The Tenth Muse Read online

  She looked up. “Yes?”

  “Forty-five,” I said.

  “Forty-five?”

  “That’s the answer.”

  Mrs. Linen sighed. “How many times do I have to tell you, guessing does not count?”

  She had, in fact, said this to me many times, and each time it had wounded me. “I’m not guessing,” I said. “I never guess.”

  She stood up then and strode to my desk. She picked up my paper, and when she saw it was blank, she cried, “You didn’t even write the problem down! If you don’t show your work, you get no credit. Now stop wasting my time.”

  Back then this idea of showing work was one of the most difficult concepts for me to understand. What did it mean to show your work? Why did I have to write something down if I understood it perfectly? And when was it necessary, and when was it not? For instance, if I didn’t have to show my work to say 1 + 2 = 3, why did I have to show my work for 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 45? How were they different? This was a far more complicated idea for me than that of simple sums because it involved tracking the movements of my own mind, which was a skill that took me much longer to learn.

  Now I would be able to tell you that I had solved the problem so quickly because I’d realized a simple pattern: that if you took the numbers on the opposite ends of the sum, 1 and 9, and added them together, they equaled 10. So did the next two numbers moving inward: 2 and 8. As did 3 and 7, and 4 and 6, with only 5 left over. So four tens and a five. Almost two centuries ago Carl Gauss had presented his teacher with the formula to solve a similar problem, but that explanation took more sophistication than I was capable of back then: for me, math and its attendant pattern-making was purely intuitive.

  Perhaps this is what frustrated Mrs. Linen about me—the inner workings of my mind were inaccessible to myself, and thus, to her. After standing over my desk sternly for a moment, she said, “Very well, add 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 + 13 + 14 + 15 + 16 + 17 + 18 + 19.”

  “One hundred ninety,” I answered at once. (This I was able to deduce because of course it was the same as the first answer added to itself plus 10 tens.)

  “Nonsense,” she said.

  “One hundred ninety,” I said.

  Mrs. Linen went to her desk and began writing. After her hand stopped moving, she looked down for a long moment. Then she looked up, met my eye, and said, “You don’t know everything.”

  “I know,” I said. Of course I didn’t—that was the unmet goal, wasn’t it, toward which I was hurtling as fast as I could, headlong?

  She stood up and went to the front of the blackboard. “Katherine, please come here to the front of the room,” she said.

  I obeyed.

  She took a piece of chalk and drew a small circle on the blackboard. “Put your nose inside the circle and do not move at all until class is over,” she said. This was a punishment she reserved for the worst infractions in our class: when boys fought or said bad words, they were often made to stand in front of the classroom like this. I was the first—and it would turn out, only—girl to be punished this way.

  When I hesitated, Mrs. Linen put her hand on the back of my head and pressed it against the blackboard until my nose was firmly squashed in the center of the circle she’d drawn.

  The other children had only ever been made to stand like this for half an hour, but I stood for over two hours with my face pressed against the blackboard. My knees grew stiff and my back started to ache. I kept waiting for Mrs. Linen to release me, but even after the last bell had rung to announce the end of school, and I turned away from the board to leave, Mrs. Linen said, “I did not give you leave to move, Katherine.”

  I knew I would miss the bus if I didn’t go with the rest of my classmates, but I pushed my nose against the board again and felt as if anything could happen.

  I heard Mrs. Linen leave the room. Still, I did not move. I heard her return and sit down at her desk. I heard her shuffle through some papers. I heard the scratch of her pen. And then after some very long minutes, she said, “You may take a seat, Katherine.”

  So I went to sit at my desk, my legs trembling.

  “I called your mother,” Mrs. Linen said. “She’s on her way.”

  MY PARENTS ARRIVED TOGETHER, tense and unsmiling. They greeted Mrs. Linen and sat beside me in the small student-size chairs.

  Our classroom was decorated with maps and giant-size letters and drawings, and my teacher stood in front of them. She struck an imposing figure, and it was only then that I noticed how out of place my parents looked, squeezed into child-size furniture. My mother, especially, looked ill at ease, and this frightened me. Until that moment, my parents had been the ultimate authorities in my world. And now I felt as if I had gotten them into trouble, as if they had to answer to Mrs. Linen as well.

  “Your daughter refuses to follow instructions,” Mrs. Linen said. “She won’t show her work, and she skips ahead without waiting for instructions.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” my father said. “Is she in trouble for being advanced?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Linen. “She reads ahead and interrupts. She doesn’t listen, and she shows off. It disrupts my lessons and makes the other children feel bad. I won’t have it in my classroom.”

  “That’s not true,” I gasped. “I listen.”

  “This is what I’m talking about with the outbursts,” Mrs. Linen said. She shook her head. “No self-discipline, I’m afraid.”

  “I have self-discipline,” I interjected, but my father held up his hand to silence me and nodded at the teacher. “We’ll talk to her,” he said. “We’ll see to it that she behaves.”

  “Please be sure that she does,” Mrs. Linen said. And then she motioned at the door, to say she was done with us. My parents stood up quickly, my mother took me by the hand, and we left.

  AT HOME my father sat me down and said, “Tone it down.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “I answered her questions.”

