Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I was insane with hunger, and I ate it sitting at her desk, devouring with indelible gusto every edible atom of what was on the plate, and thanked her with an energy bordering on groveling.

“You must have been hungry,” she said.

“Starving!”

“I have to do my homework now.” She dumped out the contents of her backpack and flopped a heavy textbook open flat on her desk, switched on the desk lamp, and got to work on a series of mathematical equations.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“My algebra homework, dipshit. What, they don’t teach algebra to circus midgets?”

“No!”

“I know . That was sar casm. We’re doing rational inequalities. I hate this stupid bullshit.”

I looked over her shoulder at the big glossy textbook pages from which she was copying “problems,” as she called them. I watched her work, and comprehended nothing. It was all a bunch of chaotic and elusive symbols to me, numbers mixed up with letters, lines, shapes, dots, punctuation marks, alien markings as enigmatic and indecipherable to my eyes as hieroglyphics carven on the walls of an Egyptian tomb. Little Emily, though, was apparently so accustomed to the business of unlocking these symbols’ mysteries that she was actually bored with it. She raced, flew right through the “problems,” mashing buttons on her calculator and using her pencil to scribble out more and more of these symbols, new symbols which the arrangements of the symbols in her book somehow unleashed into possibility — all while grumbling and sighing in irritation. I was fascinated by the process, watching her glance at the symbols and then send the tip of her pencil into a flurry of scratchings, scribblings, and crossings-out, until it arrived at some final number — the mysteriously-arrived-at “answer”—as seemingly arbitrary as the rest of the process — which she then lassoed in a circle of graphite before moving on to the next “problem.” I was not only enchanted by the sorcery of this, but I began to grow sick with envy in my heart at little Emily’s privilege of education. I was envious that she was so comfortable with this privilege that she had grown resentful of it. What I would have given for a formal education like hers! To learn algebra, geometry, calculus, and trigonometry and all the rest of it! All the education I had ever received — outside of my experimental instruction in spoken and written language and my lessons in philosophy and logic with Mr. Lawrence — I had given myself, with little outside guidance. I had given it to myself not out of a desire to better my mind, but simply out of curiosity, nothing but curiosity, as I sat in the reading room of the University of Chicago library, where I read many books more or less at random. I would read Thucydides followed by Freud followed by Dickens followed by Austen followed by Machiavelli followed by Blake followed by Montaigne followed by Wittgenstein followed by Cervantes, returning often to Milton, and most often, I think, to Shakespeare. I read these books merely because they were the books that happened to be in that room. I also read legal disquisitions, encyclopedias, medical school primers, travelogues, books on astronomy, botany — it didn’t matter, I was utterly indiscriminate in my reading; all of it fascinated me. The problem was (and this is the curse of the autodidact) my studies had no guiding direction, and so my education lacked any sort of coherent plan, path, or structure — and so there were (there have always been) gaping holes in my learning, and one of these holes was mathematics. Thus I stood gape-jawed and wide-eyed in rapture before little Emily’s arithmetical aptitude, while simultaneously eaten up inside with jealousy at her fortunate birth, a jealousy that darkened even into a shade of anger because she took her fortune for granted so. But my anger went away. “I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end.” (Blake.) Only I didn’t tell it, actually. I swallowed it, and like a bit of unwholesome food it pained my belly awhile, and then the pain subsided as my system digested it. Silly monkey — educations are for kids.

So I had to sate myself with watching in glazy-eyed awe as the tempests of numbers and other symbols shot from the tip of her pencil as if from the end of a wizard’s wand.

“Fuck off,” she said, in a voice unheated with any real anger. “I can’t concentrate with you standing there, like, breathing on me. Go away.” I retreated from looking over her shoulder in remorse, and instead occupied myself with her books, or in inspecting all the artifacts contained in the room. Dejectedly, I sat down and played with the sexless woman-dolls in their dollhouse. So we passed the remaining hours of the waking night, she bent monastically over her studies with pencil, calculator, and book, and I sitting on her floor playing with dolls. It is a woeful thing to be a striver like me.

The hours ticked away like this until the house gradually grew silent and dark. Other noises had helped to animate this house — footsteps and so on from downstairs, and the murmur of a TV — but these noises died away as the evening wore on, and soon in little Emily’s bedroom we could tell by the silence and the absence of vibration in the rest of the house that everyone else in it had gone to bed. There was a soft knock on the door. I abandoned the dolls and swiftly hid myself amid the lint and dust under the bed.

“Come in,” sang little Emily. In the sliver of visibility beneath the scrim of her bed, I saw a pair of slippered feet quietly enter the room. The slippers crossed the carpet to where little Emily sat at her desk, the desk lamp burning her shadow long across the room. The slippers walked up behind her chair, and a female voice said: “Good night, sweetie.”

“Good night, Mom,” said little Emily, with a note of annoyance.

“I love you.”

“Love you too.” Little Emily’s voice was quick and flat. The slippers left the room, the door shut. I dared not emerge yet from beneath the bed. I saw the crack of light under the door go dark. Little Emily did not tell me to come out from under the bed, so there I remained. I heard the thump of her shutting her mathematical textbook, and the click of her pencil lain to rest on the desk. I saw her small bare feet step swiftly out of the room. Her bare feet came back a few minutes later.

“You can come out now. My mom and dad went to bed.” I slithered out from beneath the bed. Little Emily was pouring red wine into two wineglasses on the desk.

“They have so much wine they never notice when I steal a bottle,” she said. We drank the wine in the bathroom, where little Emily stood on the lid of the toilet seat and smoked another cigarette, surreptitiously blowing the smoke through the window, which she’d propped open to the cold March night. We talked for a long time after that. Little Emily told me all about her complex family and social lives. She told me that she was a four-time child beauty pageant winner. She told me that as far back as she could remember her life had been a harried circus of traveling, preening, and display. She also told me that her mother wanted for her a life of celebrity. She told me about being dragged to auditions in the city, about endless hours of acting lessons, singing lessons, lessons in any discipline that might increase her value in the entertainment industry, about her mother taking her to be consulted by certain professionals on matters like what clothing would most flatter her unripe physique, what hair and what makeup. She said her summers were always eaten up by all these lessons and auditions, and by rehearsals for the plays and TV commercials she had successfully auditioned for, and in flying back and forth to Hollywood to film these commercials when they couldn’t be filmed in New York. She said she had been in TV commercials for all sorts of various products: for fast food restaurant chains, for toothpaste, for waffles, for breakfast cereals — any sort of product that a smiling, adorable young girl might help to sell. She told me that she was currently slated to star in a production of Little Orphan Annie . All this she told me, and more. In a way I sympathized with her, even identified with her life. Both of us had been selected by forces greater than ourselves for lives of careful study and display. Little Emily had been sold into entertainment, just as I had been sold into science.