How Did You Get This Number (5 page)

Another thing about having the village idiot camped out in half your brain is that the other half is forced into some resourceful public-relations work. At school, if someone asked me what time it was, the better-brain half would put its hand over the lesser half’s mouth, and I’d say my watch was broken. Or I’d wear some numberless, handless, spinning-faced gadget on which no one with human eyes could tell time. The lies we construct to defend ourselves from humiliation are the strongest, refusing to be torn down. To this day, I’ve never met a clock that works properly. I think there’s something faulty with the way they make the hands these days. Something in the screws, maybe. But who needs a watch when you have a cell phone? Problem solved.

By age twelve, I started wearing a bracelet on my left wrist so I could look down and associate it with that direction. At the age of sixteen, I discovered it would take me twice as long as my peers to drive anywhere. No matter what part of town I happened to find myself in, I was swinging past my house between destinations to reorient myself. The good news was that my visual memory became stronger. I could tell you what you wore two weeks ago. I could memorize the internal organs of a fetal pig. I could sketch the contents of my locker in accurate detail—I just couldn’t find it.

Flunking more of my classes than not, I was placed in an all-grade after-school program called The Learning Center. Which was purposefully veiled in a maze of confusion by the school’s architects. “Center,” I will say, was totally misleading. Perpetually late, I usually found that the only seats available were next to a mute paraplegic girl whose hair was done in bows, or the prematurely sexualized kid who told our teacher he’d like to “bone the fuck” out of her. Each week I sat next to the girl and read for an hour, handing her colored pencils and waiting for someone to ask me if I needed help with my homework. I declined. I didn’t want to look stupid in front of the other kids.

Around this time, a couple of teachers broached the possibility of my taking my SATs orally. Throughout high school, they had slyly allowed me to circle my answers on the tests themselves, forgoing the Scantron sheet. Being a teenager is hard enough without having people look over at your exam paper to see an insane pattern of misplaced carbon dots in the margins. You know who else does that? Disaffected psychopaths in laced boots and trench coats.

But the SATs were bigger than high school. They plugged you into the rest of the nation. They ingrained a sense of patriotism that the chin-ups on the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge had failed to do. In suburban New York, your life began in earnest once you took the SATs. They were the first determining factor for the next four years, a canary into the mines of your future. A dead canary, and you were looking at a nail-polish-merchandising degree from Pump My Stomach State. So, the nightmare of having to think out loud in the midst of all that pressure, to change your mind, to search someone else’s face for signs of your rightness ... It was too much. Instead, I sat with my mother in the same spot where she had once found me stacking blocks, and we devised a plan. I would write each answer on a Post-it note. Then I would unstick the note from the test, stick it to the answer sheet, and reread it while I made the correct mark. Not permitted to bring outside materials into the exam room, I padded my bra with Post-it notes. The proctors were accustomed to no end of odd teenage behavior. They said nothing when I periodically scratched my strangely square breasts.

This worked well enough to get me into college. But it couldn’t work every day. I was living in the movie
Labyrinth,
but without the evil-puppet factor. I have never outgrown that feeling of constant disorientation. Rather, the feeling has followed me around like a homing device.

I finally came to terms with this when I was returning home from college the Thanksgiving of my freshman year. My father and I stopped off at a sprawling Connecticut market with curving aisles and outdoor spaces and multiple entrances. We split up. When I had collected the items on my half of the list, I tried to find him. For fifteen minutes, I circled back through the crowds and around shortcuts that landed me in places I had just left. I was at a loss. Should I ask someone to lead me to the manager’s office, where I could call my father over the PA system? I once heard that you can find your way out of any maze by keeping your hand on the left side of the wall. Great, but which side was left? Damn you, David Bowie. Maybe I could live here, mop-ping and stocking my way to room and board. Eventually I gave up beneath a sign for
Festive Pumpkins!,
thinking it was best to stay put until my father found me.

