Bees and Strawberries

The sting on his face was clearly swelling. He was horribly self-conscious all of a sudden. For the entirety of his adult life, he had managed to steer clear of bees, and now, today, a bee found its way downtown and attacked Jim, as though it was targeting him because it somehow knew it would cause him a greater deal of pain than it would anyone else. He fell to the ground in agony and the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen happened to be passing by, and of course she stopped to help him. When it became clear what the matter was, she took his hand to lift him up and then she accompanied him to the emergency room. She assured him that she could stay with him throughout this ordeal, if he wanted her to. He nodded miserably, having no one else to call.

“My name is Alice,” she gently remarked.

“I’m sorry we’re meeting under such circumstances, Alice. I’m Jim.”

He feebly smiled at her, trying to ignore what he felt was surely an incredibly disgusting rash developing around the spot the bee had stung. She smiled warmly at him in return, and he melted to the floor. He was now in love with her, and particularly with that dark, curly hair hanging loosely at her sides. But he could barely stand to look at her, and he inched away from her on the bench as far as he could without seeming rude, because this beautiful, kind woman smelled awfully strongly of strawberries.

Bees and strawberries. Jim cursed his parents for carrying the prone-to-allergies genes without said genes actually manifesting in either of them. Instead, they were passed down to Jim, in whom they manifested severely. He was tested for every allergy he could possibly have, and it boiled down to two: bees and strawberries. He hated the summer, and flowers, and sugar. He cursed his one real misfortune in life.

As a teenager, he became fanatically obsessed with his allergens. He learned everything there was to know about bees and strawberries (The most well-known bee species is the Western honey bee and the most commonly cultivated strawberry is the garden strawberry). One evening, as an adult, he watched a television show about the pollination process of bees on The Discovery Channel (Most bees are fuzzy and carry an electrostatic charge, which helps in the gathering of pollen). That same evening, his fanatical obsession switched gears. The Discovery Channel was now his sole joy in life, having given him something to look forward to every night (The Discovery Channel debuted on June 17^th, 1985, and he is so glad that it did). He hated his job, and women mostly terrified him, and he couldn’t have any pets in his apartment building, and despite having lived there for three years, he still hadn’t made any real friends, so The Discovery Channel was his company (The Discovery Channel’s slogan is The World Is Just Awesome, which Jim appreciates but mostly disagrees with).

Alice was on her way to the local New Age/hippie store, In Tents In Cents, where she bought many of her candles and all of her incense, when she saw Jim fall to the ground. Always wanting to help, she rushed to his side, day’s plans forgotten. She helped him up, and he mumbled something about an allergic reaction to a bee sting. “I don’t need an ambulance,” he said, “but I do need to get to the hospital.” So she hailed a taxi to get them there. He reminded her of Alan, her next door neighbor, although Jim was scrawnier, and awkward. Alan was never awkward. Alan was gorgeous and tall, sweet and polite, funny as hell. She hadn’t seen him in a couple weeks; he was away on business. Somewhere in Spain, he didn’t miss her. She thought she loved him, but he considered her nothing more than the friendly woman next door. She briefly wondered about Jim’s love life, but by then they had arrived at the hospital, so she didn’t ask.

In the emergency room, Jim thought that if only he could distract himself from the smell, maybe he could scale down the escalation of this already hellish experience. So he focused on her necklace. The chain was long, and the bright green parrot at the end of it hung squarely in the center of her torso. ‘I am not allergic to parrots,’ he thought. ‘A parrot might be nice.’

And then she noticed.

“Oh, do you like my necklace?” she asked. Startled, he looked up into her face.

“Yes… It’s quite lovely. You like parrots?” he managed to choke out in between raucous coughs, which in turn caused her to rub his back good-naturedly, which itself caused him to cough even louder.

“Oh yes, I just love parrots. All animals, really. I have a parrot at home. His name is Barry, and he’s just great…” He tuned out after this, and tried to let the sound of her voice soothe him. It didn’t, because even her breath seemed to reek of that god forsaken fruit.

“You know, we’ve been waiting for a while,” she suddenly changed topics, “and your rash and cough are not getting any better. I’m going to go talk to someone in charge, see what I can do.”

“Wait, wait. Let me ask you something first. Do you ever watch The Discovery Channel?”

Half-out of her seat, she sank back down. “The what?”

“You know, The Discovery Channel. They play all kinds of interesting shows about science and space and sharks.”

“Oh. It’s a television channel. I’m sorry, I don’t even own a television set. I can’t remember the last time I watched one.”

