Bee Season (12 page)

Aaron claims his customary seat and flips to the front of his
siddur
to check the name. Every inside cover has a light blue bookplate with the words, “This prayerbook is dedicated to the memory of ______,” or, “This prayerbook is dedicated in honor of ______.” Weddings, bar mitzvahs, and births get “in honor of.” Funerals get “to the memory of.” Divorces don’t get anything, but sometimes Aaron comes across an “in honor of” for an obsolete marriage, like the book for the Kaufmans who he heard split up because Mrs. Kaufman ran into her high school boyfriend in the grocery store and never came home again. Aaron considers these
siddurim
bad luck. Whenever he picks an “in honor of” for a marriage, he only keeps it if he knows the couple is still together.

Aaron snaps out of his siddur reverie to find himself in the middle of
L’cha Dodi.
His hard-wired knowledge of the service has taken him through two responsive readings and three prayers as his thoughts wandered. Though Aaron can identify a few Hebrew words, his knowledge of the language is largely limited to the ability to parse letters. Aaron realizes that there’s no way for him to know he’s welcoming in the Sabbath bride as the English translation claims. For all he knows, the entire congregation could be chanting
Green Eggs and Ham.
At the idea of Rabbi Mayer and George and Mrs. Schwartz all solemnly intoning, “Would you, could you, in a box?” Aaron almost loses it, has to stop singing to keep from laughing. Eliza notices this and turns. There was a time when Aaron might have let her in on the joke, but he only smiles distantly and stands with everyone else to recite the Shema. At the Silent Amidah, he doesn’t even glance at Eliza, sitting down early and quietly enough to make it very clear that, tonight, she’s playing Sheep on her own.

Aaron is still musing over his Dr. Seuss realization when he remembers his father’s early lessons in consumer consciousness. Ever since Saul dissected a Snoopy Snow Cone Machine commercial for Aaron at age seven, Aaron has been aware of the manipulative powers of advertising. “Never buy a product just because you’ve seen it on TV,” Saul instructed at an age at which recognizing characters on cereal boxes made leaving aisle three empty-handed tantamount to abandoning a friend. As a result, Aaron has grown to mid-adolescence with an eye for label reading. It is at the service’s completion, while munching an
oneg
cookie, that Aaron realizes he’s bought Judaism without consulting the side of the box.

Miriam has designed a special outfit, a collection of pockets concealed within an otherwise normal skirt, blouse, and coat. Pockets sewn into the blouse’s sleeves serve for small items. The lining of the skirt doubles up into one giant pocket for larger ones. Inside the coat are pockets accessible through false seams lined with wire so that they may be pinched open and shut like change purses.

When Miriam has pocketed an item, she experiences the ideal pregnancy. There is no round-belly reminder of something inside, feeding upon her in order to grow. There are no sickening turns and kicks, proof of the stranger soon to emerge from between her legs. Though an only child, Miriam grew up knowing about her mother’s not-borns: the boy with the misshapen heart, the girl with the tiny head. One was neither boy nor girl but a lump that grew at such frightening speed the doctors called it cancer and misdiagnosed death within a year. Miriam grew up seeing these almost-babies in her mother’s eyes. Initially Ruth had to be coaxed into touching her baby girl, afraid of passing on to Miriam whatever had poisoned the others.

The first time Miriam’s belly grows, her mind fills with visions of monsters: something premature and malformed, something late and soft-brained. After Aaron is born, Miriam’s fear shifts toward herself. Breast-feeding Aaron, Miriam senses some vital part of herself escaping into his tiny, sucking mouth. She resents that her body must continue to give after nine previous months of suckling. She hates her breasts, grown voluptuous with milk. She ends breast feeding early, citing the work of an outdated child development specialist.

When Saul and Aaron are alone, Saul dips his pinkie into the bottle, offering his finger to his son until his skin is pruned from milk. Sometimes, when it is very late, Saul presses the bottle’s bottom to his chest. Once, sitting like this, he awakens to the warm bottle pressing against him, moving in concert to the feeding rhythm of his milk-contented son.

“Amanuensis,” Saul reads, poised above the word, the honeybee to its flower.

