An Invisible Sign of My Own Read online

  Acclaim for Aimee Bender’s

  an invisible sign of my own

  “[Aimee Bender] employs the most exacting of logics, mathematics, to add a thematic cohesiveness to her novel, and one of the most universal of human emotions, the fear of losing someone you love.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A novel that resembles a mad croquet game, played in the mystical thicket of everyday life.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Bender’s prose [is] always beautiful, always original.”

  —Salon

  “Delicately surreal.… [An Invisible Sign of My Own] reads like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale overlaid with the futuristic alienation of Philip K. Dick.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “An Invisible Sign of My Own achieves what all good fiction strives for: It gives a face to human suffering but sprinkles it with just enough magic to make reality tolerable.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “As good as the stories [in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt] are, [An Invisible Sign of My Own] is better.… Bender’s is a truly accomplished first novel.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Line by line, the reader is rewarded with a masterful prose style and an artistic vision that ruthlessly breaks down and dramatizes the arbitrary but necessary strategies people employ to keep themselves from never leaving their houses.”

  —Village Voice

  “Bender’s first novel proves that it’s possible to beguile readers with the oddest of characters, to win them over with a story that is surreal, edgy and endearing all at once.”

  —USA Today

  “A modern-day fairy tale with twists of dysfunction.… Uniquely dark and compelling.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “Aimee Bender is juggling many balls here—humor, violence, romance, illness, emotional redemption—but she keeps them in the air with deceptive ease.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Superb—concise and daring, not a word wasted.”

  —LA Weekly

  “A focused, funny novel about a young woman who has given up.… [Bender] is masterful at depicting the awkwardness of male-female romance.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Very entertaining.… With great skill, Aimee Bender maintains a precarious balance between the humorous and the horrifying.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “A seductively smart read.”

  —Glamour

  “Like Nathanael West, Bender has figured out how to map an alternative landscape where only the most essential landmarks—pain and anxiety, comedy and compassion—are recognizable. It is a remarkable achievement.”

  —New Times

  “A hypnotic love story that transports the reader to a parallel universe where even math is romantic.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  Aimee Bender

  An Invisible Sign of My Own

  Aimee Bender lives in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Story, Harper’s, The Antioch Review, and several other publications. She is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

  Also by Aimee Bender

  The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Aimee Bender

  Excerpt from The Color Master copyright © 2013 by Aimee Bender.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York, in 2000.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows: Bender, Aimee.

  An invisible sign of my own / Aimee Bender.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80447-1

  1. Primary school teachers—Fiction. 2. Mathematics teachers—Fiction.

  3. Women teachers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.E538447 I58 2000

  813′.54—dc21

  99-058948

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1_r2

  for suzanne and karen

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  part one 20 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  part two 50 Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  part three 42 Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Color Master

  Numbers are friends for me, more or less.

  It doesn’t mean the same to you, does it—3,844?

  For you it’s just a three and an eight and a four and a four.

  But I say, “Hi! 62 squared.”

  —MATHEMATICIAN WIM KLEIN

  Prologue

  So.

  There was this kingdom once where everybody lived forever. They’d discovered the secret of eternal life, and because of that, there were no cemeteries, no hospitals, no funeral parlors, no books in the bookstore about death and grieving. Instead, the bookstore was full of pamphlets about how to be a righteous citizen without fear of an afterlife.

  The problem was that because of this life spurt, the kingdom was very crowded. The women kept having more and more babies, and the babies had no place to sleep because of the fourteen great-great-grandmothers and great-great-grandfathers that were crowding up all the bedrooms. All the old people were getting older and older, and there was no respect for elders because the elders were just like the youngers; there wasn’t really a whole lot of difference anymore. Space was the real problem. So the king, getting crowded out of his own castle by the endless royal lineage, issued a decree. “Everybody in my kingdom,” he said, “please pick one person in your family to die. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it goes. If you don’t want to do it, please leave. We will have a mass execution on Friday, and it will bring forth much more space and everyone will forever honor those who gave up for the cause.”

  So on Friday, the town congregated. A few folks had packed up their bags and left, but most stayed on the land they loved. The remaining families had spent the week choosing their offering. This wasn’t as hard as might be expected; to be forever honored was appealing, and plus there was an unspoken curiosity in the town about dying—it was sort of like going on a trip to an exotic place no one had ever been before, and just having to stay there for good.

