Divide Me by Zero

by Lara Vapnyar

  I was trembling all the way home, imagining the fight with my mother, but when I came in, she wouldn’t even look at me.

  She was screaming into the phone, her face streaked with tears. I tapped her on the shoulder, but she angrily waved me away. I thought that she was on the phone with my orthodontist, who’d complained about my behavior. Then I heard her screaming: “You know what you are, Sergey? A traitor!” and saw that the conversation had nothing to do with me. I felt relieved, but mostly mad at her.

  When she finally hung up, I told her that I wasn’t going to see the orthodontist anymore. She regarded me with a blank expression. I needed something stronger.

  “I will grow out my hair and I won’t do math with you anymore!” I said.

  “Okay, fine,” she said.

  Her reaction was deeply discomfiting. Was she letting me know that I could do whatever I wanted? That I was on my own now? That I was the one in charge?

  Years later, my mother told me that the day I quit my teeth exercises happened to be the day when she found out that Sergey was married. My teeth and my hair were the last things on her mind.

  Note to children of parents. Parents do have their own problems. More often than not they trump yours.

  It took me four months to grow out my hair enough for a tiny ponytail, and about the same time to learn to smile and relax my jaws so that my expression was more or less normal.

  I believed that my new ponytail and the absence of braces changed my appearance to the point of exquisite beauty, but strangely enough nobody seemed to notice that. My classmates continued to ignore me, and people I saw in public places like the subway or the supermarket barely looked in my direction. But occasionally there would be moments when a man would give me an appreciative look, which would send me into a state of an extreme crazy high.

  I decided to test my newfound powers on Sasha, who came to our place all the time, even though I didn’t tutor him anymore. He had grown a few inches, and his hair was longer and fell over his eyes, which made him look spirited if not handsome. He was sitting on my bed, gushing about the new book he held open in his lap. I moved very close to him under the pretense of wanting to see the book better. I imagined what it would be like to kiss Sasha. I saw the pores on his skin and the spare reddish hairs growing from his ears down to his jaw, and I felt the faint smell of dill pickles gone bad emanating from his body. I didn’t want to kiss Sasha, and he seemed to intuit that too, because he moved away.

  I wished I knew how to make friends. But I found that, even if without braces and with longer hair I was significantly less ugly, the lingering sensation of ugliness was still there, and I was anxious about imposing myself on people. I would come home after school, do my homework, and sit there pondering my boredom.

  Often, there would be one or another of my mother’s students sitting in our bedroom, doing my old job, looking at my mother with canine deference.

  “Why are they here?” I would ask.

  “Well, you won’t help me anymore,” she would say, “and I have a deadline.”

  Her students were shy, homely girls in ill-fitting glasses. Most of them were married, a few of them were pregnant. I was insanely jealous of them, of their having had sex and of their taking my place with my mother. One of them said: “Professor Geller, you’re my hero!” Her hero? Her hero? My mother was my hero! Still my hero, even if she had betrayed me.

  I would walk into our room without acknowledging the students’ presence and plop right onto my sofa with my homework and a bologna sandwich, to show them how little they mattered, that this was my space, my room, my mother. The bad thing was that homework at my school took me very little time. I had to be busy with something, so I’d pick a thick book from our shelves and pretend to read it. The thickest was War and Peace. By that time, I had read a few of Tolstoy’s stories as part of my school curriculum. In my view, they weren’t much better than his math problems. I found the first couple of chapters of War and Peace equally dull. But then I came to the scene of Natasha’s first ball.

  The handsome and brilliant Prince Andrei asks Natasha to dance, and Tolstoy shows how “that rapt expression on Natasha’s face, ready for despair and for ecstasy, suddenly lit up with a happy, grateful, childlike smile.”

  Natasha is ready for despair and for ecstasy. For either despair or ecstasy. She isn’t ready for any bland state in between. I wasn’t ready for any bland state either. How did Tolstoy know that? How could he possibly know something about me that even I hardly knew?

