The Honey Bus
The Honey Bus
Meredith May
The Honey Bus: A Girl Raised by Bees is a memoir about a girl’s journey into the heart of a beehive to find herself.When Meredith May is abandoned by both parents, she ends up learning life lessons about family, generosity and resilience from a rather unexpected source: the honeybees her grandfather keeps in Big Sur.In a converted WWII military bus marooned in the backyard, Grandpa shows her the nuances of harvesting honey while the bees become a guiding force in her life, bonding her to the natural world and modeling a successful community that thrives on industry, democratic decision-making and loyalty.The exquisite relationship between insect and girl becomes a sanctuary from her lonely childhood, but when her increasingly despondent mother turns violent, she must leave her grandfather’s side and strike out alone with only his hive lessons to help her.
MEREDITH MAY is an award-winning journalist, author, and a fifth-generation beekeeper. She spent sixteen years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where her narrative reporting won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She is co-author of I, Who Did Not Die and lives in San Francisco, where she keeps several hives in a community garden.
MEREDITH MAY
THE
HONEY
BUS
A Memoir of Loss,
Courage and a Girl
Saved by Bees
ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES
Copyright (#u692c6b47-4d83-5451-afee-eb3dfd217848)
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Meredith May 2019
Meredith May asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9781474077095
For Grandpa
E. Franklin Peace
1926–2015
“So work the honeybees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the art of order to a peopled kingdom.”
—William Shakespeare, Henry V
Contents
Cover (#u69c0b162-3375-5871-9db0-36ced5097d26)
About the Author (#u88915152-584e-5878-8551-5214d8607bcd)
Title Page (#uf40670d8-2767-5f56-9a23-8b6c4d740d53)
Copyright (#u284e63b1-74d3-5a32-a26a-94a71afdcc30)
Dedication (#u1a05c5d8-a983-589b-be80-f2981dedb5ab)
Epigraph (#ucefd81a4-60ff-5112-9fa3-7742cd588b5f)
Prologue: Swarm (#ulink_b1237b0b-58b8-5794-ab2c-7f6faa0cb8a1)
1. Flight Path (#u573e30b3-4a9c-581c-8e6a-ad785e87e60f)
2. Honey Bus (#uda29dfae-2902-52d1-98aa-c252427ad688)
3. The Secret Language of Bees (#ufd590d85-be03-5e3c-b537-d5b9b33154b1)
4. Homecoming (#uedea2091-6529-52ae-b347-c4847d2e4fa4)
5. Big Sur Queen (#litres_trial_promo)
6. The Beekeeper (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Fake Grandpa (#litres_trial_promo)
8. First Harvest (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Unaccompanied Minor (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Foulbrood (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Parents Without Partners (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Social Insect (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Hot Water (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Bee Dance (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Spilled Sugar (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_687b4838-26de-5ee3-999a-e2be518c747e)
Swarm (#ulink_687b4838-26de-5ee3-999a-e2be518c747e)
1980
Swarm season always arrived by telephone. The red rotary phone jangled to life every spring with frantic callers reporting honeybees in their walls, or in their chimneys, or in their trees.
I was pouring Grandpa’s honey over my corn bread when he came out of the kitchen with that sly smile that said we’d have to let our breakfast go cold again. I was ten, and had been catching swarms with him for almost half my life, so I knew what was coming next. He slugged back his coffee in one gulp and wiped his mustache with the back of his arm.
“Got us another one,” he said.
This time the call came from the private tennis ranch about a mile away on Carmel Valley Road. As I climbed into the passenger seat of his rickety pickup, he tapped the gas pedal to coax it to life. The engine finally caught and we screeched out of the driveway, kicking up a spray of gravel behind us. He whizzed past the speed limit signs, which I knew from riding with Granny said to go twenty-five. We had to hurry to catch the swarm because the bees might get an idea to fly off somewhere else.
Grandpa careened into the tennis club and squealed to a stop near a cattle fence. He leaned his shoulder into his jammed door and creaked it open with a grunt. We stepped into a mini-cyclone of bees, a roaring inkblot in the sky, banking left and right like a flock of birds. My heart raced with them, frightened and awestruck at the same time. It seemed like the air was throbbing.
“Why are they doing that?” I shouted over the din.
Grandpa bent down on one knee and leaned toward my ear.
“The queen left the hive because it got too crowded inside,” he explained. “The bees followed her because they can’t live without her. She’s the only bee in the colony that lays eggs.”
I nodded to show Grandpa that I understood.
The swarm was now hovering near a buckeye tree. Every few seconds, a handful of bees darted out of the pack and disappeared into the leaves. I walked closer, and looked up to see that the bees were gathering on a branch into a ball about the size of an orange. More bees joined the cluster until it swelled to the size of a basketball, pulsating like a heart.
“The queen landed there,” Grandpa said. “The bees are protecting her.”
When the last few bees found their way to the group, the air became still again.
“Go wait for me back by the truck,” Grandpa whispered.
I leaned against the front bumper, and watched as he climbed a stepladder until he was nose-to-nose with the bees. Dozens of them crawled up his bare arms as he sawed the branch with a hacksaw. Just then a groundskeeper started up a lawn mower, startling the bees and sending them back into the air in a panic. Their buzz rose to a piercing whine, and the bees gathered into a tighter, faster circle.
“Dammit all to hell!” I heard Grandpa cuss.
He called out to the groundskeeper, and the mower sputtered off. While Grandpa waited for the swarm to settle back down into the tree, I felt something crawling on my scalp. I reached up and touched fuzz, and then felt wings and tiny legs thrashing in my hair. I tossed my head to dislodge the bee, but it only became more tangled and distressed, its buzz rising to the high pitch of a dentist’s drill. I took deep breaths to brace for what I knew was coming.
When the bee buried its stinger in my skin, the burn raced in a line from my scalp to my molars, making me clench my jaw. I frantically searched my hair again, and stifled a scream as I discovered another bee swimming in my hair, then another, my alarm radiating out wider and wider from behind my rib cage as I felt more fuzzy lumps than I could count, a small squadron of honeybees struggling with a terror equal to my own.
Then I smelled bananas—the scent bees emit to call for backup—and I knew that I was under attack. I felt another searing prick at my hairline followed by a sharp pierce behind my ear, and collapsed to my knees. I was fainting, or maybe I was praying. I thought that I might be dying. Within seconds, Grandpa had my head in his hands.
“Now try not to move,” he said. “You’ve got about five more in here. I’ll get them all out, but you might get stung again.”
Another bee stabbed me. Each sting magnified the pain until it felt like my scalp was on fire, but I grabbed the truck tire and hung on.
“How many more?” I whispered.
“Just one,” he said.
When it was all over, Grandpa took me into his arms. I rested my pounding head on his chest, which was muscled from a lifetime of lifting fifty-pound hive boxes full of honey. He gently placed his calloused hand on my neck.
“Your throat closing up?”
I showed him my biggest inhale and exhale. My lips felt oddly tingly.
“Why didn’t you call out to me?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know.
My legs were shaky, and I let Grandpa carry me to the truck and place me on the bench seat. I’d been stung before, but never by this many bees at once, and Grandpa was worried that my body might go into shock. If my face swelled up, he said, I might have to go to the emergency room. I waited with instructions to honk the horn if I couldn’t breathe as he finished sawing the branch. He shook the bees into a white wooden box and carried it to the truck bed while I reached up and checked the hot lumps on my scalp. They were tight and hard, and it seemed like they were getting bigger. I worried that pretty soon my whole head would be puffed out like a pumpkin.
Grandpa hustled back into the truck and started the engine.
“Just a minute,” he said, taking my head in his hands and exploring my scalp with his fingers. I winced, certain he was pressing marbles into my head.
“Missed one,” he said, drawing a dirty fingernail sideways across my scalp to remove the stinger. Grandpa always said that squeezing the stinger between your thumb and finger is the worst way to pull it out, because it pushes all the venom into you. He held out his palm to show me the stinger with the pinhead-sized venom sac still attached.
“It’s still going,” he said, pointing to the white organ flexing and pumping venom, oblivious that its services were no longer needed. It was gross, and made me think of a chicken running with its head cut off, and I wrinkled my nose at it. He flicked it out the window and then turned to me with a pleased look, like I had just shown him my report card with all A’s.
“You were very brave. You didn’t panic or nothin’.”
My heart cartwheeled in my chest, proud of myself for letting the bees sting me without screaming like a girl.
Back home, Grandpa added the box of bees to his collection of a half dozen hives along the back fence. The swarm was ours now, and would settle into its new home soon. Already the bees were darting out of the entrance and flying in little circles to explore their surroundings, memorizing new landmarks. In a few days’ time, they would be making honey.
As I watched Grandpa pour sugar water into a mason jar for them, I thought about what he had said about the bees following the queen because they can’t live without her. Even bees needed their mother.
The bees at the tennis ranch attacked me because their queen had fled the hive. She was vulnerable, and they were trying to protect her. Crazy with worry, they’d lashed out at the nearest thing they could find—me.
Maybe that’s why I hadn’t screamed. Because I understood. Bees act like people sometimes—they have feelings and get scared about things. You can see this is true if you hold very still and watch the way they move, notice if they flow together softly like water, or if they run over the honeycomb, shaking like they are itchy all over. Bees need the warmth of family; alone, a single bee isn’t likely to make it through the night. If their queen dies, worker bees will run frantically throughout the hive, searching for her. The colony dwindles, and the bees become dispirited and depressed, sluggishly wandering the hive instead of collecting nectar, killing time before it kills them.
I knew that gnawing need for a family. One day I had one; then it was gone overnight.
Not long before my fifth birthday, my parents divorced and I suddenly found myself on the opposite coast in California, squeezed into a bedroom with my mom and younger brother in my grandparents’ tiny house. My mother slipped under the bedcovers and into a marathon melancholy, while my father was never mentioned again. In the empty hush that followed, I struggled to make sense of what had happened. As my list of life questions grew, I worried about who was going to explain things to me.
I began following Grandpa everywhere, climbing into his pickup in the mornings and going to work with him. Thus began my education in the bee yards of Big Sur, where I learned that a beehive revolved around one principle—the family. Grandpa taught me the hidden language of bees, how to interpret their movements and sounds, and to recognize the different scents they release to communicate with hive mates. His stories about the colony’s Shakespearean plots to overthrow the queen and its hierarchy of job positions swept me away to a secret realm when my own became too difficult.
Over time, the more I discovered about the inner world of honeybees, the more sense I was able to make of the outer world of people. As my mother sank further into despair, my relationship with nature deepened. I learned how bees care for one another and work hard, how they make democratic decisions about where to forage and when to swarm, and how they plan for the future. Even their stings taught me how to be brave.
I gravitated toward bees because I sensed that the hive held ancient wisdom to teach me the things that my parents could not. It is from the honeybee, a species that has been surviving for the last 100 million years, that I learned how to persevere.
1 (#ulink_25cd391e-ec54-56e5-a2e7-99ff49164380)
Flight Path (#ulink_25cd391e-ec54-56e5-a2e7-99ff49164380)
February 1975
I didn’t see who threw it.
The pepper grinder flew end over end across the dinner table in a dreadful arc, landing on the kitchen floor in an explosion of skittering black BBs. Either my mother was trying to kill my father, or it was the other way around. With better aim it could have been possible, because it was one of those heavy mills made of dark wood, longer than my forearm.
If I had to guess, it was Mom. She couldn’t stand the silence in her marriage anymore, so she got Dad’s attention by hurling whatever was within reach. She ripped curtains from rods, chucked Matthew’s baby blocks into walls and smashed dishes on the floor to make sure we knew she meant business. It was her way of refusing to become invisible. It worked. I learned to keep my back to the wall and my eyes on her at all times.
Tonight, her pent-up fury radiated off her body in waves, turning her alabaster skin a bright pink. A familiar dread pooled in my belly as I held my breath and studied the wallpaper pattern of ivy leaves winding around copper pots and rolling pins, terrified that the slightest sound from me would redirect the invisible white-hot beam between my parents and leave a puff of smoke where once a five-year-old girl used to be. I recognized this stillness before the storm, the momentary pause of utensils held aloft before the verbal car crash to come. Nobody moved, not even my two-year-old brother, frozen mid-Cheerio in his high chair. Dad calmly set down his fork and asked Mom if she planned to pick that mess up.
Mom dropped her paper napkin on top of her untouched dinner; we were eating American chop suey again—an economical mishmash of elbow macaroni, ground beef and whatever canned vegetables we had, mixed with tomato sauce. She lit a cigarette, long and slow, and then blew smoke in Dad’s direction. I expected him to take his normal course of action, to unfold his long body from the chair, disappear into the living room and crank the Beatles so loud that he couldn’t hear her. But tonight he just stayed seated, arms crossed, his coal-colored eyes boring at Mom through the smoke. She flicked her ash into her plate without breaking his stare. He watched her, disgust etched into his face.
“You promised to quit.”
“Changed my mind,” she said, inhaling so deeply I could hear the tobacco crackle.
Dad slapped the table and the silverware clattered. My brother startled, then his lower lip curled down and his breath hitched as he wound up for a full-body cry. Mom exhaled in Dad’s direction again and narrowed her eyes. My nerves hopped like a bead of water in a frying pan as I nervously tapped my fingers on my thigh under the table, counting the seconds as I waited for one of them to pounce. When I counted to seven, I noticed the beginnings of a sardonic smile at the corners of Mom’s mouth. She stubbed her cigarette out on her plate, rose and sidestepped the peppercorns, then stomped into the kitchen. I heard her banging pots, and then a lid clattered to the ground, ringing a few times before it settled on the floor. She was up to something, and that was never good.
Mom returned to the table with a steaming pot, still warm from the stove. She lifted it over her head and I screamed, worried she would burn Dad dead. He screeched his chair back, stood up and dared her to throw it. My stomach lurched, as if the table and chairs had suddenly lifted off the floor and spun me too fast like one of those carnival teacup rides.
