I’D ALWAYS KNOWN I wanted to go to college one day, but after Linda moved in, I began to pursue that goal with single-minded purpose. It was the one thing I knew that I wanted, and I aimed myself at the goal like an arrow. One day, as I sat at the kitchen table filling out applications at last, Linda sat down across from me. She said, “Katherine, I think we have to talk.”
“What do you want to talk about?” I asked.
She chewed her lip. “I’ve tried to give it time, I really have, but I know you’ll likely be gone in a year. I just want to say while there’s still time that I’m not the enemy. I’m not the evil stepmother. I’m not the reason your mother and father didn’t work out. Or the reason she left.”
I knew I’d hurt her feelings over the years. I had even started to feel guilty about it, but now I clenched my hands together. “Please don’t talk about my mother,” I said.
“This is what I mean,” she said. “I’m not trying to start a fight. I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t blame you for my mother leaving, okay?” This was true. I blamed her, however unfairly, for my mother not coming back.
“But I don’t believe you,” she said. “Listen to how angry you sound! You blame me, I know it. And I think you think something that isn’t true. You don’t even know where she lives, do you?”
All I wanted to do was get up and leave. When I thought about how my mother had left us, how we didn’t even know where she lived, I felt weak, like all the strength had gone out of my body. But now I wondered what Linda was getting at. “No. Do you know where she lives?”
“No,” Linda said. “But I do know some things you don’t.”
I felt a prickle of apprehension. “Like what?”
“Well, for one, she wasn’t your real mother.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she wasn’t your real mother,” Linda repeated. “Your father needed someone to take care of you, and the woman you thought was your mother agreed to do it.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. I felt a crack open inside me. In the span of a breath, Linda had upended everything.
“It’s the truth.” Linda said.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, but for some reason, I did.
“I’m telling you now so that you can let go,” Linda said. “I’ve always wanted children, you know, and when I married your father, I thought maybe we could be friends.” Her voice was trembling now.
Rage blossomed inside my chest and spread through my limbs. “We’ll never be friends,” I said, and though my arms and legs were shaking, I got up and left.
I still don’t know what Linda was thinking, telling me that the way she did—as though she thought I would thank her for it. As though she thought that would solve, not exacerbate, my hostility toward her.
Still, I realized I had underestimated her—I’d thought of her as an irritant to be borne, someone whom my father loved who had nothing to do with me. But in just a few minutes, she had reconfigured everything I knew and set up a powerful new equation: my mother ≠ my mother. It was a staggering revelation. She might as well have told me Katherine ≠ Katherine.
I felt as if my whole past was lost to me—that there was no ground to stand on, and my mother was no longer mine, had never been mine. And if that was the case, then I was Katherine-from-no-one, Katherine-from-nowhere, Katherine-doomed-to-be-lost.
I SPENT THE REST of the afternoon in the bathroom, vomiting. When my father came home from work, he stood inside the door-frame, watching me as I heaved and cried in turns.
“Katherine,” he said, and he knelt down next to me. He put his hand on my back and sighed. “My poor sweetheart. Linda told me what happened,” he said. “I’m sorry you found out this way, but she doesn’t know the whole story. It’s complicated.”
I wiped my mouth. “So tell me,” I said, my voice raw. “Is Mom my real mother, or not?”
My father rubbed his face. “Katherine, I know this must be confusing for you, and I’m sorry. I wish Linda hadn’t said anything, but your mother and I were not entirely up front about everything. Your real mother died right after you were born, and your mom offered to take care of you.”
So it was true. “Why would she do that?” I asked. “Who was she?”
“Well, she was close to your real mother, but she couldn’t have children of her own. She’d known you since you were born, and after your real mother died, your mother and I grew close.”
“Who was my real mother, then? How did she die?”
“She died in childbirth,” he said.
“So it was my fault.”
“No,” my father said. “No, no, I shouldn’t have said that. Listen, Katherine, that’s why I never wanted to tell you these things. I knew they would hurt you. It doesn’t change anything. Your mother was your mother in every important way.”
My mind was racing. Real mother, false mother. True story, false story. I’d been living in a false story all my life. There was nothing I could count on. “If that’s true,” I said, “then why did she leave me?”
My father exhaled slowly. “That had nothing to do with you,” my father said. “She loved you more than anything else in her life.” He reached out and took me in his arms.
I let him hold me for a moment, my head tucked under his chin. I was so confused. I understood, intellectually, that my mother wasn’t my real mother, that she hadn’t given birth to me. But she was the one I missed, the one I longed for, the one I still struggled to understand.
“She’s not coming back, is she?” I asked.
I felt him shake his head. My tears spilled over.
“What can I do?” he asked. “How can I help?”
“What about my real mother?” I demanded. “Where is she buried? What was her name?”
“Katherine, don’t ask me to do this right now,” he said. “Give me time.”
“You’ve had time!” I cried. “If you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll never know anything. I’ll never know who I am.”
