Long Division

by Jane Berentson

  30 I have not told David about this journal. My pre-memoirs. My womanly memoirs. My femoirs. My fem Wars! It’ll be more touching when I hand over the publisher’s bound proofs for his approval. Sometimes I feel deceptive for not sharing my authorial aspirations, but doesn’t everyone secretly kind of want to be a writer/rocker/movie star/artist? I’ll tell him someday. I promise.

  31 When we first went away to college Gus would mail me sketches of all the new friends he’d made. It was always quite amusing when I finally met the people in person or saw them in actual photographs. After having the sketches for so long, it was hard not to notice their cartoony features—droopy earlobes; catlike eyes; this one poor guy with a birthmark the shape of Ohio.

  32 Yes, this bar sells pickled hard-boiled eggs. I’ve seen David and his friends actually eat them.

  33 I cringe when Gus says “kick-ass,” knowing the damage control I’ll have to perform later.

  34 Gus uses some strange words that I think he steals from obscure fantasy novels.

  35 Fuck. I can never get those two straight.

  36 Even after eight years, a shared queen-sized bed, and a very openly loving relationship, my mother still calls Rebecca Aunt Carol’s friend.

  37 Specialize? So what is he during peacetime? A florist? A mailman?

  38 Annie, does David write often? Have you two talked about marriage? Have you seen his living will? Does he have siblings? Where do his parents live? Are you going to take time off when he returns? Can he send you videos via the Internet? What kind of care packages do you send him? Does he need any books or magazines? Have you sent him shaving cream? Don’t they always need shaving cream? How often does he call? Are the connections usually good? Have there been any injuries in his unit? Does he carry a gun all the time? What kind of gun is it? Do they have a chaplain in their camp? Do you know the denominational affiliation of the chaplain? Does he sleep well? Do you sleep well? Does he tell you about his dreams? Are you having bad dreams? How are his love letters? Are you saving all the letters? When does he come back? How much longer will he be in the army? Do you think he’ll stay in? Have you talked about it? Are you going to eat that drumstick? Are you in some sort of support group? Do you have a flag in your classroom? Do your students say the pledge of allegiance? Do your students know he’s gone? Do you watch Fox News? Do you get Fox News? Do you think it’s going to be weird when he gets back? Does he complain about the heat? Do you know if he smokes? Do you smoke? Have you been going out much lately? Who are you hanging out with? Are your friends supportive? Would you want to adopt one of our neighbor’s kittens? Do you want me to send David my issues of Reader’s Digest? Can I have his address? Do you want whipped cream on your pie? Have you been losing weight? Are you stressed? Are you miserable? Do you get the Times or the P.I.? What’s the difference in time zones? Can’t you just wait until he’s back? Wouldn’t it be fun to have a welcome-home party? Do you want me to start planning? Is David religious? Did you two ever go to church? Can I send him an annotated Bible? Can he call you much, Annie? How often does David call? What do you talk about? What does he tell you about? Can he e-mail? Can he tell you what he’s doing? What is he doing? What’s his rank? What does that stand for? Do you think he’ll want a government job someday? Would you mind moving to D.C.? Have you ever been to the Holocaust Museum? Do you like museums? Does David like museums? Does he get to watch sports over there? Is he a Seahawks fan? Are you a Seahawks fan? Is the game on? Is there any more wine? Annie, can you check the pantry for more wine? Have you sent him a Christmas gift? How long does the mail take to get there? Do you want to go to Arizona for Christmas? Did you know it’s eighty degrees there? How hot is it in Iraq, Annie? Do you know how hot? How hot? How hot? Hot hot? Hot? Annie? Annie, do you know? Hot, Annie? Are you hot?

