Life by the numbers

By GINA VIVINETTO

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

Funny thing is, once Mona gets good at something, be it the piano lessons, running, dancing lessons, she quits it. Mona likes to keep things orderly, no excess. Subtract whatever's inconvenient. The only thing Mona can't shake is the magic of numbers and her own anxiety at engaging in life.

Aimee Bender's An Invisible Sign of My Own is a modern day fairy tale examining the relationships between adults and children, as well as those between adults. It's told with grace and passion, with Bender, author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Girl In The Flammable Skirt, writing in her signature dreamy minimalist tone. Bender is a joy to read: playful, inventive but also capable of prose that is breathtakingly pretty. There are several lines in each of this novel's chapters that scream to be underlined. But what Bender is best at, is the simple art of storytelling.

At 20, Mona accepts a job teaching arithmetic to second graders. This turns her orderly life topsy turvy. Though Mona exhibits her share of obsessive-compulsive behaviors -- knocking on wood when she's nervous, gorging on soap to fend off sexual situations -- she has managed to stay just outside the human condition. Problems found in that mess are, after all, not easily solveable.

Unlike math.

"I find math tests soothing; all those numbers on the page nervous and undone," Mona explains, "waiting for me to come over and settle them into the right spots."

At school, Mona meets 7-year-old Lisa Venus, whose mother has cancer. She attaches herself to her favorite student, feeling waves of empathy that she struggles with when it comes to her detached, gray-pallored father. Add to the equation handsome Benjamin Smith, the school's young science teacher with the sexy chemical burn marks on his finger, and see Mona fail to neatly solve for X, emotionally.

Not that this math whiz isn't capable of passion. She's wonderfully creative, challenging her students to bring in number-shaped objects. Lisa brings in a number made out of her mother's hospital I.V. tube. Mona brings in an ax to represent the number seven -- on second thought not such a good idea.

Bender's humor runs rampant in segments detailing Mona's intrigue with Benjamin's equally unorthodox teaching style. For an assignment investigating the effects talking to houseplants has on their growth, Benjamin has his class divided into those who talk positively and negatively to them.

"The kids assigned to cuss were thrilled beyond belief until Mimi Lunelle's mother found her daughter telling the bathroom fern it was a shame on the family's name and to f---g go to bed thirsty."

Though Mona's charmed by Benjamin, she repeatedly refuses his advances, to the point where she is cold to her frustrated paramour. Bender captures Mona's ambivalence perfectly:

"I was so grateful that he wasn't touching me that I wanted, suddenly, acutely, for him to touch me."

Finally Mona succumbs to Benjamin's invitations with a trip to the town's only movie theater. When sparks fly, Mona sees it all again through her math lens:

"Just like that, he traversed the space and halved it, then quartered it, then eighthed it, then shut it down completely until there was no space between us at all and his lips were warm and tasted like butter from the popcorn."

Bender has a keen eye for summing up people. Her descriptions of various students are brief and lithe. The school's art teacher is "the kind who noted birthdays down in her little book with the vigor of someone who has often been forgotten."

Once Mona becomes engaged in the lives of those around her -- once she "adds" herself to them, she is overcome with empathy. She is obsessed with quirky Mr. Jones, her former algebra teacher, who now runs the local hardware store. Since she was a child Mona has witnessed him wearing around his neck numbers he fashions out of wax. These indicate his mood. For months he wore a 2, "a very bad time." Lately Mona has seen him perky, wearing "42," looking "younger, brighter, higher better."

An Invisible Sign of My Own reads simply, but it packs powerful messages about communication, alienation, about identity and the risk of adding and subtracting people from your life. Though Mona never stops seeing parallelograms and triangles of isosceles in everything, she gets some new heart-shaped insights. Bender allows Mona -- and us -- in on a secret: Life is fine even when it's not orderly. And sometimes brainy math geeks have poetic souls.

An Invisible Sign of My Own

By Aimee Bender

Doubleday, $24

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