I closed my eyes and wished for a time machine so I could go back to just last year, when my parents still talked to each other. If I could just pinpoint that moment right before everything went wrong, I could fix it somehow and prevent this day from ever happening. Maybe I’d show them the forgotten box of Kodachrome slides in the basement, the evidence that they loved each other once. When I first held the paper squares to the sunlight, I’d discovered that Mom’s face was once full of laughter, and she used to wear short dresses and shiny white boots and smoke her cigarettes through a long stick like a movie star. She still had the same short boy haircut, but it was a brighter shade of red then, and her eyes seemed more emerald. In every slide Mom was smiling or winking over her shoulder at Dad. He took the photos not long after he’d spotted her registering for classes at Monterey Peninsula College, and invited her for a drive down the coast to Big Sur.
He’d recognized her from a few summer parties. She had been the one with the loud laugh, the funny one with a natural audience always in tow. He noticed how easily she flowed in a crowd of strangers, which drew my quiet father out of the corners. He was raised never to speak unless spoken to, and liked to study people before deciding to talk to them. This made him slightly mysterious to my mother, who was drawn by the challenge of getting the tall stranger with the dramatic widow’s peak and smoky eyes to open up. When he told her his plan to join the navy and travel abroad after college, Mom, who had never been outside California, was sold.
They married in 1966, and within four years the navy relocated them to Newport, Rhode Island, where Matthew and I were born. After his service, Dad worked as an electrical engineer, making machines that calibrated other machines. Mom took us on strolls to the butcher and the grocery store, and made sure dinner was on the table at five. On the outside, our lives seemed neat, organized, on track. We lived in a wood-shingled row apartment, and my brother and I had our own rooms on the second floor, connected by a trail of Lincoln Logs and Lite-Brite pins and gobs of Play-Doh dropped where we’d last used them. Dad installed a swing on the front porch, and we played with the neighbor kids who lived in the three identical homes attached to ours. On weekend mornings, Dad came into my room and we identified clouds as they passed my bedroom window, pointing out the dinosaurs and mushrooms and flying saucers. Before going to sleep, he read to me from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and even though every story ended in a violent death of some kind, he never said I was too little to hear such things.
It seemed like we were happy, but my parents’ marriage was already curdling.
I imagine they tried at first to manage their squabbles, but eventually their disagreements multiplied and spread like a cancer until they had trapped themselves inside one big argument. Now Mom’s shouting routinely pierced the walls we shared with the neighbors, so their problems had undoubtedly become public.
I opened my eyes and saw Mom standing there in position, ready to throw the pot of American chop suey. Their threats arrowed back and forth, back and forth, his restrained monotone mixing with her rising falsetto until their words blended into a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I tried to make it go away by softly humming “Yellow Submarine.” It’s the song Dad and I sang together with wooden spoons as our microphones. Back when music filled our house. Dad recorded every Beatles song off the radio or vinyl records onto spools of tape, which he kept in bone-colored plastic cases on the bookshelf, lined up like teeth. He listened to tapes on his reel-to-reel player, and lately he preferred “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” the one about the man who bludgeoned his enemies to death, blasting it from the living room until Mom inevitably told him to turn that racket down.
I was somewhere in the second verse when I saw her lift her arm, and the pot handle released from her palm seemingly in slow motion. Dad ducked, and our leftover dinner flashed through the air and slapped into the wall, where it slid down, leaving a slick behind as it pooled with the peppercorns on the floor. Dad picked the pot up from near his foot and stood, his whole body quivering with silent rage. He dropped the pot onto the table with a loud thud, not even bothering to put it on a hot plate like he was supposed to. Matthew was wailing now, lifting his arms to be picked up, and Mom went to him, as if nothing had just happened. She bounced Matthew, shushing softly into his ear, her back to Dad and me. Dad turned on his heel and escaped to the attic, where he would spend the night tapping out Morse code on his ham radio in conversation with polite strangers.
I didn’t bother asking permission to leave the dinner table. I made a run for the staircase, two-stepped it up to my room and slammed the door. I pulled my Flintstones bedspread off and dragged it under my bouncy horse. It was a plastic horse held aloft by four coiled springs—one on each leg attached to a metal frame. I put my feet under its felt belly, and pushed it up and down until I’d established a soothing rhythm. I curtained my eyes with my shoulder-length hair, blotting out reality so that I could almost believe that I was safe inside a yellow submarine, below the surface, alone, and so far down I couldn’t hear any voices at all.
Although I didn’t understand why my parents fought so much, deep down I understood that something significant was shifting inside our house. Dad had stopped using his words, and Mom had started using too many. I tried to make sense of it by gleaning bits of information I overheard whenever my godmother, Betty, dropped by while Dad was at work. Mom and Betty would sit on the couch and talk about all sorts of things while Betty would play with my hair. Matthew would go down for his nap, and I’d sit on the carpet between their legs where Betty could reach down and absentmindedly wind long strands of my brown hair around her fingers. She’d twist my locks into knotted snakes and then let it unfurl, over and over, while she and Mom worked out their problems. She’d coil my hair tight, then release. Twist, tug, release. Twist, tug, release. It felt like getting a deep itch scratched, a tingling scalp massage that could go on as long as it took them to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes.
They talked the afternoons away, and I stayed so quiet that they forgot about me and got to discussing things I probably shouldn’t have heard. Mostly I learned that men are disappointing. That they promise the moon, but then don’t bring home enough money for groceries. I overheard Mom say that Dad might lose his job because his boss was doing something called “downsizing.”
“Layoffs?” Betty asked. Twist, tug, twist, tug.
“Apparently,” Mom said. “They’re letting all the junior engineers go.”
“Shit on a shingle.”
“You said it.”
“What will you do?” Twist, tug.
“Hell if I know.”
Betty tugged on my hair once more and let it uncoil from her index finger. I stayed statue quiet, ear hustling. They were silent for a few minutes, and Betty switched to scratching my scalp, sending pollywogs of ecstasy squiggling down my neck. Mom got up and fetched two more Tab sodas from the fridge and cracked them open, handing one to Betty. Mom plunked back down onto the sofa and put her feet up on the sagging ottoman. She sighed so hard it sounded like she was deflating.
“Honestly, Betty, I don’t think marriage is all it’s cracked up to be. I’m thirty and feel like ninety.”
Betty shifted her heavy legs, unsticking them from the Naugahyde and stretching them out lengthwise. She attempted a forward bend, but couldn’t reach her hands much past her knees. She grunted with effort and sat back up. She pushed aside the curtains and looked out the window.
“You think being single is all rainbows and unicorns?”
Mom blew a wedge of smoke out one side of her mouth and dropped her stub into an empty pink soda can where it hissed out. “At the rate this is going,” Mom said, “I’d be happy to change places.”
Betty turned back and looked directly at Mom, to make sure she had her full attention. “Sometimes it’s lonely.”
“It’s better to be lonely alone than lonely married.”
Betty cocked an eyebrow at Mom as if to say she wanted proof. Mom launched into Exhibit A—the time she was returning from a walk with me in the buggy, and Dad hollered down to her from the upstairs window to come quick. Terrified something was wrong with Matthew, she left me in the buggy on the sidewalk and streaked into the house and up the stairs, only to find the crisis was a diaper that needed changing.
Mom’s voice turned indignant. “Isn’t child rearing supposed to be fifty-fifty?”
Betty let out a low commiserating whistle. I wanted to ask if Mom ever went back outside for me in the buggy, but knew it wasn’t the time to remind them I was listening.t
“Betty, listen to me. Don’t marry anyone without first asking one crucial question.”
Betty’s fingers froze in my hair temporarily, waiting for the secret to marital bliss.
“Ask if he’s willing to change diapers. Depending on his answer, he’ll treat you as his equal, or his employee.”
I lifted my head like a cat to prod Betty’s fingertips and remind her of her job. Her fingers automatically hooked a strand of my hair and began winding it into a knot. I knew that I was not to repeat anything that was said on the couch. It made me feel a little squirmy to eavesdrop on them, but I liked the head scratching too much to pull myself away.
I must have fallen asleep under the bouncy horse, because I didn’t remember how I got into bed when Mom pushed open my bedroom door with such force it slammed into the wall, jarring me awake. She yanked open dresser drawers, and tossed fistfuls of my clothing into a white suitcase with satiny orange lining. I sat up and tried to adjust my focus, but she was moving so fast she stayed blurry.
“Five minutes,” she said, standing still for a second. “I’m going to get your brother. Be dressed by the time I get back.”
Mom whizzed out of my room. It was dark outside. My body felt like concrete, and I didn’t want to go out into the cold. Mom had done this before. She’d shake us awake in the middle of the night, hurry us into snow pants and hats and mittens, and run down the stairs screaming that she was going to run away. Dad would let her scurry around the house packing until she tired herself out, then he’d eventually get her to sit next to him on the couch to talk. He had a low soothing voice, and she was like a too-loud TV. From the top of the stairs, I’d listen until there was no more yelling and I heard her sniffling, the signal that the argument had passed and it was time for everybody to go back to sleep.
I decided to wait Mom out this time. When she reappeared in my door frame with Matthew on her hip, I was still sitting like a question mark in bed.
“Where are we going?”
“Not now, Meredith. I’m in no mood.”
Balancing my brother in one arm, she tugged off my pajamas and wrestled me into daytime clothes. Mom was scooting me toward the door when I turned back.
“Can I bring Morris?”
Morris was a stuffed pink cat with a skirt that my parents had bought at a drugstore on the way home from the navy hospital nursery after I was born. I had named him Morris after the cat in the TV commercial, and he was my most prized possession. I had grown so dependent on him, especially lately, that I couldn’t fall asleep if he wasn’t tucked under my arm. Mom nodded her permission, and I dug around my sheets, grabbing him just seconds before Mom led me out of the room by my wrist.
As Mom was helping me into my coat in the hallway, Dad passed by, his shoulders slumped in defeat. He opened the front door and walked out into the chilly air. I ran to the living room window and watched as he started up the Volvo under the light of the porch. His breath came in silver puffs as he scraped frost from the windshield. I watched him lift the suitcase into the trunk and get into the driver’s seat while Mom strapped Matthew in the car seat and then came back inside for me. I clutched Morris closer to my chest, and rubbed my chin back and forth against the soft fleece of his pink ears.
“Where are we going?” I asked again, softer this time. Mom zipped up my puffy jacket and put her hands on my shoulders.
“California. To visit Granny and Grandpa.”
Her voice warbled, but she forced a smile and I brightened just a bit. Last summer Granny and Grandpa came for a visit, and because they were guests there was no fighting in our house for a whole week. Grandpa and Dad took me to the beach and taught me how to bodysurf, letting the waves lift and slingshot me into the hissing foam until I glided to a stop on my belly in the sand. Grandpa put me on his shoulders and dug quahogs out of the mud with his toes, teaching me how to spot spurts of water where the clams were siphoning. We brought home a whole bucket and shucked them in the kitchen for dinner. Maybe there’d be quahogs in California.
Inside the car, Mom turned away from Dad and drew wet lines on the frosty window with her finger. Matthew fell back asleep with his head bent toward me, his light brown hair falling into his eyes and his little red lips making a puff noise instead of an actual snore. Unlike me, who came into the world screaming, my brother arrived, blinked twice and smiled. Mom liked to say that I had apparently used up all the fussy and left none for him. It was true; Matthew’s soul was calm and trusting. He was a boy who assumed goodness in everyone. What three-year-old smiled while you took candy out of his hand, certain the game would end with something even better in return? I could feel Matthew’s trust in humankind when he curled his hand around my index finger and toddled in a tipsy lockstep with me, certain I wouldn’t let him fall. He followed me everywhere, plucking words out of my sentences and parroting them like my own personal backup singer. It was for those kinds of things that I loved him fiercely, even though he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. But he knew one word that bonded me to him for life. Whenever he awoke from a nap and saw me walk into his room, he’d stand and reach for me with chubby starfish hands.
“Mare-miss!” he’d shout.
I had a super fan, and his adoration gave me a profound sense of distinction.
Dad shifted gears with punching force, and I hugged my knees to my chest and rocked in the back seat, silently willing someone to speak. Mom spoke just once on the ninety-minute drive to the airport in Boston; she asked Dad to detour to Fall River so she could stop at a friend’s house to say a quick goodbye. When we finally pulled into the airport parking lot, suddenly everything was moving too fast. Doors opened and slammed. The four of us speed-walked in silence. As the glass panels of the revolving door spun around us, I felt like I was falling down a well. I didn’t understand what was happening, other than it was big, and that I wasn’t supposed to ask about it. I grabbed Mom’s hand and held on.
Dad bought our tickets and handed our suitcase to the woman behind the counter, and I watched it glide away on a conveyor belt and disappear through an opening in the wall. When we reached the gate, Dad brought me to the window and pointed out the plane we were going to take to visit Granny and Grandpa. It gleamed in the morning light, a sleek bird with upturned wings, and I felt a flutter inside, imagining myself soaring inside it. I peppered Dad with questions—how high would the plane go, how did it stay in the air, would he sit next to me? When it was time to board, Dad knelt down and squeezed me so hard that I felt him shaking.
“You be good, kiddo,” he said, forcing a smile. “Love you.”
My body suddenly turned cold. I felt something rip inside my stomach as Dad sank into an airport chair and Mom tugged me toward the door leading to the plane. This wasn’t right. Dad was supposed to come with us. Mom pulled me by the arm as I leaned in the opposite direction, unwilling to take another step without Dad.
“Come ON,” she huffed.
“What about Dad?” I demanded, digging in my heels. But she was stronger, and I was forced to hop in her direction as I struggled against her weight.
“Don’t make a scene.”
I let myself go slack. Conversation around me became muffled, like I was underwater. I fell silent, feeling myself get pulled into the breezeway, and when I looked back to find Dad, there were too many people behind me, blocking my view. My mind swirled as I let Mom steer me down the aisle and into a window seat, where I pressed my forehead to the chilly oval until I saw a tall figure with ink-black hair and plaid pants standing behind the plate glass of the terminal. Dad looked like he was in a television. I lifted my hand, but he didn’t see me. He didn’t move from his spot as the plane pushed back from the gate. I kept my eyes locked on him until he became smaller and smaller, until the plane turned away.
