mathematics practice test. I scanned the first page. It wasn’t that I
didn’t know how to solve the equations; I didn’t recognize the symbols.
It was the same on the second page, and the third.
I took the test to Mother. “What’s this?” I asked.
“Math,” she said.
“Then where are the numbers?”
“It’s algebra. The letters stand in for numbers.”
“How do I do it?”
Mother fiddled with a pen and paper for several minutes, but she
wasn’t able to solve any of the first five equations.
The next day I drove the same forty miles, eighty round-trip, and
returned home with a large algebra textbook.
—EVERY EVENING, AS THE CREW was leaving Malad, Dad would phone the
house so Mother could have dinner waiting when the truck bumped up
the hill. I listened for that call, and when it came I would get in
Mother’s car and drive away. I didn’t know why. I would go to Worm
Creek, where I’d sit in the balcony and watch rehearsals, my feet on the
ledge, a math book open in front of me. I hadn’t studied math since
long division, and the concepts were unfamiliar. I understood the
theory of fractions but struggled to manipulate them, and seeing a
decimal on the page made my heart race. Every night for a month I sat
in the opera house, in a chair of red velvet, and practiced the most
basic operations—how to multiply fractions, how to use a reciprocal,
how to add and multiply and divide with decimals—while on the stage,
characters recited their lines.
I began to study trigonometry. There was solace in its strange
formulas and equations. I was drawn to the Pythagorean theorem and
its promise of a universal—the ability to predict the nature of any three
points containing a right angle, anywhere, always. What I knew of
physics I had learned in the junkyard, where the physical world often
seemed unstable, capricious. But here was a principle through which
the dimensions of life could be defined, captured. Perhaps reality was
not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted. Perhaps it
could be made to make sense.