  39 That and the 15 to 20 percent discount at Barnes and Noble.

  40 Add to that chaos one solid week of reading and watching about Saddam’s spidey-hole capture. I didn’t write. I didn’t cook much. I just stared at that scraggly image of him, searching for some insight or glimmer of what he’s really about. I’m a huge fool, I know. But it was somehow particularly captivating without being exciting. I didn’t feel like capturing Saddam was going to bring David home any sooner or make him any safer. I can’t even figure out if it’s making anyone any safer. Happier? Maybe. Some people. Lots, maybe. Now what? Now what? Now what? I almost wanted to dig my own spider hole in my back yard. I’d take a bottle of water, a flashlight, and the latest issue of Time magazine. I’d fold myself into the cool, dark space and wait. Maybe that would help things make sense. Who knows?

  41 We have reasonably recovered from that haiku showdown that may or may not be removed from the real book. Once I talked to him on the phone about it all, I realized that he did appreciate the work and thoughtfulness of my students more than his terse and emotionally sloppy e-mails let on. We made a truce not to e-mail fight, and if something is bugging us to wait until the phone lines allow us to detangle it. Fair enough.

  42 No wonder my blanket-making instincts are now stifled. I’ve already done it!

  43 Though I fervently tried to insist I walk.

  44 Which was surprisingly lively for a winter morning. I stood in front of the giant octopus’s tank for a good half hour watching the fluid movements of the creature playing with this floaty ball toy that would sink—but not all the way—to the bottom of the tank if she stopped whapping it with one of her legs. David stood behind me with his arms around my waist while I kept stammering out stupid phrases like And it has no bones and Can you imagine having that many appendages? and What a magnifi cent organism and It’s so happy just to play . . . alone. Later I read about octopuses online and found that they are the only invertebrates known to play. They’re that smart.

  45 Sadly, it was probably obvious. You would think a sister or brother would have come up by now, right? I should probably get this out sooner when I write the real book. Ah, the sad, lonely, only child. A fact about myself I’ve tried my whole life to ignore. I know it sounds strange: trying to hide something that is in fact a lack of something. I don’t know when I became aware of the stigmas and stereotypes attached to only children—the selfish personalities due to coddled rearings—or how I decided that ignoring the topic would prevent me from ever being labeled such. And putting my energy into not being a certain way was definitely a distraction from the fact that as a child, I was regularly lonely.

  When I get to know people, I don’t ask about siblings until the other person asks about siblings. Books, movies, television, everything, all cultures, all stories—most people have siblings. A sister or a brother is an automatic friend and the closest thing in the whole universe to being you. With shared DNA, shared meals, the shared backseats of cars and bathroom sinks and overbites, I’ve always yearned for that closeness. I’ve resolved that I long/ have longed/will long for siblings for the rest of my life. Something happened during my birth that rendered my mother’s womb unsuitable for further childbearing. In junior high she told me the specifics, and it was so sad and awkward that I never asked again and have since let the details fog up. Ovaries something something. We were driving in her car up to Seattle for a shopping trip. I think I needed a dress for the eighth-grade dance or maybe a swimsuit for an end-of-the-year pool party. I had just received the menstruation/uterus talk about six months before, and I still couldn’t wrap my mind around what it meant to be sterile and what—as a woman who had already successfully produced offspring—it must feel like to know that you no longer can. I remember feeling this kind of pressure to be awesome. To please and support and amuse my parents more than I ever had. Because

  I was all they had. The only combination of themselves and the only shot they had at raising a perfect piece of progeny. And so I tried really hard in high school. And for a while I stopped feeling so bad for myself for being the only one. I was fairly certain my parents would have welcomed another Harper into the universe. And later I learn
ed that they definitely would have. Because they did!

  When I was in eleventh grade, digging through the attic, rifling through my mom’s boxes of old clothes in search of anything fantastically retro, I found a box of photos. The first pages of a simple, black vinyl album showed my parents with a baby. My dad had a mustache then, and my mother’s hair was feathered in that Farrah Fawcett way that can make anyone look carefree. The baby was a red, swollen infant bound in flannel blankets, snuggled against my mother’s face. There was this one photo of the baby in a pale blue onesie touching its chubby hand to a brighter blue sock with that almost alarming baby flexibility. What’s with all the blue? I thought. Instantly I figured my garb to be the result of some friend’s or relative’s generous hand-me-downs. My parents being either too poor or too cheap or too in love with their baby to give a fuck about gender-appropriate attire. And then I turned the page.

