Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  “Ten o’clock tomorrow.” Snickering, he said, “My wife says you claim to be an artist. You wanna do it?” This was so slurred, I couldn’t be sure this was what he really said. He passed out on the couch shortly after that so I couldn’t double-check.

  The women were clumped on the other side of the room discussing bed-wetting. This wasn’t an issue in my household so I figured what the hell, sat down at the drawing board and did the revision. He could use it or not. All he was out was a sheet of good bond paper. Men stopped by and watched. It was obvious I knew what I was doing. The revisions marked on the initial layout were written in an artist’s short-hand code.

  One man laughed and said, “I’d love to be here tomorrow when Randy wakes up with a hangover, drags himself over to his drawing board and tries to figure out when and how he finished the comp. And how he did such a good job.”

  I glowed. It felt great to do something tangible that had a beginning and an end.

  Another man grinned. “Let’s tell him he did it. That’ll really freak him out.”

  “Nah. He’ll just get drunk every time he has a freelance job to finish hoping he’ll wake up and find it all done.”

  The first man turned to me. “How about it? We could have his wife call you. And you could wait until he passes out and slip into the house and finish the comp.”

  The idea was entertaining. They were half serious. Pete had told me about some of the elaborate practical jokes the artists carried out. “It’s okay by me but I’m not sure his wife would agree. I gather Randy is a bear when he has a hangover.”

  Regret in his voice, the second man said, “Yeah, I guess it’s not a good idea. Randy doesn’t need any more reasons to tie one on.”

  Pete came home early the following Thursday. Max and Linda were already fed and in their pajamas. It was a little early for bedtime but Pete liked to have them in bed when he got home. I closed the book I had been reading to them. “Say goodnight to your dad, kids. I’ll finish the story tomorrow.”

  “Let them stay up. I have to take a few photos of them for work. You can go to the store as soon as we eat. I’ll put them to bed.”

  This unexpected help from Pete was a nice surprise and I made the best of it. I dawdled. Buying groceries without the children had become one of the high points of my week. I tried not to dwell on this sorry commentary on my life.

  When I got home, Pete was up in his studio working. I smelled turpentine, not an odor I had smelled recently. Pete had planned to be a painter before we married. He wasn’t alone. The art floor at his agency was full of wannabe painters just as the copy floor was filled with writers who dreamed of writing the Great American Novel. These longings were soon eclipsed by the Great American Dream of wife, three children, house, car and enough money to make it all happen.

  After the groceries were put away, I went up to see what he was painting. He said it was just something for work so I went to bed.

  He needed the car the next day because the paint on the canvas was still wet. That was when he said the agency was having a show of art-work in the company gallery and the head art director had insisted he enter something. The painting was already in the car and he said he had to hurry so I didn’t see it.

  The show’s opening was that Friday. I got a sitter and drove into town. In the late fifties there were two ways to get from Levittown to Center City, Philadelphia. Either wend your way down Roosevelt Boulevard with a traffic light at every corner or take the Burlington Bristol Bridge into New Jersey then drive down Route 130 and across a second bridge back into Pennsylvania. Neither way was good.

  When I went into the gallery, a cluster of people stood staring at Pete’s picture. It hung in a conspicuous spot. Mostly white paint applied with a palette knife, it had a sign below it saying WET PAINT. It took a while to work my way to the front of the people. When I did, I was stunned. Pete had caught the essence of our two children’s personalities and relationship. Linda was relaxed and appeared to be pleased. Max was wide-eyed and looked worried. His right hand was clamped over his mouth.

  The man next to me said, “I wonder who these children are. What a powerful picture. I get the sense there’s a story here. That poor little boy looks frightened.”

