Honeydew

by Edith Pearlman

  A few girls were gagging or at least making gagging sounds.

  “The ant is being exploited by her pals,” said the irritating fatty. Her size-six jeans were big on her and she wore her little sister’s tee. A strip of pink flesh showed between the two, like a satin ribbon. “When does she eat?”

  “She cannot be said to eat as we understand eating,” said Emily severely. “She collects and stores and regurgitates. She is the life spring of her world.”

  “So we evolved, and lost our second stomach,” Wolfie said. “We got ourselves brains instead. A good deal.”

  “What’s good about the brain?” Emily said. “It evolved to make money and war.”

  “Zeugma!” Adele shouted.

  Perhaps it was because of the only moderate success of her lecture, perhaps because of her binge at the banquet—at any rate, Emily turned up at the nutritionist that week at an unacceptable weight. She was hospitalized. She was not force-fed, but her room’s bathroom had no door, and while she consumed one pea at a time she was watched by a nurse’s aide with baroque curves.

  “Sugar, eat,” the aide coaxed.

  “Honey, do,” Emily mocked. But she acceded to the regimen; her work was calling her. Soon she’d gained enough to be discharged, though she’d have to see the nutritionist twice a week for a while. She was released a day earlier than planned. Her mother drove to the hospital in a downpour. She brought a present: a long, black vinyl raincoat with a hood.

  “Thank you,” said Emily, unsurprised at the kindness of the gift. Her mother was everything a human was entitled to be: outspoken, attached to her particular children, unacquainted with tact. Ghiselle had no concern for the superorganism—but, after all, ever since the development of the spine, the individual had become paramount, the group disregarded. Ghiselle was only following the downhill path of her species.

  “There’s a candy bar in the pocket of the raincoat,” Ghiselle said.

  “Oh.”

  “Wolfie and Adele can split it. Veux-tu rentrer?”

  “Pas encore. Laisse moi à la bibliothèque, s’il te plaît.” Emily was the only member of the family, Richard included, who had mastered enough French to converse with her mother in her mother’s tongue.

  Ghiselle parked and Emily got out of the car. The rain had stopped. The new coat concealed Emily’s emaciation, and she had raised her hood against the suspended mist that had followed the rain, so her patchy hair was concealed too. She looked, Ghiselle thought, like any serious modern girl—bound for medical school, maybe, or a career in science.

  Emily crossed the modest campus and entered the library. Ghiselle blew her nose and drove away.

  “Emily is the heroine of the moment,” Alice murmured into Richard’s shoulder.

  “Is she? They all love insects now?”

  “No, they envy her monomania—”

  “Polymania is more like it. Subway systems, for instance—she can diagram the underground of every major city in the world.”

  “And they associate it with her lack of appetite, and they associate that with free will. ‘You can get a lot done if you choose to skip dinner,’ Wolfie Featherstone told me. Richard, not eating will become a fad and then a craze and then a cult.”

  “Well, bulk the girls up ahead of time. Have the cook serve creamed casseroles instead of those stingy salads.”

  Alice groaned. “You are undermining Caldicott’s famed nutrition.”

  “Screw nutrition. The body tends to take care of itself unless it’s abused. All the girls except Emily are strong enough to beat carpets.”

  “Beat carpets? The maids do that once a year.”

  “Ghiselle does it more often.”

  “Ghiselle? I don’t believe you. Ghiselle is a grande dame.”

  “On the surface. She’s a peasant inside.” He withdrew his arm gently from beneath Alice’s shoulder, clasped his hands under his head. The watery light from the uncurtained window shone on him—on them both, Alice supposed, but she had lost all sense of herself except as a receptacle with grasping muscles and a hungry mouth. Only her lover was illuminated. His pewter hair swept his forehead, sprouted from his underarms, curled around his nipples, provided a restful nest for his penis, too restful maybe…she leaned over and blew on the nest and got things going again.

  And afterward…well, this woman had come late to passion and had not yet learned restraint.

  “Do you love Ghiselle the grand dame or Ghiselle the peasant?”

  “I love you, Alice.”

  “You do?”

  “I do.” He loved Ghiselle too, but he didn’t burden Alice with that information. He had come to believe that monogamy was unnatural. He would like to practice polygamy, bigamy at least, but Ghiselle would run off to Paris, taking the girls…

  “Oh, Richard,” Alice was lovingly sighing. Then there was silence, and the room that had seemed so steamy grew cool like a forest brook, and she was as happy as she had ever been. They lay side by side in that silence.

  “So you’ll leave her,” Alice ventured after a while.

  “…No.”

  “No!” She sat up. “You are going to stay with the bitch.”

  “She is not a bitch. We’re a bit of a misalliance, that’s all, fire and steel, you might say.”

  “Misalliance? A disaster!”

  He kissed her left nipple, and the right, and the navel; and if she’d had any sense she would have dropped the argument and lain down again. Instead, “You’re going to stay with her for the sake of the children instead of divorcing her for the sake of yourself. And for the sake of me,” she cried. “But, Richard, children survive this sort of thing. Sometimes I think they expect it. I’ve noticed at the bat mitzvahs I get invited to, and I get invited to them all, the girls with two sets of parents and a colony of half sibs—they’re the snappiest. Richard, come live with me, come live with me and be my—” He covered her mouth with his. “We belong together,” she said when she got her breath, and he did it again. “You are practicing probity,” she said, and this time he didn’t interrupt her. “You are a prig!” She began to sob in earnest. He held her until the sobs grew less frequent, and they lay down again, and she fell asleep, and he held her for some time after that.

