“THINK in threes. Trysts as triads, and so on.”
In my family, we were taught to spot triptychs early on, and by the end, we saw the world sliced into tercets. Imagine this globe, tripled in size and slashed twice through. We were raised to account for threes, rather than twos like everyone else, so it made for a far more complicated way of living.
There were those who ate steaks with a fork and knife, but we ate with spoons too, trading off the cutlery with ease. And to those who claimed solely an inside and an outside, we responded by building a screened-in porch. You and me was a more complicated concept and we spent an entire summer in our screened-in porch working through it. My sister, May, by my side, my mother propped up on some pillows on the floor, my dad in the rocking chair, and my little brother, Ian, pacing around. We read philosophers, but I kept getting stuck on the concept of being—this irritated my mother who said, “you can’t move beyond twos if you keep getting bogged down in the ones.”
My sister and brother were skeptical, and even my dad was unsure. I appreciated when he candidly told me this one twilight summer. Made me feel closer. I understood that even though my parents believed in the power of three whole-heartedly, it was all a bit of an experiment. “We just don’t want you to be stuck living in a world divided by two, it’s so limiting,” I think my father said once.
May was the one to pull us out of that mess that summer of philosophy.
“If there’s you and me, there has to be an in-between, there’s a space right between us, right? Maybe this can be the third,” she said one August evening.
That was the unnameable third, the dense air between us that made us all exist together. We nodded in agreement. There’s always that one sibling who is wise beyond their years, in our family it was May.
My mom and dad had met in a moment of evangelism. They both joined this group searching for something, I don’t know the name of the group but I think it was affiliated with the local university. The members saw exponential potential in my parents’ individual loneliness and set the two up. Once married, they broke off from the group, having found the ideology uninspiring. “Plus, we had found the missing piece, each other—we didn’t need them anymore.”
There was no near-death experience, no fever dream—no moment of great revelation. Discussions were plotted out, like star maps, until we all developed a notion of the number three. We were lucky to be three siblings, a lucky coincidence perhaps.
In a world divided by the number two, living in threes proved difficult.
Time passed and the years that were multiples of three proved to be more fortuitous for us. The crevasse years (those between threes), much less so, and unfortunately, it was during one of those years that May and I met for lunch.
“The people in this town.”
Her greeting was a statement. Parking was a chore on Miami Beach.
“I’m sorry, I know.”
I noticed our table setting only included a fork and knife, I called the waiter over.
“Oh, you can’t be serious,” May said, rolling her eyes.
I wasn’t sure what she expected. I was vaguely aware that there’d been some unspoken shift (she hadn’t joined us for Christmas in a number of years), but I didn’t know she’d given up on it altogether.
“Let’s not,” was all I could muster.
The wrinkle directly above her right eyebrow was pronounced.
“I know that mom and dad want me back for Christmas, but I can’t deal.”
This was the real reason for our meeting—or so I thought at the time—earlier that week, mom had called me to ask that I meet up with May and encourage her to join the family for the winter holidays.
“Ian is coming. It’ll be all of us. We need you. Think about it.” (What I wanted to say was think about the number three, but I didn’t.)
May shook her head.
“Are you still counting?”
The spoon was still missing.
“Not really,” I lied.
The world simply could not be divided in the way that I needed, but I did my best to find the threes when I could, a consolation prize for inevitable failure. My romantic relationships suffered, I’m sure you can imagine.
“Look, mom and dad have something to tell us, think about it.” This wasn’t true, but whatever it took.
She left and I waited for a single moment, before standing up at precisely three o’clock.
“Cut to the quick.”
“You mean cut to the chase,” I said to May on Christmas Day. She had shown up at the door the night before.
One the biggest problems for me, when it came to counting, was the question of arbitrariness. I had to, inevitably, choose when to see threes and I ended up having to make concessions sometimes where I really didn’t want to.
