Bee Season (22 page)

“I can tell you’re feeling overwhelmed. That’s okay. You should feel overwhelmed. Nothing in your experience has prepared you for this. Judeo-Christianity has nothing like our deities or our temples. I’ve had people ask me if by worshiping Kṛṣṇa  we’re not breaking the second commandment. But worshiping Kṛṣṇa  is not idolatry because we are not expecting the deity to answer our prayers. The deity serves a focus for our worship and as a reminder of Kṛṣṇa’s qualities when he was on earth — his kindness, his beauty — which inspires us to bring out these qualities in ourselves. But we don’t expect you to blindly accept any of this; you need to experience it for yourself. Like the Jews, we are people of the book. The
Sri Isopanisad
will introduce you to the principles of the
Vedas,
which is our sacred text. This, the
Bhagavad-Gita,
is the most important of the
Vedas.
However, the most important aspect of Kṛṣṇa  consciousness is also the easiest and you can do it without reading a single word.”

From the cupboard, Chali produces a string of wooden beads the size of hazelnuts.

“These are
japa
beads. They are made from the wood of the sacred banyan tree. We use them in chanting
japa,
which consists of God’s holy name.”

Aaron’s face lights up. “You mean like meditation? Like a mantra?”

“Exactly, but this is not just any mantra. This is God’s name itself. When we fill our mouths, ears, and minds with the sound of God’s name, we free ourselves from material existence and realize our original and pure relationship with God.” Chali hands Aaron the beads. “Each bead symbolizes a completed chant. There are 108 beads on this string. To complete a round of chanting is to say the chant 108 times. As a devotee, I chant at least sixteen rounds a day. If I have time, I chant more.”

Aaron eyes the beads dubiously. “How long does that take?”

“It takes me two hours, but it will take you longer until you get the hang of it. Don’t feel like you need to do sixteen rounds at first. Just try doing a little every day and see how it feels. Morning is the best time — before the material world has time to fill you with its petty concerns.”

Aaron peers at his feet. “But do you actually
feel
God when you do it?” he asks so softly he fears Chali hasn’t heard him.

Chali waits for Aaron to raise his head. His eyes grip Aaron’s.

“In the beginning, no. I felt more relaxed, but I was still too involved in the material world to feel God. Then, as I learned to let go of
maya,
the world of illusion, chanting
japa
began to fill me with amazing happiness. God is inside all of us, but we forget this. Chanting allows you to remember.”

Aaron strokes the beads with his fingers. Incense wafts up from his palm. The scented wood is cool and smooth to the touch. It feels good in his hand.

At school, no mention is made of Eliza’s national defeat. Without the spelling sheets in her pocket, class drags. Eliza cannot remember how she used to make it through the day. The first of her newspaper articles, “Huntingdon Girl Spells Her Way to
V-I-C-T-O-R-Y
,” is replaced in the school showcase by an article about a third grader whose spaniel placed fourth at a recent dog show. Though Eliza knows she is still welcome at the lunchroom’s good girl table, she doesn’t feel like she belongs there anymore.

Eliza tries to return to her routine of after-school television, but she no longer enjoys the reruns. Their familiarity, in which she once found such comfort, now mocks her. In every episode Eliza sees the predictability of her post-bee life. Just as surely as she knows that Blair and Jo will reconcile by the end of today’s half-hour installment of “Facts of Life,” she knows that each day will be a repetition of the last — bus, school, bus, home, bed — with some food and television in between. None of that comes close to the excitement of tracing a word back to its salty origins, of charting its transformations over time. Ms. Bergermeyer and her high-pitched nasal lectures are no match for her father’s asides, expansions, and non sequiturs, his excitement enough to make it all relevant and alive.

Eliza knows Saul is waiting for her. Ever since the national bee, he has kept his study door open in standing invitation. But she also knows that if she returns it will be to different rules. There will be no more dictionary, no more word derivations. If she wants to continue with him, she’s got to want to “get to know the letters.” She isn’t sure how she can pretend to want something she doesn’t understand, something she’d be embarrassed to mention in front of anyone else. Getting to know the letters sounds like a game for little kids, as obsolete as Chutes and Ladders or Candyland. Yet she knows that if she walks through the study door her father will convince her that getting to know the letters is something she desperately wants to do. Though she doesn’t have the time or personal perspective to put it into words, she senses that once she enters her father’s study, she is destined to give him whatever he wants even if she isn’t sure she has it.

