more HATE numbers, and she has forgotten many of the primes and prime factors that she used to whisper because they were «too good». Numbers, like others of her obsessions, have, in her own phrase, «worn away», as she has entered more and more fully into the normal world of the everyday. And that itself is normal. How many of us leave an interest behind, or a skill, as the piano stands unopened or the sketchbooks gather dust?
And yet — how much there is in Jessy’s mind we don’t know about! A year ago her father and I were wondering why our home phone gave a continual busy signal; was it out of order? Jessy picked up on our conversation. (That itself is something she never used to do.) Unexpectedly she informed us that the out-of- order signal was like the busy signal but with 120 beeps per minute instead of 60. Now who knew that?
But counting may be only a habit when you’ve done it all your life. There are other indications that numbers persist, no longer emotion-filled, no longer secret, but underground. This year I notice that her social security number ends in 1421; I mention that (obviously) it’s divisible by 7. It’s even more obvious to Jessy; «Divisible by 72», she says. I recall another instance. Jessy had written 1875 in one of her old books and I asked her if she remembered anything about it. Though it was half her lifetime past, her answer was immediate. «Has a 3 in it. And 5V». And indeed, divide it by 3 and you get 625: 5 X 5 X 5 X 5! It’s no great surprise, then, to find she’s factored the year of her birth: 1958 is 2 X 979. «979», she says, «is definitely a prime».
As I go over envelopes and slips I find an old calculation. 1988 = 22 X 497, 497 = 7 X 71. Jessy is interested in the book about her, and answers willingly when I ask her about 1998. Divided by 33 it equals 74, which divided by 2 gives (old faithful!) 37. I ask about 1999. It’s early in the year and Jessy, ever truthful, says she’s not sure about 1999. 1997? But by now she’s had enough. What’s past is past: «I’m too old», she says.
Chapter 7
«The hangman hangs by the clothespin because of new politeness»
Strangeness/Secret Life — a label on an envelope in a folder crammed with other envelopes, Hypersensitivities, Obsessions, Compulsions, and the rest. As if a folder, as if even a suitcase, could contain the strangeness that suffused our family’s every day. Strange systems, strange numbers; still, I need another chapter to explore (not exhaust) the strangeness of that busy mind, the bewildering interplay between its creativity and its handicap.
The contents of the suitcase are spread all over my bedroom as I try to classify and select. Drawings of «little imitation people». «Books», hundreds of them; there were months when she made one almost every day. As her language progressed she titled them: Book About the Number with Three in It; Book About the Number of Three in It; Book About the Bump; Book About the Light in the Science Building; Book About the Shadow. The records of her preoccupations, her enjoyments, her anxieties, her desolations. I have been in no hurry to put them away, thinking she would be interested in these relics of past absorptions. In the years when talking — and human interaction — was an educational project, the best way to elicit speech was to revisit this library of former experience. Her books were made for her own satisfaction, not to communicate experience but to record it. Still, she would explain if we asked the right questions and we didn’t press too hard. Though intentional, eager communication («Come see!») lay far in the future, the books, with their successive layers of explanations, allowed us glimpses of the world within.
She wouldn’t — couldn’t — say much about her books in the early years, often not more than a few garbled words. But I’d write them down. A year or two later, returning to the same book, I could gauge how much her language had progressed, when she now had the words to clarify the explanations that had been a puzzle. I’d write those down too.
Jessy remembered then and she remembers now. Briefly the books about the numbers catch her interest; she wants to explain the «difference between ‘with’ and ‘of’». «Of» means divisible by 3; «with» means there is an actual 3 to be seen. But she looks no further. It’s I who am interested. This is the past; she has better things to do.
The little imitation people came first, inspired by the illustrations for Gulliver’s Travels and The Borrowers. Before she understood words, I was always drawing for her, showing her pictures. We looked at The Treasury of Art Masterpieces; we looked at the nice explicit illustrations in beginning readers. We looked at Harold and the Purple Crayon, where what Harold draws with his crayon becomes his own story. And the year she turned nine she too began to draw her own stories and enter them. The books began.
The first were the series of what Jessy called «comic books». Harold and his crayon provided both inspiration and model; Jessy’s adventures followed his closely. TV was another source; Batman appeared, and renditions of TV logos — NBC, ABC and true to form, nonsense acronyms, VBC, ZBC, KBC. Jessy was now interested enough in letters to use them. Mysterious words appeared — not words she might be expected to know, like «cake», but GAKE, VAKE, GOKE, day after day. More nonsense, we thought — until, years later, she explained those as the noise of the heat coming on in the radiator and we understood why she had refused to enter rooms where she might hear the offending sound. Sometimes, however, the secret life remained secret. «Not for Mama. Oh oh, do not look at any more pictures, please!» and she crumpled it up and threw it away. Enough was enough.
Jessy was quite conscious of her sources. «This is all from Batman. I never understood the Batman plot, which involved two tigers, a fight, and a fall in the water. But the progression was orderly, the drawings clearly sequential. If the characters climbed a hill on one page, on the next they descended, or („like Harold!“) they fell from it, their streaming hair obeying gravity to register their fall. I had made her figures out of pipe cleaners, and Piper Cleaner Man, Piper Cleaner Lady, Piper Cleaner Girl and Boy, Piper Cleaner Fairy — and Paper Doll Jessy — formed the basic cast, occasionally joined by Big Girl Jessy, Mama, and Daddy». Piper Cleaner people came and went mysteriously, Jessy keeping careful count. Sometimes she doubled the group, and there would be two Paper Doll Jessies as well. The cast increased as she grew more interested in numbers: twelve, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one.
The next year numbers took over. An isolated sheet shows the numbers from o to 8, drawn hollow so a corresponding number of Piper Cleaner people could cavort with Jessy inside each one. (The zero, of course, is empty.) Then Piper Cleaners became rare, replaced by row after row of standing figures whose bodies are actual numbers. There are odd consistencies; the hair on each 5 figure 5, 15, 50 always stands on end, and there is always a 200-person, often Jessy herself, to remind us that that busy mind knew exactly what it was doing, even if we didn’t.[25]
Jessy’s simple plots were uniformly upbeat. Paper Doll Jessy may open a door and fall into water (bubbles rising), but she finds another door, a rope, and returns to the Piper Cleaner family. The Piper Cleaners, naturally thin, procure sticks of gum and grow fat. If, as in Batman, they fight, the fight is «for fun». If they fall, they and Paper Doll Jessy still proceed home, to end safely in her bed, or occasionally with a party. That was natural enough; Harold’s adventures ended happily too. But the next year, when she’d done with Piper Cleaner books, Slovenly Peter hardly encouraged so benign a vision. Heinrich Hoffmann’s verses for bad children can raise the hair on an ordinary child. But Jessy made a book of two of the worst; in one a cry-baby literally cries her eyes out, in the other a hyperactive boy romps so hard he breaks off his foot. The German illustrator showed the detached foot and the two eyes on the floor, and so did Jessy. In her version, however, «ring a bell, girl and dog come» to restore the eyes and bring another foot. «Put the foot on, stand up!» In other books poor families are given meat, new houses, and finally a Christmas tree. Even a book about a terrifying night-long lightning storm ends with Jessy peacefully in bed, the storm over and a cerulean blue window heralding the dawn.
But the child’s world of happy endings was coming to an end. Numbers could turn bad. Flavor tubes and weather anxieties lay ahead. And Jessy, entering adolescence, was more and more engaged in the human world. We were glad of that. But the human world is not Nirvana. Her family, her companions, her teachers, had been