  Chapter 10

  I was thrilled when my neighbor invited Linda and two-year-old Max down to her yard to play on the large swing set her husband had spent the last week setting up. She promised she would stay next to the swing set and supervise. They lived two houses away down the hill in the direction of the creek on the far side of the road circling our sub-division. I kept going into my backyard to check on Max. It looked as though every kid in the development was playing on the swing set. Linda was on the glider laughing or on one of the swings. Max was observing from a perch on one of the crossbars bracing the side. He wasn’t a group player but he loved to climb. The neighbor waved at me each time I went out. Her husband sat with her at the small patio table. He looked pleased with himself, like a king surveying his fiefdom. He nodded to me with a satisfied expression. The scene looked like an ad for the Sears outdoor section, everyone’s idea of the perfectly equipped backyard in the suburbs.

  I was folding clothes from the dryer when someone pounded on the front door. Alarmed, I yanked it open. The swing set man loomed in the doorway quivering with fury. He clutched Max’s hand. Next to the man’s bulk, Max looked like a small doll. Clearly terrified, his eyes were like enormous lapis marbles so wide open I could see their inner curve. Each time Max tried to pull his hand loose, the swing set man yanked him so hard his feet swung off the ground. The man sputtered, spraying me with beer-tinged saliva. His voice rose with each garbled word. I felt like clapping my hands over my ears. I couldn’t figure out what he was saying.

  I didn’t care how big and mean the man was, I wasn’t going to let some hulking bully yank Max around. I reached over my pregnant belly, put my hands under Max’s armpits and tried to lift him. I could see the man’s eyes shifting. He was trying to decide whether he really wanted to have a tug-of-war with a pregnant woman. I looked him in the eye trying to out-mean him. He finally let go of Max’s hand but compensated by leaning into the doorway and shaking his fist at him. Max flinched each time the man came close. I was tempted to step back but was afraid the man would just follow me into the house.

  I realized Linda was cowering on the sidewalk behind him. I held up my right hand in front of his face in classic cop-stop style and startled the burly man into a brief pause in his still unintelligible tirade.

  “Excuse me, my little girl’s trying to get past you.”

  He half-turned and reached down as though he planned to grab her. She shot past him with an evasive maneuver that would have made any quarterback proud and stationed herself behind my left knee. I took advantage of the break in his abuse. “I can see you’re upset but I still don’t know why. Can you speak more slowly?”

  “Yeah. YOUR DAMN KID TOOK APART THE SWING SET IT TOOK ME A WEEK TO SET UP. Did you hear me that time?”

  “He did what?” Before he could answer, I said, “Are you sure the swing set wasn’t defective?”

  “No way, lady. Sears don’t sell defective stuff. ”

  I tried to sound reasonable. “How could a little kid take apart a swing set if there wasn’t something wrong with it?”

  Before I could stop him, Max said, “Like the cribs.” I gave him a warning squeeze but he was impossible to silence once he started on an explanation.

  The man kept yelling, Max kept explaining how he did it and I tried to talk above them both. Now that both kids were safe I was fighting not to laugh. I concentrated on keeping a thoughtful frown on my face but my chest bounced with suppressed glee. Max stopped telling the man how he dismantled the swing set and looked at my face. He was clearly confused. He had no sense of the ridiculous. I tried to tuck him against my shoulder but he flipped his head out of my grasp and reared back so he could see my face. He looked at me with an intent expression. I tried to give
him a “don’t talk” warning with my face alone but he didn’t seem to be able to read body language.

  The man began to wind down. “What your kids need is a good beating. You’re a disgrace to the neighborhood.” He gestured at the black VW beetle in the driveway. “How can you drive around in that Kraut excuse for a car? Ain’t you got no pride?” He swung back to me. “I don’t want to see none of your kids in my yard. Not her,” He jabbed a finger at Linda then at Max, “and not that devil kid you’re holding there. If I see one a them anywhere near my yard, I’ll give them a good beating myself.”

  Linda stalked off as soon as I closed the front door and said, “I was having fun. Now I won’t have anyone to play with. All the kids are going to be playing down on the swing set. Max ruins everything for me. I wish you never borned him.” Her voice was bitter. She stomped down the hall wailing as though her world was about to end and slammed her bedroom door behind her.

