Free Bee Season by Myla Goldberg

imperative powers… .” or, “I find the whole concept of ‘centralized opposition’ oxymoronic even from a neo-communist perspective… .” Miriam signs each of these gleeful invectives with a pen name composed expressly for the occasion, then stuffs them into linen envelopes addressed to editors in Freedom, North Dakota, or San Francisco, California. Though she doesn’t talk about the letters with her family, she makes no secret of their writing or of the photo album she keeps beside the family encyclopedia set. They have all read the letters Miriam has carefully snipped from the editorial pages of these magazines. The first clipping is dated not long after newlyweds Saul and Miriam moved in together. It never occurs to Saul or to Miriam that the magazines have replaced the lectures they used to attend together, the arguments she once presented to Saul now addressed to others. Miriam’s transition to letter writing is so automatic that she doesn’t notice the substitution, her quick mind filling in the gap before she recognizes its presence. Drifting away from her husband is less a conscious choice than a series of unconscious ones.
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    Eliza feels invigorated by her rejection of Saul’s offer of help. Her power to cause her father’s emergence from his study in the name of spelling is made all the sweeter by her decision not to employ it. Rather than block out her father’s and brother’s guitar music she now incorporates it into her own pursuits, her words gliding on the muted chords rising up through the air vents. Even her mother’s solitary habits have lost the feeling of a party to which Eliza is not invited. Miriam’s typing lends Eliza’s studies rhythm and tempo.
    Paging through the dictionary is like looking through a microscope. Every word breaks down into parts with unique properties — prefix, suffix, root. Eliza gleans not only the natural laws that govern the letters but their individual behaviors. R, M, and D are strong, unbending and faithful. The sometimes silent B and G and the slippery K follow strident codes of conduct. Even the redoubtable H, which can make P sound like F and turn ROOM into RHEUM , obeys etymology. Consonants are the camels of language, proudly carrying their lingual loads.
    Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful. E can sound like I or U. -IBLE and -ABLE are impossible to discern. There is no combination the vowels haven’t tried, exhaustive and incestuous in their couplings. E will just as soon pair with A, I, or O, leading the dance or being led. Eliza prefers the vowels’ unpredictability and, of all vowels, favors Y. Y defies categorization, the only letter that can be two things at once. Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood. Eliza begins to look at life in alphabetical terms. School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.
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    Toward the end of the Silent Amidah, Aaron and Eliza play a game called Sheep that both claim to have invented. At the Amidah’s beginning, Rabbi Mayer tells the entire congregation to rise. The congregants are supposed to remain standing for as long as they wish to pray, sitting down when they have finished. A lot of people actually do begin by praying, but most stop soon after they start. They become distracted by thoughts of the evening’s prime-time television lineup or by how awful the perfume is of the old lady with dyed hair who always sits in the seat under the air duct so that the smell of her goes everywhere.
    Because of this, knowing when to sit down is a problem. People want to appear prayerful, but they also want the service to end in time for “Remington Steele” or “Dallas” or “Falcon Crest.” After a period that is short enough to move things along but