Finding Solutions

1. Bowling for Numbers

Back in fifth grade, we signed out our textbooks; I got Phillip Pigeon's, which hinkied up the whole half year for me. Phillip had memorized the multiplication tables in no time, in third grade. He went around reciting them, but because he was deformed by an elevator accident, we didn't mind his being smart. We looked at the crippled arm and let him say his sixes, out loud, over and over.

In fifth grade I struggled with subtraction, multiplication, with 7s and 8s and 9s. My father took me bowling to help. "Nine," he said, "is one less than ten. Ten pins, minus one. Seven pins is three less than ten." I'd roll a gutter ball because he'd expect me to do subtraction right there on the spot. In bowling shoes with everyone watching. If pins fell, I'd fidget, say the first number under ten I could think of. He'd stand shocked as if I'd slapped him. "No, no. Look. It's easy. Nine," he'd say, "is one less than ten. Seven is three less than ten. Once you can do that, you can multiply. Start with nines. Five times ten is fifty, so five times nine is forty-five. Fifty minus five." He bent over to look me in the eyes like he was telling me particularly bad news. "You can do tens. Then subtract."

My teacher wasn't interested in bowling. From behind a big brown desk in front of a blackboard chalked full of numbers, she pitied me. "You haven't learned to subtract, have you, dear?" I said nothing. The chair dug into the middle of my back, my shoulders pressing towards my two scabbed knees. She sighed, moved some papers on her desk that shuffled like someone wringing her hands lightly. Or brushing them off. I kicked a shoe on the floor. She pushed some flashcards across the desk to me, the kind we had at home for my little brother. Five birds minus two birds equals? I took them anyway, put them in my pencil box.

I learned enough for the B. I still can't subtract well. And multiplication? Hopeless.

2. The Accountants

I find when I locate my biological family that they are all in numbers. My father's a CPA who worked for PriceWaterhouse, my sisters and brothers have finance, business, accounting degrees. They add and subtract and multiply and divide like they were born to it.

"Clearly," I tell my sister as we ride around San Francisco in her gigantic new SUV, "numbers are not genetic."

3. The German Man

I am in India for two months, working on my Fulbright. Only I'm very sick and my bike is broken and I have no clue where to get fresh food. On my first day at the office, the department chair brings by the Other White Guy, a German professor who's there teaching one of the social sciences. He speaks English. We discover we're neighbors at the faculty housing complex.

On the day my computer blows up in a rage of fire and sparks, I knock on his door. "Can I use your computer," I say. "Mine's on fire."

He sniff s the air. "Is it out?"

"The fire? Yes. I got it with a blanket."

"Ah, good, good. Yes, yes, use this one here in the house, please."

Which is how we start talking about food. Which is how, the next morning after walking my flat-tire bike to the air boy in the market, I find myself trundling after the German Man towards the women's dorms. "There," he points. "There is the food." He shows me how to buy it, and I have oranges, pineapples, and apples from then on.

4. Calculating Pennies

The first version of "Solving for P" looked simply like a list of equations. Bad ones, since I had no clue what I was doing, really. It was math, after all.

I began it at the table in my Indian apartment. It was the only place in the...