This is a fascinating question to think about, and one I haven’t managed to come to a conclusion about. Their faith comes across so much as based in external actions—their lifestyle and how they present themselves to others. I don’t think we ever see them pray? (Which I feel like would give a little more insight, at least, and maybe it says something that this isn’t something that ever happens during the story.)
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Back again, as a reminder I’m exploring content related to capital, sara, and Jerome, as this is the “things of this world” playthrough.
We begin with another Sara scene.
Lessons from Sara
English lessons with Sara are awkward and mysterious. She sits with her legs tucked under her and asks you questions about the book you’ve read that week. They are not factual questions, such as “Whom did Natasha love?” They are not questions of faith or morality, like “What sin caused Oedipus’ downfall?”
They’re vague questions, plushy questions.
Alex, we see, it quite literal-minded. Perhaps this is not surprising, given her fascination with something as fixed as spelling. On the other etymology can be rather murky at times.
“What does the color black represent?” she asks earnestly after you read Othello.> The Devil? Black is often for the devil.
“The Devil is the bad guy, and bad guys wear black.”
“Well…” She pushes her curtain of straw-textured hair behind one ear. “It might be something subtler than that.”
Iago wears black, yes, and he is unquestionably evil, but Othello’s dark skin is a major concern within the play. I found myself wondering how diverse the homeschooling cooperative might be. Alex’s difficulty interpreting themes is an indication of her literalism—which, to be fair, is normal for a person her age–but it might also indicate that Alex inhabits a rather small world. The latter is reinforced by her reaction to Sara’s magenta bra:
The neckline of her woolen sweater slips down and you get a glimpse of a magenta bra-strap peeking out. The color scandalizes and electrifies.
> What does magenta represent?
She catches you looking, and adjusts her sweater over the bra strap again. She doesn’t seem embarrassed, though. “My lucky bra,” she explains. “I have an econ exam later.”
There is a lot to consider in this brief-yet-dense passage. What does it mean for Alex to be scandalized and electrified? The top layer of this layered moment is, of course, the violated taboo of a publicly-visible and conspicuosly-colored undergarment in a home that emphasizes “plain dress.” That speaks to the scandal, yes, but what of the electricity?
Perhaps seeing it engenders the thrill of transgression. It is interesting to note that Sara “doesn’t seem embarrassed.” What is Alex feeling, here? Perhaps this is a chance for her to see women who exist differently and independently up-close without the judgement or condescension Alex encounters with strangers on a bus. The scene also seems a way for Alex to think about women’s bodies differently: what if they are not shameful as mere things wanting concealment?
“Maybe if you gave me some study questions I would be better at this,” you offer hesitantly. It is lesson ten. Sara is sitting in the scruffy porridge-colored armchair. In the next room your mother is bartering with Celia Hopgood to exchange a car battery and a sack of dry peas for some home tailoring.
“They’re not questions with one answer,” Sara says, knee bouncing against the arm of the chair. “You should say whatever you think. It won’t be wrong.”
> If it can’t be wrong, what’s the point of learning it?
“If it can’t be wrong, what’s the point of learning it?”
“Hmm. That’s an excellent question.” Sara seems more pleased by this impertinence than by any of the hesitating answers you’ve given before. She looks around the room and a thought occurs to her. “Why do you reread Bible stories?”
“To make sure we understand them?” You stick your hands under your legs to prevent yourself from biting the nails, as you sometimes want to do when asked questions like this.
While we do not get any callbacks to this scene in the wider text (the design cannot assume we have seen this passage), this exchange must be a crucial moment in Alex’s development as a thinker and student of the humanities. What is, she wonders, the point of questions without fixed answers? Despite the theological inconsistencies we see in Alex’s parents, Alex lives in a world of rules: rules about women, rules about clothes, rules about whatever is going on at that public school. As we have already discussed, spelling itself is rules-based. The idea of questions without pat answers must challenge her fundamental beliefs about thought and life.
Fortunately, Sara asks the right question, using the bible—a very familiar text—as an example.
“Do you understand them the same way every time?”
> That story about Ruth and Boaz seemed more innocent a couple years ago.
“We might get them wrong at first,” you say. “So I guess maybe no.”
Sara slumps in her chair. “Okay, look,” she says. “Every time you read something, you’re building a bridge between you, the person you are now and the time you’re in, to the author, the person she was and the time she belonged to.”
“Or he.”
Having been a humanities student in the 1990s, I can attest that some writers used “she” rather than “he” as an act of linguistic resistance. That was before the use of “they” became widespread, which seems a better solution. Unaware of such heady matters, Alex offers “he” as a correction.
Back to Ruth and Boaz: without taking a wide detour into interpretation of the Bible, there is an ambiguous and sometimes debated passage in which Ruth “goes to” Boaz while he sleeps:
And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman.
It certainly makes sense that a middle-school student might have recently cultivated a new understanding of this passage! Like Alex’s flirting in the previous post, this is a rare sign of Alex’s developing awareness of romantic and/or sexual relationships .
“Or he,” Sara agrees amiably. “So what the story means, that’s partly about you and partly about the author. It doesn’t just, just mean in the abstract. It means something to someone. Meaning exists in relationship.”
> Except if you don’t know the right meanings of words.
“Yes,” you say. “But what if I don’t know what all the words mean? Maybe I think ‘handkerchief’ is a word for a kind of goat. Then the story won’t mean the right thing.”
“Fortunately you are very good at vocabulary,” says Sara, with a mild smile. “I don’t think you will be having that kind of misinterpretation.”
Sara’s answer is close to my heart, as anyone who has read my criticism (or played my games, probably) can attest, in that I maintain that meaning is transactional in nature. It is noteworthy that Alex worries that misunderstanding the definitions of words might interfere with her interpretation, when that is inarguably her greatest academic strength. I find it more likely that this is an expression of general anxiety regarding freedom couched in a retreat to the familiar.
While not directly about our chosen topics for this playthrough, I still find this passage relevant.
Isolation
Lying face-down on the carpet in the study. It is early in the morning. No one else is awake. You are printing off your worksheets for the day. The printer works, and while it works, you can get an extra moment or two of lying down, almost as though you were sleeping in.
The carpet is very close to your nose. Like everything. The thought that comes is like a stranger speaking in your head.
If I ever killed myself, it would be from boredom.
> You’d be less bored if your parents let you out. Ever.
You know the standard answers about socialization and child development. You know that you see people at church and field trips and the co-op. You know that you have more meaningful interactions with adults, officially, than most young people your age.
You know that you are waiting.
It is relevant because it speaks to our interests in the negative. Here, Alex despairs because is bored and lonely. She finds the socialization offered by the co-op and church inadequate, and, therefore, she waits. The mention of suicide is sudden and is a bit of a one-off, as self-harm is not explored as a theme in Bee. This lends power to the passage, in my opinion, as it is as surprising as it worrying. While middle-school children—some of them, anyway—might be given to hyperbole, Alex does not seem to be of that type.
The passage “The carpet is very close to your nose. Like everything,” certainly accomplishes much with little.
Alex, it seems, yearns for the things of this world.
Next, a return to the salon.
Mother and the Haircut
After a while, your new hair grows out. It frames your face in the old, straight, dull way.
> Beg to go back to the salon.
You place your request.
“I don’t think we could afford it,” Mother says. “Mrs. Barron has more money than we do.”
“She only paid the salon lady twenty dollars for the three of us,” you say. “I saw her.”
Mother looks uncertainly at Father. “Darling, do you think, for her birthday, we might…?”
It is not surprising that Alex would want to return, as the salon was for alex a luxurious and worldly place. It is interesting—and will be more interesting soon—that her parents are willing to pay an extravagant twenty dollars for something so impractical.
So Mother takes you to the salon, and sits on the benches waiting while you get your hair redone by Manie. You had not realized until you came how out of place Mother would be in this environment, sitting upright in her homemade blouse and skirt, doing a bit of hand-sewing from her big craft bag, while other ladies sip coffee and read magazines.
> Maybe it’s for the best Mother doesn’t realize how out of place she is.
Yes. Best not to dwell on that.
The presence of Mother illuminates the radical differences between Alex’s world and the wider world encircling it.
Manie washes and fluffs and cuts and blow-dries, and it is all as good as last time. Better, really, because you know what to expect, and can be a woman of the world about it all, and not surprised by the black sink with a notch for your neck, or by the fruit-scented mists.
Alex’s joy at her own “sophistication” is as humorous as it is illuminating, and the dense construction of these two sentences gets a lot of work done in a small space. Alex, she feels, “can be a woman of the world,” which seems a bracing antidote to her recently experienced isolation.
