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.
The misery began when I moved beyond the Pythagorean theorem to sine,
cosine and tangent. I couldn’t grasp such abstractions. I could feel the logic in
them, could sense their power to bestow order and symmetry, but I couldn’t
unlock it. They kept their secrets, becoming a kind of gateway beyond which
I believed there was a world of law and reason. But I could not pass through
the gate.
Mother said that if I wanted to learn trigonometry, it was her responsibility
to teach me. She set aside an evening, and the two of us sat at the kitchen
table, scratching at bits of paper and tugging our hair. We spent three hours
on a single problem, and every answer we produced was wrong.
“I wasn’t any good at trig in high school,” Mother moaned, slamming the
book shut. “And I’ve forgotten what little I knew.”