It was the indignity of it all that bothered me. Consequence-wise, the experience of getting lost is not the end of the world. Unless you do it imprudently, veering toward poorly lit parking garages and uncovered manholes, nothing terrible beyond tardiness is going to happen to you. But that’s the thing. A learning disability doesn’t exactly qualify as an emergency. It’s a subtle problem for everyone except the person who has it. Standing in the middle of the aisle with the shoppers buzzing around me, I told myself I would trade breaking a bone just once rather than continue with a lifetime of this crap. Because at least with a broken bone you get a cast or a sling. People see your problem coming. But how do you explain an eighteen-year-old trapped and teary-eyed in front of a pile of seasonal gourds? Where is her excuse?

It would get a little better as I became an adult. I learned my right from my left and my up from my down. Unfortunately, that school psychologist, in defiance of the grand tradition of incompetent childhood professionals, turned out to be correct about my functionality cap. Even now, I do all public counting with one fist under the table, preferably in a jacket pocket. If there is no pocket to be had, I twitch my knuckles instead of fully extending my fingers. It’s less obvious that way. And I still can’t tell time on an analog clock. Or, rather, I can, but it takes me ten minutes, a lapse that defeats the purpose of the exercise. This remains unbelievable to most people, as demonstrated by the well-meaning but misguided response, “I’ll teach you right now!”
Oh, no, really, I... Okay, let’s get this over with.
I try to avoid the kitchens in other people’s apartments, as this is where most analog wall clocks live, and apparently there are few activities so fun as herding a cocktail party full of people into one room to watch a grown woman try to tell time. Of course, age grants you a whole new set of loopholes.
You mean that wall clock there? Sorry, I can’t read shit without my glasses.

My terrible sense of direction also remains. To live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never, ever make a smooth entrance, always getting caught looking lost on the street. The only subway I can exit and begin striding forth with confidence is the one by my home, as there is a gigantic park on the right-hand side. And I know I don’t live in the trees with the pigeons and the butterflies. Otherwise, I always go the wrong direction. The trains were slow, I complain, when in actuality the trains were fine and I went the wrong way down Broadway. Again. I dated someone who lived near the Seventh Avenue stop in Brooklyn, and an odd phenomenon occurred every time I’d visit. When I left his apartment, I’d go into the subway through the same entrance. The next time I arrived, I’d find the entrance, go up the familiar staircase, and it spat me out across the street from where I needed to be. I have no idea why.
We’re all mad here, says the Cheshire Cat. I’m mad. You’re mad....

It’s not a disability, it’s life. We are complicated creatures with larger matters on our plates than tip calculation. I grew up watching TV with my mother while she diagnosed the characters as having hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder. I rolled my eyes and wondered why there weren’t any stupid kids anymore. Why did there have to be something to explain everyone? Were the cave people on Ritalin? I didn’t think so.

But waiting for my father to find me in the supermarket that day, I started calculating how many times I had embarrassed myself, how many perfectly functional watch faces I had defamed. Whatever natural inability I had to orient myself I had doused with a self-made need to cover it up. People get lost and invert numbers. They make plans for Tuesday the sixteenth when the sixteenth is a Wednesday. Most people would claim they are “terrible with” something. Names, dates, faces. Even make-believe characters on TV had these problems. But did they feel the need to lie about them afterward?

 

 

 

 

WHEN I CONFESSED MY SAT METHODS TO A FRIEND, she said she knew someone who had facial blindness, a kind of recognition agnosia that makes it impossible for her to recall faces of casual acquaintances and old friends. To compensate, she goes through life taking photographs and being dangerously friendly to strangers on the street.
How cool,
I thought. If anything, this is a convenient way to snub people. I also found this woman’s existence oddly reassuring. I wondered how many of us there were out there with severe disabilities walking among us, like anti—X-Men with disadvantageous powers.

Recently, my sister had a barbecue, and the best means of getting to her house is to take the bus. I took the opportunity to leave the country for the weekend instead.

“We were making fun of you,” my mother recounted. “I thought,
She’s going to Canada because she doesn’t want to take the bus.”