When it comes time to pay, Mother goes to the front desk with a twenty clutched in her hand that she brought from the savings jar at home. It is wrinkled. And then the cashier announces the price: seventy-three dollars.
Mother turns towards you with eyes wide and shocked.
This is a rather devastating turn: the “wrinkled” twenty-dollar bill, the savings jar, Mother’s wide eyes.
“I saw Mrs. Barron paying with a twenty-dollar bill,” you hiss urgently.
Manie and the cashier exchange glances.
“Oh, honey,” Manie says. “That was the tip.”
In the end Mother has to get out the debit card she carries for emergencies, and pay with that. Her hands are shaking as she signs the receipt.
> Perhaps you’d better be quiet and do your spelling until she feels better.
On the car ride home Mother is totally silent, and you are silent too, shuffling through your pack of spelling cards. You’re doing better on words with funny French endings; that should come in handy later, right?
But you avoid the sight of your reflection in any window or mirror.
It seems that Mother and Alex know the exact same amount about salon pricing, since both are equally surprised. In that sense, it says as much about Mother as it does about Alex. This will come up later, but it seems that Mother has also been separated from the things of the world. How much does she like that? Presumably, Father has had something to do with that. We will have to see what develops!
It is also noteworthy that Alex has retreated into spelling once more, as that seems her most typical stress reaction.
Consultation
Rather surprisingly, Jerome corners you in the hallway at church when you’re coming out of the girls’ room.
“Were you waiting for me?” you ask.
“Yeah, actually.” He lifts his chin in challenge. “Do you know anything about child-led learning?”
> Your learning is mostly pretty parent-led.
“You mean unschooling?”
Jerome looks frustrated. “Not exactly,” he says. “I want to do something sort of project based, but where we get to pick curriculum topics. We’ve been doing this workbook series for years and I’m about ready to gouge my eyes out if we have to do it again.”
Jerome returns! He has an idea about “child-led” learning, a topic he presumably discovered via research. His use of the term “project-based” also sounds like the product of research. He’s bored with the workbooks and, despite Alex’s barb regarding “unschooling,” it is very reasonable to assume that she is bored, too. She’s said as much in a dramatic and unsettling way (above).
At this point he gets out a set of notecards from his pocket. “Look, can I practice my presentation on you?”
> Well, okay.
So you go up to one of the unused Sunday School rooms and Jerome gives a short speech with the aid of the notecards. There’s an introduction and three supporting paragraphs and a conclusion. The gist is that the workbooks are boring and have sapped his desire to continue home-schooling, and that he feels a different method would be preferable.
He then lays out a rather utopian future in which he’ll be able to study whatever topics interest him at the moment, resulting in greater engagement with learning and even the possible development of genius-level intelligence in some particular area.
You contemplate possible objections.
> Sounds terrific.
“That’s terrific,” you say. “It sounds like you’ve thought of everything.”
Jerome grins. “We’ll see whether the parental units agree,” he says. “But I’m not just doing this for me. I need to liberate Flauberta too.”
While Alex seems suspicious, I venture that her misgivings arise from a fixed sense of what educational experience is. She struggles to imagine things being different or better despite her own dissatisfaction.
It’s refreshing to see Jerome push against the status quo, isn’t it? He is critical of his experience because he wishes to improve it, and he has couched his proposal—sincere or not—in pedagogical theory. An argument can be made that Jerome’s experience with homeschooling is the most positive, since he is committed to improvement and finds untapped possibility within it.
Perhaps we also see one reason why Alex finds him interesting.
While I’ve referred to jam-making, I do not think we’ve covered the specific passages.
Jam
Time has come for making jam and other fruit products to use in barter.
- Help pick fruit. [Unavailable]
You’re old enough to do something harder.- Help dump in the sugar.
- Help clean. [Unavailable]
You’d have to be up past bed-time for that chore.- Help label the jars.
> Help dump in the sugar.
There are a lot of options here! I only visited this episode twice, but I’ll print the choices to give a sense of scope. This is an economic activity; the “womenfolk” are not making jam for fun.
On the counter is a large bowl containing seven measured cups of white sugar. The crystals gleam. It almost looks magic.
“Can I?” asks Lettice, looking avidly into the bowl.
“No,” says Mother. “You might spill.”
- Sounds like this one’s for you, then.
- Lettice really is a klutz.
> Sounds like this one’s for you, then.
You do the honors, upending the whole bowl into the seething blackberry goo.
Lettice takes the empty bowl and licks out the remaining sugar grains.
“Now stir,” says Mother. So you stir, while Lettice watches. Half-way through she gets bored and leaves.
If you’ve ever made jam, you know that it is hot, sticky work. Note that the blackberries seethe. While the tedium and hard work is left to our imagination, it is notable that children are once more part of the economic engine powering the household.
This is also an opportunity to be mean to Lettice, as if anyone would ever do that!
One last passage for today:
Mrs. Perry Gossips
You and Lettice are at the Co-op library, changing out your books. Mrs. Perry is doing a volunteer stint today as the librarian, and is on the phone when you come in; and as she is not very quiet, you are able to overhear her talking.
“What I heard,” she says into the phone, “is that William Barron was shopping around for a private school. It sounds as though we might be about to lose them.”
The Barron’s might send their children to public school! How scandalous.
Lettice pulls a book entitled Magic Tricks: Cups and Balls off the shelf.
“…of course I don’t care at all about their Co-op fees. It’s those poor children I’m worried about,” Mrs. Perry says to the person on the other end of the line.
Lettice leafs through Cups and Balls, frowning at the line-drawings of an androgynous hand concealing a red marble between its third and fourth fingers.
“Well, no,” Mrs. Perry concedes to the person on the other end of the line. “But if the marriage is on the verge… no, certainly. Well, keep the Barrons in your prayers. Yes. God bless.”
She hangs up.
Is it really true that Mrs. Perry doesn’t worry about the money?
Note the “androgynous hand” operating the cups and balls. What does that signify?
- Warn Lettice not to check out Cups and Balls, as Mrs. Perry might not approve.
- Then again, who cares what she thinks?
> Then again, who cares what she thinks?
Mrs. Perry raises her eyebrows at the sight of Lettice’s selection. “These are just tricks, which is why we’re allowed to have it in the library,” she says. “But please remember that real magic is the work of the devil, and is performed by calling on demons to intervene on our behalf. And you do not want the help of demons.”
“No, ma’am,” Lettice says solemnly.
You consider asking Mrs. Perry what sort of demon she thinks would be interested in helping to hide rubber balls under cups, and whether they’re perhaps very junior demons who haven’t learned to do anything impressive yet.
Ha! Note Alex’s bemused disdain for Mrs. Perry’s anxiety over “magic.” It is pleasant to imagine incompetent fledgling demons performing sleight of hand. Note, beyond the humor, the way Alex’s suspicion of what might lie outside the boundaries of her social, religious, and economic milieu seems to be breaking down: flashy undergarments, hair and fashion, romantic interest.
What we have seen—and this is in keeping with the worst ending (“Being Cain”)—is that the less attention Alex pays to the seemingly fixed elements of her existence, the more she develops as an independent, freethinking person—and one who enjoys life more fully. The rest of this playthrough will, I am sure, bear that out!
Whew! We are over 3k words again! More soon.
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Let’s keep at it!
We return to Jerome’s and Flauberta’s house:
Return to the House of Mildew
Your next visit to Jerome and Flauberta’s house isn’t much like your first. Your parents aren’t along, just you, at Flauberta’s invitation. They have hamburgers for dinner, and tater tots that they heat up in the oven and that came in a bag. Flauberta’s father wears a hat indoors. There are no read-alouds from the encyclopedia and no flute demonstrations.
> And what about the mildew smell?
“Um so,” you say to Flauberta. “Your house smelled a little different last time we were here.”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “Because my mother tried to hang-dry all of our clothes indoors and it kind of wasn’t a good idea. So we’re back to using the clothes dryer now.”
“Why did she do that?”
Flauberta says, “To impress your family with how thrifty we are, I think. I’m not sure. It didn’t work out.”
“I had to throw out my jeans,” Jerome says. “They grew black spots on the crotch.”
This funny passage reveals social pressures that have largely gone undiscussed, though Mrs. Barron has said that “very few mothers are quite as house-proud as yours.”
