Bee Season (16 page)

Elly opens the bathroom door. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, failing to blink back the tears that start dripping onto the nice hotel carpeting.

“Elly, Elly, please. I’m not angry with you.” Saul gathers his daughter up and walks her to the bed. She is stiff in his arms.

“Elly, you and I are a team. I’m here to help you, but only if you want me to. If you don’t want to do this, just tell me, honey, and we can stop. I’ll put the dictionaries away and we won’t study anymore. Come Friday, you can do your best with what you’ve got.”

But Elly knows this isn’t really an option, knows that there’s only one way to answer.

“I want to do it, Dad. We can work more tomorrow. It’s just that I’m really tired. I really need some sleep.”

“Of course you do. Let me tuck you in. I don’t want you to worry about this, kiddo. You’re doing a terrific job. I’m proud of you. Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the gegenscheins bite.”

She dreams a sky black with swarming letters. They fly with thick, stubby wings barely able to hold their fat bodies aloft. They brush against her skin, nest in her hair. They crawl up her nose, into her eyes. The ground is covered in torn and broken letters that crunch beneath her feet with every step. The sound of letters fills the air, making thought impossible. The letters squeeze themselves between her lips and flutter their terrible wings inside her mouth. With her arms and legs, Eliza struggles against the crawling black swarm that coats her in her sleep, kicking and thrashing to wake up cold from the hotel air conditioning, the bedsheets at her feet.

On his first fatherless night Aaron actually removes
A Buddhism Primer
from the book sandwich of
Eastern Religions, Faiths of the World,
and
Are You a Hindu?
under his mattress and places it on his night table where anyone can see it. In the morning he tries meditating completely naked for the first time. He’s been wanting to do this for a while. He knows he’ll have to conquer the urge to touch himself, rejecting the physical world with all its false enticements. The idea of failure is as enticing as the idea of success, but he pretends that this isn’t the case, sits cross-legged on the carpet and begins to work on clearing his mind. He can feel nubs of carpet pressing against his buttocks and the soft skin of his thigh. He feels cool air on his penis and realizes he’s a little hard. He tells himself this makes sense since he never allows himself to be naked, not even in his bed on hot summer nights. His body is just reacting to something new. Then he pictures himself sitting naked on the floor of his room and this turns him on even more. He begins whispering a mantra in an attempt to erase the image, reprimanding himself for thinking of his body just when he should be escaping it, and before he knows it he’s completely hard.
I will not touch myself,
he vows as his hand reaches between his legs. He strokes himself with each
Om,
chanting faster and faster until it is a struggle to speak at all, his words more gasps than words, and then with one final
Om
it’s all over and he has to clean up the carpet fast with a sock and a glass of water he happens to have waiting so it won’t stain. Luckily his carpet is tan.

By light of day the evening study sessions are shadows, fuzzy as half-remembered dreams. There is the noise of the hotel and the distraction of scheduled activities. In the east wing of the National Gallery of Art, Eliza finds herself drawn to the oil portraits, the bee having strengthened her appreciation for what it means to sit so still for so prolonged a period. The frozen faces with their glinting eyes remind her of hummingbirds above flowers, wings all movement, going nowhere.

The spellers tend to group by experience and seriousness. The two- and three-year veterans maintain a cool distance from the rest, returning to friendships formed in previous years, renewing old envies. Eliza gravitates toward the more intent first-timers. There is an inherent distrust of the home-schooled competitors, who can study as much as they want without the distraction of other subjects. One night Eliza sees a home-schooler at the hotel restaurant, her dinner plate untouched as her parents quiz her at the table. She is an eighth grader who has made it to the finals for three years running. This is her last chance to win. When Eliza sees her next, being walked by her parents back to her room, Eliza realizes things could be a lot worse than Saul’s strange new talk about letters.