  In the next set of pictures my parents are slouched low in the sofa. It’s a pose I know means the camera is resting on the television and the photo is being taken using the timer feature. My mom is holding the baby, cradling its head in the cozy nook that signals the end of her lean upper arm. My father’s arm is draped over her shoulders. His legs are crossed in that special dad fashion with the ankle resting square on the knee in a way that forms a triangle-shaped hole between the legs. And sprouting out of the triangle—like a scouting gopher or a jack-in-the-box or a cheery sunflower greeting the morning light—is me. I know it’s me because I’m wearing this kelly green sweatshirt with a daisy stenciled on the chest in fabric paint. My mother had made herself a matching one that I eventually wore on camping trips in college. Later, I learned that I am two in this photograph. And later, I hated

  myself—despite the neurological impossibility—because I can’t remember this day. Or the three months after it. The three months of my life where I actually had a brother.

  The confrontation with my parents was expectedly emotional. One of those moments teenagers have where your head spins from the feeling of being stuck inside an after-school special. Something that while it’s happening you can already feel a stiffness in your back that will result from staying up all night thinking and brushing your hair and calling your best friends.

  When I was two years old, my parents adopted a baby boy. It was one of those things where an agency sets you up before the baby is even born and they practically hand it off to you once the cord is cut and the birth mother’s shaky hand signs some form. The birth mother wanted to name the baby Alden after her grandfather, and my parents agreed to keep the name, finding it both crunchy and classic. My mom said he was a happy baby, slept a lot, and that she’d find me emerging from his room with two vertical red lines running down my cheeks: the result of pressing my face to the bars of his crib and watching him sleep for periods of time that are typically considered too long for your average two-year-old to stay still, let alone quiet. When my mother told me this, I cried. I was sixteen and prone to fits of melodrama anyway, but I flat-out sobbed. The three of us were sitting at the kitchen table (of course we were sitting at the kitchen table!), and like most kitchen tables, it has four sides. So at this point, it probably seems like baby Alden is dead. Thankfully, no! Baby Alden is now twenty-two-year-old Alden, and we haven’t had an update since he graduated from some high school in the LA suburbs. After those first three months, Alden’s first mommy changed her mind. It’s a classic move, a legal loophole that rips hearts and brings the toughest judges to tears. It’s like temporary insanity, but more like temporary emotional instability where mothers give their babies away and then realize they need them back. I figure biology has a lot to do with it, the body carrying the fetus for so long and twisting a mother’s hormones and neurons around to generate the capabilities for many years of nurture. Alden’s mother (I only know her first name: Julia) didn’t think she could handle a family—didn’t think the father would be there to help out. But I guess the couple reconciled and decided that raising their baby was vital to maintaining that reconciliation. My parents lost and Alden left us.

  But why didn’t you tell me? Why couldn’t I know? All the usual questions. We knew it’d upset you. It was a terrible time. We couldn’t handle it. All the usual answers. My parents realized they’d erred on the side of overdue secret keeping and made up for it by answering every single obnoxious question I could think of about my once-upon-a-time sibling. My whole senior year of high school I was practically obsessed. I wrote weird short stories about Alden and me making tree forts and performing short plays for our parents. I talked Gus’s ear off about it. As an only child himself, he was almost equally fascinated by the situation. We practically launched a campaign to find Alden. We knew he lived in California with his mother and maybe his father. Gus even started writing a screenplay about the two of us driving down the Pacific coast searching for brother Alden. Where Is Brother Alden? was to star unknown teen indie actors, and Gus himself would hand-select the soundtrack. My parents kept telling me they were legally restricted from attempting to contact Alden. They knew his last name and wouldn’t even tell me, an issue I took years to get over.