“You’re my daughter,” he said firmly. “That’s all that’s important for now.”
I still felt a sick clench of dread in my stomach, but I was actually relieved not to learn more in that moment. And I let my father pull me up off the floor and wipe off my face with a towel. I let him lead me back to my room and tuck me into bed, like a child.
Mathematicians used to believe that all statements that exist within mathematics could be categorized as true or false, and that we could use those statements to construct an accurate description of the world. And then Gödel proved all second-order language systems were incomplete, overturning David Hilbert’s second problem—dismissing the hope that mathematics was without internal contradictions, that everything in the universe could be described in pure, mathematical terminology. He didn’t solve Hilbert’s problem so much as he obliterated it.
Some historians say Gödel shook the foundations of mathematics, but that isn’t exactly right. What he shook was our understanding of the foundations of mathematics, our perception of them, but that was enough to cause a major crisis of faith.
All my life there had been topics we didn’t talk about in my family. I saw now what lies that silence had been meant to hide, but I still didn’t know how to break through it. And I was devastated by what I had already learned. So I gave up. I closed and locked the door to that part of my life and stopped asking to know.
A FEW WEEKS LATER my father bought me a telescope, an Endo Astrola, and set it up in the backyard. The Endo Astrola had a 6-inch mirror and both 10 and 25 mm eyepieces. It came with a tripod and weighed about thirty pounds. I couldn’t stop touching it.
“How did you know to get this for me?” I asked my father.
“I’ve seen the magazines you bury your nose in,” he said. “I’ve picked up all the sketches you left around the house. I pay attention. I’ve been planning this for some time.” He reached out and ruffled my hair. “I know the la
st couple years have been tough on you.”
I wanted to tell him that this gift fixed nothing, that I still felt bereft and abandoned. That I was still confused. But my father smiled at me, his eyes lit with hope. So, leaning against him and tilting my head to rest on his shoulder, I said, “Thank you.”
I spent every clear night I could outdoors in our backyard looking up at the stars. When my father came out to join me, I showed him Saturn’s rings and the spiral arms of the Andromeda galaxy. Around that time I received a scholarship letter from Purdue University, and over the course of the following few days, three more acceptances from other colleges followed. Together, those admissions letters and my telescope promised expansion to me, and freedom. On those nights I felt I had cast my mind out so far that I couldn’t care about what was happening on our lawn, or in our house. We were so small compared to the immensity of time and space.
Linda never asked to look through my telescope, and I never offered to let her, though I would have let her look without resentment, I believe, if she’d asked. I wouldn’t—I don’t think—have begrudged her a closer view of the heavens. I tried not to think about what she had told me and also stopped obsessively waiting for my mother to return. Instead, I turned my attention to the sky. Through an instrument made from polished glass, I could look at stars light-years away, at celestial bodies that had circled each other for millennia. Out there, in the vastness of eternity, I found the promise of transcendent purity, a deeper order that never failed. I would believe in that, and let go of everything that couldn’t be counted on. Like my mother. Like family. Like home. By the time fall came around and it was time to go to university, in my mind, I was already gone.
Chapter 6
THE FIRST UNDERGRADUATE MATH CLASS I TOOK, I took on a dare. I arrived at Purdue University a week before classes began and spent it walking around campus. I loved everything about the university—the sprawling green lawns, the red brick buildings with their accents of limestone, and the great pillars of Hovde Hall. The day I arrived, I walked up and down each aisle of the university bookstore, picking up books and putting them down. A handsome, neatly dressed young man—blond hair slicked back—approached and said, pointing to a lovely light blue book in front of me, “That’s supposed to be the hardest undergraduate course in the whole school.”
I met his eyes for a moment, then picked up the book—Real Number Analysis. I opened it to a page full of pictures of functions. They were lovely, I thought, in what they suggested—a visual representation of an idea, an ordering of a thought.
“Trust me.” The boy broke into my thoughts. “That’s not for you. The professor fails half the course.”
“Do you work here?” I asked.
“Good God, no,” the boy said. He grinned. “I’m a student.”
“How do you know so much about the math curriculum?” I asked.
“I’m a math major,” he said, nonchalantly, like he expected me to be impressed.
“Which class are you taking next?” I asked.
He looked sheepish and proud at once. “Real Number Analysis,” he said, nodding at the book I still held. He held out his hand. “My name’s Blake.”
I ignored his outstretched hand. I smiled. “Thanks so much for your advice.” Then I turned away from him, and walked to the counter to pay. As I handed over the money for the book, I couldn’t help glancing back. Blake was standing in the aisle I’d left him in, still watching me, a rueful smile on his handsome face. I turned on my heel and walked home to my residence hall.
ANALYSIS IS CONSIDERED the study of limits, but before it was called that, it was called the study of the infinite. When I got home and looked inside the blue textbook, I found definitions of infinity and density, and proofs showing that the set of real numbers is both infinitely large and infinitely dense, and—most astonishing for me—that there are even different sizes of infinity. I flipped through the pages with growing excitement. There were descriptions of convergent series: sequences of numbers that go on forever, getting closer to limits they never quite reach, as well as divergent series, those unbounded by limits. I felt for the first time that I was looking at mathematics as it was meant to be done: here was a book that wasn’t meant just to instruct, but to open a door.
