Aimee Bender - An Invisible Sign of My Own

Before she left 9119, my mother put those cherries, bright as blood cells, on the counter, took out a camera, and snapped some photos of the rooms to show my father later.

I had sex with that one boyfriend. Once. Twice. All at his place.

His skin was a buoyant ship over mine, and he kissed silver into the back of my neck, and was fine with my insistence on having lights ON at all times. I like to see what’s happening, I explained. Cool, he said, picking at his elbow. After the third time, when we were just starting to get the hang of it, I came home one morning to my new empty apartment; I checked my messages to see if anyone had died while I was out in the world having sex but no one had or at least it was unreported so I sat on the couch and kept a knock going on the side table when I thought of how his eyelashes made a simple black rim when he looked down.

The clock said noon so I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator but the food inside looked too complicated and I peered into the cupboards but I didn’t want turkey soup, or garbanzo beans, or tuna, and I wandered into the bathroom and without even really thinking about it unwrapped the spare package of soap that I kept in the cabinet beneath the sink.

I bought the same brand my mother did. A bright white bar, rocking on its back, friendly. I brought it to the living room couch, and held it for a while, smelling it, and there was a knife sitting on the side table from the previous day’s apple, which seemed convenient, and after a few minutes of just holding and smelling, I picked up the knife, balanced the bar on the arm of the couch, sawed off a portion, set it sailing in my mouth, and bit down.

Slide! Slip! It careened around my tongue. Gave like chocolate under my teeth. I cut another piece. My mouth crammed with froth.

Mmm. I cut again. My hand slipped. I steadied the knife, cut again.

I’d chewed half the bar before I realized that it tasted strange, that the feeling it left in my mouth was not right, that there was something about the swallowing part that was wrong. By then it was making me gag and I went to the bathroom where the mirror revealed lather gathered around lip corners in clusters. Sticking the remains of the bar in the shower, I gulped glass after glass of water, spitting up foam into the sink, and the rest of the day I thought very little of the boyfriend, and instead wandered the rooms, burping clean burps, evaluating how badly I felt: Should I just relax? Should I get my stomach pumped?

When I woke up the next morning, slightly dizzy but not dead, I stumbled into the shower and stood in the spray.. meek, naked, distant. I used the straight bitten end of the soap to clean myself, but before I put it back on its shelf, I took one mildly interested nibble. The smell slammed back through me. In an instant, my stomach heaved up and I crouched down, water sticking in my eyes, and threw up down the drain, all whiteness and foam, soap rushing in waves back through me.

Then I took that remaining bar, complete with the paneled markings of my teeth, and dumped it into the trash.

I couldn’t use soap for months after that-had to wash my hands with shampoo. A week or so later, when I next saw the boyfriend, he took his hand up my shirt and clicked my bra, releasing my breasts, but I stepped away and told him no. Peach fell off the tree, dead. He blinked; oh, he said, okay. If I had any doubts, if I felt the warmth rising when he touched the corner of my lips with the tip of his finger, when he kissed the nape of my neck, turning my entire back into perforation, I just excused myself, went into the bathroom and washed my hands. He used the same brand of soap I did, and the smell did the trick right away. I left his house before midnight, underpants wet, stomach roiling, knocking every sidewalk tree. We broke up about three weeks later. He kept saying he was sorry. I held my clean fingers to my nose, nodded.

After all that, the one thing I loved but never quit, could not seem to give up, was, of all things, math. I tried to stop thinking about numbers but found myself, against my will, adding my steps and multiplying the people in the park against one another, knocking on wood in a careful rhythm, counting endlessly: sheep, students, parents, age, heartbeats. Mix up some numbers and signs, and you get an equation for the way the wind shifts or an axiom for the movement of water, or the height of someone, or for how skin feels. You can account for softness. You can explain everything. Even air is just an arrangement of digits, and with just the right balance-poof! We breathe.

I’ve spent entire afternoons thinking about one number, flying down its long onyx tunnel, opening up the trapdoor that it is.

Take 5. Seems regular-five — dollar bill, five-minute break-but five is also the sum of two squares, and a prime, and penta grams and my sixth-grade math teacher told me that the Pythagoreans thought 5 was about marriage because it was 3 (their first odd) joined with 2 (their first even). For my parents’ anniversary that year, I made them five small cakes. They seemed puzzled (maybe because it was their twenty-first anniversary) but my mother praised the frosting, in chocolate peaks on her fingertips.

I noticed the 31 Rag they gave me at the sandwich shop, so then I knew how many sandwiches I had to wait for before I ate my own. I used the 60–90 dial on the heat thermometer to calm my goose bumps or cool my sweat. I poked the little squares 1–9 on the telephone keypad to dial up the world; I knocked 15 times on the potted tree before I fell asleep. 2-hour parking signs told me how to avoid tickets, and I memorized the capacity warning in the elevator: onlyzz allowed. Beautiful. Clear. To quit numbers would be to pack in a bustling group Of 25 people, eager to get where they’re going, let the metal doors shut, and plunge straight into the basement cement, swift and hard as a comet.

heard about a woman who got a job reordering an entire town. The numbers were off because the mayor had a counting problem, and she’d been hired to come in and reintroduce 8. It’d been missing in some clocks. She’d also needed to go over the books and see if the adding was correct (which of course it wasn’t, without 8) and to check all the signs. Drivers were apparently getting off the highway, following the sign that said GAS: 2 MILES, to find nothing but dusty roads. The sign was supposed to say 88. It was a whole industry, townsfolk dashing over to gas less cars with cans of portable petrol.

She was called a number doctor. That was my dream job.

But I was still intrigued and humbled when I got a call from the elementary school principal asking me if I wanted to be the new math teacher. At the last minute, the previous math teacher had flown off to Paraguay. No one knew where she was until her resignation arrived, four days before school began, in the form of a postcard with very green trees on the front. Sorry, she’d written, but I have decided to become a revolutionary. Please send my final paycheck to this address.

It’s dreadful, the principal said to me on the phone. You have no idea how hard it is to find a math teacher.

She said she was sleepless with worry until she remembered, in a dreamlike flash, a summer years and years before when she was in the park and happened upon me, curled up by the duck pond, sipping lemonade, doing long division.

You’re it, she said.

I’ve never taught math before, I said. I’m only nineteen. So, she said. Know how to add?

Ilaughed. Or an octagon, she said, how about octagons?

What about them?

What are they? she asked.

I leaned against the counter. I’m not an idiot, I said. I’m practically married to the stop sign, I said.

And can you start Monday? she asked. Because you’re hired, Mona Gray.