During the flight, Mom blew smoke at the folding tray in front of her and picked at her copper-colored nail polish with trembling hands. She seemed to be crumbling. I snuck peeks at her while pretending to draw in the coloring book the stewardess had given me. Mom still looked pretty to me, but her skin seemed grayer under the overhead light. At home, she was careful about the way she looked, and never went outside without first covering her freckles with beige cream and putting shimmery blue shadow on her eyes. I liked to watch her ritual, and all the tools that came with it. A blow-dryer to make her short curly hair stand up higher, fat brushes to put pink powder on her cheeks, and that clamper thing she squeezed on her eyelashes to curl them up. Sometimes she’d let me choose her lipstick from dozens of tubes she kept in the bathroom. The final touch was a cloud of smelly spray all around her head, to make her hair stay in place.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a little chubby, as long as you have a pretty face,” she’d say, threading gold wire hoops through her ears. She never left the house with out her movie-star sunglasses, two big brown circles as large as drink coasters.
Mom had some rolls around her middle but her legs were thin, so she covered her shape with dresses that had busy designs and loud colors. The dresses stopped above her knee, which made her look like a bouquet of flowers on two stems. I thought she was beautiful. My favorite part of watching her get dressed was when she picked out her shoes. She kept a row of heels in a perfect line on her closet floor, toes facing in, in every color of the rainbow. I wasn’t allowed to touch her things, but I admired her footwear, imagining myself perched high like a lady, strutting down the sidewalk to my grown-up job. Once she’d put on her outfit, she’d turn left and right in the mirror and ask me if she looked fat. I never thought so, but she always looked disappointed when she looked at her reflection.
At least once a month, she got dressed up to visit the Vanderbilt mansion. The towering limestone “summer cottage” had seventy rooms and looked like six houses pushed together, perched on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic. It was a five-minute drive from our apartment, and we entered through the wrought-iron gates, Mom’s dress rustling softly and Charlie perfume wafting behind her, as she pushed Matthew in the stroller past topiaries clipped to scientifically precise triangles, the pea gravel pathway crunching underfoot. We never went inside for the tour, but we had our favorite bench where Mom had a view of the top floor windows. My brother picked pebbles out for me to throw into the garden fountains as she conducted surveillance on the windows, hoping for a glimpse of one of the heirs who reportedly lived in the attic apartment.
Mom was absolutely engrossed during her mansion visits, as if familiarizing herself with opulence so that she’d be ready when prosperity came for her. She read books with Pygmalion plots about regular people being plucked from obscurity for greatness, gravitated toward movies about unearthing hidden treasure, and game shows of all kind. Mom was a dreamer without a plan, and as the years piled up without her Cinderella transformation, she felt more and more cheated out of the grandeur she was entitled to, and increasingly disappointed in my father for not providing it. She was forever waiting for life to happen to her and becoming more befuddled as to why it was not.
The plane made a little hop as it encountered some weather, and I snuck another glance Mom’s way. She appeared drowsy, her eyes open but no expression behind them. Wadded Kleenex collected in her lap, and black makeup ran down her cheeks, smudged in places where she’d tried to wipe it away so it looked like bruises. Every once in a while she gave out a long, body-slumping sigh that sounded like all the air was coming out of her. I patted her arm, and she put her hand over mine absentmindedly. I wanted to ask why Dad wasn’t coming with us, but knew I wouldn’t get an answer. Even though her body was in the chair next to mine, her mind was somewhere else. I flipped the metal cover of the ashtray embedded in the armrest—open, closed, open, closed—hoping the noise would become so irritating that she’d have to talk, to tell me to knock it off.
If only Mom would say something. I wanted her to cry, or shout, or throw something to send me a signal that things were still the same. But she was eerily quiet, and that was terrifying. At least with an outburst, I could tell what was on her mind. Silence was not her style, so that meant something serious was happening. Dread dripped in the back of my throat, an acrid taste like burned walnuts.
I tried to keep a vigil over her, but eventually the engine hum inside the cabin lulled me to sleep. I dreamed there was a small reservoir in the floor of the plane near my feet, with a long lever protruding from it. I unfastened Matthew’s seat belt and shoved him into the hole and pulled the lever. Hissing steam rose, and when I released my grip, Matthew had turned into a blue glass totem, about the size of a soda can. He was trapped in the glass, and I could hear him screaming to be let out. I shoved him into my pocket, promising him that I would turn him back into a boy, but for now, this was the best way to keep him safe until we arrived at Granny and Grandpa’s house.
My intuition was telling me that I needed to protect my little brother. During the flight, I could sense that Mom was receding from us. I felt a slipping away that I couldn’t put words to, a change as subtle as growing taller that couldn’t be perceived until it had already happened. By the time we landed, her eyes were vacant and looked right through me. Somewhere thirty thousand feet up over Middle America, she had relinquished parenthood.
2 (#ulink_c69e8154-7122-514b-bb7d-0d647c4dac80)
Honey Bus (#ulink_c69e8154-7122-514b-bb7d-0d647c4dac80)
Next Day—1975
Granny was waiting for us at the Monterey Peninsula Airport, standing with arms crossed in a wool dress and a crisp, high-collared blouse with puffy sleeves. Her tawny bouffant was salon-sculpted into frozen waves, and protected by a clear plastic headscarf tied under her chin to shield her hairdo from the elements. She was an exclamation point of perfect posture, jutting above the glut of less-mannered travelers flagrantly kissing their relatives in public. She scrutinized our approach through cat-eye glasses, lips pursed in a thin line. When Mom saw her, she let out a wounded cry, and reached for a hug just as Granny pulled out a wadded hanky from her sleeve cuff and held it out to Mom to avoid an embarrassing scene. Mom took it and just stood there, unsure of what to do. Granny observed manners, and one did not blubber in public.
“Let’s have a seat,” Granny whispered, grabbing Mom’s elbow and guiding her to the row of hard plastic chairs. Mom blew her nose and gulped back sobs as Granny made soft clucking noises and rubbed her back. I stood there awkwardly, looking while at the same time trying not to look. Granny handed Matthew and me two quarters from her coin purse and pointed to a row of chairs with small black-and-white televisions mounted on the armrests. Delighted, we ran to the chairs to watch a TV show while Mom and Granny had a Very Important Conversation. Matthew and I squeezed together in one of the chairs, dropped the quarter in and spun the dial until we landed on a cartoon.
When Granny and Mom finally stood up to go, we were the last people left in the boarding area. Granny came over, and I instinctively stopped slouching. “Your mother is just tired,” she said, leaning down to kiss my cheek. She smelled like lavender soap.
Matthew and I rode in the wayback of Granny’s mustard-yellow station wagon, far enough from Granny and Mom so we couldn’t hear what they were saying. I looked out the back window to inspect California sliding past. It was February, but oddly there wasn’t any snow. We drove over rolling brown hills with horse ranches and up a steep grade with hairpin turns, pushing the car higher and higher. The car groaned with effort, and my stomach dropped when I realized that we were on top of a ring of mountains, like we were driving on the edge of a gargantuan bowl. Beneath us, the earth fell away in deep folds and grooves all the way to the valley below, and an idea came to me that we must be driving over the dinosaurs, whose bodies had turned into mountains after they’d died.
I also noticed that the trees in California were different—solitary, massive oaks with outstretched octopus arms twisting just a few feet above the ground, nothing at all like the fiery maples or crowded forests of skinny birch trees back home. When we finally started to descend, I could see all of Carmel Valley below us, a vast green basin with a silver river snaking along one side of it. My ears popped on the way down until we reached the bottom of the bowl, the mountains now a towering fortress around us. Carmel Valley felt like a secret garden in one of my fairy tales, sealed off from the rest of the universe. It was warmer here, and the sun seemed to slow everything down: the ambling pickup trucks, the sleepy crows, the unhurried river.
We drove by a community park and public swimming pool, then made a right turn onto Via Contenta and passed an elementary school with tennis courts. The rest of the residential street was lined with one-story ranch homes separated by juniper hedges and oak trees for privacy. Granny slowed in front of a volunteer fire station where some men were washing red engines out front, passed a small cul-de-sac with a handful of identical wood-shingled bungalows, and then reached her destination—a small red home perched in the middle of an acre of land, bordered on four sides by overgrown trees.
Granny skipped her front gravel driveway and instead took the back way to the house, turning onto a short dirt lane that ran along her fence and was canopied by a row of mammoth walnut trees with branches reaching all the way to the ground, engulfing us in a tunnel of green leaves. Walnut shells popped under our tires as we followed the curving drive to the backyard. She parked next to a clothesline, where her square-dancing petticoats were flapping in the breeze.
Granny took great pride in living on one of the largest lots on her street, and she was quick to remind anyone who forgot that she was among the first residents of Carmel Valley Village, arriving in 1931 from Pennsylvania with her mother when she was eight. They’d driven across the country in a convertible Nash Coupe after Granny’s father had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, because her mother wanted to escape the tragedy in a warmer place with good swimming. This history, Granny believed, conferred on her a pedigree that allowed her to complain about the influx of newcomers over the next forty years. However, she was comforted that the oak, walnut and eucalyptus trees demarcating her property had grown to screen the neighbors from view. And the neighbors in turn were spared the sight of Grandpa’s accumulating junk heaps that now pervaded the king-size lot.
I stepped out of the car and saw several haystack-size piles of tree trimmings, at least three toolsheds, mounds of gravel and bricks, two rusting military jeeps, a flatbed trailer, a backhoe and two beaten-down pickups. A trellis of grapevines led in a sloping line from the laundry to the back fence, where there was a small city of stacking beehives resting on cinder blocks, each one four and five wooden boxes high. From this far away, it looked like a mini-metropolis of white filing cabinets.
Something caught my eye through the billowing laundry. I walked through the rainbow of swirling skirts to get closer, and found myself standing before a faded green military bus. Rain had chewed away a ring of rust holes around the roof, leaving brown streaks trailing down its sides. Weeds choked the tires, its wraparound front windshield was cracked and cloudy, and a massive rhubarb bush sprouted from under the front bumper. It seemed to have driven right out of World War II and wheezed to a stop right by Grandpa’s vegetable garden, from an era when vehicles were all fat curves instead of sleek edges, making the bus look more animal than machine. The rounded hood was sculpted like the snout of a lion, with vent holes for nostrils and globe headlight eyes that stared back at me. Below its nose was a row of grinning grille teeth, and under that, a dented metal bumper that looked an awful lot like a lower lip. In peeling white paint above the windshield, it read U.S. ARMY 20930527. Captivated by the incongruity of it, I felt compelled to investigate.
Kicking a path through waist-high weeds, I tried to see inside but the windows were too high. I circled to the back of the bus, and near the tailpipe I found a crooked stack of wooden pallets that improvised as stairs leading to a narrow door. I scrambled up, the makeshift staircase wobbling beneath me, and pressed my nose to the filmy glass.
Inside, all the seats were gone, and in their place was some sort of factory of whirligigs, crankshaft gears and pipes. A metal basin about the size of a hot tub rested on the floor, and contained a hefty flywheel powered by pulleys as large as manhole covers. Behind the driver’s seat were two massive steel barrels with cheesecloth stretched across their open tops. An overhead network of galvanized steel pipes was suspended from the ceiling with fishing lines.
The equipment ran the length of one wall, and on the other side Grandpa had stacked a bunch of wooden boxes, each about six inches tall and two feet wide, and painted white. Each rectangular box, taken straight from his hives, was open on the top and bottom and contained ten removable wood-framed sheets of wax honeycomb. The frames hung in neat rows, supported by notches inside the box. I would later learn from Grandpa that these were the “honey supers,” the removable top-tier boxes of a modular beehive where the bees stored nectar in the wax honeycomb and thickened it into honey by fanning their wings. The supers rested atop the larger brood boxes at the base of the hive where the queen lays her eggs.
There must have been three dozen boxes of honeycomb inside the bus. Glistening honey trickled down the stacks, collecting in shiny pools on the black rubber floor.
I could see glass jars on the dashboard that had turned purple in the sun, and sunflower-yellow bricks of beeswax that Grandpa had made by melting wax honeycomb and straining it through pantyhose into bread pans to harden. Electrical cords snaked everywhere, and construction lights dangled from the ceiling handrails. I cupped my hands over my eyes to shield the glare, and from out of the shadows someone inside pressed their nose to mine. I startled and nearly fell backward, just as Grandpa popped out the back door.
“Boo!” he said.
Bees buzzed around his head, and he slammed the door quickly to keep them from getting inside the bus. He was wearing threadbare Levi’s a couple inches too short and no shirt. He had Einstein hair sticking out every which way, as if electricity had just zapped through it, and a round face tanned to a chestnut color that settled into an expression of bemusement with life, as if he was forever chuckling at a private joke. In one hand he held a can with smoke pouring out of a spout on top. He yanked a tuft of green grass out of the ground, jammed it into the spout to stifle the flame and set his bee smoker on a pile of bricks. Then he dropped down on one knee and opened his arms wide, signaling me to fall into them.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, squeezing me tight.
I peeled my arms from Grandpa’s neck and pointed at the bus.
“Can I go in?”
His workshop held a Willy Wonka–like spell over me. He’d built it himself, out of hand-me-down beekeeping equipment and spare plumbing parts, and powered it with a gas-powered motor taken from a lawn mower. When he bottled honey inside during the hottest days of summer, the whole bus rumbled as if it were about to drive off, and the indoor temperature shot above one hundred. Nothing in his secret workshop was official, or safety-checked, and the sweltering, sticky danger of it all made entry that much more irresistible. It seemed like magic to me that Grandpa brought honey supers inside, and emerged hours later with jars of golden honey that tasted like sunlight. Grandpa had the power to harness nature, like Zeus, and I wanted him to teach me how.
Grandpa stood up and blew his nose into a grease-stained rag, then shoved it in his back pocket.
“My honey bus? It’s not a place for little kids,” he said. “Maybe when you’re fifty, like me.” The bus was too hot and dangerous inside, he said. I could lose a finger.
Grandpa reached his long arm to the roof of the bus, where he’d stashed a piece of rebar that was bent at a right angle. He inserted one end of the rod into a hole where the back door handle used to be, and twisted to lock the bus. Then he put the homemade key back on top of the bus, out of my reach.
“Franklin, would you come get the suitcase!” Granny called out, in a way that sounded more like an order than a question. Granny had honed her leadership skills with decades of practice keeping elementary schoolchildren in line. I was a little afraid of her, and always tried to be on good behavior because her presence inherently demanded it. Not only of me, but of everyone in her orbit. Grandpa’s ears perked at the sound of her voice.
I followed Grandpa to the station wagon. He fetched our one shared suitcase from the back and we walked to the front door, trailed by a handful of bees attracted to the honey stuck to Grandpa’s boots.
