Stinging bee

“I think most people are too young to choose a profession like medicine when they come straight out of high school. Look at Monique, a few years more might have changed her mind about going into the profession.”

Monique was a French woman who had joined their class in their final year. While she was a couple of years younger than most of them, she had already received her medical degree and done her internship in Paris before she came to the US. She seemed very unhappy at UC Med, and most of her classmates, figuring she was homesick and didn’t like having to retake a year of medical school and redo her internship, were sympathetic, in the beginning.

She soon became the kind of person whom a lot of people either instinctively avoided or simply disliked. No one could say why, just that she seemed to exude some sort of hazardous emission. For some reason, her very appearance had a tendency to bring out coffee klatsch filters. While no one had ever talked about it much before…that wouldn’t have been polite as long as she was around… they had all sensed it, in different ways.

“Somewhere beneath her heavy brows, she always seemed to stare vacantly at her listless hands, resting in a stack on her lap. And everyone else had to look at them too, however inadvertently, because they wondered what it was she was actually cooking up. Pot luck?”

“Once she showed me a photo of a goose in a silver locket she wore around her neck. Said the goose had been silly enough to think she was its mother. Blamed it on her father when that the goose ended up in a silver terrine on the family dinner table. So much for secret loves, and civilized family meals. Otherwise her lips stayed pursed as a roach clip.”

“Her hands were like broken wings, I suppose, and she knew it was best to keep them still. Hurts less that way, and probably heals faster.”

No one seemed to know what had become of her, only that she had married a wealthy businessman whom she had met in Paris, and gone to work at a public hospital as an anesthesiologist.

“I thought she seemed to breath in fresh air through the darkest pores along the wings of her nose, and breath out some innocuous gas that put her and everyone around her in a trance. A true anesthesiologist.”

“Now that sounds like something a real doctor would say, Barb. I thought she looked like she was always gazing through a screen of invisible bangs, or through the black veil on a pin hat. I remember she had a very distinct widow’s peak, long watery blond hair pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck. I often felt like trying to lift that veil, to stroke the loose strands of hair away from her forehead and describe what I saw, but Monique didn't offer much art, none of her own pictures, none of her own words.”

“That was the problem with Monique, no skills, no craft, and yet the few things she ever said or did made her seem crafty, sly, rather than shy.”

“ She just didn’t look healthy at all to me, more like a glossy mirror that vibrates just before it’s going to shatter. Not exactly the kind of doctor you want to anesthetize you before you go into surgery. Who wants to end up on a stainless steel platter in a refrigerator room after a good meal?”

“But I can’t help wondering how I would have felt about her if she had been able to reach out?”

“She did stick out, her tongue. Stung. Yellow jacket, WASP. I saw her in a Mustang convertible with windblown hair, and a bouquet of sunflowers in her embrace, and I believe she almost looked happy.”

“I saw her that day too, though she looked sad to me. Hard to know what was cupped in the palms of her hands. A coin, heads or tails, make it or break it, safe bet? Money, honey, blew her away.”


“ Maybe she was just embarrassed because she had psoriasis or something. Cracked, red, dry, scabs. Not a hand people usually like to hold, exactly, though hardly contagious.”

“I actually saw her once in a bathing suit, low back with a floral pattern - huge pink petals, with lime green pistils and sticky yellow stamens. Gaudy awful, had to recoil when she turned her back on me. It wasn’t pretty, allergic reaction, lots of pimples and puss.”

Suddenly they all giggled. Sign of a successful bee in the bonnet of med students.

“Oh Jesus. Just keep an eye on where you put that needle, will you. This is a sewing bee, not a stinging bee. No need to prick your finger to check your own blood, sugar. Wake up, put on a thimble or you are going to have a lotta blood on your hands too. Bumblebee flies by the power of their own ignorance, and neither the queen nor the workers are likely to sting if we don’t disturb them.”

“Oh genius bombus, you are, but that cuckoo gal was different Maxine. Bad genes, I'd say. Just listen to that buzz. Without basic social skills or even an ability to collect pollen, she can get pretty invasive. I think we better keep an eye on her.”