by Lara Vapnyar
Dan asked me if he should go there. I said no. I thought it was important that he not remember what was in that room as his grandmother.
His grandmother was gone. She wasn’t there anymore.
We sat together on the sofa for some time, the Skyrim universe frozen on the TV screen.
Then the service came to retrieve the body. They asked me not to enter the room while they were performing their task.
I wouldn’t enter it after they left either. I was scared to see nothing there. An actual tangible nothing.
FORTY-ONE
An hour after they retrieved the body, I found myself going up and down the stairs. Dan was in his room. Asleep, or at least I hoped that he was asleep. The house had only three floors, and only two flights of stairs. But it seemed to me that it had turned into a bizarre labyrinth, like in Escher’s drawings. You could go up and down and then up and down again, until you couldn’t understand whether you were going up or down.
FORTY-TWO
Several hours after my mother died, I woke up on the floor of my room. I heard the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, and thought that my mother was up and cooking breakfast for us. Then I remembered that this wasn’t possible, because she had been bedridden for weeks. Then I remembered that she had died.
I went down to the kitchen. My son was there, fixing himself a bowl of cereal. He looked embarrassed that I’d caught him doing something so ordinary on a day like this. I fixed myself a bowl of cereal too. We sat side by side in silence and ate our cereal.
After breakfast, I went outside to check the mail. I was dressed in the clothes that I had put on the previous morning, when my mother was still alive. There was a thick, damp envelope stuffed in the mailbox. My first thought was that it was from my mother. From There. But it was from our divorce mediator. The final papers. Signed and executed. How strange, I thought, that my marriage officially ended on the same day that my mother died.
But I didn’t have time to ponder that. I saw the car bringing Nathalie home pulling up the driveway. I put the envelope back into the mailbox and went to tell Nathalie that her grandmother had died.
We spent most of the day holed up in my stuffy bedroom, sitting cross-legged on top of my bed, avoiding the rest of the house, because it seemed frighteningly large for the three of us, until I decided to drive us to the beach.
The time was about an hour before sunset, when most of the beachgoers had already gone and the fishermen were starting to arrange themselves along the water’s edge, with their plastic buckets and their long and short rods, and their fishing lines bobbing over the sand.
We walked in perfect silence for a long time, until Nathalie said: “Look at the shadows!” The bright light made our shadows especially pronounced. Every detail was visible, even separate wisps of our hair messed up by the wind. Dan’s shadow was longer than mine. Nathalie’s was the same length. We didn’t look like a mother and children, but like three orphaned siblings.
Now that my mother was gone, I needed to become their mother. I wondered if I’d ever be able to master that.
FORTY-THREE
Two days after my mother died, there was a funeral. We had a very small service followed by a very small reception at our house. No speeches. My mother wouldn’t have wanted that.
Grisha and Bella brought lots of food from NetCost. Anya brought the flowers. Dan and Nathalie brought a friend each. Len brought back my copy of War and Peace. Yulia brought a crate with twelve Sancerre bottles left over after yet another Résistance party. Sasha flew in from Germany and brought some duty-free schnapps. He wanted to bring his mother, Rita, but she was too sick to travel.
I hardly understood what was going on, because I was simultaneously drunk on Yulia’s Sancerre and high on my mother’s leftover OxyContin. At some point I brought all of my mother’s notes for her new book upstairs and spread them over the table. I kept telling everybody how this was a great idea. A self-help math book, imagine that!
I didn’t see B. right away. I was at the kitchen table with a glass of Sancerre in one hand and one of my mother’s flash cards in the other, forcing Anya to read it out loud. “I can’t read her handwriting,” Anya said. “But it’s so good,” I insisted, splashing my wine.
Then I saw B. across the room, standing timidly in the corner, staring at me with a pained expression. In my confused state, I thought he was a hallucination. I thought that while my mother was dying I had been protected from thinking about B. But now that she was gone and I was exposed, was this a return of my longing, my obsession? And was it so powerful that it made me hallucinate?
Then B. started to speak. He was talking about respect. Respect? Did I hear him right? How he respected my silence. How he had heard what happened from Sasha. How he felt like he had to come today. He needed to see me. He needed to know that I was okay. He cared about me. He loved me.
Don’t they say that OxyContin is supposed to make you kinder, happier, mellow, at peace with yourself and with others? It didn’t work that way for me.
I picked up a kitchen chair and raised it above my head. It was so heavy that I almost toppled over. Then I made a swing and threw it at B.
I missed, Sasha told me. I don’t remember it myself. I don’t even remember throwing the chair. I don’t remember anything that happened after I heard B. talking to me.
Apparently, Anya and Sasha dragged me upstairs, gave me two Ativans, and sat with me until I fell asleep. Len took the kids to his place for the night. And all the guests cleared out.
FORTY-FOUR
The next morning, I woke up dizzy and nauseous and confused.
I walked into the kitchen and saw that somebody must have cleaned up. Everything was in perfect order, paper plates in the garbage bins, wineglasses drying in the dishwasher. There was a chair-sized dent in the wall, but I didn’t notice it until later. What I did notice was the notes for my mother’s book still strewn across the table.
I poured myself a glass of water and sat down at the table. This was when it hit me for the first time. I didn’t have a mother anymore. Before that I had been mourning the loss of the specific person, my mother. Now I realized that I had also lost a mother, a person who would love me and forgive me no matter what, even when I was being stupid, cruel, awful.
Which meant what? That I’d have to grow up? But how? How did one do that?
There was nobody and nothing to guide me. Except for those twenty yellow sheets of paper. Twenty disjointed, barely legible notes for my mother’s book. Which she had left for me.
Mark Gurevich
LARA VAPNYAR came to the United States from Russia in 1994. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction. She is the author of There Are Jews in My House, Memoirs of a Muse, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, The Scent of Pine, and Still Here. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, and Vogue.
Copyright © 2019 Lara Vapnyar
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vapnyar, Lara, 1971- author.
Title: Divide me by zero / by Lara Vapnyar.
Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019013808 | ISBN 9781947793422 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781947793514 (ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3622.A68 D58 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013808
Photo credits: p 43: 1. Anonymous / AP / Shutterstock, 2. Andrey Ole
ynik / Shutterstock; p 75: Oxy_gen / Shutterstock; p 98: n7atal7i / Shutterstock
First US Edition 2019
Printed in the USA
Interior design by Diane Chonette
www.tinhouse.com