My grandparents lived in a tiny red house with a flat, white gravel roof that looked like year-round snow. Grandpa said it turned away the sun and was cheaper than air-conditioning. The house had two bedrooms, and a kitchen wrapped by an L-shaped room with redwood paneling that served as both the living and dining room. A large brick fireplace that took up half of one wall was the main source of heat. Next to it was a windup grandfather clock, and on the opposite side of the house, floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Santa Lucia Mountains, which formed a natural barrier between our house and Big Sur on the other side. The kitchen was painted baby blue and was home to Grandpa’s black dachshund, Rita, who slept under the stool next to the washing machine. There was one bathroom, decorated with brown-and-silver-striped wallpaper, and a low-flow showerhead that misted weakly.
Granny led us to the spare bedroom that used to be Mom’s when she was a girl. It had since been painted a cantaloupe color. I stepped inside and immediately saw my world shrink: Matthew would sleep in a cot in the corner, and I would share the double bed with Mom. We would put our clothes into a Victorian marble-topped vanity with two lavender-scented drawers. My room in Rhode Island suddenly seemed like a castle in comparison to this small box, so crowded by beds there was no space to play.
Mom immediately closed the curtains to the sun, sending a shadow over the walls. Granny steered Matthew and me back into the hallway.
“Your mother needs some peace and quiet,” she whispered. “Go on and play outside.”
Granny had a voice that never suggested, but always instructed. We immediately understood the first unspoken rule of our new home—Granny was in charge. She would be the one to set our daily routine, plan the meals and make decisions for Mom, Grandpa, us.
Mom didn’t join us for dinner that night, so Granny put a bowl of tomato soup and toast on a tray for her instead. She set a crystal vase with a rose next to the bowl, like hotel service.
“Someone get the door,” Granny said, standing before Mom’s bedroom.
I twisted the doorknob and pushed, sending a wedge of yellow light into the darkened room, and a plume of cigarette smoke billowed out. The air was so thick I could feel it pour into my lungs as I inhaled. I took a step back and let Granny go in first. She gently approached the bed, where Mom was curled in a fetal position, crying softly. A glass ashtray the color of amber rested on the headboard, filled with a cone of ash.
“Sally?”
Mom moaned by way of answer.
“You should eat something.”
Mom uncurled herself and sat up. She winced and squeezed her temples.
“Migraine,” she whispered. Her voice was so thin, it sounded like it might tear. Granny flicked on the light, and I could see Mom’s face was flushed and her eyes were puffy.
“Tylenol?” Granny offered, fishing the plastic bottle out of her pocket and rattling it.
Mom extended her arm, and Granny dropped two pills in her palm. Granny held out a water glass and Mom gulped twice, handed it back, then flopped back down into the pillows.
“The light,” she said.
I reached up and turned it back off.
Mom seemed so weak, like she couldn’t even hold her head up. I thought of that time I found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. It was pink, and I could see the blue of its bulging eyes that had yet to open. The poor thing’s head lolled to the side when I tried to pick it up.
“I’ll just leave this here,” Granny said, setting the tray at the foot of the bed. Mom waved it away. Granny stood over the bed for a few seconds, waiting for Mom to change her mind. She bent down and adjusted the pillows to make Mom more comfortable, then Mom closed her eyes again and turned away from us. Granny picked up the tray and we shuffled out.
That first night Matthew slept in his new cot, while I crawled into the big bed where Mom was burrowed into the middle, the sheets tightly wound around her like a burrito. I carefully tugged on the sheet, trying not to wake her. She mumbled in her sleep and half-heartedly tugged back, then scooted aside to make room for me. She sniffled and fell into a light snore.
I moved to the edge of the mattress, as far as I could possibly be from Mom without falling out of the bed. I faced the window, which ran the length of the wall, tracing the moonlight that leaked in around the perimeter of the curtains with my finger. I didn’t want our bodies to touch, as if her tears were contagious.
I felt twitchy and sleep wouldn’t come. I wondered what Dad was doing at that moment, if he was walking through the empty rooms of our house, changing his mind and deciding to come to California after all. I hoped that whatever had just happened to our family was temporary, but I didn’t understand what had broken, so I couldn’t imagine how to fix it. I had a new uneasiness in the pit of my stomach because I now knew the injustice of random bad luck, that it was possible to have a family one day and lose it the next. I wanted to know why I was being singled out for punishment, and tried to retrace my steps to pinpoint what I had done wrong to have my life upended this way. It was baffling, but I had the sense that going forward, I had to choose my words, and my steps, more carefully, so I could do my part to comfort my mother and slowly, craftily, coax her happiness back. I had to be good, and patient, and maybe my luck would turn around.
Mom’s and Matthew’s snores settled into a syncopated rhythm, and I tried to match my breathing to theirs so I could relax into sleep. I lay motionless and fell into a self-induced trance, humming “Yellow Submarine” quietly until I receded somewhere deep inside my skull and blinked out.
Over the next few weeks, Mom remained bedridden. Granny tried various strategies to cheer her up and brought her all sorts of bedside meals, trying to find something she could stomach. But Mom refused most of it, accepting only sugary coffee, canned soda and the occasional bowl of cottage cheese. Granny fetched hot pads for her back, cold compresses for her forehead and murder mysteries from the library. Still Mom’s migraines wouldn’t go away. When she complained of sore muscles, Granny dug around in the hall closet and produced a gadget that looked like a handheld electric mixer; only this thing had one stem protruding from it that ended in a flat metal disc. Granny plugged it in and the disc heated up and vibrated. She sat on the bed and moved the vibrator across Mom’s back in lazy arcs, loosening the tension while Mom sighed with relief.
My brother and I were not allowed in the bedroom during daytime because Mom needed to recuperate, but Granny would sit at her bedside for hours in deep conversation, and despite my eavesdropping I caught only snatches of it. Mostly I heard Granny reassuring Mom that it wasn’t her fault, that she could put this behind her, that men were worthless when you really get right down to it, and not worth this much fussing over. I’d hear Mom sniffling and asking wounded questions. Why me? What am I supposed to do now? What did I ever do to deserve this? Her questions were similar to my own, and I strained to hear an answer from Granny that would explain. One never came, and eventually I grew weary of spying and gave up.
Spring came, and the almond tree in the front yard erupted in white flowers. Mom entered her third month of bed rest, yet her despondency only grew. Mom’s bad luck invoked in Granny an inexhaustible pity. While Granny gave Mom a safe haven and unlimited time to regain her strength, she worked double-time to hold up appearances that my younger brother and I weren’t really semiorphans. She never spoke to us about what was happening to our mother, instead forging ahead as if nothing was amiss. Granny bought and washed our clothes, took us to the doctor for checkups, made us brush our teeth before bed and wrote scathing letters to our father demanding he send more money to support us. Granny adapted to her second motherhood with a sense of family duty, which gave Mom permission to carve out a new identity as a woman scorned. Granny looked after Matthew and me in an obligatory way, without the affection she reserved for her daughter. Mom was her child, and we were more like unexpected foster kids. In her most frustrated moments, she blamed Matthew and me for ruining her life plans, letting us know that if it weren’t for that no-good father of ours, she could have been enjoying her retirement.
Her suggestion to go outside and play became a refrain. Granny now had more laundry to do, more food to make, more dirt tracked in the house to clean up and she couldn’t keep up with it if we were constantly underfoot.
Outside there was plenty to mess with, and as we were loosely supervised by our grandparents, we were free to roam the yard as long as I kept an eye on my little brother. That first summer Matthew and I gorged on Grandpa’s blackberry vines until our lips and fingertips were purple. We climbed into two hollowed-out army jeeps rusting in the yard and drove them through dozens of imaginary wars. We unearthed plastic soldiers and old glass marbles that someone had buried in “olden times,” and we came upon an enormous pruning pile that Grandpa had been contributing to since before we were born—a colossal hill of fruit tree branches—and scaled it on all fours like lizards climbing a wall. We discovered that if we jumped up and down on the heap, we got excellent bounce, just like a trampoline. We fell off and bruised ourselves only a few times.
We quickly adjusted to the outdoor sounds of Carmel Valley, no longer jumping in terror when one of the peacocks on the hilltops let out a squeal like a woman being throttled, and learned to differentiate between the ambulance and fire sirens coming from the volunteer fire station down the block. We much preferred outside to inside, which felt more like a library than a home with everyone talking in hushed voices and being careful not to slam cupboards or clang dishes that might disturb Mom.
My brother and I ran loose and were becoming slightly feral, wearing the same jeans so many days in a row that the denim became more brown than blue, and bathing only when we remembered, which didn’t seem to bother anyone because it was right and good to save water in drought-prone California. Which is why Matthew and I got in supremely big trouble when we got caught hiding behind the oak trees at the top of the driveway with the garden hose going full blast, dousing unsuspecting drivers with sudden rainstorms. It was bad enough we’d pulled a dangerous prank, but it was even worse that we wasted precious water with a looming drought. Grandpa was letting his fruit trees die, and he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough flowers for his bees to make honey. Neighbors were rescuing gasping steelhead trout from what was left of the Carmel River, transferring them into water tanks in the back beds of their pickups and driving the fish to the mouth of the river, closer to the ocean, to release them.
I tried arguing that we had crimped the hose in between cars, but it didn’t win any points. Granny ordered Grandpa to spank us anyway. But he did it in a way that was more symbolic than painful, making a big showy swing with his arm and slowing to a pat by the time his hand reached our bums. But we yowled from the shame of it all.
The real lesson we learned from the spanking was that our grandparents were exact opposites. She was the disciplinarian, and he was the softie. When they shared the newspaper in the morning, she fretted over the political news and he laughed at the comics. She worried about reputation and appearances; he wore tattered undershirts dribbled with coffee stains and never bothered to clean the black grime from under his fingernails. She was tidy; he never threw anything away, collecting his possessions into indoor and outdoor piles that grew taller and thicker by the year, which in a certain light matched the professional definition of hoarding. She detested the outdoors; he had to be coaxed inside.
When Granny met Grandpa during a square dance at the elementary school in Carmel Valley, she was a forty-year-old single mother living in the little red house with Mom, who was then nineteen. Barely a few months divorced, Granny was trying to socialize again, and Grandpa, three years younger, was perfectly satisfied being single. When Grandpa twirled Granny around, she noticed the strength in his upper body, the care he took to get the steps correct. It didn’t hurt that she’d read about him already in Big Sur’s monthly newsletter, The Roundup, which dubbed him Big Sur’s Handsome Bachelor.
Grandpa wasn’t looking for a mate; he was just fine with his bees, and he earned a steady income as a plumber, learning from friends how to make water flow to remote cabins where there was no centralized water system; digging wells and climbing the steep Santa Lucia Mountains to divert natural springs and creeks to homes below.
Ruth and Franklin were an odd couple but a good dancing pair, and began attending square dances together, even traveling to the faraway ones in Salinas and Sacramento. On their third date, at a square dance in South Lake Tahoe, Granny asked him what his intentions were, and when he tried to dodge her question, she literally told him to “fish or cut bait.” No one had ever confronted him so directly, and he was impressed. He agreed to marry her, and she convinced him right then and there to drive across the border into Nevada so they could tie the knot immediately, giving him no time to change his mind. They drove until they located a Carson City courthouse that offered around-the-clock weddings, summoned a janitor to serve as witness, and at nine that night became husband and wife. Mom was a little surprised and somewhat dubious of her sudden stepfather, but she didn’t have time to get to know Grandpa. Four months after he moved in, she transferred from Monterey Peninsula College to study sociology at California State University, Fresno.
My grandparents knew scant little about one another when they married, but over time they learned to love their differences. He liked a cold beer; she preferred Manhattans. He spoke only when he had something to say; she spoke in monologues. But they fit, mainly because she liked to lead and he, averse to confrontation, willingly followed. He had no interest in power, prestige or money, and handed his income to Granny so she could figure out the bills and the taxes. They parted every morning for their separate worlds—hers in the classroom, his in the Big Sur wilderness—and then came together every night at the dinner table where he ate in silence as she lectured on a never-ending list of topics. Grandpa admired her mind, although he also had an Olympian appetite and could fill his plate four times in one sitting. This made him an excellent listener.
It didn’t take long for Matthew and me to adjust to the rhythms of our grandparents’ schedules. Granny preferred her afternoon cocktail lying down. After a full day of teaching grammar and arithmetic to a roomful of trying fifth-graders, her first order of business was to mix a Manhattan and recline on the orange shag rug in the living room, her head propped on a pillow and a newspaper spread before her. By now she had taught me how to make her drink, and I liked the daily ritual of it almost as much as she did. I poured brown bourbon into a tall blue plastic tumbler until it was two fingers high, splashed in some sweet vermouth from the green glass bottle and added two ice cubes and a neon red maraschino cherry. I swirled it around with a dinner spoon and brought it to her.
“Grazie,” she said, reaching up from the floor.
With a loud licking of her fingers, she flipped the pages of the free Carmel Pinecone that she’d picked up at Jim’s Market and told anyone within earshot what she thought about local politics.
“Goddammit all to hell, I can’t believe they want to put streetlights in the village! Excuse my French.”
Her outbursts were not invitations to respond. She kept her head down and continued her conversation of one.
“What do we need lights for? We don’t even have any sidewalks. Damn Monterey County supervisors!” she said, taking another gulp from her tumbler. Outsider politicians were always trying to modernize unincorporated Carmel Valley Village and ruin the reason people moved out to the country in the first place, she said.
I kept listening as I climbed into Grandpa’s recliner and wiggled the handle on the side, trying to get the chair to go flat. I believed Granny was exceptionally smart, and knew things that regular people didn’t. My opinion came from two sources: Granny herself, who had told me several times that her 140 score on an IQ test proved she was a genius; and secondly that she could predict the weather. I didn’t know that forecasts were printed in the newspaper, so when I’d ask her what the weather was going to be like and she’d foresee sun or rain or frost, I thought she had some direct line to the universe.
She dropped phrases in Latin and Italian every once in a while, which sounded cosmopolitan to me. As the cocktail hours piled up, I was slowly starting to adopt her worldview, dividing people into those who were wrong and those who were right. I didn’t know what a Democrat or a Republican was, but I had heard the words so often that I knew we were on the Democrat team. Granny’s world was black and white, and therefore easy to follow. She was right, and anyone who disagreed was dim-witted and therefore deserved our pity.
