Approaching Zero
Fifteen isn’t a prime number, but it’s the product of two primes, three and five. Five, the number of years since Mom split, the difference in age between me and my brother. Three, when I was adopted.
Numbers. I threw myself into them when I was a girl, math the antidote to my up-in-your-face brashness. At school, numbers marched across the page of my algebra book and cooled me down, one thing equating another, concealed in a maze of functions. My favourite, ax2 + bx + c = 0, the quadratic equation, which I took as some mysterious paradigm for my family: four roots, solutions to paired complex polynomials. Fifteen is also the number of years since my brother disappeared. This morning, out of nowhere, there he was. At the supermarket, calling my name. I’d given up trying to understand why they’d left. But now? Stumbling on him out here in LA when all I had to go on was a stack of vague postcards? Whatever mathematician left in me is searching for patterns, scanning our past for elemental symmetries to see what obtains. A rusty tool, but I’ve got to do something while I wait. I want my family back. Pattern Element Seven (PE7): FINDING MY BROTHER. Down on Santa Monica Boulevard: Boys Town. Not one of my usual haunts, but I’d decided to go for a walk on the beach before work and it was on the way. I didn’t recognize Kyle—towheaded still, but looking like an extra in an exercise infomercial. He was with his boyfriend who was young, gorgeous, with deep-set eyes under caterpillar brows. The BF ambled toward the checkout stand with their basket. It brimmed with cheeses and sausages and crackers. Plus twenty or so packages of dried mission figs—which threw me. “We’re on the way to a party in the canyons.” Kyle eyed the parking lot, scratching at that silky white hair I teased him so mercilessly about as a kid: geezer, grandpa, granny, gramps. Because I couldn’t talk about anything important, I asked him what he did. “Retail design, mostly,” he said. “Display windows for shops on Rodeo Drive. Couture. High-end furnishings.” I sliced a bit of cuticle with my front teeth. “Remember your Christmas displays? Those angels. The stars with the little lights.” I shouldn’t have been surprised he’d turned out so well; a kid’s idea of things isn’t real. “You look good, Rachel,” he said. He was just being nice, overlooking the mac-and-cheese-specked sweatshirt, the nappy hair and its bad DIY cut. Mom used to make such a fuss over my bristle-brush black hair. It’s not the style to straighten it any longer, but it was weird he didn’t say anything about it. He did say, “I was surprised to hear you gave up math.” Begging the question of how he’d heard that, I said, “I liked it more early on, when it was like solving puzzles. Wasn’t a total loss; I’m a Sudoku whiz now.” He giggled, like he used to, and right away I saw him—the image so clear—jumping in his PJs, excited in front of our Christmas tree. Something warm passed through me, then a guilty stab. Hadn’t I mocked him that morning for fumbling with his new Erector Set? I slipped one of my cards from my bag. He tapped it into a plastic holder, handed me his, and said, “We’ll be in touch.” Using the royal we like that, I would have thought him flip ordinarily, but the words were flavoured with sadness. Something clicked. I wanted to scream: Mission figs? Mission fucking figs? You never liked them. How could I have been so dense? Mom’s here, isn’t she? Look, I know I was a bitch and Dad must have been a dick about the gay thing, but WE DIDN’T DESERVE THIS. When the wannabe starlet at the counter asked me if I wanted paper or plastic, I couldn’t say, the memories of our childhood so helter-skelter, like an infinite series before you grasp its pattern. On the other side of the sheet glass, Kyle loaded canvas bags in the back of an SUV, the windows tinted so I couldn’t see inside. As their car slid away, the side window rolled down slowly and I just knew Mom would be sitting there and she would lean her head out slightly into the blistering sun and rake her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose. She’d smile at me through the store window and lift one hand, jewelry stacking up on her forearm, and twiddle her fingers in the barest approximation of hello. She’d pucker a mission fig into her mouth as the window floated up and concealed her. Instead, a rain cloud-grey Weimaraner poked out his pointy nose, his long tongue slobbering the inch or two of glass that stuck up from the door cavity.