Why Writers Can Be Great Scientists, While Mathematicians Can Be Horrible Ones, Part 2

If you asked my calculus teacher to describe that time, I think she would tell you that I mistreated her. She had rescued me from my dysfunctional family and welcomed me to her home. She generously let me live there for free for several months. She and her husband cheerily invited me along to dinners, concerts, and plays; I would have been happy to stay home and play with their shih tzus. An excellent seamstress who makes costumes and who once made herself an ethereally lovely emerald green satin evening dress with a Mandarin collar, she taught me how to sew with a machine. Dude, she even gave me a sewing machine. Not one of the flimsy modern models with which halfhearted amateurs console themselves , either. A genuine dressmaker’s model with old-school metal parts instead of designer plastic ones. Even Tiny One, my younger sister, covets it; she tried to get me to sell it to her, and only gave up because I was affronted.

She took me to Mass with her, in the year I tried to convert to Roman Catholicism. She offered me rides in the Dark Days When I Didn’t Own a Car in Los Angeles. She invited me to Thanksgiving dinner and made me an elaborate green Christmas stocking, on which a strawberry blond angel hovers lovingly over a decidedly brown-skinned Baby Jesus. I love this stocking. “Do I say things about black people that I shouldn’t?” she asked me once, anxiously. “I want to know, before I get really bad.” We went shopping together and watched movies together. She treated me with the generosity she had always shown me, both when she tutored me after school as a teen and when she flew all the way to Cal upon learning that I’d been hospitalized under suicide watch. Why would she do all this, if she didn’t love me? If she loved me, why wouldn’t she want me to succeed?
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Yet I was a surly, distrusting person, who didn’t help out with chores as often as I should have and who frequently suppressed my anger until I exploded and no one knew what I was talking about. I said hurtful things. Worse, I believed that I was the one who was wronged! This was shamefully ungrateful. “After all,” righteously said one of my teacher’s indignant friends, “if she doesn’t like it so much, why doesn’t she move?”

If you asked me, I would agree. Wholeheartedly. I would add that I owe my calculus teacher and her husband one of the greatest of my debts, and I eagerly await the day when I can repay them in full.

I would also add that I was a poor communicator—unmedicated, to boot— when I lived with them. Were I transported back in time, I would sit my teacher down and say, “I am so incredibly grateful to you. This is why I want to tell you that sometimes I can’t help feeling like you’re trying to tear me down. I only think this because I’m a hypersensitive nerd who’s read way too much Ayn Rand and who paradoxically feels that in spite of her 'superiority' to everyone else, she is the most unlovable creature she knows. Please know that I’m very sorry that my feelings tend to make me treat you unfairly, and that your willingness to hear this confession will help me to consistently treat you with the openness and respect you deserve.”

I would have told her, too, that I knew that she especially hated to be pitied. I sincerely didn’t pity her. I meant every compliment I paid her. I envied her unusual mathematical aptitude. I admired her for withstanding a lifetime of cruelty dealt her for being overweight. I detested the cultural attitudes that have somehow led to the overwhelming conclusion that no woman can be beautiful-- something's always lacking. So it pissed me off when she thought I was being obsequious when she put her appearance down and I refuted her. When I compliment you, I mean it, because when I don’t like someone, I simply don’t say anything. (Unless I get pushed over the edge.) A fat mathematician packing two master’s degrees, a pronouncedly hourglass figure and the face of an Eastern European pageant queen looks very different from the rotund, haggard Albertson’s employee who glared balefully at her in the parking lot on Tuesday. Or, for that matter, that hideously mean sorority chick from Study Abroad whom everyone thought was hot and whom I secretly thought was totally fake and gross; if she hadn’t blond hair, too, no one would have given her a second look. But I digress.

No, I would’ve admitted, I don’t like it when white women who aren’t thin tell me that while their ideal is Hugh Jackman, they’ll settle for black men, because the Hugh Jackmans of the world exclusively pursue the Last Unicorns of the world, while all black men, with their penchant for the voluptuous, also prefer white women whenever they can achieve them. You have no idea how many white women have actually said this to me.