As far as Eliza can tell, Saul has been effortlessly filling the time that moves intolerably slowly for her. Eliza doesn’t know his seeming occupation is intended to make her feel free. Instead it strikes her as a taunt:
I don’t really need you.
She feels caught out in the face of this, realizes she had come to think of herself as necessary. With the spelling bee over, she had entertained soft-focus visions of father/daughter kite-building and cookie-baking, images she doesn’t realize she has lifted from an old Hallmark commercial until she sees it again on TV. In the wake of her own loss, she finally appreciates what she took from Aaron by replacing his guitar sessions. The guilt that fills her is no longer tempered by a private sense of victory. Instead of feeling as if she has won her father from her brother, she feels as if she has lost them both.

Back in his bedroom, Aaron examines Chali’s gifts. It’s hard to believe that half an hour away is a place where these objects actually make sense. If it weren’t for the books and beads, Aaron is pretty sure he could convince himself that his visit was a dream, that there is no Chali, no place where robed men and women walk with
japa
beads hanging from pouches around their necks. Aaron slips his own pouch over his head. He looks at his closet full of clothes, the books on his shelf, the dusty guitar case in its corner. “
Maya,
the world of illusion,” he whispers.

Aaron sits cross-legged, the
japa
beads in one hand.

“Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare. Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare.”

The words are tentative, his voice self-conscious. It’s nothing like what Chali sounded like. Watching Chali had been the clincher. When Chali closed his eyes and began to chant, the words ran like water from his throat. Chali’s face became suffused with a joy so intense Aaron expected at any moment to see him jump up and begin to dance, could not imagine that much happiness remaining still. Aaron decided right then and there that even though the wax statue and the Kṛṣṇa  deity were a little weird, it was all worth a try if it meant having a chance at feeling the way Chali looked at that moment.

Aaron closes his eyes and tries again. By the fifth cycle he’s found a rhythm, stretching the A’s in
Rama
the way Chali did. In his head is an image of a stone rolling down a mountain, building momentum, the chant’s finish carrying over to its start so that the words are seamless, his fingers on the
japa
beads the only indication of a beginning or an end to the sounds. Aaron chants fifty cycles before he hears someone coming up the stairs and stops, afraid of being overheard. He decides that tomorrow morning he will wake up before Elly or Saul and try again.

Eliza cannot get through a day without at least one spelling bee word finding her. The word can come from anywhere: a television newscaster, an overheard conversation, a song lyric on the radio. On each occasion she gets an adrenaline rush that makes the world more intense for a few moments, the word standing out the way a random object highlighted by the sun acquires sudden significance. Life becomes filled with opportunities for discovery. Elly repeats the word inside her head. She pretends she is once again at the microphone and victory still within reach, an entire room silent save for the letters from her mouth. But she cannot maintain the moment. Invariably the word fades, leaving her with that disappointed feeling at parade’s end after the last float has passed.

It is during a “Barney Miller” episode that she hears Detective Nick Yemana say
LOQUAT
and remembers how the word blossomed in her head, its letters inhabiting her as surely as her own skeleton. She remembers her father’s words, “Next year you could be unstoppable.” Remembering
LOQUAT
, she decides to believe him.

The next night Saul awakens to find himself hard inside his wife’s mouth. At first he thinks he is dreaming, but the distinctly nondreamlike detail of used dental floss on his nightstand assures him that he isn’t. His dreams never feel this specific — her hands clutching his hips as if they are all that is holding her to the bed, her hair brushing the inside of his legs as she works her mouth up and down.

“Miriam,” he whispers, but she doesn’t hear him. “Miriam,” he says a little louder, ending in a moan. Only when he props himself up on his elbows and touches her shoulder does she finally look at him, seemingly startled to discover a person attached to the focus of her attention.

