Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (18 page)

The smell made her hungry, and as usual, hunger made her think of being hungry in London, such a different kind of hunger, long-lasting and tedious, like a sickness, and panicky, with no hope of ever being fully eased.

That was far away now, though. Her present hunger is the good kind, the hunger of anticipation.

The girls are jabbering across the large kitchen. Having raised two children to adulthood, Ilse is not passionately interested in the jabbering of teenagers. But this conversation is special. It snares her. Evidently they are learning about World War II in history class, and Mary Beth, a thin, still flatchested girl with straight blond hair, is a Quaker, Ilse gathers. She is explaining to Cathy the principles of nonviolence.

“But there must be limits,” Cathy says. “Like supposing it was during the war and you saw Hitler lying in the road, half dead and begging for water. You wouldn’t have to actually kill him, just … sort of leave him there.”

“If a dying person asks me for water I would have to give it,” says Mary Beth.

“Even Hitler?”

Mary Beth doesn’t hesitate. “He’s a human being.” Ilse chops pork steadily with her cleaver. She rarely mixes in.

“But my God! Well, supposing he asks you to take him to a hospital?”

“I guess I would. If it was to save his life.”

“You’d probably nurse him and help him get back to work, right?” Cathy is irate, Ilse notes with a keen stab of pleasure in her gut.

“No, you don’t understand. I’d never help him make war. But see, if I let him die it would be basically the same as killing him, and then I would become like him, a killer.”

“So big deal. You’d also be saving a lot of people.”

“I’d rather try to save them by talking to him, explaining what—”

“Oh, come on, Mary Beth. What horseshit.”

Ilse accidentally grazes her finger with the cleaver and bleeds onto the pork. She sucks, tasting the warm blood with surprising glee. It has just left her heart, which strains toward her daughter with a weight of love.

“Look, Cathy,” replies Mary Beth, “the real issue is what do I want to be? Do I want to be a truly good person or do I want to spend the next fifty years knowing I could have saved a life and didn’t? How could I face myself in the mirror? I’d be, like, tainted.”

This Mary Beth is a lunatic, that much is clear, thinks Ilse. Get rid of her this instant. Out, out of the house! But of course she cannot do that. The girl is Cathy’s blameless little friend, invited for a Chinese dinner.

“Who gives a damn about your one soul!” exclaims Cathy. “What about all the other souls who’ll die?”

Enough already, please! moans Ilse silently, watching her blood ooze through a paper napkin. What kind of people could teach their children such purity? They should teach her instead about the generous concealments of mirrors. Taste every impurity, she would like to tell Mary Beth, swallow them and assimilate them and carry them inside. When you’re starving you’ll eat anything. Ilse has. And none of it shows in any mirror.

“I’m sorry for those people. I mean it. I’d try to help them too. But I can’t become a killer for them.”

“That’s the most selfish, dumbest thing I ever heard.”

It begins to appear the friends will have a real falling-out. Not worth it, in the scheme of things. “How’re you girls doing with the chopping?” Ilse breaks in. “Oh, that looks fine. Mary Beth, do the cabbage a little bit smaller, okay? Cathy, would you get me a Band-Aid? I cut my finger.”

As soon as she gets the Band-Aid on, she hears a van pull into the driveway. Ban-the-Bug. The symbol with the grotesque insect is painted on the van. In her torment she has forgotten the appointment. She greets the smiling young man at the kitchen door and takes him around to the side of the house where the hive is. Behind her she can hear the girls tittering over how good-looking he is. Well, fine, that will reunite them. And indeed he is, a dazzling Hollywood specimen, tall, narrow-hipped, and rangy, with golden hair and tanned skin. Blue eyes, but duller than Mitch’s. Wonderful golden-haired wrists and big hands. He is holding a clipboard with some papers, like a functionary, and
Ban-the-Bug
is written in red script just above the pocket of his sky blue shirt, whose sleeves are rolled up to the shoulders, revealing noteworthy muscles. Ilse points out the hive and he nods, unamazed.

“I would judge from the size,” he says, “you’ve got about forty thousand bees in there.”

Ilse gasps.