It makes sense that there would be gossip around the co-op, but we do not see a lot of interaction with that group. Still, we know it is happening. Alex is likely getting some amount of STEM instruction outside the house, for instance, even if we do not see it. I think we can safely assume that Mrs. Barron and Jerome’s family attitudes are representative indicators of Mother’s reputation in the community. Of course, we have to credit, at least partially, the labor of Alex and Lettice when it comes to the state of their house. It is nowhere indicated that other children are shoveling sidewalks and whatnot. In fact, it seems that these other families are categorically not involving their children in household or economic drudgery.
In this presumably chatty bunch, I doubt this has gone unnoticed.
In any case, the mildewy crotch punctuates the scene in a very humorous way.
> Ask them about what else they’ve heard around the Co-op.
“What else have you heard about other families?” you ask.
“Oh, you know. Mrs. Barron might not be quite well, Mrs. Perry is worried about the next election being thrown if the election machines are demonically possessed. You guys probably hear the same stuff,” Flauberta says. “Um… speaking of which, what do they say about us?”
Conservatives grousing about election machines aren’t as funny as they once might have been, but, like the recent cups and balls episode, the passage might lead to questions regarding Mrs. Perry’s power within the group. While the text never says so, it seems clear that Mrs. Perry really should not be influencing the educational experiences of children.
I think it is worth considering what Bee really says about home schooling. After playing through it several times, I’m not convinced that it portrays home-schooling in a categorically negative way. In fact, Bee takes considerable pains to portray public school as inferior with regard to Alex’s language and literary interests. The two issues I see are a lack of socialization and organizational/resource issues. Who is in charge? Where does the money go? The socialization seems largely the responsibility of parents rather than co-op, and they don’t seem to be getting it done in the cases of Alex and Lettice.
I think a common criticism is that the homeschooling experience in Bee isn’t representative, but I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of why that is and if this is deliberate. Short has said that lots of things in Bee are patchwork amalgams. “Are there plain dress Episcopalians somewhere?” is a reasonable question to ask, I think. I feel confident that religion is portrayed amalgamously here. But in Bee’s portrayal of home schooling, I see people in charge who shouldn’t be, and parents who haven’t shouldered the responsibilities that accompany their decisions.
Is the message that these failures are fundamental to home schooling’s make-up, or is this a critique of a very specific implementation? I suppose the reader must decide, but I see a greater problem in putting the “demons in voting machines lady” in charge of picking textbooks than I do in homeschooling. I wouldn’t want to see her on a public school board, either, but I’m sure there are a lot of board officers fretting over demons here in Louisiana.
I have lingered on this because it comes up a lot. I don’t think there’s a definitive answer in the text, but I also don’t think it’s bad to let readers wrestle with ambiguity.
Moving on…
“Field trips cost more than they used to,” your mother is saying to Mrs. Perry. “And now the dues are going up as well?”
Mrs. Perry smiles tightly. “There are rental costs for this space,” she says. “Those go up too.”
- Perhaps the Co-op has scholarships?
- Perhaps your parents need to spend less on other things.
> Perhaps the Co-op has scholarships?
You raise the question. “Are there scholarships available?”
Mrs. Perry looks surprised that you spoke.
“Sometimes academic high achievers get support at private schools,” you remark.
While this presents as a comment on the nature of home schooling, and it certainly is that, I think this also reflects the current financial condition of Alex’s family: they can’t afford the increases. In this spirit, Alex asks (pointedly? innocently?) about scholarships, even going so far as to mention private schools.
Exercises in Reading Between the Lines
A conversation, overheard:
“…wondering about Sara. I’ve noticed that she…” Something in lowered voices. “…not what I would want influencing our daughter.”
Father’s voice: “Are you sure? Wouldn’t want to fire her if it’s a misunderstanding.”
“I can hardly ask her straight out, can I?” Mother asks.
But you can. If you can figure out what to ask her about. Perhaps at the beginning of a lesson, but after Mother has left the room.
This is an interesting one! It is hard to keep track of who is the stricter parent in this family. The answer, most probably, is that both of them are strict in different ways. But what are we to make of this? We can look through one answer, and then I’ll pull the other from the source code.
But before we do, what is it that Mother is worried about? “Atheist” and “Feminist” are two options, certainly, but Alex is perhaps too young (and sheltered) to recognize a third possibility: is Sara a lesbian? The exchange, IMO, sounds more queerphobic than anything else. In fact, let’s have a look at one of the options in the “running away” vignette. We might as well look at all of it now. This is taken from source.
It’s 1 in the afternoon when you find Sara’s dorm room at college. You knock.
“Come in!” someone calls.
You open the door and step inside. Sara is sitting at her desk at a computer. Another girl is lying in the twin-sized bed, wearing a baseball shirt that says ICHIRO 51 on it.
Sara jumps out of her chair. “You can’t be here,” she says to you.
The girl in the bed sits up too. She looks confused.
“Class isn’t for another two days,” Sara tells you.
“Oh!” says the girl in the bed. “Shit, whoops, right. I was never here.” She swings her legs out of the bed — bare, was she sleeping at this hour? “Shitshitshit,” she says. Under the bed she finds a very skinny pair of jeans and wiggles into them.
Then she ducks at Sara, weird, like she’s trying to kiss her, but Sara dodges. The girl giggles and runs out.
- @who-was: Who was that?
- @probably: Better not ask. It’s probably some feminist friend of Sara’s. She looks embarrassed that you saw her.
Sara has the best “running away” scene by far, by the way. So Sara is gay, and my take is that Alex’s parents are bigots. The father is a bigot, he just lacks his wife’s confidence in bigotry. And it makes sense, as we can see in this passage, that Alex wouldn’t ask about that: it’s not something she recognizes or understands.
This complicates later portions of the text, especially the ending of this playthrough. More on that later. Back to the playthrough:
> Is she atheist?
“Do you not believe in God?” you ask.
Sara’s mouth goes sideways and she pushes back the straw hair. “I don’t talk to you about God,” she says. “So I don’t think it should matter.”
> Perhaps she’s afraid of losing the fee for teaching you.
“I won’t tell Mother what you say,” you offer. “I’m just curious.”
She sags in her chair and pulls the arms of her sweater down to cover her hands. “I think the Bible is a record of experiences people have had, and stories they’ve told each other, about how they understand the Divine. But I also think that about some of the Greek philosophers, and the Koran, and spiritual poetry. They’re records of human thoughts, which might not be big enough to encompass all of the truth. I wouldn’t say for sure there’s no God, but I’m not convinced any religion has a unique claim to describe him.”
Not atheist, exactly. But agnostic? Hm. Or perhaps some other heresy. Best not to mention that, then.
Sara seems to be Alex’s only connection to this degree of thoughtfulness, be it right or wrong. We don’t for instance, get exposed to a lot of theological insights from members of the community, nor do we witness any sort of religious interiority. I want to be clear that I’m not saying that the religious life necessarily lacks inward seriousness; I’m only saying that this kind of interiority isn’t a feature of Alex’s life. This absence makes Sara a sort of lifeline toward thoughtfulness that is rare and precious. We’ll see that illuminated further when we look again at her ending in a moment.
Let’s turn to the alternate question regarding feminism:
@feminism
“Are you a feminist?”
Sara doesn’t seem particularly mean to children or anti-man, for that matter. So it is a little surprising when she says, “Well, of course.”
- @promise-silence: Promise not to tell the parents.
@promise-silence
“I won’t tell Mother,” you say. “I promise. I think you shouldn’t tell her either.”
The corners of Sara’s mouth turn down. “What do you think a feminist is?”
“Someone who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to be mothers and stay home with their families?” you say. You’ve also heard the phrase “ball-busting” in this connection, but you’re pretty sure the term has testicular significance and that children shouldn’t use it.
“That’s not what it means, and anyone who attacks feminists on those grounds is using a straw man argument.”
- @rhetoric: Ah, rhetorical terms. Now you’re on familiar ground.
@rhetoric
Sara talks and talks, but the important thing seems to be that, whatever Mother and Father were concerned about, she isn’t a feminist in that bad way.
This is familiar, misogynous nonsense. The question is where is it coming from? Mrs. Perry? Alex’s family? The co-op in general? Surely not Mrs. Barron. It would at least be nice to assign a name to the phrase “ball-busting,” but it seems that mystery must go unsolved.
Since this is the last mention of Sara in the playthrough, let’s turn to the source for the rest of her “running away” ending. As a reminder, when Alex runs away, her relationship with her parents has become intolerable, so she is understandably upset in this scene.
“Who was that?”
“My friend Leslie,” Sara says. “She sleeps over sometimes. Why are you here?”
@probably
go-to: explainingYou say nothing.
