Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  Eventually a cop who had dealt with Max before noticed him when he was stopped at a traffic light and he was hauled in. It was long after curfew. The police called me. I was supposed to pick him up.

  “It’ll take me a while. The car he was driving is the only one we have now. I’ll have to walk.”

  “You only have one car?” He sounded dumbfounded. “Just a sec.” I heard a second voice suggesting I ask a neighbor to drive me. The officer relayed this to me.

  “Not at 1:30 in the morning. I’m not going to drag anyone out of bed at this hour. I’ll walk. I should be there within the hour.”

  “Uh. Stay put. We’ll bring Max and the car home.”

  This time Max was cited. Pete said he had no stomach for another lecture. I went to court with Max. It was a different judge. As usual, he wanted to know why I couldn’t control my son and centered much of his stern lecture on me. He kept telling me I should just tell Max “No” and punish him when he misbehaved.

  Recently turned 17 and full of himself, Max looked so indifferent he verged on rude but, out of habit, his voice was polite and he called the judge “sir.”

  I wanted to say, see, see, that’s what I did. Give me some credit. How many 16-year old boys call you sir? Do you have any idea how many times I lined up my kids and drilled good manners into them? They even know what to do if they meet the Queen of England, for God’s sake. But I didn’t say anything. I just nodded and looked as polite as I could while stifling the desire to scream at every person who was making my life so miserable, starting with Max.

  The judge segued into a soliloquy about the damage broken homes were inflicting on society. Suddenly realizing where he was going with this, I said, “Max doesn’t come from a broken home. His father and I are still married.”

  He shook his head and frowned. I didn’t think he liked being wrong when he was on his bandwagon. “Why isn’t he here then?”

  “He said he didn’t want to listen to another lecture.” This was probably the wrong thing to say but I was sick of being put in the position of defending everyone else’s reputation. I clamped my mouth shut. I was too drained by this futile song and dance to trust myself. Nothing I did or said had any affect on Max. As his headmaster had said years earlier, he didn’t get it. Why couldn’t anyone understand this?

  The judge blinked and stared at me. Then he said, “I better not see him in my court again.”

  Chapter 45

  Halfway through the first semester in his junior year, Max’s math teacher told him he would get a failing grade unless he did every homework assignment for the entire semester. Max protested. He aced all the tests, why did he have to turn in the homework? He had his own way of learning.

  It was first grade all over again. Only this time, I sided with the teacher. With math, the correct answer could be less important than the method of reaching it.

  Max finally spent a long evening methodically doing every homework assignment. In order to expedite this tortuous job he used one of his father’s large bond paper pads, carefully numbering and drawing neat boxes around each day’s work. He showed me the resulting sheets with obvious pride. I was pleased and told him so. He then rolled them and submitted them to the teacher.

  The teacher wouldn’t even look at the work. He told Max he had to redo it on individual sheets of paper. Max reacted as though the man had just slapped him in the face. He ripped the large sheet into bits, dropped these into the wastepaper basket and stalked to his assigned seat.

  I was sick when I heard this. What kind of a teacher would be so destructive with a brilliant kid who loved math and showed he was willing to do the scut work in order to learn more? I talked with his counselor. He was equally disgusted with the teacher but couldn’t do anything to change the outcome. He said he was worried about Max. High IQ-low achievers can thrive if they make it to the right college. If they don’t, they can become so angry with the world they aren’t fit to do anything and end up on the street.

  He shook his head. “Max’s too naive and vulnerable to survive there. He worries me when he rants about running away from home and becoming a hippie. That can be an ugly world.”

  The New Trier school district had a rigid dress code. In a town with a major yacht basin that hosted Olympic races, it was full of world class yachts and people in boat shoes without socks but for some reason the school insisted socks had to be worn at all times on the school’s premises.

  This made Max’s contest with his teacher simple. He stopped wearing socks. He had them on when he left the house and when he entered the school building but they magically disappeared before he showed up for his math class. He was at war with the teacher. I don’t think he cared if he won. Each time Max walked into the class, the teacher made him leave the room until he had missed enough classes to be kicked out of the class. There were no adults in this contest.

  Max was clearly depressed. He talked constantly about running away. I empathized with him. He had no successes to help him through the failures. Each time I heard the sound of the car coming back from one of his late night forays, I relaxed enough to sleep for a few hours. Inevitably Max was picked up and cited again. I took him to court. We were lucky enough to get a judge who didn’t know him so we just got the lecture. I got the impression the judges didn’t like the curfew any more than the kids did. It had to be wearing sitting there day after day telling sulky kids the same thing. At least Max called the judge “sir.” The next time he was cited I figured our luck was bound to run out. I lost a lot of points but insisted Pete come with us.

  We got the ultimatum judge. He informed us we were doing a terrible job of parenting. If Max appeared in front of him again, he would be made a ward of the court and removed from our household.

