Long Division

by Jane Berentson

  “I’m kind of getting used to sleeping alone now,” I tell her. Though Loretta is a bit shocked when I reveal that David practically lived at my place before he left, I can tell that she’s not totally judging me by the way she smiles when I describe David’s special bathroom treatment.

  “Every day, he folded the toilet tissue93 like that?”

  “Every day.” I don’t tell Loretta that I’ve kept it there since he left. I know that it’s a bit weird of me and perhaps a neurotic breed of sentimentality that she might not understand.

  “Quite the gentleman, your boyfriend.”

  “Quite,” I say, and we take dignified sips of our tea.

  As I drive home I think about how nice it was to be with Loretta and forget about Dead Alden for a while. I’ve never told her the whole saga, and it’s nice to be a single-issue girl around her. I am a lonely woman with an absent boyfriend. And Loretta can understand and comfort me about it. She’s like Helen, but chattier and older.

  I’d left my phone in the car, and when I look at it, I have a message from Gus. We haven’t spoken since he drove me home the night I found out about Alden. He’s wondering what my plans are for Easter and says that if I’m not busy at seven A.M. tomorrow morning, he has a small project he could really use my help with.

  I like projects.

  I like helping.

  I like Gus.

  So I call him back.

  “Thanks for doing this at such short notice, Annie.” Gus is backing out of my driveway, and I notice there are two steaming paper cups in the cup holder. He sees me looking. “Oh yeah, I brought you coffee.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and I pick up the cup closest to me and start to slurp at the plastic lid.

  “Yeah, so the guy that usually does this every year had to go in for some emergency kidney stone operation, and the rest of the dudes in my dad’s Rotary Club are either too short or have usher duty at their e arly-bird church services.”

  “So what is it I have to do again?”

  “You’ll be my escort. So basically you have to prevent me from stepping on children, hand out eggs to the little squirts . . .”

  “I’m really good with little squirts,” I say.

  “And hold my hand as we walk around the park.” I laugh and ask Gus where the costume is and if Gina’s going to be jealous. He says his dad will meet us there with the gear and that he didn’t ask Gina to help because he knows she doesn’t like crowds and weird, pseudo-Christian activities.

  We get to the park and find Rex’s car parked behind the back door to the little public lodge thing that the community uses for craft festivals and summer day camps. He lets us in and we help Gus into the bunny suit. Once Gus has got the body part on, Rex notices that the cottony tail is all lopsided and smashed, probably from spending a year in someone’s garage storage space. Rex is bent over to Gus’s rear, fluffing the tail back into a round puff ball and telling me about how his Rotary Club has sponsored this Easter egg hunt for over fifteen years. Seeing how ridiculous the two of them look at this moment, I think about how Gus and Rex grew up alone. No mom/wife. No sibling/sister. A father and a son. A rabbit keeper and his adorable bunny. They’re pretty amazing guys.

  Rex stands up and tells me that I look really nice. I thank him and smooth the front of the linen skirt that I had hastily ironed at dawn. I’m wearing open-toed sandals that I guessed would probably wick dew off the park grass and let it settle freshly between my toes.94 Next we strap the big klutzy bunny mittens over Gus’s hands. Rex pulls up a chair so he can lift the mask over Gus’s head,95 but then I tell him to stop. I grab my purse off the nearby table and rummage through it until I find two bobby pins. I turn back to Gus.

  “You won’t be able to brush your hair back with your bunny hands or flick it out of your eyes by jerking your head with that mask on, so this is totally necessary,” I tell him as I brush the front pieces of hair from his forehead and sweep them to the side. I have both bobby pins in my mouth as I say this, so it comes out kind of chewy-sounding and silly. He’s smiling. “It will be hard enough to see already,” I continue. I slide the first pin across his left temple, and it feels a bit awkward because I can tell that Gus is watching my face and not my hands. As I position the second pin, I notice how soft Gus’s hair is and how long it’s been since I touched another human with this kind of tenderness. Maybe I played with Michelle’s hair when she was here over the holidays, and now and then a student will hug me. David’s hair has been that clipped, military buzz since I’ve known him, so there’s something about touching Gus’s hair that makes me—embarrassingly, perhaps pathetically—want to stretch my fingers all the way through it.