“Why are you here?” Sara asks.
@explaining
So you tell her, the whole sobbing story. Halfway through, she gets up.
“Stay here.” She goes out, and comes back after a minute with a clutch of paper towels, the rough cheap brown kind from public restrooms. “I don’t have any tissues, sorry.”
You use up quite a few of the towels.
When you’re done, Sara sits back in her seat. “You know I have to tell your parents where you are. Right?”
The rough paper towels are a nice touch.
“You can’t report them for child abuse?”
Sara sighs. “The situation you’re in, that’s not legally abuse. Your parents don’t neglect you, they don’t beat you, they don’t even shout mean things at you. They’re schooling you according to the law. And if I did report something and it worked, you and Lettice would at best be put in foster homes. You might not wind up in the same one. It might be hard for you to see your parents again, or see each other at all. Is that really what you want?”
“No,” you mutter.
“It gets better,” Sara says, and her expression is wry. “It gets much, much better. You just have to stick it out until you’re older, and then you can choose for yourself what you want to do. Go to college, travel the world, change religions, shave your head if you want.”
“It’s going to be years before I’m that old!”
“I know,” Sara says. “I really, really know.”
“So what am I supposed to do now?” you ask.
“Get ready,” she says. “The way I used to think of it was, I was in a chrysalis. I read things and I watched movies and looked things up on the internet, and I learned things that made me ready to break out as soon as I had wings.”
“Caterpillars are almost completely dissolved in the chrysalis,” you say. “The liquids break down their bodies into a nutritional soup. The butterfly is pretty much a different animal.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That sounds right.”
Is it fair to say that Sara, of all the adults in Alex’s life, is the one who really sees her? We hardly ever—if ever—see her spoken to—free of condescension—in this very empathetic way. Alex’s response to metaphor with science trivia is pitch perfect. This is just an excellent scene. While we won’t see Sara again, she is definitely a real one.
Back to home economics:
Handwashing
Mother teaches you how to do the handwashing, with a capful of Woolite and cold water. However, the only place to do it is the bathroom sink, and the bathroom sink cannot be left occupied all the time. It’s vital to do the washing early in the morning before anyone else is up, so that no one else will be disturbed.
The caps and scarves and so on are not so bad.
The sweaters, however, are awful. They fill up completely with water, and the rough wool scrapes your fingers when you rub it together to get the dirt out. Lettice’s sweaters are inevitably stained in interesting ways, with dirt and fruit punch and the odd marker stroke. And you can’t always tell which stains are going to be removable until you’ve had a go at all of them.
While you work you make up stories in your head.
> About becoming so wealthy that you could have servants.
First you would have to come into a very large amount of money – much larger than you could win even at the National Bee. But that $30,000 would be good seed money. Perhaps you could invest it in stocks. (Can children own stocks? Maybe Father would have to buy them for you.) Then the stocks, naturally, would rise very greatly in value: this can happen.
Afterwards, you would have a housekeeper to do the washing. But she wouldn’t be oppressed and also would definitely not be an illegal immigrant. She would be someone who liked washing clothes and enjoyed having that for a living. She would have lost her husband and be a young widow with three – no, maybe just two – adorable children, who would move into a bedroom in your mansion. People at church would frequently tell you how selfless you were to have given a home to this young family.
You turn on the tap and refill the sink with hotter water. It scalds your hands. But when you are rich, your housekeeper will have gloves.
Alex’s idea of wealth is humorous, of course, as are the altruistic elements of her fantasy. She is rich—ethically! I appreciate the way focusing on capital and poverty in this playthrough renders Alex’s home situation more credible. Of course she knows that her family is poor. Cinderella is mentioned twice in the text of Bee. In one passage, she sees in Cinderella a fellow sufferer, performing rote and degrading manual labor for an ungrateful family. In another, she dreams of escaping “like Cinderella.” It’s entirely natural that young Alex would fantasize about a happier and more comfortable adulthood, and that her fantasies involve workers who—unlike her—enjoy what they do.
Her use of the term “seed money” suggests that Alex has been thinking about this more than a little! The shock of scalding water dispels the fantasy, but a last brushstroke remains: “But when you are rich, your housekeeper will have gloves.”
We’ve reached 3k words again! We are on the last third of this very dense and engaging playthrough. Stay tuned.
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Moving on! As we begin, Alex experiences another bout of…
Isolation
This time, Alex chooses to text Jerome. Wait! She has a cell phone? This wouldn’t have been a so-called “smart” phone, of course, but this is still a surprising development, isn’t it? How would her family afford it?
You: Hey Jerome. Are you up?
Jerome: u r going to typ everythg out arent u
You: I just like to be correct.
Jerome: use autocorrect
You: If I did, my phone would call you Jerry.
Jerome: good pt. sup
You: Bored. Very very bored.
Jerome: Photograph of a brown and pink knitted… thing.
Jerome: check out flau’s latest project
Jerome: it is a flute cozy
Jerome: do not ask me what I think it looks liek
This passage is one more rare instance of Alex engaging in flirtation, this time sharing a laugh over a phallic “flute cozy.” While we do not get to see many such exchanges, they remind us that, despite her awkward precociousness, Alex is still a middle-school child with middle-school interests.
Mr. Barron Intervenes
William Barron comes into the laundry room when you’re moving a fresh load into the dryer.
He is Mrs. Barron’s husband, but you don’t see him nearly as often. He works in software engineering and wears jeans and a polo shirt at all times. Even in church.
He’s told you to call him William, but since you’re not allowed to call adults by their first names, this creates a bit of a dilemma. In your head he’s listed by full name, WILLIAM BARRON, like a Quaker.
“Hey,” he says, not looking at what’s in your hands.
You shove your mother’s bra into the darkness. It’s stiff and starchy and damp.
“Hey,” you say.
“So, look,” he says. “Some of us are a little worried that maybe your parents are putting too much pressure on you guys. You know, with all the school stuff. One of us could talk to them for you. If you want.”
You pull a damp skirt out of the washer and shove it into the dryer.
“Everything is fine,” you say. You close the dryer and twist the knob to permanent press and then you turn it on.
“Okay,” says William Barron. “If you ever change your mind, though.”
This affords an outside perspective on Alex’s family. We’ve been treated to a few of these, but they have focused on Alex’s mother. Mrs. Barron calls her “house-proud,” for instance, and, more recently, there was the mildew incident at Jerome’s and Flauberta’s house. I think it has been clear—and this passsage seems to confirm my thinking—that Mrs. Barron has tried to help Alex and Lettice with the salon trip and the “house cleaning” money. We must concede that Alex doesn’t “play” a lot in a sense that many would recognize. Nearly all of her free time is spent on the Bee (unless we resist it as we are in this playthrough). There is a weekly board game (which Alex can skip for spelling practice), but what else is there?
Lettice is fortunate enough to be able to have her art, which the family seems to perceive as “productive.” A question I feel we’ve answered is “how much does Alex enjoy spelling?” I maintain that she loves language, but things have gone too far. We learn in the “Being Cain” ending that Alex was not spelling for herself but for money and ascendence in her small community. We can also consider this encounter within the context of Alex’s attempt to run away to Sarah (in the post preceding this one): Alex refers to her parents’ treatment as “abuse.” Children can and do exaggerate, and, like Sara says, there is no legally-defined abuse. Nevertheless, we can conclude that Alex is very unhappy in that ending, and, in a world so small, there are few people to blame.
Considering the wider context, Mr. Barron (and Mrs. Barron, too) are not off-base. Too much work, no toys, a very limited social sphere all limit Alex’s happiness. Let’s dip into the source code and review an alternative answer, in which Alex asks Mr. Barron to speak to her family.
@say-yes
When you agree, he just nods and goes away again. You don’t hear anything more of it until a couple of days later.
“Did you complain to the Barrons that we work you too hard?” Mother demands over a bowl of too-cooked peas.
“Mr. Barron asked whether I had too much to do,” you say.
“I’d like to think that if you have concerns, you can come directly to us,” Mother says. “But we don’t ask more of you than you can do.”
“I hope you haven’t been going around saying the same to everyone else,” Father observes. “Mrs. Perry does relish spreading gossip about families she thinks aren’t doing home-schooling right. And there’s the newsletter to think about.”@say-yes
When you agree, he just nods and goes away again. You don’t hear anything more of it until a couple of days later.
“Did you complain to the Barrons that we work you too hard?” Mother demands over a bowl of too-cooked peas.
“Mr. Barron asked whether I had too much to do,” you say.
“I’d like to think that if you have concerns, you can come directly to us,” Mother says. “But we don’t ask more of you than you can do.”