“Where’s it from?” Eliza is already taking the word apart, dissecting the junctures between syllables, weighing each vowel and consonant on her tongue. She bets the word spells like it sounds; all the syllables stand out in her head instead of blending together.

“Where do you think it’s from?” Saul asks with a smile, his eyes flitting between Eliza and the dictionary.

Eliza loves this game almost enough to forget that Aaron isn’t really talking to her anymore. Saul turns the words inside out with her, spurring her to venture inside each one. Even though he holds the answer in his hand, it is like he is learning with her, the two of them traveling through time and across the world to trace a word’s beginnings.

Amanuensis. All the -is words are usually the same.
Eliza looks to Saul. He is waiting, entirely focused on her, time measured by the movement of her lips. Sometimes Elly takes longer than she needs just to see if he will keep waiting. He always does.

“Is it from Latin?”

Saul’s face lights up. “Exactly! Now what do you think it means?”

“Is it some kind of disease?”
Some kind of awful skin thing. Like that boy in Ms. Paul’s class who’s always scratching.

“Let’s see,” he says, peering into the dictionary. “
Manu-
means hand. It comes from a Latin phrase,
a manu,
meaning secretary. Amanuensis means someone who takes dictation or copies a manuscript, like a Torah scribe. Here’s a riddle. What do you and a Torah scribe have in common?”

Eliza no longer minds that her father’s riddles are never riddles but things he wants her to know. Sometimes she wishes he’d just tell her instead of making her guess, especially when it’s something that she’d never know in a million years.

“Um … we’re both Jewish?”

Eliza watches Saul’s mouth for the slightest upward curve so that she can make it seem as if they are breaking into smiles at the same time.

“Well, yes, but you have something bigger in common, something that has to do with you being in the spelling bee.” He looks at her like he actually expects her to know.

Eliza shrugs. After one failure, he always tells.

“Both spelling bees and Torah scribes share the idea that a word should be constructed perfectly or not at all. A little mistake and you’re beeped off the stage. If a Torah amanuensis makes even one stray ink mark, he’s got to start on a brand-new piece of parchment.”

“It’s called getting dinged out.”

“Huh?”

It’s gotten to the point where she expects to have to say things twice. She wonders if Aaron also had the problem of only being listened to when Saul expected something.

“When you mess up,” Eliza repeats patiently. “They call it getting dinged out.”

Saul nods, but he’s already looking through the dictionary for the next word. Eliza reminds herself how lucky she is. Most kids have to study alone.

Aaron used to enter the synagogue at his father’s side feeling like a prince beholding the kingdom he stood to inherit. But he’s older now. Adults are no longer impressed by his ability to recite the service from memory. He can no longer fool himself into believing that Stacey Lieberman has or ever had a crush on him, especially since she got breasts and became an alternate on the pompon squad. Most bothersome, however, is the fact that after three years of patient waiting, Aaron’s bar mitzvah experience has yet to repeat itself.

Aaron had not expected to commune with God on a regular basis. He knows that what he felt on the
bima
was an experience denied to many. But he had hoped that after becoming a man, Judaism-wise, he would occasionally be able to sense God’s presence, even if only a pale glimmer of what he had felt as a bar mitzvah. Instead, compared to that magic moment three years before, the synagogue has become yet another place where he doesn’t fit in. He’s too old to want to be seen playing tag after
oneg
and too young to want to talk to the adults. And so, guitar gathering dust in the corner of his room, his father’s study barred to him, Aaron decides to apply his father’s lessons about advertising to religion. He decides to visit a church.

Aaron tells himself that his decision is an empirical one, that he will grow to appreciate his given religion by testing others. Lurking beneath his empirical spirit, however, is a thrilling sense of fear. Aaron cannot even begin to picture what would happen if his father found him out.

Christianity has always existed in Aaron’s head as an unvariegated whole, Christian a handy, all-purpose term used to describe anyone for whom a cross signified more than a lower-case
t
. Suddenly, upon fingering Church in the yellow pages, Christianity explodes into a jigsaw of Apostolic, Baptist, Christian, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic. Of them all, it’s Ro-man Catholic that sparks Aaron’s imagination.