  “Well, you look pretty stupid, but you’ll thank me for this later.” I step back and realize that with his hair pulled back so taut Gus’s eyes really stand out, making him look like a drag queen in some early stage of costuming.

  “I will thank you now, even,” he says. “Thank you.” Rex looks at his watch, places the headpiece over Gus’s head, and hurries us along outside. And I guess I’m still reeling in the strange sensations of the hair-petting, so I don’t really notice the hordes of children outside until they notice us—or Gus rather—and come running, all five million of them, precisely in our direction.

  We get the hang of things fairly quickly. I make sure the space behind Gus’s tail stays clear so he can crouch up and down to hug the munchkins and shake their hands. I take his paw and place it on the heads of kids that are too far left and right for him to see with his limited bunny peripheral vision. I hand out plastic eggs filled with candy and stickers, and we accommodate all the mothers who insist on taking pictures. Oddly enough, some of the mothers want me in the picture too. Like the Easter Bunny’s attendant is a staple piece of this memory. My pink cardigan does match Gus’s fur almost exactly, but each time we assume the pose—Gus’s arm across my back, the other hand resting on the shoulder of the child—it feels like some strange, magical family. But I do kind of like it.

  When the actual egg hunts96 start, I lead Gus over to a wooden picnic table so we can sit for a few minutes and regroup before the final Easter Bunny meet-and-greet. I ask him how things are going in there.

  “Great,” he says. “I just hope my dad dry-cleans this thing before Mr. Richards tries to wear it again next year. I’m sweating profusely.” It is a nice morning. Clear and warm enough so that kids are bumbling around just in sweatshirts or light windbreakers. I’m tired because I stayed up late the night before reading newspapers on the Internet and trying to map out lesson plans for the next few weeks. Gus stretches his arms out across the picnic table and tilts his bunny muzzle up to the sky. I ask if the air circulates much inside there. He says no and that it smells like the coffee he drank for breakfast. I say that it could be worse and that he could be suffering through pork sausage or cottage cheese breath. And then the sun is just so warm, making me feel all relaxed and melty. I wiggle my feet around in the grass to splash some water across my toes, and I scoot in closer to Gus. The fur is soft and cozy against my forearm, like a stuffed animal that’s been puked on and washed a hundred times. I close my eyes and lean up against Gus’s shoulder. We’re both silent, and I cross my feet at the ankles. I exhale a nice long breath and actually doze off.

  When I open my eyes, there’s a man with a camera about fifteen yards away. I can tell that he’s not a dad because it’s a real camera with a big lens and film inside. I’ve lifted my head up, and he’s replacing the lens cap and walking over. As he approaches I notice that my Easter basket has slipped out of my hands and that the eggs are splayed across the grass at our feet.

  “Sorry if I scared you,” the photographer says. Then he reaches into his camera bag and hands me a card. “Scott McCormick, Tacoma News Tribune.”

  “Oh,” I say, still confused and sleepy. “Okay.”

  “Hope you don’t mind that I snagged a few frames of you two dozing. It was just too adorable. They send one of us out here each
year to grab some cheesy shots of the kids for the Local Living section. Can I get your name, miss, and permission to run one of these photos if they turn out nice?” I sit up straight and turn to Gus. I lower my gaze to the bunny mouth, where I can see his eyes. I can tell he’s back in character and not going to speak, but his eyes communicate consent.

  “Sure,” I say. “Why not?” I can hear Gus snickering in his mask as I give my name to Scott McCormick.

