Bee Season (3 page)

Eliza can’t read Hebrew like her brother. In the time it takes her to negotiate the first five words, picking her way right to left across the page, the prayer is halfway over. Rather than add to the aural melee, she chooses to keep her mouth shut.

For years after his summary dismissal from Dr. Morris’s office, Saul entertains hopes that Eliza will prove her elementary school principal wrong. Grading quarter after grading quarter he erases all memory of report cards past, tearing open each successive manila envelope in a frightful evocation of predator and prey.

Eliza is sitting at the kitchen table so engrossed in a
Taxi
rerun that a mini-pretzel is frozen in its trajectory from the bag to her mouth. The sealed manila envelope rests on the table just beyond the pretzel bag’s shadow. Jim Ignatowski and Alex Rieger are far more comforting than the sound of Saul exiting his study. Eliza can block out the sounds of her father’s arrival altogether if she concentrates very hard on the openings and closings of Alex Rieger’s bloodless mouth.

Eliza is seven, she is nine, she is six and a half. She is any age at all between second grade and the present.

Jim Ignatowski is bugging his eyes out at Latke Gravas, that funny little foreigner, and Eliza is right there in the taxi depot with them, can practically smell Louis’s cigar as he barks commands from the dispatch desk, wants to bury her face in Latke’s grease-stained overalls. Her father’s hand snaps her out of it.

Eliza wishes her father’s hand were on her shoulder for some other reason, generally covets all forms of his attention. She feigns absorption in the TV so that the hand will stay a little longer. Eliza has learned this trick from Saul himself, though she knows his powers of concentration are real.

Take, for example, the time the ambulance came for Mrs. Feruzza when she broke her hip. The sound of passing sirens shook the walls, but Saul swears he didn’t hear a thing, reading as he was a recent translation of Pico della Mirandola. Eliza isn’t convinced her father would hear an emergency knock on his closed study door. What if she was bleeding, choking, going blind, the house burning down, the escaped convict holding her at knifepoint? She has been kept awake nights wondering if her father would save her in time.

The hand on her shoulder is gone. The manila envelope, now empty, has fallen to the floor. Eliza cannot help but watch her father’s eyes scan the twin grade columns. She feels compelled to watch his face fade from expectation to resignation. Math, C. Science, C. Social Studies, C. Work Habits, B. Behavior, A. Reading, B. Spelling, A. Then, the forced smile, the patting of the head. The click of Saul’s door after his silent retreat to his study always manages to cut through the sound of the television. That night when Eliza glides into sleep, she sees the disappointment on her father’s face behind her closed lids.

Eliza realizes too late that slipping the spelling bee notice under her father’s door may have been a mistake. There is no historical reason for her father to think that an envelope from her is a good thing. When, that first day, he emerges from his office without lauding her bee victory, Eliza assumes he has saved the envelope’s opening for a better mood. She decides to keep quiet to preserve the surprise. She likes picturing Saul’s face the moment he realizes the envelope’s true contents, mentally screens and rescreens this imagined moment to ease her anxiety.

When three days pass without a word Eliza, so accustomed to being disappointing, begins to wonder if the singularity of this, her first achievement, has caused her to overinflate its importance. Spelling, after all, is a skill made redundant by the dictionary. The steady stream of spelling A’s on her report card has never inspired much praise. Perhaps her father is even a little embarrassed? That all his daughter can do is spell? His daughter, who still can’t recite the Hebrew alphabet? Eliza accepts this possibility with the inherent grace of the acutely underconfident, decides not to mention it until he does.

By Friday night, Eliza’s resolve has been seriously shaken. The district bee is less than twenty four hours away. Even if her father is not impressed by her victory, he should have acknowledged by now that there are transportation needs to be met. Saul has never shirked his duty as child chauffeur, is a reliable member of any carpool. But, by now, Eliza cannot imagine bringing it up. Like many things left unsaid, Eliza’s thoughts have metastasized, kernels of doubt exploding into deadly certainties. She has taken Saul’s silence to mean that her accidental achievement is too little too late. Friday night after services, she cannot sleep. She stays in bed until she can’t stand picturing another version of Dr. Morris’s rebuke for her failure to serve as the school’s spelling representative. It’s way past midnight. Eliza decides to visit her mother in the kitchen.

