Casebook (11 page)

We ate at a Mexican restaurant where they served Mexican Coke in bottles. After, Eli said we could drive to the city to shop.

“What city?”

“Pasadena.”

“We’re near Pasa
dena
?” I’d thought we were someplace remote. And Hector was supposed to be in Pasadena! His mom had a job planning a party there. I tried to call them, but the Mims’s cell phone had no reception. Eli drove us to a district called Old Town, and we walked on cobblestone streets, he and my mom bumping into each other on purpose. They veered us into a tiny bookstore, where we scattered in the aisles. Boop One found a collection of old Nancy Drew mysteries. Boop Two sat cross-legged on the dusty floor in an aisle of sheet music.

Eli seemed to be compiling a small stack of books.

“Do you have this?” he asked my mom, holding out an old hardback called
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
.

“No,” the Mims said, “but you met him, right?”

Eli opened the book to show me a picture of an old man. “I knew him a little when he lived with Ron Graham.” They told me about the guy. He was the most published mathematician who’d ever lived. After his mother died, he was homeless. He traveled from one mathematician’s house to the next, carrying his belongings in a plastic garbage bag. He won prizes, and he gave away all the money. He put out contracts for whoever could solve certain problems. It turned out that both the Mims and Eli had sent money so that those contracts could still stay open after he died. He called God the Supreme Fascist and referred to children as “epsilons.” He was a drug addict—amphetamines (the Mims shot Eli a look when he said that). He collaborated with so many people that mathematicians assigned themselves an Erdos number according
to whether they’d ever collaborated with him, or collaborated with anyone who’d collaborated with him. The Mims had an Erdos number of 3, because she knew Marge, who’d written a paper with someone who’d coauthored with Erdos. He had no interest in food, sex, or art. He didn’t bother with anything but math. He left ten notebooks when he died. He used to say that God kept a book of all the best proofs. “God’s proofs,” Eli said. “He’d arrive at Graham’s place with his pillowcase of clothes and say, ‘Is your brain open?’ ” Eli asked the Mims, “You know Graham, don’t you? They’re in San Diego now.”

A little bit later, at the counter, Eli showed me another book, called
The Man Who Knew Infinity
. This was about a guy who’d been a twenty-five-year-old uneducated clerk in India who wrote to the best living mathematician in the world in 1913. That guy was named Hardy, and he was at Cambridge. Hardy and one of his pals went out to lunch to study the Indian clerk’s letter; they thought he was either crazy or brilliant. They decided he was a genius and brought him to England. But the isolation from his family plus the work killed him within seven years. He was dead in his thirties. But for Hardy, the collaboration was the one truly romantic incident in his life.

Eli offered to buy it for me. I shrugged. I didn’t want a book.

Eli debated between the two hardbacks for Boop Two, but in the end settled on a used paperback called
Letters to a Young Mathematician
. I was surprised he didn’t buy her all three. In our family, neither parent stinted on books or music. Eli found a green hardback for the Mims called
A House for Mr. Biswas
.

He paid for it all, packing the twenty-six Nancy Drews in a box. After a trip to the car to put the books in the trunk, they found another store of old things. There, Eli plucked a set of German binoculars in a leather case from a jumbled shelf, and as I was wishing I’d spotted them first, he looped them over my head, saying, “You need a pair.” Later, I wondered about the fact that Eli had sent me Sherlock Holmes and bought me binoculars. Does everyone
finally want to be caught? The Boops hated the smell of this store; they asked if they could go across the street to Patagonia. The Mims sent me along, and in a good mood from the binoculars, I said they could each pick out something from me. Boop One found a black fleece hoodie. Boop Two chose a birdcall. In line for the cash register, we started petting the fleece. I told Boop One to go get another for her sister. But the Santa Claus feeling froze when I saw the total. How much would you think two miniature sweatshirts plus a birdcall could cost? A fucking fortune was what. But, with my sisters watching, I handed over the last of my money.

Boop One skipped outside the thrift store. I didn’t see the Mims at first, and then I heard something near the back. “Are you the personal shopper?” someone asked. The Mims stood in front of a mirror in a dress like a dress in the old movie we’d seen. The store lady was kneeling on the linoleum with pins in her mouth. I lingered behind a rack of musty clothes. Eli draped his arms around our mom from the back. They looked at themselves in the mirror. I wasn’t used to seeing my mom look at herself.

She had never been beautiful before. But she was—there, then, in that mirror. And what my father had once called Eli—a less-good-looking version of himself—that seemed a little off now, too. My dad was best in profile, still. He was a great-looking man. You saw Eli’s handsomeness only in movement. “Wow,” he whispered, eyes stretching, looking at her in the mirror. “We’ll take it,” he said to the woman with pins in her mouth. “Merry Christmas.”

At the counter, the woman showed us a label in the dress’s collar.
HATTIE CARNEGIE
. “This was a thousand-dollar dress, once,” she said. Our great-grandmother Hart had worn thousand-dollar dresses during the Depression, we’d been told. The woman wrapped the dress in a long plastic bag, tying the end in a knot.

My mom’s phone finally worked, and I called my dad. My sisters huddled together, ready to leave, while I paced the brick street, gossiping about the weekend’s releases and how they’d opened. Some
things I said made my dad speed up. Questions about his work, about the studio executives who drove him crazy, unrumpled his voice and slowed him. I had him pausing now, for emphasis. My sisters kept staring at me. But this was a good talk, the first time I’d really figured out how to be with him on the phone. It was okay to make them wait. Then, as an afterthought, I called Hector. He turned out to be a mile away, where his mom was supervising the cleanup after a party for the Southern California Realtors Association. They invited us to come over.