  I spent the next couple of weeks reading War and Peace, oblivious of my mother’s pathetic students who couldn’t possibly understand either ecstasy or despair, and once I finished, I went to our bookcase and picked up another book, then another, then another, then all the issues of the Reading World my mother kept on her shelf, until I earned the title of “avid reader.”

  And that was how my mother introduced me to her lover when he came for tea.

  My grandparents refused to meet him and were adamant in their refusal. The man was cheating on his wife—it was disgusting.

  “Serezha loves me!” my mother insisted. “He’s only staying with his wife because they wouldn’t let a divorced man attend foreign conferences!”

  “Oh, really?” my grandmother said. “Is that what his wife thinks? Does she think that her husband is sleeping with her for the sake of the conferences?”

  My mother ran into our room and slammed the door.

  On the day Sergey was supposed to come, my grandparents went to visit Uncle Grisha. But I stayed. I was curious to see him up close.

  He turned out to be just as old and ugly as I remembered, with shrewd little eyes made even smaller by thick glasses.

  “Serezha,” my mother said, “meet Katya. She’s an avid reader, like you.” She was all sweaty and flushed and unnaturally friendly.

  “Oh, really?” Sergey said with a smirk. “Read anything interesting lately?”

  I wanted to say War and Peace, but I had the sense that this wouldn’t impress Sergey. I decided to go with the Reading World, and pick a piece that I found the most bizarre.

  “There was a very funny piece about Gogol in the Reading World. Some Nabokov guy wrote it.”

  That made Sergey choke on his tea.

  “Excuse me? Did she just say ‘some Nabokov’?”

  I blushed and looked at my mother. She was staring at me accusingly.

  “I can’t believe you don’t know who Nabokov is!” she said.

  And Sergey said: “An avid reader, huh?” After which they both started to laugh. Not only did my mother refuse to stand up for me, but she offered me like a sacrifice for her and her lover to mock and ridicule.

  Note to parents (myself included) who mock their children for ignorance. Are you fucking serious? Isn’t it 100% your fault?

  For the first time in my life I felt true undiluted hatred for my mother. I wished the worst for her. Not her death or illness because that would be the worst for me, but something that would be awful for her, like Sergey dumping her, for example.

  Which he did. Three years later. Sergey’s wife found out about their relationship and demanded that he stop seeing my mother. Sergey broke the news to my mother in an especially cruel form. “It’s not that I’m afraid of my wife,” he chose to say. “We have to stop because I’m afraid of causing my wife pain.”

  My mother didn’t tell me about this until years later. Back when Sergey broke up with her, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even notice that he was gone. I had just fallen in love for the first time, and the rest of the world ceased to exist.

  SIX

  In the seven months between my mother’s diagnosis and her death, she was asked to assess her pain countless times. Every week, sometimes twice a week, sometimes even twice a day.

  More often than not, there would be a startlingly bright pain scale poster on the wall.

  “Please assess your pain on a scale of zero to ten,” a nurse would ask my mother,
while pointing to the poster. “Zero is no pain at all and ten is the worst pain you can imagine.”

  “Nine,” my mother would say in the beginning. This was the truth. Her pain was about as bad as anything she had ever experienced or could imagine.

  But when they asked her the same question closer to the end, she would say, “Five? Six?” even though her pain at that time was much greater than in the beginning. This disparity wasn’t caused by any increase in stoicism but by her newly acquired knowledge of what nine and ten truly felt like.

  That’s why I think being asked to assess pain on a scale of zero to ten doesn’t make any sense. The value of ten is always the worst a person has experienced so far. We have no idea how much worse it can get.

  The same goes for the pain of heartbreak. When your heart gets broken for the first time, you think that what you’re feeling is a ten, and it could be true, but it could turn out to be a two or three compared to your future breakups. Just as with physical pain, you can’t possibly imagine how much worse it can get.

