The last thing Albert Rose said to Esker, nine years ago, when both were twenty-two, was, “I don’t know about this.” It was his afterthought, his loose thread, his pale, anxious face turning back once more after they’d said goodbye and not kissed, after he’d climbed back into his whitish van from which all of her belongings had just been cleared on that torpid August day down on Greenwich Street. She hadn’t even known if he was referring to everything they’d just done or everything he was setting off to do. He’d simply left her with that thought, that dangling addendum, that disastrous question mark to hover like a vacuum, expectant, enduring, over the entrance to her new apartment. Then he’d driven off to Baltimore to get married as planned.
In the second grade, Esker had grasped—intuited, more accurately—the arbitrariness of math. She and her teacher nearly drove each other wild that year, each with her positive insistence that the other was wrong. Here is Iphigenia, called Genie, kneesocked and pigtailed, holding a sweaty fistful of Cuisenaire rods, and here is Miss De Witt, cropped gray hair and Peter Pan collars and heavy breath that somehow makes Genie think of cooked carrots-and-peas, holding her pristine, corrective length of chalk like an extra digit.
“All right, Genie.” She sighs. “Can you count out a bundle of ten?”
And Genie, not an imbecile, after all, does it: ten white cubes, tinier than sugar cubes, tinier than dice, they are baby teeth to Genie. The one-units are baby teeth.
“Yes,” says Miss De Witt, holding out her hand for Genie to deposit the bits of wood. “And here is a ten for you,” handing over an orange rod, ten whites long. She writes it on the board as evidence: nothing in the ones column, a one in the tens column. “You see!” Triumphant and relieved.
Genie looks at the orange rod: a carrot stick, like Miss De Witt’s carrots-and-peas breath. “But why isn’t there just another number for it? Why does the ten stick have to have a different column?”
“Because there’s one ten.” Miss De Witt traces firmly over the number, then underlines it for further clarity.
Genie’s voice gets a little high-pitched now, in the way that grates so on her teacher. “But it doesn’t have to change at ten, does it? Really? Like it could have been at eleven or seventy or something? Someone just decided ten, right? It’s that way because someone said so.”
“It isn’t that way because someone said so. It’s that way because it is so!”
Miss De Witt stares. Genie stares back, unmoved. She bites the button on her collar.
“Get that out of your mouth,” says Miss De Witt. Obviously a behavior problem: after all, the child tests bright. “Oppositional,” she puts on the report home.
Later, in junior high, when they talked about base ten, Esker felt as much affirmation as vindication. It was ten because people had ten fingers; it was ten because it was convenient; it was ten because people agreed to go along with it. Esker found it reassuring to confirm that math was a human conceit, a humble and lofty approximation. That somewhere beyond the boundaries of mathematical rules lay a place where the rules held no sway. You see, Miss De Witt! What a comfort, queer comfort, but comforting nonetheless. Up in her slope-ceilinged room after school, the winter she turned twelve, Esker filled composition books with sequences of strange numbers, counting to a thousand over and over again in base one, base two, base three, base four. . . .
And then, in her eleventh-grade math teacher’s classroom, a poster of Einstein with his shrunken-apple countenance and leonine wisps bore this quote (she has searched for and been unable to find this poster ever since she became a math teacher herself): “The series of integers is obviously an invention of the human mind, a self-created tool.” You err, Miss De Witt! Miss De Witless. A great comfort, and Einstein’s background in the poster was black space and a bit of Milky Way, starry and shifting, finally out of everyone’s reach, even his. Finally unsusceptible.
And then, in college, in the library that day, the aggressively geometrical library with its oddly beguiling antisuicide tiles in the lobby, its peekaboo floor plan like a cross-section of some vast multileveled organism, she’d chanced upon a magazine and been thrown for a loop, thrown back into the world of Miss De Witt’s absolute, pre-existing hierarchy of numbers, orders, operations. If it was all an invention of man, how did man’s humble equations come to be echoed in the clouds, in ridged sand dunes, in whorls of cream dispersing in coffee? Oh, Miss De Witt, in your dumb certainty were you more right than you knew? Is it that way because it is so?