“It’s tedious being smart,” she’d sigh, swirling the ice in her drink. “Waiting for everyone else to catch up to you. One day you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Granny was now reading about the gasoline shortage and flipping the pages with more force. I went to the kitchen and helped myself to one of her cocktail cherries, and then slipped away to Mom’s bedroom. The door, as usual, was shut, and there was no sound from inside. Mom had been in bed so long that she was becoming shimmery around the edges like a memory. I felt my mother more than I saw her, when she curled her body around me at night.
“Mom?”
I tapped lightly on the bedroom door. Nothing. I knocked a little harder. Her voice sounded like it came from under the covers, thick and muffled.
“Go away.”
Her words pinched, and I winced reflexively. Mom still liked me; I knew that. I reminded myself that she just wasn’t herself right now. Granny rounded the corner and spotted me lingering where I wasn’t supposed to be. “Come with me,” she said, placing a hand in the small of my back and guiding me to the kitchen. She lifted a wicker basket of wet clothes off the counter, and I followed her outdoors to hang the laundry. She dropped the basket on the ground with a thump under the wire clothesline that Grandpa had strung up between two T’s made out of plumbing pipes.
“Hand me the clothes,” she ordered. “I can’t bend down on account of my bad back.”
I passed her one of Grandpa’s white cotton undershirts, encrusted with drips of plumber’s putty and worn so thin I could see through the fabric. She snapped it into the wind once, then pinned it with clothespins. Then she reached toward me for the next item. I pulled out her floor-length quilted nightgown, the one covered in pink roses.
She cleared her throat.
“You know your mother is going to need everybody’s help to get better,” she said, contemplating the clothing in her hands. I knew what was coming. I was in trouble for knocking on the bedroom door again.
“I just needed Morris.”
Granny paused and faced me.
“Aren’t you getting a little old for a teddy bear?”
Her words were so horrible that I momentarily forgot what I was doing and dropped my favorite green-checkered dress on the ground. I couldn’t sleep without Morris tucked in my arms. He was my only possession, the only thing left from Before.
“Dad gave him to me!”
Granny bent down to pick up my dress, and she grunted like it really hurt. It looked like she was stuck, but she put her hand to her back and rose slowly, puffing out her cheeks with the effort. She shook the dirt off my dress and continued pinning.
“That’s another thing,” she said. “I don’t want you and Matthew mentioning your father around her. It only upsets her.”
Dad was the only thing I wanted to talk about, but his name had not come up once since we landed in California. Everyone acted as if Dad didn’t exist, and I was beginning to wonder if Matthew even remembered him. He had even started to refer to Grandpa as Daddy. Each time, Grandpa gently reminded him that he was a grandpa, not a daddy. It was like our life in Rhode Island was a movie, and the movie had ended, and that was that. Over and forgotten. If everyone pretends your dad doesn’t exist, does he?
Granny was staring at me, waiting for me to agree to never say Dad’s name. It was pointless to argue, because I would be taking Dad’s side against hers and that would have repercussions I could only shudder to imagine. It’s true I wanted Mom to get better. I didn’t want to keep thinking of her as a sick person, someone with a weak heart and faraway eyes. I wanted her to braid my hair again, read Winnie-the-Pooh to me, take me with her to the grocery store. If that meant having silent conversations about Dad in my head, then that’s what I would do. But before I submitted to Granny’s ultimatum, I had to ask a question.
“When’s he coming?”
Granny reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She shook one out, lit it and relaxed her shoulders with the first exhale. She stared at the honey bus as if searching it for my answer.
“Your father is not a very good man,” she said, keeping the back of her head to me. Then she indicated to me to hand her the next thing in the basket. Conversation over.
I put my tongue between my teeth to keep from calling Granny a liar. How dare she pick sides, as if she could just snip Dad out of my life with a swipe of her scissors? I had bat-ears; I knew that she talked about Dad with Mom sometimes, when their whispers floated out the gap at the bottom of the closed bedroom door. It wasn’t right that they could talk about him but I couldn’t—he was my father after all. I wasn’t dumb; I’d figured out that Mom and Dad were having a fight and this wasn’t a “visit” to California, but that didn’t make my dad bad and my mom good. He was my dad, and he was coming back. Granny had everything all wrong.
The sun was low in the sky, and the honey bus looked stage-lit with orange and yellow bulbs. Through the windows I could make out the shapes of three men crowded inside with Grandpa, passing honeycomb frames between them and shouting over the rat-a-tat of the machines inside.
I crept forward to get a closer look. The men had taken off their shirts in the heat and tied them to the overhead handrail. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but could tell they were swapping jokes, slapping one another on the back and doubling over with laughter. The men had an action-figure quality to them, their barrel chests rippling and shining with sweat as they hefted hive boxes and stacked jars of honey into towering pyramids. I studied their every move, even how their Adam’s apples bobbed with each swig of beer, and I silently willed them to wave me inside with a swing of their Popeye arms. These were the Big Sur friends Grandpa grew up with, the ones who had taught him to rope cattle and dive with a snorkel for the iridescent abalone shells that I had found in the backyard. These were big men with big hands who showed Grandpa how to build log cabins from redwood trees, how to hunt wild boar, or clear landslides off the coast highway with heavy equipment. They were living Paul Bunyans, the Big Sur mountain men who fended for themselves in the wild.
I patted down the tall weeds and made a little burrow for myself where I could sit and watch them work. They used thick, heavy knives blackened with burnt sugars to gently slice open wax-sealed honeycomb, exposing the orange honey underneath. They lowered honeycomb frames into the massive spinner, and cranked a handle protruding above it from left to right, using two hands and all their body weight to shift its position. I saw one of the men yank on a pull-cord several times and heard the lawn-mower motor sputter to life. The flywheel started to rotate and whine, and as it picked up speed, the bus began to rock slightly from side to side. The pump kicked in and forced the honey from the bottom of the extractor, up through the overhead pipes, and directed it to cascade in two streams into the holding tanks. It was nothing short of miraculous; like striking gold.
I stayed in my spot until the sun slipped behind the ridgeline and the crickets came out to sing. The men flicked on the construction lights in the bus and hung them from the handrails so they could keep working into the night.
I was drawn to the bus like a moth to flame, by an irrepressible longing that I felt as a physical ache, a gnawing in my belly to disappear into the secluded protection of an enclosed space like a submarine, or a bus. The honey bus looked like it was warm inside, and safe. I wanted the men to invite me to join their secret club, and to teach me how to make something beautiful with my hands. My pulse sped up when I watched them work together in a harmony of familiar dance movements, passing frames of dripping honeycomb between them and taking turns capturing the honey into glass jars as it flowed out of the spouts. I could tell the bus made them happy, and I believed it could do the same for me.
I was struck by a certainty, from some deep place inside myself, that something important was waiting for me in the bus, like the answer to a question that I hadn’t yet asked.
All I had to do was get inside.
3 (#ulink_4db8a07d-5e33-5cea-8c04-a24415cdbe39)
The Secret Language of Bees (#ulink_4db8a07d-5e33-5cea-8c04-a24415cdbe39)
1975—Late Spring
I didn’t limit my snooping to the outdoors. I brazenly opened drawers, rifled through closets, and took a keen interest in what Granny and Grandpa had tucked away inside the house. Because my grandparents were old people, their stuff was old, too, and I enjoyed hunting for rare artifacts forgotten in the far corners of their history. I found arrowheads that Grandpa had unearthed while digging pipelines in Big Sur, and inside the cedar chest I dusted off a stack of LIFE magazines with JFK, Elvis, and the first astronauts on the covers. The kitchen cupboards held a boneyard of cooking gadgets that Granny had tried once and then deemed ridiculous.
One morning I dug out an Osterizer blender from deep in the back of the cabinet under the sink. I wedged the glass pitcher onto the base, put the lid on, pressed one of the buttons and it whined to life. For a bored girl with few toys, I suddenly possessed this most miraculous machine and a whole kitchen packed with mystifying things pickled in mason jars. I opened the pantry and selected a jar containing a bright green Jell-O-looking substance, unscrewed the lid and sniffed: mint jelly. That could taste good—I liked mint gum, as well as jelly on toast—so I scooped it into the blender and added milk. Figuring I needed more than two things to make a smoothie, I did another quick scan of the kitchen until my eyes rested on the cereal boxes lined up on top of the fridge. I dragged the stool over and pulled down the corn flakes, thinking it would make my drink thicker. I pressed the button for the highest speed and whirred it into a concoction resembling runny, lumpy toothpaste, which I poured into a ceramic mug and brought to Grandpa, who was at the dining room table watching the birds peck at seed he’d sprinkled on the deck railing.
Grandpa would eat anything. He chewed chicken gizzards, said cow tongue was so delicious it put hair on his chest, and devoured artichoke leaves whole. He’d even developed a technique to pull every kernel clean off an ear of corn, using only his lower teeth and running the cob back and forth before his mouth like the carriage return on a typewriter. I presented him with my milkshake. He took a swig and then needed a few seconds to come up with an adjective.
“Refreshing!” he said, chasing it down with coffee. “What’s it called?”
“Mintshake,” I said.
He nodded thoughtfully and strummed his fingers on the table, like a gourmand considering a tasting note.
“Let’s share it,” he said, sliding the cup back toward me.
It was a dare, all right. I could tell Grandpa was trying to keep a straight face as I reached for it, but just as I was about to take a drink, a low hum distracted us from our standoff. Grandpa reflexively turned toward the sound and tracked something flying in the air. I followed his gaze until I saw what he did—a honeybee hovering over the dining room table. It was suspended in the air with its legs dangling beneath its body, keeping itself in place by beating its wings so fast they became invisible. I set the cup down and leaned back in slow motion. The bee, watching my every move, began to slowly come toward me, flying in slow arcs left and right, inching closer with each swing.
My muscles tensed, and I willed the bee to please, please, go take a hike. But it was attracted to the sugary smell inside my cup, and determined to have a taste. When it was about to land on the rim, I swatted at it.
The bee emitted a shrill zzztttt! in response, and zoomed in an anxious circle above our heads.
Grandpa jumped out of his chair and grabbed my forearm so tightly I could feel him pressing bone. I startled, frightened by the sudden aggressiveness of his touch. He’d never gotten mad at me before; he always fake-spanked Matthew and me when Granny forced him to punish us for misbehaving. He leaned toward me until we were nearly touching noses and locked eyes. His words were deliberate and forceful, each one like the clap of a church bell.
“You. Must. Never. Hurt. Bees.” He didn’t look away until he was certain his words had landed in my brain. I must have done something truly awful for Grandpa to scold me, but I was confused. Bees stung people. They were pests, like mosquitos. Who cares if I smashed one? Wouldn’t I be doing the right thing by protecting myself?
“It was going to sting me!” I protested.
Grandpa’s eyebrows sprang up in disbelief. “Why do you say that?”
The bee was now slamming itself into the window trying to fly away. Its buzz rose to a shriek. I thought perhaps we should be having this conversation in a different room, but Grandpa was unperturbed by the sight of a stinging insect going berserk. I kept one eye on the frenzied bee as I tried to answer Grandpa’s question.
“Because bees always sting.”
“Come here,” Grandpa said.
I followed him into the kitchen, where he searched the cupboards until he found an empty honey jar.
“Go get a piece of paper,” he said.
I was eager to do anything to get back on his good side. I raced to Granny’s desk and pulled out a piece of her fancy stationery, and practically bowed as I offered it to him.
“Listen,” he said, cupping his ear and cocking his head toward the buzz. “It’s high-pitched,” Grandpa said. “It’s in distress. Do you see it?”
I followed the sound until I saw the bee gliding in a wobbly circle around the room, looking for a way out, until it rested on the dining room window facing the deck.
“There!” I pointed.
Grandpa crept softly toward it, hiding the jar behind his back. When he was directly behind the bee, he reached up and imprisoned it in one swift motion. With his free hand, he slipped the paper between the window and the mouth of the jar, forming a temporary lid. He stepped away, holding the trap in his hands, and the bee crawled up the glass, tapping the inside of the jar with its antennae.
“Okay, come get the door for me,” he said.
We stepped outside together, and instead of releasing the bee, Grandpa sat on the back step and patted the space next to him, signaling me to sit near.
“Hold out your arm.”
He tilted the jar as if he was going to release the bee onto my forearm. I jerked my hand back.
“It’s going to sting me!” I wailed.
He sighed like he was summoning all his patience, and then turned to me again.
“Bees won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt them.”
Most of my information about bees came from cartoons in which bees always traveled in bloodthirsty swarms terrorizing all manner of people, coyotes, pigs and rabbits. I mentioned this to Grandpa.
“That’s make-believe,” he said. “Honeybees don’t go on the attack. They will only sting to defend their home. They know that if they sting they will die, so they’ll give you plenty of warnings first.”
Grandpa reached for my arm again, but I tucked it behind my back, still uncertain. The bee was now incensed, banging into the walls of its glass prison. Grandpa set the jar down and spoke to me slowly and carefully.
“Bees can talk, but not with words. You need to watch how they behave to understand their language. For example,” he said, lifting a finger to numerate his points. “If you open a hive and hear a soft chewing sound, that means the bees are busy and happy. If you hear a roar, that means they are upset about something.”
I watched the bee get more frantic by the second.
“Two,” he said, holding up a second finger. “Bees will ask you to back away from the hive by head-butting you. It’s a polite warning to step away so they don’t have to sting you.”
I was starting to understand that Grandpa might know bees in a different way than everybody else. He spent every day with them, so he probably could tell what they were thinking. But that didn’t mean that I wanted a bee to crawl on me. I trusted Grandpa wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, but I couldn’t say the same for the trapped bee, who by the looks of things was now totally, royally, pissed. He reached for the jar again and brought it over to me. I shook my head no.
“You mustn’t be afraid around bees,” he said. “They can sense fear, and it will make them scared, too. But if you are calm, they will stay calm.”
“I’m still scared,” I whispered.
“The bee is more frightened of you,” he said. “Can you imagine how scary it is to be this small in a world that is so big?”
He was right, I wouldn’t want to change places with a bee. A little bit of my trepidation melted knowing the bee was also scared. I knew I wouldn’t hurt it, but the bee couldn’t know that for sure. I stretched my arm out again, ever so gently.
