Bee Season (37 page)

“Our discussion is over,” Aaron yells loud enough for Saul, still upstairs, to hear. “If you don’t get out of my room right now, I’m gone.”

The floor above them creaks. Footsteps sound on the stairs. Before Eliza has a chance to say a word, Aaron scoots through the kitchen and into the living room, easily bypassing Saul en route through the hallway. When Saul reaches the kitchen, there is the sound of feet scampering up the stairs and a door slamming.

“I hope we didn’t disturb you too much.” Saul’s voice has deflated. His face sags in places it hasn’t sagged before.

Eliza sticks the paper with the triplets into her back pocket, pulls her shirt down over her pants.

“What were you guys fighting about?” she asks, more to distract attention from her own actions than out of any desire to know, fearing that proximity to the conflict may be interpreted as enlistment.

“We weren’t fighting,” Saul says, unconvinced. “We were holding a theological discussion. Your brother has been exploring other religions.”

“What do you mean?” Eliza asks, wide-eyed. “Do you mean he isn’t Jewish anymore?” She can’t believe she didn’t think of this before.

“He will never stop being Jewish,” Saul replies in a steely voice that makes Eliza inadvertently recoil.

“I’m going to go to bed now,” she says.

“Elly-belly,” Saul says too quickly, “it’s okay. Your brother and I are just having a difference of opinion. I’m trying to help him see things straight, but he’s at an age where nothing I say can possibly be right. We’ll work it out.”

“Is he moving out?”

“As soon as legally possible,” comes Aaron’s voice from the stairwell, surprising them both.

Saul immediately starts into the hallway, Eliza forgotten. “Aaron, come into the kitchen.”

Aaron stays where he is. “I’m going to bed, unless you want to try to forbid me to do that too.”

“How do you expect us to carry on a rational discussion when you are acting like a child? I’d have more luck talking to Eliza.”

“Of course you would. She’d agree with everything you said. Talk about brainwashing; you’re an expert.”

Eliza starts back toward the study where she can at least close the door behind all this but Saul, red-faced, motions for her to stay.

“I demand that you come into the kitchen right now and explain yourself. You at least owe your sister an apology. She’s been working extremely hard. She doesn’t need your crap.”

Eliza cannot imagine having that voice directed at her and surviving. When Aaron’s voice comes to her from the stairwell, she can tell he is crying.

“I’m sorry, Elly. It’s not your fault. You don’t know any better. Sleep well.” The stairs creak and a door clicks shut.

In her outside-the-house life, Eliza feels as though she has been given special eyes to see the secret world hidden inside the regular one. She cannot look at a poster or a book without smiling.
I know what you’re really like,
she wants to sing out to the letters, so innocently frozen on signs and on television, in newspapers and on T-shirts. It is as revelatory a feeling as the time she looked through the class microscope to see a universe of tiny creatures inside what had seemed a simple drop of water.

At school, Elly can generally get enough of a head start on a permutation to block out the questions people have started to ask her, like why isn’t her brother wearing normal clothes or is it true her mother is in the loony bin and won’t come out. She supposes she can’t help it if someone’s older sister has seen Aaron in his robe, but she’d like to know how they found out about her mother being sick. Elly doesn’t like hearing “Like mother, like daughter” just because she has better things to do than play at recess. A good day is when the school bus catches all green lights on the ride home.

Once the study door closes behind her, the world beyond is just as Eliza wants it to be. Her mother is no longer in the hospital, but in the living room writing one of her letters. Aaron and Saul are getting along.

The few hours Saul now has with Eliza before dinnertime are the spark of his day. He secretly returns to bed after seeing the children off in the morning, setting the alarm to wake him in time for Eliza’s return. It has gotten to the point where he needs to set alarms on both sides of the bed to insure his timely revival, having developed the habit of unconsciously turning one off. Asleep, he wanders the bed, waking up on Miriam’s side or with his head where his feet should be. He has not changed the sheets since she left, not wanting to lose her scent.