  Every fall, Alden’s grandmother, this woman my mother referred to as Bless Her Heart Barbara, would mail us his school photograph. He wasn’t a particularly attractive kid (I was so pleased to see he got braces in eighth grade), but there was something about his bony shoulders and curly dark hair that made me confident he could easily pass as my kin. I could see us posed next to a snowman, sharing a quilt and playing Super Mario, fighting over remote controls and insulting each other’s blotchy teen skin; I knew, I believed, I would bet my bottom dollar that we were soooooooo, so very alike.

  And then in college, I kind of got over it. I was living in a massive dorm with hundreds of kids my age and was suddenly flooded with companionship. At the university I joined a Spanish club and had weekly potlucks with other education majors. My junior year I moved out of the dorm and into a scruffy apartment with three female friends. We’d make breakfast together on weekends and eat it snuggled up to a showing of the PBS miniseries of Anne of Green Gables. I cherished the close relationships I had and slowly stopped mourning one that never was. And then I met David. He occasionally teases me in brotherly ways and would shield me from flying glass in a bar fight. He sometimes calls me dude. Of course I still think about Alden, but like my parents, I’m relatively healed. It’s just things like the holidays that occasionally make our family feel so small.

  46 Ugh. David would pee his pants with delight if he saw me type that word. I don’t know if it’s interesting or scary that his lexicon is finally penetrating my own.

  47 I love love love teaching the water cycle.

  48 Later I told this story to Carrie. You know, teacher-next-door Carrie. And she said (this is an exact quote): “Yeah, infidelity is a big problem in the military, but you have nothing to worry about. David’s sooo in love with you.” Like she thought I was telling her to express some anxiety I have about being burned. I didn’t even think about that. In all honestly, I didn’t even think about The Military or David. It was just a sad story about a woman having to uproot her life. Cheaters span all professions. Infidelity is as old and as universal as love itself. Carrie and I were in the photocopy room, and she was sitting on the counter swinging her legs. I didn’t really want to continue the discussion, so I mashed a bunch of the buttons on the Xerox machine I was using so it made this beeping noise and I could pretend to be distracted by a paper jam. This was a really good move, I thought. I will use it again.

  49 The woman has no source of music in her room.

  50 I did not know that toothpaste could ferment.

  51 At the time, “debilitating” was really the only thing my brain could recognize. Okay, maybe “fucked up.” It’s just now (after three cups of coffee) that I’ve sat down to write about it that my brain is frantically grasping for the right description. Maybe I should take out all that slop that I just wrote. Maybe I’m coloring
myself an absurd shade of melodramatic. Not sure. But for now, while things are still fresh, the rice pudding feels right.

  52 I might have made the spa thing up.

  53 A birthday gift from David one year because I’m always slipping in my socks.

  54 Interesting, because I’ve actually whimsically considered this before. Loretta saying it cements it as an entirely fabulous idea.

  55 Saturday.

  56 First thing when the boogerfaces go out to recess, I look this up on the Internet. No, I will not need a rooster. A rooster’s presence is only necessary if you want your chicken’s eggs to hatch. Duh. Annie, please remember to omit this mortifyingly ignorant moment from the real book. Christ.

  57 Loretta excused me from our regular Saturday visit.

  58 I’m thinking about lining the eaves with this hot pink feather boa left over from a random night in college that ended at a strip club, but I’m not sure if Chicken will appreciate the use of feathers, however faux they may be.

  59 I know there is some word like “company,” “platoon,” “fleet,” or “unit” that refers exactly to the group of three hundred men who left Tacoma for Iraq with David. And I know they all work together on the same stuff, but I never remember what word it is, and it’s embarrassing that I don’t. The military has this very precise Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species type of organization, but there is no snazzy mnemonic device for it, so I always forget. King Philip Conquered Over France, Germany, (and) Spain. Go Philip.