  Lucky for Miss Harper, it turns out three of her twenty-nine students read the News Tribune over their Froot Loops each morning. Or at least their parents do and are sharp enough to recognize their kid’s teacher’s name. You wouldn’t really know it’s me from the picture. My head is turned sideways and I’m nuzzled into Gus’s bunny armpit, so really only half my face is showing. One arm is draped across my lap, and my other hand is dangling lifelessly above the handle of the dropped, spilling basket. Gus’s head is hanging to one side, and an ear is flopping just above my ponytail. With my feet crossed at the ankles and with Gus just looking so big, I am more or less a pastel illustration of a six-year-old you’d find in an old volume of nursery rhymes. I spend the thirty minutes before the warning bell in the teachers’ lounge catching up with Carrie about various spring break banalities and other popular gossip topics of boring schoolteachers.97 When I enter my classroom I see a distinct cluster around Caitlin Robinson’s desk. Desk clusters are always a bad sign. It’s either some new form of trading cards or mini electronica that I’ll have to learn about and enforce bans on. Or else someone got stitches on his hand. Or else someone is really mad at someone else and small alliances are forming. As soon as my presence is noticed, Max Schaffer steps away from the cluster, revealing the perfectly clipped newsprint on Caitlin’s desk. He shouts, “Miss Harper, you’re famous!”

  “I know. Isn’t it funny?” I ask lightly, hoping this won’t be a big deal and the kids will settle enough for me to get them peacefully sorted into their reading groups. “Did everyone have a nice spring break?” I ask. There’s some high-pitched muttering about ski trips and boring older sisters and a movie about aliens that I’ve heard nothing about. Then that nosy brat Caitlin Robinson pipes up.

  “Isn’t your boyfriend going to be mad at you because you cheated on him with the Easter Bunny?” Oh, the roar of laughter! Caitlin has just achieved a very high position on the Miss Harper’s Class Humor Hall of Fame. She got the language and the tone of her accusation just right, like she spent the entire spring break watching Maury and Jerry Springer. On today’s show: Lovers torn over bizarre infidelities. I’m sitting in a cushioned chair wearing my pink cardigan, looking all innocent and non-kinky. David is fuming beside me in his fatigues. And Gus Bunny is slouched in his costume in this carefree, confident way, as if to say, “I can’t help that I got what she wants.” It’s really fucking absurd.

  “Jeez, Caitlin. No. I was just helping the Easter Bunny at the egg hunt, and we were simply resting there.” I can’t believe I’m defending myself in front of nine-year-olds.

  “Well, my mom said that you two look pretty intimate.” Intimate! Reason number forty-nine to hate Mrs. Robinson. I take a deep breath that is meant to dissolve my burning desire to wallop Caitlin all the way to the kindergarten wing. The class is still Giggletown, USA, and I resent the fact that I can feel myself blushing. It’s all so very ridiculous.

  “The Easter Bunny and I are old friends. And I can assure you that our relationship is purely platonic.” Someone asks what platonic means. “It means when you love someone, but it’s not romantic. It means you love them just as a friend.” The class seems to accept this answer, and I switch gears98 by asking Garrett Wagner to come adjust the felt weather symbols on the front bulletin board. He moves the sunshine to the side and overlaps a few clouds on each other. “It might rain later,” he says.

  I say, “Oh, really.”

  The next day I’m driving Max Schaffer to his violin lesson and he says, “It was your friend Gus, wasn’t it?”

  “What about Gus?” I ask, trying not to look over at Max while I drive.

  “He’s the Easter Bunny from the picture.” Damn kid is so f-ing perceptive.

  “Yep,” I say. “It was Gus. And I take it you don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, Max.”

  “Well duh,” he says. “I never have. And I know Gus is your best platonic friend.” I can’t help but smile at how Max inserts the vocab word into his speech.

  “Yeah, Max,” I say. “I guess he is.”

  18

  Today I’m calling my book Shout Across the Ocean, and I just got off the phone with David. And boy, am I mad at that guy. I feel like someone has lit my ear on fire and implanted a series of ten-pound dumbbells in each of my internal organs. The organs are stretched out—heavy and saggy—and the tips of my fingers are all tingly and sweaty as I type this. And it’s not a good kind of tingly.

  So two days ago after school, I was goofing off on the computer when I was supposed to be grading social studies tests. I hadn’t read the paper that day, so I pulled up the New York Times online. I read the headlines, the Science Tuesday section, and then I clicked around to the Names of the Dead. There were two names. One of them was Private Francisco A. Flores, age twenty-four, of Denton, Texas. It took a second for my brain to stir and process the name. I thought: Flores, Flores, Flores, Ray Flores, Polar Bear Flores, Ray Flores, Saved by a Beanie Baby! Then I remembered that Ray was the name I made up for David’s friend Flores and that David’s Flores was in fact from Texas, and could it be the same Flores? I typed and searched and Googled.