What bothered me too was that my family seemed to have moved on. My parents no longer followed the rules that had been set out for us. My mom was very involved in Buddhism now, something my father rejected. This wasn’t a problem, their lives were just a bit more separate than before. We all knew it was a passing phase anyways. May reminded me that all that with the number three had actually only lasted five or so years—this felt unreal since I saw my childhood under the sign of the number three.
Mom sat us all at the dining room table.
“I think we should all talk about what we’ve been avoiding.”
Three lightbulbs above my head, one flickering
Everyone nodded except for me. I wasn’t sure what was coming.
This was the same dining room table where I’d been asked to recite my numbers. One, two, three, and again. Mom followed suite and the rest of the family after her. I was always the one to go first, I assumed I was the one who had the easiest time understanding it.
I was so disappointed to learn that I was the only one sticking to the rule.
“Amy, we are here today—”
I don’t know why but I pictured the day with the berries that stained our tongues, and I’d become quite sick when I realized I’d collected more than the thirty three I’d planned for.
“—to talk about—”
I’d slept all night and day, waking up to stare at the ceiling and count the cracks.
“—the truth.”
I saw my family as shapes, as outlines at the table. They were black spots and when my mom told me the truth, the black spots grew bigger, so I did the only thing I could and I squeezed my eyes shut. One, two, three.
The pills didn’t help much and the rain wouldn’t let up.
My brother and sister left, so I spent my days in bed reading everything I could get my hands on. And when I was out of books, I’d send my mom off to get me more at the local library.
She always made sure to avoid getting books in multiples of three, which I pretended not to notice.
The therapist came to our house to meet with me since my surroundings were like white noise that amplified the further away I was from home.
I pulled myself out of bed one day and wandered downstairs. I was staring into the fridge when my mom came in.
“Can I cook something up for you?”
“I’m good.”
Her arms were loaded with groceries and I began to help her sort everything.
The river was on the verge of flooding, she told me. It cut into the center of our small town and had already caused endless problems. It was unseasonably warm and instead of mounds of snow we were stuck with buckets of rain.
The roof was pounding.
“What happens if it does flood?”
She shrugged. We were safe, feet and feet above the danger zone.
I sat, drawing my knees inward, pulling my fingers one by one—she stared at me and I wanted to tell her I wasn’t counting, but my hand was clenched on my ring, inside of which was a secretly scratched three.
I saw water groping at the riverbanks. Smooth, deep creases of liquid spilling over and out. I wanted nothing more, in that moment, than to launch myself into the water, to be tossed from side to side, to let numbers collapse into one another, until I was part of a swirling eddy of both nothing and everything at once.
Over the next few days, the space between numbers that had gripped my chest tightly began to fade. Their ridges were turning smooth, connecting in new ways I never thought I would see, until two and three became reconnected by what made them similar rather than different. When the numbers lost their shape, my heart would inevitably start pounding, and I would hear the echo as if I were a marble pool ball struck by a cue, over and over again.
That day, when we’d been gathered at the table, and mom had said she would tell me the truth, this is what she said: “We knew you were different and we tried to make the world fit around you the only way we knew how.”
From the earliest days, she said, I’d been obsessed with the number three.
And they tried to make the number three not only my reality but theirs.
“But it’s gone too far.”
I saw in their faces how they’d tried. And now, how they felt they had failed me.
It’s been a few months since that conversation and I’ve been getting better. At first, I was really bad.
Now, it’s not a question of the numbers losing their shapes, but the numbers slowly disappearing, ever so gently being replaced by words, and the words that come to me rise and fall without ever really getting stuck like the numbers did.
When I leave home—I’ll have to at some point—it will be difficult.
But for now, I’m trying, I’m trying to be the water that slips over everything and curves its rough edges and combines numbers and shapes and letters together as it sweeps across it all. I’m trying to be like those people who sit back and let the world wash over them, the people who don’t think the way that I do, I’m trying to fit into this world that’s already and always been divided by two.