“Yup, that’s right.” His tone is cheerfully sympathetic. Really a charming young man. Perhaps attended the local community college for two years, like Brian, Ilse thinks, found he was not academically inclined, though bright enough, and looked for any old job till he could decide what he wanted. He would make a nice tennis instructor. “They’re honeybees. There’s most likely a lot of honey in the wall.”

“Oh, can we get it out?” Ilse loves honey.

“Well, once we spray, it won’t be good anymore.” He sounds genuinely regretful. “You see, the bees take turns fanning the honey with their wings to keep it at sixty-five degrees. But now with the warm weather it’ll melt pretty fast. You might even have to break though the wall and get rid of it. It could smell or stain, it’s hard to say.”

She envisions forty thousand bees frantically fanning, protecting their product and livelihood, their treasure and birthright. That is the terrifying demented noise she hears at night.

“Will you get them all?”

“Oh sure.” He laughs. “No problem. We guarantee. Any that don’t die just fly away—with the hive gone, you won’t be seeing them around. Except if you have holes in the wall some might try to get back in and start all over.”

“I don’t think there are any holes.”

“Could you just sign this paper, please?” He holds out the clipboard.

Ilse is always careful about what she signs. Robbie taught her that when she first came to America. “What is it?”

“Just routine. That we’re not responsible for any damage to property, the terms of payment, the guarantee, and so on. Go ahead, read it. Take your time.”

Feeling rather foolish, she scans the document. It is merely what he said, as far as she can see, and seems excessively formal for so simple a transaction. The undersigned is to pay half now and half on completion of the service, but since this case will probably require only one visit, the young man says, she can pay all at once. A hundred dollars for forty thousand bees. A quarter of a cent per bee, Ilse rapidly calculates, though it is a meaningless statistic. She signs and hands the document back.

“How long will it take?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes at the most.”

“No, I mean before they’re all gone.”

“Oh,” He chuckles at his little error. “The stuff works gradually, like, in stages. You might still hear something this evening, but then, during the night”—and he grins so ingenuously that she realizes he is just a boy, after all—“
baaad
things will happen to them.”

He pauses, but Ilse has no ready response.

“Okay, I’ll do the inside first.” He fetches several cans and a small toolbox from the van and follows her up to the bedroom, where she shows him the makeshift cardboard patch. He nods as if he has seen it all before, and asks her to leave the room and close the door. Although she again has a secret hankering to stay and watch, Ilse obeys. So she never gets to see exactly what is done, but sits at the kitchen table, writes out a check, and waits. The girls have vanished for the moment, leaving their assigned vegetables ably chopped. In a few minutes the Ban-the-Bug man reappears and goes outside to do the hive. After she thanks him and watches him drive away, Ilse scrubs her hands at the sink before returning to the food—why, she does not know, for she has touched nothing alien except his pen and paper.

Mitch, when he comes home, is pleased at what she has accomplished, and listens respectfully as she relates all the pertinent facts. The dinner is excellent and lavishly praised, and the girls seem to be reconciled. Mary Beth is not such a thoroughgoing prig, as it turns out—she can be highly amusing on the subject of her family’s foibles and idiosyncrasies. Later, in bed, Mitch wants to make love, but Ilse cannot summon the spirit to do it. He is disappointed, even a trifle irked, but it will pass. There will be other nights. She lies awake listening. The sound is feebler, and intermittent. She trusts it will stop for good very soon, as she was promised.

The next day, after work, she returns home and finds
Cathy stretched out on a lawn chair, Walkman on, eyes closed. She calls to get her attention and Cathy unplugs. Ilse asks her to gather up and dispose of the corpses, which are so numerous they look like a thick, lush black and gold carpet. Shaking her head morosely at her fate, Cathy fetches a broom and dustpan. Ilse remains there as if turned to a salt block, watching her daughter work.

“Do we really need to go to all this trouble?” Cathy grumbles. “I mean, maybe you could use them for fertilizer or something.”

She darts two giant steps to Cathy, grabs her shoulder, and shakes her hard. “How dare you say such a thing!” Her other hand is lifted, in a fist, as if to deliver a killing blow. “How dare you!”

Cathy, pale, shrinks back from her mother. “What did I say? Just tell me, what on God’s green earth did I say?”

