When he asked why I’d entered college relatively less prepared in mathematics than him and our fellow students, I explained to him that our high school simply didn’t have as advanced a curriculum as his, and I felt ashamed. He asked why the teachers hadn’t sent me to a nearby university, or encouraged me to study on my own or take correspondence courses, and I replied there was no university near me. I told him about my experience with Mrs. Linen, explaining, “My experience wasn’t like yours. A lot of the time I felt punished for doing well.”
Blake was aghast at my story. He said that when he was in elementary school, his teacher had made a child in his class wear a dunce cap all day. When Blake’s mother found out, she’d been so outraged she’d called the principal to complain and insisted he reprimand the teacher. She also requested both Blake and the dunce-cap child be switched to another classroom.
“That’s great,” I said. “Good for your mother.” But I remembered how my parents had looked in Mrs. Linen’s classroom, squeezed into the small furniture, and thought to myself that even if they had complained on my behalf, the outcome wouldn’t have been any different.
Still, I liked Blake’s perspective on things, his confidence that the world would bend to his will, the way that nothing ever seemed like an obstacle to him. It made things that had never seemed possible seem possible. Blake was the first person to mention graduate school to me as a thing I should do. To put things in perspective, notoriously few women who studied mathematics as undergraduates went on to study it at the graduate level. And there were very few of us to begin with: I was almost always the only woman in any math class I took—at most there were one or two others. Elite universities like Princeton and Yale wouldn’t even take undergraduate women then, not until 1969. Blake said he’d go with me wherever I got in. It never occurred to either of us that I would be admitted somewhere he was not. In any case, we drew up a dream list: Stanford, MIT, NYU, and the University of Chicago, and I daydreamed about going to one of these programs with him. In my fantasies, we were always a couple.
The more time we spent together, the more I was convinced he must return my feelings. I was baffled by why he never made a move and wondered if it was because I was Asian or because I did not meet the standards of a girl that he could be with, no matter what his feelings. Perhaps to be with someone like me would embarrass him. I was always on the brink of confessing my feelings or demanding he explain his, but I held back, afraid he would say I was not good enough to be his girlfriend: I only fit into his life as a friend.
I told my father about my friendship with Blake, and our plans to go to graduate school. My father said, “That’s great, but don’t get ahead of yourself. Even if you are admitted, it’s possible that afterward no one will want to give you a teaching job over a man.”
But Blake disagreed. The world was changing, he said, and just in time for me. Women were infiltrating science—growing up he’d met a handful of women mathematicians, including the physicist Lise Meitner, who’d discovered nuclear fission along with Otto Hahn, and Maria Mayer, who had discovered the subatomic structure of an atom and would win the Nobel Prize in a couple years hence.
Blake’s life was so different from mine: it overflowed with money and ease, and I was impressed by his casual and dismissive attitude toward his own privilege, and eager to sympathize with his complaints. I was jealous of what he had, and it seemed noble to me that he could wave away the winters he’d spent skiing in Vermont, the adolescent afternoons in the company of the most famous intellectuals, politicians, and artists of our time. But his feelings about his upbringing were ambivalent. He was jealous of my relationship to my father, he said. His father had not paid much attention to him or shown him any affection. His father had not even applied pressure to follow in his mathematical footsteps. No, Blake said, the pressure had come from his environment, from where he’d come from and who he was.
I never told him this, but the thing he wanted most to escape was what I most wanted for myself: a sense of importance, a sense of belonging, a history I could root myself to and claim—and more urgently, something or someone to claim me. What I’d inherited from growing up with my mother and father was a kind of separateness from other people, a sense of yawning interiority that made me feel always alone. I wanted what Blake had—a sense of history and belonging, the feeling that I was doing what I was meant to do—and I was grateful for the proximity to this he provided. I was astonished and moved to discover that who he was and where he came from came with certain expectations that were unspoken, like mine, and were thus—for him as well—impossible to answer.
BLAKE WAS MY BEST FRIEND and only love interest, but he went on many casual dates. To me he said these girls were just for fun, and “If a fellow really wanted to marry someone, he’d want to marry you,” which sounded like a compliment, but I took as an insult—because why couldn’t the person you wanted to marry also be the person you spent time with for fun?
My one consolation was that these dates never amounted to anything: Blake came to be known as something of a heartbreaker, but I was the only girl he spent time with regularly. Those other girls he took out to dinner, and occasionally for other nocturnal activities, but he did not see them otherwise. Because I never had to see him with anyone else, I was able to distance myself from that Blake—the heartbreaker—while remaining devoted to the Blake who was mine.
One day, he was telling me about a date with a girl the previous evening, and he said, “The problem is she isn’t smart. No one’s as smart as you.”
I laughed in his face when he said it, but the laugh was edged with hurt. I wanted people to think I was smart, but I wanted Blake to see me as more.
He touched my arm with his hand and said, “No, really, I mean it.” He caught my eyes with his and gazed at me intently.
