The Vanishing Half(65)

Eleven


Statistically speaking, the likelihood of encountering a niece you’d never met at a Beverly Hills retirement party was improbable but not impossible. Which Stella Sanders might have, at least intellectually, understood. Improbable events happened all the time, she tried to explain to her students, because improbability is an illusion based on our preconceptions. Often it has nothing to do with statistical truth. After all, it’s wildly improbable that any one person is alive. A particular sperm cell fertilizing a particular egg, producing a viable fetus. Twins are more likely to be stillborn, identical twins more vulnerable than fraternal twins, yet here she was, teaching Introduction to Statistics at Santa Monica College. Likely does not mean certain. Improbable does not mean impossible.

She’d discovered statistics unexpectedly in her second year at Loyola Marymount University. She didn’t call herself a sophomore then; she was ten years older than everyone else in the class, so the title felt silly. She didn’t even know what she wanted to study, only that she liked numbers. Statistics entranced her because so many people misunderstood it. In Las Vegas, she’d sat beside Blake in a smoke-filled casino as he lost four hundred dollars at the craps table, staying in the game longer than he should have because he was convinced that he was due. But dice owed you nothing.

“It doesn’t matter what’s already rolled,” she finally told him, exasperated. “Each number is equally likely if the dice are fair. Which they’re not.”

“She takes one class,” Blake told the man sitting next to them.

The man laughed, puffing at his cigar. “I always stay on,” he said. “Rather lose than know I would’ve won if I hadn’t played it safe.”

“Well said.” Blake and the man clinked their glasses. Statistical truth, like any other truth, was difficult to swallow.

For most people, the heart decided, not the mind. Stella was like everyone else in this regard. Hadn’t her decision to follow Blake from New Orleans been an emotional one? Or her choice to stay with him over the years? Or her agreement to, say, attend Bert Hardison’s retirement party, even cajoling her daughter to appear, because, Blake claimed, they needed to show a united front? One big happy family—it mattered to the rest of the partners. Blake was a marketing man who understood the value of his own brand, Stella and Kennedy merely an extension of it. So she’d agreed to go to that party. In spite of everything, she’d whisked around the living room, playing the dutiful wife even as Bert Hardison, smelling like brandy, crowded near her all night, his hand on her waist (as if she wouldn’t notice!). But Blake, of course, didn’t see, huddling in the corner with Rob Garrett and Yancy Smith, while Stella tried to make small talk with Donna Hardison, keeping an eye on her daughter, who kept inching near the bar, and avoiding the red stain on the white rug that a lanky black man was feebly blotting with soda water.

There’d been a disturbance earlier, a black girl spilling wine on the rug, which had, for a few moments, stolen the attention of everyone at the party. Stella had just arrived, so she’d only seen the aftermath. A charcoal girl frantically mopping an expensive merlot out of the even more expensive rug before Donna shrieked that she was only making it worse. Even after the girl was dismissed, the party continued to discuss her.

“I just can’t believe it,” Donna told Stella. “What’s the point of hiring waiters if they can’t hold on to a damn bottle of wine?”

The topic bored Stella, to tell the truth. The type of minor skirmish that people fixated on during a party where there was nothing more interesting to discuss. Unlike the math department mixers, where conversations leapt from one topic to another—inscrutable, pretentious, but never boring. She always felt lucky to be in the presence of such brilliant people. Thinkers. Blake’s colleagues viewed intelligence as a means to an end, and the end was always making more money. But in the mathematics department at Santa Monica College, no one expected to be rich. It was enough to know. She was lucky to spend her days like this, knowing.

That night, driving home from the party, she’d found herself thinking about Loretta Walker. Stella was wearing the mink coat Blake had surprised her with that Christmas and maybe the luxurious fur brushing against her calves reminded her. Or maybe because that morning, when she’d told Blake that she would be late to the party, they’d fought again about the job that she only had because of Loretta. For months after the Walkers left, she’d fallen into a depression that was deep even by her own standards. She was grieving for reasons that she could never explain. Like she’d lost Desiree all over again. Blake suggested she take a class, which he later regretted because she brought it up each time he complained about her working.

“You said it yourself,” she said, during their last argument. “I was going crazy in that house.”

“Yes, but—” He paused. “I thought you’d, I don’t know, take a flower-arranging class or something.”

But she’d always felt ashamed of being a high school dropout. She felt stupid when someone used a term she didn’t understand. She hated asking for directions even when she was lost. She dreaded the day when her daughter would know more than her, when she would stare at Kennedy’s homework, unable to help. So she’d told Blake that she wanted to take a GED class.

“I think that’s great, Stel,” he’d said. He was pacifying her, of course, but she signed up for classes anyway. Two nights in a row, she sat in the parking lot outside the public library, afraid to venture inside. She would feel stupid, staring blankly at the chalkboard. When was the last time she’d done any math more complicated than balancing her checkbook? But when she finally went inside, the teacher began to explain an algebra problem and slowly, she felt sixteen again, acing Mrs. Belton’s tests. This was what she loved about math: it was the same now as it had been then, and there was always a correct answer, whether she knew it or not. She found that comforting.