First, it makes me want to yell, “Well, Tiny One and my size-zero-without-fucking-trying ass are dating all the hot white men you really wish you were with. Oh, and my skinny black dad married my skinny Korean mom. Oh, and I ate six pieces of pepperoni pizza and a whole fucking pint of genuine chocolate Haagen Dazs for dinner, and, after I digest all this and shit it into the toilet, I will still fit into my motherfucking jeans without a hitch.” Ha ha! Juniper Shoemaker’s Malicious Thoughts!

Second, it devastates me. Black Americans were this continent’s Untouchable Caste for hundreds of years, the “social line of demarcation”, and the legacy of slavery, even in its last vestiges, constantly shocks me by manifesting itself in diverse insidious ways that inculcate self-loathing in men and women of all colors.

Yeah. I hate that shit. And nothing grieves me more than feeling forced to witness self-loathing that I have no power to mitigate. But I could’ve been kinder about it, since you have been my friend. I have said my share of racist things about white people, and you have forgiven me.

For inadvertently reducing my parents to racial stereotypes and dismissing my uniquely close-knit nuclear family as dysfunctional, I would say, I can forgive you, because you didn’t mean it. I know that you are the accidental last of five children and you have had to compete for attention in a way that I never have.

Moreover, I know that you are fearfully, fearfully clever, and that you are fully aware that you preemptively snark at everyone you encounter, lest they get a chance to pity you. You are so clever that you confirmed this for me yourself. Additionally, I am a big gal and I can handle being abruptly and passive-aggressively told, on multiple occasions, that I’m “short” when I’m 5’7”, and that boys don’t chase girls “with no boobs to speak of” (tell that to them!), and that I will never meet a man with whom I can have a happy marriage, because they don’t exist. With effort, I can handle constantly being told that I could very well die tomorrow-- which, along with everyone else, I already know-- and that life will disappoint me.

With more effort, I can handle your announcements that my parents are smarter than me because they worked their way up from destitute, neglectful families, while I have always lived in a loving home in which I wanted for nothing. I know you think that people care that while your husband and I went to competitive Research I universities, you attended state schools on full scholarships, because your parents told their five children that if they wanted money for school, they would have to earn it themselves. Who wouldn’t be defensive?

(But, by the way, can you please be proud of your tremendous accomplishments without pronouncing them superior to mine, and without deriding my parents for providing for me? Especially my parents! As Mrs. Method and Theory* said, “Why is it superior to have five children that you can’t afford? Juniper’s parents had childhoods so hard that they didn’t want their daughters to have any of the same experiences, and they worked really hard to materially provide for them. I personally have more respect for that.”)

With even more effort, I can handle your limiting my IQ to 140 even though I’ve never even taken the fucking test, and I can handle your delusion that I resent my dearth of musical talent. Yeah, I have no musical talent. I can’t sing at all, and I never played instruments with artistry. WHO THE FUCK CARES? You know what? It’s a fucking relief, to have a list of things that I TOTALLY SUCK ASS AT in addition to a list of things I do incomparably well! It’s wonderful to go to the theater or a concert and marvel at the beauty of the singer’s voice, or the proficiency of the pianist on the floor! You just want to hear it—you don’t fucking care who’s doing it! And you, being loaded with talent yourself, surely know what the fuck I’m fucking talking about!

(Yes. I did say, “with even more effort”. )

If I had a time machine, I would return to that time and say all these things. And I would say all of it, because my high-school calculus teacher is an extraordinary person, who is still young even as my twenty-eight-year-old ass types this, and who can achieve whatever the fuck she strives to achieve. Therefore, she doesn’t deserve to be spared. Or pitied. Definitely not.

At this point, Valued Reader, you probably think that I and my calculus teacher aren’t friends anymore. Actually, we are. We rarely spoke during my time in grad school, but we remained friends.





*Mrs. Method and Theory is a stellar academic in her own right. I just haven't figured out what to nickname her yet.