imaginary row in half, and folded the right half over the left so it looked like this.

  1 2 3 . . . 47 48 49 50

  100 99 98 . . . 54 53 52 51

  He saw that the sum of each pair would equal 101, and all he needed to do was multiply this sum by the number of pairs (fifty). The answer was 5,050. What a brilliant solution! Can’t help but hate Carl Friedrich Gauss, even after all these years!

  I told this story to my rich lover Victor shortly after we met. We were sitting across from each other in a bar, searching for things we might have in common. I wanted to get over B., so it was very important to me to find enough of those things, but the process of searching made me sad, because with B. I didn’t have to search. B. and I matched so effortlessly that I would get a kick out of finding the points of divergence. Like his unquestioning acceptance of Christianity, or my passion for Alice Munro, who left him cold.