Long Division Read online

  Later, on my computer:

  November 1, 2003

  Dear President Bush,

  When I met David, I lied to him. I told him I was seventeen and visiting a sister at the university over my spring break. We were at a house party hosted by the soccer team, and he approached me with some lame comment about how the music totally sucked. I hadn’t even been paying attention to the music, but was instead counting girls with matching peasant-style tops and making fun of them in my head.

  I first noticed David’s clean haircut, and after he told me his name, I asked if he was in the military. He explained the whole ROTC scholarship thing to me briefly, and I nodded along the way. Maybe that’s why I felt okay lying. Why when he asked for my number, I denied him, subtracting years from my age and inventing some story. Maybe because at that first conversation he seemed to think that this whole free-school/ serve-the-country get-up was a good idea. At that point, maybe I thought he was easily deceived.

  It was early in our senior year of college, and soon after the encounter at the party when I ran into him at the library.

  “I thought you weren’t a student here.” That’s all he said. Not even “hi” first. I was squatting to a low shelf, reshelving nineteenth-century Russian literature, and I was suddenly aware that my pants were low and that maybe he could see my butt crack. That’s right, Mr. Bush, I said butt crack. I worked at the library to pay the bills. Lots of students do this sort of thing.

  “Err, um. I don’t. I work here.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Yes, I’m sure. Do you think I’d organize old Russian poems for fun?” I stood up and tugged the back of my pants, making sure all was decent.

  “No, are you sure you don’t go to school here?” All I could do was sigh. I put a crusty maroon volume back on the shelving cart and tried to formulate some socially normal response.

  “Yes. I mean, no, I’m not sure. I mean, yes I do go to school here.”

  “And you’re not seventeen?”

  “Yes. I’m not seventeen. You figured it out.”

  You see, George. That lying to David about my age thing was stupid and impulsive. It accomplished nothing. I could have easily used an honest form of phone number rejection. All it really did was make things more awkward in the future. And well, yeah, things did work out pretty well. I learned he was more than his haircut, and somehow, amazingly, he learned to trust me. We grew to love each other and have remarkably good premarital sex nearly every day. So what I’m getting at here is quite simple. We all do silly things at strange moments. We make fast decisions based on finding quick fi xes and on what we think will be most safe at the time.

  So.

  If you could please yank on your powerful strings and bring these soldiers back home in the next seven to ten business days, I’d be very much obliged.

  Best wishes,

  Annie T. Harper, PhD

  P.S. Please send my regards to your family. Please tell Jenna and Barb how lucky they are that they are not spending twenty hours a week in college shelving books. Though from what I understand, it was remarkably more difficult for them to obtain a decent fake ID.

  Gus called me in the fucking middle of the night. He said he needed my help with something. Gus has never called me in the middle of the night. Even when his dad told him more about his mom leaving and even when he lost his virginity and even when he got into Yale. He never rushed to tell me these things. He always waited until the next time we saw each other. He’s not really the sort of guy who is pestered by urgency.

  “Right now, Gus? You want me to get up right now and go to the Dairy DeLite?”24

  “Yes. I need help scratching off the pumpkins.”

  “What? I don’t get it.”

  “Just come, Annie. I’m turning the soft-serve machine on right now. It’ll be ready when you get here.”

  “I don’t eat ice cream.”

  And he hung up. And maybe because I wasn’t sleeping well anyway, and maybe because I just wanted to see what this pumpkin-scratching business was all about, and maybe because I still kind of owed Gus for picking me up after the eye-stabbing thing and for sacrificing his socks at the bowling alley, I went.

  Pulling into the empty parking lot of the drive-in, I noticed a few lights on and Gus’s slim figure shadowed against a half-painted window. Oh. Pumpkins. He was scratching off that dusty, flaky window paint with a tool, and as I walked through the door I noticed he was whistling “Jingle Bells.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Scratching off paint. Here.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an identical tool and tossed it to me. I stood there waiting for an explanation and knowing that he was waiting for me to start whining out questions before he revealed any speck of his absurdity. I just gave in.

  “Gus, why are you doing this in the middle of the night?”

