Honeydew: Stories (23 page)

C
aldicott Academy, a private day school for girls, had not expelled a student in decades. There were few prohibitions. Drinking and drugging and having sex right there on the campus could supposedly get you kicked out; turning up pregnant likewise; that was the long and short of it. There was a rule against climbing down the ravine on the west side of the school, where a suicide had occurred a century earlier, but the punishment was only a scolding.

Alice Toomey, headmistress, would have welcomed a rule against excessive skinniness. Emily Knapp, all ninety pounds of her, was making Alice feel enraged and, worse yet, incompetent—she, Alice, awarded the prize for Most Effective Director two years in a row by the Association of Private Day Schools. This tall bundle of twigs that called itself a girl—Alice’s palms ached to spank her.

Emily: eleventh grade, all As, active member of various extracurricular clubs, excused from sports for obvious reasons. Once a month she visited a psychiatrist, and once a week a nutrition doctor who emptied her pockets of rocks and insisted that she urinate before stepping on the scale. She had been hospitalized only twice. But according to her mother, Emily was never more than two milligrams away from an emergency admission.

She displayed other signs of disorder. Hair loss. Skin stretched like a membrane over the bones of the face. A voice as harsh as a saw. But her conversation, unless the subject was her own body mass, was intelligent and reasonable. Alice had endured a series of painful meetings with Dr. Richard Knapp, physician and professor of anatomy, and his wife, Ghiselle. The three met in Alice’s dowdy office. The atmosphere was one of helplessness.

On one of those occasions, “I worry about death,” Alice dared to say.

“Her death, if it occurs, will be accidental,” said Emily’s father evenly.

Ghiselle flew at him. “You are discussing some stranger’s case history, yes?” Despite twenty-five years in Massachusetts, she retained a French accent and French syntax, not to mention French chic and French beauty.

Richard said: “It is helpful to keep a physician’s distance.”

Husband and wife now exchanged a look that the unmarried Alice labeled enmity. Then Richard placed his fingers on Ghiselle’s chiffon arm, but it was Alice he looked at. “Emily doesn’t want to die,” he said.

“That is so?” scoffed Ghiselle.

“She doesn’t want a needle fixed to her vein. She doesn’t want an IV pole as a companion.”

“That is so?”

“She doesn’t want to drive us all crazy.”

“What
does
she want?” Alice said. And there was a brief silence as if the heavy questions about Emily’s condition and the condition of like sufferers were about to be answered, here, now, in Godolphin, Massachusetts.

“She wants to be very, very, very thin,” Richard said.
No shit,
Alice thought. “Achhoopf,” snorted Ghiselle, or something like that. She herself was very thin, again in the way of Frenchwomen—shoulders charmingly bony, neck slightly elongated. Her legs under her brief skirt—too brief for fifty? not in this case—were to die for, Caldicott students would unimaginatively have said.

“She wants to become a bug, and live on air,” Richard added, “and a drop or two of nectar. She thinks—she sometimes thinks—she was meant to be born an insect.”

Alice shuddered within her old-fashioned dress. She wore shirtwaists, very long in order to draw attention away from her Celtic hips and bottom, and always blue: slate, cornflower, the sky before a storm. She wondered if this signature style would become a source of mockery. She was forty-three, and six weeks pregnant—in another few months the shocked trustees would have to ask her to resign. Perhaps it would be more honorable to expel herself. “What can we do?” she asked.

“We can chain her to a bed and ram food down her throat,” Ghiselle said, her accent lost in her fury. Alice imagined herself locking the chain to the headboard. Now Richard’s fingers slid down the chiffon all the way to Ghiselle’s fingers. Five fiery nails waved him off. The two younger Knapp daughters, their weight normal, were good students, though they lacked Emily’s brilliance and her devotion to whatever interested her.

“Emily must find her own way to continue to live,” Richard said, at last providing something useful and true; but by now neither woman was listening.

Though Caldicott was not a residential school, Emily had been given a room to herself. It was really a closet with a single window looking out on the forbidden ravine. Mr. da Sola, jack-of-all-trades, had lined two of the walls with shelves. Mr. da Sola was a defrocked science teacher from the public schools who had seen fit to teach intelligent design along with evolution and had paid for that sin.