“I hope you haven’t been going around saying the same to everyone else,” Father observes. “Mrs. Perry does relish spreading gossip about families she thinks aren’t doing home-schooling right. And there’s the newsletter to think about.”
It’s telling that the primary concern here is social. There is no reflection here: Alex is wrong, Alex is fine. Let’s see what happens if Alex remains defiant.
@lovely
on-arrival: parents += 1; status += 1“It’s great to know that you care more about the newsletter than you do about me being happy,” you say.
Lettice looks back and forth between you and your parents, then shovels another spoonful of mashed potatoes into her mouth.
“Sweetheart, you’re fine,” says Mother. “You get your work done. Or you could, if you applied yourself. God never demands more of us than we can perform, remember.”
The text of Bee seldom blames the parents for Alex’s dissatisfaction, but it is telling that nearly every ending is primarily concerned with Alex escaping her home and school situations.
Isn’t the assertion that “God never demands more of us than we can perform” obnoxious? Alex’s parents and Mrs. Perry are not God. They may not even be right about what or who God is.
On a lighter note: It’s Tyler Barron’s birthday!
Dinner for Tyler Barron
Mrs. Barron stops her minivan outside your house and honks. Mother walks you and Lettice down to the curb.
“Sorry I couldn’t come in,” says Mrs. Barron, grinning at Mother over her sunglasses. “You can see we’ve got the car full.”
“Full” means that the van contains both of her sons and her husband. The sons are dressed in identical suits with red ties. The husband is wearing a polo shirt and, from his expression, thinking about something very far away. Life on Mars, possibly.
“Have a nice evening,” Mother says to you. “Behave yourselves. Tyler, happy birthday!”
Tyler waves. You are not exactly sure which birthday it is for Tyler, since no one told you and Lettice this.
“Get on in,” says Mrs. Barron.
The humor in this episode is well-wrought, and leavened by rather adult seriousness. The identical suits worn by the Barron sons feel incongruous. What boy wears a suit to his birthday party? Some must, presumably, but, as we’ll see, Tyler doesn’t have a “red tie” dinner establishment in mind.
While our playthroughs have suggested that Mr. Barron might be unhappy in his marriage, this vignette offers sure confirmation, as we will see.
Tyler follows your glance. “Just put that stuff in a pile,” he says. So you and Lettice squeeze into the back bench of the minivan and pile the stuff between you.
There’s a sheaf of crumpled Latin translations beginning (incorrectly) with “He calls me labor”; a snack cake, squashed but still in its plastic wrapper; two pencils; a historical atlas of battlegrounds of the Civil War.
“Where shall we go for dinner?” Mrs. Barron asks, looking into the rear-view mirror.
- It’s Tyler’s birthday, so he should get to pick.
- Suggest Burger Wizard.
> It’s Tyler’s birthday, so he should get to pick.
“Tyler should get to pick,” you volunteer.
Tyler hesitates. After a long while he says, “Maybe Burger Wizard?”
Burger Wizard is a restaurant with an animatronic warlock on the front yard. The end of its wand waves and sparkles. Mrs. Perry picketed it once to protest the encouragement of Satanic beliefs among children, but her picketing didn’t accomplish much. It doesn’t seem like the Barron family, who collect Harry Potter gizmos and have all of the Lord of the Rings movies, can possibly suffer from an ethical objection to a moving warlock statue.
But… “Oh, no, honey,” says Mrs. Barron. “Not Burger Wizard.”
“Why not?” says William Barron, his attention returning from the depths of the solar system. “Burger Wizard is fine.”
“I know, dear, but I just don’t feel like a hamburger,” says Mrs. Barron.
There is no further discussion. Mrs. Barron takes a left, humming to herself, and drives down a long, leafy road you don’t remember taking before. Tyler and his brother Kyle get bored and take off their ties. Lettice, who is holding the birthday present for Tyler, picks nervously at the wrapping until the tape tears a little bit.
There are so many laughs here: a bad Latin translation, Burger Wizard, Mrs. Perry’s ineffective protest, the Barron family’s collection of “sinful” pop-culture artifacts with noncritical representations of magic.
But why not Burger Wizard? The kids aren’t dressed for it—well, perhaps Alex and Lettice are, as we don’t know what they aren’t wearing—but that hardly seems to matter. It is Tyler’s birthday. Mr. Barron seems confused, too.
You sit still. The long winding road ends at last in a parking lot in the middle of a field, and beside it is a small Victorian house decorated with twinkle lights. Some men are coming out of the house wearing jackets.
William Barron reties Tyler’s tie and then Kyle’s tie. Everyone troops into the restaurant and is seated. The table is enormous and covered with a very white, very stiff cloth. The napkins are folded into swans. Mrs. Barron orders a clear cocktail with a lemon twist for herself, and ginger beer for you and Lettice, Tyler and Kyle.
“And I’ll have a Coke,” says Mr. William Barron.
The ginger beer, when it comes, is the color of cat urine, and contains a number of floating chunks. It is extremely spicy. Your nose hurts when you drink it. And then there’s the food order.
Is this Alex’s first “fine dining” experience? Nothing about the place or its ambience seems familiar. The ginger beer is both exotic and singularly unpleasant.
“The hamburger, please,” you say. “Medium rare.”
“I’ll have the same,” says Mrs. Barron.
“You’ll have the burger,” repeats Mr. William Barron to Mrs. Barron. He sounds deeply, deeply displeased.
“Yes,” says Mrs. Barron, folding her menu.
“The burger.”
“Yes, you just heard me order it.” Mrs. Barron shakes her head at the waiter, who smiles fakely and goes away.
“But you refused to go to Burger Wizard because you couldn’t face a burger,” says William Barron angrily. Both Tyler and Kyle are studying their napkins with extreme attention.
“Well, darling, a burger here is not really the same thing as a burger at Burger Wizard,” Mrs. Barron says. “The aioli for one thing, and the beef is grass-fed, it’s much better. The girls will love it. You like this place, don’t you, Lettice?”
Lettice, startled, takes in too much ginger beer and chokes. “It’s really nice,” she says, even though the menu flustered her into ordering crab bisque and you know for a fact that she feels too friendly to shellfish to want to eat them under ordinary circumstances. Lettice’s eyes water.
“This is ridiculous,” says William Barron. “Kids, would you rather be at Burger Wizard?”
Tyler nods. Kyle says nothing. Lettice is wiping her nose with her napkin.
Alex orders a medium-rare burger! Is this surprising? It is not what I expected. Perhaps she has seen adults do so, though we never see the family eat out or even attend a cookout. Mrs. Barron, in a shocking reversal, orders a burger too! This moment is funny and rather on-brand for Mrs. Barron, but it reveals the tensions in the Barrons’ marriage. Why does Mrs. Barron insist on this place? One possibility is that the family never goes out, and that, more pointedly, Mr. and Mrs. Barron never go on dates. This is a rare chance to do something Mrs. Barron considers “nice” with the family.
It is also rather inconsiderate, of course, since it is Tyler’s birthday. The choice should have been his.
We get to weigh in on the Burger Wizard question. I voted “yes.”.
“Yes,” you say. “I like the wand that sparkles.”
“Fine,” Mrs. Barron says, standing. “I see.” She goes to the restaurant’s front podium and there is a long discussion. Then she comes back to the table.
“Get your things,” she says.
“But what about our food?” Kyle asks.
“I’ve paid for it,” Mrs. Barron says. “Come on. You wanted Burger Wizard, we’re going to Burger Wizard.”
At Burger Wizard Tyler orders two burgers which he eats stacked on top of one another, and Kyle has nothing but an extra-grand order of Fries-acadabra.
Mrs. Barron refuses to eat anything herself. William Barron says something about cocktails on empty stomachs and does the driving home.
While this last bit is humorous, I also find it sad. Mrs. Barron is a lonely person who presumably is perceived as “odd” or even “troubled.” The night is, for her, a disappointment and a failure.
The contrast between the adult tensions at work here and the humorous image of a boy stacking burgers atop each-other is effective and characteristic of Bee’s effectively complex tone.
Orange and Purple Christmas
The boxes under the tree are as always wrapped in paper that Lettice has decorated. Lettice’s ambition this year has led her to specialize in camels and wise men.
Brown crayon camels, when folded, look like mushrooms.
Inside the boxes are a lot of crumpled newspaper, and among the newspaper are cards with messages on them. Like: “This represents your new textbook for social studies that you got in September!” or “This card good for one trip to Co-op movie night!”
