Posted on November 12, 2007 by Jenna
To bumblebee is to become a bumblebee; and the price of that becoming is your death.
The news is always full of stories.
Bumblebees are squished;
Licked up;
Yakked out;
and, lastly, wiped.
The Lady Devereaux—as all the ladies Devereaux had before—expresses bombastic disdain.
“We need them, yes,” she says.
One arm waves, broadly. A length of lace cuts the air.
“As we need all those sorts. The grouting ants, the toilet skinks, and the far-too-serious badgers of City Hall. But it is … hymenopteraic,” she says. “Segmenting your eyes; growing the antennae; carrying about the slops of flower sex—it is not done.”
“Hymenopteral,” says Emeline, behind her too-large glasses.
Grammar constrains the Lady Devereaux. She feels it binding her as her corset might—not literally, but still a certain coarse constraint.
“The adjective is hymenopteral,” Emeline concludes.
The Lady Devereaux sighs. She sinks down into her chair. She gestures Emeline to her lap, and gently she brushes Emeline’s hair.
“So it is,” she says.
“Mum Grayden,” Emeline says—here referring to Heloise Grayden, across the road—“is proud of Robert; so she says.”
There is a peculiar misery to Emeline’s expression now. Robert had been a funny child, in his too-tight suits and his niceties, but he was more to her than her brother Adric or the Skevinses down the road. And you can follow the story of a bumblebee in the papers—the government was always very proper in keeping towns up-to-date on the accomplishments of their bees—but you cannot play with a bumblebee. You cannot drink hot cocoa with a bumblebee, if you do not want it to drown or become sick of chocolate poisoning or burn up after coming too close to the chocolate and forgetting how to fly. And you certainly cannot play Scrabble, gin, or DS Pokemon while doing so. Even a fantasy tea party is somewhat stifled when it is only yourself and a bee; and Robert had flown on not long after his transformation in any case.
“Mum Grayden,” says the Lady Devereaux, “is putting her best face on.”
There were five of them living in Emeline’s house, which is to say, the Lady Devereaux; her daughter Morgaine; her son-in-law Edward, of whom nothing further shall be said; and her grandchildren Emeline and Adric.
In the mornings Emeline would eat breakfast, always a toasted bagel with a cream cheese spread, a glass of orange juice, and occasionally an egg. She would shower and change from her pajamas into clothing suitable for school; then she would catch the bus. Later, after receiving an education, she would return home and while away her evenings on study, family time, and play; and on no occasion did she reveal herself as anything other than the kind of person who remains human all their life.
It takes a peculiar kind of dignity to live as a human all one’s life—given, of course, that one should have the means—
But the ladies Devereaux mostly did.
Now Heloise Grayden visits one afternoon for tea; and Emeline breaks her silence to say, “I think that they should let the bees come home.”
It is one of the opinions voiced in the local paper; and she is quoting Harvard Elling of that paper when she finishes, “It is a matter of simple justice.”
Mum Grayden makes a noise; it is a strange sort of noise, half-gasp, half-snort, indelicate and covered shortly after with a napkin to her lips.
“Naturally, no person ought to be—constrained,” says Lady Devereaux.
It is surprisingly kind of her to say; then she spoils it altogether by continuing, “Although I’m sure there are considerations— stinging and flying in people’s eyes and such. If there weren’t some regulation, wouldn’t bees just do as they like and make the ecosystem worse? I’m sure the government bees as compassionate as it can.”
“Mum,” murmurs Morgaine.
Morgaine looks away from Lady Devereaux and extends a hand towards Heloise. Heloise follows it with her eyes but does not take it. Instead she places her napkin down with great delicacy and offers Lady Devereaux a kind of wet-eyed grin.
“When the flowers bloom on the trees, and the orchards live—I think, we wouldn’t have anything to eat, would we? We wouldn’t have the means to live, not like this anyway, without our boys in yellow—there’s no way to say it—without our boys in yellow, busy in the hives, inseminating the queen. Isn’t it so? So I think, isn’t it good? I don’t know what I’d do if he came home.”
The Lady Devereaux fixes her expression in a porcelain smile.
“Yes,” she says. “God save them.”
Emeline frowns.
“Inseminating is Latin,” she says, deep in thought. “Inseminare: to sow, implant. Pray, if you could tell me—”
The Lady Devereaux stands abruptly.
“A wonderful tea,” she says, in sharp swift cadence. “Thank you for your visit, dear Heloise, and may you come again. Children ought, dear Emeline, be seen and not heard. Have you entirely completed your studies for the weekend? I feel I need a walk; adieu.”
Her bustle proves eponymous as she retreats from the room.
“Do not be a bumblebee, Emeline,” says Heloise.
Her hands come down on Emeline’s. They grip them tight.
“Not a bumblebee. Not even a queen. Not even some other kind of bee. Do not.”
Morgaine says, sharply, “Heloise!”
Heloise stares at her hands and Emeline’s for a moment. Then she shakes her head. She looks confused, as if she does not understand how she has come to this place, this time, and this position.
Slowly she pulls away.
“I think,” Adric says, in what shall be his only line, “that she’ll become an owl.”
But this is the fallacy of Lamarck; and for his deviation from evolutionary orthodoxy Emeline punishes him with itching powder in his sheets.
At school the next week three boys are singing in the playground:
“I’m bringing home a baby bumblebee;
“Won’t my mother be so proud of me?”
Emeline, who is walking past them to the library, stops to hear them out.
“I’m bringing home a baby bumblebee.
“Ouch! He stung me!”
She frowns at them distantly.
