Divide Me by Zero

by Lara Vapnyar

  We woke up to a phone call. My first thought was that it was Len, calling to say that something had happened to the kids, or that it was my mother and something had happened to her. I was afraid that B. and I were too happy, that happiness of such intensity couldn’t go unpunished. Then I realized that it wasn’t my phone ringing, it was B.’s.

  He sat up in bed and looked at me in panic. “It’s Nadya.”

  I sat up too and pulled the sheet up to my chin, because I couldn’t bear to be bare-breasted while he talked to Nadya. I could hear that she was crying. Not wailing, but rather whimpering. B. got out of the bed and carried the whimpering Nadya into the bathroom. His butt was all creased from the motel’s sheets. He closed the door behind him and fumbled with the lock for a long time because it wouldn’t close all the way.

  He was in there for ten minutes or so, mostly silent, mumbling something occasionally, and when he emerged, he was wrapped in a towel. Now he was the one who couldn’t bear being naked.

  Nadya was in bad shape. Really bad. He had to go.

  He asked if he should give me a ride home. Home, I thought. Home. He wasn’t coming back. I said no, I’d call a cab. I did my best to act supportive. I helped him pack, even though I wanted to scream and grab on to him and not let him go.

  Then I went up to the window, pushed the blinds away, and watched him put his bag into his car, get into his car, turn the ignition, pull out from the parking lot, drive unsteadily down the hill toward the main road.

  An hour later, I called a cab to take me home. I dragged my suitcase up the steps leading to the porch, opened the door with my key, and walked in, panting from the effort and misery.

  My mother heard the noise and asked who it was from her apartment. I opened her door but didn’t see her. She must have been reading in her bedroom alcove. All the better, I thought. I couldn’t face her now.

  I spoke to her from the threshold.

  I said: “It’s me, don’t get up!”

  Then I said that it was all over with the guy in Italy, and with the guy I loved it was over too. Then I added that the divorce was still happening. I was positive about that. I had been considering going back to Len the entire time I was in Italy with Victor, but the three days I had spent with B. made that impossible. I couldn’t possibly go back to Len.

  I walked out of my mother’s apartment, but then I remembered to tell her something else, and came back.

  I said that I needed some time on my own, before the kids came home. So I was asking her not to bother me, not to come upstairs or even talk to me. I would really really really appreciate that.

  She said, “Okay.”

  I went upstairs, plopped onto my bed, and dove into my grief. I had two full days to indulge in it. I would cry and scream and do whatever I wanted to do, so that by the time the kids came home, the acute stage of my grief would be over, and I would be able to pull myself together, and figure out how to handle this new stage of my life, and act as normal as I could. I guess what I imagined was some sort of Grief Express vacation. There were moments when my pain was so severe and all-encompassing that it could be mistaken for happiness. I felt like all my nerve endings were open and raw, which made me feel as if I were expanding, as if I were able to experience the world as fully and as acutely as anybody ever could. Everything I saw or touched or tasted had this tragic tang.

  I didn’t hear from my mother for the entirety of that first day at home, and I was grateful to her, but also a little disappointed. I had asked her not to bother me, but didn’t she worry about me? Didn’t she care how I felt?

  The next morning I woke up feeling so bad that I had to abandon my perfect grieving plan. I jumped into the car and drove to my family doctor’s office to beg her for antidepressants.

  The doctor was a sweet bug-eyed Romanian woman. She said that she was a family physician, not a psychiatrist, but in her opinion what I had was situational depression, which wasn’t really depression at all. I dropped to my knees and grabbed the lapels of the doctor’s white coat and said: “Please!” She must have decided that I wasn’t as mentally healthy as she’d thought I was and gave me samples of Zen-pro, a new expensive antidepressant.

  The first dose of Zen-pro made me violently nauseous. I had never experienced anything like that, because this nausea was overwhelming and didn’t lead to vomiting and didn’t have any end in sight. As I lay on the bathroom floor with my forehead pressed to the cold floor tiles (I found this position slightly less unbearable than all the others), I wondered how I would feel if B. appeared in front of me right now and said that he had changed his mind and realized that we must be together for the rest of our lives. I wouldn’t have cared. Zen-pro made me too sick to care. I was relieved to discover that there was a force stronger than my love for B.

  My mother knocked on the door just as I managed to pull myself up and was sitting with my back pressed to the toilet. She must’ve heard me retching and was worried.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” I said. “Please, go away.”

  Note to an angry reader. Yes, that’s how selfish I was. But don’t waste your breath. You can’t possibly make me feel worse about that than I already do.

  My mother didn’t go away. She knocked again. She said that she needed me to take her to the hospital. Her voice was different, feeble and croaky.

  Her voice scared me. I scrambled up and opened the bathroom door for her.

  She was leaning against the wall. Trembling. She had to hold on to that wall to keep her balance. She was white and frighteningly gaunt. Her features were distorted by a grimace of pain. Then I saw her stomach. It looked like an enormous balloon, taut and heaving, about to blow up.

  And like that my nausea was gone. I rushed out of the bathroom and grabbed my mother by the shoulders, just as she started sliding to the floor.