I didn’t know what to do. Lean in or pull back? I felt caught in the moment, and breathless, and deeply self-conscious. My pulse beat so hard I could feel it in my fingers. Awkwardly, jerkily—not at all like the movies, not at all like I had imagined, I leaned forward and kissed Blake on the mouth. I had never kissed anyone before. It was only a moment of contact—his lips were so soft—and then behind them, his teeth, which I banged with mine. He smelled like laundry soap and pine needles.
We both pulled back, and I turned my face away. I stole a look at him, wondering what he would do next. But he just stroked my hand, and when I finally looked back at him, he smiled sweetly, and said, “Not yet, Kath. Not yet.”
That moment disoriented me. What did he mean, not yet? Was he letting me down gently, or was he saving me for later? My infatuation intensified after that moment, and I read meaning into everything he said or did: even the most casually tossed aside comment or gesture became something to consider and interpret. Mostly, I wanted to touch him again, to lean against him, to crawl a little bit closer. I wanted to feel the softness of his mouth. I heard stories of how he flirted and danced and laughed with girls who were not me and wondered what he meant when he said I was the marrying kind.
IN THE SPRING SEMESTER of that year, one of our professors asked us to come to his office after his class. I went with no trepidation whatsoever, but I noticed Blake was uncharacteristically quiet, that as we walked he kept buttoning and unbuttoning his shirtsleeves and, once we arrived, kept pacing outside the professor’s door. He was prone to fits of neurosis, however, so I didn’t ask what was bothering him, but waited quietly.
I smiled brightly at the professor as we entered his office, but he didn’t acknowledge me at all. He did, however, put his hand on Blake’s shoulder briefly before closing the door.
“I’m here to discuss a very serious offense,” he began, as soon as we were seated.
I waited, a little alarmed by his opening, but still mostly curious and expectant.
“Plagiarism is punishable by expulsion,” the professor said, looking sternly at each of us in turn.
I nodded, wondering if he was going to tell us
someone in the class had plagiarized. Then he placed my problem set in front of us, and next to my problem set, he put Blake’s. Realizing what the professor was implying was exactly like when my father told me my mother had left us—disorienting, unreal, an actual shock that ran through the length of my body.
“If it was only the one problem set,” the professor continued, “perhaps I could be convinced of your innocence. But all three problem sets you have turned in so far have been identical, including minor errors, and that cannot be a mistake or coincidence.”
Blake looked up. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. He paused and seemed to be thinking. Finally, he said, “I felt bad for her. I wanted to help.”
My confusion was so great that for one panicked moment, I actually thought Blake was talking about the kiss. Why was he telling the professor this?
The professor nodded. “I suspected that’s what you’d say,” he said. “And I can’t say I don’t admire you for wanting to help your friend, though it puts me in a difficult position.”
I heard a rushing in my ears. My fingers felt numb. I opened my mouth to explain, to defend myself, but the professor was still talking.
“The only reason I’m not failing you, Blake, is that you have a marvelous future ahead of you. Your solutions are very unique—you don’t think the same way as everyone else, and this—in the end—will be your greatest strength. You shouldn’t have shared your work, but I daresay we have all had lapses in judgment when we were young, and it would be criminal to see you fail because of a girl.”
Those were my solutions he was praising, and though I knew the professor wasn’t speaking to me, I was naive enough to think that once everything was sorted out, that once the professor understood that the problem set was mine, he would transfer that praise—his belief in the author of the homework—to me.
“But I didn’t do this,” I said. “I didn’t cheat. Tell him, Blake.” I put my hand on Blake’s arm.
He pulled it away. That’s when I knew for sure that he’d done what he did. A small sound escaped my chest, like the chirp of some tiny creature, and I clamped my mouth to shut it in.
I didn’t understand. Blake was smart enough to do his own work—I knew this to be true. But I remembered times when I would go to the bathroom and come back and see him fiddling casually through my papers, searching for pieces of gum in my desk, or looking for something to write with when he already had a pen in his hand. He had never asked for my help, but if he’d ever needed it, I would have been happy to do whatever I could. In fact, I’d been hungry to do so, to offer him something in return for the gift of his friendship. But he’d always acted like everything was easy, like it took no time—laughing at me while I pored over my books at night.
The sunlight streamed in from behind the professor’s back through the tall leaded windows. I knew I’d lost something that would take me a long time to work out.
The professor glanced at me and saw the tears on my cheek. He said, “The tears of females have no place in this university,” but I knew he meant I had no place in the university, not just my tears.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling ashamed of my tears, and for the first time, like the female my classmates saw me as. “Can I just explain?”
The professor rolled his eyes. “There is no explanation I am interested in hearing,” he said. “I hope you understand, young lady, that if this ever happens again, you will fail the course and be reported to the expulsion board.”
The word expulsion shot through my heart. Any defense of myself died on my tongue.
Several more excruciating seconds passed before he cleared his throat and said, “Very well now, you may leave.”
I STOPPED GOING to classes for the next several days. I avoided the dining hall: I didn’t want to run into Blake. I remembered his outrage at my story about Mrs. Linen and wondered if he knew that what he’d done was much worse. I thought of his story about his mother going to the principal and wondered if I should go back to talk to the professor, or even the Dean, but I remembered how cold the professor had been at our meeting, how convinced he’d been that I was the one who had copied, and I felt frozen with dread. What if I was expelled, after all?