  So that afternoon, each family that showed up in the to
wn square had chosen one martyr to die for the cause of greater community space. There was a lot of weeping and praising going on, and finally everyone pushed forward a volunteer; that is, all except one family. This family simply could not pick. First the mother had said she would die, and then everyone in the family protested, and then the father said he would die, and everyone protested, and then the daughter said she would, and no one liked that idea, and the son offered, but that was no good either, and then the baby cried and they thought it meant she would, but she was the baby and that didn’t make much sense at all. The whole family was arguing and crying and volunteering and pushing and shoving and finally the mother moved forward and said to the king’s executioner: “We cannot pick, so we would all like to die together.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous,” said the town executioner. “Then there will be none of you left. That spoils the whole point.”

  The rest of the town was irritated as well. They didn’t want the whole family gone. This family ran the bakery and was particularly adept at making a fine sausage roll, with ground-up meat and nutmeg inside, so delicious it tasted like dessert.

  The family took off to the sidelines to discuss. The rest of the families waved tearfully at their martyred volunteer, who each waved back, hands shaking with goodwill and terror. Finally, the difficult family stepped forward.

  “Well,” said the father, “how about this. We would like to offer a piece of each of us. With all these pieces combined, it will be as if one less person lived in town.”

  The town executioner cocked his head. “Continue,” he said, interested. The mother stood forward, and said, “You may have my leg.” The father said he’d gladly cut off an arm. The daughter said she’d remove her ear. The son said he’d cut off all his hair, and perhaps a foot, too. They let the baby be.

  “We need a head,” said the town executioner.

  “Fine,” said the father. “I will also deliver my nose.”

  This seemed to satisfy the executioner, so after all the other people were killed, the family was cut up and the pieces were laid out on the ground in their correct places to make a partial person who was the sacrifice to the kingdom’s population control. The town dispersed, disoriented, unsure how to mourn their losses.

  The cut-up family, after recovering, still made their sausage rolls, but no one could stand to buy them anymore because it was so disturbing to go into the store and see the noseless father, with that strap around his face, or watch the legless mother hop in to ring up the cash register, or to have to shout the order at the daughter since she only had one ear left. The family, broke, was forced to leave. They moved to the next town, which wasn’t so bad after all, and opened up a new business, and since no one there had ever seen them whole, here they accepted the family of pieces without a problem and bought sausage rolls day after day. Each family member lived a long long time, and only the baby, who was complete, contracted any disease. When she did, at age twenty, they nursed her and nursed her until her leg fell off with gangrene, and then they had a party to celebrate her arrival.

  That’s the story my father told me at bedtime on my tenth birthday.

  part one 20

  1

  On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax.

  This was the best gift I got in a decade. Before I saw it, shining on the wall of the hardware store like a lover made from steel and wood, I’d given up completely on the birthday celebration.

  On my nineteenth, my mother had kicked me out of the house.

  On my eighteenth, I had a party of two people, and after an hour, both claimed allergies, and went home, sneezing.

  On my seventeenth, I made myself a chocolate cake, but since I didn’t really want to eat it, stirred bug poison in with the mix. It rose beautifully, the best ever, and when I took it out of the oven, a perfect brown dome, I just circled the pan for a few hours, breathing in that warm buttery air. Some ants ate the crumbs on the counter and died.

  On my sixteenth, my aunt sent me a beautiful scarlet silk dress, which smelled and felt as delicate as the inside of a wrist. Stroking it in my lap, I sifted through the phone book, finally picking out the name of a woman who lived at an address with 16s in it. Then I mailed the dress to her. Red is not my color.

  On my fifteenth, fourteenth, thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh birthdays, my mother and I went shopping, and each year, by the end, one of us was in tears of frustration because I didn’t like anything, and I said I really didn’t want anything, except, maybe, a new math workbook. You had to send away for those. They came from a big number barn in the South. My mother shook her head; she refused, flat-out, to buy me math supplies for my birthday, so finally we just put the money in the bank instead.

  The year of my tenth birthday was when my father got sick, and that’s when I started to quit.

