by Maryl Jo Fox
Clara excuses herself to use the bathroom. Returning, she sees Arianna crouched near the loudly humming beef jerky jars in the closet.
“These wasps—you brought them with you?” She laughs in delight. “I had ant farms as a kid.”
Furious, Clara folds her arms across her chest. “You go too far, Miss Paul. Did you photograph these wasps?”
Abashed, she nods.
Clara glances at the agitated creatures. “This is very private to me. I’m afraid we need to end our little tour now, Arianna. I’m really quite tired.” She is formal, cold.
Coloring, Arianna abruptly stands. “I’m really sorry, Clara. But please know I can’t use pictures or interview material unless you give me the rights.” She swallows hard. “I didn’t mean to offend you. That’s the last thing I wanted to do.”
At the door, she says, “I can’t thank you enough for letting me photograph your home. It’s truly American. No sham, nothing flashy. Your house is what houses are for: to give shelter, fill basic needs. People forget that these days.”
Vaguely, Clara nods. She’s flattered and offended by Arianna’s interest. Secretly she admires the woman’s wily way of getting what she wants, even if it’s a form of invasion. She smiles to herself. That woman could find a way to photograph powerful people using the toilet.
Arianna walks slowly down the wooden steps. Shielding her eyes from the bright afternoon sun, she turns toward Clara. “Thank you for the coffee. I’ll bring you the shots next week if I can. I’m going to approach the curator of the show I mentioned. Your house is perfect for it.”
In a low voice, Clara says, “I’m not promising anything.”
Undaunted, Arianna holds up one hand with crossed fingers and strides toward the casino.
Clara locks the kitchen door and flops down on her bed. The visit started so well. Why did it end so badly? “You’d think taking pictures was the only thing in the world. That woman needs more balance in her life.”
She frowns. Everyone wants her to do something—the wasps, Arianna, even the video store owner. She’s overwhelmed. “Why can’t people just leave me alone? We just got here! Where’s Frank?” Instead, the scent of another female is in the house, something citrus and sharp mixed with the burglar’s stink.
Lying with her hands behind her head, she thinks how Samantha would have been forty-nine now. Arianna looks about the same age, give or take. Would her daughter have been canny, driven, ambitious, like Arianna? When Samantha was nine and ten, she was already bookish, retiring, reading precociously about foreign countries. Samantha would never barge into someone’s house like that. Even when she was eleven, she had better manners than that. Frank too. Frank is a gentleman.
Without warning, she bursts into tears.
Things are falling apart and they just got here. She gets out the Lysol to get rid of the smells, but the Lysol smells bad too. She opens the kitchen door to air out the house, but now flies come in through the broken screen. In confusion, she closes the door and sits at the table, fly swatter in hand. She pours herself a cup of cold coffee and sits back down, losing interest in the flies to watch the unruly wasps in their beef jerky jars that she just put on the table to distract herself.
They are particularly frantic this morning. She needs to feed them again. She gets the sugar water for the wasps, a peanut butter sandwich for herself. Holding the measuring cup, she’s suddenly weeping over Darrell, something she hasn’t done for a long time. He could help her now. They could be a team. She looks at the wasps, flailing about in the jars.
After Darrell died, she became a health food nut, probably because his death scared her. She didn’t want to die so young like that. He was only thirty-five, dead of a massive heart attack on this very kitchen floor. So she turned to megavitamins, herbal teas, Ayurveda, homeopathy. Vegetarianism for herself, while Frank remained a stubborn carnivore. Prevention, prevention, prevention to this very day—everything to stay safe and alive. Staring now at the disheveled wasps, it seems her whole life has become one long attempt to hold off the inevitable march of worms through her skull.
Sitting at the table, something comes over her—a loosening, a desire to shout to the sky in the hot Nevada sun. She’s tired—bone tired—of being prudent and sensible and gray, of holding back, holding in, guarding against God knows what. For heaven’s sake, hasn’t she done enough guarding all these years? What good has it done? An irresistible whisper rumples the air.
