Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  “But doesn’t it hurt a lot?”

  “It hurts, Mom, but I’ll live.”

  “What’s the matter?” Mitch must have been dozing behind the travel section. He rearranged his body in the lawn chair and blinked, trying to look alert. He was a graying man of fifty-three, handsome in a ruddy, solid, ex-athlete’s way, with strikingly pale blue eyes. He owned a chain of hardware stores. A safe man, Ilse thought each evening when he returned from work. And decent, competent, sexy: mornings, watching him dress—the ritual bending, reaching, zipping, and buttoning—she felt a reflexive pleasure, compounded with satisfaction, like the interest on capital, at how durable this pleasure had proved. If that was love, then she loved him well enough.

  “It’s those bees again. We really must do something about them. Poor baby. Come, let me wash it and put on some ointment.”

  “God, what would you do if I had rabies?”

  Ilse knew why she was making a fuss: the one time she herself had been stung as a child—at four years old—her usually attentive mother hardly seemed to care. That baffling lapse, the utter failure to respond properly, even more than the throng at the airport or the loudspeaker barking, the pinched, scared faces and the forest of gleaming tall boots, told Ilse something portentous was happening. Her father had already kissed them goodbye and disappeared, leaving her mother teary, and she was close to tears again five minutes later, showing some papers to a mustached, uniformed man at a desk, who waved his clipboard in the air and called them to a halt in a gritty voice. Soon, like a little firecracker fizzling out, he spat a bad name at them and sent them on. Her mother was tugging her by the hand, rushing towards the stairs at the plane, when Ilse let out a howl.

  “Shh! Don’t make noise. What is it?”

  “Something is in my dress! In back!”

  Her mother yanked at the dress and slapped her back hard—to kill the bee, she said later—but that only made the sting worse.

  “Be still now, Ilse!” she ordered. “I’ll take care of it afterwards.”

  But Ilse wailed running up the stairs, and as they entered the plane people looked up disapprovingly. Her mother kept her head bowed. Only when they were above the clouds did she become herself again, rubbing spit on the sting till Ilse calmed down.

  “When we meet our cousins,” she said, belatedly kissing the sore spot, “can you say ‘How do you do,’ in English? How do you do?” She exaggerated the shape of the words on her lips and Ilse repeated. How do you do. But for long after, she felt betrayed in her moment of need.

  In England, when she asked for her father, her mother said, “He’s coming. He’ll come as soon as he can.” In time she understood there was a war going on: the children at school wouldn’t let her play and made fun of the way she spoke. Her mother couldn’t get a job and often they were hungry. Just as the hunger was becoming unbearable, food would appear, Ilse never knew how. If she complained, her mother said cryptically, “Still, we’re lucky. Lucky.” She stopped asking about her father and eventually the war was over. When they went looking for a flat in London she heard her mother tell the landladies he was killed in the war. Then her mother would murmur some words very low, as if she were embarrassed, and the landladies’ granite faces would loosen a bit, and a Mrs. Soloway finally let them have a room.

  In bed with Mitch that night, Ilse heard a humming noise, muffled, but rhythmic and relentless like the plangent moan of an infirmary.

  “Listen. Do you hear anything?” she whispered.

  “Only you breathing.” Mitch lay with his head on her stomach, his arms locked around her hips. Always, after they made love, his voice was heavy and sweet with a childlike contentment. “You sound sensational, Ilse. Do it a little harder.” He began kissing her belly again.

  She smiled even though the noise agitated her. “Not that, silly. Listen. It sounds like something in the wall.”

  He groaned and sat up, businesslike, turning on the lamp as if that could make the noise clearer. They stared at each other, concentrating, and indeed enlightenment came. “I bet it’s those bees. They’ve managed to get into the wall now. Jesus Christ!” He turned away to roll himself in the sheets.

  “Hey, I didn’t put them there,” Ilse said softly. “Come on back.”

  “You know what I’ll have to do now? Make a hole in the goddamn wall and spray inside. Just what we needed. A bee colony.”