  “When else would I do it, Annie? This place is open eleven to eleven. I’m busy in the morning. And plus, they don’t want me scraping flakes of paint into people’s onion rings and milk shakes and stuff. Could you please begin over there next to that confused-looking witch? I can’t believe I painted her with those dimples.” I wandered over to the far edge of the window. With neither of us speaking, the scrapers on the windows sounded like some odd mix between someone crying and someone smashing croutons. I asked Gus how long he’s been doing window art. “Well, this was my first mural here, and I’ve done the public library just once since I’ve been back in Tacoma. They’re giving me a hundred bucks each time I paint here, and I’ll be doing the library for free, but not really free because I’ve negotiated an understanding about them clearing any future fines I might incur. And those can get pretty bad.”

  “Well, it is pretty nice of you.” I squatted down to the lower vines of the pumpkin patch. I noticed his work was detailed enough to have included prickles along the twisting vines of the pumpkins. I cautiously lifted a finger to the glass and the fine black brushstroke of a prickle. I touched it tentatively like it was actually going to poke me. It reminded me of something I’d see one of my students do when he or she didn’t know I was watching.

  “Art is art is art, you know. I’ll do what I can,” Gus said, jumping down from a bar stool and grabbing a rag to wipe the glass. “Could you hand me that Windex behind you?” I grabbed the bottle and handed it to him with the handle first, like it was a pair of scissors. “Thank you, Miss Harper,” he said, “I really wish we didn’t have to do turkeys and pilgrims. You know how much I fucking hate that ridiculous pilgrim image? Those industrious hats and devious smiles. ‘Share your corn with us and we’ll exploit you forever!’ ”

  “I kind of agree. But did you say we? Because I’m not painting anything, Gus. As soon as these little goblins are gone, I’m off to bed. It’s a school night, you know.” I turned back to the glass and scraped ferociously, trying to pretend that the sound didn’t hurt my ears. Gus began to whistle the theme from Indiana Jones, and I did my best to ignore him while we both worked diligently at the scraping. It took maybe thirty minutes. The whole scenario reminded me of projects Gus and I would do together in high school. There was once this assignment for Advanced Geometry where we had to construct a polyhedron with more than twenty sides out of paper and glue. Then we were supposed to make a poster explaining how to find the volume and surface area of the polyhedron. Gus spoke to the teacher and cleared permission for us to make our sixty-four-side-agon not out of paper, but out of aluminum soda cans. It turned out to be an outrageous undertaking where we stayed up all night in Gus’s garage. Around three A.M., while attempting to score and fold a particularly rigid Mr. Pibb can, I sliced my thumb rather severely. Without waking our parents, Gus drove me to the ER, and by the time I had seven waxy-looking stiches sewn into my skin, he’d completed the entire poster in the waiting room and even had time to fetch me a slice of pie from the hospital cafeteria. He’d acquired several fans among the waiting and the a
iling, and they were gathered around to stare at the poster: math equations in perfect Gothic-style calligraphy. As he helped me put on my coat and we turned for the door, I noticed a small child with his chubby hand wrapped around one of Gus’s silver-tipped pens, drawing loops and circles across the cover of Time magazine. Even though we weren’t even halfway done with the construction of the polyhedron, Gus insisted that I go home to bed—the aluminum was his idea, after all—and when he picked me up just hours later for school, there was the sixty-four-side-agon, shiny and perfect and finished, buckled with obvious care into the back seat of his Volvo.

  I broke the screechy silence of our paint scratching to say “Hey, Gus. Remember the sixty-four-side-agon?”

  “Of course. That thing was awesome. My dad still has it in his study.”

  “And I still have the scar on my thumb.”

  Once all the paint was gone, I helped myself to some Diet Coke from the fountain while Gus squeegeed the whole thing. When he finished, he just stood there in front of the glass, the squeegee dripping a small puddle on the floor. I joined him with my soda, making slurping noises because I filled the cup nearly all the way with ice. The window was so clean and so clear; we just stood there staring through it at my car and his van and the dank ugliness of the parking lot.

  “That is some clean-ass glass,” Gus said.

  “Yep,” I said. “Doesn’t get much cleaner than that.” I slurped at my soda again.