She had gotten as far as the garage door before she forced herself to turn around, knew the only way to resist the car and an unfamiliar house would be to go directly to bed. When she first started and he had been completely soft, she wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted him to wake up. As he became harder she realized it didn’t matter. All she needed was him inside her.

“Miriam, slow down. Come here so I can touch you.” He has fantasized about this, but it has never actually happened, a lover waking him in the middle of the night. A long time ago, when it still felt natural to talk about such things, he had mentioned this to Miriam. When he asked if she had any fantasies of her own, a look of utter puzzlement had been her only response.

Miriam must not have heard him. He’s getting closer and closer to coming even though or perhaps because he is trying to hold himself back. Maybe he should pull away so that he can bring her with him but it feels so good and she’s so
intent,
as if she’s got a secret mission, he can’t hold back much longer and now she’s taking him between her legs and he can tell that she’s dry, he can feel the resistance going in. He knows it can’t feel good for her, knows she needs time, wants to pull out but she’s thrusting him in so hard there’s nothing he can do; it’s over. He looks at her, confusion in his eyes, but she’s not even looking at him, not even aware that he’s come. She’s still pumping up and down. He has to push her off before she stops.

Eliza’s table has been replaced by two overstuffed pillows. The dictionary has joined Saul’s other books. Until Eliza smells the dust and paper and crumbling leather again, she doesn’t realize how much she has missed her father’s study. Even as a long-absent sense of well-being overtakes her she has no idea that this feeling is contingent upon the smell, which she associates with Saul’s love.

At first Eliza thinks her father’s ideas are weird.

“Think of your brain as a muscle. A runner does stretches to warm up. Brains need the same courtesy.”

Some days he has Eliza write the alphabet over and over again without looking at the paper, switching the pen between her right and left hands. He tells her not to think about what the letters look like or if she is writing too small or too large. She is only to focus on the motion of her hand, upon the feeling of the letter emerging. Eliza imagines the alphabet climbing inside her arm and taking her hand for a ride until she is no longer aware of her fingers’ movements, only knows what she is writing after she looks at the page.

Sometimes Saul has Eliza visualize the first letter that comes into her head, telling her to make it grow to the size of a tangerine, to a melon, to a small dog, and on and on until the letter is bigger than herself, bigger than the house, stretching majestically toward the sun.

“What is a universe of A like? What’s a universe of Q?” he’ll say, usually not guessing the letter that’s growing inside her head like a time-lapse film of seedling to flower. Occasionally she has trouble breathing, the letter grown so large in her imagination that it takes up all her air.

Sometimes they chant the alphabet together, forward and backward, in unison and independently, until the letters are a continuous ribbon of sound unwinding from Eliza’s tongue. She feels most like her brother then, the ghost of his guitar entering the room. The letters become music, the alphabet their own duet.

“Okay, Elly, I want you to clear your mind.”

This is the hardest part. There is so much going on. The more of her mind Elly makes quiet, the more she finds making noise.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,
she repeats as fast as she can, sweeping her other thoughts away. Eliza pictures her brain as a tunnel extending deep into the earth,
nothing
the water slowly filling it from bottom to top.

Saul can see the change. Elly’s jaw relaxes, her face slackens. Only a few minutes after closing her eyes, she is in what Saul calls the Zone.

“Are you clear?”

Elly nods.

“I want you to open yourself up to a letter.”

Elly has learned that this is something different than thinking of a letter. When she opens herself up, she doesn’t know what the letter will be. Somehow, Saul can tell if she is opening up or thinking. The trick is to think about babies.

Eliza imagines she is floating in a warm space. She is a mere half something waiting to be made whole. Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute. Each letter struggles to be the first. Some letters stumble. Others slow and then stop. What was once the whole alphabet is now only part of the letter spectrum. Elly feels mounting excitement as the remaining letters approach. One pulls away from the others. It comes closer and closer until, finally, it passes into her, filling her with its A-ness or R-ness, K-ness or Y-ness, and now she is a growing thing, the letter present in every fledgling heartbeat, every newborn drop of blood.