The press arrive on Friday morning. In each press kit, spellers are listed by number, their names and vital statistics printed below their photos. They come from Neptune, New Jersey; Gallup, New Mexico; and Kokomo, Indiana. They come from Fairbanks, Alaska; Naples, Florida; and Rome, Georgia. Their local papers featured them in last Sunday’s human interest column. Between them they have 276 siblings, 89 dogs, 54 cats, and 108 fish. Sixty five have dreamed of accidentally attending Friday’s competition in their underwear. Forty four have churches praying for them. Twenty nine have been constipated for the past two days. Twelve are afraid of vomiting onstage. Five have been wagered upon by overconfident parents.

One will win.

When Miriam entered her car she had no idea she’d find herself on the interstate, driving toward an unknown destination. It doesn’t feel like she’s going to a mall or a department store. It feels like she’s heading somewhere new and more significant, her recalibrated body directing her toward the external manifestation of her internal change.

One exit sign looks different, as though it was put there just for her, and she takes it to an unfamiliar street. Though she is a woman of maps and explicit driving directions, for some reason this strange road in a strange town is a calming thing. Her looser heart and larger lungs settle into a new rhythm,
Tik-kun Tik-kun Tik-kun,
that she can hear in the pulse in her ears. It sounds like a promise, a whispered pact between herself and the future.
Come, come, come with me.

She passes grocery stores and churches, a liquor store and a restaurant. She doesn’t know the name of the street she turns onto, only that she is meant to turn. It is a neighborhood of diminishing returns. The houses are old, small, and disappointed. Retouched El Caminos and Dodge Darts rest over oil patches that rain can no longer wash away. Sprinklers remain on lawns from forgotten summers long past, the grass beneath them brown.

When Miriam spots the house, she automatically drives a few more blocks before parking. Only while walking back to it does she realize that this approach is less conspicuous, that an unfamiliar car in the driveway might solicit unwanted attention. She finds herself walking as if she is a neighbor about to borrow a cup of sugar, a friend making a spontaneous visit. She walks as if she knows the street well enough to navigate it in her sleep. Dark windows and an empty driveway tell Miriam what she needs to know.

In ten years things will be different, alarms will have been installed, people will have become more cautious, but even then there will be neighborhoods like this one that are their own insurance against theft. Miriam finds a key under the doormat, fits it into the lock, and walks right in.

The house smells of floral deodorant spray and grease. The front door opens onto a small living room with a matted carpet. Everything in the room is clean but tired. Miriam circuits the house once before examining any details, passing from living room to kitchen, hallway and bedrooms. In the back of her mind, a distant voice whispers
Wrong,
but it is barely audible. Miriam knows, technically, that she doesn’t belong here, but neither does the object she has come to rescue. As long as it stays in this house, the world will remain slightly misaligned. By reclaiming it and becoming more whole she is working toward the correction of a larger imbalance. She is carrying out
Tikkun Olam.

Her body confirms this. Inside this strange house, looking for her missing piece, she feels intensely, acutely alive. Her senses fine-tune to appreciate small details. From the master bedroom she can hear the
tick tick
of the oven clock in the kitchen. From the far side of the bed she can see a dropped earring embedded in the carpet across the room. Her missing piece beats like a heart beneath the floorboards. It pulses with its urgency, drawing her closer. Each minute she and it remain separate, the pulse grows louder and the whispering voice grows even quieter, until
Wrong
is barely a memory, a half-forgotten dream.

Miriam knows the instant she sees it that she is here for the blue ceramic dish holding spare change beside the kitchen telephone. She carefully pours its nickels, pennies, and dimes onto the weathered counter. Outside, she is careful to lock the door before replacing the key under its mat.

In exiting the house, Miriam is reborn. She has left her outer skin, like so much cracked eggshell, in the house where the dish once was, a weight she didn’t know she carried until it was gone. She is more fluid and vibrant. Her new inner rhythm, born that first Saul-less night, now fits her outer body. Her looser heart beats closer to the surface than before. She can feel it just by placing her fingertips lightly upon her chest.
Tik-kun. Tik-kun.
It beats faster now, a pulse somewhere between that of woman and bird. Back on the road, the dish at her side, Miriam feels she could release the wheel and steer by looking, could press the gas pedal to the floor and soar into the air. She feels, at this moment, she could do anything.

