“That’s exactly right,” I said.
Linda sighed, and looked out the window. “I just don’t see the point of this,” she said. That was a feeling I felt really sympathetic to. I pushed aside the chart and tried to explain the point of fractions. I started by drawing a circle and telling her it was a pie. She looked annoyed. I remembered that the program director, a senior who had been working with underprivileged adults since he was in high school, had said that, if you were teaching math, it was always good to talk about money, because it showed that math was important in daily life. I turned to a new page in the composition book and explained that the one-numerator and four-denominator was just like a quarter, and four of them made a dollar, so it was useful to be able to divide something into parts and talk about the parts.
“You probably already think about fractions all the time,” I said. “It’s just a matter of learning the words.”
Linda sighed again. “Maybe this is important to you,” she said. “But to me it’s just not important. I got way more important stuff to think about.”
I nodded, while I thought about what to say. “The thing is,” I said, “it’s important to pass the GED test. You have to learn fractions to pass the test.”
“Nuh-uh,” she said. She was still looking out the window. I looked out the window, too. I saw a dumpster and some pigeons. It had started to rain.
“How do you mean, ‘nuh-uh’?” I said.
“Nuh-uh,” she repeated. “There’s no pies on the test. The test is on what’s in the book. The regular teacher doesn’t talk about pie.”
I thought it over. I thought about the test. I said I wouldn’t talk about pie anymore, and we would just learn what the book said. I turned to the next page. “Now you are ready to reduce fractions,” I read. “Instead of two-fourths, write: one-half.” There were no illustrations, or explanations, or anything to indicate why two-fourths was the same as one-half. Under “Practice Problems,” there was a whole list of fractions to reduce. The thought of trying to explain how to reduce fractions without talking about pie or money was terribly daunting.
“Since you already learned that chart,” I suggested, “maybe we should just call it a day.”
Linda didn’t say anything. I wondered if “call it a day” was an elitist expression that only rich people used.
“Maybe we should go home,” I said. “Until next week.”
She nodded, put the book in her handbag, and left.
? ? ?
“You know you don’t actually have to defend fractions to her,” Svetlana said. “They don’t really want her to understand—they just want her to memorize the book.”
I had come home to find Svetlana seated at my desk writing industriously on a sheet of pink paper. She didn’t look up when I came in. Reading over her shoulder, I saw that what she was writing was a note to me to cancel our plan to watch Battleship Potemkin. Her left hand toyed with the necklace she was wearing: a string of heavy amber beads.
She signed her name with a fancy S and handed me the paper. “I wrote you a note,” she said. Instead of going to the movie, we went to her room and sat on her bed, reading “Nina in Siberia.” It was convenient to read with Svetlana, because she already knew all the vocabulary from Serbo-Croatian, so instead of looking in the glossary, I could just ask her.
The story was confusing and sad. Nina found out that Ivan was working in his uncle’s lab and had married a geochemist. But you weren’t sure about any of it because she didn’t actually talk to him—she just saw his desk with a nameplate and a note from his wife.
“Who writes this stuff?” I asked. The cover of the workbook was blank; it just read Russian Reader I.
“Beats me,” said Svetlana, turning to her psych textbook.
I picked up my 1,020-page Norton Critical Bleak House, which was as simultaneously absorbing and off-putting as someone else’s incredibly long dream. For about the hundredth time I read the same sentence:
Vholes finally adds, by way of rider to this declaration of his principles, that as Mr. Carstone is about to rejoin his regiment, perhaps Mr. C will favour him with an order on his agent for twenty pounds on that account.
Again and again Vholes finally added the rider about Mr. C and the money. Again and again, Mr. C, his agent, the twenty pounds on that account . . . maybe.
Svetlana was highlighting something about deindividuation, while her left hand played with the amber necklace.
“That’s a beautiful necklace,” I said.
“Hm?” she said. I decided I had to make her look up. “Your necklace,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
“Oh—this? It’s a gift from my analyst.”
When she mentioned her analyst, I knew I had won and she would talk to me instead of reading.
Her analyst had been to a conference in Moscow over Thanksgiving. It was his first trip to Eastern Europe and everything reminded him of Svetlana. He kept meeting other women called Svetlana, many of them also analysts, though one was a travel agent. At the amber jewelry counter, he had debated whether it was unprofessional to buy Svetlana a gift. He consulted one of his colleagues, a Russian Svetlana, who had come to help him choose a gift for his wife. The Russian Svetlana had encouraged him to follow his more generous impulse.
“It’s not such a big deal,” Svetlana said. “As he pointed out himself, the price of the necklace was only about one-fiftieth of what I’ve paid him in fees since September. It all comes out of my insurance anyway. In a way, this necklace is a gift from Blue Cross of Massachusetts.”
I didn’t want to go back to Bleak House, so I asked about her health insurance. As I was asking, I thought to myself, Bleak House is practically about boring paperwork, so why don’t I just read it instead of asking Svetlana about her boring paperwork? Svetlana’s eyes opened wide. She said that the insurance form had a space for the mental health diagnosis, and she had seen hers. It was a four-digit number, corresponding to an entry in the DSM-IV.
“Just think,” she said, “four numbers. That’s it—that’s what ails you.” She had asked her analyst to tell her what her numbers stood for, but he wouldn’t. He said the words in the DSM didn’t count; the words that counted were the ones spoken there in that room between the two of them. But Svetlana had used a mnemonic device to remember the four numbers, they were imprinted in her brain, and later she went to the science library and found the DSM-IV. “I went into the stacks and saw it there,” she said. “Two big hardcover volumes on the shelf.”
“And?”
“And—I didn’t look. I left the library. I just wasn’t interested anymore.”
? ? ?
I started forgetting things I’d read. It started in Russian conversation class. I got there late, they were already reading aloud. Ivan pushed his copy of the book toward me and pointed to the passage. At the line where she looked out the window and thought about Leonid, Ivan leaned toward me and said, “It seems she’s always thinking about men.”