He keeps the weekly reports from the hospital under the bed with the rubber ball. When the children ask, he tells them that their mother is making slow progress. He tells them she has begun taking medication to help order her thoughts and keep her grounded. He refrains from giving them any idea of when they might see her again.

On weekends, he lets Aaron go. It is a break they have both come to require, the accumulated tension having, by that point, become unendurable. He tells himself that Aaron is a phone call away, that the Hare Krishnas are more reasonable than he first feared. He has spoken with Chali briefly. The man thanked Saul for allowing Aaron the freedom to explore his beliefs. Somehow, Saul does not find this gratifying.

He reminds himself that greatness is impossible without suffering. Abulafia was rejected by the rabbis, disappointed by his students, and persecuted by Jew and Christian alike. Ambition has its price. None of this would be happening if his daughter weren’t worthy. On Fridays when congregants ask him where Aaron is, he tells them his son is trying out a different temple. It does not feel like a lie.

She memorizes the letter triplets to the tune of “Oh, Susannah” to keep them all straight. She’s got to sing it three times to get through them. She’s mostly able to keep the song to herself, but a few times Ms. Paul has told her to stop humming and Elly reminds herself to be more careful.

Ms. Paul has warned Eliza that if she doesn’t start paying more attention she won’t let her participate in the class spelling bee, but they both know she’s bluffing. Dr. Morris has already told Eliza how excited he is for her about a hundred times and even the cafeteria ladies are saying how much they’re looking forward to watching her on the lunchroom stage so they can say they saw her when. The closer the bee gets the less Eliza gets teased, as if even the other kids recognize that what’s about to happen is larger than them all.

She can feel her father getting nervous. When they practice together, any little sound that breaks the silence makes him jump. He asks her how she feels a lot. She generally doesn’t tell him. Even when her back is turned, she can sense where she is in relation to
Life of the Future World.
She holds her progress with the book responsible for the fact that she barely has to concentrate now to spell perfectly any word her father gives her.

She’s come to covet her time alone, doesn’t know what she would do if her father and brother called off their nightly skirmishes. Saul’s adult education class at the synagogue provides Aaron his only weeknight respite. Those nights, Elly can hear her brother chanting in his room as she works a permutation. She feels closest to him then, his sounds blending with hers in the shared space of the air vent.

At dinnertime, if Saul gets up to use the bathroom, Eliza tastes whatever Aaron cooked for himself that evening. At first Eliza only did it to be nice, but lately he’s been getting much better and she can mean it when she says he’s a good cook. Aaron tells her he plans to work in the temple kitchen once he becomes a devotee.

Elly thinks of her mother even more now that she’s stopped sleeping. It happened gradually. For a while, Eliza only needed an extra half hour to wind down from the buzz of a permutation, a feeling similar to having drunk too much sugared tea at
oneg.
In the time it takes to wind down, however, she has become increasingly aware of a rising tide of questions her brain can’t seem to stop asking. They aren’t the important ones like
How is Mom?
and
What’s wrong with Aaron?
and
Will I be able to win the bee?
Instead she thinks long and hard about whether her left or right side is better to lie on, having once heard something about one putting more pressure on the heart. Then she will think of her heart, beating all this time, and worry if it ever gets tired, beating like that. She will press her hand against her chest, but it will only make her scared, so she’ll start thinking about the letters and singing her triplet song, which has become the only thing that can make the other thoughts go away. So that now at least four hours pass between being put to bed and closing her eyes.

In the day the repeating questions are different, but the feeling is the same. It’s like the time she went to the bathroom and two tall girls followed her in to stare over the kid-sized stall door as she tried to pee. She had to pee really badly, her bladder hurt because it was so full, but the staring girls made it impossible. Eliza has started to feel that way all the time now, as though she needs to do something so much it hurts but she can’t. She can’t answer the small, stupid questions filling her brain. She can’t get to sleep. She can’t get hungry. She finds herself eating as quickly as possible to get it over with, putting food in her mouth and chewing because she knows it’s what she’s supposed to do.