Roll the dice, kid. It’s time to wake up. You’ve got nothing to lose.
Slowly she unscrews the lids of both beef jerky jars and lays them on the table. The wasps burst deliriously from their prisons and swarm the kitchen, tapping against cabinets, careening through the air, buzzing against the sunlit window over the sink. They spread through the house, exploring every nook in wild ellipses. Walking around with them, she concentrates on their joyous latticed hum.
Gradually she swallows the lump in her throat and wipes her eyes. A little smile lights her face. Will they like their new home? But the desert air will be a drying oven for them. Well then, she’ll buy a humidifier, create Eugene air in here. They will be humidified house wasps. She smiles.
She sits down at the table and pours herself another cup of cold coffee in her old Greenpeace mug. A special wasp contingent gathers around her on the table, puffing their tails up and down, cleaning their wings with their legs. One by one, they tap against her face and hair and arms, one by one settle there, ruffling their wings and crawling gently on her orange T-shirt. Before long, all the wasps are perched on her. The design they make on her vaguely suggests a biomorphic space helmet with upper body armor. She laughs. A picture of her now would make the evening news, but she would keep that same picture in her dresser drawer, quiet and private. She closes her eyes, feels the wasps’ feet gentle as elfin slippers padding over her. She almost dozes off under their delicate tapping. They are giving her a little massage, knocking on the doors of her skin, the drapery of her T-shirt.
Hello! they say. We’ve come to pay a visit. What’s new? We’re fine. Thank you!
They are little healers. They brush her and snaggle her and hum. They want her in their hive. They snuffle her smell into their smell memories so thoroughly that they’d know it anywhere, even in a crowd of ten million people. She smells like Jergens lotion, Prell shampoo, Secret deodorant, and Ivory soap. She can’t smell any wasp smell. Her nose is too primitive. But she hears them—their rufflings, their languorous tizzies like grease spurts on a fire.
The wasps still cover her. She slowly gets up from the kitchen table, feeling much better. She sets out jar lids full of sugar water in each room—the three small bedrooms, living room, bathroom, kitchen. The wasps stay perched on her until they understand about the sugar lids being in every room. They leave her one by one to lazily take their fill of sugar water, then doze like overstuffed piglets on top of the refrigerator.
chapter 4
Frank appears for lunch looking haggard. He hasn’t slept at the house for three days. He’s probably been out gambling and partying with Scotty. No telling where he’s been, and it’s none of her business. He’s a grown man. But she feels stiff around him, on guard. She holds herself tall.
He and his mother don’t say much. Frank makes himself peanut butter and jelly, this time with two Dr. Peppers, so Clara knows he’s really tired. She has her usual apple and cottage cheese with fresh black coffee in her old Greenpeace mug. Both have been too preoccupied to think of groceries. Silence reigns, broken only by the slick pages of Time magazine turning and the chewing of food.
She wants to tell Frank about Scotty’s brief visit an hour ago. He had stopped by the house to offer her a part-time job greeting gamblers who come down on buses from southern Idaho twice a week. Amazed and amused, she accepted his offer. Maybe she’ll meet someone, make some friends. She wonders what Frank would think.
Frank passes her the magazine. Not interested, she passes it back. Should she tell him about
the break-in? What good would it do? He’d just worry and get in a worse mood than he’s already in. She doesn’t want him to say, “I told you so.” He’s frowning at the magazine. For about twenty-five years, wandering on Union Pacific, the whole country was his home, not this house. Even so, she’s surprised to feel shy, even uncomfortable, now that they’re actually here together. She wonders how he feels about her in such close proximity. She’s afraid to ask.
“So Frank, what do you think?”
“About what?” He looks up.
“Jackpot. This place.”
He looks back down at the magazine. “I might like it if I could get some sleep. Scotty knows how to get a little party going.”
“How is he anyway?”
Frank looks at her without expression. “He doesn’t look good. His third wife left him.”
“Marcy? Oh, the poor man. Well, I didn’t like her much.”
“Keep it to yourself. He doesn’t want it known yet.”