  We were too shocked to talk on the drive home. Pete didn’t go to work. He paced back and forth, turning the TV on and off repeatedly. He finally suggested that we sell the house and move to Florida where, as he said, we always had a good time. We could scale down our lifestyle and work less and he could spend more time with Max. His IQ would make Max eligible for Nova High School. The change of school sounded good. Nova had been written up recently and did seem better suited to Max’s learning style. I felt dread at any move but anything seemed better than the current situation. Having Max named a ward of the court would put him in a foster home. That would be tantamount to throwing him to a pack of wolves.

  Pete resigned from his job and the Boy Scouts. I was surprised to see he didn’t seem to regret either loss. I was under the impression both were important to him.

  Six weeks before we were due to move, he opened his eyes one morning and said, “Let’s go to Russia.”

  “Why Russia?”

  “I’ve always wanted to go there. It’ll be a learning experience for the kids.”

  The house sold fast. Two weeks before our moving day, Pete and I came home from an early evening farewell party. Linda had a date and Seth had gone to a movie with a friend. We had Andrea with us.

  Max was going through a bout of pyromania. So far he had stuck to candles. I stopped buying them but had to keep a few short candles for the times when high winds knocked over trees and we lost power.

  The distinctive odor of burnt wood and candle wax greeted us when we opened the front door. Max had gone out leaving a candle stuck on the sill of the large double-paned window in the kitchen. The fire had consumed the wick and instead of guttering out, had set the pool of melted wax on fire, burnt through the window sill and cracked the four foot by five foot, one quarter inch thick inner glass pane. I tried to be grateful the outer pane was still whole but it was a struggle. We couldn’t find anyone to replace the glass in time for the move so we ended up doing it ourselves. I was left with a monster pane of thick glass. The trash firm in Wilmette wouldn’t take it.

  I finally laid an old canvas drop cloth on the cement in front of the garage, put the pane of glass on it, covered this with another drop cloth and whaled at it with my largest sled
gehammer. It was surprisingly hard to smash that much extra thick glass into pieces small enough to be hidden in trash but the job had its good points. It got rid of a lot of free-floating aggression.

  If casting spells were possible, a number of people in the area would have been flinching. Whacking large pieces of thick glass with a ten-pound sledgehammer had to carry a stronger curse than sticking pins into a wax figure.

  Chapter 46

  Two months later we were on a BOAC flight on our way to London. It was late June. We would be in England and Russia close enough to the summer solstice to enjoy the long midsummer evenings. The plane swung out over the ocean and flew parallel to the East Coast for the first hour or so. The scene to the left of the plane was the sort of over-the-top view of raw nature 3D theater-goers loved. An enormous weather front was moving in from the west. Back-lit by the sun, the roiling, dark gray clouds spewed arced flashes of lightning that filled the western sky for the first hour or so of the flight from Miami International Airport. Up as high as we were, the bank of angry clouds appeared to stop at the coast. In front of us and to the east the sky was clear. Bright stars began to appear.

  It was a great send-off. I hoped it was a portent of a change in our luck. I loved to fly. After two hectic months of constant motion, I could finally relax and enjoy myself.

  The Iron Curtain was showing signs of cracking but was still very much in place. We were going to Russia but had gotten caught in a posturing standoff between our state department and the Kremlin. We had planned to start in Russia and made all the plane and hotel reservations but because of a dust-up between a couple of people in the American embassy in Moscow, the Russians punished us by changing all the reservations in Russia. Fortunately, this sort of thing happened often enough so our State Department helped us rearrange the rest of the trip. London was our first stop, Russia our second, Denmark the third and Spain last. We would be traveling for five weeks.

  This was the first time the kids had been to Europe. I was glad we started in England. They loved it. It was a great non-threatening transition. They had seen Mexico, Canada and most of the United States and felt well-traveled but from the minute we boarded the Aeroflot Ilyushin Jet at Heathrow Airport for the flight to Leningrad, they were wide-eyed. They had spent a lot of time in airplanes and were used to the constantly refurbished interiors standard on American planes. The Ilyushin jet was sleek and elegant from the outside but had clearly never been refurbished on the inside. The kids stared at the broken tables in front of them and the stained and frayed seats. They were intrigued when the flight attendant brought us all small glasses of champagne, holding them with a finger stuck in each glass rather than on a pristine tray. Then they were disconcerted when the flight attendant gave champagne to seven-year-old Andrea and was clearly put-out when I refused it and asked if they had juice. The crabby flight attendant brought a glass of apple juice and plunked it down on Andrea’s tray with such force half of it splashed out of the glass.

  A group of students were going to a Russian language institute near Leningrad. One student spotted Max. A boy I had never seen before yelled, “Hey Max.” It was a boy who had been in a number of Max’s classes at New Trier High School. The two boys chatted with the relief of people finding the familiar in the midst of chaos.

  On landing, we were met by the Intourist representative assigned to us. We had been warned by our own state department that we would be watched at all times. This would normally have struck us as funny but we worried what they would make of Max. He had been allowing his thick hair to grow during the last semester in New Trier. By the time we were ready to leave for Europe, it was well below his ears and a definite antiestablishment statement. We had insisted he have it cut. I sympathized with him when he refused. I agreed it was his hair. I said if he felt his hair was more important than a European trip, I would find him a safe place to stay in Florida but I didn’t plan to show up in Russia with a child who would immediately be pegged as a hippie. In 1970, Russians arrested hippies on sight. When Max realized I was serious, he agreed to a haircut. He looked like a 16-year-old Beatle.