“You ready?”
I nodded as I watched the bee fall onto its back inside the jar, its six legs scrabbling to find footing.
“Bees are sensitive, so no sudden movements, and no loud noises, okay? You must always move slowly and quietly around bees to make them feel safe.”
I promised to hold still, an easy pact because I was too terrified to move. I tried to summon calming thoughts, but it was impossible to do on command. Grandpa tapped the jar on the underside of my wrist, and the bee tumbled out. It stood still as I held my breath, then it took a few tentative steps.
“Tickles,” I whispered. This close, I could see that a honeybee’s body was a miracle of miniature interlocking parts, like the insides of a watch. Its antennae, two L-shaped sticks that swiveled in sockets on its forehead between its eyes, searched the air and tapped on my skin, reminding me of a person without sight using a cane to get a mental picture of a place.
“What’s it doing?”
“Checking you out,” Grandpa said. “A bee’s antennae can smell, feel and taste.”
Imagine that. Having a body part that is a nose, fingertip and tongue together. As the bee got used to me, I got used to it. Grandpa was right. This small insect was not my enemy. I carefully lifted my arm until I could see into its eyes, shaped like two glossy black commas on the side of its head. Fear gave way to fascination as I studied how it was put together, so small, so perfect.
Veins crisscrossed its shimmering wings. It was furry, and its abdomen expanded and contracted with each breath. I looked closer at the stripes, and noticed that the orange bands had small hairs and the black ones were slick. The bee’s legs tapered to tiny hooks, and it was now using its front two pair to stroke its antennae. Cleaning or scratching them, I guessed.
“What do you think?” Grandpa asked.
“Can I keep it?”
“’Fraid not. It will die of loneliness if you separate it from its hive.”
I was beginning to understand that bees have emotions, like people, and like people they live in families where they feel safe and loved. They will lose their spirit if they don’t have the security of their hive mates. I was about to ask if we should return this bee to its hive when it parted its mandibles and unfurled a long red tongue.
“It’s going to bite me!” I shrieked.
“Shhhh, hold still,” Grandpa whispered. The bee tasted my arm tentatively, realized that I was not a flower and recoiled its tongue. The bee put its hind end in the air and fanned its wings so rapidly that I could feel a vibration on my skin. Then it lifted off and was gone.
Grandpa stood, reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet.
“Meredith, never kill something unless you are going to eat it.”
I gave him my word.
That night when I got under the sheets, Mom was already snoring. I cleared my throat hoping that would wake her, and when that didn’t work, I jiggled the bed, just a little bit.
“Hmmmm?”
“Hey, Mom.”
She grunted and turned toward me with eyes closed. “What?”
“Did you know bees die after they sting?”
“Shhhh. You’ll wake your brother.”
I lowered my voice and whispered.
“Their guts come out with the stinger.”
“That’s nice.”
Mom rolled me away from her, then tucked her knees under mine and drew me to her stomach. I was about to brag about picking up a bee with my bare hands, but I felt her legs twitch and realized that she had fallen back asleep.
I lay there, my mind swimming with new questions about bees. Grandpa had just cracked open a portal to a secret microcosmos in our backyard, and now that I knew bees lived in families, I wanted to know everything about them. Which bees are the parents? How many bees in one family? How do they remember which hive they live in? What does it look like inside a beehive? Do they sleep at night? How do they make honey in there?
Grandpa had proven to me that I could get close to a honeybee without getting stung. I was coming around to the opinion that fearsome animals and insects rarely live up to the reputations foisted on them by circuses and monster movies. Grandpa was teaching Matthew and me that all creatures were sacred, with their own inner emotional lives. As part of our education, after dinner each night we climbed into the recliner with Grandpa to watch his favorite nature shows. I’d been astonished to watch male lions play with their cubs, aquarium octopuses reach from the water to embrace their human handlers, or elephants dig stairs leading out of a deep mudhole so a drowning baby could clamber to safety. So it made me wonder, what if bees were compassionate like that, and what if I could teach myself how to see it? As a girl needing to know that love existed naturally all around her, it was thrilling to realize that I didn’t have to wait for Wild Kingdom or Jacques Cousteau to be reassured. The mysteries of the animal kingdom were within my reach, anytime I wanted. That night when I went to bed, the confines of our small room expanded ever so slightly. I had found one good thing—a reason how California might make me happy.
I awoke to the percolator bubbling on top of the stove, so I knew my grandparents were up. I tiptoed down the hall and pushed open their bedroom door. Granny was reading aloud to Grandpa from the Monterey Herald while he looked at the photos in a beekeeping magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture. On weekends, they liked to ease into the day. I climbed onto their small four-poster bed, wedged myself in between them and asked Grandpa if he could show me his beehives.
“Whoa, Nelly,” Grandpa said, putting down his magazine. “I haven’t had my think-juice yet.”
“Excellent point,” Granny said. “Sounds like the coffee’s done, Franklin.”
Grandpa dutifully threw back the covers and slid his feet into slippers, and I heard his joints crack as he pushed himself upright. I sighed dramatically, but nobody acknowledged it. I was in for a long wait. On Saturdays and Sundays they savored several cups of coffee in bed, as Granny curated the newspaper front to back, reading aloud particularly important paragraphs to Grandpa, enhanced by her commentary. Grandpa would often get weary at a certain point, but he never complained. Instead, he would distract her by gripping sections of the paper with his strong toes and dropping the pages on her lap. Granny thought it was repulsive; Grandpa thought it was a riot.
I wandered outside and spotted Matthew lifting his chubby leg and stomping on something near the vegetable garden. When I got closer, I could see that he was killing snails. He smiled when he saw me approach, and lifted his shoe to display the slimy puddle he’d made on the ground. He was helping Grandpa, who’d shown him how to hunt the marauders who ate his crops. Snails and gophers were the only exceptions to Grandpa’s no-kill rule.
“Gross,” I said, slightly unnerved by how much my brother was enjoying himself.
He held a snail between a thumb and forefinger and dropped it on the ground.
“You do it,” he commanded.
I reached for his hand instead. “Come on, I have another job for you.”
His eyes widened, and he bounced alongside me as I walked him toward the honey bus. There was about a foot and a half of clearance under the chassis. If we crawled underneath, we could hopefully find a rusted-out hole or some type of entry and maybe climb through to get inside the bus. I’d already tried pushing all the windows, and had inserted all manner of sticks and screwdrivers and butter knives inside the opening where the back door handle used to be, hoping to pop the lock. This was my last idea. I figured I’d need Matthew if we found an opening too small for me.
I slid under first on my back, as it was more Matthew’s nature to see if something was safe before trying it. He watched my legs disappear and waited for my report. A tangle of weeds blocked my view of the undercarriage, so I used a snow angel technique to knock them down. I pressed here and there on the bus floor with my foot to test for weak spots. The metal was rusty, but solid. I kicked at the exhaust pipe, and it rattled some, showering me in fine dirt. I scooted toward the front of the bus, and bumped into a discarded tire. Other than that, the only thing I found under the bus was a graveyard of corroded five-gallon Wesson Oil cans.
I gave up searching and rested for a moment on my back, trying to think. There had to be a solution that I was overlooking. Matthew called out to me, and when I turned to look over my shoulder, I saw him on his hands and knees peering under the bus. Then two legs appeared and framed my brother.
“What’s so interesting under there?” I heard Grandpa ask my brother.
“Mare-miss,” my brother said, pointing. His tongue still hadn’t mastered my three-syllable name.
Grandpa got down on his belly next to Matthew, and now both of them were staring. I held still because I felt like I had just been caught doing something, not anything bad, just something slightly embarrassing.
“Whatcha doing under there?”
“Trying to get in.”
“Don’t you know the door’s up here?”
“It’s locked.”
“To keep little kids out.”
Grandpa reached under the bus and crooked his finger, signaling me to come to him. I scrabbled out, and as he helped me to my feet, he brushed the dirt from my back and plucked off the burrs. Whatever was in the bus would have to wait. Until I got bigger, whenever that was. The only people admitted entry were Grandpa’s friends, so I imagined I would have to wait until I was an adult, which might as well be never.
“I thought you wanted to see the bees,” Grandpa said.
His counteroffer was exquisitely played, and I perked up immediately. As my part of the deal, I had to come inside for breakfast first.
Belly properly filled with pancakes, I followed Grandpa to the back fence, where he kept a row of six beehives. The sun was shining on the slit entrances at the base of the hives, illuminating the landing boards where the bees were flitting in and out. A small cloud of bees hovered before each hive, all the foragers waiting for a clear shot to get back inside. I noticed that the bees were buzzing in a different way than the one we caught in the house; their sound didn’t have the urgency of a shout, it was more contented and calm like a person humming a song. I stood in front of the right-most hive, about a foot away from the entrance so I could watch them. I felt Grandpa’s hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t stand there,” he said. “See what’s happening behind you?”
I turned and saw a traffic jam of bees jiggling in the air, unwilling to go around me to get into the hive. The backup was growing by the second.
“You’re in their flight path,” he said, guiding me to the side of the hive. As soon as I stepped out of the way, the clot of waiting bees whooshed in a comet back to their hive. I knelt down next to the hive so I was eye level with the bees. One by one they marched to the entrance, cleaned their antennae, then crouched and launched like a jet fighter.
“What do you see?”
“Lots of bees coming and going,” I said.
“Look closer.”
I did, and saw the same thing. Bees flying in. Bees flying out. So many it was hard to keep my eye on one bee at a time. Grandpa took a comb out of his back pocket and whisked it through his hair in three practiced swipes, top and sides, waiting for me to see whatever it was I was supposed to see. Then he pointed at the landing board. “Yellow!” he announced.
All I saw were bees.
“There’s orange! Gray! Yellow again!”
And then I saw it. Some of the returning bees had something stuck to their back legs. Every fifth or sixth honeybee that returned waddled in carrying small balls like the pills that collect on a favorite sweater, some loads no bigger than the head of a pin, others the size of a lentil, so large the bee strained under the weight.
“What is it?”
“Pollen. From flowers. The color tells you which flower they came from. Tan is from the almond tree. Gray is the blackberries. Orange is poppy. Yellow is mustard, most likely.”
“What’s it for?”
“Bee bread.”
Now he was just messing with me. Bees can’t bake bread. All they make is honey. Everybody knew that.
“Grandpa!”
“What? You don’t believe me?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself. Bees mix the pollen with a little spit and nectar and feed it to their babies. Bee bread.”
It made some sense, but it was just too weird. I waited for him to giggle at his own joke, but he kept a straight face. Grandpa had told the truth when he said it was safe to let a bee crawl on me, so I guessed he knew what pollen was for. For the moment, I played along.
“They’re making bread in there?”
“They push the pollen off their legs, chew it with nectar and store it in the honeycomb.”
“Can I see?”
“Not today. I don’t want to disturb them right now. They are building new wax.”
Just then the fattest bee I’d ever seen lumbered out of the hive. It was wider and stockier than all the others, and its head was comprised almost entirely of two massive eyes. I watched it approach several of the regular-size bees and tap its antennae against theirs. Every bee it touched backed up and walked around it, as if irritated by being bumped.
“Is that the queen bee?”
Grandpa picked it up and put it in his palm. “Nope. A drone…a boy bee. He’s begging for food.”
I asked Grandpa why he didn’t just get his own food.
“Boy bees don’t do any work. All those bees you see with pollen? All girls. Boys don’t collect nectar or pollen for the hive, they don’t feed the babies and they don’t make wax or honey. They don’t even have stingers, so they can’t protect the hive.”
Grandpa returned the drone to the hive entrance where it resumed the search for handouts. Finally, one of the returning girl bees paused and linked tongues with him. Feeding him nectar, Grandpa said.
“He only has one job, but I’ll explain it to you when you’re a little older.”
Grandpa had set up two stumps near his apiary, and we took seats and watched the bees flying as one would watch a fire, or the sea, lulled by all the individual movements that combined together into a single flow. I liked interpreting the patterns of their routine, to know that the bees weren’t just flying willy-nilly; there was an order to what they were doing. They were out grocery shopping for bread and nectar. A beehive could seem chaotic if you didn’t understand that bees had a plan for everything.
I could have never guessed that a beehive is a female place, a castle with a queen but no king. All the worker bees inside are female; around sixty thousand daughters that look after their mother by feeding her, bringing her water droplets and keeping her warm at night. The colony would wither and die without a queen laying eggs. Yet without her daughters taking care of her, the queen would either starve or freeze to death.
Their need for one another was what kept them strong.
4 (#ulink_909c519b-84b5-576d-ab23-3dd002fc4e47)
Homecoming (#ulink_909c519b-84b5-576d-ab23-3dd002fc4e47)
1975—Summer
Our grandparents had the incredible good fortune to live only steps away from the Carmel Valley Airfield, where two-seater planes landed and took off a handful of times a month. It was nothing more than a dirt landing strip, with just one runway and a taxiway, and no lights, fences or security of any kind. There were no markings or signs to direct pilots and the tattered wind sock was rendered useless. Pilots had to radio in to a neighbor with a view of the runway and ask which way the wind was blowing.
Uprooted as we were without access to our playthings or our former playmates, Matthew and I had to get creative in our diversions and make use of whatever was readily available. We tried to build pyramids with Granny’s poker cards, we put out birdseed and waited for birds, but an airport with real live planes was an entertainment jackpot.
All it took was the rumble of an incoming propeller, and Matthew would drop whatever was in his hand and go streaking out of the house to look for a plane. He was mad for those planes, falling into a near trance as he watched them come in for a landing. He’d run for Grandpa and yank him by the hand, urging him to take us across the street so we could stand by the runway and feel the wind wash over us as the plane whooshed down from the skies.
One afternoon we heard the telltale engine noise, but Grandpa was working in Big Sur and we didn’t have an escort. But now that we were spending so much time alone together, a budding solidarity was forming between Matthew and me, and sometimes our companionship crossed over into mischief. We hesitated ever so slightly, looked back to the quiet house, then grinned at one another and bolted across the road, huffing it up the small incline to reach the airstrip just as the plane was circling overhead.