The rash instantly spread across his already-red face, and he could feel the burn; as if all this weren’t already embarrassing enough, now he had really made a fool out of himself. He smiled the pitiful little smile of a defeated man, and cursed himself under his breath as Alice walked away to consult the woman at the front desk. Jim did not notice the small battle that ensued between the two, nor did he witness the final concession made, entirely missing the first (and perhaps only) time two women would ever (technically speaking) fight over him. He did immediately notice, however, when Alice came striding back, his troublesome genes forcing his poor nose to twitch at the smell.

“Well, I have good news and bad news,” she announced.

“Bad news first, please.”

“Anyone that could possibly help you is busy, and as long as you aren’t visibly dying, we have to wait.”

‘If only I could plug up my nose and get rid of this rash, I could spend all of eternity waiting next to you,’ Jim thought as he said, “So what could possibly be good news, then?”

Alice grinned mischievously and pointed to the muted television perched in the corner of the room. This television, normally kept strictly on the public access channel specifically created for hospital use, had been changed for the first time in twelve years. Perhaps it was Jim’s sad demeanor that had convinced the woman at the desk. Regardless, The Discovery Channel’s swirling-Earth, instantly recognizable logo was now displayed, miniaturized, in the right-hand corner of the screen. As only pure, random luck would have it, a program about the African Grey parrot was on. The closed-captioning ticker scrolling along the bottom read: “These parrots are particularly known for their cognitive capabilities, thought to have evolved due to their history of cooperative bird-feeding as largely tree-dwelling birds in central Africa.”

“Hey!” Alice exclaimed, “That’s what Barry is! An African Grey! And he is quite smart; he calls me by name and everything!”

Jim’s heart rate decreased. His rash stopped burning. Even the swelling seemed to have petered out, and was now reversing itself. The Discovery Channel did for Jim what Alice’s voice could not, and within minutes, even his coughs grew less and less frequent. He looked over at Alice, who was now reading the ticker with rapt attention (“African Greys have been kept as pets for over 4000 years”), and was struck once more by her beauty. Filled with gratitude, he braved the smell and scooted closer to her. ‘Oh, to hell with it,’ he thought as he reached for her hand.

Daniel

My father had decided it was time for a family vacation. School was out for the summer, and my brother and I were already growing listless with boredom. We had played every game we could think of, and our favorite ones we played again and again, but we had run out of steam. My father knew exactly what to do to perk us up; he knew just the trick. We spent two days preparing, and then we piled into his yellow Datsun and left.

My mother died when I was four. She died giving birth to my brother. It was either her or the baby. She screamed and screamed, and something important was ruptured, and then she died. My brother doesn’t know. We’re adults now, and he still doesn’t know. He thinks our mother had cancer. I don’t know why my father told me the truth. Maybe so he could share the burden. Every year, my father and I go out for coffee and talk about finally telling Daniel the truth. We’ll sit him down and explain. But at the end of the day, we are scared of his reaction, so we never tell him. He’s working in cancer research now, inspired by our late mother. Sometimes when I think about it, I get sick to my stomach.

We made it through an entire rendition of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. At a rest stop in West Virginia, I chased my brother around the vending machines, and he fell and scraped his knee. He cried for a bit, but I found him a band-aid and stole him a candy bar from the bottom row, and he was okay. We tumbled back into the Datsun, my father turned on the radio, and we drove off down the highway, our sleepy eyes holding on as much as they could to the passing scenery. But it was no use; we both drifted off, leaning against each other in the backseat, missing the austere beauty of the mountains. In my dreamy haze, I vaguely recall my father whistling as we passed a particularly impressive peak.

I remember more about my mother than I think I should. Her flawless skin, her dainty hands, the way she sang into my ear to bring me to sleep, the time she carried me, soaked to the bone and filthy from playing in the mud, into the house and up the stairs to set me directly in the bathtub, clothes and all. The way she looked at my father when I wanted something she didn’t think I needed. The long, flowy skirts she always wore that I liked to hide under, then jump out and scare the dog. He was never scared, he always smelled me behind the cottony fabric, but he pretended not to, and covered me in sloppy wet kisses whenever I emerged. I would giggle and giggle, and my mother would pick me up and fly me through the air, and I knew she would never drop me. Maybe I don’t really remember these things at all. Maybe I only remember what my father and grandmother have told me. Maybe I have invented memories to go along with photographs. I have a framed photograph of her that gets placed in a prominent position wherever I go. I look at it sometimes and wonder what she was really like. I only knew her as a mother, I did not know her as a woman. My father has described her personality to me countless times, but I still can’t get a grip on who she was. My brother has our mother’s bright green eyes, and sometimes when I look at my photograph of her, I see him. I see him, and I see the lie that my father and I have perpetrated hiding behind him, a shadow of a shadow. I pick up the phone and I dial his number and I decide, this is it. I will tell him now. And then he picks up, and we talk about our days, and I ask him about his Italian wife, and he asks me about my German shepherd, and we hang up after making dinner plans for next weekend, and I don’t tell him. I never, ever tell him.

