Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  Chapter 26

  Max’s second grade teacher liked him. She had a sense of humor. When the class made paper mache topographical maps, she gave Max the want ad section so he would concentrate on the project instead of reading the news. She laughed when she told me this. “I should have known better.”

  “Did he make a map?”

  “Not until he read every want ad. I had to explain every abbreviation. Thank God I didn’t give him the personal ads. Those would have been a challenge to explain without getting fired.”

  She said she wanted to meet with his father. She already knew he was an artist and worked in downtown Chicago and volunteered to come in early to meet with him so he wouldn’t be late for work. Pete met with her, said she just asked him about his background and family but wouldn’t go into detail.

  “Didn’t she ask about Max?”

  “Not much.”

  “What did she say?” He shrugged, turned and walked away.

  Max’s teacher asked to meet with me a second time. She was direct and to the point. “I’ve met and talked with you and your husband and now I have a question. How do you explain Max?”

  “I assume you’ve figured out we’re not responsible for the high IQ.”

  She laughed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to insult you or your husband but I guess that’s about it. Do either of you have a brilliant eccentric in your family?”

  “We both had lots of eccentrics but if the few antecedents I knew were brilliant they hid it well.”

  “No one?”

  “My dad’s retired now but judging from what he did for a living, I guess he was brighter than usual. Kids aren’t good at evaluating their parents objectively. He worked as a research engineer in a lab with a cyclotron. He told us how it worked so my brother and I always called it an atom smasher. We thought they were ordinary. He was asked to go to Los Alamos to work on the atom bomb when the war started, although we didn’t know that until years later. His boss wanted him there but he wasn’t at a high enough level to take his family so he refused.”

  She looked down at the table as though trying to figure out how to phrase something worrisome. “I read the headmaster’s note from his school in Philadelphia. It mentioned Max’s inability to follow rules.” She shook her head. “No. That’s wrong. He described someone who didn’t even know there were rules. I see that. If I want him to do something, I have to give him a verbal map covering every possible permutation or he goes sideways. He’s very polite but doesn’t interact with the other children.” She looked at me kindly. “No one wants to be paired with him because they can’t predict what he’ll do next. When I had playground duty, I noticed he didn’t play ball with the other boys. I asked his dad if he ever played ball with Max. He looked kind of surprised at the idea but didn’t answer. I assumed that was a no.”

  I nodded.

  “What does your husband do with the children?”

  I thought for a minute. “He takes us on long drives.”

  “To any place special?”

  “No. He just wants to see what’s down the road. We go to interesting places but we rarely stop.”

  By late November of 1960, the lake shore was full of thick slabs of ice piled helter-skelter on the hard frozen sand. The biting wind was a constant and cooking outside on a charcoal grill had lost its charm. It was time to get a stove. The kitchen was a small room, odd in such a large house, and had a large coat closet across one end. This was a dumb use of valuable space so I removed it.

  I loved demolition. Give me a large pry bar and a heavy sledgehammer and I could rip out virtually anything. By the time the wall was gone, I had discovered an absolute rule of remodeling. The space inside every other wall might be empty but the void between the plaster walls in the part slated for removal always had plumbing, wiring and/or duct work in it. All of which had to be re-routed. I bought books on construction, wiring and home repair then went to the lumber yard and hardware store and asked questions. At first the men were politely dismissive and suggested that I send my husband in. I was small, thin and looked like a dumb kid.

  When I explained I was doing the work myself and persisted, the men took me seriously and were helpful.

  Pete had always dreamed of having a proper workshop so he bought a large radial arm saw, a powerful drill press and mounted a vise at the end of the large work bench already in the basement. Eventually we had every hand tool imaginable. I loved it.

  An odd dynamic between Pete and me became clear in the gradual remodeling of the house. He had no problem with me doing heavy work, no ingrained sense that women weren’t as capable of wielding a hammer as men and we worked together well as long as he made all the decisions. This worked for a while. He did beautiful work. I had no problem being the handmaiden as long as this got some important job done.

