Addition (2 page)
At school everything was normal. Better than normal. A plus, A plus, A plus.
And top of the class, again, is Grace Vandenburg
. The secret of my success was numbers: each week I did 100 minutes of homework for each subject, and when the work was done I memorised 10 words from the beginning of the dictionary. Aardvark, aback, abacus, abalone, abandon, abase, abashed, abate, abattoirs, abbess, accident. My memory sharpened and primed on words and numbers—facts and figures, dates and words still stick today, even when I don’t intend it.
When I fell in love with numbers, no one noticed. No one would have noticed if I’d been set on fire. That was a bad year for my parents. My mother would spend hours in the garden cradling every seedling as if the death of even one would diminish her. By then, my father had already begun to fade. Jill and I fended for ourselves. Counting became, and remained, my secret.
I live here in Glen Iris, two blocks from where I grew up. I live alone, except for Nikola. (Nikola Tesla: 11.) His photo is in a polished silver frame on my bedside table, right next to my Cuisenaire rods. The picture was taken in 1885 when he was 29 by Napoleon Sarony, the famous photographer—the original hangs in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC next to an induction motor Nikola invented in 1888. His hair is neatly parted and slicked down, although the right side refuses to lie flat. It’s cut short above his ears, which are too large for his delicate head and which lie backwards on an angle: a greyhound sensing prey. His moustache is also asymmetrical, certainly presentable enough, not scruffy by any means but not preened either. He is wearing a white shirt with the collar pinned down inside his suit coat, which is darker and striped, with narrow lapels that I assume were usual at the time. But it’s his eyes that show the world who he is. Deep set, dark—staring straight ahead. To the future.
I’ve stared at that photo for twenty years now. I wouldn’t be surprised if he spoke one day. If the greyscale melted into warm flesh and his lips started moving. ‘My name is Nikola Tesla,’ he’d say. ‘I was born at midnight between the ninth and tenth of July, 1856 in Croatia. My mother was Djuka Mandic and my father was Milutin Tesla. My brother was Dane and my sisters were Milka, Angelina and Marica. I studied engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic School in Graz. I emigrated to the United States in 1884 where I discovered electricity, magnetism, the AC motor, robotics, radar and wireless communication. I never married, nor had a girlfriend. My friends included Mark Twain, William K. Vanderbilt and Robert Underwood Johnson. I hate jewellery on women. I love pigeons.’
I’ll be lying on the bed when I hear this, and I’ll roll over to face him. ‘My name is Grace Lisa Vandenburg,’ I’ll say. ‘I am 35 years old. My mother, Marjorie Anne, is 70 and my sister Jill Stella is 33. Jill is married to Harry Venables; he’s 40 on the second of May. They have three children: Harry junior is 11, Hilary is 10 and Bethany is 6. My father’s name was James Clay Vandenburg and he died. I am a teacher, although I’m not working now. I was in love when I was 21. He was funny and clever and wanted to be a filmmaker. His name was Chris and he looked a bit like Nick Cave. I lost my virginity in his car outside my mother’s house. It took four months before I realised he was also sleeping with his flatmate. I don’t like coriander. I don’t understand interpretive dance. I don’t like realist paintings. Lycra makes me look fat.’
Scratch that bit. Possibly I wouldn’t fill up the head space of the greatest genius the world has ever known with this riveting detail. He would understand, though. He’d understand me. He was also in love with numbers, but he didn’t care much for 10s.
The love of numbers takes many forms, although 10s are obviously and anatomically superior. In one famous case, an 18-year-old boy was obsessed with 22. Imagine walking through doorways 22 times. Sitting in a chair, then immediately standing again, 22 times before you could finally rest. It highlights the inherent logic of 10s. There was a 13-year-old girl who had 9s—tapping her feet on the side of her bed 9 times before she could sleep or rise. There are a number of reports of 8s including a boy who had to spin around 8 times whenever he entered a room. The 6 story is probably the saddest. This teenager loathed the number so much he couldn’t repeat anything 6 times. Or 60. Or 66. He even detested numbers that added up to 6. No 42s. No 33s.
Nikola loved 3s. He counted his steps like me, but it was 3s that captured his heart. He would only stay in a hotel room if the number was divisible by 3. Each night when he ate his dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, at precisely 8.00 p.m. at his usual table, he had 18 napkins folded beside him. Why 18? Why not 6 or 9 or 72? I’d love to roll over in bed one morning, see him next to my pillow and ask him. This year on 27 August I turn 36. He’d love that.