Co-op movie night is free, but usually you do not get to go, because it means driving out at night, when they are tired.
When you and Lettice are done, you each have a stack of cards beside you. They look not much different from a half-hour’s worth of spelling drill.
Mother is looking at you and Lettice very closely to see if you are sad.
Oof. What a dismal scene this is. A card representing a school textbook. A co-op event that other children attend as a matter of course. While we have known all along that Alex’s family is poor, we may not have realized just how dire their situation is. Why is it so bad? Perhaps Mother works exclusively for barter rather than money. One of my few complaints about Bee is that we never get to understand the causes of the family’s poverty, even though Alex would have had thoughts on the subject. The result is a sort of narrative flimsiness. Father is in charge, and he is the one who goes to work in the world of “men,” but no one ever remarks upon his utter and abject failure to make money. Perhaps he is unlucky; perhaps his job has been outsourced; perhaps he spends all of his time on the newsletter; it might not be his fault! Still, given the power structure within the household, the buck really ought to stop with him. He isn’t even mentioned in this scene.
Afterward in bed you look out at the snow-laced trees, which are orange from all the reflected street light. This is the way the world is. Orange snow under a purple sky. Frosty the Snowman on the neighbor’s roof. Boxes of newspaper under the tree.
What you feel is something else that lives next door to sad, a regret that consists of sadness on behalf of someone because that someone feels sadness on behalf of you.
In all the vocabulary you know there is no word for that. If there were it would certainly be German. You slip out of bed and flip through the German box just in case, but you don’t find any such thing, and the floor is cold under your feet.
In heaven there will be no place for feelings of this type, which are made partly of sadness and partly of love. This too is a loss.
A poetic and melancholy passage. “…It would certainly be German” is a humorous and likely theory. It also is an extremely rare case of religious interiority, with Alex concluding that “there will be no place for feelings of this type” in heaven.
What are we to make of “This too is a loss”? It is not an especially middle-school construction. In fact, it sounds very adult. One question I’ve discussed with friends is “Is the voice in Bee the live, unmediated voice of a child?” Or is it rather an adult reconstruction of a child’s experience? I don’t have a ready answer, but I think “This too is a loss” implies either adult reflection or else Emily Short’s voice showing through.
We are still at it! But getting closer. I’d like to wrap this up before IF Comp begins. The podcast is coming, too! Callie and I discussed it yesterday. More soon.
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And the sole choice (click to continue) here is “So you’re not, of course.”
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I do wonder how much Alex knows about it; while the fact of the family’s poverty is of course impossible to conceal, the parents may feel that the children shouldn’t know the details. Though Alex’s age, the fact that she’s the elder child, and the amount of responsibility they place on her in general do seem to argue against that. And from a narrative perspective, if the story wanted to bring in those details it could certainly do so by having her overhear conversation between her parents, as she does about Sara.
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This is the first exercise in Wheelock’s Latin, FWIW.
An interesting update! The Barron’s behavior sure does feel like a symptom of a late-stage failing marriage; it’s notable how little interpretation Alex does of the events, beyond simply recounting them (actually, as narrators go she has a close eye for detail but rather a resistance to interpretation or assessment; some of this, I’m sure, is the author not wanting to tell the player what they should be thinking or feeling, but it does start to feel characterological).
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I do think it lines up with what we see of Alex’s approach to literature and her education in general; observation and memorization have clearly been heavily encouraged while drawing her own conclusions has not been. It probably is mostly the author not wanting to overinterpret for the audience, but it ends up being sort of fitting.
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Yeah, definitely – it’s of a piece with her confusion at Sara’s open-ended, interpretive questions in the tutoring sequence a couple updates back too.
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Could it be? Is the end in sight?
To begin, trouble with a source of income—the newsletter.
At the Copy Shop
Father does not ordinarily curse at all, but he curses today when he gets back the run of his newsletter from the copy shop. “The copy shop put in the Hamilton advertisement upside down,” he tells Mother. “They’ll never let us hear the end of this. They’ll take it as a personal insult. You know how Mrs. Hamilton is.”
Mother looks up from washing the dishes. Her hands are wrist-deep in suds. “Perhaps you could copy the run again?” she suggests.
“That would cost me as much as we earned from having the advertisement in the first place,” Father grumbles.
> Maybe if it’s the copy shop’s fault, they’ll do a new run for free.
“Maybe if it’s the copy shop’s fault, they’ll do a new run for free.”
“I doubt it,” Father says. “People these days never take responsibility for their own actions.” He flips again through the stack of papers and glares at the unruly advertisement.
“You can hardly distribute the newsletter like that,” Mother says. “It wouldn’t be appropriate. Our striving for perfection is the gift we give to God.”
Father mutters something about the gift he gives to Mrs. Hamilton; but he goes back out into the rain clutching the cardboard box of bad copies.
While the surface of this scene is innocuous, there are some important ideas lurking. While I’ve mostly considered the newsletter just sort of “there,” we see here that they have importance after all. Is this pastime a substantial source of income? I had imagined it as a pet project, but this was really an unfounded assumption. We seldom see this family do anything for enjoyment’s sake. This scene serves to call attention to that reality.
Is Mother the primary source of religious axioms? My question might be fueled by recency bias. as the previous post featured her saying “God never demands more of us than we can perform, remember.” I find myself wondering, again, what or how much Alex’s parents believe. In the past, I’ve said that they believe the same things, but Mother is more vocal and/or open about those beliefs. Is that really true, though? Who or what is the driving force behind this family’s commitment to religious observation?
And now, a rare bit of adult business overheard:
Heard Rather Than Seen
William Barron arrives at the door after 9 PM. Mother lets him in.
“I’ve just had a fight with her,” he says, not caring that you’re standing right there. “I can’t take it any more, I have to talk to someone. Oh, hello, Lettice.”
“Who is she?” Lettice asks brightly.
“This is a grown-up conversation,” Mother says. “Why don’t you two go get ready for bed.”
> Try to overhear.
Since we’ve only recently discussed the absence of grown-up conversation and/or a lack of… deduction? curiosity? regarding the world of adults, this vignette is a bracing shake-up.
You and Lettice brush your teeth very slowly. Slowly you take off your clothes and put on your nightgowns. You do not speak to one another, do not make any noise. Through the not-quite-closed doors come bits of William Barron’s conversation.
“…so I told her… you’re not married to me, you’re married to being sad, and I can’t compete with that. I can’t deal with it any longer.” His voice rises at the end.
You can guess what Mother will say next.
- The LORD never gives us more than we can bear.
- Mrs. Barron should go to a healing service and be cured of her problems.
> The LORD never gives us more than we can bear.
You wait for her to say it, but she does not.
“That sounds very hard,” Mother agrees.
“Sometimes I get home and everything is energetic and happy – I mean the house is a mess, when is it not, but she’s in a good mood and the kids have gotten plenty done. And other times I come in and all the lights are off and there’s nothing cooking and the boys are in their bedroom playing on their XBox but with the sound turned all the way off and the subtitles on.”
It may be that Mrs. Barron suffers from a mental disorder. It’s a complex scene further complicated by the period setting of Bee. While sanism, regrettably, is alive and well in 2025, there has been some progress since the 90s and aughts. We can’t take for granted that Mr. Barron would know anything useful about depression or bipolar disorder II, so the question of Mrs. Barron’s health is not yet answered. It’s clear that she has unexpected shifts in mood, whatever the cause.
It sounds like Father would say she didn’t do her duty.
Father doesn’t have a lot of time for people who won’t take responsibility for their own tasks. We all have our own business in life, he says, but for some reason she’s just too lazy or bored to do hers. You’d guess.
“Hey,” Lettice whispers in the dark. “Do you think Mr. and Mrs. Barron are going to get a divorce?”
“Ssh.” The adults are still talking.
“…have to put the boys in public school. Or private. I told her she could pick whichever one she thought was best for them. We can afford it.”
- Sending them back to school? Things must be very bad.
- Your parents could not at all afford to send you and Lettice to private school.
Your parents could not at all afford to send you and Lettice to private school.
“Of course,” says Mother, and if William Barron cannot hear it, you can; a tiny little beat of annoyance in Mother’s voice.
“But she says she’ll slit her wrists if she doesn’t at least have the boys around.”
What is the source of Mother’s annoyance? Leaving the co-op? Perhaps it is that Mr. Barron can afford private school. Let’s drop back and look at the outcome for choice #1, “Things must be very bad.”
“Of course,” says Mother, and you think you hear a little tiny smoke-curl of contempt in her voice.