She was all at once Genie in kneesocks again, thrust-jawed, resisting what seemed like a lid. Only she wasn’t, she was eighteen and Esker by now, adrift from her parents and the old stately anchor of her Adirondack town. For years she had been the strongest force she knew, and she was tired of it, sick from it, sick with an unnamed longing for something larger, something huge and inevitable, whose long arms might cover and hold her completely, as intractable as gravity but more subtle and various, something which would neither shatter nor disintegrate when tested by the full strength of her thrashing skepticism, her railing queries, her exacting probes. She had never fallen in love before. Smitten, she switched majors.
That she met Albert Rose over a photocopy machine was just the sort of ridiculous coincidence she was increasingly willing to notice. A sort of poetry of the invisible. A poetry of repetition, in which nothing is ever new, in which nothing has not been said before, done before, in which every divergence is down a path already paved and mapped. And on some level there was always that feeling with Albert and Esker, from their first prickly encounter.
In college Esker worked part-time as a receptionist in the Office of Student Affairs. Albert had found a position serving as personal lackey to a professor of modern European history, and in this capacity presented himself in front of Esker’s desk one day with a stack of articles he’d been sent to duplicate. Esker held the key to the photocopy machine and the log book. Albert gave her a winsomely hangdog look.
“You think that gets you in?”
His pupils shrank to points. “For Chrissakes, what’s your problem?”
“This machine is for Office of Student Affairs use only.”
He sighed gutturally. “I think you might be a little overzealous about your mission here.”
“The log gets checked. I’m the one they’re going to ask to account for this. Why don’t you copy them over at the history department?”
“I already got booted by the sentinel over there. Copyright violations.”
“Oh, good. I want that on my head.”
He assessed her impassively. “At least the other one acted sorry about it.”
“I’m sorry.” What could she say?
He continued there, long arms weighted down by the stack of papers so that his wrists leaked beyond the cuffs of his blue oxford, and they were wide and flat. The tendons showed fiercely. He appeared to do minor calculations behind his eyes, which were gray and reckoning. His mouth was just a line. Then he returned to the elevator. He waited quite a while for it to come, and held his long blue back straight for the duration.
The next day, when the phone on her desk rang, she prattled by rote, “Good morning, Office of Student Affairs, how may I help you?” and he said, “Hello. I’d like a student affair.” In the interim, while she was regrouping, waiting for her brain to fire an appropriate response through, he said, “Oh, lighten up,” and hung up the phone. She knew it was him even though his voice wasn’t that distinctive.
A week later, they saw each other in the cafeteria and said hi, uncertainly, as if they recalled perhaps once sharing a joke.
Two weeks after that, they ran into each other again, over a keg in a shower stall in some dorm at 1:00 A.M. She was in the stall herself, pumping beer all over her sneakers, filling the plastic cups people shoved forward, and looked up to catch him watching puzzledly, as though struck by the incongruity of her, here.
“Oh, you,” she said as wryly as possible.
“No, you,” he countered.
And she smiled.
“You can do that with your mouth? Smile?”
“Shut up,” she said. It got her to laugh. And then they shook beery hands and exchanged names. He was a foot taller, and wearing an awful powder-blue cardigan. They were freshmen.
The thing that made her fall for higher math, more than the oil-slick beauty of the Julia set, more than the rainbow-doily allure of the Mandelbrot set, or the exquisite simplicity of her iterated snowflake, or the levelheaded mysteries of wind-blown wheat, or population growth, or fibrillating hearts—the thing that made her fall so hard was that she’d been wrong. It was the toppling of her certainties that won her, the way, in one fell stroke, ingesting that article in the Escher-like library one day, she’d been diminished, beautifully reduced, relieved, before the promise of something so much greater—not stiflingly greater, like Miss De Witt’s tidy set of rules—but something unmastered, uncomprehended, in whose presence she might be controvertible, yielding.
No wonder she had never fallen in love, not once, growing up—never fallen, period, for fear of smashing past the neat, fragile borders of the world that kept her and her family. Esker’d gauged its fragility by the time she was two. What made her parents fearful? She didn’t know, only that they assuaged unarticulated fears with dutiful cheer and routine: an ever-constant rotation of meals corresponding to specific days of the week, an ever-constant conversation repeated over orange juice and vitamins each morning, an ever-constant wardrobe so prudently laundered and mended she swore the contents of their closets never altered in all her eighteen years of living at home.