  But he traveled a lot. And inevitably I had to make decisions on my own in order to have some bit of construction or destruction done to meet the timetable of the electrician or the plumber; the only two professionals we used. Pete rarely faulted my decisions but it seemed to threaten him to see I was so comfortable taking charge.

  The electrician changed our antique fuse box to a hundred-amp circuit-breaker box and ran lines to outlets all over the cellar. He was good but expensive so I bought a book on wiring and a professional fish wire that could snake into the smallest spaces and with Max’s help I rewired the entire house. He was a quick study and had small, strong hands. I just had to explain once why I had to thread the wires between floor joists, not through them, and he got it.

  Pete made walnut cabinets. He did a beautiful job and seemed to enjoy working with the tools in his workshop. I worked along with him, sanded and finished wood, installed hinges and knobs, pounded thousands of ring shank nails into a plywood sub floor and installed vinyl tiles.

  I saw this as an obvious need. We bought a broken house so we could live in Wilmette. We obviously had to fix it so it was habitable. I saw this as a joint effort and assumed he did too until he said, “If you think I’m going to put in this much work every time we move, think again. This is the last time I’m going to build you a kitchen.”

  Too amazed at his weird thinking to reply, I just stared at him with my mouth open.

  ***

  One afternoon in March, Max burst through the back door. “Mom. Mom.” I ran downstairs expecting a crisis. “Will you do it?” He shoved a crumpled paper at me. It came from Boy Scout headquarters. Eight boys including Max had signed up to be cub scouts. A den would be formed if they could find a den mother.

  “You want to be a cub scout?”

  “Yeah. I get to wear a uniform.”

  It was easy to become a den mother. One phone call indicating I was willing to take on eight second-grade boys did it. There wasn’t a long list of volunteers. The boys had lessons and other commitments every other day so we ended up meeting on Friday right after school. Not the best time for a meeting. After a week of sitting still the boys were ready to roll. Eight raunchy boys shoved their way into the playroom in a testosterone cloud. The four-letter words were milder but the loud, aggressive voices sounded like Friday night at a midtown bar when the surrounding offices closed and all the unfettered males descended on it.

  Second-grade boys were like a parody of masculinity. I thought they were funny but tried not to laugh. They were supposed to complete specific tasks in order to get badges. They wanted the badges. They liked the way the badges looked stitched on the uniforms and made the cubs feel like generals with long, illustrious careers. But on a Friday afternoon they weren’t in the right mood to sit and plod through tasks that smacked of schoolwork.

  Most kids were pyromaniacs. I used this trait as an incentive to do the badge work quickly. We lived in a forest of oak trees. Our backyard was always littered with fallen branches of all sizes. Before school shootings and terrorists, every boy carried a pocket knife and knew how to use it. I showed them how to build a small fire, how to safely carve a point on the t
ip of a small branch, gave each boy three extra-long fireplace matches and set out a large bowl of quartered, cored apples and a bowl of sugar and cinnamon. I spelled out the rules. These were nonnegotiable. If they weren’t able to get their own fire started, they had to borrow fire from another boy. If they made any aggressive moves with the sharpened stick, they would be sent home without recourse. Wilmette was a town where doors were unlocked and everyone walked so I didn’t have to involve their mothers. I showed them how to stab the apples so they didn’t break, how long they had to hold the speared apples in the fire to bring out the juices so the sugar and cinnamon mixture stuck then hovered over them and watched every move.

  Inevitably one boy lunged at another with his sharpened stick. I took it and sent him home. He whined. “I won’t do it again.”

  I was pleasant but didn’t budge. “Good. I’ll see you next week.” He sulked, dragged his feet and muttered about unfairness but walked home with no further protests and showed up the next week. No one tried it again.