  “My sweet baby,” she said, stroking him. “My prince to the rescue. My Saint George killing the dragon.”

  “It’s going to stink to high heaven,” he said.

  Mitch slept, but hours later Ilse was still trapped in wakefulness by the humming noise. She pictured a gigantic swarm of bees fluttering their wings together in the dark, a shuddering jellylike mass. It was an unbearable sound, ominous, droning. Of course, she thought. Drones.

  The next two evenings Mitch forgot to bring the extra-strength spray home from the store. On the third day Ilse phoned to remind him. “Look, I hate to keep nagging, but I’ve hardly slept.”

  “They can’t come out, Ilse.”

  “I know. I’m not afraid of bees anyway. It’s the noise. Just bring it, will you please?”

  After dinner he listened with his ear to the wall for the place where the noise was loudest, then chipped with a screwdriver until a tiny hole appeared. Quickly he shoved a small rectangle of shirt cardboard over the hole, and using that as a shield, made the hole bigger. When it was about a half inch in diameter, he told Ilse to go out of the room and close the door. She closed the door but stayed, standing back. It didn’t seem fair to protect herself while he was in danger. Besides, she felt an eerie fascination. Mitch moved the cardboard aside and inserted the nozzle of the spray can. The smell was nasty and stinging, but not as bad as she had imagined. Then he covered the hole again and they fixed the cardboard to the wall with thumbtacks. Ilse heard a sharp crackling like the sound of damp twigs catching a flame.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s them. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Let’s just hope it gets them all.”

  A wave of nausea and dizziness assaulted her, and she lay down till it passed. That night she slept well, in blissful silence.

  The following morning, one of her days off—she worked as a part-time secretary at a law firm in town—she was outside, kneeling to put in the marigolds, when she noticed a patch a few feet off that looked like speckled black velvet. She crawled closer. The corpses of bees, hundreds, thousands, the obscene remains of a massacre. She had never thought about where they would go, never thought further than getting rid of them. Why hadn’t they simply rotted in the wall unseen? Peering up, she spied a dark mass the size of a cantaloupe, attached like a tumor to the outside wall not far from their bedroom window, and almost hidden by the thick leaves of the maple. Somehow they had never thought to look for a hive, but now it seemed obvious.

  Ilse was not squeamish. She had disposed of dead ants and flies and even mice, but the sight of the slaughtered bees paralyzed her. She knelt in the garden for a long time, then dragged herself inside and phoned Mitch, but when he answered she found she couldn’t tell him right away.

  “This must be our lucky day,” she said instead. “Both wanderers heard from.” There had been a postcard from their son, Brian, who was working on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and another from Melissa, who had just completed her second year of law school and, with three girlfriends, was recuperating for a week in Jamaica before starting her summer job.

  “That’s great.” He sounded distracted.

  Stammering a bit, Ilse mentioned the dead bees and the hive near the bedroom window.

  “A hive, eh? I should have known. Well, just sweep them up, Ilse, okay? I’ll have a look when I get home.”

  “Yes, well—you can’t imagine how hideous … These are enormous bees. It’s like a battlefield…. What should I do with them?”

  “Do with them? Put them in the garbage, sweetheart. Unless you want to hold a mass funeral.” />
  “I see I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “Ilse, it’s just that I’ve got a store full of customers. Leave it if you can’t do it. Or have Cathy do it. It’s not worth bickering over.”

  She tried sweeping them into a dustpan, but as she watched the bodies roll and tumble, the wings and feelers lacing and tangling, she felt faint. Finally she abandoned the task and left the marigolds, too, for another day. When Cathy came home from school she asked her to do it and Cathy obliged, with pungent expressions of disgust but no apparent difficulty.

  Mitch got on a ladder and sprayed the hive. There was silence for several nights and they thought it was over. Then Ilse woke before dawn and heard the humming in the wall, fainter, but still insistent. She began to weep, very quietly, so as not to wake Mitch.