  “You know, Annie, I don’t think I’ve done a better, more thorough job of anything in my entire life. This glass is perfect.” He said this with awe. Gus has always been prone to hyperbole.

  “You’re probably right. This glass is definitely your best work.” And I have always been prone to encouraging him.

  “Looks like you could just run right through it. Like it’s not even there.” We stood in silence for another minute or so. It wasn’t really one of those meaningful, contemplative moments for me. I was just looking at my car, thinking about how tired I was. Just bullshitting with Gus like I have for years. Then he turned and said to me, “So, Annie, how are you?” And I didn’t quite know how to take it. I didn’t know if he was asking me the same way that Hillary asked me and the women at my school ask me and my mom asks me and everyone fucking asks me. “Annie, how are you?” they say. And it’s usually at a moment where I’m not thinking about David at all. When I’m not thinking about all the chances my boyfriend is having to die. It’s usually a moment when I’m just being a normal, functioning human, talking about the weather or thinking about how many eggs are in the fridge or when I need to pay for cable. And when they say it, it’s usually accompanied by some degree of head tilting or eye narrowing, or if I’m really lucky, a tender hand to the shoulder.

  At this moment, when Gus put his squeegee down on the table and reached in his bag for jars of powdered paint, I couldn’t even tell if he meant it the same way. For years I’ve been shooting the shit with this kid, discussing everything from world peace to free-range beef to whether our alter-ego superheroes would prefer nylon or lycra. I can tell when his heart is mopey or when he’s recently gotten laid. I can tell when he’s been fighting with his father or drinking too much or watching lots of the History Channel because he’s been spitting out stupid facts. But after I sucked down the last drops of my Diet Coke, as I stood there biting and chewing my straw, I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t really tell what Gus meant. I walked over to the trash and tossed the paper cup inside, being careful not to get my hand whapped by the germy swinging door. Pulling it out, I stared at my fingernails and the chunks of paint beneath them. Remnants of a white ghost and a black cat. Orange from the pumpkins and a lot of green from those gnarly vines.

  “How am I?” I paused and switched to examining the fingers of my other hand. “Well, Gus, I’m fine. A little tired, but pretty good. And I need to trim my fingernails.” I kind of wanted to tell him about the knitters.

  “Well, if you’re not too tired, I was still going to let you paint.” I wondered if he even wanted to know my answer to the question. If he wanted to know about my fingernails or my sleep deprivation. My students or my addiction to CNN. Or if it was just Gus transitioning the awkward silence into the next act of his show.

  6

  Today I’m calling my book Nine Times Forever Equals Way Too Long, and I told my kids about David. I pretty much had to. Jessica Marquez brought in this whole gimongous photo album from her cousin’s wedding. Jessica, the proudest flower girl in America, wouldn’t shut up about the dresses and the veils and her slow dancing with the best man. Obviously, the boys didn’t give a rat’s ass, and when Jacob Ware pointed out that you could see one of the bridesmaids’ fat rolls under her turquoise satin dress and that it was “raunchy,” I wanted to kiss the top of his awful head.

  I am sitting at my desk in the front of the class, and Jessica is standing right in front of me pulling 4×6 prints from their plastic pouches and passing them around the aisles. I’m considering outlawing photographs (especially twenty-page albums of photographs) from show-and-tell. Where the fuck is the creativity?

  “Miss Harper?” Caitlin Robinson pipes up from the back row.

  “Yes, Caitlin?” I peek around Jessica to see the class.

  “When are you getting married?”

  “Um. Well, Caitlin. Probably not for a while. I’m still pretty young.” And then it’s one of those moments. Those explosions of twenty-eight eight-year-olds spouting and blabbing and word vomiting all over my tidy, orderly classroom. Each grabbing bits of each other’s speech and commenting with pure, unbridled reactions. No one phrase belongs to any one child. It’s just high-pitched verbs and pokey question marks bouncing off my forehead and back onto their grimy desks. How old are you? My cousin is twenty-two. My mom got married when she was thirty-three. I’m getting married when I’m. Your mom is a grandma. You’re a. Miss Harper. When can we. I have to. Miss Harper. Miss . . .