  Most of the meetings were in our basement or backyard so I could enlist Linda’s help to watch Seth during the den meetings. They were good together. Sometimes I took the boys out to the forest preserve. Linda was ten and old enough to go to a neighbor girl’s house the first year I was a den leader but Seth was just five and had to come with us. Max resented having him there and went out of his way to be nasty to Seth to the point where he made the other boys uncomfortable. No matter how I handled his aggressive behavior I couldn’t stop it so I hired a babysitter to take care of Seth.

  Max often seemed irritated when he had to share me with seven other boys but he tolerated it. He wanted to be part of this group but he couldn’t control his anger at having his brother join us. Ironically, Seth fit in well with the older boys, which might have been part of the underlying problem. Seth fit in everywhere. Max never found a situation where he felt comfortable with anyone his age. He never formed an individual friendship with any of the boys in the den.

  In an era when wearing what kids called “high waters” was ridiculed, the boys wore their uniforms to school on meeting days even when their legs grew and long expanses of ankle showed below their too-short trousers. The uniform was important. It identified them as members of an exclusive tribe. This seemed to be what they all wanted.

  Chapter 27

  I loved museums, trains and cities. Wilmette was the last stop for what was locally called the ell. I took the three children into Chicago on the Sundays when Pete had to work or was out of town. We always sat in the front of the first car so we could see the spooky abandoned tracks and stations when the elevated train went underground and turned into a subway.

  Chicago had great museums. The train ride was always a success, the cafeterias at the museums rated high but deciding what to visit at which museum was a problem. Each child had a favorite exhibit in a specific museum and the two children in what they considered the wrong museum and/or the wrong section bickered non-stop no matter what I did.

  I had taken a job teaching graphics at The Art Institute of Chicago. I was to work from nine to four on Mondays and Wednesdays. A smart, kind woman named Ann Duncan cleaned and took care of children for two neighbors. She was pleased to get two more days of work and was available on the days I needed her. My classes started in early September but I hired her in mid-summer theoretically to train her but quickly saw she didn’t need training. What’s more, she liked Max and he liked her. After a couple of weeks, I saw she didn’t need me underfoot so I suggested setting up a rotation system one day a week where I took one child at a time to a museum of their choice and the other two stayed at home with Ann.

  This worked. Max loved the Science and Industry Museum with lunch at the cafeteria. Linda loved the Thorne rooms at the Art Institute with lunch at Marshall Field. Seth loved the Field Museum. He was okay with the museum food but liked it better when we ate in Marshall Field’s cafeteria. He loved their rice pudding. We all hated having these special days end, Max most of all. Each time my day with him wound down, I wished I could prolong the cheerful peace we enjoyed when no one else was there to disrupt it and we did exactly what he wanted. He was so rewarding one-on-one when he wasn’t bored. By the time the train arrived in Wilmette, we were both edgy and anxious. I was suddenly tired knowing the rest of my day was about to go downhill no matter what I did.

  Chapter 28

  Yellow jackets were mean-tempered wasps at the best of times but they were at their worst in late August. They tolerated humans earlier in the summer unless the person got between them and ripe fruit. But when the days shortened noticeably they became particularly aggressive and nasty. Theoretically insects have no understanding of death. Maybe not. But these wasps with their tiny waists and yellow and black-striped abdomens knew something bad was about to happen and they were royally pissed-off about it.

  Our yard was 200 feet long and 50 feet wide. Absolutely flat and shaded by oak trees, it was mostly grass with a lot of weeds. A constant stream of yellow jackets flew in and out of a small hole between two flagstones in the wide patio beside the alley on the far side of the house. It was clearly a large nest. Garbage pickup was from the back alley. Even though I was more than 30 feet away from its nest, a yellow jacket zoomed after me and stung me when I took the garbage out. I warned the kids to stay away from the flagstone patio if they went out the back door.