Matthew wanted to get closer to the plane this time, so we crept to the median between the two runways and sat down in the grass to wait for the plane to fly over us. I snapped off a mustard blossom and ate it, like I’d seen Grandpa do. I offered a yellow bloom to Matthew, but he wrinkled his nose. We could hear the propeller approaching, beating the air like thunder. Matthew reached for my hand, and we stretched out on our backs and looked skyward.
When the plane’s underbelly crossed not twenty feet overhead, we felt the growling engine in our chests and screamed with the same mix of joy and terror that roller coasters were designed for. I can’t imagine what the pilot must have thought when he saw two small children pop into view at the last minute. We waved, innocently hoping he’d see us; he probably had heart palpitations.
We sat up and watched the plane make a few short screeching hops and then touch down. It rolled toward the end of the landing strip where a collection of similar planes was parked, their wings chained to the ground.
Just then the plane, its blades still whirring, made a U-turn and started slowly approaching us. It was halfway down the runway when the plane stopped and the pilot got out and shouted something at us. We couldn’t hear the words, but picked out the unmistakable tone of an adult who “would like a word” with us. We sprang to our feet and took off, and before I could count to ten, we were back behind our little red house, bent over, sucking in oxygen. I hoped the pilot hadn’t seen which house we ran to, and secretly promised myself never to do that again.
When we caught our breath, we walked as innocently as possible into the kitchen, where Granny was scorching something in the electric skillet. She’d given up on the oven long ago, insisting the temperature dial had a manufacturer’s defect that burned her food. The oven became a tabletop for a square electric frying pan no bigger than a pizza box, and although her cursing had subsided considerably, every breakfast, lunch and dinner still came out blackened and overdone.
“Where have you two been?” she asked, keeping her back to us and furiously scraping at something with the spatula. I put my finger to my lips to remind Matthew we couldn’t tell. He nodded.
“Nowhere. Just outside,” I said.
“Well, stay close. Dinner’s almost ready.”
“We saw a plane!” Matthew piped. The kid just couldn’t help himself. Before the conversation could progress, I quickly grabbed his hand and led him to the living room, distracting him with a suggestion that we build a fort.
Granny had one of those couches that felt as long as a Cadillac, made with two rectangular bottom cushions that when removed made excellent walls. We dismantled the stuffed yellow chair for the roof pieces and assembled a hut in front of the television, leaving a peephole so we could sit inside and watch TV. It was almost like being in the dark of a real movie theater. We settled in to watch Matthew’s favorite show, Emergency!, about two Los Angeles paramedics who carry a hospital phone in a box and rescue accident victims, mostly by jolting them back to life with electrical paddles.
“TV’s too loud!” Granny called from the kitchen.
Just then a car exploded on-screen at full volume.
I was cozy. I didn’t feel like removing a wall and crawling all the way to the TV to reach the volume knob.
“Turn the TV down,” I said to Matthew.
He ignored me. Lately, Matthew’s adoration of me seemed to be waning. This was disturbing on two counts. One, he was no longer following my orders. The other day he’d even refused to let me put every necklace and bangle in Mom’s jewelry box on him, something we did all the time. But worse, he was all I had left of my family, and I couldn’t tolerate the thought of him leaving me, too. I tried not to take his emerging independence personally, it was part of his growing up after all, but I was afraid it signaled something deeper, that he one day wouldn’t need me. The thought of Matthew leaving me was so terrifying that I became meaner to try to keep him in line, to show him that there were severe consequences for disobeying me. So if he wasn’t going to turn the TV down, then he wasn’t going to get to stay in the hut, either. I knocked the sofa cushion nearest me, and our house toppled on us. Matthew howled in outrage as he kicked his way free of the ruins.
Granny appeared in the living room, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She shot us a look that said we were riding her last nerve. Then she cranked down the volume, and that’s when we heard someone knocking on the front door.
How long the visitor had been trying to get our attention, we couldn’t say. Most likely it was one of Grandpa’s honey customers, dropping by unannounced with an empty glass jar in hand. Grandpa wasn’t home, so whoever it was would have to leave their jar on the doorstep with a check or cash in it, and Grandpa would swap the money with honey, then put it back outside so they could fetch it later.
Granny opened the door, and I saw her back stiffen.
Then she shouted my mother’s name over her shoulder. “Sal-leeeee!”
I heard the creak of the bedroom door, and Mom padded into the living room in rumpled sweatpants and T-shirt, an outfit that doubled as her nightgown.
“You don’t have to yell, Mom,” she said, blinking in the afternoon light. Mom came up behind Granny and put one arm on the door frame and leaned in. Then she took a step back.
“David,” she said.
I heard a low male voice, and the hair on the back of my neck prickled up.
Dad!
The vault inside me where I stored all my secret thoughts about Dad flung open, and fireworks exploded out of every pore. Six months of wishing in the lonely quiet of night had worked its magic, and now everything was going to snap back to the way it was before, just like I knew it always would.
I clicked off the TV, and Dad’s silky words swirled into the living room, wrapping me in a tight fabric and pulling me toward him. I knew he would come back. Now we could finally go home, Mom would be happy again, and Matthew and I would get our own rooms back. I looked at my little brother, and he was bouncing up and down, his eyes fixed on the door.
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” he sang.
I leaped in the direction of Dad’s voice, but Mom and Granny wouldn’t step aside or open the door wider than a couple of inches, so all I could see were bits of him—the side of his leather Top-Sider shoe, a patch of ink-black hair. I peered through the crack in the door and spotted our green Volvo parked in the driveway by the eucalyptus tree. He must really want us back if he drove all the way here, I thought.
“Did you bring my portable dishwasher?” Mom demanded. “The kids’ toys?”
I tugged on Granny’s sleeve, but she didn’t respond. I tapped on Mom’s back. Nothing.
My father had just driven across country in Mom’s Volvo to return it to her, and no one had explained this beforehand to Matthew and me. He’d stayed the night at his mother’s house in Pacific Grove, and he’d asked her to follow him to our house the next day and park a few streets away so he could catch a ride back to the airport. He’d anticipated a possible confrontation at our house and wanted to spare his mother from seeing it, so they made a plan for him to walk to the village where there was a one-block strip with a grocery, barbershop, bank and restaurant, and meet her in the parking lot.
I knew none of this. When Dad suddenly appeared on our doorstep, I’d assumed that he was there to fetch us. I looked on, stunned, as Granny blocked him from coming through the door.
Something wasn’t right. Dad must know we were in the house, so why wasn’t he coming inside? What was taking so long? Why weren’t they letting him in? Granny was speaking in clipped sentences, with the same undertone of disgust she saved for bad politicians she read about in the newspapers. I heard Dad mumbling, like he was apologizing, and the air became thick with malice. Their voices were getting louder, darker, sharper, and my muscles clenched with the memory of our last night in Rhode Island. Then Mom’s voiced cracked into thunder.
“How can you do this to me?” Mom shrieked. “Don’t you care about your own children?”
Dad’s fingers flashed into the house and dropped the car keys into Granny’s open palm. She tossed the key ring a few feet onto her writing desk as if it was a stinky shoe that she didn’t want to touch. Mom stepped outside to talk to Dad and Granny closed the door, thumping her butt into it to make sure the latch caught. She pushed the button in the doorknob to lock it, and swiped her palms together in a gesture of finishing something, of wiping flour off her hands. She walked back to the kitchen without glancing our way, as if nothing had happened.
Things were moving too fast. I could hear Mom outside roaring at Dad. I didn’t know what divorce meant, but I caught the finality in her voice as she spat the word at him, and that told me all I needed to know—that whatever was wrong with my parents was unfixable.
“Don’t you want your kids?” she wailed.
Matthew looked at me with wide eyes, searching my face for reassurance. I took a step closer to him, and he wrapped his arm around my leg.
I heard Dad’s voice rise to meet Mom’s, and they became two dogs, barking and growling at each other. A familiar dread pressed down on my rib cage, and I understood that if I didn’t get through that door, I might never see my father again. This was my one chance to try to change his mind. Maybe, if he saw me, if I pleaded with him, he’d stay. I couldn’t let Dad come this close and then slip away without trying. I lunged for the door, unlocking it just in time to see Dad walking down the driveway and toward the road. The neighborhood reverberated with Mom’s voice as she hollered to his back.
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Meredith May
The Honey Bus: A Girl Raised by Bees is a memoir about a girl’s journey into the heart of a beehive to find herself.When Meredith May is abandoned by both parents, she ends up learning life lessons about family, generosity and resilience from a rather unexpected source: the honeybees her grandfather keeps in Big Sur.In a converted WWII military bus marooned in the backyard, Grandpa shows her the nuances of harvesting honey while the bees become a guiding force in her life, bonding her to the natural world and modeling a successful community that thrives on industry, democratic decision-making and loyalty.The exquisite relationship between insect and girl becomes a sanctuary from her lonely childhood, but when her increasingly despondent mother turns violent, she must leave her grandfather’s side and strike out alone with only his hive lessons to help her.
MEREDITH MAY is an award-winning journalist, author, and a fifth-generation beekeeper. She spent sixteen years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where her narrative reporting won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She is co-author of I, Who Did Not Die and lives in San Francisco, where she keeps several hives in a community garden.
MEREDITH MAY
THE
HONEY
BUS
A Memoir of Loss,
Courage and a Girl
Saved by Bees
ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES
Copyright (#u692c6b47-4d83-5451-afee-eb3dfd217848)
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Meredith May 2019
Meredith May asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9781474077095
For Grandpa
E. Franklin Peace
1926–2015
“So work the honeybees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the art of order to a peopled kingdom.”
—William Shakespeare, Henry V
Contents
Cover (#u69c0b162-3375-5871-9db0-36ced5097d26)
About the Author (#u88915152-584e-5878-8551-5214d8607bcd)
Title Page (#uf40670d8-2767-5f56-9a23-8b6c4d740d53)
Copyright (#u284e63b1-74d3-5a32-a26a-94a71afdcc30)
Dedication (#u1a05c5d8-a983-589b-be80-f2981dedb5ab)
Epigraph (#ucefd81a4-60ff-5112-9fa3-7742cd588b5f)
Prologue: Swarm (#ulink_b1237b0b-58b8-5794-ab2c-7f6faa0cb8a1)
1. Flight Path (#u573e30b3-4a9c-581c-8e6a-ad785e87e60f)
2. Honey Bus (#uda29dfae-2902-52d1-98aa-c252427ad688)
3. The Secret Language of Bees (#ufd590d85-be03-5e3c-b537-d5b9b33154b1)
4. Homecoming (#uedea2091-6529-52ae-b347-c4847d2e4fa4)
5. Big Sur Queen (#litres_trial_promo)
6. The Beekeeper (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Fake Grandpa (#litres_trial_promo)
8. First Harvest (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Unaccompanied Minor (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Foulbrood (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Parents Without Partners (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Social Insect (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Hot Water (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Bee Dance (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Spilled Sugar (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_687b4838-26de-5ee3-999a-e2be518c747e)
Swarm (#ulink_687b4838-26de-5ee3-999a-e2be518c747e)
1980
Swarm season always arrived by telephone. The red rotary phone jangled to life every spring with frantic callers reporting honeybees in their walls, or in their chimneys, or in their trees.
I was pouring Grandpa’s honey over my corn bread when he came out of the kitchen with that sly smile that said we’d have to let our breakfast go cold again. I was ten, and had been catching swarms with him for almost half my life, so I knew what was coming next. He slugged back his coffee in one gulp and wiped his mustache with the back of his arm.
“Got us another one,” he said.
This time the call came from the private tennis ranch about a mile away on Carmel Valley Road. As I climbed into the passenger seat of his rickety pickup, he tapped the gas pedal to coax it to life. The engine finally caught and we screeched out of the driveway, kicking up a spray of gravel behind us. He whizzed past the speed limit signs, which I knew from riding with Granny said to go twenty-five. We had to hurry to catch the swarm because the bees might get an idea to fly off somewhere else.
Grandpa careened into the tennis club and squealed to a stop near a cattle fence. He leaned his shoulder into his jammed door and creaked it open with a grunt. We stepped into a mini-cyclone of bees, a roaring inkblot in the sky, banking left and right like a flock of birds. My heart raced with them, frightened and awestruck at the same time. It seemed like the air was throbbing.
“Why are they doing that?” I shouted over the din.
Grandpa bent down on one knee and leaned toward my ear.
“The queen left the hive because it got too crowded inside,” he explained. “The bees followed her because they can’t live without her. She’s the only bee in the colony that lays eggs.”
I nodded to show Grandpa that I understood.
The swarm was now hovering near a buckeye tree. Every few seconds, a handful of bees darted out of the pack and disappeared into the leaves. I walked closer, and looked up to see that the bees were gathering on a branch into a ball about the size of an orange. More bees joined the cluster until it swelled to the size of a basketball, pulsating like a heart.
“The queen landed there,” Grandpa said. “The bees are protecting her.”
When the last few bees found their way to the group, the air became still again.
“Go wait for me back by the truck,” Grandpa whispered.
I leaned against the front bumper, and watched as he climbed a stepladder until he was nose-to-nose with the bees. Dozens of them crawled up his bare arms as he sawed the branch with a hacksaw. Just then a groundskeeper started up a lawn mower, startling the bees and sending them back into the air in a panic. Their buzz rose to a piercing whine, and the bees gathered into a tighter, faster circle.
“Dammit all to hell!” I heard Grandpa cuss.
He called out to the groundskeeper, and the mower sputtered off. While Grandpa waited for the swarm to settle back down into the tree, I felt something crawling on my scalp. I reached up and touched fuzz, and then felt wings and tiny legs thrashing in my hair. I tossed my head to dislodge the bee, but it only became more tangled and distressed, its buzz rising to the high pitch of a dentist’s drill. I took deep breaths to brace for what I knew was coming.
When the bee buried its stinger in my skin, the burn raced in a line from my scalp to my molars, making me clench my jaw. I frantically searched my hair again, and stifled a scream as I discovered another bee swimming in my hair, then another, my alarm radiating out wider and wider from behind my rib cage as I felt more fuzzy lumps than I could count, a small squadron of honeybees struggling with a terror equal to my own.
Then I smelled bananas—the scent bees emit to call for backup—and I knew that I was under attack. I felt another searing prick at my hairline followed by a sharp pierce behind my ear, and collapsed to my knees. I was fainting, or maybe I was praying. I thought that I might be dying. Within seconds, Grandpa had my head in his hands.