Contempt! Perhaps public school is the object here. It’s a complicated moment, to be sure.
I’ve buried the lede a bit. We are told that Mrs. Barron has threatened to “slit her wrists!” This is a rather shocking reversal coming as it does on the heels of fretting over school choice. This must be shocking and confusing for Alex, let alone Lettice.
> Surely Mrs Barron would not do anything really dangerous.
Things like that happen, but they happen on the news. Like there are wars, but bombs do not drop here; or there are famines, but everyone here has enough to eat mostly; or there are plagues, but you don’t expect to see Mother and Father dropping dead from Ebola. Bad things are in their place.
Mother’s voice, when it comes after a silence, is stony. “Please tell me she didn’t say that when the boys could hear her.”
William Barron’s response is quieter, but it sounds negative.
Father speaks for the first time. “I’m going to get you some numbers to call,” he says. The grown-ups move away towards the computer and their voices become too distant to hear.
“Bad things are in their place” is a very effective demonstration of childlike naivete.
“Please tell me she didn’t say that when the boys could hear.”
Oof.
As the scene ends, we can safely assume that Mrs. Barron does, in fact, suffer from a mental disorder, and that Father is fetching numbers for what I assume are providers of psychiatric care.
We return to the subject of money.
Overheard
In the kitchen, there are raised voices.
Father is complaining about the cost of curriculum materials and Mother is explaining that not everything can be borrowed or home-made. Sometimes the Co-op doesn’t have the right used textbooks. Sometimes materials get used up. Sometimes you need paper.
- Ignore it as hard as you can.
- Distract yourself with all the words for money you can possibly think of.
- Mention the fight to Mrs. Barron next time you see her.
> Distract yourself with all the words for money you can possibly think of.
There are so many different currencies, after all. TAKA and DINAR and LEMPIRA. RUPEE and WON and LILANGENI.
The most in-character response is likely #2, as Alex frequently retreats into spelling when pressures rise. The more interesting choice is, of course, the one involving Mrs. Barron.
view-if: barrons > 2 and barrons-card = 0
on-arrival: barrons += 1; poverty -= 2; barrons-card = 1Mrs. Barron listens to the whole story. “I wouldn’t worry about it so much,” she says, serving you an extra slice of pineapple cake. “Adults fight about money all the time; it’s very stressful. But I’m sure your parents will be all right.”
A week or two later a gift card comes in the mail. It’s $150 for the big box store.
The fight that happens after that is epic. Father is convinced Mother asked someone for money, and is all for giving it to charity. Mother argues back that that would subvert the charitable intentions of the donor of the card, and that that wouldn’t be right. Then there’s a second round of arguing about what the money should be spent on and what could reasonably wait for later.
But after all the shouting, the pantry is restocked.
The outcome doesn’t really align with Mrs. Barron’s storyline, obviously. This is a feature of Bee’s design: it’s modular nature sometimes means that vignettes seem out-of-context. Nevertheless, we do to observe the “adult” world of Alex’s parents. We discussed a perhaps surprising lack of such episodes in the last post.
The character features on display may or may not surprise: Father’s pride, Mother’s flexibility regarding the gift. It is curious that, despite my own observations, Father seems more concerned about money than Mother. Despite that, his pride motivates him to refuse assistance. I can’t help but imagine, once again, what it is he does for work.
It’s telling that the most immediate purchase is food, despite the inciting incident being worry over the cost of textbooks.
Crisis
The phone rings and rings.
“Ignore it,” Father says. “They can learn not to call during dinner time.”
But the phone just starts ringing again.
“It might be an emergency,” Mother says, and she and Father look at each other as though something has jumped into their heads at the same time. “I’d better–” “-- yes, go ahead this once.”
You and Lettice and Father sit silent at the table. No one even pretends not to be listening to Mother’s half of the conversation.
“Yes, it’s true, he did come over… no, of course… I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t – no, of course we didn’t tell him to file for divorce” – Mother’s voice is angry. “You know we believe in the sanctity of – I’m sure he’s not seeing anyone, no! Maybe you should talk with Father Mayhew about this.”
After a short diversion, we are back to Mr. Barron’s storyline. This scene more resumes the thread spun in “Heard Rather Than Seen.” Things have escalated in the Barron house. Mr. Barron has left, and has either filed for divorce or is threatening to do so.
It’s rather artful, showing only one side of the conversation, as it dramatizes Alex wrestling with her lack of understanding. Hearing just a part of the conversation is a way to limit our understanding, too.
“…please breathe. Calm down. Yes, yes… okay. Mrs. Barron, where are the boys right now? Oh, he did? Okay. All right, then I imagine they’re fine there… No, no don’t. I really don’t think that’s going to happen…”
Mother appears in the doorway, holding the phone, and signals urgently to Father.
“Here,” says Mother to the phone. “Would you like to talk to my husband? I know he talked with William more than I did…”
She shoves the phone into Father’s hands. She goes to the closet and with shaking hands opens it and pulls on her coat. She puts her shoes on without socks and walks out the door.
While we don’t know what Mrs. Barron says, we see Mother’s fear. Her hands shake, and she wants Father to keep her on the phone while she drives to the Barron residence. A small detail—shoes without socks—reinforces our sense of urgency.
> Later.
Mother does not come home again until the next day. When she does, there are circles under her eyes. She goes to sleep on the sofa still wearing her coat and even her shoes.
Mrs. Barron will be all right, is all she will tell you. A long night of the soul, she says.
What happened, we are left to wonder. Hospitalization, perhaps. Such problems are not cured overnight, naturally, but readers and Alex alike will never know. This scene, so far as I can tell, is the end of Mrs. Barron’s storyline.
A few days later there is a big gift basket on the front porch, wrapped in pink cellophane. It contains boxes of biscotti and bags of chocolate-dipped cherries, white truffle oil in a bottle, smoked oysters in a tin. Mother pulls out all the things and sets them on the dining table, half laughing and half crying.
“Honey,” she says to Father, “do you think the girls would like Aztec Chipotle Cacao?”
“Only one way to find out,” says Father, and the grin on his face says he thinks you wouldn’t.
Many of the things stay in their containers and some are bartered away for other, more useful food. But Mother opens the smoked oysters before dinner one night and serves them on crackers.
> How grown up.
They taste strange and the texture is sort of chewy and mushy at the same time, but the sensation that you ought to like them is stronger than the sensation of how they actually taste. You find yourself having seconds, and thirds.
There’s a lot to wade through, here. Mother is “half crying.” She must miss some of the things of the world. Still, some of the gifts are traded for more practical goods. The final paragraph is very well done. Why should Alex like them? I think the ready answer is that Alex frequently expresses interest in “escaping” into the world, and she perceives the treat as worldly. I think she also enjoys them for their cost.
It’s a curious period at the end of Mrs. Barron’s sentence. Does life go on? Is experience an alternation between sadness and humor? The answer to both questions is “yes,” naturally, but things do move on rather quickly. It really does seem that Mrs. Barron’s problems have passed into a realm beyond worry. This effect is engendered by Short’s emphasis on showing rather than telling, for one thing, as we are not often told things like, “You worry about Mrs. Barron.” That’s an effective and well-regarded technique, of course, but it may feel that something is lacking, here. Mother did not help Mrs. Barron fix a flat tire, after all.
But complaining too much is probably ungenerous. This is not Mrs. Barron’s story, after all, and the focus is family response to crisis. Still, tying everything off in this way might not convince all readers.
For something lighter, let’s return to a familiar vignette.
Isolation
…
>Text Jerome.You: Hi Jerome. What are you doing right now?
Jerome: um flau is watching mean girls again
Jerome: she is a ltl in luv w it
You: Why?
Jerome: linsy lohan is homeschooled in it duh
Jerome: srsly u havnt seen it?
You: My parents don’t really encourage that kind of thing.
Jerome: figures
Jerome: time for breakfast ttyl
Alex, not surprisingly, has not kept up with developments in popular culture.
Moving on! This playthrough approaches its conclusion.
Mother’s Temporary Work
“We were hoping that your Mother would be able to accomplish enough at home to make up our clothing and food needs,” Father says.
“It’s not as easy as all that,” Mother mutters. She’s got her knitting in her hands right now. The needles are dancing savagely.
“Whatever the reason,” Father says, “We must make some changes here. Your Mother is going to take on some temporary work.”
“Temporary work like what?” asks Lettice.
“Like answering phones,” Mother says. “Or typing things into the computer.”
