1st Place
Beehive Inside My Heart
By Harriet Garfinkle
Deborah, 1999
The sun was swooning into the arms of the day, and Nathan stood beside me in my childhood home and addressed Mother, not quite meeting her eyes. He wouldn’t meet my eyes either.
Mother was curled up in the music room window seat. She’d been reading, one leg tucked under her, her filigree of hair shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight, Mozart on the stereo.
Nathan’s gaze ping-ponged around the room, chasing the shifting piebald light. Mother fingered her pearls. I stood, a mountain of shame, with the salty taste of sperm lingering in my mouth, despite Listerine.
At long last, Nathan pushed his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose. “Augusta? Deborah and I — uh, what I intend to say is — we’ve been thinking, or rather — we’ve been planning on getting married.”
Watching me twist the ruby engagement ring round and round my finger, Mother shot up an eyebrow. “I assume there’s been a marriage proposal?”
He exhaled and rubbed his fledgling five o-clock shadow, feet splayed awkwardly in a turned-out position, like a ballerina’s. I gave him a nudge on the elbow, and he cleared his throat.
“Oh, sorry. I’m really quite terrible at this. What I meant to say was — Augusta. Deborah and I are perfect for each other. I respectfully request her hand in marriage.”
There. He’d done it properly. I could unclench my jaw.
Now Mother held out her hand toward me. “Is this the engagement ring?”
I placed my left hand in her warm palm. “Yes, it was Nathan’s grandmother’s. It’s an emerald-cut ruby with diamonds.”
And the thought came unbidden. It’s flawed. The stone is flawed. Our relationship is flawed.
Earlier that afternoon, I’d gone to his house. He’d met me in the doorway, his eyes halfway shuttered. Oh, fantastic, I thought, has he been jacking off?
“Are your parents home?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Why?”
“Let’s go to the basement and play strip poker.”
“Deborah, what’re you talking about?” He ran his hand over his mouth and chin.
“You can tie me up.”
“Oh.” He stepped back, lifted his glasses, and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Deborah, that was so long ago, we were kids. I’d never do that to you now. You’re a queen to me. We’re going to be married.”
Never? Oh, God, please don’t tell me that. Please don’t tell me Sigmund Freud —that misogynist — actually knew what the hell he was talking about. I had purposefully left off my bra, and now I undid the buttons on my dress to expose my naked breasts. He stood a moment in the harsh light, blinking, then grabbed my upper arms and pulled me inside. Great, this is it. He’s going to throw me to the floor and ravish me. I stood exposed, nipples erect, nipples hard, nipples leaning toward him in the humid air.
“Nathan, we’re adults. This is okay. Don’t you desire me?”
“Deborah, I desire you so much, my balls are blue.” He removed his glasses and placed them on the side table.
Even that was a turn-on. I said, “Let me see.”
He unzipped his khaki pants, the sound tearing through the foyer, a fingernail scratch on a 78-rpm record. He stood in his tighty-whities, pants around his ankles, rubbing his hands in circles over the bulging cotton ball, massive hands filled with maleness. He shook his head and pulled his underwear down. There it was. My first view of his penis. Any penis. God, it was strange and oddly beautiful, a fat, dark arrow; bald on top with a hairy bush and two pendulous testicles. It was straight and erect and all mine. Take me, Nathan, take me now, take me hard and strong and without question, without thought. Fill me. Consume me. Obliterate me.
I pulled the dress from my shoulders and let it drop to the floor. We stood, his penis staring at me, me staring at it. Nathan pulled me to him, the rough chambray shirt like sandpaper against my erect nipples. Finally, finally Deborah gets what she wants.
“Close your eyes,” he said, “I need you to close your eyes.”
He pressed my shoulders, pushed me to my knees, hard, the wooden floor thumping, a beloved book being slammed shut. He grabbed my hair and yanked my head back and groaned, “Suck my dick. Deborah, suck my dick.”
My eyes flew open, and I tried to pull away. “What? No! Nathan, I’m a virgin, this is not how I want my first time to be.”
