We were yelling at each other, me and my girlfriend. We were in upstate New York, in the living room of a first-floor duplex, and all the walls felt close, and the blinds were open but it was dark outside. We shoved each other and said awful things, some of which were true. Goddamn it, I sputtered and denied and my indignation was overblown because I was thinking about sleeping with someone else. And things got worse and worse as things do. Sometimes when people argue, one of the arguers has an impulse to say or do anything he can to make the other person angrier.
She said something into the receiver and then she dropped the phone so that it dangled by the cord. God was I angry. It pissed me off that our relationship was failing, and it pissed me off that I felt this failure was mine. Plus, my girlfriend was screwing up the possibility of me sleeping with the girl on the other line. So I grabbed my girlfriend by the throat and pushed her up against the wall. At my home in Pennsylvania, I keep bees. I keep chickens, too, and cats and dogs and a garden and a lawn where my two kids can play, and it is all so goddamned sweet that I sometimes sick up a little into the hedgerow.
The bees live in hives with copper roofs. I touch them with my bare hands and they crawl on my fingers. By our fruit trees, I kneel to watch the workers carry bright polka-dots of pollen in the sacks at their knees. There are flowers everywhere. The air smells of honeysuckle. But in the fall food becomes scarce. Everybody gets pissed off and I have to use a smoker and a beekeeping suit to get close to the comb.
The bees raid one another, fighting to break inside foreign hives and loot the honey stored for winter. There are wasps and feral honeybees, and they mass into killing balls and their stingers descend and the guards drag dead intruders from inside the hives and drop the bodies on the ground. Until the grass is thick with corpses. This is what good luck looks like. Otherwise I go outside and the air is quiet and ominous.
Inside, Oates reflects on being asked why her writing is so violent. It pisses her off. For me at least, her point rings true. And yet something bothers me here.