  I packed our clothes, aiming for conservative, easy to care for and multi-purpose. We didn’t stand out in England until we spoke. In Russia we couldn’t have stood out more if we had worn suits designed for moon walks. People gave us a wide berth. I got a sense of how lepers must have felt. It was clear the average Russian feared anything American, except for small, blond American children. I was grateful we had Andrea with us. In Leningrad there were few children and the ones we did see were clearly very valuable. No child went out without an adult clutching his or her hand. Probably due to inter-breeding with Nordic stock all the children were blue-eyed blonds. Some adults had brown hair but the children were still fair.

  Andrea was small and delicate with hair so blond it was almost white, and big blue eyes. Every time we got on a bus or tram some woman insisted Andrea had to sit on her lap and the woman would then pat her and say what were clearly kind and loving things in Russian and give her candy. Andrea smiled and accepted kisses and candy with polite thanks, endured numerous hugs and even hugged back. Once after climbing off a bus, she smiled and waved at the old woman who had claimed her. Then when the bus was out of sight, she turned to Pete and me and said, “Boy, if you can’t speak Russian, you sure have to smile a lot.”

  Our hotel was directly across from a major train station. There were so few vehicles on the streets that I wasn’t certain which side of the street they drove on because most drove down the middle unimpeded by any oncoming traffic. In Leningrad, we saw nothing but official vehicles. People poured in and out of the train station across from our hotel at all hours. It was impossible to guess the time by looking out at the street. Close to the summer solstice, it was never fully dark.

  It was a wonderful time to be in Russia. There was no western influence whatsoever. Each time we got off the elevator on our floor, a woman sitting at an imposing desk demanded our names and had to see our room keys then noted the time in a journal before we were allowed to walk away. We had to do this in reverse before we were allowed on the elevator to go to the lobby.

  I had read about the communist party policy all over Russia that made everyone put in two weeks a year doing manual work, regardless of their normal work status. The theory being that this would keep them from thinking they were better than the average working man or woman. The hotels were a testament to the ridiculous notion that the working classes weren’t experts at their crafts. The people who administered this program did have the sense to be selective about some professions. The college professors didn’t forge steel beams. They stuck to laying bricks, setting bathroom tiles and painting buildings. Only no one taught them how to do these jobs well. The tiles in every one of our bathrooms looked as though they had been set by someone who had never seen a wet saw. Every side started with full tiles at one corner and stopped wherever the last full tile ended. After that point, cement was used in an effort to fill the resulting void. I found it amusing. For some reason it upset the kids.

  England had replicated the comfortable surroundings they had always known with a charming accent added to make the surroundings exotic enough to make them feel well-traveled. They could read the signs and buy food they recognized. Given a map, they could figure out which bus or tube line to take.

  Russia was strange. The only blankets were scratchy khaki wool and looked as though they were Russian Army leftovers. Or the proverbial hair shirts beloved by masochistic medieval monks. These were encased in what looked like white cotton duvet covers with a large open diamond shape in the center. I was glad I wasn’t a Russian chamber maid. It looked as though centering the thick blanket in the cover would have been an exhausting challenge.

  Pete and I had a great time. We both enjoyed the strange aspects. We didn’t get to see inside as many museums as we had hoped. Meals were taken seriously and took a long time to serve and eat. If we wanted to eat, we had to forego something else
.

  Max wanted to roam on his own. This worked in England. His friend from school had invited him to visit the Russian language institute. The boy had told him how to get there and back. The Intourist rep seemed to think this was okay. She insisted children were safe anywhere in Russia. Pete and I exchanged worried glances but neither of us said anything. Pete was the only one authorized to exchange money but any of us could spend it. He gave Max enough rubles to get through a day.

  There were small liquid dispensers mounted on the outsides of buildings in downtown Leningrad and Moscow. The Intourist guide was surprised when I asked her what they were dispensing and then she was disgusted when I didn’t know what kvass was. She explained it was a mildly alcoholic beverage usually made from rye bread crusts, yeast and sugar. I was tempted to ask, why only crusts? What do they do with the rest of the loaf? I really did wonder but got the impression she had a hard time dealing with American stupidity as it was.

  Max was intrigued with the idea that he could buy something alcoholic by dropping a few kopecks in a coin slot. I told him this was a bad idea. There was one very sticky finger-and mouthmarked glass upended on a post. As we were looking at a kvass dispenser, a woman walked up to the machine. Her bleached blonde hair was partly covered by a well-used and rarely washed babushka so old and dirty I couldn’t make out its design. She dropped her coin in the slot and pushed the glass down against what turned out to be a water spigot, not bothering to move her filthy, black finger-nailed hand from the resulting gush of cold water. She shook the glass to get every last drop of water out, lifted it, positioned it under a spout, pushed a second button and watched the glass fill with murky brown fluid. After gulping this down, she re-hung the glass and lumbered off.