Dissection Lab
In which I unlearn algebra
[A little essay for y’all. Looking for stories? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Did I tell you about Philippe?
I was at college four years with him, but I’m not sure I’d recognize him if I saw him today. He comes back in fragments.
Dark, triangular face. Eyes bright with restless intelligence. Swaggery jeans, hip points I could just about have spanned with my hand, big blousy shirts, big Chevy Suburban he had to be nimble to leap up into. Jesuit High boy, I think, but we’ll pretend it was St. Stanislaus or Christian Brothers or or —
He asked, “You understand this algebra, right?”
Mild surprise. “Of course.”
“Will you study with me?”
Night after night. Fluorescent lights in the science building, tile gleaming like tile does when it’s buffed every day, plate glass windows casting back our reflection.
Two of us, desks pulled close.
Me: “No, that’s not right. You see, you have to perform the same action on each side of the equation — ”
Him: “But no, no you don’t, you already did that, see — ”
I was confused, and became more confused.
My grade fell from an A to a C. I thought I understood algebra, but I did not understand it well enough to withstand an onslaught from an adversary who was persistent and persuasive — not when I wanted so much to please.
How can he learn from me, I wondered at first, when he won’t let me teach?
But in a few weeks I was so bewildered I could not teach. Instead I sat while he went through the exercises, correcting — I thought, but wasn’t sure — my right answers to wrong.
One night I asked, “How can you learn anything when you won’t listen to what I explain?”
“Let’s go down in the basement.”
I thought and hoped maybe he would kiss me in the basement.
The basement held the dissection lab. In a locked room — also bright, though windowless, also floored with gleaming tile — stood empty lab tables. Shelves all around the walls of the room held glass jars. In the jars floated teaching samples. Frogs, pigs, pig fetuses, human fetuses.
In silence I walked from one jar to another, inspecting those fetuses. They hovered there, just yellow-off-white. Some could have fit in my hand. Some I remember as almost fully grown, though remembering the form factor of the shelves and jars now, I doubt that was true. Some, then, were large as my forearm curled in on itself.
Many had clubs for hands and feet, or a smeared face, or organs outside the body, or some other sign of the insult that killed them.
Philippe, behind me: “I don’t suppose you’ll ever have an abortion after this.”
Well, that came out of the blue. I felt a sort of stunned, icy blankness. My ears rang.
I had never thought much about abortion; what did it have to do with me, when I could bust my ass for weeks on end and never get even one kiss? As yet I didn’t understand which cluster of beliefs was identified as liberal, as conservative. I liked Ayn Rand and City of God; I thought poor people should be cared for; that was the extent of my politics. I didn’t understand that a girl who knew how to do algebra (at first) was already coded as an enemy.
Yes. I think that’s right. I was an enemy, and had been under attack as an enemy the whole time, and never knew it. I didn’t realize it even there in the dissection lab. I only hoped that the weird intimacy of this conversation might mean we were becoming closer. A deepening, a descent.
Yet something put me on my guard. For a long time I couldn’t speak. Finally I said: “I never thought anything about it. I didn’t plan to.”
My voice came back to me as a loud startled echo. I realized I was pushing Philippe away despite myself. I tried to think of other, more placating words but could not.
We left the building.
I never wondered how he got the key. Why he had it with him that night.
— No, I do remember, let’s not make this a conspiracy. He was a biology student, pre-med. He had a job as lab assistant.
Imagine him as your doctor, now. Just for a second.
Try.
He was learning algebra, though. His grade climbed from a D to a B. Once he performed better in class than I did, he left me alone.
At the time I thought he simply a person who wasn’t good at math but was so conceited he couldn’t bear to be taught. Annoying, but endearing. I tried to let him know it was okay not to understand math, even okay to be conceited, I didn’t mind, I was ready to adore him as he was — crowns of clover on his desk —
Later I wondered whether his original low grades were a lure; whether he saw me as an enemy from day one and set out to harm me in a small way.
But I was no enemy. I gave him so many flowers, little drawings of fairies, stories —
No. Maybe it wasn’t enmity after all. Surprise, pity, alarm?
Maybe I just annoyed him, so he toyed with me in a small way. Why not?
Why not?
A year or two later he used to come to my room to study his books or tell me about his life — a mother in poverty; a rich uncle, abusive but adored; various girls in love with him —
Sometime in our junior year, not quite an apology: “I would have dated you, you know, but you were too intelligent.”
Me, very near tears: “But I can pretend, I can pretend for ever without pause, you could let me try, please — ”
Maybe it was a lifeline. Maybe, if I had actually started pretending then, even then — but it’s too late now, isn’t it?
I think he was surprised I still had the same feeling that much later. In fact I was coming out of a black depression lasting more than two years. I spent most evenings after class and work in bed crying — hard, fevered crying — worn out with love, and by then I had done it for probably five or six hundred days. Now all the tears rose again like groundwater filling a well.
He shook his head. “It wouldn’t work.”
No. There is no beautiful ending — no happiness for me, no witty condemnation for Philippe, who was right the whole time. It just wouldn’t work.
[In this spirit of fairness, a coda.]
It's actually a memoir, and a good one at that.