“He’s such a nice man. Why would anyone want to leave him?”
“Well, Mother”—his voice is sarcastic—“it’s clear we don’t know what goes on with Scotty and his wives.”
His barbed tone unnerves her. She wants to connect with him so badly that she lacks good judgment when he gets like this. She plunges on, trying to keep a conversation going. “Scotty dropped by this morning. He asked me to be a greeter a couple days a week. Can you imagine?” Frank looks up, one eyebrow raised. She plunges on. “He was telling me about this waitress who’s crazy about theater. Sometimes he lets her do these little performances in the casino. Short: three minutes max. She has a following. Have you seen her? I’d like to see one of her pieces.” She’s rattling on.
Frank is silent. He wishes she’d stop talking. He’s got a bad hangover. “You know, Mother, it’s really none of your business if I’ve met some waitress or not. But I’ll tell you anyway. No. I haven’t.”
Clara is stricken. Of course she can’t ask her grown son anything about a woman. But usually he’s more accommodating toward her. “Sorry, Frank. I’m just intrigued that someone wants to do theater in this god-forsaken place.”
“Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t know—or care. Why don’t you ask her yourself? And who says this place is god-forsaken? I like it here. No one puts on airs, the air is clean, the land is wide open. Lots of possibilities. People leave you alone.” He glares into the magazine.
Meekly, she replies, “You’re right—it’s too early to make judgments. Sorry, Frank. Sorry.” You are a stupid woman, Clara Breckenridge. Why don’t you just keep your mouth shut?
Clenching his jaw, he puts his dishes on the sideboard and grimly returns to the magazine. They sit in silence. He can’t ignore her presence, though he’d like to.
She’s drinking her coffee, trying hard not to slurp. He hates slurping.
He jiggles his leg under the table. She’s driving him crazy. Being around her and the old house for a week has made him remember things he usually keeps in deep freeze.
“So.” He clears his throat, wanting to talk about something. “That was some trip we had.”
She looks at him. He can see the hope in her eyes. “Yes, indeed,” she says.
Long silence.
He decides to just say it. “On the road, I wondered why we never talked about Dad and Samantha all those years.”
She puts her fork down, her face going white.
He won’t stop. “You always changed the subject. I never understood it. All those years, it was a taboo subject. Like when Bobby Kennedy got shot, I heard his family never talked about it.” He stops, taking a deep breath.
She stammers. “What? Bobby Kennedy was five years later.” She looks in her lap. “What do you mean we haven’t talked about it? Haven’t we talked about it?”
“No, Mother, we haven’t. Not really. You always change the subject.” He feels angry for some reason.
She looks down at her plate. “What’s there to talk about? I don’t know what to say.” She blinks at him as if he were a strange new creature. “Why bring this up now?”
“I don’t know, I’ve just been thinking about them. They weren’t bad, you know. They were good. Good sister. Good dad. Things like that. Don’tcha think?” He’s sarcastic now.
She feels a hammer strike her heart. “I know. Believe me, I know.” Her eyes falter and drop.
A long silence opens between them. She does not want to pursue this topic. All these years, Samantha and Darrell stayed in her Brain Rooms as much as possible. She never wanted them tromping around in daylight. Especially if someone else invited them out.
He gets some water, sits down at the table, thumbs through a USA Today, skips an article on Armageddon cults. His mother is confusing him. Why shouldn’t he talk about his own father and his own sister after all these years? His throat tightens. He studies a Smirnoff ad. Maybe it’s really too late. Maybe he should just seal up his memories in a concrete box like she apparently does and throw it in the ocean. He’s a fool to talk to her like this.
Nervously, she gets up to clear the dishes and swab the counters, thinking. He bought it up with no warning. I never talked to a single person about Darrell and Samantha, only the wasps. She almost pants with anguish as she wipes the counter, whispering to herself, her defenses thin and falling. All these years, Clara, you’ve been so wrapped up with your own sorrow and guilt that you never even thought of healing your son’s pain, your son’s pain, your son’s pain. She wipes her eyes with her arm. Selfish! You’re so selfish, Clara!