  Chapter 11

  I insisted the kids had to spend an hour in their room every day after lunch. They didn’t nap any more but I needed to put my feet up. I was out cold as soon as I was prone. With a baby due in a few weeks it was a struggle to get off the couch when the buzzer on the stove went off. I dragged myself into the kitchen, punched the button to stop the abrasive noise and turned on the burner under the kettle. I needed a large cup of tea to get through the afternoon. I didn’t hear the kids. There was a hook on the outside of their door and their room was baby-proof so I knew they were safe.

  I put a tea bag in my empty cup, waddled back to their room, unlatched the hook and opened the bedroom door. Yawning, I looked around the room. Linda was sitting on her bed but I didn’t see Max. I slid open the closet door and looked inside. No Max. Linda looked sullen and guilty and the high sliding window over her bed was open. Moving my off-center bulk as quickly as I could, I ran to the window and craned my head out. “Where’s Max?”

  She shrugged. “He went out the window. It’s not my fault.” She cringed when I whipped around and glared at her. Her bed was under the window and the opening was so far above the bed she would have had to hoist him up for him to crawl out.

  “When? Why didn’t you call me?” I shrieked this as I was stumbling to the front door. I walked around the outside of the house shouting Max’s name. I couldn’t see him. I didn’t expect him to answer but I yelled anyway. I checked the car and the garage. No child in either one.

  Linda came out of the front door. “Your tea kettle’s making noise.” I pushed past her and turned off the burner. I called neighbors and the police. No one had seen him. The police took his description and my phone number and said they would put this on their radio. My neighbor across the street brought her baby over and said she would stay with Linda and answer the phone. I drove around the streets in my neighborhood stopping and asking anyone outside if they had seen a small boy wandering around. I gave them my phone number and asked them to call me or the police if they saw Max.

  People were nice. Losing a child aroused atavistic terror in every parent. Having alerted at least one person on each of the surrounding streets, I tackled the wooded strip Max had asked to explore each time I drove past. I parked at the foot of the hill and went down the slippery bank to a mucky area referred to on local maps as a creek. There may have been a constantly running creek there when this area bordered a field of wheat but now it was just a strip of slimy mud with the occasional glimmer of a narrow meandering rivulet of sudsy water. It stunk. Thick stands of skunk cabbage still flourished in the deep shade under sumac and wild cherry trees. Ratty elderberry bushes bent toward the open spots where sun peeked through.

  I caught movement on the edge of my vision. The tip of a hairless tail disappeared behind a rock. Too large for a mouse. Too small and fast moving for an opossum. I shuddered. It had to be a rat. Would it attack a small child? What if it had a nest of baby rats to protect? It was April. Did rats have young in the spring like deer and foxes? Max would want to pick up a baby rat if he saw one. Did they carry rabies like the local skunks?

  It was hard to keep my footing. What if Max slipped and fell? He could have cracked his head against the rock where the rat went. Someone or something had been walking here earlier. Skunk cabbage leaves had been broken in a wavering path. I yanked a dead branch off a skeletal wild cherry tree and flailed it back and forth crushing everything in front of me. I had to get down to the bare mud to see if there were footprints. Oh God. Was he still wearing his shoes? I tried to picture his room. Were there shoes on the floor? I couldn’t remember. My brain flopped from bad thought to worse. Why didn’t I dress Max in red today? Or yellow? Why did I pick his green shirt? Attacking the stands of strong-smelling greenery left me with wet, muddy shoes and a rotten stench that clung to my baggy maternity pants but no little boy or even footprints.

  I finally got to the iron pipe where the creek went under the road. It was too small for Max to squeeze into and covered with sturdy mesh that hadn’t been tampered with. I had to retrace my steps and follow the creek in the other direction. This time I slipped and fell. Close to full term with a very large baby throwing me off balance I had to turn sideways and crawl on my knees to get back on my feet. My black pants were now stained with brown mud. The bottom end of the creek bed had an iron pipe slightly larger than the one at the top and was just as carefully sealed with heavy steel mesh. I clawed my way up the bank and hurried down the road to the place where I had left my car.

