“Please don’t do that,” I said. I found an algebra book in the supply closet, and asked her to check if there was anything in it similar to what she had been learning. She slowly turned the pages. “This is what I don’t know,” she said, stabbing a page with her finger. “This about the polynomials.”
I was worried at first about explaining polynomials, but it went as smoothly as a dream; it was nothing like trying to tell Linda about fractions. Dinah understood right away the difference between binomials and trinomials, and coefficients and variables. I told her about “adding like terms.” That took more time, but when she understood it, I felt really happy.
“Now I’m going to add up the ones that are alike,” she said. “You hope!”
After she could add like terms, we started to simplify polynomial expressions. “Oh, I’m having a good time,” she said. “See, this is what I didn’t know, all this about polynomials. I never knew these polynomials could be fun.”
? ? ?
I applied to Let’s Go, the travel guidebook series that Ivan had told me about, to be a researcher-writer for Russia, Spain, or Latin America. The interview was conducted by three Let’s Go editors. First they asked me to describe the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square in the style of a Let’s Go guidebook. I had never read a Let’s Go guidebook.
“You can get a tuna sandwich for five dollars,” I said. The editors exchanged glances.
“What do we miss out on if we don’t hire you?” one girl asked.
I had never heard of such a question and felt a combination of shock and exasperation. Were they really going to make me pretend that I was doing them a favor? I said I was good at languages. The editor said right away that I hadn’t studied Russian for long enough to go to Russia—you had to have had at least two years, ideally more. You had to be able to bribe people. They said it would make more sense for me to go to Turkey, because it was such a popular vacation destination and because so few Harvard students spoke Turkish. But I had spent every summer of my life in Turkey, and wanted to go somewhere new. “What about Spain or Latin America?” I asked. They said the bar for Spanish was really high because a lot of applicants were native speakers.
“What if we were to ask you to describe this room, in Spanish, in the style of Let’s Go?” one editor said. I looked around the room. It was a totally pointless room, containing nothing of interest. “Una atmosfera antipática,” I said. “Mejor evitar.”
The editors exchanged glances again. “We’ll be in touch,” the girl said.
When I told Svetlana about the interview, she said I had been crazy to apply—everyone who did Let’s Go had a nervous breakdown. Specifically, the guy who had gone to Turkey the previous year, an American who spoke no Turkish, had first gotten severely beaten and then had a nervous breakdown. A prostitute had come to his hotel room in Konya and he had sent her away, but then later some guys came and beat him up. The whole episode had somehow been minutely documented in Rolling Stone magazine as part of some kind of exposé.
? ? ?
Over lunch, Lakshmi from the literary magazine told me about the preoccupying problem of her life. The preoccupying problem of her life was a boy. He was a senior, like Ivan. Lakshmi and I tried to discuss our shared plight, but the things that happened to us were so different that they barely seemed comparable or commensurable. Noor was from Trinidad and studied literature and economics. He was into theory. Every weekend, Lakshmi went out with him and his friends to clubs or raves—institutions I couldn’t begin to imagine, architecturally or in any other way—where they did ecstasy and talked about postcolonialism and deconstruction. Sometimes Lakshmi would black out and wake up in Noor’s bed, though nothing ever happened. “Nothing happened, of course,” she would say, in a rueful tone that seemed to imply that this outcome was somehow to Noor’s credit.
I could see that my stories made as little sense to Lakshmi as hers did to me. The emails, the walking around, the burial of strawberries. Lakshmi said that I must have been leaving something out.
? ? ?
Hannah and I were cleaning the room while listening to the radio. The DJ gave away a Butthole Surfers CD to the twenty-seventh caller, Mary from Dorchester, who shrieked orgasmically for fifteen seconds. Just then the phone started to ring. I knew it would be Ivan.
“Guess where I am,” Ivan said.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m at your house.”
“My house?”
“Your next year’s house. You’re supposed to be here.”
It was true—the freshmen had just had a housing lottery and we were all supposed to be having brunch in our new dining halls, while the senior class had brunch in the freshman dining hall.
“I didn’t go,” I said.
“Yeah, I figured.”
“What about you? Why aren’t you at your brunch?”
“I hate stuff like that, where they try to make you feel nostalgic.”
There was a pause.
“Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t go to your brunch to look for you, too. It would have been like ‘The Gift of the Magi,’” I said. I was sorry as soon as I had said it.
“Like what?”
“Ah, never mind.”
“The gift of the what?”
“The Magi—it’s a story they make you read in American high schools.”
“I don’t know this story.”
“Well, no, why would you.”
“Why not? You mean, because I didn’t go to an American high school?”
“Right.”
“But you went to an American high school.”
“True.”
“So I can infer that you do know this story.”
“Right again.”
“Logical inference is something they teach you at Hungarian high schools.”
“Lucky you,” I said.
“Lucky me,” he said. “So tell me the story.”
I tried to think of something else I could say instead. I couldn’t think of anything. “Once upon a time,” I said, “there was a poor married couple. Even though they were incredibly poor, they each had one prize possession.”
“Wait, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. They each had one what?”
“A prize possession. Something that was really valuable to them.”
“Oh, a prize possession. Go on.”
“The husband’s prize possession was his gold watch, and the wife’s prize possession was her beautiful long hair. These two things were a huge consolation for them. They might have been cold and starving, but at least they had this great watch and this amazing hair.
“Then it was Christmas, and they had to buy each other presents. They really—um. They really loved each other, and wanted to get each other amazing presents. But they didn’t have any money. So the wife sold all her hair to a wig-maker, to buy the husband a chain for his beautiful watch. Meanwhile, the husband pawned his watch, to buy jeweled combs for the wife’s beautiful hair.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ivan encouragingly.
“That’s it. That’s the end.”
“What? The story is finished?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“Well, it’s ironic. The woman can’t wear the combs, because she sold her hair, and the man can’t use the chain, because he sold his watch.”
“So these combs were something that the woman would wear? Like a decoration?”
“Right.”