  “Then do it without showing off,” my father said.

  I flinched. The problem was I enjoyed answering questions. Numbers were predictable and knowable, and I liked getting them right. Why was it bad to take pleasure in this? Why was it necessary to pretend otherwise, when the thing I loved most about numbers was their very straightforwardness? Other children were praised when they answered—only I was punished. Tears sprang from my eyes. I choked them back.

  My mother, sitting silently next to me, unexpectedly reached over and took my hand. I sidled up to her, eager for comfort. “Katherine,” she said, and her voice was kind. “Do your best. No matter what anyone says. Next year you’ll have a different teacher, and things may change then. Life is long, and nothing lasts forever. So don’t worry, and maybe for now, don’t draw attention to yourself.” My mother often said things like this that seemed both wise and wrong at the same time: my best could not help but draw attention—that was the problem.

  “Why do I have to do as she says?” I asked. “What if she’s wrong?”

  “She’s your teacher,” my father said. “She’s in charge, and you have to treat her with respect, not think that you know better than her.”

  The injustice of this choked me. But I told my parents I would do as they said. And I did. I stopped talking in class, and soon I stopped listening, too. I read my textbooks and ransacked the school and public libraries for more. Because it was impossible to please my teacher, I learned to please myself. I stopped trying to follow her guidance and followed my own interests instead.

  The following year my new teacher immediately skipped me forward a grade, and for the most part things were much better. Still, I have always thought of my confrontation with Mrs. Linen as a defining moment from school. It was how I became a freethinker, the moment I learned to distrust authority and question whether grown-ups had my best interests in mind. For that, I am grateful, because without this early preparation, I would never have made it in l
ife. Still, I wonder now why it had to be necessary, and why my teacher disliked me so much—whether it was because I was a girl, or my family wasn’t from New Umbria, or because I was half Chinese. But it occurs to me now that even if those were not the reasons she treated me badly, they were the conditions that made it possible to do so.

  Chapter 3

  THE FIRST THING I EVER OWNED WAS A NOTEBOOK that my father gave me before I can even remember. My father had brought it back from the war as a souvenir, he told me—he liked the look of it. It was made of soft brown leather, with a cord that wrapped around it. Inside, the whole book was stuffed with writing. It filled the pages and looped around the margins—words in German I couldn’t read, as well as formulas and symbols, and incredibly precise, small graphs and drawings, all in a handwriting that was nearly impossible to decipher. On the front page were the initials S. M., and beneath that, Universität Göttingen, 1935.

  When I asked my father where he’d gotten this book, how he’d acquired it, he would never answer—only say that it seemed like something I might want someday. He refused, as a general rule, to talk about the war or his experience in it. I knew he’d shattered his right arm and been sent home, that he’d been told he’d never regain full use of it again, except that against all expectations, he had.

  The one time I pressed him for more information about what he had done as a soldier and what the war had been like—I must have been seven or eight at the time—he dropped his head in his hands and wept. I had never seen him cry before, and the suddenness of his grief and his inability to overcome it terrified me so much that I didn’t ask again. It made a deep impression on me—that even the memory of war, years later, was too terrible to discuss.

  As I grew older I couldn’t help but wonder about all the things my father wouldn’t tell me. I wondered if he had killed anyone. I knew he probably had, of course—that’s what soldiers did. It was their job. But my mother wouldn’t tell me either. Her past was even more a mystery than his. Sometimes I heard her cry out at night, and when I ran to my parents’ bedroom to see what was wrong, the door was locked against me. When I pounded, she or my father would respond from the other side, “Don’t worry, Katherine, it was just a nightmare,” but their voices were strained and they never let me in.

  Sometimes I had nightmares, too, that I woke up crying from. They were always the same—I came upon my mother’s body in the creek that ran through our town, her body caught by a branch, being pushed back and forth by the water. My father stood over her with a gun. After these dreams, I crawled to the door of my parents’ bedroom in the dark and curled up against their door. When my parents found me in the morning and asked me why I did this, I couldn’t answer, couldn’t tell them I was afraid that they would die and leave me utterly alone. I had learned the silence of my parents well. I knew all my grandparents were dead, but neither my mother nor father discussed them, much less how they’d died or when. That topic was off-limits, but I felt the proximity of those losses, the enormity of them, and was afraid that if I voiced my fears, they would come true.

  One day I begged my parents to promise they would never die. And when they promised, I protested. “But that’s impossible. Everybody dies.”

  My father laughed and said I was too clever, but my mother sat down on the floor next to me and said she would tell me a story.

  The Story of the Wise Princess Kwan-Yin

  Once upon a time, there was a king who had three daughters, and of the three he loved Kwan-Yin best. She was kind to everyone, especially the suffering and the poor. The king had no sons and declared that whomever she married would be heir to his throne, and she would be queen. Kwan-Yin did not wish to marry, or to rule a kingdom, and begged her father to reconsider.

  “I do not want to live in wealth or power when others are sick and in pain,” she said. “Instead, let me join a convent, where I could study and devote my life to serving those in need.”

