Bee Season (20 page)

“Thank you,” the mother of Number 33 says to Brown Braid as she guides her son out the door, slowing her pace to match his small, shuffling steps.

“You did a
great
job,” Brown Braid calls out to Number 33, who leaves without looking back. Brown Braid’s compulsive, faux-intimate word-stressing is accompanied by a look intended to seem meaningful but which instead makes her appear as if something small and calcified has become lodged in her throat.

Saul rushes in, envelops Elly in his arms. “You did good, sweetheart. You gave it your all.” He kisses Eliza on the forehead.

Brown Braid nods to Saul and smiles. “You two are welcome to stay in here as
long
as you want. The curtain is for privacy.” She pegs Eliza with her most therapeutic face/voice combo, subconsciously lifted from repeated viewings of
Ordinary People.
“It’s okay to cry. You’re
safe
here.” She gestures to the corner opposite the punching bag. A three-foot-high bee constructed of wood and wire grins back. “You know,” she says conspiratorially, “some of the spellers feel better after they’ve talked to Mr. Bee.”

Eliza looks to Brown Braid, then to her father, then to Mr. Bee. She turns her attention to the juice in her plastic cup.

“I think we’re going to be just fine,” Saul says.

Eliza is sitting in the audience with Saul when Rachel’s last competitor, Kush Thambinayagam, stumbles on
BATHYSCAPHE
and Rachel jolts out of her seat as if electrically shocked. She staggers to the microphone. The pronouncer gives her
PIRANHA
. The audience groans.

“That’s it?” she asks. “Piranha?”

The pronouncer repeats the word.

“The fish? With the teeth?” Rachel bares her own teeth and chomps into the microphone. The amplified clicks remind Eliza that teeth are essentially naked bones.

The pronouncer confirms Rachel’s definition, politely ignoring her characterization. Rachel begins flapping her arms with glee as she sings the letters into the mike, her final A combining with a screech of victory that sends the audience reaching for their ears. The press descend upon the stage. Trophy pressed to her chest, oblivious to the television cameras, Rachel begins a solitary dance to a private tune with no discernible rhythm, displaying a sensual grace that is all the more disturbing for its unexpected beauty and complete inappropriateness on a young girl with ragged, bloody nubs for fingernails.

Miriam has no memory of the time between backing out of the driveway and arriving before this strange house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. When she looks at her watch she learns she has lost forty five minutes.

Like her previous selection, it is not a proud home. It was built poorly and quickly by people who knew it would be sold not because it was desirable but because it was all that could be managed at the time. Even the small square of brown lawn sags in defeat, its center sinking inward so that, post-rainstorm, there is a muddy pool staring skyward like a bad eye. When Miriam approaches the front door she avoids the water, afraid to make it a witness by her reflection in its clouded surface.

This time the front door is locked, with no door mat to conceal a spare key. Miriam walks to the back, stepping through a gap in a rotted wooden fence that once held a gate. Overgrown grass brushes her thighs, soaking her pants with last night’s rain. The back door is also locked but there is an open window. Miriam hoists herself up with her arms, surprised at her strength. She doesn’t notice the splinter in her palm from the window frame until she is inside. She pulls it out without hesitation, unflinching at the sight of her blood.

The air smells of kitchen grease and cigarettes. Miriam stands in a dark room with a sagging couch that reminds her of the front lawn. A dog-eared
Penthouse
lies centerfold down on one cushion. A Felix the Cat wall clock with wagging tail and moving eyes loudly ticks the time, ten minutes slow. A plate of dried-out spaghetti, having served more recently as an ashtray, rests precariously on a sofa arm. It’s the kind of room that should make Miriam’s skin crawl, compelling her to spend five minutes scrubbing her hands. Instead, she feels as if she and the room are not occupying the same space. There are two realities: the house and the special zone meant only for herself and the object she is here to claim.

She knows immediately it is not in this first room. She moves on to the kitchen where her feet stick to the floor in places, where the sink is overflowing with dishes, and the garbage needs to be taken out. There are cockroaches. Her stomach doesn’t even clench. It is as if in entering the house she has grown her own carapace, her normal sensitivities safely shelled over. With a perverse sense of pleasure, she opens the refrigerator, unleashing the smell of something moldy and revealing a half-drunk six-pack and an encrusted ketchup bottle.