“I don’t need another science teacher,” Alice had said, wondering where he got the nerve to sit on the corner of her desk. What dark brows he had, and those topaz eyes…

“That’s good. I don’t want to be a science teacher,” he told her. He didn’t tell her that no other private school had agreed to interview him. “I want to return to my first loves, carpentry and gardening.” So she took him on.

On Mr. da Sola’s shelves Emily had placed her specimen collection equipment; the specimens themselves, collected from the ravine and its banks; and some books, including the King James Bible and an atlas of South America. There was also a box of crackers, a box of prunes, and several liters of bottled water.

Emily was permitted to take her meager lunch here and also her study periods, for the study hall nauseated her, redolent as it was of food recently eaten and now being processed, and sometimes of residual gases loosed accidentally or mischievously. She dined among her dead insects, admiring chitinous exoskeletons while she put one of three carrot sticks into her mouth. Chitin was not part of mammal physiology, though she had read that after death and before decomposition, the epidermis of a deceased human develops a leathery hardness—chitinlike, it could be called—which begins to resemble the beetles that gorge on the decaying corpse and defecate at the same time, turning flesh into compost. The uses of shit were many. The most delightful was manna. Emily liked the story of Moses leading the starving Israelites into the desert. Insects came to their rescue. Of course the manna, which Exodus describes as a fine frost on the ground with a taste like honey, was thought to be a miracle from God, but it was really Coccidae excrement. Coccidae feed on the sap of plants. The sugary liquid rushes through the gut and out the anus. A single insect can process and expel many times its own weight every hour. They flick the stuff away with their hind legs, and it floats to the ground. Nomads still eat it—relish it. It is called honeydew.

Ah, Coccidae. She could draw them—she loved to draw her relatives—but unfortunately the mature insect is basically a scaly ball: a gut in a shell. It was more fun to draw the ant—its proboscis, pharynx, two antennae. Sometimes she tried to render its compound eye, but the result looked too much like one of her mother’s jet-beaded evening pouches. She could produce a respectable diagram of its body, though: the thorax, the chest area, and the rear segment, segmented itself, which contained the abdomen and, right beside it, the heart.

Richard was pulling his sweater off over his head. The deliberate gesture revealed, one feature at a time, chin, mouth, nose, eyelids closed against the woolen scrape, eyebrows slightly unsettled, broad high brow, and, finally, gray hair raised briefly into a cone.

Alice and two Caldicott teachers lived on the school grounds. Their three little houses fronted on the grassy field where important convocations were held. The backs of the houses overlooked the ravine. In the wet season the ravine held a few inches of water—enough for that determined suicide a century ago. These days it provided a convenient receptacle for an empty beer can and the occasional condom. On the far side of the ravine was a road separating Godolphin from the next town. The Knapps lived in a cul-de-sac off that road. Leaving his house, walking across the road, side-slipping down his side of the ravine and climbing sure-footed up hers—in this athletic manner Richard had been visiting Alice twice and sometimes three times a week, in the late afternoon, for the past few years. Sometimes he picked a little nosegay of wildflowers on his way. Alice popped them into any old glass—today the one on her bureau. She was undressed before his sweater had cleared his head. And so, reclining, naked thighs crossed against her own desire, she watched the rest of the disrobing, the careful folding of clothes. Sometimes crossing her thighs didn’t work, and she’d surrender to a first bliss while he busied himself hanging his jacket on the chair. Not today, though. Today she managed to keep herself to herself like the disciplined educator she was, waited until her body was covered by his equally disciplined body; opened her legs; and then spinster teacher and scholarly physician discarded their outer-world selves, joined, rolled, rolled back again, each straining to become incorporated into the other, to be made one, to form a new organism wanting nothing but to make love to itself all day long. Perhaps some afternoon they—it—would molt, grow wings, fly away, and, its time on earth over, die entwined in its own limbs and crumble to dust before midnight.