The class, when I arrived on the first day, was all male except me. I sat by myself in one of the middle rows, and the boys came clustered in pairs and groups, as cliquish as any girls. No one sat near me. Two boys sitting a few rows in front chatted with great animation about how parallel lines could intersect. I leaned forward—I’d only learned Euclidean geometry up until then.
I said, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to interrupt, but could you please explain? I thought the very definition of parallel lines is that they don’t intersect. Are you talking about a different kind of space?”
And one of them—I’d later find out his name was Gerard—paused in his conversation, turned back, his eyes lingering on my face and then my chest, and when he was finished looking, he smirked a bit, and said, “Girl.”
Ironically, years later, I came to be known as something of an expert on the mathematics of the curvature of space-time, but at this moment, I didn’t even know that such a thing existed. When I told this story to a female colleague in the prime of my career, we laughed until we cried. Poor Gerard, who in the end failed the course. Poor Gerard, bested in the end by a girl.
There was only one person in that class who would talk with me, and it was Blake, the boy from the bookstore. Those of us taking Analysis could usually be found in the math library, and at first Blake sat with the others, sauntering in later than the rest of us, and leaving much earlier. But after the first few weeks of sitting with the rest of our classmates while casting sidelong laughing glances my way, which I haughtily ignored, he came over to my table and sat—not across from me, but next to me, and leaned over the homework I was doing.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you mind? I’m trying to work.”
“Ah, Katherine, don’t be so cold,” he said, smiling disarmingly. “Let’s be friends. How are you doing on the problem set? What did you think of the lecture today? The prof went on and on about pointwise convergence a little too long, wouldn’t you say?”
And despite my pride, I laughed—and thus began the closest friendship I’d had in my life thus far. It turned out Blake came from a family of math royalty—he was the son and grandson of mathematicians who were celebrities in their ways. His father was a professor at Princeton and had been friends with Einstein; his grandfather had written the primary textbooks on algebra still used in colleges today.
“Mathematics is in my blood,” he used to say, as if it was a biological imperative rather than a field of study. He said he didn’t regret it, exactly—his relationship to numbers was an extension of his being, as natural as hunger or thirst—but sometimes he wished that his family did not loom quite so large, that he’d had the opportunity to test out whether any other subject might exhilarate him as much. His talent felt like a generational obligation, as if his name was not his own, to do with what he wished.
I had always been an outsider, but now, for the first time, I was friends with someone who seemed like the ultimate insider. He told me without restraint what he cared about, what he thought, and how he felt. It was exhilarating. I could finally unleash my mind and not be careful, not explain, but just really talk. I was infatuated, but didn’t know what to do next. I was afraid to say anything and ruin the only friendship I had. And I didn’t want more, not yet. I would have been happy to stay as we were, forever.
In those first months of friendship we went on long walks together; we watched thunderstorms from the sunroom in the giant apartment his family had rented him, and I told him how my mother and I had watched lightning together. When he asked where she was now, I told him she was dead. I regretted the lie immediately, but Blake said, “Oh, Kath, I’m so sorry,” and wrapped his arm around me, and I felt such relief against his shoulder that I let
myself melt into him. Thus freed from my family, freed from my past, I felt that I bloomed into a new person, one who was defined primarily by being friends with Blake. If not for him, I may have become a physics major instead of studying mathematics, but I took class after class with him and discovered in doing so that what I found most exhilarating was figuring out how to make the mathematical tools that explained the logic underpinning natural phenomena—to do the science beneath the science. I was fascinated by the physical world as well, but what I was really interested in was how to turn it into an abstraction, to reduce it to its most elemental form.
I told Blake about my ham radio and telescope, which I’d reluctantly left behind in the garage at home. One Saturday night that fall, we lay on a blanket watching the Leonid meteor shower until the curfew for the female students on campus. We talked about Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe, and how Einstein had included a cosmological constant in his equations for the theory of general relativity because he’d assumed the universe wasn’t expanding, and how he later called that the biggest blunder of his career. Much later, it’d turn out a cosmological constant was necessary after all—because of dark energy—so Einstein would have been right anyway, though of course we didn’t know that then.
In the winter Blake and I bundled up and raced each other in the snow, we drank steaming cups of coffee until we shook from the caffeine, we smoked cigarette after cigarette, and I watched the elegant way Blake carried himself, so lean and long and impeccably dressed, always draping himself over the furniture as if he could make a room glamorous just by being in it.
I adored him, but I always felt he had the upper hand, and this embarrassed me. He was so comfortable and confident everywhere he went: he knew how to dress, how to talk, and how to make friends. I could never quite believe that he wanted to be friends with me too.
The Tenth Muse Page 4
