What the Sting of a Wasp Reveals
Beyond a softball-sized fibroid named Betty, I’ve never birthed anything other than the rare idea. The brains of women forget the excruciating pain that accompanies childbirth, and this neglect is what ensures the continuation of our species. That theory has since been debunked. But it’s hypothesized that the memory of severe pain is lessened if the overall experience was positive, but is heightened if the overall experience was negative.
When I was 9 the inside of my mouth was stung by wasps. The direct object of my mouth and the action of being stung would come to coalesce later in fantasies of wasp-play.
Trapper, our golden retriever, woke me with frantic barking. My groggy eyes went straight to the once-bright shine of my nightlight, now diffused by a swarm of energetic wasps. These weren’t the directionless wasps of summer with legs that dangled paralytically, these were the disoriented wasps of an indoor winter. Trapper was chomping at the air and contorting his neck to bite his own back. My mouth felt fat.
Trying to remember childhood is odd. If you don’t analyze it, the memory feels full, but once you break it down you realize you’re working with an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.
I opened the door and trapper and I ran down the hall. The shag carpeting tripping my toes. Were the wasps following in a velocicloud behind me? I don’t recall.
I woke my mom and step-dad, a man 30 years my mom’s senior, who I called Papa John. He was a stocky Sicilian who owned a security company and taught me to pick locks. Other than that, he was old school and preferred children be seen and not heard; an agonizing task for a chatty child like me.
Papa John woke efficiently, skipping over the transition between asleep and awake. The combination of his classic Oxford-blue boxer shorts and crisply ribbed undershirt were the vestiges of masculinity; the outfit of chivalric abuse. As he ran past me, I clearly recall noticing how muscular his quads were. I’d only ever seen him fully clothed in his prescient Paulie Walnuts attire.
Papa John grabbed his newspaper and rolled it into a weapon. He erupted into my bedroom, swatting and slashing, a Zorro of a father for once. After we closed the door and tucked a towel at the threshold, I slept in the guest room where the Playboy magazines were kept.
The next day, an exterminator came and found a wasp’s nest in the dormer roof above my room. Papa John would describe the nest to people as “the size of a hassock” while my mom would describe it as “the size of an ottoman.” Either way, it was big.
Both Trapper and I sustained multiple stings, but I can’t remember the pain. I was already dissociated from my body because of what happened at 6. Or maybe I don’t remember the pain because for one fleeting moment, I loved my second step-dad.
Nice.
Oddly the only insect sting I ever received was from a wasp. My main memory about it was being angry when I learned that wasps don't die the way bees do (but now that might not be true: do bees die when they sting?) because that felt unfair. In retrospect the sting was perfectly fair: my friend Gerad and I knocked the wasp nest down with a stick; we started it.
One summer I looked up and saw a speck of mud in the corner of my bedroom ceiling. Over the summer I watched it grow and grow. For some reason I never really put together the wasps that would float around the house from seemingly nowhere and the surprising stickiness of the mud clump growing in the corner. Finally one day my mother saw it and exclaimed "How long has that wasp nest been there?" Oops.
I don't remember what dude she was dating, one of the three or four relationships that went nowhere after my parents' divorce, but he climbed up with a latter and removed it. There was still a brown stain in the spot for years afterward, until I moved out and Mom repainted the room to make an office.