Miriam Naumann is a hummingbird in human form, her wings too fast to be seen without a stop-motion camera. The silver in her hair makes her seem electric, her head a nest of metal wires extending through her body. Eliza can only imagine the supercharged brain that resides inside, generally equates the inside of her mother’s head with the grand finale of a July Fourth fireworks display. The fact that Miriam only needs a nightly three hours of sleep helps to foster this mental image. Saul has calculated, with some envy, that his wife’s Spartan sleep requirements gain her two and a half months more wakefulness than the average person annually.

Eliza has never seen her mother’s law office but is certain that it is kept as obsessively clean as the kitchen. Counters are waxed daily, as is the floor. The dishware in the cabinets is arranged according to precise plan, the stacks spaced exact distances apart and ordered according to a conception of size, color, and function that no one but Miriam fully understands. Miriam refuses to waste anything and insists upon maximum space conservation, such that a spectrum of containers is needed to house everything from the single remaining meatball to the half bowl of uneaten salad. The Tupperware she uses toward this end, stored in cabinets under the oven, is a vision of military precision.

Miriam cleans at night. She is working the Formica in her favorite rubber gloves when Eliza sits at the kitchen table. The room is silent except for the tick of the oven clock and the
smrsh, smrsh
of the green side of Miriam’s Scotch Brite scrubber sponge pad. Eliza knows she could sit here for an hour without attracting her mother’s notice. In a concentration contest, Miriam would pin Saul to the mat every time.

“Mom?”

Miriam looks up mid-stroke. “Elly? When did you wander in?”

“Just a few seconds ago. I can’t sleep.”

Miriam works the counter like she’s massaging sore muscles. She is at her most placid in the morning’s small hours. Eliza used to fake insomnia for the chance to stay up with her, a ruse Miriam became expert at detecting. For Eliza, the smell of solvent conjures up rival feelings of love and frustration.

“Are Saul and Aaron asleep?”

In Miriam’s conversations with her children, Saul has always been Saul and never “father.” It is a habit of speech to which Eliza, after eleven years, still hasn’t adjusted. Saul’s name in her mother’s mouth makes Eliza feel as if her father is not actually hers, just some man who has come to live with them.

“Yeah. They’re asleep.”

Miriam flips the cleaning pad from green to yellow, downshifting from scrubber to sponge. The counter gleams like an ice rink, post-Zamboni. Eliza had originally intended to tell her mother about the bee, but something about the way Miriam is scrubbing makes Eliza fear that her words will be washed away upon leaving her lips. Eliza has a growing suspicion that she never won the bee at all, her father’s silence proof that she has imagined everything.

Eliza decides to keep quiet. If the bee isn’t real, she would like to hold on to its illusion a little longer.

Miriam turns her attention to the refrigerator. She removes a jar of gherkins, a bottle of Worcestershire, and a tub of margarine, wiping each with a Handiwipe before lining them precisely along the line in the linoleum floor tile pattern. The fridge light bathes Miriam and the foodstuffs in a soft, yellow glow. Though Eliza cannot identify the song’s title, she finds herself mentally humming the opening bars of the Pachelbel Canon, the image of her mother at the fridge having tapped into a memory of the music from a light bulb commercial.

“Mom?”

Miriam jerks her head like someone caught sleeping in class.

“Silly me, forgot you were here.” Miriam offers Eliza the jar. “Would you like a gherkin?” Miriam is the only one who actually eats the gherkins, drinking the juice from the jar when she’s through.

“No, thanks. I’ve been wondering. Do you clean so much because you like to or because you have to in order to get to sleep?”

The light from the refrigerator turns Miriam’s silver hairs to gold. The Worcestershire has been placed in the exact center of the middle shelf of the refrigerator door. A pint of strawberries has taken its place on the floor between the pickles and the Parkay. Miriam knits her eyebrows together until they resemble a hairy rendering of a bird in flight. Eliza isn’t sure her mother has heard her question. When Eliza looks into Miriam’s eyes, she sees vast intelligence and unspannable distance.

