Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [21]
WHAT MY FATHER PRESSED upon me even more than his family being an old St. Louis family was the fact that we were also, as far as he could trace our ancestral beginnings, not math people. I remember my mother reading aloud from the New York Times science section about right-brain/left-brain theories. She loved to identify with right brainers, to distance herself from “lefties” (engineers, lawyers, people who could add 7 plus 6 and come up with 13) as much as possible. It seemed to me growing up that my mother used the number forty-five so often (“I’ve asked you forty-five times to pick up your room,” “That dog has pooped under the dining room table forty-five times this week”) simply because it was one of the few numbers she knew. If there was one area of their marriage that was quite strong it was their mutual disapproval of math. They did the best they could to keep math out of our house and it may have been, for us, the subject non grata even more than God. They were more than happy to discuss and many times actually do my schoolwork for me if they found the subject matter lively enough. When I studied Greek and Roman history in Mr. Shaw’s sixth-grade class my dad built me a Trojan horse and my mom had painstakingly fashioned a gorgeous clay Julius Caesar figurine with a knife sticking out of his chest and twenty-three plops of Heinz ketchup around his body on the steps of the Senate building indicating the twenty-three times Caesar was stabbed. My dad wrote plenty of papers for me. He showed real promise on a ten-pager about Saint Thomas Aquinas, but usually he got terrible grades at Bronxville High School, where his obscure and plentiful high literary references—from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to a Voltaire pun to the thick of Faulkner—usually lost teachers. That, or they couldn’t pass my father’s lack of a decent five-paragraph funnel essay. But I was still expected to pass math class.
When summer school in algebra became a distinct possibility, my parents hired the Harvard-bound daughter of their only friends, the other Democrats in Bronxville, Bill and Suzanna Dean, to tutor me. Bill and Suzanna would come over and have drinks in the kitchen with my parents while April and I sat upstairs at my desk, directly above the kitchen, going over parabolas for the fiftieth time. I didn’t understand a thing April said but I responded with phrases like “Isn’t that interesting?” and “Ah! I see. I didn’t get that before,” as I was the host and didn’t want my guest to feel awkward. In addition to April I also had my algebra teacher, Mrs. Peterson, tutoring me a couple times a week after school. I just didn’t get the shit. When I came home after school one day and told them I had indeed failed algebra and would need to go to Scarsdale summer school, my mother asked me if I had been nice to Mrs. Peterson.
“You catch more bees with honey than you do with vinegar,” my mother said as I cried on her bed. My mother had gone to Villa Duchesne, a Catholic school in St. Louis where the chaste young girls strolled the verdant campus wearing sweaters with “VD” emblazoned on the chest and where apparently a good shampoo would do just as well as a pencil in solving fractions. “Honestly, with that dirty hair the nuns wouldn’t have passed me, either,” she told me.
From her point of view, math was a social problem that could be solved with a few well-placed compliments and clean hair. “We’re not mathematicians, dolly. But you can pass a class. You just don’t care.”
I had timed it so I could tell my mom while Eleanor, Katharine and Julia were out. Failure had two parts: the part between you and your fuck-up and the part between your three sisters and your fuck-up. There would not be a scene of feminine compassion and empathy. (Don’t worry, Jean. You’ll make a good life for yourself somewhere where decent people can’t add or subtract.) No, there’d be a lot of “What? You FAILED algebra?” and