  I fell in love for the first time in the dark, half-empty auditorium of Sasha’s school, at a screening that I attended with Sasha and my new friend Yulia. Yulia transferred to our school in the beginning of my senior year, after her family moved to Moscow from Saint Petersburg. She was a tiny redhead who came to school wearing adult pumps that made her gait unsteady and cautious. I struck up a fragile friendship with her, because she was the only other girl in our class who loved to read. She knew who Nabokov was.

  Yulia’s parents worked as stage designers in one of the Moscow theaters and they had ways of getting their hands on any book, prohibited or not. She promised to bring me a copy of Lolita, which was her favorite book. She told me that it was about this smart, free-spirited thirteen-year-old girl who was traveling across America with a grown man. The man was madly in love with her, so he paid for everything, for hotels and candy and beautiful dresses and shoes. And they were having really hot sex too!

  Yulia was almost unbearably cool, but I was afraid that she was spending time with me by mistake, only because she was new at our school and didn’t know any better. I desperately wanted to impress her, but I didn’t know how. I thought of mentioning my mother the famous author of school textbooks, but math seemed too boring to impress Yulia. I tried to brag about my uncle Grisha who lived in New York and sent me American clothes, but Yulia only shrugged and said: “Who doesn’t have an uncle abroad nowadays?” Finally, I told her about Sasha—a boy who had been hopelessly in love with me since we were three and who attended the best school in Moscow. They had these amazing screenings of art-house films, and perhaps I could even try to get us in. “Yes,” Yulia said. “Yes! Please, try!”

  The screenings were hosted by Sasha’s favorite teacher, Boris Markovich. Sasha talked about him so much that if I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve suspected that Sasha was in love with him. Boris Markovich was only twenty-four, but already finishing his doctoral thesis on twentieth-century Russian poetry. He read Mandelstam and Brodsky in class and he screened his favorite movies for his students in the school auditorium. The wife of Boris Markovich was very pretty and an aspiring actress. Sasha showed me a tiny photo of her in a theater program for a show in which she had a small role. Oh, and they had a baby, who was only seven months old. Sasha had gone to his house once—Boris Markovich lived right across the park from us. The wife hadn’t been there, but he’d gotten to see the baby and even hold his little hand.

  I would usually refuse to go to the screenings, because I knew I’d feel awkward in the company of fancy kids from a fancy school. But for Yulia’s sake I was willing to do anything.

  “Just don’t tell anybody and don’t be late,” Sasha said. “Boris Markovich hates that.” I promised that we wouldn’t.

  Yulia and I kept the first promise, but broke the second. Yulia asked if she could borrow any of my American clothes. I told her she could pick anything except for my favorite red T-shirt, and she took forever picking.

  My mother was right there in the room, sitting cross-legged on her bed with the pile of manuscript pages in her lap, wincing at the noise we made.

  “I don’t like this girl,” she whispered when Yulia went to the bathroom. “She’s got shifty eyes.” I waved her away.

  “Your mother is so old,” Yulia said when we finally left. “I thought she was your grandmother.”

  We missed our bus, then we ended up taking the wrong bus and got off at the wrong stop, then the guard at the school wouldn’t let us in because I stupidly admitted that we weren’t the school’s students, we just came for the screening.

  By the time we made it past the guard and into the auditorium, the film was already playing. It was black and white. There were two people on the screen. A boy around my age with long hair falling into his face, and a woman in a white coat, a doctor, urging him to do something with his hands. The auditorium was perfectly dark. We couldn’t see anything or anybody, we weren’t even sure that there were people there. There was a medical chemical smell in the room that matched the visual on the screen. Then I heard the teacher’s voice. He said: “Shut the door! Shut the door tight and sit down!” His voice was high and strained. We shut the door and tiptoed down, groping at the backs of the seats, Yulia grabbing on to my arm, finding our way by the thin strips of light coming through slits in the heavy drapes on the windows. When my eyes adjusted to the dark a little, I saw a small group of people. Five or six kids were sitting in a single row in the middle, and the teacher was sitting alone in the row in front of them. I located Sasha and dragged Yulia there to take the two seats directly behind him. He said: “Shh!”

