Subtraction

“What is it?”

I had just unwrapped a wedding gift sent by my cousin Barbara. A filigreed silver railing surrounded a padded surface four or five inches in diameter. Eventually I learned it was a wine bottle coaster, meant to showcase an opened wine bottle and keep it from ruining the dining room table during a dinner party.

Bu, my new husband, and I didn’t drink wine. We didn’t have a dining room table that might be ruined. We had no plans to host dinner parties. Indeed, we hadn’t even had a wedding. We tied the knot at City Hall with no witnesses and no heads-up to anyone except the doctor who had to certify that neither of us had syphilis. When I blurted to my mother that we’d gotten married, she insisted I tell all our closest relatives and submit to a party where her friends could congratulate Bu and me. We thus became reluctant owners of fancy gifts about as practical for us as spittoons.

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Subtract four from seven, and you get three.

Subtract desire from customs, and you get an awkward mismatch between someone’s lifestyle or habits and others’ expectations.

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Many of the “nots” in my life derive from generational rebellion: not bras, not shaving, not pinstripes or chic heels, not chastity, not discrimination, not corporate climbing, not kowtows to authority figures. At our college graduation, my friends and I did not rent caps and gowns. We marched in the black-robed Commencement procession in just the T-shirts and jeans we wore to classes.

But much of my “not” energy comes from temperament. Even before my teens, I battled my mother when she insisted I make my bed. “It’s idiotic! I’ll just mess it up again at night,” I argued. At the same age I refused responsibility for my older brother’s lunch. “What, because he’s a boy he can’t make a sandwich?”

At age 33 I did not believe in marriage, but that ceremony at City Hall would more easily keep Bu in the United States and make it easier for him to get a job. It never occurred to me that a different legal status would trigger a pale shadow of a wedding reception or preposterous gifts. Subtractive “nots” have complicated consequences.

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Mathematically, subtraction is the inverse of addition. Subtraction undoes addition and vice versa. Four plus three equals seven, and inversely, seven minus three equals four.

Socially, subtraction upsets people much more than addition. Not performing a courtesy, not fulfilling a role, not meeting expectations often sparks complaints and accusations. Adding something not in the script comes across as creative, enterprising, charmingly eccentric and entirely optional.

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In 2008 or so, I watched a heated dispute between two marketers. One pressed the other to explain why she wasn’t as enthused about using Twitter for marketing as he was. “There isn’t a single good reason not to use it,” the instigator of the clash contended.

The respondent scoffed. “I’m simply not interested – just like I’m not interested in football, bungee jumping, Mesopotamia or anime,” she retorted. “I don’t need a reason not to do what you’re excited to do.”

The face of the first expert remained sour, as if a peer’s refusal to swing into his favorite social medium reduced his stock of spunk.

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American kids learn subtraction as an operation of separation and removal. Seven take away four is three. With the so-called Austrian method, however, subtraction becomes a matter of addition. To reach seven from four, we must add three. The latter approach seems sunnier, though it’s logically equivalent.

Note too how corner-market clerks confirm the change they owe you. They don’t say “You gave me 20 dollars. Subtracting the 7.85 you bought gives you 12.15.” Instead they start from 7.85 and count up coin by coin and bill by bill to 20.

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In Herman Melville’s 1853 story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a law clerk suddenly and repeatedly declines to perform his job duties or to explain himself. He baffles his well-intentioned boss and scandalized colleagues with the placid refrain, “I would prefer not to.”

Recent commentators diagnose Bartleby as having depression, agoraphobia, autism, schizophrenia, self-isolation, trauma, apathy, or as being a lifeless zombie, a victim of capitalism, or suffering from schizoid personality disorder. Hardly anyone sees him as a resistor, an instinctual subtractor or an existential tragic hero, as I do.

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House guests drive my writing teacher Gabriela into the red zone of the loco meter. So when she inherited a fortune, she hired an architect to design a home at her favorite seashore without a spare bedroom. She now has a truthful, practical excuse when relatives or friends want to visit her and stay over. That subtracted anxiety and conflict from her life. Unlike Bartleby, who died in prison at the end of Melville’s story, she thrives.

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Whichever way we learn grade-school arithmetic, humans have a powerful bias favoring addition, according to cognitive scientists. Trying to build a more stable Lego tower, more people add bricks than take some away. If seven rules at the office create problems, managers decide to add four more rather than cancel three. Subtraction is a minority option.

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A woman in her seventies waylaid me near my home at the beach community where I spend winters. “I don’t understand why you won’t acknowledge me,” she declared. “For five weeks I’ve been watching you and your husband swim…” I gazed at her oversized square glasses, almost clownishly made-up face and showy outfit, certain I’d never seen her before in my life.

I do tend to ignore people offering a “hello” or “good morning” when I’m deep in my thoughts. This woman trailed off finally when I failed to apologize or explain. Why should I play-act contrition I didn’t feel? I said “Thank you” and walked off, leaving her with an indignant story to tell.

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Educators say subtraction is harder for children to learn than addition. In adult life, too, subtraction isn’t for everyone.