  After the war her mother got a clerical job at the National Gallery in London, where she met an American tour guide and married him.

  “We’re going to have a new life, darling,” she told Ilse excitedly. Mostly they spoke German when they were alone, but her mother said this in English. “We’re going to America with Robbie. Denver. You’ll love it, I know.” Ilse nodded. She was a silent child, the kind who seems full of secrets. At school she had few friends, was politely enigmatic, and did her work adequately, but the teachers nonetheless accused her of dreaming. In America she changed. Robbie was all right; he looked like a cowboy and sounded like Gary Cooper, and Ilse treated him as a casual friend of the family. But she did love America. No one shunned her. They liked her British accent and were eager to hear stories of life in London. I can be a normal girl, she whispered to herself one morning in the mirror. From now on. And she behaved as she perceived other normal girls to behave, a tactic which worked so well that she adopted it for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, when she was old enough to understand, around Cathy’s age, she went on a binge of reading books about the war, till she was satisfied that she comprehended what had happened to her father, what his final years or months had been like, and had lived them in her bones up to the point where his own bones lay in a ditch, indistinguishable from the millions of others.

  “You never talk about him.” She expected her mother would hedge and say, About who? but she was mistaken.

  “What can I say? He died in the war.”

  “But I mean, about how.”

  “Do you know how?” her mother asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, so do I. So …”

  She was craving a significant scene, tears and embraces, or lies and shouting, culminating in cloak-and-dagger truths, secret horrors not included in any books, and above all in profundities vast enough to connect the past to the present, but her mother offered nothing.

  “Did you cry?”

  “What a question, Ilse. I cried plenty, yes.”

  But she was not about to cry anew for Ilse. They were lucky, her mother repeated with lips stiff and quaking. “Remember all your life what a lucky person you are.”

  Ilse fled from the room. Now she had long forgiven her mother. At the time they boarded the plane for London, she realized, the day she got stung, her mother was twenty-four years old. A girl the age of Melissa, who was swimming and dancing in the Caribbean moonlight and about to earn extravagant sums of money. And at the time of their talk, her mother had known Robbie for as long as she had known Ilse’s father. Her mother was truly lucky. In compassion, Ilse stopped pestering her and let her live her lucky life.

  Twice more Mitch moved aside the cardboard and sprayed into the hole. Twice more the bees crackled, the room smelled, and the nights were silent, then the noise returned.

  “It’s no use. We need an exterminator.” And he sighed a husbandly sigh of overwork.

  “I’ll take care of that.” Ilse was expert at arranging for services and dealing with repairmen. In the yellow pages she found just what was needed: Ban-the-Bug, which promised to rid your home of pests for good. Ban-the-Bug’s logo was a familiar black-bordered circle with a black line running diagonally through the center. Three times a week Ilse saw that same symbol, but in red, on the door of Ban-the-Bomb, a local group with a small office opposite her own. Except instead of the mushroom cloud in the center, Ban-the-Bug’s circle displayed a repulsive insect suggesting a cross between a winged cockroach and a centipede. The black line was firm and categorical: it meant, Ilse knew, No More, Get Rid Of, Verboten.

  On the telephone, she did not even have to supply details. Ban-the-Bug understood all about the problem and would send a man over late that afternoon.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll never have to hear that sound again,” a reassuring, motherly voice told Ilse.

  Never again. She would sleep in peace. The soothing promise echoed as she shopped and chatted in the market and set out on the kitchen counter all the ingredients for a Chinese dinner. With another secretary from the law firm she was taking a course in Chinese cooking, and Mitch and Cathy had been teasing her for a demonstration. Cathy had brought a friend home from school, and both girls volunteered to help. As Ilse sautéed garlic and ginger, the kitchen filled with a luxurious, tangy odor. She chopped the pork and set the girls to work on the peppers and scallions and cabbage.

  The smell made her hungry, and as usual, hunger made her think of being hungry in London, such a different kind of hunger, long-lasting and tedious, like a sickness, and panicky, with no hope of ever being fully eased.