Walking the streets of New York was difficult for him because if he went more than halfway around a city block he needed to keep going until he had walked around it 3 times. Instead of counting food the way I do, he calculated the cubic volume of each forkful or plateful or glass; he didn’t care if he ate two beans or twenty. This kind of mental gymnastics takes some concentration even for the world’s greatest genius, so he always ate alone. He loved playing cards, which I’ve long suspected is a way of channelling a love of counting. Gambling is one of the few things Nikola and I disagree on. Cards and wheels don’t behave in any kind of pattern despite the desperate hopes of those sad casino addicts. Back in 1876 Nikola had become a gambler, which worried his father, a minister of religion. But he conquered this vice, like he conquered smoking and drinking coffee, because he could conquer anything.
The front stairs at our house started me counting, but I sometimes imagine how it all began. There are so many possibilities, but it had to start somewhere. With someone. One person.
In my most usual imaginings it’s a Cro-Magnon woman. It’s not that men weren’t capable, but men protected the tribe and hunted— numbers were less important to them. It’s the women who needed them more.
A group of women collecting wild grains or fruit or caring for children. They would need to measure things like when a baby was due or how many days of food were left. More than 10,000 years ago, she would have been on a trip, maybe to visit another tribe and perhaps she wanted to know when her period would come. The tribe had some rules, say: a menstruating woman couldn’t handle food, or mix with men or skin game. She may have needed animal skin torn into strips. She didn’t want to be unprepared. It was late winter and the sky was overcast. She couldn’t see the moon. She took something extra with her on that journey. She took the radius bone of a wolf that she had found one day while looking for ptarmigan eggs. She picked up that bone without really knowing why but, on the day before her journey and the first day of her period, she marked it with a piece of flint that had broken off a spear-head. She drew a line:
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Would she have been heralded as a great benefactor, the giver of a way to know how many bison were in a herd or how many days’ walk to the ocean? Prized as a mate, a mother, a senior member of the tribe? Perhaps it would have been too different, this way of seeing. Was she ostracised or punished or bullied because her insight was greater? Was she alone, sent away because she defied the moon and the seasons and the knowledge that they bring?
It started as a row of notches; but it didn’t take long for the notches to be grouped in finger-lots of 5. Then the groups of 5s became 4 downward strokes with 1 cross stroke through them. In fact the Arabic numerals 2 and 3 come from those strokes. A 2 is just two horizontal strokes joined together; a 3 is three joined strokes. Eventually special symbols would evolve for 5 and 10, to end the repetition of all those strokes. Yet there’s purity in those simple marks, the kind you still see on children’s blackboards. We all count with our hearts when we are young. At teachers’ college most of my classmates aspired to teach upper secondary, but primary school was all I ever wanted. Seeing small children learn to count thrilled me year after year, as if it were me drawing those marks for the very first time. I remember everything about being a teacher. The feeling of chalk dust, silky against my palms. The wonder and mischief on those little faces.
Sometimes at night, after all the day’s counting is done, I imagine I am the woman who finds the numbers first. The woman who cut the marks into the wolf ’s bone. I am to be sacrificed for my heresy. It is always Nikola who saves me.
Sometimes I’m in Salem, Massachusetts. My puritan-black smock is laced tight over my breasts. My wrists are bound behind my back, around a stake piled with branches for burning. From waist to ankles my legs have been pressed together and tied by my church-going neighbours who take the chance to force roughened hands under my skirts, lingering over my calves, my thighs. The crowd jeers. The fire is lit. There is no hope for me. I am to be devoured by the flames. Suddenly, the crowd falls silent. A black horse thunders through the night. It is Nikola. He walks towards me, the flames curling around his knee-length black boots. He is unburned. Unharmed. He snaps my ties and cradles me against his chest.
Other times my wrists are bound in front of me and I am kneeling before the Aztec high priest. My eyes and mouth are open wide. My clothing, elaborate gilded and jewelled cloth wound around my body, is removed by two guards who stand on either side, hands on my shoulders. They tie a silken blindfold over my eyes. One guard cups my naked breast insolently. I am helpless. They haul me to my feet by a chain around my throat and bend me over an altar. A cold hand presses against the nape of my neck. Abruptly I sense a change in the crowd—murmurs, scuffling. I am hauled from the altar, lifted over Nikola’s shoulder. My blindfold falls to the ground. The guards lie dead, the high priest grovelling.