  TWENTY-TWO

  It usually takes days if not weeks to get a cancer diagnosis. All those countless tests, bloodwork, biopsies, MRIs.

  My mother and I got it even before we made it to the hospital. From a medical technician in the ambulance. The guy took one look at my mother and asked me what kind of cancer it was. He was a burly guy who spoke with a strong Eastern European accent. I said that my mother didn’t have cancer. She’d had a colonoscopy! It was clean! It was perfect! He turned away from me. What an idiot! I thought.

  But then an admitting intern at the hospital took one look at her and immediately requested an oncologist.

  The oncologist arrived at the same time as the first batch of test results. He was a cheerful middle-aged guy with fake teeth that must have been cheap, because they looked faker than fake teeth usually do.

  Ovarian cancer, he said. Metastatic. Stage four. Lots of secondary tumors. He recommended the surgery right away. Because without the surgery my mother could be gone in days.

  I looked at my mother. She wasn’t reacting to his words; she appeared to be confused. She was smiling at him like an eager student trying to please the teacher. I wondered if this was the effect of painkillers or something worse.

  Meanwhile, the doctor continued with his speech. It was a simple surgery. With a simple name. Debulking. All of her reproductive organs had to be taken out. But she didn’t need them anyway, did she?

  “You don’t need that anymore, mamacita?” He smirked at my mother.

  I don’t think I ever hated anybody as I hated that doctor at the moment when he called my mother “mamacita.”

  mamacita (when addressed to a dying older woman who speaks English with a strong accent):

  1. Somebody who is less than an American

  2. Somebody who is less than a woman

  3. Somebody who is less than a human being

  4. Somebody whose impending death is an appropriate subject for your cool, lighthearted jokes

  Example: “Hey mamacita, why don’t I take your organs out?”

  I told my mother that I was taking her home. We would find other doctors, better doctors; we definitely wouldn’t a
gree to any treatment until we had a second opinion. We were incredibly lucky, I said, because my best friend, Anya, worked at a cancer hospital and personally knew the best oncologists in the country. My mother smiled with relief. The nurses had drained the liquid from her abdomen, the terrible pressure was gone, but more importantly my mother saw that I had accepted being in charge instead of her and was grateful.

  By the time the kids came home from their trip, I had the second, the third, and many other opinions. Most of the doctors were reluctant to talk until they had done their own tests and personally examined my mother, but a few of Anya’s close friends agreed to look at the existing results. All of them said the same thing. There was no sense in starting with the surgery, because the tumor was too large for a safe removal. The best option was to start with chemo and see if it worked. They were especially reluctant to discuss the prognosis, but one of them said that in the best-case scenario, my mother would have up to a year.

  I didn’t know whether I should tell this to my mother. I knew that Americans always chose honesty with terminal patients. But Russians did not. As a Russian I was required to lie; as an American I was required to tell the truth. In the end I did both. I told my mother that her prognosis was grave, but it wasn’t like there was no hope. There is always hope, right? Even if a tiny one? Nobody can tell you that there isn’t hope.

  My mother smiled for the first time in days and said how strange it was that she’d been scared of cancer her whole life, but now that she had it, she wasn’t scared at all.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked. “Do you want to go for a walk? I can drive you to the beach. It’s not too cold. Or maybe we could order some food?”

  My mother said that she wanted to watch a video. She had a boxed set of Sex and the City, which she’d never opened.

  In the middle of the pilot episode she pressed pause and asked if I was going to tell people. “So I don’t have to?” she said. I said that I would.

  I called Uncle Grisha later that day. There was such a long silence on the other end that I thought that the call was disconnected. I said: “Grisha? Grisha! Are you there?” Then I heard him sobbing; it was like the barking of a deranged dog.

  The kids arrived the next day around five. They were messy, loud, gushing about their trip, happy to see me, and eager to go and greet their grandmother. Len was hovering behind, impatient to leave.

  I told the kids that their grandmother was asleep and sent them upstairs. I said I’d be there shortly. Then I asked Len to come to the kitchen with me, where I told him everything, about myself and about my mother.

  “Is there any hope?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  Len covered his face with his hands, and when he took them away, I saw that he was crying.

  There had been so much ugliness in our marriage, but his tears at that moment canceled all that. At least for me.

  He offered to help us in any way, or even to move back into the house. I thanked him, but said getting back together would be a very wrong thing for both of us. He agreed and left.

  As I saw him to his car, I thought how bizarre it was that a few weeks ago, I had three men in my life. Now I had zero. It was as if my whole life were screaming “error” at me.

  I found both kids in Dan’s room, leaning over his desk, arguing about the best way to upload Mexico photos. I sat down on Dan’s bed and asked them to come to me.

  The conversation that I was going to have was probably among the most daunting tasks a parent could face, and as with many daunting parental tasks before that, I didn’t handle it very well.

  My speech was vague, convoluted, and broken by sobs.

  “But she’s not going to die, is she?” Nathalie asked in the end.

  “Of course she is going to die, you stupid idiot!” Dan screamed.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Six months before my mother died, one of her doctors offered her good math.

