IN ONE MISERABLE WEEK, I did learn to answer questions about the times tables more quickly than Mr. Beaker could snap his fingers. I also learned to snap my fingers, and I learned that the pattern on the wallpaper in my room repeated every eleven inches and that the meals my mother made lost all their restorative power when they were handed through my door on a tray, the puddle of gravy around my potatoes already dark and rubbery at the edges. However, I didn’t really learn the times tables very well at all. I memorized them as I might have memorized lines for a performance, and it worked pretty well. I was able to satisfy Mr. Beaker, impress Clarissa during our “practice” sessions, and please Mrs. Graham. But as soon as I had put on my performance, the lines began to slip away from me. Later, when I needed to know one of the products that had, while my mind was occupied with something else, crept into the dark unknown, never to return, I would reconstruct it from one of the ones that remained or count it out on my fingers, at least in my mind.

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