“No one would go to Canada over that, Mom. It’s a ladies’ weekend in Montreal.”

“You can’t fool me,” she said. “I know how much you hate the bus.”

“Mother, I feel as strongly about the bus as I do about the Canadians.”

“No,” she reveled in her rightness, “I think you’d rather sit on a Canadian than on a bus.”

“Well, sure,” I gave in. “That’s probably true.”

Fine, I thought. Let them think I’m a snob. Let them think I’m lazy. See if I care.
It’s better than the fear of falling down the rabbit hole and realizing the smiling cat has a better sense of direction than you do, and then running into the white rabbit only to realize that
he
has facial agnosia and doesn’t recognize you, and it’s not as if you can read his pocket watch, anyway.

Then my mother, forever the parent of a genius toddler, laughed and said, “But I know you, and I thought, She won’t get on a bus because it’ll take her too long to translate the schedule. And then she won’t know which direction to go when she gets off. And then I thought, I wish I could tell her that it’s no problem—I’ll just stand at the corner, and when she walks down the stairs I’ll be there to meet her.”

A
week before college graduation, I made plans to live in New York with my friend Mac. Mac’s parents were intent on buying him an apartment. The idea was for them to pay the mortgage and for me to pay the monthly maintenance. On average, we were talking about a good four hundred dollars less than renting from scratch. Though not the real estate equivalent of winning the lottery, it was certainly the equivalent of finding a bunch of money on the street and keeping it. Over the next few months, most of the New York—bound members of our graduating class had also paired off—or, in some cases, quadrupled off—erecting fake walls out of bookshelves and pounding the underdeveloped fishy quadrants of Red Hook, tearing phone numbers off the paper fringe on lampposts. They divided spaces that were never meant to be divided. It was like splitting a wasabi pea in half with your thumb. Doors opened into bed corners more often than not. Watching TV was a bet with gravity, as sets hung from the ceiling for want of shelf space. Flat screens existed, but they were prohibitively expensive for the people who needed them most, people who needed their heads uninjured and their hallways unblocked. All immediate hints of purpose went out of the rooms themselves. Showers in kitchens, toilets in living rooms, sinks in bedrooms. It was as if Picasso were born a slumlord instead of a painter. Nothing was where you thought it would be, which would be eccentric in a mansion but was disarming in an apartment. Once, at a party, I opened a door expecting to find a toilet but found a stove instead. Just a closet with a stove in it. And a bare bulb hanging, as if to say, “Here is where we roast the children.”

Meanwhile, Mac and I were taking tours of rooms that made sense, in apartments with full-on hallways. I took the train in from Westchester, dreaming of where I’d meet Mac and his parents next. Home was just around the corner. I had set sail on a little ship called
Sponsorship,
part of the Fleet of Parental Enablement. The horizon of happiness was as clear and measured a line as the walls that met the floors without wobbling. Mac and I could even pick the neighborhood, a fantasy I indulged by going on real estate websites and hovering my giant arrow over the lower portions of Manhattan. I amused myself with the concept that there would be a “minimum” a tenant could pay. I liked to imagine myself as one half of a couple, both of us in panther-skin shoes, storming out of a converted candy warehouse upon discovering that it was too cheap. It was all very
Brewster’s Millions.

And, oh, the apartments I saw! The appliances gleamed in defiance of our slovenly and disaffected youth. Faucets arced up from the backs of sinks, stopping in midair to fan out wide. They seemed more comfortable in the world than I did. I understood I was about a decade too early to live a life in which I casually washed my hands in freestanding square sinks. There were living rooms with dark wooden floors and vaulted bedrooms with skylights. A few of the apartments were duplexes with winding staircases that led us to roof decks, where upon arrival our broker would apologize for an archway covered in roses.

“We can get rid of this.” She’d gesture at the problem without deigning to look at it. “You are a person of importance, and if you want us to behead flowers for you, we’ll gladly do it.”