Miriam is born to wealthy parents for whom parenthood equals patriotism. Melvin and Ruth Grossman’s desire for a large, boisterous family à la Kennedy is tempered, with each of Ruth’s miscarriages, into steely determination. Some of Ruth’s near pregnancies are cruel in their duration, allowing for hopes to be raised and names to be chosen before the painful end. This only intensifies the couple’s fervency. After four childless years of marriage Ruth and Mel have become procreative partisans in the clash between will and womb. Ruth’s ultimate pregnancy and delivery of a baby girl is a battle won but a war lost; Miriam’s difficult birth leaves Ruth unable to bear more children. Accordingly, Miriam becomes the repository for the expectations Mel and Ruth harbored for all five of their conceptual offspring. These quintupled aspirations trickle down to Miriam through a series of high-powered nannies and tutors, money no object in insuring that their sole surviving progeny receives the best of everything five times over.

Miriam is an exceptional and obsessive child. She forbids anyone to touch her toys and insists upon her underwear being washed twice before its return to the bureau drawer. Mel and Ruth interpret their daughter’s eccentricity as a sign of genius, insist she be humored to facilitate her intellectual growth.

Miriam learns the extent of her social maladjustment upon her enrollment at a prestigious boarding school at age twelve. There, her natural predilection for study is reinforced by the unremitting mockery of her peers, the library quickly becoming her only place of refuge outside the classroom.

She is a phenomenal student. In college her powers of concentration achieve mythic status when she is evacuated from the stacks by a fireman who discovers her intent upon a book despite the blaring alarm that has cleared everyone else from the building.

Miriam and Saul meet when she is finishing law school and he is working as a research assistant for a Judaism professor. Saul has abandoned drugs to devote himself to a life of mystical scholarship. He now knows that
LSD
was a false doorway, a simulation of an experience accessible only after years of devoted study. He looks upon his acid insights as shadowy impostors, clay pigeons that will explode at the first touch of true transcendence. Though he knows he may never share the experience of the ancient mystics, Saul has decided to spend the rest of his life trying. Miriam embodies the intellectual discipline Saul senses he will need to reach his goal. Her unconventional mannerisms seem charming indicators of her rich mental life. He is attracted by her permanent slouch, her head always slightly craned forward as if examining a book’s fine print. He likes the solidity of her body, neither fat nor thin, which she carries with a charming lack of self-awareness. As their acquaintance deepens, the hidden workings of Miriam’s mind beckon to Saul like a seven-veiled Salome.

Their early courtship consists of shared dinners in the campus cafeteria followed by neighboring seats at lectures with titles like “God and the Plague: Religious Revivalism in the Middle Ages,” and “Unmaking Your Mind: Discerning Truth From Falsehood in the Midst of Vietnam.” Saul thrills to Miriam’s intellectual voracity, attends the lectures solely to observe her assiduity as she drinks in the words. Weeks later, she can alternately defend or destroy the lecturer’s arguments point by point without having taken any notes.

Until law school, Miriam’s entire academic career is single-sexed, boys an elective she bypasses. Though she has been on a few abortive dates, Saul is the first beau willing to indulge her interests, the first not to suggest popcorn and a formulaic comedy followed by an invitation to his apartment. Saul’s experiences with the greater portion of the female student body at his alma mater have taught him to be a good listener. With Miriam he is patient, luring her with his constancy.

Miriam is grateful for the attention. Aware that her unique temperament might severely limit her relationship options, she had been willing to take on someone far more socially stunted than Saul. Though not religious, Miriam takes self-congratulatory pride in dating a Jew, on occasion even accompanying Saul to synagogue for the opportunity to analyze group religious ritual.

Into their third week of dating, Miriam scrutinizes the library’s dog-eared
Joy of Sex
and
Hite Report
from the relative privacy of her cubicle. Sex, like ironing or changing a flat tire, is an essential life skill to be mastered. She is intrigued by a firsthand account of an orgasm as a giant body wave.

And so, after a month of twice-weekly dinner/lecture dates, Miriam and Saul make love. It is the longest Saul has waited to bed a woman he is wooing. While Miriam harbors unspoken reservations (she still prefers to wash her underwear twice and is well versed in the number of microorganisms exchanged during a kiss), she is intrigued by Saul’s vast sexual experience and knows he represents her best chance at a good lay. Miriam is glad they go to his apartment. While somewhat willing to yield up her body, she is less certain about her sheets and towels.