  “Loud and clear!” the woman on-screen was saying. “Loud and clear!”

  And the boy looked at her as if he had just woken up and said: “I can speak!” He was loud and clear.

  Then the screen went black and there was the long queue of opening credits accompanied by heavy classical music.

  “Shit,” Boris Markovich said, “I’ve seen the opening scene at least three times and it still gives me goose bumps.”

  There were notes of anxiety in his voice. It seemed to be important to him that his students like the film. I found it moving, even if I wasn’t moved by the opening scene itself.

  Then there was a different scene, this time in color. A long-necked woman wearing a skirt and thick cardigan was sitting on a low fence, her eyes trained on a small figure approaching along the path on the edge of a field or a meadow. She was smoking nervously but gracefully, as if she wanted to hide her disquiet even from herself. The soft male voice-over told us what the woman was thinking. That if that figure made a turn toward the hedge, it must be her husband, but if it didn’t—it was not her husband, and her husband would never come back. And it was then that I felt the goose bumps for the first time. There was something deeply familiar in the woman’s expression and posture. She was guarded yet hopeful, proud but intensely vulnerable. I had a premonition that her husband wouldn’t come back, and he didn’t. The only way he would appear in the film was in the form of memories and dreams and lines of poetry.

  There were many strange and disjointed moments in the film that I didn’t understand and didn’t enjoy. I couldn’t follow the story or even see what the story was. I couldn’t stand the imposing classical music that reminded me of all those concerts at the Kremlin Palace that had made me sick as a child. But I was still gripped by the power of the film. I was watching it in a way similar to how I used to watch movies when I was a child. Back in Sevastopol times, my mother would often sneak me into a theater to watch a grown-up movie with her, and even though I hardly understood the story, I was fascinated by the enormous figures moving on the screen in the dark. They looked and acted like regular people or regular animals, but they were magically beautiful and magically large, larger than anything life had to offer. My mother once showed me that all those enormous creatures reached the screen through the ray of light streaming from the tiny hole
of the projector, but that didn’t diminish my awe.

  And then the movie arrived at the last scene, and Boris Markovich whispered: “Stabat Mater, here we come,” and his voice broke.

  There was the shot of the same field or meadow that we saw in the beginning. The long-necked woman who was smoking on the fence in that scene was now lying in the tall grass with her husband. The husband who wouldn’t come back. But this scene was a flashback, and he was there, and he was asking her if she wanted a boy or a girl. There was a close-up of her face. She was happy, absolutely, unbearably happy, but she also knew that happiness like that could not last, it was too much, it wasn’t allowed, it would be taken away.

  I was suddenly struck by something that my childish egotism had obscured from me before. I had always thought of my father’s death in terms of what I had lost (a father, a warm and happy mother, a perfect childhood by the sea). I had never considered what my mother had lost, which was incomparably more. And at that moment the music came out from the background, and rose—loud and clear and devastating—to crush me with shame and grief.

  I spent the remainder of the film sobbing, until I felt Yulia tapping me on the arm. I saw that the light was on, the screen was blank, and everybody was staring at me. Yulia, and Sasha, and Sasha’s classmates, and Sasha’s teacher, Boris Markovich. I could hardly make out his features through the screen of tears. I only saw that he had dark long hair and a beard. He said something to me, I didn’t understand what, but it sounded like something kind. Then I remembered where I was and bolted out of the auditorium.

  I didn’t want to take the bus, so I walked most of the way home. I continued walking even after it started to rain. I was thinking about my mother. This was her day off. I imagined her either sitting behind her desk or curled on the bed in a whirl of manuscript pages. I thought that I’d rush to hug her the second I made it home. But the closer to home I got, the harder it seemed. I couldn’t just hug her, could I? I would have to explain, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to explain. I couldn’t possibly put into words what I’d understood while watching The Mirror. It would take me many many years to learn how to put things I felt into words.