The Lava in My Bones (16 page)

The velvety fur on their backs brushed gently against the inner dome of my armpits, pressed against the sensitive skin on the underside of my jaw. I gazed into the black-bead eye of one bee who peered back into my own from its place by my lower lash. Its body shivered. Its eyes clung to each side of its head like tiny balls of mercury. I wondered, what colour are bees' eyelids? I waited for it to blink but thought, do bees even have eyelids?

All at once several bees shot up into the air. The others followed and formed a roaring, black blanket that hovered and rippled over my body. The shape dissolved as the insects dispersed, flying in all directions at once.

I sat alone in the empty field.

I touched my arm to discover my skin was licked clean and was as smooth as polished porcelain. Still shaken, I walked home sobbing quietly. When I entered our kitchen, Mother asked sharply, “What's the matter? You look flushed.”

“It's very windy.”

That evening I went back to the spot where I'd met the bees. I noticed that the sky was again very clear. I remembered the softness of the bees' fur, the slight tickling as their twig-like legs stepped hesitantly about the hair in my armpits, and the ululating warmth as their stingers stroked the skin behind my knees. The wind was blowing again. I listened deeply into the distance, heard a cow mooing and an old woman calling, “Come home, Madeleine, come home!”

Having at last admitted I would never belong to a circle of friends at school, I wondered if I could be absorbed by something else, something unknown and so bizarre and beyond logic that it seemed to have sprung from the depths of my own imagination. I snaked my hand up my shirt sleeve and felt the return of that fetid stickiness. For the first time, I felt happy to be who I was.

The next morning we woke to a town bursting with swollen-headed flowers that had bloomed overnight. Pollen-carrying bees buzzed in tremulous haloes about the open mouths of moisture-beaded tulips, lush frilly-skirted chrysanthemums, and rouge-lipped gardenias, which lined sidewalks, filled parks, exploded in riotous displays of colour in once-meagre rock-gardens or crept up the peeling walls of wooden bungalows. From a distance the long-stemmed roses wavered like lipstick smudges in an air now laden with the dizzying odour of floral perfume rather than salt.

Girls ran laughing from house to house picking flowers while boys charged through clouds of bees that, though ubiquitous, were continually out of reach. My mother, terrified by the profusion of blooms in our backyard, closed the blinds and swore she wouldn't go outside even if God ordered her to.

In school, boys fidgeted beside laughing girls who'd placed tulips behind their ears, in their hair, or in the V-cleavage of dresses. Unfortunately, Estelle looked magnificent. I was completely ignored, which pleased me. No one stuck anything on me; the days of Sue the garbage hedgehog seemed over. As I sat writing my essay on the War of 1812, I luxuriated in the glow of my beautiful secret: Cartwright had blossomed because of me.

That afternoon when I left school, the streets were eerily silent. I entered the field and, as before, the roaring swarms of bees gathered in the sky, then descended. I was ready for them this time. My sweat flowed in a honey-torrent over the exposed expanses of my body. I laughed and screamed with delight as they licked and leapt, crawled, nestled, frolicked, snorted or, crouching on the cliff edges of my lower eyelids, stared right into me. Then
they disappeared, and I rose feeling cleansed and refreshed.

Back home, Mother was pounding cookie-dough with both fists. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes. Since the bees' arrival, she'd lost the ability to speak in tongues. Their presence in the atmosphere cut off her access to the Holy Spirit, and when she closed her eyes and raised her hands, she caught high-frequency soundwaves that had nothing to do with God. Yesterday she'd opened her mouth and a shriek like microphone feedback emerged. Flustered, she tried again and caught the radio waves of CBNK: “This song's to Donna from George who says you're one hot baby doll.” Now Mother put the cookies in the oven, sat down, and braced herself. She'd make another attempt. She shut her eyes and opened her lips, but this time a man's gravel voice emerged. “These walkie-talkies work, Gladys. Lets me know what time your husband leaves and I'll comes out of the bushes.”

Mother covered her face. “Oh God, what have I done? Am I not working hard enough? Sue, tell me if you're involved in this!” She rummaged through my closet and dresser drawers for clues, happy to find nothing. She wrote a letter to the newspaper urging that the bees' hives be found and destroyed. “So many insects is unnatural,” she argued. She didn't mention God this time, but still the letter wasn't published. “They laugh at what I send,” she snapped. “They think I'm a weirdo.”

I began to commune with my insects daily. I indulged eagerly, but it was a guilty pleasure. I felt slightly perverse and was terrified of getting caught, so now I waited for the insects in a clearing outside town. We'd meet, then run up and down the bare rock hills, the bees roaring behind me like a furnace; their swarm
changed shape—it was like an amoeba, a huge question mark, a whirlpool, or a spinning Ferris wheel. The wind was a giant hand pushing my back as I charged into valleys, up hillsides, over streambeds, along the shores of crystalline lakes, by foaming waterfalls that sprayed and rumbled, in and out of fog-clouds that blew in from the ocean. Brother, you said the pressure in rocks is what moves life forward, but I believe it is the air that drives us, that churns the sea, that brought the bees from their faraway home to be with me.