Such a feeling of limitless possibility has found Miriam once before. Miriam is home on break during her last year of prep school, her entrance to college already assured. She is driving on a familiar back road, flush with her then irrevocable youth and the unwavering certainty of her future, when she turns off the car’s headlights. She knows she has crossed a boundary, that the act of extinguishing her headlights has placed her in a world whose rules her youth hasn’t mastered. Here, her presumed immortality no longer applies. This idea is both terrifying and exhilarating. She trains her eyes upon the faint gray stripe of the road divider and maintains her speed. At any moment the dark might congeal into an impenetrable wall that will accordion her car upon impact. The darkness seeps through her open windows, thick with possibility. It weights the air and coats her skin. She can stand it less than a minute before switching the headlights back on, turning the gray stripe back to yellow, vaporizing the darkness, and illuminating the two boys walking just ahead along the road’s edge, close enough that, had she kept her headlights off, she might have met up with an event that would have crossed back over with her from the unlit night, rewriting her future. Driving in broad daylight with the dish by her side, Miriam feels as if she is defying her fear to push on farther and longer than ever before.

The bee is to be held the following morning in the Independence Ballroom on the bottommost floor of the hotel, three stories underground and accessed via a series of neon-lit escalators that cycle the colors of the rainbow with the descent. Each successive floor is smaller than its predecessor, the last floor housing only the ballroom. The descent recalls a deep-sea dive; the varied life forms at the upper levels nearer to the sun thin until only spellers and their families remain, the blind, albino fishes of the ocean’s trenches.

After she has told her father she is going to sleep, Eliza slips out of her pajamas and back into her clothes. The muffled sound of the television from Saul’s room makes it easier not to be heard. Eliza checks her pocket three times for her room key before braving the hallway, closing the door to her room so slowly and softly that even she is unsure when it clicks shut. She stifles her urge to run, afraid to draw attention to herself, settling on a very brisk walk. The hall is empty. As she passes the closed doors of her fellow contestants, she hears nothing, imagines them asleep in their beds or desperately seeking sleep, their bedside clocks ticking away the bee’s approach.

The glass elevator terminates at the lobby, requiring Eliza’s transfer to the escalator. At the first sublevel, grownups sip cocktails at a rotating piano bar. A sign beside the “One full rotation every thirty minutes” sign announces that bee parents get their first drink free. The conference-room floor below the bar is dark except for the cycling colors of the escalator rainbow. Eliza is exhilarated by the darkness and the strangeness of being alone so far from home so late at night, empowered by the fact that she has broken away from her expected place in time to steer her own course. To combat the fear that shadows her every movement, she focuses on centering her feet upon the escalator step.

Only the first few feet of the lowest floor reflect the escalator lights. As Eliza approaches the ballroom entrance, the dark takes on a grainy, dreamlike quality in which anything might happen. Eliza wishes she had thought to put on her mother’s shirt.

She half expects the ballroom door to be locked, tells herself that she may escape the dark sooner than she thinks. When she finds the door ajar, she is surprised by the strength of her relief. It is as if the room has been awaiting her arrival.

Her eyes, having semi-adjusted to the darkness, can just make out the rows of chairs stretching back from the stage. The smallness of this stage compared to the stage in her nightmare is a comfort. From the schedule of events in the hotel lobby, Eliza knows that this ballroom housed a reception for paint salesmen last Sunday and will be filled with postcard collectors next weekend. It is just a room. Eliza closes her eyes and listens to it.
This is what I will think of tomorrow when I am onstage, of this room perfectly empty.

Perhaps if there were a little more light or if Eliza’s night vision were sharper, she would see the other small forms in the room, all absorbed in their own version of prayer, getting the last taste of peace this room has to offer. The quiet of the room feels like a held breath, its still air full of promise. Each small shadow claims one of these promises as their own, takes from the air the image of themselves at the microphone, the final winning word alive on their lips.