He didn’t hear or he didn’t listen. He pressed my head forward and I put my mouth around him, and the skin ruffled under my tongue. He had a hold of my head with both hands and was forcing it to move at an unnatural tempo. This was wrong. This was all wrong. My mouth was too small, my throat was too small, he was too big, this was not romantic. His legs were skinny and hairy, and he had on those stupid black leather oxfords. This was gritty and ugly. And ordinary. This was that slut, Monica Lewinsky.
And yet. I swallowed it all. Then I cried. I wailed. “What was that?”
He wouldn’t look at me. He was getting dressed. “Deborah, I promised my mother you’d be a virgin when we married. She’s looking out for you.” It hit me then. Nathan hates his mother.
He repeated his refrain, “You’re a queen to me.”
I hiccupped. “Promise me next time it’ll be different.” I sniveled. I snotted. I wiped my mouth again and again. “Promise me.”
“I promise. Next time we’ll be married. It’ll be different.”
There was no soundtrack playing in my head.
He finally said, “We’re seeing your mother soon, aren’t we? Let me get Bubbe’s ring.”
At the wedding on The Vineyard, I had one attendant: Debra, my roommate from
Wellesley.
OD — Other Debra — now living in Palo Alto, had come East for the wedding. Debra was from Florida. Cutler Bay. She’d come to Wellesley on a scholarship. She’d wanted to escape all that sunshine, she explained. It was just too depressing. So, what did she end up doing?
Moving to the sunshine in California.
At the rehearsal dinner, at the inn on the bluffs, she pushed her brown hair off her face and patted her round, pregnant belly. “I cannot tell you how horny I am. Aaron and I make love every day, and it’s still not enough. We’ve even done it on the kitchen table, with Madonna blasting on the stereo.” She sang, “Like a virgin! Touched for the very first time!” She cupped her now-large breasts and jiggled them up and down in her hands for effect, cocking her head and smiling coquettishly at her husband, who put his hands in his pockets. “This hormonal thing is crazy!” she said.
I didn’t tell her that I was still a virgin, that Nathan was refraining from violating me, because I didn’t think she’d understand. Oh, hell. I still didn’t understand. Only Giselle understood. Too well.
“OD, may I?” Nathan asked, running his palms over Debra’s belly, then he kept them there, fingers spread, covering her entire expanse. He stared down as though his eyeglasses had x-ray vision, the fetus visible through the layers of skin and fascia and muscle. Years later, he would stare at his father’s CT scans with the same intensity, at the aberrant homunculus living inside Elliot’s abdominal cavity.
Aaron and I looked at the floorboards.
Our wedding day was collapsing in on itself, it was so hot. I wore Mother’s 1950’s sweetheart-necked satin, lace and tulle gown and a halo of blushing baby roses in my hair.
Nathan packed his gangly frame into a white tuxedo coat. Nathan’s parents, Elliot and Giselle, clucked and chirped and congratulated themselves. Elliot, in a rented tuxedo large enough for his girth, had trimmed his goatee and pulled his gray hair back in a ponytail, an aging folk singer. He was hoping to serenade the happy couple after the nuptials. Giselle was elegant in her pink size four suit, but I noticed that she had stuffed the Filene’s tag up the sleeve. What the heck? It would be just like her to return it after the wedding. I smiled and told her she looked nice. I did not want to make waves with Nathan’s mother. Especially today. Today was my day.
Mother, in a flowing flowered silk dress, was preening, nervous, fussing with her hair and biting the pearl necklace that Father had given her the day I was born. She kept pacing looking for things to do, playing with my curls or the hem of my dress or smoothing down her skirt.
“Mother, please, calm down. You’re driving me crazy. Why don’t you go check the place cards? And, please, try to breathe!”
“Deborah, I just have the feeling I’m forgetting something. Oh, I know! I have a present for you.” She rummaged around in her beaded bag and pulled out a black velvet jewelry box.
She flipped open the lid to reveal two old-fashioned cushion-cut diamond studs. “These earrings were your Nana’s. I wore them when I married your father.” She got teary-eyed as she placed the diamond earrings from Nana Ruth in my ears. Generation to generation.
