Divide Me by Zero by Lara Vapnyar

Author:Lara Vapnyar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2019-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

How do you sustain x days of a loveless marriage?

That’s easy—you compartmentalize.

When I was six, my mother introduced spatial paradoxes to me. She used the drawings of Maurits Cornelis Escher. We had a stack of Escher’s prints tucked behind the glass doors of our bookcase. One of the prints was called Relativity and showed a house that looked neat and solid at first glance but attacked you with its craziness if you held your gaze.

“I hate it!” I said. “It’s scary!”

“Show me what makes it scary,” my mother said.

I pointed to a man casually walking on the underside of a staircase, perpendicular to the rest of the house.

“Okay,” my mother said, “now rotate the drawing all the way to the right.”

I did.

Now that particular man was doing okay, but the previously normal parts of the house suddenly turned crazy. I said that I especially hated the upside-down dinner table on the bottom.

I kept turning and turning the print, watching how craziness migrated from one spot to another.

“Do you see what’s going on here?” my mother asked. “Each part of the drawing is working perfectly well, they just don’t work as a whole.”

Our house on Staten Island was an Escher house. This type of architecture turned out to be essential to sustaining my marriage for so many years. The secret was that I could conduct the different parts of my life in the different parts of the house and ignore the fact that they didn’t work as a whole.

The ground floor was divided into two parts, my mother’s apartment and the heated garage.

My mother’s apartment was a tiny studio with its tiny alcove of a bedroom and its own kitchen that also served as my mother’s living room, her study, and even a makeshift math school for local kids.

The garage served as Len’s home office, where Len did work for his own software company, SoftUniverrse. (The extra r was a necessity caused by the fact that there was another company called SoftUniverse. I liked to roll the extra r the Spanish way, as in the word perro.) Len would come home from work, have his dinner, and disappear into the garage, making it to the bedroom long after I was asleep. On weekends he would go to the garage right after breakfast and stay there for most of the day. This schedule was extremely helpful for reducing our opportunities to fight with each other. There was one problem though. The garage didn’t have a door connecting it to the rest of the house, so every time Len needed to use the bathroom he would have to exit through the aluminum garage door and enter the house through the front door, which he often found locked. Since it was impossible to make our doorbell work, Len would have to knock, then bang, then kick the door, yelling and frightening the neighbors. “Sorry! I must have forgotten that you were home, Len,” my mother would explain. My mother and Len had had a

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