Guess and Check

By Thaddeus Rutkowski

My brother and sister and I took my mother to a parking lot to teach her to ride a bicycle. We rolled a child’s bike along with us. The bike had one gear, and its brake was built into the pedals. When we got to the paved area next to the local school, we helped our mother onto the bike. “Go for it,” we said. “Pump.”

“I don’t know how to pedal,” she said.

We gave her a push, and she coasted down the slight hill of the parking lot. As she rolled, neighbor children stood and watched her.

“I don’t know how to stop,” she called.

“Use the brakes!” we yelled.

“Where are the brakes?”

“In the pedals! Stand on the pedals!”

She worked the pedals, but she pushed them forward, not back. She picked up speed for a few yards, then pitched over onto her side. She ended up at a right angle to the bike. She got up but didn’t lift the bicycle — she let it lie on the ground. “I don’t think I can learn,” she said.

The neighbor children stood there, watching.

 

On our way home, we walked past a house that had a dog in its backyard. When the animal sensed our presence, it started to bark.

“I don’t want to go near it,” my mother said.

We couldn’t tell if the dog was loose or tied, so I went to the edge of the yard to check. The dog rushed forward and shot into the air. A chain attached to its collar jerked it back like a shock cord.

“You can walk past,” I called to my mother.

She went around the house in a large half-circle.

“Where I grew up,” she said, “dogs weren’t pets. They were wild animals. If they were larger than knee-high, they could be taken away. If you had more than one dog, you had to give one up. After Mao took over, all dogs were banned. They were seen as bourgeois.”

At home, our two pet dogs jumped on my mother’s legs. She wasn’t afraid of them, but she wasn’t happy to see them either.

“I don’t like these dogs,” she said. “I don’t like them rubbing their fur against me. I wish we could bring them to a shelter.”

 

In the evening, my mother helped me with my algebra homework. The idea was to isolate x on one side of an equation, but the equation I was given was complicated. It contained parentheses, positive and negative numbers, repeated multiplications and divisions.

I started simplifying. I divided by 2 on both sides of the equals sign; I subtracted 6; I divided by x. I was able to isolate x on one side of the equation — I knew it didn’t matter which side. On the other side, there was a load of numbers — that was acceptable too. In my solution, x equaled 2(x-6), all over 4.

My mother looked at the same problem, worked for a minute and came up with an answer. For her, x simply equaled 4. According to the workbook, her answer was correct.

“How did you get that?” I asked.

“I can’t explain it in English,” she said. “I know the language of numbers.”

“Maybe I’ll just guess and check,” I said. “I’ll guess at an answer; then I’ll check to see if it works out.”

When my father saw what we were doing, he said to my mother, “Don’t coddle him. What do you want him to be, a mama’s boy?”

I had several more problems to solve. The assignment would take a long time, with no guarantee of success. I had a lot of guessing and checking to do. I started looking at the equations, plugging in numbers like 6.5 and 17, but luck was not with me. The random answers didn’t work out.

 

My siblings and I rode in the back seat while my father tried to teach my mother to drive. In the passenger seat, my father kept hitting the floor with his foot, as if stamping on a brake.

“Let up,” he said, as he tried to release an imaginary gas pedal with his toe. “Don’t gun it.”

My mother responded and the car lost some speed, but its momentum carried it forward.

“Accelerate,” he said as my mother went around a curve.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” my mother said.

“When you go around a turn, you want more traction. Give it the gas.”

My mother accelerated and the car left the road. It shot across the gravel shoulder and into a wheat field. The car ran softly over the plants. I could see the tops of the stalks sweeping across the side windows. The car encountered nothing solid, and my mother kept going. She accelerated as she turned. Eventually, she brought the car back across the shoulder and onto the pavement.

“That’s it,” my father said. “From here on, you can take lessons from a professional.”

 

On the school bus, no one wanted to sit next to me. When the seat next to me was the last spot left, a boy sat there, but he didn’t speak to me. I pretended I didn’t notice him during the half-hour ride to school, and he did the same with me.

In class, I sat hunched over a pile of books on my desk.

“Egghead,” someone whispered.

“Nerd,” someone else said.

“Dork,” said another student.

In the hallway, a tall girl approached me. “You’d have more friends if you weren’t so smart,” she said. “Just act like you’re stupid, and you’ll do OK. See these other guys? That’s what they do, and they’re popular.”

 

When I came home from school, I saw my father sitting at the kitchen table; he was drinking a beer and smoking. He didn’t notice me, or he seemed not to.

“Is there anything to eat?” I asked as I went to the refrigerator.

“Why do you always interrupt me?” my father asked. “I can’t do anything with you around. I always have to stop what I’m doing to serve you.”

He got up and heated milk, then poured it in cups for hot chocolate. He called my brother and sister, and the three of us sat at the table, looking down into the cups.

“Drink!” our father shouted. “Now!” He slammed his hand on the table, and the cups jumped.

We drank reluctantly. As we sat there, our father lectured us. “My work requires full concentration,” he said. “I might look like I’m doing nothing, but I’m thinking. I’m figuring out how to start a revolution. That’s what Lenin did. That’s what Mao did. They didn’t spend their time taking care of children.”

 

Our father banished me and my siblings from the house.

We went out to the yard, but we had little to do there. We looked for stones, picked them up and threw them. We could heave a few over the telephone wire strung between houses. But we soon tired of this activity.

We stood around outside until our mother got home from work. She spent some time inside, presumably listening to our father speak, then came out to talk to us. “If my parents had a disagreement, they wouldn’t argue,” she said. “They would put the issue aside and bring it up after their children were asleep. Then they would discuss the problem calmly and come to an agreement.”

“Why did you marry him?” one of us asked.

“I was in a new country,” she said, “and I didn’t have many friends. I ate in the college cafeteria. Two boys also ate there. One was an artist; the other was a mathematician. For some reason, I picked the artist.”

At night, I could hear my father yelling. I couldn’t tell what he was saying. Nevertheless, the sound of his voice — the volume and cadence — made my stomach sink.

 

Later in the night, I could hear a storm blowing against the windows. The wind made the frames rattle. The air pressure was dropping with each gust. I imagined that whole trees were being knocked over. I could picture pines lying on their sides. I heard dripping, and I thought water was coming through the ceiling, through a crack in the plaster.

I could hear myself crying, but there were no tears. There was just a rhythmic huffing sound as the air left my lungs. I could have been laughing.

When I woke in the morning and looked outside, all of the trees were standing. There was no water dripping through the ceiling. But the nearby stream had overflowed. A large, shallow lake covered what had been a cornfield. I saw that the dirt lane through the field was above water. I could walk along that lane to get to higher ground. I could cross the flooded field and walk up the hill on the other side. The problem was, there was nothing but brambles and tall grass on the other side.

I put on my insulated boots and got ready to go out. I didn’t know what I would find. I would have to guess and check.

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Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse. His writing has appeared in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Fiction, and Fiction International. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York. He recently received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.