Being Mother, she wanted the day to be perfect, but she saw shades in the shadows that reminded her of Father. I held her hand and patted her downy cheek and told her how much I loved her. She looked back at me with watery eyes. “Darling, you are the light of my life.”
I never knew Mother to say such a thing before.
Father insisted on giving the bride away, fluttering around me. “Deborah, you are not having the string quartet play Pachelbel’s Canon in D, are you? That’s so overdone, so tired.” He filed his nails, the sound grating on me, skin being peeled off a dead squirrel. I hummed to myself to drown him out.
“Deborah, don’t let your mother drink too much. You know how belligerent and angry she can get.”
I held my hands over my ears and tried to shut him out, but just like Mother’s floaters, Father and his groupies kept reappearing at the corner of my vision, like Jung’s shadows. And I could hear Father’s voice inside my head, rippling notes on a keyboard. “Why don’t you be honest with Nathan?” Ending on high C.
I was a determined bride; determined to make this work. Who on earth was ever fortunate enough to wed their ideal man? I was being as honest as I could be.
Nathan and I said our vows in the late-afternoon sunlight on the lawn under a chuppah decorated with white hydrangeas, calla lilies, and wisteria. The day was so humid, so torpid, the frosting dripped right off the cake into a big puddle. The Citron and Grunwald grandchildren ran around with icing on their faces and hands, sucking the lemony sweetness from their fingers.
Suddenly, the wind shifted and was riddled with a strange, ominous buzzing. —thousands of swarming bees, the air teeming, obscuring the sun. We shrieked, threw up our hands, and ran. Slices of lemon cake went flying. Drinks spilled. We crammed into the screened in porch, panting and laughing and holding each other, hot and sticky and sweet, pressing our noses against the screen.
“How do they know where to go?”
“This is so scary!”
“How many do you think there are? There must be thousands!” Most of us had never seen a swarm of bees.
The porch smelled of gin and tonics, and I could taste the lemon on my tongue. The swarm hummed like raw nerve endings, like my breakdown. I needed physical contact. I wrapped my arms around Nathan’s chest from behind, burrowing into him. I whispered into his ear, “Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error—that I had a beehive here inside my heart.”
Nathan whispered back, “Red, what is that?”
“Antonio Machado. When Father was alive, he used to recite it to me. Because I’m his little bee.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Is?”
“Was. I was.”
Mother’s hair had come loose from her twist and was bouncing on her shoulders, and even she was laughing. She came up behind me and pressed her body against my back, enveloping both Nathan and me in her arms, giggling. I was encased and protected by love on both sides. A human hive. How happy that made me feel.
The bees landed on a branch of the magnolia by the house, covering it with their little bee bodies, shaping a long cone. I took all this as an auspicious sign. I couldn’t do anything else.
Harriet Garfinkle’s short fiction has appeared in online journals such as the RiversEdge Journal of the University of Texas and Gris-gris Magazine of Louisiana State University, among others. She appeared as a finalist in a previous Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest from WNBA-SF.
2nd Place
Dark Sea
By Kimberly Dredger
“Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other.” John D. MacDonald 1965
The roar and hush of the ebbing tide was a constant background as the young man stumbled through dark sloughing sand. He slipped, fell, jammed his right hand hard into the undercut. Eons of flood tides had hollowed the cut; boulders and broken tree roots turned it into an obstacle course, difficult to maneuver even in broad daylight. Now, he could see only by starlight and the strange green fluorescence of the breaking waves, each one farther out to his left than the one before. He stood, brushed his sandy, bloody hand on his jeans and pulled up the strap of the backpack.
Long ago he’d stopped wiping the tears from his eyes, stopped blowing his nose. His face was wet, anyway, from the cold humid wind coming off the ocean. Tears and snot were as salty as the seawater blown up from the waves. He bent over, rested both forearms on his knees, and snorted to clear his nose. He scrubbed his face with freezing hands, then tucked them in his armpits for warmth and trudged on.