Genie was an only child. Her mother, whom Genie grew up hearing people refer to as delicate, had had a difficult time conceiving; she’d given birth finally at age thirty-nine, named her daughter in an uncharacteristic and unrepeated burst of romantic frivolity, and died of renal failure twenty years later. Her father, whom she never heard referred to as delicate, and who died nevertheless of a heart attack in his early sixties, had held a white-collar job at Boltman Paper Co., and came home most Fridays during Genie’s childhood with a pack of samples for her collages: kraft and newsprint, bond and colored construction paper. Sometimes now when she pictures her childhood it’s as if their very house had been made of construction paper, with construction-paper tulips lined up in construction-paper flower beds, construction-paper pies her mother pulled from a construction-paper oven, tiny construction-paper smoke curling from her father’s construction-paper pipe. Even her parents appear as paper dolls sometimes in her imagination, with Genie the only real, fleshly being on the premises: an alarmingly robust three-dimensional figure giving off body heat and sound, forever in danger of tearing through the façade.
Genie the Giant, her father used to call her, a reference to her supposedly heavy step as she tore through the house. “Slow down, now, easy,” his admonition forever followed her, or he would cringe involuntarily as she took the last three steps into the hall in a single bound: “You’ll crack the plaster.” Her mother forever seated in some dim adjacent room, doing handwork, always ready with a vague smile. They were unfailingly gentle with each other, her parents, softspoken, thoughtful of each other’s needs to the point of condescension. As though there were an understanding that no one ought ever to have to bear hurt.
The older Genie became, the more hopelessly, corporeally giant she grew, although by then she’d learned how to mask it, or to compensate, and she tiptoed around the paper boxes of her house and school and all the buildings in town with a mixture of pity and loathing. In reality, she did not cut a particularly imposing figure; she was actually on the small side, and the concoction of genes bequeathed her by an ancestry that included a mixture of Eastern European and Mediterranean ethnicities declared itself in rather muddy fashion: her complexion, her eyes, her hair, her bone structure all sort of a neutral blur. Her conduct, too, was unremarkable; she was reasonably obedient, performed well in school, was respectful toward the institutions of her community.
She sometimes pretended she was a nurse, or anyway that she was disguised as a nurse, someone tidy and soothing, someone trained in the art of smoothing the bedclothes without jarring the body beneath them. It was easy enough and rewarding, in a limited way, to tend to people, to minister to their needs: she made soup and meatloaf and set the table; she gently drew the shades when her mother needed rest; she asked her father about his day; cut elaborate snowflakes from the papers he brought her, and taped these in the windows at Christmastime. Straight through high school, she gave her parents reason to praise her and rely upon her, and she took her satisfaction in never causing any harm.
She didn’t learn the story of her namesake until tenth grade, in world lit., and arrived home that afternoon ready to demand an explanation, but her mother, propped at one end of the couch, crocheting more of her endless squares, pleaded ignorance—“I just thought it was beautiful. I thought she was one of the Muses, or something”—then betrayed herself in the next sentence: “Anyway, they all had terrible fates: Clytemnestra, Persephone, Antigone, Io. That doesn’t make their names any less beautiful.” A sacrificial virgin, sacrificed by her father, for the sake of getting on with war! Yuck, but by far the worst part of the story was Iphigenia’s grotesque nobility, her complicity, her self-effacement in deciding not to save herself or let Achilles save her. That spring, playing JV softball, all the girls on the team took to calling each other by their surnames, and Esker dropped her first name altogether after that. Outwardly she still appeared to be the same compliant, beige, thin-voiced girl; inwardly, she promised herself, she was simply biding her time.
The trouble was, having shed Genie, she had no sense of what she might actually become. How could she know without a test, a trial, but how would she ever encounter a fitting test in this construction-paper town? She began to long, like a lovesick creature in a fairy tale, for some force greater than herself, something as vast and patient as the great pine forests all around, but less dispassionate. She wished at once for some great palm she could lean her forehead full upon, and some strong muscle she could wrestle fully against with no fear of hurting. She ached for the relief of a worthy adversary.
Much later, as a high-school teacher, she would catch glimpses of similarly restive students, young women and men who would strike her as familiarly, dangerously unbound, like knightless squires seeking to pit themselves, solo and clueless, against what dragons they could find. Some of these she would see fling themselves into the gaping rapids of drugs and alcohol, and others drift toward the large, vaporous promises of love and sex, and a rare few disappear like shadows into the stern black caves of extreme religious practice. One, attempting a different tack, would try to fly from the Big Room bleachers.