  I was hanging curtains in the dining room when I heard voices, an odd hum then a succession of abrupt noises I couldn’t identify. Thup. Thup. Thup… I finally climbed off the ladder and looked out the French door.

  Max was sucking up yellow jackets with an old tube-shaped tank vacuum cleaner plugged into the outside outlet. Moving rapidly, he snagged them going in and out of the nest. He seemed to understand it was important to get every yellow jacket on his first pass. No one lives in Illinois long without learning the mean disposition of these wasps. Two boys from the house across the alley looked on. Seth stood near the stairs to the back porch on the other side of the yard. He had the intently alert expression of a deer ready to bolt.

  I watched Max suck up so many insects in fast succession I was surprised they hadn’t filled the vacuum. Then the hum from the motor stopped abruptly. There were no more thups. Max looked surprised then frantic as furious yellow jackets streamed out of the end of the hose. All three boys shrieked and took off running. Seth shot into the kitchen and slammed the screen door behind him. I opened the French door. Max darted in. I pushed it closed. Angry yellow jackets banged against the glass. The other two boys were only halfway through their backyard when the pursuing insects attacked. Their shrieks increased.

  “The motor stopped.” Max’s eyes were opened wide. He was visibly jolted.

  “Yeah. Big surprise. What in God’s name gave you the idea to vacuum up yellow jackets? I just told you to stay away from their nest this morning. Why do you go out of your way to look for trouble? Don’t you realize you could go into shock if you got stung by a lot of yellow jackets?”

  “I thought I could get rid of the whole nest so we could get our bikes out of the shed. How was I supposed to know the vacuum would stop working?” He sounded aggrieved. “People shouldn’t put things in the trash if they still work.”

  “Max, you know that’s backwards. It’s not their responsibility to second-guess what someone walking through the alley is going to do. You’re supposed to know things in the trash are probably broken.”

  “I never saw a vacuum shaped like a long tube before. I thought it would make a good rocket. It looks like a rocket. I couldn’t pass it up.”

  His offhand comment that he planned to make a rocket filled me with dread. Knowing Max I had visions of projectiles with long fiery tails shooting out of the backyard and crashing into a neighboring roof.

  “Didn’t you wonder why it was in the trash?” My voice rose with frustration.

  “No. The lady should have put a sign on it so I knew.”

  “Max, you have to try
to figure out why people do things. Like stuff is usually in the trash because it’s broken.”

  “Yeah but not always. How about the clock the lady put out. It worked; she just didn’t like it. You said you wished you saw it before the neighbor did.”

  “True. But most of the stuff in the trash is broken.”

  “How about the silver knives and forks Seth found in her trash? You still have those in the drawer.”

  “Okay. Do you agree that something in the trash is more likely to be there because it’s broken than because someone just doesn’t like it?”

  He mulled this over and shook his head. “People around here put out a lot of perfectly good stuff they decide they don’t need instead of taking it to the Goodwill. That guy in the funny old blue truck with the rusty pretend wood on the sides checks out all the alleys before the sun comes up on trash days. He fills up his truck.”

  “Good point. But he knew not to take the vacuum.”

  “Maybe he started on the other side of town and filled up his truck before he got to our alley. Maybe he would have wanted the vacuum if he saw it.”

  I gave up. Doing ‘what ifs’ with Max was like an endless dance with a guy who stepped on your toes no matter where you put your feet. Eventually you had to say, let’s sit this one out.

  Chapter 29

  Max started third grade still not aware there were pecking order rules in the playground. A bunch of aggressive sixth-grade boys had been making a polio-crippled boy’s life miserable during recess by daring each other to knock his crutches out from under him. They were careful to do this only when the teacher on playground duty had her back turned. No one helped the boy stand up. No one told the teacher. Anyone with sense didn’t want sixth-grade bullies mad at them.

  Unaware there would be consequences, the first time Max saw the nasty boys attacking the crippled boy he picked up the boy’s crutches, helped him to his feet then stood next to him until the bell rang.