“Brynn,” my dad said. “You know what happened—”
“I don’t know!” My eyes burned hot with the threat of tears. “I don’t know what happened! Nobody does!”
“Brynn, I’m sorry,” he said. His voice seemed to back down. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
I couldn’t speak, my throat was so tight with anger. An image of my mom flashed through my mind—a silent, black monster tearing her to pieces from the shadows. The silence in the phone held for so long that I thought the call had dropped.
“Okay, well, love you, Brynn.” He waited for my response, but I wasn’t going to give him one.
“I’ll call you again soon,” he said.
“Sure.”
The phone screen went blank, and I realized that my hand was shaking as I set the phone down. I didn’t know how he could pretend that everything was normal between us. He had tortured me with his words, and never apologized, never, not once—
I pushed the back door open and walked outside. The evening air chilled my skin, but I didn’t even notice in my heated anger. The cypress tree in the back of the yard had grown some more since I went away to college. My grandmother and I had planted it right after my mother died—to remind us of her always, Nagy said—and although it had started out the same height as eight-year-old me, now its sweet-smelling branches towered over my head. I reached out to touch the bark, my fingers still trembling. My stomach turned at the thought of leaving California, of leaving my Nagy behind and with her everything I knew and loved. But then I thought of what—and who—would be waiting for me in Hungary. Just seeing Eliot’s face in my mind calmed me down after the horrible conversation with my dad. I breathed more easily as I touched my hand to the heart of the tree.
“Hi mom,” I said. I let myself sink down to the patch of grass next to the cypress. A ladybug crawled over a thin blade of grass, and I lay my finger down in front of it, letting the small beetle-backed creature traipse over my skin before it uncurled its wings and hovered gently away. It always made me feel strange to begin talking to my mom, but once I started it was always okay. Like she could hear me.
“I’m really nervous about this trip, mom. I know I should just be proud of myself for winning the prize, but I’m scared too. And there’s this guy…”
I stopped, unsure if I should say anything. I laughed once, nervously, and looked around. Only the brush overheard our conversation.
“He’s really nice, and he loves music, and he loves Satie. You’d like him, mom, he played your favorite song.”
Hot tears came out of nowhere, running down my cheeks. I didn’t bother to wipe them. Gone was the anger I had felt while talking with my dad. All that was left was a gentle sorrow. The dissonant notes of the Gymnopedie played low in my mind.
“We can’t be together, but it’s just nice to know that I can like someone. And someone can like me… like that. Nobody ever looked at me like that before.”
I thought of Eliot’s eyes on me and my body shamed me by reacting instantly to the memory. A heat spread through me, and I brushed the wetness from my cheeks.
“Anyway, I’m coming to visit you, mom. It’s been a long time since you left but I’m finally coming.” My voice cracked, and a host of terrible images flew through my mind like blackbirds on wing. I shook them away and reached forward, pressing my hand into the cool bark.
“I can’t wait to see you, mom. I love you.”
Fate was often cruel to me. My hips were too round to wear a sleek princess’s gown, and I could never imagine myself in any fairy tale that did not end in tragedy. How could I? All of my life I had known sorrow, and it became too easy to retreat from reality into academics when I needed to.
The wicked mother and stepsisters, both perfectly beautiful, were real enough. Hissing spite at me between breaths, they convinced my father that I was inferior. He hated me, I knew it, because I reminded him so much of her, of my mother. My mother had left him to go to her own mother in Hungary—I remember their arguments over her leaving— and that was how he remembered her. He must have thought that I would blame him for my mother’s death, and to prevent that judgment from coming down upon him he made of me a monster. I was only a child.
Occasionally I remember the insults that have been thrown at me, either casually or in malice, and their barbs still prick. The torment only ended when I left to live with my Nagy, when she came to America to rescue me, but the echoes of my stepfamily’s words still resonate within me. After so much damage, I cannot fully trust words. Unlike mathematics, words can be twisted too easily to deceive, to cover up, to hurt. It pains me to write when I know I cannot write the truth as it is exactly. Nobody can. So I do my best, and when I fail I go back to my proofs, the lines and numbers that match up perfectly and never, ever lie.