Instead of going to the professor in person, I amassed all my class notes, and the notes I’d taken on my way to solving my problem sets before I transferred them cleanly onto the papers I turned in. I compiled these notes and wrote a letter to my professor in which I said, “I thought you might be interested in these notes, which show the work that went into solving my problem sets.” I didn’t mention Blake at all. I slipped the folder into my professor’s mailbox when class was in session and I knew I wouldn’t run into him, or Blake, or any of my classmates. I waited a few days for a response, but a response never came.
While I was waiting, I took up the old German notebook my father had given me, which I’d slowly been going through the process of translating, page by page. Most of the text was math speak, defining terms or explaining certain moves, which didn’t help me place the math in a context of any kind. But there was one page, near the end, that was just three lines, all in text, and on my fifth day of hiding out, I skipped ahead to translate that instead.
After some toggling between the page and the German-English dictionary, I was able to translate:
Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
I discovered later that these were quotes. But at that moment they read to me like a direct order handed down through time from the author of the notebook to me, and I took this as a sign.
THE NEXT DAY I took a shower and got dressed. I caught up on my homework. I went to the dining hall at the same time as I always had. I would not change my schedule for him. When I got there, Blake was at the same seat at the same table where we had always sat together, except now he was sitting with another girl. So he had not had the decency to change his schedule, I thought. He had not had the decency to hide. I sat at another table alone and recited the lines from my notebook silently to myself like a mantra.
Toward the end of my meal, Blake approached, smiling, as if to speak. I stood up and hissed, with a viciousness that surprised me, “Get away from me, cheater.” His blue eyes widened, and he backed up so quickly he knocked into a group of students. After that, he stayed away.
We sat far from each other in class for the rest of the semester, but when our grades were posted on the door, I paid attention to his scores, making sure to note that I outdid him on each assignment. On the exams, again and again, I broke the curve.
I kept waiting for the professor to admit he’d been wrong, to make the smallest gesture when he handed back my homework or my exams, but he never did. He said nothing, and when I tried to catch his eye, he turned his head and ignored me. This was what made me angriest—not that he never apologized or admitted or said even once, “Good job,” but that I expected him to, that I waited and waited, and was wounded by the waiting, like a fool.
If there is an upside to what happened with Blake, it’s this: I worked harder in the following year than I ever had before. I became more disciplined. When I went home for summer vacation, my father said, “Relax. Do you need to study nonstop?” But I wanted to dominate so completely that my record would speak for itself, and no one would ever be able to assume I’d relied on someone else for my work ever again. When I returned, I was unapologetic and ferocious—hungry for the problem—and not only for the problem, but for victory as well. I devoured my textbooks, I laid waste to my homework, and when I rose to the top of my class, I felt a cold, triumphant thrill. By the end of my sophomore year I was on track to graduate a year early from college. Let them gossip about my accomplishments, I thought—let them know they had been right to fear my arrival. I wanted them to see that my ambition and hunger were no different from theirs, but that my will—and my nerve—were stronger.
I began to
speak out of turn in classes, not waiting to be called on, but anticipating, jumping in, and asking for clarification. I had learned that if I waited to be called on, my turn would never come. I pushed myself even harder, and if at first I was met with resistance, I would persist and stumble upon something interesting to say—something that would communicate my seriousness and my commitment—show that I had really thought through the topic at hand. Then the professor would pause for a moment, surprised, and look at me—and something between us would shift. It happened again and again. Sometimes I said something stupid or obvious, but I made myself face those moments unflinchingly, nodding calmly when I was corrected, as if I was unembarrassed, as if I was grateful for being told my mistake. It worked.
“Our own Kovalevskaya,” the professors said. “Our own Sophie Germain.” I was their pet, their novelty, their very own girl-prodigy, and with the exception of the one professor who’d accused me of plagiarism—he simply would stare off into the distance whenever I was near, as if I didn’t exist—they were delighted by me. Still, I had stopped looking up to professors, stopped seeking validation from them.
“If only you were a man,” one said, “I’d ask you to be my assistant next year.” Said another, “If you were a man, you’d have a brilliant future ahead of you.” I let such comments roll over and past me like a wave I had nothing to do with. I compiled a list of women mathematicians from the past: Hypatia and Kovalevskaya, Noether and Germain.
In the fall of my junior year, I applied to the graduate programs Blake and I had once planned to apply to together, alone. I took classes on complex functions, algebra and rings, field theory and logic. In the spring I was accepted everywhere I’d applied. I took number theory and became entranced by prime numbers. It was then I first learned about the Riemann hypothesis. It’s called a hypothesis instead of a theorem because it’s unproven, but it’s not a conjecture because so many theorems have woven the Riemann hypothesis into their proofs that the assumption of its truth now forms the foundations of entire fields. If it is ever shown to be false, proofs in every field of mathematics will fall. The drama of this has always appealed to me, as has the glory. By the time I graduated, I had promised myself that I would make my own attack upon it one day.
The Tenth Muse Page 5