Knowing the tide patterns as he did, the young man worried he would arrive too late. Time now was a frightening factor. He turned to the wet hard-packed sand near the waves and picked up his pace, gripping the straps of the backpack so he could jog. No reserve of energy remained; forward momentum came from a deep-seated terror of not getting to the cliff on time. He could not make this passage again; no way could he sit in daylight with the backpack and its terrible, sad weight until the next ebb tide. This tide was the one. The strongest pull away from shore. He simply had to be there on time.
It was his school backpack he carried. Hard—hell, impossible—to imagine that just yesterday it held his books and computer. Then, the contents had been heavier, but tonight it seemed to hold the weight of all eternity. It dragged on him, crushing his shoulders. He knew what was inside weighed less than a small sack of apples. Compact, too, bundled completely and carefully in the small blanket. But with every step it gained in density, in mass. In a panic, he used his icy hands to wipe his flowing eyes and nose. He had to forget the contents of his backpack, or he wouldn’t be able to finish the job and this night would never end.
In time, his jogging strides calmed his thoughts. The hush of the waves, the gentle starlight. His soul relaxed as he cleared his brain. This was just a night-time walk on the beach. No job to do. No heavy weight on his shoulders. He could almost remember what it was like to be a normal sixteen-year-old kid.
She was so beautiful, that sweet girl with long flowing blond hair. They’d met at midsummer when the beach blasted with music and fun and kids and sunshine. She was the only girl to ever look at him that way. It made his blood boil then run cold. He knew she knew the very first day they would be together forever, so naturally their day turned into night. Her folks were stoned out of their heads, up at the campground. His mom never cared where the hell he was. The boy and girl slept on the sand together, waking to the sound of gulls screaming overhead. She leaned over him that first morning. Her smiling kiss. Her hair falling on either side of his head. The beginning of forever, she whispered.
And when school started in the fall, she was still his girl.
She never had one day of sickness, didn’t gain much weight at all. In fact, they had no clue. Her parents, of course, didn’t guess. It was only a month ago she figured out why her jeans were getting tighter, but between the two of them they knew they’d be able to handle it. They’d make it because there was no option—figure things out as time went on—and because they loved each other, they would succeed. Be better parents than they’d ever had. They told no one.
Yesterday morning when she didn’t come to school, he panicked. Ran to her house. Found her in the bathroom alone, bloody, scared.
So . . .very . . . scared.
The baby came too fast, lived only seconds, with just the two of them ever aware of his existence.
Now, that sad bundle weighed down his backpack. He knew the turn of the tide would be too late, but he was almost there. The waves howled in darkness, pulling back to the west, to the deep ocean, the stars the only witness.
He left the hard-packed sand and stumbled again through tripping softness, then struggled into seagrass on the steep hillside. The sharp, salt-encrusted blades allowed him more leverage, but it was a nightmare of making progress only to slide backward again. Finally, he reached his goal.
The cliff loomed forty feet over the river roaring into the ocean, forty feet over the retreating waves sucking out to deep water. He had not missed the mad last rush of the ebbing tide.
No thought of unwrapping that bundle. He took off the backpack and hugged it close. He kissed where he thought he should, then used one strap as a sling. Once, twice, winding up to get momentum.
And then, he let go.
Kimberly Ellen Dredger is a retired teacher, living in the town of her birth: Missoula, Montana. She is the author of Begin Again, a novel published in April of 2020, which tells the story (partly autobiographical) of a young woman learning to live as a widow.
3rd Place
The Silbermans
By Harriet Garfinkle
Phil, Rachel’s father, was not a good-ole-boy from Montgomery, Alabama — he was a Jew-boy from Montgomery. His parents, Chana and Hyman Silberman, were Polaks, which is synonymous with miserable. They were not educated people, and they enjoyed beating their five children with all the gusto of the lower class. Why shouldn’t their newly American children suffer the same way they had suffered, in the old country,
the way that Jews from anti-Semitic Poland had been made to suffer?
Despite all this, Phil was a happy child and, despite the fact that Chana and Hyman tried very hard to beat the optimism out of him, nothing they did could destroy his good humor. He was one of four skinny, runny-nosed boys and two buxom, zaftig girls. Phil’s oldest half-sister — twenty years his senior — was also his cousin.