(PE6): MOM. Every summer she went with her friend Myrtle for a week on the beach and to get away from Dad. After the blowup he had with my brother, more and more she would narrow her eyes, make some withering observation about him. To Dad’s face, of course. If you weren’t on the receiving end, they could be quite funny. The year Kyle disappeared, she went on that trip three times—way too many to be a coincidence, I see now. She came back tan and happy, gold highlights in her auburn hair. She laughed this gutsy laugh I’d never heard before. Lost weight and wore stiletto pants with bright, sleeveless flower-print tops. She made Dad fix her martinis before dinner, though she’d never drunk anything stronger than rosé wine before. She came into my room one night after dinner, a bowl of dried mission figs in one hand, a paperback in the other. This was way earlier: Kyle’s senior year in high school. She’d forgotten to take off that apron with cowgirls I used to like. She promised us that morning she was going to bake a chocolate cake, but had started her romance novel, and in the afternoon she’d drunk wine and read under the big tree in the backyard since it wasn’t too hot. She sent Kyle out for Sara Lee right before Dad came home. She placed the bowl on my nightstand and sipped a fig into her mouth. She lowered herself onto my bed, cleared her throat like she did when she was about to lecture me. Kyle had probably told her about the poster. He told her everything, their late night buzz buzz buzz like a gnat in my ear, keeping me awake, it made me so mad. I had just tacked the poster of Ronald Reagan on my wall. Next to my trig tables. Stuck it opposite my door for everyone to see. My brother had an old Mondale sticker on the bumper of the car Dad gave him. He sure hated the poster. I knew Mom would too. “You know we’re Democrats in this house, don’t you?” she said. I did, but wouldn’t let on, so I raised my eyebrows, hunched my shoulders. “Do you even know who he is?” she said, pointing to the Reagan poster. “The president. Duh!” I probably rolled my eyes. I used to do that a lot. “I mean, do you know what he stands for?” On the evening news, they were always talking about nuclear disarmament, so I said that. She pinched the bridge of her eyeglasses up her nose, took another fig, the paperback splayed on one knee. On the cover was a shirtless man with an enormous chest and long, silver hair. “You know, if the Republicans had their way, you all would still be working in kitchens, instead of going to college.” I twirled the ends of my straightened black hair. “What’s wrong with working in kitchens? You do.” I hoped that might get a rise, but she drew me by the shoulder beside her onto the bed. Her breath figgy, cinnamon and vanilla. “Everybody wants to be better than they were meant to be, honey. Democrats understand that.” We sat together a long time—she nibbling figs while staring out the window, me scratching off the cover man’s face with my fingernails. “Why’d you adopt me, anyway?” There, I finally said it. “We wanted a girl and I couldn’t have more children.” I touched the coffee-coloured skin on my forearm. “Yeah, but why me?” Mom looked me in the eye. “You were so cute, staring up from the crib, and I thought, Where were you going to end up if you didn’t come home with us? What kind of people would your father and I be if we didn’t try to do something different?” I was stuck to the bed after she left the room, pouting in a prickly silence. I scanned the trig table. cos 0 = 1. I always confused her love with condescension. We never worked that out. Summer after college, when I was interning at one of the accounting firms downtown, she subtracted herself from the equation. She went on her trip and never came back. Dad phoned Myrtle’s husband, and it was Myrtle herself who answered. She told him they hadn’t been to the beach in years. Her dermatologist had told her tanning was bad. A while later, Dad said the divorce papers came, but otherwise he refused to talk about it. My opinion: he was relieved. He was tired of not being good enough. Mission figs? Never another in our house after Mom disappeared. For her, I’ve tried to like them. I like the hint of spice, but they’re gritty with a sliminess I can’t stand. I got a postcard from her about that same time: palms lining a country lane and rows of orange trees. Postmarked Palm Desert, California. It said she was happy; it said she would explain in a long letter. Postcards from all over southern California brought reassuring messages, well-wishes, but the letter never came. I never tire of beating myself up about it.
