Bee Season. Myla Goldberg

has calculated, with some envy, that his wife’s Spartan sleep requirements gain her two and a half months more wakefulness than the average person annually.

      Eliza has never seen her mother’s law office but is certain that it is kept as obsessively clean as the kitchen. Counters are waxed daily, as is the floor. The dishware in the cabinets is arranged according to precise plan, the stacks spaced exact distances apart and ordered according to a conception of size, color, and function that no one but Miriam fully understands. Miriam refuses to waste anything and insists upon maximum space conservation, such that a spectrum of containers is needed to house everything from the single remaining meatball to the half bowl of uneaten salad. The Tupperware she uses toward this end, stored in cabinets under the oven, is a vision of military precision.

      Miriam cleans at night. She is working the Formica in her favorite rubber gloves when Eliza sits at the kitchen table. The room is silent except for the tick of the oven clock and the smrsh, smrsh of the green side of Miriam’s Scotch Brite scrubber sponge pad. Eliza knows she could sit here for an hour without attracting her mother’s notice. In a concentration contest, Miriam would pin Saul to the mat every time.

      “Mom?”

      Miriam looks up mid-stroke. “Elly? When did you wander in?”

      “Just a few seconds ago. I can’t sleep.”

      Miriam works the counter like she’s massaging sore muscles. She is at her most placid in the morning’s small hours. Eliza used to fake insomnia for the chance to stay up with her, a ruse Miriam became expert at detecting. For Eliza, the smell of solvent conjures up rival feelings of love and frustration.

      “Are Saul and Aaron asleep?”

      In Miriam’s conversations with her children, Saul has always been Saul and never “father.” It is a habit of speech to which Eliza, after eleven years, still hasn’t adjusted. Saul’s name in her mother’s mouth makes Eliza feel as if her father is not actually hers, just some man who has come to live with them.

      “Yeah. They’re asleep.”

      Miriam flips the cleaning pad from green to yellow, downshifting from scrubber to sponge. The counter gleams like an ice rink, post-Zamboni. Eliza had originally intended to tell her mother about the bee, but something about the way Miriam is scrubbing makes Eliza fear that her words will be washed away upon leaving her lips. Eliza has a growing suspicion that she never won the bee at all, her father’s silence proof that she has imagined everything.

      Eliza decides to keep quiet. If the bee isn’t real, she would like to hold on to its illusion a little longer.

      Miriam turns her attention to the refrigerator. She removes a jar of gherkins, a bottle of Worcestershire, and a tub of margarine, wiping each with a Handiwipe before lining them precisely along the line in the linoleum floor tile pattern. The fridge light bathes Miriam and the foodstuffs in a soft, yellow glow. Though Eliza cannot identify the song’s tide, she finds herself mentally humming the opening bars of the Pachelbel Canon, the image of her mother at the fridge having tapped into a memory of the music from a light bulb commercial.

      “Mom?”

      Miriam jerks her head like someone caught sleeping in class.

      “Silly me, forgot you were here.” Miriam offers Eliza the jar. “Would you like a gherkin?” Miriam is the only one who actually eats the gherkins, drinking the juice from the jar when she’s through.

      “No, thanks. I’ve been wondering. Do you clean so much because you like to or because you have to in order to get to sleep?”

      The light from the refrigerator turns Miriam’s silver hairs to gold. The Worcestershire has been placed in the exact center of the middle shelf of the refrigerator door. A pint of strawberries has taken its place on the floor between the pickles and the Parkay. Miriam knits her eyebrows together until they resemble a hairy rendering of a bird in flight. Eliza isn’t sure her mother has heard her question. When Eliza looks into Miriam’s eyes, she sees vast intelligence and unspannable distance.

      Miriam is born to wealthy parents for whom parenthood equals patriotism. Melvin and Ruth Grossman’s desire for a large, boisterous family à la Kennedy is tempered, with each of Ruth’s miscarriages, into steely determination. Some of Ruth’s near pregnancies are cruel in their duration, allowing for hopes to be raised and names to be chosen before the painful end. This only intensifies the couple’s fervency. After four childless years of marriage Ruth and Mel have become procreative partisans in the clash between will and womb. Ruth’s ultimate pregnancy and delivery of a baby girl is a battle won but a war lost; Miriam’s difficult birth leaves Ruth unable to bear more children. Accordingly, Miriam becomes the repository for the expectations Mel and Ruth harbored for all five of their conceptual offspring. These quintupled aspirations trickle down to Miriam through a series of high-powered nannies and tutors, money no object in insuring that their sole surviving progeny receives the best of everything five times over.

      Miriam is an exceptional and obsessive child. She forbids anyone to touch her toys and insists upon her underwear being washed twice before its return to the bureau drawer. Mel and Ruth interpret their daughter’s eccentricity as a sign of genius, insist she be humored to facilitate her intellectual growth.

      Miriam learns the extent of her social maladjustment upon her enrollment at a prestigious boarding school at age twelve. There, her natural predilection for study is reinforced by the unremitting mockery of her peers, the library quickly becoming her only place of refuge outside the classroom.

      She is a phenomenal student. In college her powers of concentration achieve mythic status when she is evacuated from the stacks by a fireman who discovers her intent upon a book despite the blaring alarm that has cleared everyone else from the building.

      Miriam and Saul meet when she is finishing law school and he is working as a research assistant for a Judaism professor. Saul has abandoned drugs to devote himself to a life of mystical scholarship. He now knows that LSD was a false doorway, a simulation of an experience accessible only after years of devoted study. He looks upon his acid insights as shadowy impostors, clay pigeons that will explode at the first touch of true transcendence. Though he knows he may never share the experience of the ancient mystics, Saul has decided to spend the rest of his life trying. Miriam embodies the intellectual discipline Saul senses he will need to reach his goal. Her unconventional mannerisms seem charming indicators of her rich mental life. He is attracted by her permanent slouch, her head always slightly craned forward as if examining a book’s fine print. He likes the solidity of her body, neither fat nor thin, which she carries with a charming lack of self-awareness. As their acquaintance deepens, the hidden workings of Miriam’s mind beckon to Saul like a seven-veiled Salome.

      Their early courtship consists of shared dinners in the campus cafeteria followed by neighboring seats at lectures with titles like “God and the Plague: Religious Revivalism in the Middle Ages,” and “Unmaking Your Mind: Discerning Truth From Falsehood in the Midst of Vietnam.” Saul thrills to Miriam’s intellectual voracity, attends the lectures solely to observe her assiduity as she drinks in the words. Weeks later, she can alternately defend or destroy the lecturer’s arguments point by point without having taken any notes.

      Until law school, Miriam’s entire academic career is single-sexed, boys an elective she bypasses. Though she has been on a few abortive dates, Saul is the first beau willing to indulge her interests, the first not to suggest popcorn and a formulaic comedy followed by an invitation to his apartment. Saul’s experiences with the greater portion of the female student body at his alma mater have taught him to be a good listener. With Miriam he is patient, luring her with his constancy.

      Miriam is grateful for the attention. Aware that her unique temperament might severely limit her relationship options, she had been willing to take on someone far more socially stunted than Saul. Though not religious, Miriam takes self-congratulatory pride in dating a Jew, on occasion even accompanying Saul to synagogue for the opportunity to analyze group religious ritual.

      Into their third week of dating, Miriam scrutinizes the library’s dog-eared Joy of Sex and Hite Report from