She finds what she has come for in the bedroom. It’s the only ashtray without cigarette butts in it, a piece of pressed copper bearing a cameo profile of a woman’s face. It feels warm to her touch.

With the object in her possession, the safety of her shell cracks. The staleness of the air, the dust, and the grime seep under her skin. She is just able to make it to the toilet before throwing up. She is suddenly certain that the barest contact with any surface will cancel her out, dissolving her as surely as a snail in salt. She can smell her metallic sweat, the scent of her own panic seeping from her armpits, darkening her blouse. Drops of perspiration pool between her breasts even though it isn’t warm. The house has become a crude stranger standing too close on a crowded bus. It presses against her, insinuating itself into her most guarded places. Miriam grips the ashtray tightly in her hand. In her haste to leave, she barely remembers to exit the window through which she entered.

Though Saul insists on calling their first meal back a victory dinner, Eliza’s heavy silences at the table belie the euphemism. Miriam is strangely animated, peppering Saul and Eliza with questions and not noticing that Eliza’s answers mirror her father’s.

Aaron is much more comfortable staring at his father’s hands than his eyes. In a fit of guilt-induced fear, he removed two candles from the Shabbat candle box and lowered the level in the Manischewitz bottle in preparation for Saul’s homecoming. Even as Aaron performed these compensations he sensed they were unnecessary. His father is no candle-counter. Of course Saul’s son, the future rabbi, would have observed Shabbat in his absence.

Aaron found himself giving Eliza a solid sympathy hug in response to the news of her defeat. He has a feeling she was as surprised by it as he, but the way she squeezed back assured him that, though unexpected, it was not unwelcome. He’s pretty sure he can detect the ghost of a smile when they exchange brief glances across the dinner table. He almost wishes he could tell her about skipping out on Shabbat, has a feeling she might get a good laugh out of it. Eliza’s small smile eases some of his anxiety over the lie he has been preparing all day to tell.

Both wife and son insist, over Saul’s repeated questions, that absolutely nothing at all happened while he was gone. Aaron shyly mentions a new friend, haltingly asks if he might join this Charlie for pizza and a movie tomorrow evening.

Saul can’t help but wonder if there is something more to Aaron’s question — look at the way he’s blushing — and takes great pleasure in asking, “There wouldn’t be a girl involved in this pizza/movie venture, would there?”

“No, Dad, it’s nothing like that. I mean I wouldn’t …” Aaron had braced himself for the unmasking of his untruth, but he hadn’t prepared for his father to be this clueless.

“Aaron, it’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed about going on a date. When I was your age, I went out with girls. To tell you the truth, I was getting a little worried — ”

Aaron’s voice is flat. “Dad. It’s not a date.” He wishes Elly and Mom weren’t at the table. “I mean, girls don’t even …” He can’t say the rest. It’s too obvious. The last time he even touched a girl who wasn’t a relative was at his bar mitzvah, now three years past, the token dance with Stacey Lieberman whom he was stupid enough to call the week after and whose unconditional, mortifying refusal to accompany him to a movie alerted him to the fact that she had only been his dancing partner out of politeness after all.

When Saul looks at his stammering son, he suddenly sees him through a stranger’s eyes. While he assures himself that this has no effect on his fatherly love, which is of course unconditional, he realizes that Aaron at sixteen is as mockable as Aaron at ten. His son is a walking target, an invisible yet unmissable
KICK
ME sign forever pinned to his back. Of course girls don’t go out with him. Saul looks at Aaron’s wounded face and reproves himself for the insult he has added to adolescent injury.

“Hey, Aaron, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. Of course you can catch a movie with Charlie tomorrow. What are you going to see?”

Aaron hadn’t thought this far in advance.

“Uh,
Ghostbusters
?”

“Haven’t you seen that one already?”

“Yeah … but it’s good and Charlie hasn’t seen it yet.” Maybe he should have said something impossible like
Bambi.
Something his father would have to suspect.