  At five o’clock he woke her. Bleakly they dressed, back to back. Richard put on the clothes he’d folded earlier; Alice pulled on jeans and a Wedgwood sweater. Then they turned. Her cheekbone touched his jaw. We’ll meet again. Richard left by the back door, walking carefully because the rain had made the earth slick. The air was cold now. Alice, standing at the doorway, crossed her arms in front of her waist and cupped her elbows in her hands. Women have worried in that position for centuries. She watched her lover make his slippery way toward the bottom of the ravine. Maybe Paolo da Sola would marry her. She could raise his salary.

  Emily was now standing on Alice’s side of the ravine, not far from Alice’s house. She leaned against a birch. She had just left the library, where she had been reading about ants’ circles of death. Sometimes ants, for no apparent reason, form a spiral and run in it continuously until they die of exhaustion. What kind of behavior was that from so evolved a creature? Oh, she had much to figure out. But at the moment all she wanted to do was watch her father behaving like a boy. If he sprained an ankle it would put a crimp in his love life. Too bad he didn’t have six ankles. But with only two he did manage to leap over the little creek at the bottom of the ravine, land without incident, and start to climb the far side. He did not look up over his right shoulder or he would have seen Alice standing in her doorway, and he did not look up over his left shoulder or he would have seen Emily and her tree; he looked straight ahead through those binocular eyes embedded in his skull. Emily herself had compound eyes, at least some of the time—the images she saw were combined from numerous ommatidia, eye units, located on the surface of the orb. These eye units, when things were working right, all pointed in slightly different directions. In a mirror she saw multiple Emilys,
all of them bulging, all of them gross.

  Alice wrenched her gaze from Richard’s climbing form and looked sideways and saw Emily, aslant against a white tree, spying on her father. She was covered in a black, helmeted carapace. She looked as if she had attached herself to the tree for nourishment. She was a mutant, she was a sport of nature, she should be sprayed, crushed underfoot, gathered up, and laid in a coffin…Then rage loosened and shriveled, and Alice, in a new, motherly way, began to move toward the half sister of her child-to-be. She couldn’t keep her footing in the mud so she had to use her hands too. She would bring Emily to her house. She would offer her a weed. She would not mention food. She would whisper to the misguided girl that life could be moderately satisfying even if you were born into the wrong order.

  Having safely ascended the opposite bank of the ravine, Richard turned and squinted at the artful bit of nature below: two banks of trees slanting inward as if trying to reach each other, some with pale yellow leaves, some brown, some leafless; more leaves thick at their roots; and mist everywhere. It was a view Ghiselle would appreciate, she loved pointillism, though she had decorated their house in bright abstractions for no apparent reason. For no apparent reason one of his two promising younger daughters spent her evenings in front of a television screen and the other seemed to have sewn her thumb to her BlackBerry. Perhaps it was in the nature of people to defy their own best interests. Why, look, as if to validate his insight, there was his beloved Emily, oh Lord, let her live, make her live, there was Emily, plastered lengthwise to a tree like a colony of parasitic grubs; and there was his Alice, intruding like the headmistress she couldn’t help being, undertaking to crawl toward Emily, not on hands and knees but on toes and fingertips, her limbs as long as those of a katydid nymph. And above her body, her busybody you might say, swayed that magnificent blue rump.

  Some of what Alice wished for came about. She and Emily developed a cautious alliance. Emily’s weight went up a bit, though her future remained worrisome. Paolo da Sola said “Sure!” to Alice’s proposal of marriage. “And I don’t want to know the circumstances. I’ve been mad about you since we met.”

  Richard eventually replaced Alice with an undemanding pathologist who already had a husband and children. The baby born to Alice had Paolo’s dark brows and golden eyes—surprising, maybe, until you remember that all humans look pretty much alike. And when Caldicott’s old-fashioned housekeeper discovered Wolfie and Adele embracing naked in Emily’s little room, and failed to keep her ancient mouth shut, Alice summoned the trustees for a meeting and told them that this expression of devoted friendship was not in contravention of any rule she knew of. She adjusted her yawning infant on her pale blue shoulder. Anyway, she reminded them and herself, Caldicott’s most important rules even if they weren’t written down were tolerance and discretion. All the others were honeydew.

  About the Author

  Edith Pearlman’s previous collection, Binocular Vision, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Story Prize. The author of three other collections, she has also received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story. Her widely admired stories have been reprinted numerous times in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. A New Englander by both birth and preference, Pearlman lives with her husband in Brookline, Massachusetts.

  Also by Edith Pearlman

  Binocular Vision

  How to Fall

  Love Among the Greats

  Vaquita

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Tenderfoot

  Dream Children

  Castle 4

  Stone

  Her Cousin Jamie

  Blessed Harry

  Puck

  Assisted Living

  What the Ax Forgets the Tree Remembers

  The Golden Swan

  Cul-de-sac

  Deliverance

  Fishwater

  Wait and See

  Flowers

  Conveniences

  Hat Trick

  Sonny

  The Descent of Happiness

  Honeydew

  About the Author

  Also by Edith Pearlman

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2015 by Edith Pearlman

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover photograph by Sophie Banh

  Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

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  First ebook edition: January 2015

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  ISBN 978-0-316-29724-0

  e3