We are at a beach in South Carolina. My father’s swim trunks are bright red, and my brother’s are dark blue. Their pale skin shines and burns in the sunlight. My toes are warm from the sand. We stay at the beach longer than any other family, because where we live there are no beaches, and this is a rare and delicious treat. My father and brother are quietly at work in the sand, building a castle for the crab king and his fish queen. I wander away and stand with my back to the ocean. The water comes in and out, curling up around my feet and then whisking itself away, only to repeat the process over and over again. The ocean sounds immense, and I feel how both near and far it really is. After a moment, I start to think about sharks, and although my hazy little mind registers that sharks do not usually swim up to shore, I still manage to scare myself enough to join the castle construction workers. They have just completed a very fancy moat to house all the royal spawn.

I sit in my dark apartment and nurse a gin and tonic. It is my third of the night. I am alone, and I am lonely. I wonder what my father is doing. He finally remarried in his early sixties, to a lovely woman his own age that my brother and I have both fallen in love with. Her heart is the size of the world, and she carries herself with dignity and grace. I can see in my father’s eyes that she makes him feel alive and young again, and I am happy for him. She knows the truth about my mother’s death, and while she thinks Daniel has every right to know, she maintains that is neither her business nor responsibility to be the one to tell him. I wonder if my father ever thinks about our family vacation the summer I was ten and Daniel was six, and if he does, how often. Once every few years, maybe?

I wake up one Sunday morning to the sound of the door bell. It rings once, twice, three times. I stumble out of bed, wrap my night gown around me, and rub the sleep from my eyes. When I answer the door, I am greeted by a man who appears to be around my age. I have never seen him before in my life, but he has bright green eyes. I think it was the eyes, the reason I believed him and let him in. A complete stranger arrived at my door early on a Sunday morning, and claimed to be my half-brother.

He turns out to be six years older than me, the product of a one-night-stand before my mother met my father. His father wanted nothing to do with them, and my mother was not prepared to raise a child on her own, so Steven was given up for adoption. He never made it into a family, and instead bounced from foster home to foster home. At the age of 19, he finally found his father, who still wanted nothing to do with him. Discouraged, he gave up the search for his mother, but recently he had become curious about possible siblings he might have, and then he found me. He had my mother’s eyes, and her nose, and I knew it was all true. This was the mother I was looking for, the woman I never knew, the woman my father didn’t even know. I called Daniel and told him he needed to come to my apartment immediately, but I did not tell him why. As we waited for him, I gently explained to Steven that our mother was dead, had been dead for years, but I could show him pictures and tell him stories. He smiled sadly, and gratefully accepted anything I had to offer. He pressed for details. He wanted to know how our mother had died. I told him the truth. There was no reason to lie to him.

Fifteen minutes later, Daniel was there. He had left his Italian wife at home. I had not asked him to, but something in my voice must have told him this was a private moment. He glanced at me out of curiosity, and as I made an introduction I could never have even imagined, I saw Daniel’s eyes widen at the realization that he was meeting an older version of himself. I left the room to make coffee and give them a chance to get to know one another. I came back just in time to catch Steven express his sadness for Daniel because of the way our mother had died. My heart leapt into my throat, and I dropped the coffee tray I was holding. All three cups capsized, and a puddle formed on the polished wood floor.

Daniel turned to look at me, confusion in his eyes, and Steven immediately grasped that something had just gone terribly wrong. I collapsed in the armchair facing Daniel, sobbing uncontrollably. I thought about the ocean, and the sand castles, and our father’s yellow Datsun, and the vending machines, and I heaved out apology after apology, followed by a muted, half-assed attempt at an explanation. Steven disappeared into the kitchen, and Daniel continued to look at me. He did not speak, and he did not cry, and he made no attempt to connect with me. I thought about the mountains we had missed, and the story Steven had just told me, and my mother’s flowy skirt. Daniel never said a word.