  That was far away now, though. Her present hunger is the good kind, the hunger of anticipation.

  The girls are jabbering across the large kitchen. Having raised two children to adulthood, Ilse is not passionately interested in the jabbering of teenagers. But this conversation is special. It snares her. Evidently they are learning about World War II in history class, and Mary Beth, a thin, still flatchested girl with straight blond hair, is a Quaker, Ilse gathers. She is explaining to Cathy the principles of nonviolence.

  “But there must be limits,” Cathy says. “Like supposing it was during the war and you saw Hitler lying in the road, half dead and begging for water. You wouldn’t have to actually kill him, just … sort of leave him there.”

  “If a dying person asks me for water I would have to give it,” says Mary Beth.

  “Even Hitler?”

  Mary Beth doesn’t hesitate. “He’s a human being.” Ilse chops pork steadily with her cleaver. She rarely mixes in.

  “But my God! Well, supposing he asks you to take him to a hospital?”

  “I guess I would. If it was to save his life.”

  “You’d probably nurse him and help him get back to work, right?” Cathy is irate, Ilse notes with a keen stab of pleasure in her gut.

  “No, you don’t understand. I’d never help him make war. But see, if I let him die it would be basically the same as killing him, and then I would become like him, a killer.”

  “So big deal. You’d also be saving a lot of people.”

  “I’d rather try to save them by talking to him, explaining what—”

  “Oh, come on, Mary Beth. What horseshit.”

  Ilse accidentally grazes her finger with the cleaver and bleeds onto the pork. She sucks, tasting the warm blood with surprising glee. It has just left her heart, which strains toward her daughter with a weight of love.

  “Look, Cathy,” replies Mary Beth, “the real issue is what do I want to be? Do I want to be a truly good person or do I want to spend the next fifty years knowing I could have saved a life and didn’t? How could I face myself in the mirror? I’d be, like, tainted.”

  This Mary Beth is a lunatic, that much is clear, thinks Ilse. Get rid of her this instant. Out, out of the house! But of course she cannot do that. The girl is Cathy’s blameless little friend, invited for a Chinese dinner.

  “Who gives a damn about your one soul!” exclaims Cathy. “What about all the other souls who’ll die?”

  Enough already, please! moans Ilse silently, watching her blood ooze through a paper napkin. What kind of people could teach their
children such purity? They should teach her instead about the generous concealments of mirrors. Taste every impurity, she would like to tell Mary Beth, swallow them and assimilate them and carry them inside. When you’re starving you’ll eat anything. Ilse has. And none of it shows in any mirror.

  “I’m sorry for those people. I mean it. I’d try to help them too. But I can’t become a killer for them.”

  “That’s the most selfish, dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  It begins to appear the friends will have a real falling-out. Not worth it, in the scheme of things. “How’re you girls doing with the chopping?” Ilse breaks in. “Oh, that looks fine. Mary Beth, do the cabbage a little bit smaller, okay? Cathy, would you get me a Band-Aid? I cut my finger.”

  As soon as she gets the Band-Aid on, she hears a van pull into the driveway. Ban-the-Bug. The symbol with the grotesque insect is painted on the van. In her torment she has forgotten the appointment. She greets the smiling young man at the kitchen door and takes him around to the side of the house where the hive is. Behind her she can hear the girls tittering over how good-looking he is. Well, fine, that will reunite them. And indeed he is, a dazzling Hollywood specimen, tall, narrow-hipped, and rangy, with golden hair and tanned skin. Blue eyes, but duller than Mitch’s. Wonderful golden-haired wrists and big hands. He is holding a clipboard with some papers, like a functionary, and Ban-the-Bug is written in red script just above the pocket of his sky blue shirt, whose sleeves are rolled up to the shoulders, revealing noteworthy muscles. Ilse points out the hive and he nods, unamazed.

  “I would judge from the size,” he says, “you’ve got about forty thousand bees in there.”