  Her father the king was angered by her request, but because he loved her, he reminded her with gentleness that of all the virtues, filial duty was the most important. He would not grant her wish. Instead, he would choose a husband for her and in one month hence, they would marry, and she would rule as queen.

  When Kwan-Yin saw she could not change his mind, she ran away. A convent took her in, but the nuns were cruel there, believing she was just a simple beggar. They beat her and made her work until her hands cracked and bled. Still, she was good to all she met and gave everything she had to those even less fortunate than her.

  Then one day, an army came to the gates to take Kwan-Yin back to her father’s kingdom. There, he gave her this choice: accept the man he’d chosen and rule, or die. Kwan-Yin was executed that very day.

  Upon her death she was sent to the gates of heaven. The angels and gods and goddesses who dwelled there bowed to her and said, “In your infinite goodness you surpass all who dwell here. You may rule here as a goddess.”

  But again, Kwan-Yin refused. She said she could not enter heaven when there was so much suffering on earth. Instead, she said, she would sit upon a mountain peak inside a lotus heart and listen to all appeals for mercy, offering what aid she could. She would only enter heaven after all earthly suffering was eased.

  “SO,” MY MOTHER SAID, “if ever you’re afraid or suffering, you need only to pray to Kwan-Yin, who sits on a mountain, listening for the cries of those who need her help. She won’t rest until every living being has attained enlightenment.”

  “What’s enlightenment?” I asked.

  My mother thought. “An awareness that transcends suffering,” she said. “A consciousness that lets you rise above it.”

  UNTIL I WAS NINE YEARS OLD, I’d been terrified of lightning. When it stormed I’d hide in the bathroom, which was the most interior room in the house. During one particularly intense storm, my father coaxed me out and took me to where my mother sat on the porch. “Your mother isn’t afraid,” he said. “Look at her. She loves the storm.”

  My mother was curled in a chair, a blanket wrapped around her against the chill, her eyes bright with rare happiness. She saw me and smiled. Another bolt of lightning split the sky, and she began counting aloud: “One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand,” and when she got to six one-thousand, she turned to me and exclaimed, “Now, Katherine! The thunder is coming now!” And just then the thunder cracked.

  “How did you know?” I gasped. I was so astonished that I forgot in that moment to be afraid.

  “Come here and watch with me,” she said as she unwrapped the blanket that surrounded her, and opened up her arms, and let me scamper in. I leaned back with a sigh of happiness.

  For the rest of that afternoon she let me sit in her lap, her arms loose around me, except when lightning streaked across the sky, and then her arms would tighten, and she’d hold me close. It felt as if we were part of the storm that way, and it was exhilarating. She taught me how to count the seconds between lightning strikes and cracks of thunder and told me the shorter the time between the two, the closer the lightning was to us. We tried to guess the patterns to predict when the lightning would come, and when we guessed right, we shouted with laughter, and I imagined we were the ones controlling the weather, making the light flash against the sky. I was hooked. From that moment on, I stopped flinching at the sound of thunder and anticipated it instead.

  THE NEXT WEEK, we checked out a book on lightning from the public library, and I learned a bolt of lightning contains one billion volts of electricity and is five times hotter than the sun. I learned that lightning is electricity that opens a hole in the air, a channel that collapses back in on itself when the current leaves it, causing the boom we call thunder.

  “The air shakes,” I explained to my mother. “That’s what makes the noise.”

  “What causes the lightning, though?” she asked. “What makes it hot?”

  So I showed her the part in the book that said clouds are tiny droplets of water that hang togeth
er in the sky, and how when bits of ice move around and collide, they create an electric charge, which fills the cloud. The particles in the cloud separate, and the lighter positive particles rise toward the top while the heavier negative ones fall to the bottom. In the end, lightning is all about attraction: the low-hanging negative charges in the clouds pull on the positive particles in the ground, which climb as high as they can up anything that stands up, like a lightning rod, or a person, or a tree. The attraction between the sky and the ground builds and builds, until the electrical charges finally burst toward one another, tearing a hole through the air in their haste to connect.

  “What are particles, though?” I asked my mother. “What’s a positive or negative charge?”

  We went back to the library to find a book about protons and electrons, and I learned everything in the world is made of particles, of atoms, and charges that hold us and the entire universe together. It would be a while before I learned about the math underlying these relationships, but that’s how I began to learn about wind currents and weather, the stars and the sun. Whenever it stormed, my mother and I went to the porch to watch. My mother never instilled in me a sense of family history or tradition, but she did give me a reverence, an awe for nature—and the belief that I could get closer to it by learning how it worked.

  MY FATHER HAD NOTED my interest in science and was always showing me little things—how if you put a marble in an empty light socket and then flipped the switch on, the marble would shoot out with a pop. He built me a combination lock out of wood, and a burglar alarm that went off when you opened the lid to its box, as well as a little train set that went round and round. I still have a scar on my cheek from when we blew the cap off a bottle with acetylene and water—my father lost his grip on the bottle and accidentally pointed it toward me as it burst off. I felt no pain when it sliced into my cheek, but I remember my father shouting in alarm. A moment later I put my hand up to my face and felt something slick and warm on my fingers. When I looked at them, they were shiny and red with blood.