(PE5): THE END OF MATH. Beginning of my junior year in college I dated a football player, a bona fide bumpkin who was sweet, but so dumb he had to read his textbooks aloud, drawing his thumb under each word. I got off on it, though—hooking up with a sports star, being half of that white-bred institution’s only black couple. I see now I was just trying to piss Mom off. Once, he and I were talking on the quad steps, cicadas grinding away in the arching live oaks, and she and Dad rolled up in their silver Cadillac. A surprise visit. The electric window drifted open and Mom looked at my boyfriend over her sunglasses like she was comparing him to someone infinitely better. My brother probably. Her face darkened. She shoved her glasses up the ridge of her nose. She flicked her fingers toward the front of the car. My hands fisted on my hips, I watched them drive on, a crackling in my insides. I broke up with that guy after that. He’d served his purpose and I resented him for it. I spent the rest of the semester in a funk. I lost interest in math. I remember the day exactly. The class: Complex Analysis. Euler’s formula, eix = cos x + i sin x, in hurriedly scrawled marks looking as if something was chasing them across the board. The prof came up for air and stepped back with a flourish of his piece of chalk. “You see, the solution is infinite. A single answer does not result when exponentiating complex numbers.” That was infinity minus one too many answers. I couldn’t handle ambiguity anymore. It set me back, but I switched my major to accounting: columns that balanced, double entries, no variables. No limits, like calculus, like what I’m doing here: finer and finer approximations as x approaches zero.
(PE4): KYLE LEAVING. One of the last times I saw my brother, I must have been in the tenth grade—a particularly shitty day. I had to go to the school counselor: spit wads in detention, fighting with girls at lunch. He was home from college and after school I barged in on him to give me a lift, hoping I’d find him in his underwear in some silly pose again. He was lying in bed with his clothes on, still as stone, blue as ice, his white hair making him look like a dead old man. Or that’s what I imagined. Imagined us wearing black, single-filing in long cars to the cemetery, me snugged in Dad’s arms, now his prim darling. His only child. It turned out my brother was just napping, the color of his skin a trick of the light, I suppose. There was a girl up the street whose brother had died and everyone at school felt sorry for her, brought her presents. The smart boys did her homework for a while and the teachers looked the other way. There was a strange quiet at their end of the street, a wall, the parents’ stricken faces. It went on like that for some time, me imagining I was the sister of a brother who’d died. After that big fight he had with my father, it was almost as if he had. He hardly ever came home. When he got his BA, he was gone. I can’t find order in this pattern. The symmetries don’t make sense. Let me focus on one particular case. Narrow the data set. Let me prove a theorem: There was a time I loved my brother.
(PE3): RONALD REAGAN. When Kyle saw that poster I’d tacked on my bedroom wall, he scrunched up his face and said, “How can a soap salesman be president?” My smart retort, “How can a man in a cheap spandex uniform be captain of the Starship Enterprise? People just like him, which is more than I can say about you!” I had lots of friends at the time. Although I wasn’t speaking to Emily anymore, I don’t think, there was Monica and Erica and Sheila. I forget the rest. Boys too. My chocolate skin and straight black hair was sex to those kids who’d only ever seen their Barbie doll cousins or freckled princesses at school. “People do too like me.” “You mean Peter?” I said. My brother drooped like a party balloon losing its high. Peter, his best friend in high school. His constant companion. Peter, who wouldn’t come around anymore. No proof.
(PE2): BONER. A tap on my bedroom window. Emily tossed a Teen Vogue on the floor and squiggled in, jabbering about grooming tips. What did those Caucasian beauties have to do with me? I told her, “Let’s go make fun of my brother.” A rhombus of sunlight glowed at the top of the stairs as we snuck up to Kyle’s door, a couple of Nancy Drews. It was dark in his room with all the venetian blinds shut and it took a second for my eyes to adjust, and when they did there was Kyle, standing in his underwear with a big boner. I knew what it was since a neighbour boy had shown me his, had asked me did I want to touch it. I couldn’t see the point at the time, although later I got pretty fond of it. When Emily saw my brother’s thing she squealed and backed away, but I barged right in, laughing and pointing. Kyle had a towel around his neck like a cape and a plastic sword from when he was little. Must have been practicing for one of his plays. He threw the sword on his bed, tugged the towel around his waist. He rushed at me, his face like a Japanese person in an old Godzilla movie. He shoved me out the door and I yelled for Emily to help and the two of us pushed back and the door seesawed until Mom came down the hall, looking tired even though it was only midmorning. Emily and I ran to my room, laughing so hard our eyeballs hurt. The proof fails.