The version of the song she’d always heard began with “I wish I were—”
A good devotional song, that one. This one—
This one was perverse.
“I’m squishing up my baby bumblebee,” the boys are singing, squishing their hands together.
“Won’t my mommy be so proud of me?
“I’m squishing up my baby bumblebee,
“Eww! It’s all over me!”
“Stop it,” she says.
Her body is rigid. Her arms are at her sides and trembling. The boys turn to stare at her.
“Stop it,” she says. “They’re bees.”
“I’m wiping off my baby bumblebee,” one of the boys starts, in a soothing, pacifying, and entirely sarcastic tone. He scrubs off his hands. The others join in.
“I’m wiping off my baby bumblebee,
“Won’t my mommy be so proud of me?
“I’m wiping off my baby bumblebee—”
They sneer at her.
“Look! All clean!” they say and show her their hands; but she cannot see them through her furious tears.
Stiff-legged, she walks away.
Behind her, she hears,
“I’m licking up my baby bumblebee—”
That day she scores a 92 on her spelling test, mangling phylopraxy and palingenesis entirely and with two furious strokes of her pen.
It is not an error the Lady Devereaux accepts; Emeline goes without her evening meal that night.
Bumblebees—
It is not like it is with honey bees.
A bumblebee can sting and then survive; it can leave the hives, abandoning its peers, and make its way along the roads to home; it is fearsome-furred and powerful and strong—
It has a better life than a honey bee’s.
But to bumblebee is to become a bumblebee, and the price of that is death.
It may wait twelve months for you—fifteen, if you are lucky, young, and strong—but death, for a bumblebee, is as inevitable as the snow.
That winter, the papers tell Emeline of Robert Grayden’s death, and Mum Grayden hangs the yellow wreath upon her door.
“Sometimes I think that Adric ought become a llama,” Emeline says.
This suggestion is one students find quite clever—entirely deniable, if one knows certain details about Tibet, and while undignified not so harsh as to be cruel.
But at the table where she and Lady Devereaux are taking a late and solitary tea, the suggestion falls quite flat.
“A Devereaux does not become a beast,” the Lady Devereaux says.
Emeline swallows a bit of scone and many unwise remarks.
“I don’t know how Robert became a bee, and then he died,” she says, after a time. “And everyone says it was heroic, but they don’t— they don’t honor it.”
“It is very hard for poor Heloise,” says Lady Devereaux.
She tidies up the crumbs on her plate.
“Perhaps we should invite her by; speak about … a breath of air, you know, taking down the yellow, coming back into society again. It is not good to spend your time in melancholy; she still is healthy enough, I’m sure she and Mr. Grayden can fill their house again.”
“But—” says Emeline.
“Tut!” says Lady Devereaux. “Finish your scone, young lady, and then we shall draw your bath.”
In Church they sing,
“I wish I were a baby bumblebee;
“Won’t my mommy be so proud of me?
“I wish I were a baby bumblebee;
“A male! Or a queen!”
“I wish I were a military boar;
“Tusks and hide and shouting a great roar;
“I wish I were a military boar;
“Charge!”
But even when they sing about service, the minister mostly talks about hellfire and money.
That is why when Emeline finds herself at the transmogrification office, staring down at the clipboards and wondering, she feels utterly and entirely alone.
“If you’re under 18,” the recruiter says, “Your Mum or Dad’ll have to sign.”
“I’m 18,” Emeline says.
The recruiter looks at her. If you didn’t have access to her sanitary cupboard, you’d be hard pressed to prove she’d hit puberty.
“12 at most,” he says.
“I just have to say I’m 18,” Emeline says. “You don’t have to believe me. And it just means I live longer, after, if I’m not.”
His eyes go carefully and formally blank.
“Can’t get your Mum or Dad to agree, then?”
“‘A Devereaux doesn’t become a beast,'” Emeline quotes. “‘A Devereaux is always gracious. A Devereaux always uses perfect grammar.’
“— even if she doesn’t!” Emeline adds, in mild outrage.
“It’s tough,” the recruiter says. “It’s not— you understand that it’s not a way to get away from too much homework? Or spite your parents for grounding you?”
“Everything is dying,” Emeline says, “because the bees are dying. The plants will die. The animals. The people. All the web of life come undone.
“If you ask me,” she says, and realizes as she says this that she has become everything that is not a Devereaux, “there ought to be a draft.”
The recruiter makes one of those faces adults sometimes make.
“18, huh?” he says.
“18.”
And that is how she took the change.
The walk home afterwards is the hardest thing she’s ever done. She tells herself it is because her body is changing, but this is not so, not yet. That takes a few days to start.
It is because she is still human, rather, and knows what will happen.
“Mother,” she says, “Grandmother. It is my intention; I mean, I want to—I mean, I will— bumblebee.”
And the Lady Devereaux goes white, which is exactly as expected, and her breath rattles in her corset-constrained chest like the ball of a pinball machine, thumping back and forth.
“I said,” Emeline adds, jutting her chin, “I was 18.”
But what Emeline did not expect was the reaction of Morgaine.
They do not strike Emeline’s mother down, these words—though they strike her, yes, wash through Morgaine like lightning; but there is motion and not stillness, the bending of sleeves and jacket and the crinkling of skirts; and her mother wraps bloused arms around Emeline like package paper around a treasure, and her hug is deep and warm and faintly crackling.
“Oh, Emeline,” she says.
And there is strange wonder here; strange pride and fear; there is something here that is more than sorrow.
It is everything, and more, for thirty seconds of her life.
After that, Emeline begins to understand what a corset must be like, and why the Lady Devereaux is with such great frequency so strange.