On the softest spot of earth in the bare field, I'd fall backward, the bees would descend, and I'd be cocooned in the most beautiful darkness imaginable. Although the bees numbered in the thousands, I could distinguish some of them. Each had his or her own habits and I gave names to my favourites. Drooper was the bee whose stinger slanted diagonally to the right. Fuzz-Bucket had an inordinate amount of hair on his forehead. Q-Tip had a long, narrow body with two bulbous ends. Einstein was always pondering the mole on my right cheek. The Dabbler repeatedly touched her stinger over and over to the same eyebrow hair, while Cowardly Kim lingered outside my right nostril wanting to go in, I assumed, but afraid he'd get lost.

I became addicted to the bees, Sam. I just couldn't stop.

At dinner, Mother announced, “Sam has started to speak again. Apparently he actually smiles.” Are you thinking about ways to help me, Sam? “He asks the doctors questions. But if anyone mentions Europe, he clams up. He hates that whole continent and finds Switzerland particularly disgusting. I think that's a good sign.” You are gathering strength, Sam. I am glad.

Father now spent even more time staring into the ocean depths from his boat. I no longer tried to stop my honey flow. I still visited Dr Merton regularly, but he despaired of finding the reason for my ailment. I suspected its cause was beyond what science understood.

Lying alone on my bed, I'd play honey games. I'd place a fingertip against my leg and lift it to make a luxuriously undulating syrup string. Or I'd clasp then separate my hands to create a gooey cat's cradle. I'd press my lower jaw against my neck and repeatedly raise it, delighting in the wonderful
thwuh-thwuh
sound.

Running with my bees, I'd hold both my arms straight over my head and point my fingers so that my hands and body formed one giant stinger—at such moments I felt I was a bee myself. I'd stop running and the bees would rush ahead, land on whatever was before us—a knotted tree, a wooden fence, or telephone pole—and the ones who got there first would drive their stingers in. Each time twenty or thirty bees expired and lay stingerless below the pocked wood. I didn't play this game often as I didn't want to deplete my swarm, but it was a wonderful sport and I enjoyed it immensely.

The kids at school were too occupied with their new lovers to bother ostracizing me. Everywhere love had blossomed thanks to the thousands of blooming flowers, a side-effect of the bees' arrival. Estelle now had two boyfriends, there were no school virgins left, and Mr Schmidt's wife was pregnant with twins. The old lady on Brown Street was engaged to her gardener, the mayor was having an affair with the baker's wife, and fishermen
hesitated before cracking fish's heads with mallets. At town council meetings, representatives winked at each other across boardroom tables and stirred coffee in cups decorated with hearts. In the hospital, nurses asked out doctors who longed to French-kiss patients. Workers at Dairy-Freeze always had ice cream on their faces, and production in the steel foundry slowed because workers took flirt-breaks.

While I enjoyed my new invisibility, I resented that the students who'd tortured me were now happy. Every time I saw a smouldering dog turd, I remembered how they'd felt on my back. When I came upon a rotting lobster claw on the beach, I pictured it stuck to my cheek. One afternoon after playing with my new friends, I glared at the small pile of dead bees below a stinger-filled birch and had a deliciously horrible idea.

I waited outside the change room and, after the girls filed out for soccer practice, I rushed in and slid the plastic clothes-filled crates from their cubicles. It took a while to find one that contained a dress. I snatched a pink one and shoved it up my shirt. God, I hoped it was Estelle's. She'd dressed up today, probably to impress her new boyfriends. This dress could be anyone's, since her friends were now buying clothes from Esther. I scurried into the hall, out the door, and past the crowded football field. On the first street I headed west and didn't stop running until I'd reached the clearing outside town.

When I got there, I noticed something odd: My honey had
stopped flowing. It was only when I removed the dress from under my shirt where it was pressing against my skin that honey again began to seep from my pores.

I shook the dress out and examined it. Pink, made of satin, with a small steel hoop inside the waist. Unfortunately the dress was too big for Estelle but probably belonged to one of her cronies, which was almost as good. I pulled the dress over a bushel of hay and placed a rock on top to resemble a head. I placed my “scarecrow” in the centre of the clearing.

When my bees arrived, I sicced them on it. Oh, how I laughed and clapped my hands as the insects shoved their stingers through the lace on the chest, the ruffles on the short sleeves. When finished, I had them attack three, four, five more times!

The next day I did something I hadn't done for weeks. I waited for my bees in the park near my parents' house. The insects arrived in their whirling swarm and, as usual, I held my arms out like airplane wings, ran, and they followed me like a giant swinging tail. As we neared a row of clapboard houses, I feared someone would see me so I made a quick detour through the forest. I hid behind the hillock a block from the school where boys had once thrown glass at me, my chin pressed into a dirt groove bordered by ragweed. Before my eyes, a cluster of bull thistles; between them, a sliver of the empty, sunlit street. The black bees spun in a halo above me. I smelled dust and manure.