Talk about biblical. But as for the rest, he was smack dab in the middle of the tribe, where he remained for the rest of his life. Middle class. Middle of the road. Middling accomplishments.
When Phil was eleven years old, in 1922, Chana and Hyman packed up their wretchedness and transplanted to Oakland, to the golden state, to the land of opportunity. They schlepped their leather valises and their big steamer trunks and their good Noritake china and their fine set of prejudices. They tucked words like niggra safely between their best old-country linens.
It was years before Rachel learned that her dad had only an eighth-grade education, that punctuation was an enigma to him, that his vocabulary was limited, that Phil’s pedagogy had been at the back of a hand or at the snapping end of a belt. That his parents, Hyman and Chana, could not read, they never learned to read, not even the Yiddish newspaper, that they spoke broken English and their woolen clothes smelled of sauerkraut and pickled herring. That Hyman sold condoms and counterfeit wristwatches beneath the apples and oranges on his cart.
Phil was not often angry, but when he was, he would mutter into his skinny
moustache and slide his belt from its loops and crack it on the floor. His wife Sadie, Rachel and Owen’s mother, would hide in her bathroom, on the toilet, and Rachel and Owen would dance and hop and say, “I’m sorry, Dad. Dad, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I promise. I promise, Dad.” But Phil never once struck his children, even in his angriest
moments. He always ended up looping the belt back onto his pants and saying, “Okay, okay.”
Phil’s saving grace was dance. Sadie, with her shapely legs in her high heels, and Phil in his white patent leather shoes, loved to foxtrot and to jitterbug. What Phil lacked in verbal dexterity, he made up for on the dance floor, with his loopy grin and quick feet and masterful leading. He would say things like, “Ha cha cha-cha-cha!” Just like Jimmy Durante.
Sadie and Phil bickered in the same house in Oakland for forty years. Their Redwood Heights neighborhood was brand-spanking new in 1955, when they moved in, when Rachel was three years old. Their steep block of neatly stacked mid-century houses was not quite ticky-tacky and not quite modern.
But one day, when Rachel was home from college for the summer, in irritation over some small remark — an inconsequential remark, an unnotable remark — Sadie screamed at Rachel, “I don’t give a shit! My father killed himself and look at me, I turned out okay!”
“Mom, what did you say?”
“I said my father killed himself — and I turned out just fine!”
She screamed that while perched on the wobbly toilet seat in her green-and-black bathroom, a Salem cigarette between her fingers, dripping mentholated ash on the tile floor.
In 1929, Sadie’s older brother Joey, just fourteen-years-old, had gone to their father Herman’s tailor shop, located in the attic of a storefront, to collect him for dinner. He trudged up the stairs, calling, “Papa? Papa? Where are you? What’re you doing? Mama is worried. You’re late for dinner.” And in the dusky light, he spotted his papa’s body, face pale, neck elongated like a Modigliani, swinging from the rafters.
It was rumored that Papa had accumulated towering gambling debts with the Chinese Tong. He’d clicked one too many mah-jongg tiles in the smoke-filled backroom of the Silver Dragon. Or perhaps he was forlorn over the break-up of his affair with the milliner downstairs. She’d stuck a hatpin in their relationship. Or the stock market crash meant ruin for the family. The reason to this day was unclear, but what was clear was that twelve-year-old Sadie started to hum. Sadie continued to hum for the duration of her
years. Rachel once asked her why she hummed so much. She replied it was because then she was sure she was alive.
Phil poured himself a jigger of scotch every day after work. He would hold it to the light, admire it, take a big sniff and then slowly pour the amber liquid into his mouth.
When he was done, he would wipe his moustache with the back of his hand and exclaim,
“Ah!”
Rachel’s dad made a decent middle-class living peddling schmatas with Rachel’s Uncle Joe at their workingmen’s clothing store, Pacific Surplus. They peddled metal-toed boots to clean-shaven PG&E linemen as well as to inked and leathered Hell’s Angels. Their East Oakland store was dusty and disorganized and piled high with 501 Levis and littered with unsavory characters — men like Jonesy the aging platinum-blonde Roller Derby Star and Angelo the California Cheese King. These lowlifes — along with Uncle Joe— staggered back and forth between Pacific Surplus and The Alibi next door, downing Rob Roys and upping the disarray at the store.