  I’d always loved the sound of pianos, so I signed up for lessons and took them for six weeks, and at the end of six weeks we had a recital. I wore a dress and played a minuet and my two hands were doing two different things at the same time and when it was over I drank juice and got hugged and the melody crooned inside my head. I walked my piano teacher to her car, and she smiled at me, proud. The sky clamped down. I lowered my voice: Listen, I said, urgent. You are never, ever to set foot near this house again.

  Her eyebrows pulled in, puzzled. Mona? she asked. What?

  Thanks, I said. But this is the end of the line.

  I told my mother it was too bad, wasn’t it, that the one piano teacher was leaving our small town of no opportunity to become a rock star in the big city. Her eyes widened and she picked up the phone and my heart started pounding, but to my huge relief the piano teacher’s machine picked up and my mother’s message was vague, something like: Good luck and wow! and we wish you all the best.

  Three weeks later, they ran into each other at the market. What they talked about, I have no idea.

  I took dance class ten times, and on the afternoon of my first leap, donated my ballet shoes to charity. I had one boyfriend and within two months had hardened into a statue in bed. I ran track like a shooting star and shot myself straight out of orbit.

  I quit dessert to see if I could do it—of course I could; I quit breathing one evening until my lungs overruled; I quit touching my skin, sleeping with both hands under the pillow. When no one was home, I tied ropes around the piano, so that it would take me thirty minutes with scissors to get back to that minuet. Then I hid all the scissors.

  I did not stop knocking on wood, which I did all the time, as a way to seal each quit into roots and bark; listen: I tell the wood—look at what I’m doing here. Mark this down. Notice.

  No piano. No dessert. No track. Nothing. I am in love with stopping.

  It’s a fine art, when you think about it. To quit well requires an intuitive sense of beauty; you have to feel the moment of turn, right when desire makes an appearance, here is the instant to be severed, whack, this is the moment where quitting is ripe as a peach turning sweet on the vine: snap, the cord is cracked, peach falls to the floor, black and silver with flies.

  I had one boyfriend. He was distracted most of the time but we stood in his front doorway on a warm summer night and his lips moved over my skin like a string quartet and I could feel that peach ready to shake off the tree.

  I quit going to the movies.

  I quit my job at the local diner when the chef kept going on and on about what a good runner I’d been.

  I quit egg salad.

  I quit flipping through atlases.

  I’d long quit the idea of living away from home when, on that nineteenth birthday, my mother threw me out of the house. She closed the town tourist office that she owned and ran, came home early, and said: Mona, happy birthday, my present to you is this. Putting her hands on my shoulders, she marched me out the front door, and stood me on the lawn.

  I love you, she said, but you are too old to live here.

  But I love it here, I said.

 
Her hair blew around in the air. You’re lying, she said, and what’s worse is that you don’t even know it.

  I wasn’t sure if she was adamant or just a lot of talk until she rolled my bed into the front hallway. My father, confused, just sidled around the sloppy pillow and comforter, and for two nights, I dreamt in the space where wall nearly met wall. On the second morning, I woke, went to the bathroom, came back, and found the bed was gone again. And the front door was open. My mother stood in the doorway, her back to me, shoulders lifting and lowering from laughter at the sight of it, covers rumpled, standing in the middle of the front lawn like a cow.

  So I’ll sleep out there then, I said, heading toward it.

  She caught me in her arms and held me close. I could feel the laughter, warm in her arms and her chest.

  I went apartment hunting that Saturday. My mother was off at work, but before I left, my father called to me from the living room. He was feeling feverish, and lay on the couch, a washcloth sprawled on his forehead like the limp flag of a defeated country. Central heating, he advised. Do you need anything? I asked, but he shook his head. And Mona, he said, make sure you get a place with a toilet that flushes. I nodded. I brought him a glass of water before I left.

  The whole idea of moving made me nervous, so I kept company with the number 19 as I walked around town by myself. 19: the third centered hexagonal number. A prime. The amount of time alive of my chin, my toes, my brain. I wandered through the tree-lined streets, to the edge of town where the gray ribbon of highway dressed the hills in the distance like a lumpy yellow gift. I did pass a few FOR RENT signs, but the apartment I finally chose was only three blocks from my parents’ house, sparkled with color, came with a toilet so powerful it could flush socks, and had an address that I liked: 9119.