(PE1): ME IN THE MIDDLE. We all got too busy to have dinner together at some point, but when I was little we ate in the den a lot and watched TV. Dressed in his leisure suit, Dad was installed at the end of the y-axis of our big L-shaped couch. I don’t think he cared what program was on. “How about Dynasty?” Mom said, slim and trim then, pretty at the end of the x-axis, next to the TV, next to my brother. Mom adored Dynasty; her hair got really big the year Joan Collins became a regular. Mom even dyed it, and for almost a decade it stayed a perfectly lacquered blue-black bowl. I was perched behind my TV tray in the quilted right angle of the L, at (0,0) as if I couldn’t plot where I was on the curve between them. We had creamed beans and fish sticks. I loved fish sticks then. For dessert, Neapolitan ice cream and Dukes of Hazzard; Kyle giggled through all the stupid parts. For Mom, a plate of her mission figs. She made a show of biting into the pulpy gelatinous mess, of slowly nipping off the stems. On the TV, a guy being chased down an alleyway ran into a fat black woman carrying a basket of clean laundry, sent her flying into the mud along with all the clothes. I should have been more sympathetic, but honestly, I don’t care what the school counselor said, my race has never factored into it. My college boyfriend and his redneck family are the only other black people I’ve really known. When my brother saw the lady face down in the mud, Mr. Giggles scrunched up his face and bawled and bawled while Mom stroked his soft white hair and said, “Now, now. She’ll be all right.” I couldn’t let this stand. Dad wouldn’t do anything; he was too nice. Through the window, he surveyed our lawn, square and crisp as Astroturf, so he wouldn’t have to watch the pathetic mess his son was, but I got up and let big brother have it. “Granny, geezer, crybaby. Kyle is just a crybaby.” I danced around the den tracing a finger down each cheek. My brother jerked off the couch, nearly knocked his TV tray over. If he had, I probably would have eaten his fish sticks right off the parquet. He moped upstairs to his room and slammed the door. What do I find in this lattice of bad behavior? Transformed along any axis, it looks the same. Solve for meanness in this equation—the numbers go click, click, but there’s no root. No function will transform me. I’m the self-centered brat who drove her family away. I get how I’m not seeing the patterns. Still, that’s how I feel, alone in my office in my shitty little house in Glendale. Afternoon sun trembles on the sill, bringing to life the towel I set against the ill-fitting window to keep in the cold air. I can’t find anything in accounting, just this gig as a customer service rep for an airline, working the phones from home. Five months ago, I took Mom’s hint. Trying to be better than I was meant to be, I moved out here: Palm trees, endless suburbia where there used to be orange groves. Not in a million years did I expect to find them. I just hoped for a kind of parallel life. The AC compressor throttles on. Summers, I like to blast the cold air, but the office feels creepily contained. I adjust my headset. The computer screen’s dark; no call has flashed across it for an hour. No disgruntled, desperate traveler. I push my sudoku book aside. Tap Kyle’s number into my cell. I’m not ready to phone him. Or Dad yet with the big news. Instead, I wait. For Kyle’s call. Or Mom’s. Beside me a package of dried mission figs. I ran back into the supermarket and bought them. I’ve heard taste and smell are tickets to memory.
(PE→0): MUD PIES. The figs’ earthy smell, cinnamon and vanilla. My teeth slicing into the sickly sweet flesh sparks memories. Cough syrup. Trips to the doctor. Sunlight in dank places. The hiding place in the bushes outside our old house. My brother and I sneak down here after the rain stops and make mud pies. I must be five. We plop onto the damp and squish the slimy mud between our fingers. Doo-doo mud, I say, and that makes him giggle. When Dad comes out on the landing, Kyle puts a finger to his puckered lips. Yellow sun circles dance across his face and he has a mischievous look in his eyes. Dad calls us—is it dinnertime?—and goes back into the house. I laugh and smash a mud pie onto my brother’s arm. He puffs out his face like he’s angry, but I know he’s playing because he giggles and gobs a handful of brown gook onto my face. Soon we’re covered head to toe in the stuff, and he looks down at his arms and hands and says, “Look Rachel. I’m just like you now.” I open my mouth and sunshine pours right through me. Proof. I thought it would feel bigger, f (me), the function applied to me. I’d be better than I was meant to be. Just like my mother. The computer wakes and beeps, a telephone number flashes, blurry on the bright white screen. Let somebody else handle this call. I dry my eyes with my sweatshirt sleeve. Like her, slowly, showily, I suck another fig into my mouth.