  “With this brand-new experimental chemotherapy there is a 15 percent chance of up to five-year survival,” the doctor said.

  The doctor had a perfectly immobile face and round, glassy eyes that she was shifting from my mother to me, as if she were a remotely controlled doll.

  “This is good math,” the doctor added.

  Was this good math? I thought. At first glance, it seemed as if my mother was promised an additional five years, but if you looked at it carefully the math started to crumble. Not five but “up to five,” which meant what exactly? Two years? A year? And then there was a 15 percent chance of chemotherapy working at all. Fifteen seemed like a lot, like a pretty good chance, unless you thought of the other 85 percent for which the grueling treatment didn’t work.

  I looked at my mother, expecting her to be crushed by the numbers. She wasn’t. There was a hopeful smile on her face. The numbers that seemed tragically meager to me sounded infinitely better to her, as she had no other option but an imminent death. She leaned toward me and whispered as if she were embarrassed to appear greedy: “I think I want to live for a little while longer.”

  In the end, however, the math turned out to be bad.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Four months before my mother died, we happened to see a chemo party. We were sitting in the patient lodge of the World’s Greatest Cancer Center, waiting for her chemotherapy appointment.

  All of a sudden a loud group of middle-aged women rushed in, all festively dressed, carrying balloons, a pastry box, and a bottle of champagne. One of them was bald and wan and visibly in pain, but the others looked chipper as hell, laughing, chatting loudly.

  “Are they insane?” I asked my mother.

  “No,” she said. “They are doing a chemo party from Sex and the City.”

  My mother explained that in season six of Sex and the City, Samantha discovers that she has breast cancer. The news is upsetting, but everybody is so set on Samantha’s beating the cancer that she has no choice but to beat it. Beating, beat, upbeat. You need to stay upbeat in order to beat cancer. That’s what they all do, Samantha, and Carrie, and Miranda, and Charlotte. They throw an upbeat chemo party right in the treatment room. They are trying to defy death by denying that death is even a possibility.

  By that time, my mother’s MRIs started to show that the chemo wasn’t working, but we didn’t have the heart to stop the treatment. We continued to defy the death that had already won.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Three months before my mother died, she asked me if my publisher dealt with nonfiction. I didn’t understand where she was going with this. I said that they did.

  She asked, “Will you show my book to your editor?”

  It took me a moment to react. My initial thought was, “What book?” At that time, all that my mother had were random notes scribbled on her yellow flash cards, some of them barely legible.

  But I managed to get my bearings fast enough and said: “Of course I will! Of course!”

  I thought I was lying to her. But it turned out that I wasn’t.

  Note to my editor. My mother’s book is contained in these pages.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Two months before my mother died, I walked into Dan’s room. He sat hunched over his computer playing Minecraft, his hands hovering over the keyboard, his arms moving slowly and methodically, his back shifting left and right ever so slightly.

  He was sitting in a wooden chair we had brought with us from Brooklyn.

  I don’t remember how that chair ended up in Dan’s room, but I do remember how Dan loved rocking in it when he was younger. “Stop rocking!” we would say, since this wasn’t a rocking chair. “You’ll flip backward!” And he would say, “No, I won’t!” He didn’t flip backward; what happened was that his butt got stuck. He kept pushing it against the back of the chair, and it ended up wedged into the small rounded space between the back and the seat. He was only seven. He yelled: “Mom!”

  I rushed into the room and there he was, his little butt jammed in so firmly that he couldn’t w
iggle it out, and when he tried to stand up the chair would stay attached to his body and pull him back. I wanted to help, but I couldn’t. I slid down to the floor and laughed for five minutes or so, unable to stop. Then I managed to stand up and approach him, but I was still laughing. I tried to free him by pulling on his legs, but when that didn’t work I had to come up to the chair from behind and push Dan’s butt out with my foot. I was laughing even after Dan was finally free. I couldn’t stop for an hour or so.

  Even nine years after that incident, I still couldn’t look at Dan in that chair without snickering.

  “Are you laughing at my butt?” he asked me without turning.

  I said that I was. But then I stepped closer and saw the computer screen. A true disciple of my mother, Dan was building a Minecraft version of an Escher house, a pixelated structure inspired by Lobachevsky’s twisted geometry and the concept of impossible architecture.

  I wanted to hug him, but I was afraid that I’d start to cry and left the room.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Six weeks before my mother died, it was Nathalie’s middle school graduation. She got four tickets for the ceremony, for me, Dan, Len, and my mother.

  My mother hadn’t lost all her hair yet. She had a few long wisps. Ghoulishly white, light as pillow feathers, barely touching her scalp.

  I ordered a special chemo hat for the graduation. Made of the softest cotton. In the softest blue color—my mother’s favorite. Boasting incredible Amazon ratings. One woman said that the hat gave her comfort and joy. Another said that her dad loved his hat so much that he was almost grateful for the chemo. My only worry was that the hat wouldn’t arrive in time for the graduation, but it did, it arrived the day before.

  My mother put it on and took it right off. “Is it uncomfortable?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “it’s fine. I just don’t feel like wearing it.”