  And I guess I usually let it carry on for too long. It isn’t until I hear the loud kids (Katie Wells or Ben Morris) start to dominate the roar that I remember it’s my job to stop this sort of thing. I have this bell on my desk. One of those silver push-button domes you ring at the dry cleaner when the clerk is in the back watching TV or working. Yeah, it’s hokey—we call it the shush bell—but it works most of the time. Katie Wells is Miss Harpering me like it’s her sole purpose in life, and one of the boys is dangling a photo above his head while Jessica cries for some female comrade to Get it, get it back. Miss Harper?

  Okay. I bang it. Rap my hand on the bell one, two, three times. By the time the reverberation calms, one last hastily whispered No, you’re stupid settles amongst the squeaks of the desk chairs.

  “Alright. Thank you, Jessica for sharing your photos. They are very nice. Looks like you had a great time at the wedding. Now please take your seat.” Jessica carefully closes the pink volume, clutches it to her chest, and struts back toward her desk. Before she sits, she turns back to me.

  “Do you think your boyfriend will propose to you soon, Miss Harper?” I sigh, too tired to feel awkward or annoyed in front of the kids.

  “No, Jessica. My boyfriend is in the army. He lives in Iraq right now. And he’s not coming back for a while.” And the air in the class does not change. No one gasps and no one starts spitting off questions. They know already. And really, I knew that they know that I knew they know. I just hadn’t said it. I just hadn’t made it real. Max Schaffer raises his hand. Bless his heart; he always raises his hand.

  “Yes, Max?”

  “Perhaps, Miss Harper, he will propose to you by mail. Or by DVD.” I laugh out loud. It’s a comfortable laugh. It’s a laugh you would use drinking beers with close friends in a noisy bar.

  “Yeah, maybe, Max. That would be pretty funny.”

  The conversation is over. There are no pictures of me shoving cake in my lover’s mouth. No one is doing the macarena. There are no bubbles blowing. No limousines. No mustachioed caterers car
ving flanks of meat. What a relief. I am a third-grade teacher, and I am wearing a navy blue cardigan that perfectly matches the ugly shell beneath it that has a bleach stain on the back the shape of a lima bean. I’m not even wearing earrings. The realization is smooth and gentle, and I feel a comfort with my students that hasn’t happened yet this year. I am only an educator. I am not a show. I tell them to take out their math workbooks. That we are going to do some speed tests with our times tables. I can hear the whiners whine and the nerdy ones eagerly fumble in their desks for pencils. Someone asks if we can do the quiz without the nines.

  “Of course not,” I tell everyone. “What is the universe without nines?”

  A transcript of the letter I get when I get home:Hola babe,

  It feels weird writing you on paper. I’m the soldier and you’re the girl and I’m supposed to do this, right? I’m supposed to curl up on some cot or some corner of my tent and tell you (in cursive) how much I love you and how we’ll get such a nice house when I get back. I’ll take you to the soda shoppe and we’ll go to the movies. Just like old times, Annie! It will be swell. Ha! Not the case. Mostly because you fall asleep in movies and don’t eat ice cream. I don’t sleep in a cot either. My bed is actually better than the ones in the dorms back in college. And you know I can’t write in cursive. The thing about this paper, Annie, the thing is, that it’s waterproof, fireproof, vomitproof, bulletproof, deathproof, spaceproof, semenproof paper. I think the army pays something like $4.50 a sheet for the stuff. They issue us a bunch, but I’m not really sure what we’re supposed to use it for. So I’m writing you with it. Maybe you can use it for a science experiment with your kids or something? See if you can burn it in an airtight jar. I don’t really know what to write since I’ll probably talk to you and e-mail you six times before this actually reaches you, so what’s the point in giving you all the scoop? It will be old scoop in no time. So, SO ANNIE, what I’m going to do is imbed a secret code word. No, a secret code phrase. And when you get this and you read it, the next time we talk on the phone, you have to use the secret code phrase. But don’t just say it, you have to weave it into the conversation all smooth like. And that’s how I’ll know you got the letter. You ready? The secret code phrase is . . . “Below the Mason-Dixon line!” I don’t know where that came from. A bunch of the guys were fi ghting the other day about whether or not Maryland is considered The South. But that’s it. That’s the secret code phrase. Use it well, my pretty one.