A true story about bees

The first time I ever laid eyes on a girl’s breasts was during the summer between second and third grade. A year earlier my father had uprooted us from our home in Israel and displaced our lives to Richmond, Virginia, where he took part in a doctor exchange program that one of the local hospitals had initiated with the hospital he’d worked for in Tel Aviv.

Considering that I spent two years of my life in the suburban oval neighborhood of King’s Crossing, I hardly remember a thing about it. My memory retains fragments of fragments, mostly images and spatial relations; the feel of our house, that had more wood and carpeting than I’d ever seen before in Israel, and especially the softness of our carpeted staircase under my bare feet, the maze of pathways between classrooms at Mayberry elementary school, which was dominated by the color red, and the way each classroom shared a coat rack and a bathroom behind the blackboard with the adjacent classroom, the exact rows of identical A-shaped houses with their bushes trimmed into perfect globes, and, for the first time in my life, snow.

Only three memories from those two years of my childhood contain hints of a narrative, and two of them had survived in my mind by aid of physical links to my present; an old audio cassette and a scar across my little brother’s chin. The third memory was of Idit. She was the first friend of the opposite sex that I’d ever had, the daughter of another Israeli doctor who’d come to America as part of the same program, and it was only natural that our families would form a friendship and that she and I, being of the same age, would become inseparable. I can’t remember a time in my life when being in the presence of a female was casual, but with Idit I got as comfortable as I ever would.

She was a beautiful girl, I knew that much instantly. Her eyes were huge and semi transparent, and I’d always been attracted to big eyes. She had a gap between her front teeth that was endearing, and long hair that was always braided like a chala. She had two older brothers and I had one younger brother so at times we ran around as a gang, but mostly it was just me and her, never bored and always finding new projects to fill our time with. The innocence of our friendship was never tainted from the outside; no one ridiculed me for having a girl for a best friend, no one teased us or called her my girlfriend – not even once, and she and I never gave our genders a second thought. We were two seven-year-old kids.

Only that I had given it thought after all. Not a whole lot of thought, nothing resembling the exhaustive, obsessive nature of my adolescent infatuations, no. It wasn’t much more than the simple knowledge that I loved her and that she was mine, but that was enough to elevate her above any other childhood friends I'd had before her. It was a concept that was at peace with itself. It did nothing to change the time we spent together, with one exception.

One hot summer day we were playing with a ball in a back yard, maybe it was my back yard, maybe it was hers, I can’t be sure. I remember a slab of Israeli concrete in the background, an impossible distortion of my memory, since I do know with certainty that this minor event took place during the summer I spent in Richmond, Virginia, a time filled with wood and brick and trees but without any gray concrete. A bee started to buzz around Idit and she yelped in horror. She shut her eyes closed as tightly as she could and screamed. The bee flew away. She opened her eyes, terrified, and asked “Where’d it go? Where’d it go?!” I saw my opportunity and seized it. “It went down your shirt.” I said. "You should take your shirt off."

I stood transfixed as my quickly devised plan worked itself out perfectly. Idit scrambled out of her purple T-shirt and threw it on the ground. She made no attempt to hide her body, she was no more aware of it than I was of mine. I felt no sexual excitement; I had no idea what sexual excitement was, and Idit’s body at that age didn’t have any more breasts than mine did. I stared because I knew I had to, because I had grown to appreciate the preciousness of female nudity long before I’d understood why. It was a sobering moment that lasted no more than five seconds; I knew I was supposed to be feeling something but all I could find within myself was confusion. Idit pleaded, “Where’d it go? Is it still on me? Where’d it go!” Her voice betrayed the strong possibility of tears, and I snapped out of it and said “It’s gone. It flew away.” She opened her eyes, put her shirt back on and said “Thanks.” I was surprised at how much her thanking me stung. I can still feel that sting today.

Coincidentally, that summer I was stung by a bee for the second time in my life, and for the first time it hurt me a lot. My first bee sting had happened at the age of five, on the slide in kindergarten. A friend of mine told me “Hey, you’ve got a bee on your foot.” I’d been stung smack in the middle of the ball of my ankle, right on the bone, and I hadn't even known it. The poor bee was dead and I hadn’t felt a thing. I felt heroic and lost all fear of bees; apparently a bee sting was nothing to worry about. A couple of years later I was stung on the palm of my hand as I tried to grab a bee and squish it to death. I could not believe the pain, it tore me apart, but more than anything I felt cheated. I missed the days of painless bee stings. My fear of bees was renewed and was now more paralyzing than ever before.