Emily didn’t do drugs often. Her substance of choice—her only substance, in fact—was
bicho de taquara,
a moth grub found in the stems of Brazilian bamboo plants, but only when they are flowering. Mr. da Sola tended bamboo in one corner of Caldicott’s glass-covered winter garden. He harvested the grubs, removed their heads, dried them, ground them up, and stored the resulting powder in a jar labeled
RAT POISON
. Each year he produced about six teaspoons of the stuff; three times a year he and Emily swallowed a spoonful each…

The Malalis, in the province of Minas Gerais, Brazil, had reported an ecstatic sleep similar to but shorter than the unconscious state produced by opium, and full of visual adventures. Emily could attest to that, but she did not share her visions with Mr. da Sola, who enjoyed his own private coma beside her on the floor of her little room. In Emily’s repeated dream she was attending a banquet where she was compelled to crawl from table to table, sampling the brilliant food: pink glistening hams, small crispy birds on beds of edible petals, smoked fish of all colors ranging from the deep orange of salmon to the pale yellow of butterfish. And then: salads within whose leaves lurked living oysters recently plucked from their shells, eager to be nibbled by Emily; the mauve feet of pigs, lightly pickled; headcheese, the fragrance of calf still floating from its crock. And vegetables: eggplant stewed with squash blossoms; a pumpkin, its hat off, stuffed with crème fraîche and baked. And desserts: melons the color of peaches, and peaches the size of melons, fig preserves in hazelnut cups; and, at last, a celestial version of Brie
en croûte,
the
croûte
made of moth wings, for Mr. da Sola allowed a few moth grubs to hatch and mature and deposit their larvae before he gently pinched them dead and removed their new wings, and he caught butterflies too, in the outside garden, and sewed wing to wing to make several round fairy quilts and sugared and steamed them and laid them out on the carpenter’s table and plopped into each a light cheese faintly curdled; and then he molded several
croûtes
and baked them. He did all this off-dream. Emily plunged into the pastries. When she awoke there was often white exudate on her teeth, which she removed with her forefinger. Then she rubbed her fingertip dry on the unvarnished floor of the room while watching Mr. da Sola awake from his own glorious adventure, whatever it was. She suspected Alice was its heroine.

The rest of her time in the little room, Emily studied. She had become a master of the ant heart—like the hearts of all insects it was a primitive tube—and now turned her attention to the complicated stomach. She was soon to give a lecture on the ant stomach to the middle school and to anyone else who wanted to listen. Caldicott students were encouraged to share their interests. Wolfie Featherstone had recently talked about utopian societies, and her sidekick, Adele Alba, had analyzed figures of speech and the power of syntax.

And so, one Tuesday, Emily stood on a platform beside an easel where her diagrams were propped. “The abdomen is the segmented tail area of an ant,” she rasped, pointing with her father’s hiking stick. “It contains the heart and, would you believe it, the reproductive organs too, well, you probably would believe that, and it contains most of the digestive system. It is protected by an exoskeleton. And get this”—she licked her lips and let her pointer hang vertically between her pipe-cleaner legs until it touched the floor, making her look like a starving song-and-dance man—“the ant has not one stomach but two.”

“So does the cow,” drawled a fat girl.

“The cow’s two stomachs only serve the cow.”

“Serve the cow only,” corrected Adele.

“Whatever. The ant’s larger stomach, called the crop, is at the service of all. As an ant collects food and eats it, the nutrient is dissolved into a liquid and stored in the crop. When a fellow ant is hungry, its antennae stroke the food storer’s head. Then the two ants put their mouths together, together, together”—she controlled her unseemly excitement with the aid of the soothing smile Mr. da Sola sent from the back of the room—“and the liquid food passes from one to the other. And in addition to the generous crop, each ant has another, smaller stomach, its ‘personal belly.’”

Alice, wearing a faded denim dress, said, “Then the larger stomach belongs to the community.”

“Yes!” Emily said. “And if philosophers had brains in their heads they would realize that the ant’s collective pouch is the most advanced device that evolution, or God if you prefer, has come up with.”

“A soup kitchen,” interrupted the fat girl.

“And the ant feeding her associates through her mouth out of her own belly is the fundamental act from which the social life, the virtues, the morality, and the politics of the formicary—that’s the word for the ant as a society—are derived.” Alice saw that Emily used no notes. “Compared to this true collective, Wolfie, Brook Farm is a sandbox.”