  More and more frightened I went back to the house to see if the police had called. My neighbor shook her head. I had been hunting for Max for at least forty-five minutes now. He could have climbed out shortly after I fell asleep. I tried to find out from Linda but she said she didn’t know. She defined time by when I fed her and put her to bed.

  I debated calling Pete. He would want to know. But he was thirty miles away and commuted in a car pool. There wouldn’t be anything he could do except worry himself sick and tie up the phone with calls every few minutes. I was torn between practical kindness and resentment. They were his kids, too. Why should I be the only one going crazy with fear? But I squelched my less charitable impulses. I knew he would be helping hunt and as frantic as I was if he were here.

  I dashed out to the car and drove over the same few streets. I even stopped at the noisy stone-crushing plant where the two main roads intersected. No one had seen a very small boy in a green jersey. The two men working there looked at me with disapproval. What kind of woman loses her child?

  I would have to call Pete. Maybe he could talk the man who was driving this week to leave early.

  When I went back to find out if my neighbor had gotten any calls, she insisted I stop long enough for a cup of tea and suggested I change my clothes. I knew she was right. I was so exhausted by now I was afraid I might black out and crash into something when I got back on the road. I pulled on my other pair of maternity pants and gulped down a cup of sweet milky tea.

  I lurched and spilled tea down my fresh clothes when the phone rang. I grabbed it and squeaked out a hello. A hesitant voice said, “Uh, ma’am, do you have a little boy…” I heard his voice asking someone a question then he spoke into the phone again, “I think his name is Maxwell?” This last was clearly a question. Not for the first time, I wished we had named our son John or Ed or Dan. Anything normal.

  Max was at the drugstore I used. The one with the jars of pretzel sticks and lollipops and a marble soda fountain flanked by stools that went round and round with a satisfying squeak. The place where I got my pre-natal vitamins and never bought Linda or Max any of the teeth-rotting goodies they coveted. Max was sitting on one of the round stools drinking the last of what looked like a strawberry soda. When he saw me he burst into tears. The drug store manager and stock boy assumed he was crying with joy at the sight of his long lost mother. They both had goofy smiles on their faces until Max clutched the soda with a death grip and shrieked, “Don’t take my soda. They said I could have it.”

  The drug
gist looked at me with suddenly cold, judgmental eyes as I paid for the soda, three lollipops, four pretzel sticks and a pack of Dentine gum. I thanked him for keeping Max safe. He had the grace to apologize for not calling earlier. “He told me his name but I figured he was too little to talk well because I couldn’t figure out what he said his first name was. The last name was confusing enough. We tried every spelling we could and finally hit on one that looked like it might be pronounced like the name he kept saying. But the first name was so odd we figured he got the whole name wrong. What kind of a name is Maxwell?”

  “A family name that seems to carry a curse.”

  Chapter 12

  Max was two and a half when his brother Seth was born. He wasn’t impressed. “Why’s he so little?” He watched me change the baby’s diaper and shuddered. “Yuck.” He tried to hand Seth one of his trucks. I grabbed it before it dropped on his brother’s head and explained Seth was too little to play with toys. Max frowned in disgust then delivered his final opinion. “Why didn’t you bring home a bigger one? This one can’t do anything.” There was a long pause. “He can’t even talk.”

  Linda watched Seth with interest. When he began to respond and smile, she sat next to his cradle, played with his fingers with a delighted expression on her face and made him laugh. Max watched her and brooded. He adored Linda, did anything she suggested without question and didn’t tattle on her even when her instructions got him in trouble. She played with him because he was the only child available now that they were banned from the house on the corner but she made it clear he was a poor excuse for a real playmate. “You’re not doing it right,” came from the playroom all day long, delivered in a frustrated shriek.

  Seth was easy and rewarding. Guilt nudged me each time I realized how profoundly grateful I was he wasn’t another Max. This spurred me to compensate by giving Max extra attention. Each time I saw or heard something I particularly liked, I shared it with him. Or tried to. One evening when the stars were amazingly vivid, I carried him to the picture window so we could look at them.