The Wake

I’m being audited by the state of Minnesota, which I find both appalling — my tax refund is only $46 — and embarrassing. What’s more, I know they picked me because I can’t do math.

I have avoided math for decades, careful not to board trains leaving Peoria at 5 p.m. traveling 62 m.p.h., quietly changing banks whenever I screw up my checkbook and confident that, unless I am buying carpet in Egypt, I probably don’t need to know how to figure the square footage of a pyramid. Having lived a full and rewarding life without math, I was slightly hurt by the tone of the letter from the Minnesota Department of Revenue, which, while it didn’t come right out and say that I had failed to subtract line 35 from line 19 because I had drawn a kitty-cat on line 19, hinted that I should not have had pre-schoolers prepare my taxes.

Like many things in life, such as holding your breath or playing “Chopsticks,” math was a lot more fun when I was a kid. I dominated Quizmo, a game where, if the teacher read, “Nine plus 3,” and you had a twelve, you could put a bean on your card. I also enjoyed long division, especially remainders — I loved the idea that you could do a math problem and, if you had numbers left over, hey, that was OK! Remainder three!

It all fell apart in junior high with the arrival of X, Y and Z. These letters were called variables, and the people in the math books were always undertaking home improvement projects or performing feats of strength that involved multiple variables, such as figuring out how many bricks Juan would need to build a patio around his swimming pool or helping Maryann decide how many green marbles she must add to a jar of red marbles to insure that the final percentage of green marbles would be — I didn’t care about Maryann’s marbles.

As a result of my inattention, I had to take Algebra Survey in high school, where they taught Algebra slowly over two years instead of one. At the time, we Algebra Surveyors considered ourselves a step above the general math students, who, as it turns out, got to take Accounting and were all bound for wealth. I was lost most of the time, though I perked up when we started talking about imaginary numbers. I started giving my imaginary numbers names and interesting back stories and was working out a historical fiction plot in which the imaginary numbers took up arms against some rebel fractions who were trying to secede from the set. At this point I was interrupted by the teacher who, while enjoying my narrative arc, wanted us to learn to graph those imaginary numbers, which is a skill only slightly more useful than carding wool. My teacher was not amused I turned in a blank sheet of graph paper with my imaginary homework on it.

By the end of the second year, we had moved on to some basic geometry, learning about acute triangles and triangles that weren’t acute but had really great personalities. After I told the teacher that “radii” was Latin for “two radios,” she told me if I wanted to major in liberal arts and work for non-profit organizations for the rest of my life then I was welcome to take my abacus and leave. Little did she know that I would become a language arts teacher, where the only arithmetic you have to know is how many identical orange plastic chairs will you need for a class of 22 students.

So you can imagine my alarm when I discovered I would have to pass the math section of the Graduate Record Exam, to go back to school, which meant learning six years of math in six weeks. I could almost hear Juan and Maryann snickering in the background. I turned to the fractions chapter in the GRE study book and opened a box of crackers. Modern math teachers call these “manipulatives,” and they use them in first grade classrooms. I dutifully broke my crackers into fourths and eighths, adding and subtracting them and thinking about peanut butter.

When the problems started to deal with thirds and sixths, I started taking apart Oreos, which did not work as well. Soon I was frantically peeling oranges, separating the sections into sixteenths and searching the cupboard for two-thirds of a cup of gin, which I thought would improve the lesson. It didn’t. I was starting to feel an acute pain in my forehead, as I tried to memorize Key Facts J1 through J15. I made it as far as Key Fact J2, “The measure of an exterior angle of a triangle is equal to the sum of the measures of the two opposite interior angles,” before I went back to eating my fractions homework.

It’s a matter of public record that my GRE math score was a dismal 25, but I’m still awaiting the results of my Minnesota audit. If I have to go to jail, I hope that Juan and Maryann will visit me.