“Mom, did you go on dates in high school?” It is an intentional conversational shift. Eliza can tell her brother is lying, feels the need to protect him out of a lingering sense of guilt and indebtedness. She darts Aaron a glance, but he is still too mortified by Saul to appreciate her gesture.

The question catches Miriam by surprise. “Oh. Well. No. I attended a girls’ boarding school. There were occasional dances with our brother school, but I generally used the time to study.”

“When was your first date?” Eliza realizes she has no idea how her parents met.

“Well … in college, I suppose, but I didn’t … I was very focused on my studies.” Miriam blushes. She wishes there were a book on the subject, slim as it would be, a
Mother’s Dating Life
she could substitute for conversation in the tidy manner of
Where Do Babies Come From?

Eliza, sensing her mother’s discomfort, conveniently becomes uncomfortable as well. She keeps any other questions to herself.

“Dessert, anyone?” Without asking if everyone is finished, Saul begins clearing the table. He places a dish of chocolate pudding before each family member. Eliza looks at the unmarred surface of the pudding with longing, thinking she would easily trade eating her dessert for the opportunity to
be
it for a few seconds: serene and self-contained. When she looks up, she notices that Aaron and Miriam haven’t picked up their spoons either, are also staring wistfully at their bowls. Saul, oblivious, sits down and starts to eat. Reluctantly, the others follow. The sole sounds for the rest of the meal are of swallowing and the clicking of spoons.

The only previous time Aaron consciously lies to his parents is on the last day of middle school. To most eighth graders the day heralds their initiation into the holy American trinity of homecoming, prom, and football. To Aaron, it signifies the end of middle school gym.

The uniform is navy blue and bruise yellow, the school colors being blue and gold but gold far too expensive a color to standardize. The shorts are completely free of natural fibers and cause Aaron’s butt and upper calves to itch horribly, on warmer days causing him to break out in a rash. The shirt wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have to change into it in the locker room, subjecting himself to daily comments regarding his unnatural paleness, his lack of physique and general prepubescent state.

Aaron’s expectations for the future are basic. At Abington High he can opt out of gym for all but one year, giving him the opportunity to pubertize before again subjecting himself to locker room scrutiny. That is, assuming he will ever grow, an event he no longer takes for granted despite parental and medical assurance.

It is in the spirited resentment of late-onset puberty that Aaron, upon coming home, proceeds directly to the backyard. If he is going to do this, he has to do it in the afternoon, before his mother gets home or his father leaves the study. Aaron’s thirst for justice overrides his ingrained fear of getting caught. This is something he must do.

Aaron carefully places the gym suit in the patio’s center. His more cautious side has already considered and rejected the idea of cutting the uniform to shreds or burying it. He wants something more thorough. He needs vengeance. He craves fire.

Fire-setting is, of course, prohibited. The prospect of unequivocally breaking a family ordinance does not appeal. Withstanding Saul’s bulging stare is extremely unpleasant. All the more difficult is his father’s insistence upon the preeminence of disappointment over anger, as in “I am not angry at you, I am just extremely disappointed,” which to Aaron seems far worse. Anger is sea-squall temporary, its intensity something to be weathered. Disappointment is slow-acting, a poison that accumulates over time. Aaron can remember every single occasion in which he has disappointed his father. Each time he is certain that his actions have demoted him to a new and permanent sublevel of paternal disregard.

But Aaron needs to do this. He considers consulting Saul but decides against it. While his father might enjoy helping incinerate the cause of so much personal grief, this needs to be an independent statement. Never again will he allow himself to be victimized by a piece of fabric. The whole thing loses its punch if he goes asking
Abba
for permission.

It is much less difficult to get the uniform to catch than Aaron anticipated. The cloth bursts into flame with a satisfying
foosh.
The fire eats holes in the fabric, turning it a satisfying black.

Then, to his horror, Aaron realizes that the uniform isn’t burning. It is melting. The polyester shorts are forming burned, black lumps that look rather permanent as they fuse to the patio. Aaron rushes for the hose. The water succeeds in both quenching the flames and smearing a layer of black ash across the white concrete. Aaron panics, his brain frozen like a rabbit in the headlights of his father’s impending appearance.