We parked in front of a huge old wooden house. The night had turned colder. Both Boops wore their fleece. They looked good. They should, I thought, for that price. Crossing the wide lawn, Eli and my mom started singing. Horribly.

Eli was still the dork guy. He was turning her dorky, too.

I’m a-gonna wrap myself in paper
.

I’m gonna daub my head with glue
.

“I’ve never been to the Gamble House,” she said.

In an old-fashioned kitchen, Kat was supervising kids in aprons who were packing up plates. Both boys and girls had ponytails. About fifty glass cups of what looked like chocolate pudding waited next to a metal bowl of whipped cream.

We found Hector and Jules sitting on a huge staircase. Eli started explaining Japanese influences on the wood joining. My mom smiled a way I didn’t like. Hector and I lagged behind on the tour. In the big rooms the furniture looked spindly and uncomfortable. We ended up in the kitchen; Kat gave us each a chocolate pudding, with a cap of whipped cream.

My mother never seemed happier than on that day, eating chocolate pudding in the cold. She shivered and smiled. A mother’s happiness: something you recognize and then forget; it didn’t seem to matter much at the time, though it spread through our bodies.
How did I know a moment like that was something I’d collect and later touch for consolation?

We waited while Kat checked doors and lights and turned down thermostats. We heard a train moan. When it had passed, Eli squinted and recited:

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.

“That’s a
lot
to know by heart,” I mumbled. So Eli was a memorizer. Now I knew why I’d scored thirty dollars from poetry. My mother beamed again like a moron.
He’s not your kid
, I felt like saying.

“Are you from the Midwest?” Hector asked him.

“Yes, the flyover,” he said. “I lived in Ohio until I was nine.”

“Where in Ohio?”

“Where am I from in Ohio, Reen?” Eli asked. The Mims looked down and swung her foot. Oh no! She didn’t know the answer! My heart dropped, but I was also happy. “And when is my birthday?” He elbowed her side. He was smiling, but there was pain in it. Poor guy.

“I have it in my book,” she said, halting.

“Mom!” She knew our birthdays! What was the deal?

“I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland called Lakewood,” Eli said, looking at Hector, specifically avoiding her. “And my birthday is November tenth.”

I pushed Hector out the back door so we were alone and said, “I’m beginning to think she’s the bad guy. He remembers
every
thing about us. What’s up with her?”

“Maybe she’s got the ’tism,” Hector said. That was our new thing. The ’tism.

“See those sweatshirts?” I pointed to my sisters, one of whom was cartwheeling on the grass. “Eighty dollars each. I’m broke. Eli got the Mims a dress. We’re sleeping in a cabin, and yesterday we went skiing on Pine Mountain.”

“You went to Mount Pinos?” For years, in elementary school, his dad drove him to Mount Pinos to look at stars. It never occurred to me it was the same mountain.

“What have you guys been doing?”

“Just helping here. We’re going home tonight.”

“Us tomorrow.” It was almost time to leave for Boston with our dad. In the car, driving back to our cabin, we heard a train again.

“I love that,” my mom said.

Eli had those sticks you break to make light. We drew on the dark with those wands, leaving brief trails as we trucked down. Right before we went inside, Eli pulled my head back so I’d look up. Millions of sharp, small stars; it was dizzying how far the sky went back. The smell of the pine pressed close to us. This was a different kind of vacation than we’d taken before. I asked my mom if I could recite my poem for ten dollars. I was cleaned out. She told me sure, then had me turn around while the Boops pulled pajama tops over their heads.

I tripped through “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

“Tea and Waffle Maid?” Boop Two said, from inside her top. The Boops lived on frozen waffles.

I’d made two tiny errors. My mom told me to practice more.

“Oh, honey, I think articles are fungible,” Eli said. “May I pay him?” He gave me a twenty and said, “I have another Yeats for you.”

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book
,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace
,

And loved your beauty with love false or true
,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars
,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars
.

He was sad, I thought, because she didn’t remember his hometown. She loved him, though; I could see that. I used to count on being able to enchant her: with chess, the suspenders I snapped against my shirt when I was small, the night of paper airplanes. But now, Eli could. More. Even with his twenty in my pocket, I didn’t like that.

My sister whispered to me in the dark, “If Mom married Eli, would he still bring presents or would he get like Dad, not wanting to spoil me?”

“Like Dad,” I said.

The next day, on our way home, we stopped and wandered through the grounds of Caltech. On the highway, Eli said to the Mims, “After you drop them at Cary’s, I’ll take you somewhere you can wear that dress. To a place where we’ll hear trains at night.”

“What are you doing, Mom, while we’re gone?” Boop Two asked. She never liked being away from the Mims.

“Eli’s staying.”

They were playing some game in the front seat, handing back and forth my mom’s small graph-paper notebook. She wrote something, and then he did.

Keep your hand on the steering wheel
, I felt like saying.

“Thank you, sweetie,” he said after he read her move. “I won’t hold you to it.”

31 • A Graph-Paper Contract

Then we flew to Boston. On my dad’s side, we had traditions, too. Each year we met in a new city and shopped. We all loved the great American malls. We ate in restaurants my aunts and uncles had read about; though they didn’t cook, the Harts appreciated food. My sisters and I talked about the cabin among ourselves, but we liked this, too. For Hanukkah we each got eight presents. We didn’t light the candles and receive one every night the way Simon’s family did. We skipped the candles altogether and got the presents all at once. I missed Hector. But he wasn’t home either; they’d gone on another epic road trip.