As her dishcloth slaps to and fro, she unintentionally rouses the wasps from their back counter perches, where they drowse after another mid-afternoon sugar run to the lids. Despite their glutted ease, the wasps have watched Frank ever since he came inside. Their quivering wings alert each other that Frank is in the house.
Frank and the wasps have a long history together. Swarming along the driveway, the wasps ignored him unless he got too close, which he did just to taunt them. Then they’d sting him on the neck—always just the neck. He would laugh. He wasn’t allergic, so the stings quickly faded. But Clara always got very upset. She said the wasps wouldn’t bother him if he wouldn’t bother them. She said just ignore the wasps. But he didn’t, couldn’t. He had some vendetta against them. A testosterone challenge, she thought. He hated these corseted-looking creatures. To him, wasps performed no useful function. They just buzzed and caused trouble. Not like bees, who made honey and fertilized fruits, vegetables, and flowers.
And the wasps remember his smell—a mixture of almonds, honey, cinnamon, sometimes tobacco—and they remember the bitter smell of his hatred. The smells mean one thing: attack.
Two mini-swarms rise in the air, as if guided by a unified intelligence. They line up in small battalions on the old Kenmore range behind Frank’s chair. He and Clara sit in a mild food stupor, both wanting to keep the peace but not knowing how. In a lazy dive-bomb maneuver, two wasps go for the back of Frank’s neck and form a buzzing clump below his hairline. He feels a sour welt of pain and slaps at them as the first duo exits and the next duo tries to land but can’t. Clara bolts up, flails her arms at them. Frank lunges from his chair, briefly mesmerized with pain, swatting at the insects, his sleepy gray eyes flashing with anger.
“You let wasps out in the house? Are you crazy? What’s the matter with you?”
“You just have to shield your neck, Frank. They always go for your neck. You know as well as I do they leave you alone if you don’t nosy in on them.”
“Did I bother them? Did I bother them?” Frank shouts from his bedroom, where she hears him unzipping a suitcase.
She’s ruined everything. Full of anguish, she goes to the sink and blindly washes all the silverware with trembling hands, forgetting that she washed it yesterday. She glares at a tatty beige motel visible from the kitchen window. “They could at least paint it,” she snaps. Drying her hands, she swats at the wasps, still flying around in agitated swarms. “Get away!”
she shouts. They form a menacing halo around her head.
She flops down at the table and roars, “Get away! Now!” The wasps retreat to the top of the refrigerator. A drab-colored peacekeeper lands on her arm, fanning its wings to calm her. She brushes it away, glares at all of them. “You have to learn house rules! You can’t act crazy like this!”
In the kitchen doorway, Frank laughs bitterly. “That’s just fine then, Mother. You and your wasp pals can chat all day long. I’m outta here. You knew I wouldn’t be living with you anyway, and I’ll be damned if I’m living with wasps.”
He throws his belongings into two suitcases, slams out the door, and guns the trailer cab over to Scotty’s. He’s furiously chewing three sticks of Juicy Fruit. “She’s going off the deep end,” he mumbles. “I should have known.”
He shakes his head, remembering the trip. “Talking to them every night at rest stops. Brushing her hair and singing to them, for Christ’s sake—‘Stranger in Paradise,’ for the love of God. Swearing she even had a purple wasp to protect her.”
“You’re an intelligent woman, Mother,” he had snapped. “Gimme a break. You know wasps aren’t purple.” She had clammed up then and wouldn’t talk to him for two hundred miles. At rest stops, she sat at a different picnic table and walked in different parts of the lawn than he did.
Gingerly, he touches the stings on the back of his neck and screeches to a halt in front of Scotty’s house. “Driving with her all that way was bad enough,” he mumbles darkly. “I need the company of a clear-headed man.”
But Scotty isn’t home, and Frank doesn’t have a key. He slumps inside the trailer cab. He could go over to Desert Dan’s but he doesn’t feel like it. On the other hand, maybe he does.
The purple wasp has twenty-nine days left.
chapter 5