The problem was creative writing.
That was the curriculum for third quarter sixth-grade English. They started with Character Building Work-sheets, where they were supposed to come up with names, ages, nationalities, genders—a whole list of Identifying Characteristics they had to select for their fictional characters. Then came Paragraphs of Detailed Description: Using Modifiers and Avoiding Cliches. Then Vignettes With Action: Events Unfolding in Time. Then Vignettes Involving Two Characters: Formatting Dialogue. And so on until the final project: a Short Story with Introduction, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Denouement.
Annamae wouldn’t agree to do it. Not any of it.
“Is it that it feels too rigid? Too formulaic?” guessed her mother on the subway home.
But no, that wasn’t it.
They went a whole other stop before her mother tried again. “What if we started backward—we could come up with the idea for a story first, then go back and I can help you break it down to complete the earlier steps?”
Annamae lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
“It seems like a pretty neat assignment.” How careful her mother was being. How grindingly delicate. “But challenging also. To come up with a story.”
A woman sitting directly across from Annamae was applying purple mascara with a tiny wand. Beside her slept an old man, one hand, turned upward on his thigh, trembling in a manner apart from the vibration of the train. Beside him, another man, wearing lime green headphones, looked up from his phone, saw Annamae watching him, gave her a businesslike nod, and went back to the screen.
There was no shortage of stories.
“Everybody loves this unit,” Mrs. Altschuler had said back in the classroom. “Most of the students, it’s their favorite.”
“I know it can be overwhelming once you fall behind,” Annamae’s mother said now. “I remember in college, oh man, when I had to take stati—”
“It isn’t that.”
“Could you try to tell me what it is?”
Annamae’s only concession was to lean her head against her mother’s shoulder. Her mother’s beautiful gray wool coat. To thread her arm through her mother’s. As the train threaded through the tunnels. Rocking.
That evening she listened to her mother on the phone with Nana.
When they first got home, Annamae complained her ear ached and her mother had let her climb into the big queen bed off the kitchen.
“Do I have a fever?” Annamae had asked while her mother frowned at the thermometer.
“I don’t think this counts.”
“What does it say?”
“Ninety-eight point nine.”
“It really hurts. Do we have an onion?”
So now she lay on the sheets that smelled of apricot hand cream, a warm onion wrapped in one of her father’s famous wool socks pressed not against her ear but against her neck, just behind the ear, where the heat felt lovely and the onion didn’t prevent her from listening in on her mother’s half of the conversation.
“She says she can’t bring herself to make up a character she controls.”
The snow had stopped. Across the street the office building was mostly dark—just a few lit windows here and there.
“I know,” her mother was saying. “Not yet … The school social worker is supposed to be sending some names.… Yeah … yeah, Mom … I already left a message with the pediatrician.”
As she watched, another cell lit up across the street. A figure came right over to the window and stood there, looking out. A lone bee.
In kindergarten they had taken a field trip to learn about honeybees. A lady in a white beekeeper suit, with a long gray braid hanging down over one shoulder, had pulled a frame out of a bee box so the kids could see the bees at work. They learned that when bees are happy, they give off a lemony smell, and when they’re anxious, they give off a banana-y smell. They learned that bees live in colonies and share and cooperate. They learned that bees are always thinking not about themselves but about the whole hive. If a bee is sick, it won’t even come back into the bee box, where it could infect the others. It just nobly goes off and dies.
“I don’t think it’s that,” her mother was saying quietly on the phone. “It’s something to do with not wanting to control the characters. Wanting them to be real.”
The kids had all worn paper apples on pieces of yarn around their necks. Each apple had a kid’s name printed on it, the name of the teacher and the school, and the phone number to call in case of emergency.
Annamae strained to hear, but her mother seemed to be just listening now.
They’d learned that bees communicate with one another. That bees tell one another where to find good flowers. Manny Gustav, who spent the most time sitting out recess of anyone in their class, started going, “Bzz bzz! Bzz bzz!” and other kids started to copy him. Their teacher said, “Everyone shush,” and the bee lady said actual bee language isn’t buzzing; it’s dancing. And Annamae had wondered, If the bees’ language is dancing, what is the bees’ alphabet?
When next her mother spoke, she had dropped her voice even lower. But in their little apartment above the lighting shop, you could always hear everything. “She says—no … Mom, Mom, listen. She told me not even God would do such a thing.”