Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

Husband and wife now exchanged a look that the unmarried Alice labeled enmity. Then Richard placed his fingers on Ghiselle’s chiffon arm, but it was Alice he looked at. “Emily doesn’t want to die,” he said.

“That is so?” scoffed Ghiselle.

“She doesn’t want a needle fixed to her vein. She doesn’t want an IV pole as a companion.”

“That is so?”

“She doesn’t want to drive us all crazy.”

“What does she want?” Alice said. And there was a brief silence as if the heavy questions about Emily’s condition and the condition of like sufferers were about to be answered, here, now, in Godolphin, Massachusetts.

“She wants to be very, very, very thin,” Richard said. No shit, Alice thought. “Achhoopf,” snorted Ghiselle, or something like that. She herself was very thin, again in the way of Frenchwomen — shoulders charmingly bony, neck slightly elongated. Her legs under her brief skirt — too brief for fifty? not in this case — were to die for, Caldicott students would unimaginatively have said.

“She wants to become a bug, and live on air,” Richard added, “and a drop or two of nectar. She thinks — she sometimes thinks — she was meant to be born an insect.”

Alice shuddered within her old-fashioned dress. She wore shirtwaists, very long in order to draw attention away from her Celtic hips and bottom, and always blue: slate, cornflower, the sky before a storm. She wondered if this signature style would become a source of mockery. She was forty-three, and six weeks pregnant — in another few months the shocked trustees would have to ask her to resign. Perhaps it would be more honorable to expel herself. “What can we do?” she asked.

“We can chain her to a bed and ram food down her throat,” Ghiselle said, her accent lost in her fury. Alice imagined herself locking the chain to the headboard. Now Richard’s fingers slid down the chiffon all the way to Ghiselle’s fingers. Five fiery nails waved him off. The two younger Knapp daughters, their weight normal, were good students, though they lacked Emily’s brilliance and her devotion to whatever interested her.

“Emily must find her own way to continue to live,” Richard said, at last providing something useful and true; but by now neither woman was listening.

Though Caldicott was not a residential school, Emily had been given a room to herself. It was really a closet with a single window looking out on the forbidden ravine. Mr. da Sola, jack-of-all-trades, had lined two of the walls with shelves. Mr. da Sola was a defrocked science teacher from the public schools who had seen fit to teach intelligent design along with evolution and had paid for that sin.

“I don’t need another science teacher,” Alice had said, wondering where he got the nerve to sit on the corner of her desk. What dark brows he had, and those topaz eyes…

“That’s good. I don’t want to be a science teacher,” he told her. He didn’t tell her that no other private school had agreed to interview him. “I want to return to my first loves, carpentry and gardening.” So she took him on.

On Mr. da Sola’s shelves Emily had placed her specimen collection equipment; the specimens themselves, collected from the ravine and its banks; and some books, including the King James Bible and an atlas of South America. There was also a box of crackers, a box of prunes, and several liters of bottled water.

Emily was permitted to take her meager lunch here and also her study periods, for the study hall nauseated her, redolent as it was of food recently eaten and now being processed, and sometimes of residual gases loosed accidentally or mischievously. She dined among her dead insects, admiring chitinous exoskeletons while she put one of three carrot sticks into her mouth. Chitin was not part of mammal physiology, though she had read that after death and before decomposition, the epidermis of a deceased human develops a leathery hardness — chitinlike, it could be called — which begins to resemble the beetles that gorge on the decaying corpse and defecate at the same time, turning flesh into compost. The uses of shit were many. The most delightful was manna. Emily liked the story of Moses leading the starving Israelites into the desert. Insects came to their rescue. Of course the manna, which Exodus describes as a fine frost on the ground with a taste like honey, was thought to be a miracle from God, but it was really Coccidae excrement. Coccidae feed on the sap of plants. The sugary liquid rushes through the gut and out the anus. A single insect can process and expel many times its own weight every hour. They flick the stuff away with their hind legs, and it floats to the ground. Nomads still eat it — relish it. It is called honeydew.

Ah, Coccidae. She could draw them — she loved to draw her relatives — but unfortunately the mature insect is basically a scaly ball: a gut in a shell. It was more fun to draw the ant — its proboscis, pharynx, two antennae. Sometimes she tried to render its compound eye, but the result looked too much like one of her mother’s jet-beaded evening pouches. She could produce a respectable diagram of its body, though: the thorax, the chest area, and the rear segment, segmented itself, which contained the abdomen and, right beside it, the heart.

Richard was pulling his sweater off over his head. The deliberate gesture revealed, one feature at a time, chin, mouth, nose, eyelids closed against the woolen scrape, eyebrows slightly unsettled, broad high brow, and, finally, gray hair raised briefly into a cone.

Alice and two Caldicott teachers lived on the school grounds. Their three little houses fronted on the grassy field where important convocations were held. The backs of the houses overlooked the ravine. In the wet season the ravine held a few inches of water — enough for that determined suicide a century ago. These days it provided a convenient receptacle for an empty beer can and the occasional condom. On the far side of the ravine was a road separating Godolphin from the next town. The Knapps lived in a cul-de-sac off that road. Leaving his house, walking across the road, side-slipping down his side of the ravine and climbing sure-footed up hers — in this athletic manner Richard had been visiting Alice twice and sometimes three times a week, in the late afternoon, for the past few years. Sometimes he picked a little nosegay of wildflowers on his way. Alice popped them into any old glass — today the one on her bureau. She was undressed before his sweater had cleared his head. And so, reclining, naked thighs crossed against her own desire, she watched the rest of the disrobing, the careful folding of clothes. Sometimes crossing her thighs didn’t work, and she’d surrender to a first bliss while he busied himself hanging his jacket on the chair. Not today, though. Today she managed to keep herself to herself like the disciplined educator she was, waited until her body was covered by his equally disciplined body; opened her legs; and then spinster teacher and scholarly physician discarded their outer-world selves, joined, rolled, rolled back again, each straining to become incorporated into the other, to be made one, to form a new organism wanting nothing but to make love to itself all day long. Perhaps some afternoon they — it — would molt, grow wings, fly away, and, its time on earth over, die entwined in its own limbs and crumble to dust before midnight.

Emily didn’t do drugs often. Her substance of choice — her only substance, in fact — was bicho de taquara, a moth grub found in the stems of Brazilian bamboo plants, but only when they are flowering. Mr. da Sola tended bamboo in one corner of Caldicott’s glass-covered winter garden. He harvested the grubs, removed their heads, dried them, ground them up, and stored the resulting powder in a jar labeled RAT POISON. Each year he produced about six teaspoons of the stuff; three times a year he and Emily swallowed a spoonful each…