Aaron knows about Catholics. Catholics don’t just sit around and say prayers. Catholics stand and kneel. Catholics go to confession and take communion. Confession and communion have intrigued Aaron for some time, but until now seemed forever beyond his grasp. Aaron is torn between feeling like an intrepid explorer and an intractable sinner.

Aaron chooses a Catholic church in nearby Norristown. He considers disguising himself, briefly toys with the idea of dying his hair, but decides that a bleached-blond Jew will look even more conspicuous than a regular Jew and then there’d be the problem of explaining his new look to his father.

Aaron parks in the parking lot of a neighboring strip mall: a congregant could live in the area and recognize the car. He surveys the mall parking lot twice to assure himself he sees no one he knows, then as casually as possible exits the car and approaches the church. Halfway there, Aaron begins to worry that he left a car door unlocked. If the car gets stolen, he’ll have to call someone and then will have to explain what he is doing at this strip mall when Huntingdon Valley has strip malls much bigger and nicer than this one. Except that Aaron always worries he has left a door unlocked, always checks, and always finds that he hasn’t. If he turns around, it will just create further opportunities to be spotted. Aaron continues toward the church. And when he steps inside, his paranoia really kicks in.

The minute he sits down and takes a hymnal from the pew before him, Aaron expects a siren to go off with a mechanical voice that skreaks
JEW
JEW
JEW
JEW
until the entire congregation turns and the priest shambles toward him in that slow but inevitable
Night of the Living Dead
way. Failing that, Aaron is certain all the standing and sitting and genuflecting at impossible-to-predict intervals will earn him scorn, especially since he doesn’t even know what side to start crossing himself on, something he is sure Catholics are taught around the same time
mohels
are slicing off Jewish foreskins. But then, when Aaron incorrectly anticipates a kneel and a woman sitting near him actually turns and smiles, Aaron begins to think that maybe these Catholics are okay. Perhaps there is a reason this was the first brand of religion he picked to taste-test.

During the English prayers Aaron reads out loud with everyone else. His natural tendency is to say “Cheese and Rice” whenever the name of God’s son comes up. It’s what Saul instructed him to do during Christmas carols to avoid having to impugn his beliefs for the sake of a school winter recital or the Boy Scouts of America. But this isn’t a holiday assembly, Aaron isn’t singing the tenor part to “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” and his father is nowhere to be seen. It is a sunny morning. Faces and hands are patched in the saturated blues, reds, and greens of the church’s stained glass windows. They bestow upon the congregation a Technicolor otherworldliness that has never graced Schwartzes, Liebermans, or Mayers. As Aaron intones the forbidden J-word immediately followed by the forbidden C, he looks toward the crucifix hanging behind the altar, about where the ark would be in a synagogue. He tries to imagine the thorns, the nails, and the crushing weight of the world’s sins.

The big issue, of course, is whether or not to take communion. Since his decision to test-drive Christianity, Aaron has been doing some reading. He is alternately fascinated and disgusted by the wine-as-blood, bread-as-flesh concept. He also knows that even Catholics are supposed to have been baptized, confirmed, and recently penanced in order to receive the host, not to mention the little detail of believing that the blood and flesh they’re consuming are those of the Messiah and the Son of God. And while Aaron has no desire to disrespect or blaspheme the Catholic faith, he feels that he has to do it all to get the full picture.

To distract himself from the fast-approaching big decision, Aaron fixates on the confessionals at the far end of the church. They remind him of telephone booths, which he realizes, in a way, they are. Once inside, via a priest instead of a wire, you get to talk to God. This is a comforting thought until Aaron pictures the terrifying way Saul’s eyes bulge out when he gets angry. The idea of regularly causing that kind of reaction on a cosmic level is about as appealing as visiting the dentist knowing you have a jaw of rotting molars.

The front pews begin to empty out. The time has come. As Aaron exits his row, he reasons that it would be just as easy to turn left instead of right, to return to his car, and to forget he ever heard of St. Patrick Church. But then the same woman who smiled at him before smiles again. Aaron remembers his profound sense of mission when first deciding to give religion a second look. He turns right instead of left. He is Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, and Lewis and Clark all rolled into one intrepid Jew ready to see if, when he reaches the front of the church, he will fall off the edge of the world.