MARY BUCCI BUSH

After the week-long rain, it was too wet for working in the cotton fields, and there were too many snakes for clearing the swamp of stumps and branches. Isola’s mother saw that look come onto her daughter’s face. “Don’t you go to the levee,” she told her. “You stay here and fix the clothes with me.”

The water came from everywhere. The river swelled and, once, came within inches of the top of the levee, powerful and deep and dangerous. Puddles formed in the woods, the
bosc
’ her family called it, big puddles like ponds, and fish swam in the water, fish from nowhere. The land itself turned into a patchwork of streams and ponds and puddles. Even stepping on what looked like dry land became a risk: put your foot on a grassy spot and you might find yourself in water over your ankles.

“Where do you think you’re going?” her mother said.

“Nowhere. I got to pee.”

“You gotta work, that’s what you gotta do.” She took the dress from her daughter’s hand and shook it out. “Look at this,” she said. “What’s gonna happen to you when you try to get a husband and he sees you do a mess like this with your sewing?”

“Mamma,” she pleaded. “Maybe I’m not gonna get a husband.”

Her mother made a sound like she was spitting coffee grounds from her mouth. Then she crossed herself. “I pray for you, dear God, what’s gonna happen if you gotta be like this?”

Isola rubbed her foot back and forth along the floor, scratching the ball of her foot on a rough spot on the wood. Oswaldo was out hunting frogs with their father for their supper. Angelina was outside in the sun stringing tomatoes to dry. They had picked as many as they could before the rain came and ruined them. Everyone else was outside doing something, and here she was stuck in the house with her mother’s prayers and a needle and thread.

Her mother stood and went for a candle and her statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Isola groaned to herself as she watched. Her mother placed the statue on the floor, then lit the candle in front of the statue. She pointed to the floor. “Get down there and pray before the devil takes you to go live with him for good,” she said. Isola got down on her knees next to her mother and they prayed: Hail Mary, Our Father, Hail Holy Queen. Then they were quiet for a long time. Isola watched the flame flicker in front of Mary’s chipped blue robe. Mary’s face was like a little doll’s face, and she looked like a girl, maybe a girl Isola’s age, with an expression that made Isola think that Mary’s mother must have yelled at her all the time, too.

The Italians worked like animals, her father said, scrounging for a penny every minute of the day. When they weren’t working off their shares for Mr. Gracey they were hiring out to chop weeds for other farmers, or they were selling tomatoes or eggs house to house or patching people’s clothes or washing them or fixing a wagon for them. A penny here, a penny there, and it all got saved. The black people didn’t seem to be as crazy about working and making money as the Italians were, even though they got yelled at more for not working enough, and punished in other ways. Most of the time Isola wished she was a black girl so she could play with Birdie more, or sing with her while they worked in the fields.

Isola’s mother reached over and snuffed out the candle with her fingers.

“Can I go pee now?” Isola said.

“Go pee. And then you stop and see why the chickens are so quiet, maybe they got drowned out there. Bring the eggs in.”

Isola moved toward the door, relieved.

Everything was happening outside. The sun was already beginning to dry the land, and old Step Hall was bringing a mule and wagon down the road, going somewhere for the boss. He raised his hand to her and waved. She moved past Angelina with her strings of tomatoes, down near the road. Birdie was following behind her father on foot, trailing a branch in the dirt.

“Mornin’, Miss Isola,” Step said as he drove by. “Glad to see you out and about.”

Birdie stopped alongside Isola, dragging the branch in the dirt. “Lookit the designs I’m making,” she said.

Isola looked at the swirls in the muddy dirt. “My Papa’s at the swamp catching frogs,” she told Birdie.

Birdie shuddered, dropping the branch. “Frogs,” she said. “I don’t know how you can eat ‘em.”

“Just sometimes,” Isola said.

Step was nearly down the road. He turned and called out to Birdie, “Don’t you be dawdling here. Git back home.”

Birdie watched her father ride away. Then she told Isola, “Daddy say a man drowned in the lake. Say his boat got turned over.”

“Drowned?” Isola said. She stared at Birdie, wide-eyed.

Isola walked toward the back of the chicken shed so Angelina wouldn’t be able to see or hear them.

“Daddy ‘spec he was drunk,” Birdie told her, “trying to cross the lake to see his gal. He goin’ to see now.”