The Melting Pot

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  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 teen-agers. 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 flat-chested girl with straight blonde 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 lavi
shly 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?”

  What I Did for Love

  TOGETHER WITH CARL I used to dream of changing the power structure and making the world a better place. Never that I could end up watching the ten o’clock news with a small rodent on my lap.

  He was the fourth. Percy, the first, was a bullet-shaped, dark brown guinea pig, short-haired as distinct from the longhaired kind, and from the moment he arrived he tried to hide, making tunnels out of the newspapers in his cage until Martine, who was just eight then, cut the narrow ends off a shoebox and made him a real tunnel, where he stayed except when food appeared. I guess she would have preferred a more sociable pet, but Carl and I couldn’t walk a dog four times a day, and the cat we tried chewed at the plants and watched us in bed, which made us self-conscious, and finally got locked in the refrigerator as the magnetic door was closing, so after we found it chilled and traumatized we gave it to a friend who appreciated cats.

  Percy had been living his hermit life for about a year when Martine noticed he was hardly eating and being unusually quiet, no rustling of paper in the tunnel. I made an appointment with a vet someone recommended. On the morning of the appointment, after I got Martine on the school bus, I saw Percy lying very still outside the tunnel. I called the vet before I left for work to say I thought his patient might be dead.

  “Might be?”

  “Well ... how can I tell for sure?”

  He clears his throat and with this patronizing air doctors have, even vets, says, “Why not go and flick your finger near the animal’s neck and see if he responds?”

  Since I work for a doctor I’m not intimidated by this attitude, it just rolls off me. “Okay, hold on a minute. ... I went and flicked. “He doesn’t seem to respond, but still ... I just don’t feel sure.”

  “Raise one of his legs,” he says slowly, as if he’s talking to a severely retarded person, “wiggle it around and see if it feels stiff.” He never heard of denial, this guy. What am I going to tell Martine?

  “Hang on. ...” I wiggled the leg. “It feels stiff,” I had to admit.

  “I think it’s safe to assume,” he says, “that the animal is dead.”

  “I guess we won’t be keeping the appointment, then?” I’m not retarded. I said it on purpose, to kind of rile him and see what he’d say.

  “That will hardly be necessary.”

  To get ready for the burial, I put Percy in a shoebox (a new one, not the tunnel one), wrapped the tissue paper from the shoes around him, and added some flowers I bought on the way home from work, then sealed it up with masking tape. Carl and I kept the coffin in our room that night so Martine wouldn’t have to be alone in the dark with it. She didn’t cry much, at least in front of us. She keeps her feelings to herself, more like me in that way than Carl. But I knew she was very attached to Percy, hermit that he was. The next morning, a Saturday, the three of us set out carrying the box and a spade and shovel we borrowed from the super of the building. Carl’s plan was to bury him in the park, but it was the dead of winter, February, and the ground was so frozen the spade could barely break it.

  “This isn’t going to work,” he said.

  Martine looked tragic. She’s always been a very beautiful child, with a creamy-skinned face and an expression of serene tragic beauty that, depending on the situation, can make you want to laugh or cry. At that moment I could have done either. We were huddled together, our eyes and noses running from the cold, Martine clutching the shoebox in her blue down mittens.

  “I know what,” Carl said. “Well bury him at sea.”

  Martine’s face got even more tragic, and I gave him a funny look too. What sea? It was more than an hour’s drive to Coney Island and I had a million things to do that day.

  “The river. It’s a very old and dignified tradition,” he told her. “For people who die on ships, when it would take too long to reach land. In a way it’s nicer than an earth burial—in the course of time Percy’s body will drift to the depths and mingle with coral and anemone instead of being confined in—”

  “Okay,” she said.

  So we walked up to the 125th Street pier on the Hudson River. This is a desolate place just off an exit of the West Side Highway, where the only buildings are meat-processing plants and where in the daytime a few lone people come to wash their cars, hauling water up in buckets, and even to fish, believe it or not, and at night people come to buy and sell drugs. I looked at Martine. She handed me the box like she couldn’t bear to do it herself, so I knelt down and placed it in the river as gently as I could. I was hoping it would float for a while, at least till we could get her away, but my romantic Carl was saying something poetic and sentimental about death and it began to sink, about four feet from where we stood. It was headed south, though, towards the Statue of Liberty and the open sea, I pointed out to her. Free at last.

  We got her another guinea pig, a chubby buff-colored one who did not hide and was intelligent and interested in its surroundings, as much as a guinea pig can be. We must have had it—Mooney, it was called—for around a year and a half when Carl began talking about changing his life, finding a new direction. He was one of those people—we both were—who had dropped out of school because it seemed there was so much we should be doing in the world. I was afraid he would be drafted, and we had long searching talks, the way you do when you’re twenty, about whether he should be a conscientious objector, but at the last minute the army didn’t want him because he had flat feet and was partially deaf in one ear. Those same flat feet led all those marches and demonstrations. Anyhow, he never managed to drop back in later on when things changed. Not that there was any less to do, but somehow no way of doing it anymore and hardly anyone left to do it with, not to mention money. You have to take care of your own life, we discovered. And if you have a kid ... You find yourself doing things you never planned on.

  He started driving a cab when Martine was born and had been ever since. It’s exhausting, driving a cab. He spent less and less time organizing demonstrations and drawing maps of the locations of nuclear stockpiles. Now he spent his spare time playing ball with the guys he used to go to meetings with, or reading, or puttering with his plants, which after me, he used to say, were his great passion. It was not a terrible life, he was not harming anyone, and as I often told him, driving a cab where you come in contact with people who are going places was more varied than what I do all day as an X-ray technician, which you could hardly call upbeat. Most of the time, you find the patients either have cancer or not, and while you naturally hope for the best each time, you can’t help getting to feel less and less, because a certain percentage are always doomed regardless of your feelings. Well, Carl was not satisfied, he was bore
d, so I said, “Okay, what would you do if you had a totally free choice?”

  “I would like to practice the art of topiary.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Topiary is the shaping of shrubberies and trees into certain forms. You know, when you drive past rich towns in Westchester, you sometimes see bushes on the lawns trimmed to spell a word or the initials of a corporation? You can make all sorts of shapes—animals, statues. Have you ever seen it?”

  “Yes.” I was a little surprised by this. You think you know all about a person and then, topiary. “Well, maybe there’s someplace you can learn. Take a course in, what is it, landscape gardening?”

  “It’s not very practical. You said totally free choice. I don’t think there could be much of a demand for it in Manhattan.”

  “We could move.”

  “Where, Chris?” He smiled, sad and sweet and sexy. That was his kind of appeal. “Beverly Hills?”

  “Well, maybe there’s something related that you can do. You know those men who drive around in green trucks and get hoisted into the trees in little metal seats? I think they trim branches off the ones with Dutch elm disease. Or a tree surgeon?”

  This didn’t grab him. We talked about plants and trees, and ambition, and doing something you cared about that also provided a living. Finally he said it was a little embarrassing, but what he really might like, in practical terms, was to have a plant store, a big one, like the ones he browsed in down in the Twenties.

  “Why should that be embarrassing?”

  “When you first met me I was going to alter the power structure of society and now I’m telling you I want to have a plant store. Are you laughing at me, Chris? Tell the truth.”