The framing here is weird, isn’t it? Father is in control, and holding Mother accountable for their financial problems. “We were hoping that your Mother…” etc. He announces a shift in direction. It’s curious that she doesn’t bring it up, isn’t it? “Your Mother is going to take on some temporary work.”
“What are we doing for school?” you ask.
“You’ll have to look after yourself and Lettice more often,” Father says. “Your Mother will go over your work with you when she gets home. And we’ll arrange for more Co-op hours for you.”
> The phone rings more often in the morning.
What happens in fact is that the phone rings often in the morning, sometimes when only you are awake. When that happens, Mother gets up and puts on a pair of black trousers she made herself, and her church shoes. She takes the bus into the center of town, and usually, despite what Father said, she is gone all day.
A woman in pants! Such scandal. We might once more be impressed with well-chosen phrases. She goes to the “center of town,” for instance, which implies a worldly departure from Alex’s little world.
> Ask her about the mascara when you catch her putting it on.
When you notice her putting on mascara in the morning, she says, “Oh, honey, it’s not for vanity. My boss told me I have to wear it on assignments that require professional dress.”
She has to do a lot of things like that. One day she comes home from the drug store with a plastic bag full of stockings and lipstick and cheap gold hoops to wear in her ears.
“I don’t understand why you have to spend your whole paycheck on doodads,” Father says, picking through them. “I didn’t need this much stuff when I did data entry.”
Mascara! Lipstick! Stockings! Earrings! It seems clear that, despite previous arrangements, Mother is escaping into work. She likes having money and buying things for herself. Where does this situate her in terms of belief? This scene seems to negate a lot of what me might have assumed about Mother and her attitudes regarding religious observance.
This development does not seem a source of real conflict, either. Perhaps Father doesn’t mind, so long as the money comes in.
We still do not know, nor will we ever know, what his financial contribution to the household is.
Epilogue
It doesn’t last more than a few months. Soon Mother has to admit that she can’t really school you and temp at the same time.
She complains about temping a great deal, but she sounds a little bit excited when she gets a multi-week assignment. She talks about the boss and the snarky secretary, and she’s happy talking about them. What she hasn’t done is grade your math homework.
So you and Lettice must choose what to do next.
- Go to public school.
- Ask to be taught alongside Jerome and Flauberta.
Our thoughts are confirmed. Mother likes working. She likes being part of the outside world. Her life is too full to deal with math homework. Whose idea was the family’s household arrangement in the first place? While Mother has made many pious comments, she now seems as though she wanted something else. She is free from control—be it social or matrimonial—and she likes it. We have a couple of options here. We’ve seen the public school option before: Alex gets to dissect a frog, etc. We’ve come this way to look at option #2: joining Jerome and Flauberta.
“Could we be… sort of… fostered by Jerome’s family?” you suggest. “You’d still officially be our teachers, but we could spend our days over there with them.”
Mother and Father talk about it in the bedroom with the door shut. Then they invite Jerome’s parents over and ask, again while you and Lettice are not allowed in the room even though it is your idea.
The school year after that is one of the best you can remember.
You get dropped off at Jerome and Flauberta’s every morning. You write down ideas you want to explore and put them on the big project board. Jerome’s mother comes out in her yoga pants and sits on the sofa and talks you through the projects you want to work on today or this week, and how you’re going to assess and tackle them.
You do research on a tablet computer and write down ideas in a fancy notebook.
After lunch, there is time for your drill work, while Flauberta practices the flute. Jerome does headstands because he read a website about calisthenics. Lettice makes a butcher-paper mural big enough to stretch around the whole room.
This is, as we say in video game discourse, the “good ending,” in that it is the only one that doesn’t end in ambivalence (or worse). Mother isn’t the only one who has been freed: Alex is free to explore her own ideas. She has a “fancy notebook,” an indicator of both worldliness as well as the rise of her family’s financial fortunes. Among the chaos there is a real sense of fulfillment and actualization. The presence of an adult who discusses possibility rather than rigid structure is refreshing for both Alex and me!
This playthrough has a clear arc from poverty and oppressive family structure to imagination, self-direction, and fulfillment. It’s interesting to note that Mother’s freedom is an essential ingredient. Without her return to work, this ending is not possible. Bee is, in that sense, about the role of gender in conservative communities, and the possibilities offered by self determination.
Possibilies, of course, not just for an individual but for those nearby, too.
My goodness! We seem to have reached the end of my final playthrough. I have more to say, but I don’t want to steal all the critical thunder from the upcoming podcast episode. That’s right! I haven’t forgotten about that! Callie and I will do that next, and, should I have further thoughts, I’ll post them here. In any case, I’ll announce the episode when the time comes.
This remains a good place for discussing Bee, my favorite Emily Short game! Feel free to comment or talk to one-another if you like, this isn’t my thread, it’s everyone’s. More news soon!
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Will there be some more general/big-picture thoughts in the podcast, then?
Maybe I’m just reading it this way because my background is having been homeschooled but not for religious reasons (or only tangentially), but… I keep coming back to the fact that my strongest impression of Bee is that it’s likely written from the author’s experience of having been adjacent to that culture. That the aspects other than the spelling bee and the experiment in storytelling-through-stats, while not written carelessly or thoughtlessly, are mostly written for the needs of a particular vignette or arc.
How do I say this? I guess what I’m trying to get at is that I think when you do this close a reading, you’re likely putting more analysis into it than the author did, and that what you’re seeing is more a portrait of what sticks with us about the culture of our childhood and teenage friends than a carefully internally consistent portrait of christian homeschooling.
And for me, I think that explains most of the discrepancies
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That’s right; I don’t want to write up a lot of big picture conclusions before Callie and I have talked.
Perhaps contradicting myself immediately: the design ultimately precipitates a work of collage, so linear coherence is not what we are going to get out of Bee. We see these narrative “seams” or gaps all over the place. I agree that vignettes individually tend to be more important than the larger arcs. So one question is: “how satisfying is that?” I’m still satisfied, though that is going to be down to taste for a lot of people. I try to meet works where they are, so to speak, and Bee from the ground up is not going to, for instance, let us see Mrs. Barron again after the long night of the soul, etc.
It’s important for me to say that I’m not really interested in Short’s effort or intent. Or rather, I’m interested, but I’m evaluating the work, not Emily Short. I interpret texts rather than authors.
I do agree that Bee is not a thoughtful or comprehensive examination of home schooling, and anyone looking for that will likely leave disappointed. It isn’t an accurate characterization of the Episcopal Church as I have experienced it, either (I was confirmed as an adult), but I don’t mind. The description of Pentecost is satisfying, nevertheless.
When I talk about discrepancies, I’m mostly interested because specific details strongly emphasized by the text seem missing. But, to go back to my original point, I think the design resists linearity. It also tracks player choices rather than player knowledge, which makes it hard to gamify knowing about Father’s job, for instance. The result is that we never know what the heck he does all day, so players will have to decide for themselves whether that is enough.
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Gotcha. Yeah, I think that fits with how I feel about it. I’m not interested in interpreting authors; I just have trouble ignoring the idea that there exist possible conditions of production of the work (I can think of others) where the fact that it’s strongly emphasizing certain details but then in fact they’re missing isn’t unusual but is exactly what I’d expect to see…
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Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I like collage as a metaphor. If that’s the word I’m looking for. Framework? Lens? So when you’re interpreting the text, at what point do you stop going Wait, how does she have a cellphone? and start going As we’ve seen the last ten times, the game isn’t big on consistency between scenes or even within a single scene, it’s showing us this whole patchwork array of scenes that give a more general picture of this kind of culture?
And the text almost always (I think?) focuses on the feelings of each scenario rather than the logic of how these characters could be in that situation. That description of Pentecost. The not having money for presents. The ugh, that question about homeschooling again.
But then it is also told so specifically in some ways that we engage with them as specific characters, so… how well does it manage that? How well does that work for different people? How much is it forcing the game into an ill-fitting mold to try to construct totally coherent character arcs for even a single playthrough, let alone the whole possibility space?
I don’t know. I feel like Bee is more toward the portrait-of-a-culture end than say, Autumn Chen’s works or Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ghost and the Golem. Though not anywhere near as far as Alter Ego or Welcome to the Universe or probably Princess Maker kinds of things, hmm. It feels like it’s right on the edge of the broadness where writing as a specific character starts being tricky.
Anyway. Looking forward to the podcast
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The podcast is up! It should be on most major platforms, but let me know if it’s missing from your service of choice.
We didn’t manage to say everything there is to say, but perhaps that will have to do for now. This has been quite a ride.
It was nice to have Callie back.
A transcript is linked in the show notes for those who might need or prefer it.
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