Sadie bit her nails to the quick. “Are you and Joe meshuggeneh? What’s the matter with you? We can’t have a high-level Mafioso like Angelo hanging out in our store. You gotta be nuts to think that’s okay!”
Phil, as usual, ignored her and poured himself his daily jigger of scotch. When Angelo Marino was arrested for murder, Sadie tore off each cuticle. “Did you read the newspaper? Did you? Huh! I told you Angelo was a capo in the mob! He’s been convicted of murder! What were you thinking?”
That called for more scotch.
The Silbermans were the second family on their block to get a color TV — a heavy blonde console arrived with a big blinking eye. The TV would get turned up loud during their fights. Sadie talked at Phil and he tuned in to watch Bonanza and tuned her out and sloshed his tumbler of Dewar’s.
“Are you going to see that shiksa again?”
Phil kept his eyes on the tube, “Shhh, I’m trying to find out what’s going on with the Cartwrights.”
Sadie’s voice got loud and very shrill. “Screw the Cartwrights! I asked you if you were going to see that woman, the blonde. That Candy.” The name dribbled down her chin like spittle. “The one who embroiders bowling shirts? Fer cryin’ out loud, she even embroidered your daughter’s gym uniform! How sick is that? I know you’re seeing her. I know what you’re doing with her — a little needlework!”
Phil slumped in his chair. “I gave her up.”
“What?”
“I said I gave her up. I’m not seeing her. I broke it off with her. I have someone else embroidering the shirts.” He walked over to the TV and turned the volume up. Sadie threw her pink mule slipper at his head. He ducked.
Phil was an Army veteran, had served in WWII. Thirty-one-year-old Phil had enlisted, wanting to fight for his country, but the Army considered him too old for combat. Nope. Phil did not earn a Purple Heart or liberate Buchenwald. He was a potato peeler. That was his job. He peeled, cooked and served potatoes in Honolulu during the war. Tons of potatoes. That was Phil’s war.
Phil always thought he needed to make it up to America, not having really served anything besides potatoes. So, he proudly sported the red blazer—laden with emblems and badges and pins — of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. For the Fourth of July, he manned a VFW fireworks booth in San Leandro that hawked sparklers and bottle rockets and smoke bombs. They were completely legal then. For Memorial Day, he peddled little
plastic VFW buddy poppies. He was appointed to the Military Order of the Cooties, the honorary order of VFW past-presidents, which meant a vest embroidered — not by Candy — with a giant Cootie bug. For Veteran’s Day, Phil and Sadie baked snickerdoodles for picnics at the Livermore VA hospital, but they were disturbed by the returning wounded ‘Nam Vets with their dazed eyes and pot-smoke haze and their missing limbs. These shell-shocked men weren’t like the vets from Phil’s generation. What was the world coming to? Astronauts were landing on the moon. College students, politicians and civil rights leaders were being gunned down. Concertgoers were being knifed to death by Hell’s Angels — Phil’s Hell’s Angels! Protestors had taken to
the streets and taken over college campuses — in America! Banks who had bankrolled the illegal war were being anonymously bombed to smithereens. American soldiers in Vietnam and Cambodia were raping and massacring civilians — women, children, infants. The Northern Irish were bombing the Brits, the Soviets were invading the Eastern bloc, the Israelis and the Arabs fought a six-day war. The world was on fire. All these images blinked in color on the single eye in the living room.
The day that Richard Nixon went on TV to resign, Rachel’s father sat slumped in his Barcalounger and cried actual tears.
Rachel’s parents had done the best they could with their middle-class lives. Sadie and Phil’s days were filled with what passed as happiness, and it wasn’t until the end that they realized that the opportunity for real happiness had slipped by them, skittered away, just out of reach.
Maybe they thought they didn’t deserve better. And maybe that’s what Rachel thought, also.
Leave a Reply