  Francisco Flores was killed during a convoy inside Baghdad. Their jeep ran over an IED, and though the driver suffered only minor injuries, Flores, the passenger, died on the site. The local paper from Denton showed Mom Flores standing outside a church with a swarm of middle-aged ladies sporting black blouses and fallen faces. I remembered that it was the church ladies who gave Flores the Beanie Babies, and even though Flores is a common name and there could be two hundred Texan Floreses in the army, I knew.99 I totally knew that it was David’s friend. I guess a Beanie Baby can only save you so many times.

  I read that the accident had happened eleven days earlier—as in two days before I talked to David about Alden’s death. We’d spoken twice since, and David had mentioned nothing about losing a guy in his company. But I asked, didn’t I? I explicitly asked that day on the phone, and David had acted so quiet and somber. Why couldn’t he tell me? If the news hadn’t been delivered to the family yet, David wouldn’t have been able to use the phone at all. So he knew. He’d known. And he hadn’t told me. And then I started to feel all weird because my emotions were leaning in the “rage against my boyfriend’s dishonesty” direction and not in the “holy shit, a friend of his was killed” or the “poor Flores and his family” directions. That’s top-grade selfish, evil100 Annie Harper for you. But I couldn’t help it.

  Driving home from school, I tried to level my reactions down to something more reasonable. First: It must be another Flores. David would have told me about his Flores. Second: Maybe he’s trying to protect me. Maybe he thinks withholding devastating information will keep my twittering nerves and spastic fits of anxiety from completely consuming me. But can’t he see I’ve actually been kind of fine? I go to work every day. I continue to pay all my bills and cook for myself and keep in touch with my parents and friends and Loretta. I’ve raised a fucking chicken, for Pete’s sake! He can’t possibly think I’m too weak for this.

  It’s the not talking about things that squelches human warmth. Take Stevens from Remains of the Day. He was too busy not talking about how he felt for people and only making comments about the weather and the conditions of table linens that he nearly died in complete loneliness.

  David is my boyfriend. He absolutely must share with me.

  So today he called and I couldn’t keep anything in. After the first usual exchange of pleasantries, I jumped at it. I was already weeping stupid drama tears before I s
aid it.

  “So David,” I said. “Will you please tell me how your friend Flores is doing?” Silence. Silence. Silence.

  “Flores?” His voice wavered, almost cracked on the second syllable.

  “Yeah, Flores. Beanie Baby Flores. I haven’t heard you talk about him in a while.”101

  Silence. Silence. Silence.

  “Oh, Annie. I meant to tell you.”

  “Don’t you know by now that I read everything? I scour every bit of news I can get my eyes on to keep track of how you are and how your coworkers are and what the fuck it is you’re doing over there!”

  “I don’t know, babe. I was upset. I was grieving. You were grieving about Brother Alden. The timing was all off. I was tired. Of course, I was going to tell you eventually.” These were all very reasonable excuses now that I think about it. I can’t understand the gimongous strain of being a wartime soldier, so I shouldn’t expect to understand the effects it has on him, and furthermore, I shouldn’t blame him for what those effects were making him do. But I was tired too. Tired of feeling so in the dark about David’s life. Here I am, reduced to that lame cliché.

  “Fine,” I said, because I’m really horrible at fighting.

  Silence. Silence. Silence.

  And then I got this second wind. I harnessed it and used it to jab below the belt. “Anything else you’re not telling me?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?!!” By this point I was pacing back and forth in my living room. I’d grabbed a slipcover from the arm of my couch and I was whipping it around like some sort of floppy nunchucks. “Don’t we have some sort of understanding to tell each other everything? I mean, Flores dying doesn’t fall under the Vagueness Pact. It was in the fucking newspaper! You could have told me.” And then I lowered my voice a bit. “And maybe I could have helped.”