It’s a teenage fairytale fantasy I know, but so vivid sometimes that real life seems pale. At least it’s not like the typical middle-class fantasies of a middle-class woman from a middle-class suburb. I can imagine how they go: ‘Take me on the granite benchtop, Julio! Let me see your pumping arse reflected in the European double-door stainless steel fridge with ice-maker!’
In my fantasies, I am always about to die and Nikola always saves me. I have never been to Europe or America or Asia, but my fantasies show me exotic places I can smell and touch and feel. My dreams have no numbers in them, none at all; no counting, no signage, no paces. I wake, and count again.
It’s Saturday. It is 24 degrees, an annoying number because technically ‘room temperature’ is between 20 and 23 degrees. I wake at 5.55 a.m. I have 5 minutes to gather myself then my feet hit the floor the second the numbers roll around to 6.00. (I check the time on the internet at 6.00 p.m. every night and readjust all my clocks and my watch if necessary. It is rarely necessary.) The rest of Glen Iris might have morphed overnight from leafy streetscape to alien-inhabited moonscape. I never open the blinds.
I stand. 25 paces to the bathroom. Luckily my legs are long for my height. If I had to face a 27 or a 28 so early in the morning it would throw out my day. Brush my teeth—this is tricky. Each tooth has 3 surfaces—inner, top and outer, except for the front row which has only 2 surfaces because the tops are sharpened like a razor blade. There are 6 rows—top left, centre, top right, bottom left, centre, bottom right. Each surface needs 10 full strokes of the brush, back and forth. This means 16 by 10 strokes. 160. It takes a little while. Then floss up and down between each tooth 10 times.
Shower. When scrubbing each limb 10 times with soap it’s important not to be heavy-handed. Hair: washed every second day and counted out in the circles formed by each finger pressing against my scalp. 10 circles for each finger, and move to another place on my head. Repeat 10 times. The conditioner needs less—only 10 by 5. Out of the shower, dry myself with a towel from the top of the pile. Again, 10 wipes on each limb, 10 for the chest and 10 for the back. Wash my face. My face is divided into 5 zones: forehead— pale, wide, smooth. Each cheek, defined by sharp cheekbones. One nose, a little too pointy. And one chin, prominent. The overall effect is attractive but sharp, like a Scandinavian maitre d’ wearing underpants a size too small. Each zone needs 5 wipes with a cotton pad to remove the cleanser. Repeat with toner. Use the same action to apply moisturiser. Repeat with sunscreen. Dry hair, 100 slow strokes with the big brush under the dryer. This is the most difficult part because each stroke must be full and complete right to the tips down the small of my back, yet gentle so I don’t end up with a halo of blonde frizz. The only variation to this is Sunday morning, when I also trim my nails and push back the cuticles and cut them, and buff the nails 10 times each with each side of my buffer. There are 4 sides to my buffer: a file, a ridge-remover, a smoother and a polisher. This, too, takes a while.
But it isn’t Sunday. Back to the bedroom, another 25 steps. I have 10 pairs of knickers and 5 bras. These are folded in the appropriate drawers and I select from the top. Each bra I wear 5 times and each pair of knickers once. I have 10 pairs of trousers and 10 skirts. I have 10 short-sleeved tops and 10 long-sleeved tops. The trousers and long-sleeved tops are, of course, for the cold months and I wear them alternating on a daily basis from April 15, which is halfway through autumn, until October 15, halfway through spring. For the actual winter months of June, July and August I add a jacket regardless of the temperature. The skirts and short-sleeved shirts are for the other half of the year. Each top is worn once and each pair of trousers or skirt 5 times if its first day is a Monday but only twice if its first day is a Saturday.
I start at the left of my wardrobe and work towards the right, because after I have washed and ironed my clothes I hang them back at the right side. The order is random, determined by how I hang them on the line which is determined by the order in which I remove them from the washing machine; I put my hand in and pull out the first piece of cloth I touch. I don’t worry about co-ordination but there is a disproportionate amount of solid, dark colour in my wardrobe. Patterns and prints are asking for trouble. I have 10 pairs of shoes: day and evening shoes for each half of the year, plus boots, sneakers, ugg boots, slippers, old sneakers and a pair of sandals that don’t fit but make up the 10. The evening shoes don’t get much wear because I haven’t been out in the evening for a while.