When she is alone with the book, she tries not to think about how much she wants the pen to spontaneously leave her hand. Thinking about it only breaks her concentration. But she can’t chant the triplets she’s finally memorized until her stupid pen does what it’s supposed to do. Time is running out. Eliza wanted to be able to stand up at the class bee with God on her side, but she has come to accept that God might take longer. This realization has allowed her to relax more during her nightly attempts at transcendence. She has become less focused on the state of her hand and more on the temporary escape the words provide.

Lately there has been less and less to escape from. Saul and Aaron’s debates have degenerated into tense silence. Though Saul still insists upon spending the after-dinner hours with his son, Aaron has become more spectator than participant in their relentless discussions, having determined their pointlessness. Saul is less willing to concede stalemate, interprets his son’s prolonged silences as a sign that he is beginning to listen to reason. The illusion is shattered when Saul notices how resolutely Aaron’s hand stays in his pants pocket when they talk. Finally he asks Aaron what he’s got in there. When Aaron won’t answer, Saul makes a sudden lunge for his son’s arm, manages to extract the hand before Aaron knows what is happening. Dangling from his son’s fingers is a string of wooden beads.

“What the hell is this? A rosary?”

Aaron shakes his head, too weary to be upset. “They’re
japa
beads, Dad. Each bead has been carved from the sacred wood of the banyan tree.”

The scent of cheap incense fills Saul’s nose, reminding him of the incense he would burn in his college days in preparation for a coed seduction. A smell that might otherwise have made him nostalgic, it now transforms the
ISKCON
temple into the seducer, Aaron into the coed about to be duped.

“What do you do with them?” Saul asks, his attempt to sound objective canceled out by the look on his face.

“You
chant
with them, Dad.” Aaron doesn’t go on to say that Saul should know this by now, that he has already been told this in the course of the “discussions” that Aaron has abandoned.

“And is that what you’ve been doing the whole time I’ve been talking?”

Aaron is proud to have turned their nightly scrimmage into something worthwhile. He nods, not masking his grin. Saul pockets the beads.

“What are you doing?”

“There are appropriate and inappropriate times for prayer. Since you don’t seem to be able to distinguish between the two, I will help you.”

Aaron can’t imagine school without his beads. If, as Prabhupada writes, the true devotee should glorify Kṛṣṇa  at all times, Aaron needs the beads to stop school from being anything but a giant waste. He comforts himself with the fact that the beads his father has confiscated are only a practice string. His guru will give him his true
japa
beads once he becomes a devotee. He will get another practice set this weekend from Chali. And from now on he will be more careful.

On a calendar in his study Saul has marked the dates of all the bees from class to national. At the end of each study session he and Eliza strike through the day together, each X edging them a little closer to their shared destiny. Saul has gained special permission to sit in on Eliza’s class the day bee season begins. As recently as last year Eliza would have been mortified at the prospect of a parent in her class. The girl she’s become accepts that her father has worked hard for this moment, has as much a right to be there as she.

Saul makes his daughter promise to use Abulafia’s method even when the words are simple.

“If the word is
CAT
, I still want you to wait for those letters. Let each one fill you before you let it out. It’s the only way to avoid making a careless mistake.”

Eliza doesn’t need convincing. She is all too aware of how easily it could end, their ambitions shattered by a letter spoken too fast. She can picture her future clearly now. There will be television interviews, speaking engagements, a trip to the White House. She will be taken out of school because everyone will be forced to concede that her attendance has become superfluous. She will be buffeted with questions from all sides of the world, called upon to resolve conflicts, invent cures, fight famine. There are certain things she will not do. If the President asks her to develop a weapon against the Russians, she will refuse. She will only use her powers for good. At this point her imaginings lapse into cartoon, she the caped superhero bringing liberty and justice to the world between commercial breaks.

Which is why it is so important not to make any stupid mistakes. Which is why she would really prefer to have
shefa
’d by now. Barring that, she is more than willing to honor her father’s precautions. It is impossible to be too careful.