“Now try not to move,” he said. “You’ve got about five more in here. I’ll get them all out, but you might get stung again.”
Another bee stabbed me. Each sting magnified the pain until it felt like my scalp was on fire, but I grabbed the truck tire and hung on.
“How many more?” I whispered.
“Just one,” he said.
When it was all over, Grandpa took me into his arms. I rested my pounding head on his chest, which was muscled from a lifetime of lifting fifty-pound hive boxes full of honey. He gently placed his calloused hand on my neck.
“Your throat closing up?”
I showed him my biggest inhale and exhale. My lips felt oddly tingly.
“Why didn’t you call out to me?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know.
My legs were shaky, and I let Grandpa carry me to the truck and place me on the bench seat. I’d been stung before, but never by this many bees at once, and Grandpa was worried that my body might go into shock. If my face swelled up, he said, I might have to go to the emergency room. I waited with instructions to honk the horn if I couldn’t breathe as he finished sawing the branch. He shook the bees into a white wooden box and carried it to the truck bed while I reached up and checked the hot lumps on my scalp. They were tight and hard, and it seemed like they were getting bigger. I worried that pretty soon my whole head would be puffed out like a pumpkin.
Grandpa hustled back into the truck and started the engine.
“Just a minute,” he said, taking my head in his hands and exploring my scalp with his fingers. I winced, certain he was pressing marbles into my head.
“Missed one,” he said, drawing a dirty fingernail sideways across my scalp to remove the stinger. Grandpa always said that squeezing the stinger between your thumb and finger is the worst way to pull it out, because it pushes all the venom into you. He held out his palm to show me the stinger with the pinhead-sized venom sac still attached.
“It’s still going,” he said, pointing to the white organ flexing and pumping venom, oblivious that its services were no longer needed. It was gross, and made me think of a chicken running with its head cut off, and I wrinkled my nose at it. He flicked it out the window and then turned to me with a pleased look, like I had just shown him my report card with all A’s.
“You were very brave. You didn’t panic or nothin’.”
My heart cartwheeled in my chest, proud of myself for letting the bees sting me without screaming like a girl.
Back home, Grandpa added the box of bees to his collection of a half dozen hives along the back fence. The swarm was ours now, and would settle into its new home soon. Already the bees were darting out of the entrance and flying in little circles to explore their surroundings, memorizing new landmarks. In a few days’ time, they would be making honey.
As I watched Grandpa pour sugar water into a mason jar for them, I thought about what he had said about the bees following the queen because they can’t live without her. Even bees needed their mother.
The bees at the tennis ranch attacked me because their queen had fled the hive. She was vulnerable, and they were trying to protect her. Crazy with worry, they’d lashed out at the nearest thing they could find—me.
Maybe that’s why I hadn’t screamed. Because I understood. Bees act like people sometimes—they have feelings and get scared about things. You can see this is true if you hold very still and watch the way they move, notice if they flow together softly like water, or if they run over the honeycomb, shaking like they are itchy all over. Bees need the warmth of family; alone, a single bee isn’t likely to make it through the night. If their queen dies, worker bees will run frantically throughout the hive, searching for her. The colony dwindles, and the bees become dispirited and depressed, sluggishly wandering the hive instead of collecting nectar, killing time before it kills them.
I knew that gnawing need for a family. One day I had one; then it was gone overnight.
Not long before my fifth birthday, my parents divorced and I suddenly found myself on the opposite coast in California, squeezed into a bedroom with my mom and younger brother in my grandparents’ tiny house. My mother slipped under the bedcovers and into a marathon melancholy, while my father was never mentioned again. In the empty hush that followed, I struggled to make sense of what had happened. As my list of life questions grew, I worried about who was going to explain things to me.
I began following Grandpa everywhere, climbing into his pickup in the mornings and going to work with him. Thus began my education in the bee yards of Big Sur, where I learned that a beehive revolved around one principle—the family. Grandpa taught me the hidden language of bees, how to interpret their movements and sounds, and to recognize the different scents they release to communicate with hive mates. His stories about the colony’s Shakespearean plots to overthrow the queen and its hierarchy of job positions swept me away to a secret realm when my own became too difficult.
Over time, the more I discovered about the inner world of honeybees, the more sense I was able to make of the outer world of people. As my mother sank further into despair, my relationship with nature deepened. I learned how bees care for one another and work hard, how they make democratic decisions about where to forage and when to swarm, and how they plan for the future. Even their stings taught me how to be brave.
I gravitated toward bees because I sensed that the hive held ancient wisdom to teach me the things that my parents could not. It is from the honeybee, a species that has been surviving for the last 100 million years, that I learned how to persevere.
1 (#ulink_25cd391e-ec54-56e5-a2e7-99ff49164380)
Flight Path (#ulink_25cd391e-ec54-56e5-a2e7-99ff49164380)
February 1975
I didn’t see who threw it.
The pepper grinder flew end over end across the dinner table in a dreadful arc, landing on the kitchen floor in an explosion of skittering black BBs. Either my mother was trying to kill my father, or it was the other way around. With better aim it could have been possible, because it was one of those heavy mills made of dark wood, longer than my forearm.
If I had to guess, it was Mom. She couldn’t stand the silence in her marriage anymore, so she got Dad’s attention by hurling whatever was within reach. She ripped curtains from rods, chucked Matthew’s baby blocks into walls and smashed dishes on the floor to make sure we knew she meant business. It was her way of refusing to become invisible. It worked. I learned to keep my back to the wall and my eyes on her at all times.
Tonight, her pent-up fury radiated off her body in waves, turning her alabaster skin a bright pink. A familiar dread pooled in my belly as I held my breath and studied the wallpaper pattern of ivy leaves winding around copper pots and rolling pins, terrified that the slightest sound from me would redirect the invisible white-hot beam between my parents and leave a puff of smoke where once a five-year-old girl used to be. I recognized this stillness before the storm, the momentary pause of utensils held aloft before the verbal car crash to come. Nobody moved, not even my two-year-old brother, frozen mid-Cheerio in his high chair. Dad calmly set down his fork and asked Mom if she planned to pick that mess up.
Mom dropped her paper napkin on top of her untouched dinner; we were eating American chop suey again—an economical mishmash of elbow macaroni, ground beef and whatever canned vegetables we had, mixed with tomato sauce. She lit a cigarette, long and slow, and then blew smoke in Dad’s direction. I expected him to take his normal course of action, to unfold his long body from the chair, disappear into the living room and crank the Beatles so loud that he couldn’t hear her. But tonight he just stayed seated, arms crossed, his coal-colored eyes boring at Mom through the smoke. She flicked her ash into her plate without breaking his stare. He watched her, disgust etched into his face.
“You promised to quit.”
“Changed my mind,” she said, inhaling so deeply I could hear the tobacco crackle.
Dad slapped the table and the silverware clattered. My brother startled, then his lower lip curled down and his breath hitched as he wound up for a full-body cry. Mom exhaled in Dad’s direction again and narrowed her eyes. My nerves hopped like a bead of water in a frying pan as I nervously tapped my fingers on my thigh under the table, counting the seconds as I waited for one of them to pounce. When I counted to seven, I noticed the beginnings of a sardonic smile at the corners of Mom’s mouth. She stubbed her cigarette out on her plate, rose and sidestepped the peppercorns, then stomped into the kitchen. I heard her banging pots, and then a lid clattered to the ground, ringing a few times before it settled on the floor. She was up to something, and that was never good.
Mom returned to the table with a steaming pot, still warm from the stove. She lifted it over her head and I screamed, worried she would burn Dad dead. He screeched his chair back, stood up and dared her to throw it. My stomach lurched, as if the table and chairs had suddenly lifted off the floor and spun me too fast like one of those carnival teacup rides.
I closed my eyes and wished for a time machine so I could go back to just last year, when my parents still talked to each other. If I could just pinpoint that moment right before everything went wrong, I could fix it somehow and prevent this day from ever happening. Maybe I’d show them the forgotten box of Kodachrome slides in the basement, the evidence that they loved each other once. When I first held the paper squares to the sunlight, I’d discovered that Mom’s face was once full of laughter, and she used to wear short dresses and shiny white boots and smoke her cigarettes through a long stick like a movie star. She still had the same short boy haircut, but it was a brighter shade of red then, and her eyes seemed more emerald. In every slide Mom was smiling or winking over her shoulder at Dad. He took the photos not long after he’d spotted her registering for classes at Monterey Peninsula College, and invited her for a drive down the coast to Big Sur.
He’d recognized her from a few summer parties. She had been the one with the loud laugh, the funny one with a natural audience always in tow. He noticed how easily she flowed in a crowd of strangers, which drew my quiet father out of the corners. He was raised never to speak unless spoken to, and liked to study people before deciding to talk to them. This made him slightly mysterious to my mother, who was drawn by the challenge of getting the tall stranger with the dramatic widow’s peak and smoky eyes to open up. When he told her his plan to join the navy and travel abroad after college, Mom, who had never been outside California, was sold.
They married in 1966, and within four years the navy relocated them to Newport, Rhode Island, where Matthew and I were born. After his service, Dad worked as an electrical engineer, making machines that calibrated other machines. Mom took us on strolls to the butcher and the grocery store, and made sure dinner was on the table at five. On the outside, our lives seemed neat, organized, on track. We lived in a wood-shingled row apartment, and my brother and I had our own rooms on the second floor, connected by a trail of Lincoln Logs and Lite-Brite pins and gobs of Play-Doh dropped where we’d last used them. Dad installed a swing on the front porch, and we played with the neighbor kids who lived in the three identical homes attached to ours. On weekend mornings, Dad came into my room and we identified clouds as they passed my bedroom window, pointing out the dinosaurs and mushrooms and flying saucers. Before going to sleep, he read to me from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and even though every story ended in a violent death of some kind, he never said I was too little to hear such things.
It seemed like we were happy, but my parents’ marriage was already curdling.
I imagine they tried at first to manage their squabbles, but eventually their disagreements multiplied and spread like a cancer until they had trapped themselves inside one big argument. Now Mom’s shouting routinely pierced the walls we shared with the neighbors, so their problems had undoubtedly become public.
I opened my eyes and saw Mom standing there in position, ready to throw the pot of American chop suey. Their threats arrowed back and forth, back and forth, his restrained monotone mixing with her rising falsetto until their words blended into a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I tried to make it go away by softly humming “Yellow Submarine.” It’s the song Dad and I sang together with wooden spoons as our microphones. Back when music filled our house. Dad recorded every Beatles song off the radio or vinyl records onto spools of tape, which he kept in bone-colored plastic cases on the bookshelf, lined up like teeth. He listened to tapes on his reel-to-reel player, and lately he preferred “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” the one about the man who bludgeoned his enemies to death, blasting it from the living room until Mom inevitably told him to turn that racket down.
I was somewhere in the second verse when I saw her lift her arm, and the pot handle released from her palm seemingly in slow motion. Dad ducked, and our leftover dinner flashed through the air and slapped into the wall, where it slid down, leaving a slick behind as it pooled with the peppercorns on the floor. Dad picked the pot up from near his foot and stood, his whole body quivering with silent rage. He dropped the pot onto the table with a loud thud, not even bothering to put it on a hot plate like he was supposed to. Matthew was wailing now, lifting his arms to be picked up, and Mom went to him, as if nothing had just happened. She bounced Matthew, shushing softly into his ear, her back to Dad and me. Dad turned on his heel and escaped to the attic, where he would spend the night tapping out Morse code on his ham radio in conversation with polite strangers.
I didn’t bother asking permission to leave the dinner table. I made a run for the staircase, two-stepped it up to my room and slammed the door. I pulled my Flintstones bedspread off and dragged it under my bouncy horse. It was a plastic horse held aloft by four coiled springs—one on each leg attached to a metal frame. I put my feet under its felt belly, and pushed it up and down until I’d established a soothing rhythm. I curtained my eyes with my shoulder-length hair, blotting out reality so that I could almost believe that I was safe inside a yellow submarine, below the surface, alone, and so far down I couldn’t hear any voices at all.
Although I didn’t understand why my parents fought so much, deep down I understood that something significant was shifting inside our house. Dad had stopped using his words, and Mom had started using too many. I tried to make sense of it by gleaning bits of information I overheard whenever my godmother, Betty, dropped by while Dad was at work. Mom and Betty would sit on the couch and talk about all sorts of things while Betty would play with my hair. Matthew would go down for his nap, and I’d sit on the carpet between their legs where Betty could reach down and absentmindedly wind long strands of my brown hair around her fingers. She’d twist my locks into knotted snakes and then let it unfurl, over and over, while she and Mom worked out their problems. She’d coil my hair tight, then release. Twist, tug, release. Twist, tug, release. It felt like getting a deep itch scratched, a tingling scalp massage that could go on as long as it took them to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes.
They talked the afternoons away, and I stayed so quiet that they forgot about me and got to discussing things I probably shouldn’t have heard. Mostly I learned that men are disappointing. That they promise the moon, but then don’t bring home enough money for groceries. I overheard Mom say that Dad might lose his job because his boss was doing something called “downsizing.”
“Layoffs?” Betty asked. Twist, tug, twist, tug.
“Apparently,” Mom said. “They’re letting all the junior engineers go.”
“Shit on a shingle.”
“You said it.”
“What will you do?” Twist, tug.
“Hell if I know.”
Betty tugged on my hair once more and let it uncoil from her index finger. I stayed statue quiet, ear hustling. They were silent for a few minutes, and Betty switched to scratching my scalp, sending pollywogs of ecstasy squiggling down my neck. Mom got up and fetched two more Tab sodas from the fridge and cracked them open, handing one to Betty. Mom plunked back down onto the sofa and put her feet up on the sagging ottoman. She sighed so hard it sounded like she was deflating.
“Honestly, Betty, I don’t think marriage is all it’s cracked up to be. I’m thirty and feel like ninety.”
Betty shifted her heavy legs, unsticking them from the Naugahyde and stretching them out lengthwise. She attempted a forward bend, but couldn’t reach her hands much past her knees. She grunted with effort and sat back up. She pushed aside the curtains and looked out the window.
“You think being single is all rainbows and unicorns?”
Mom blew a wedge of smoke out one side of her mouth and dropped her stub into an empty pink soda can where it hissed out. “At the rate this is going,” Mom said, “I’d be happy to change places.”
Betty turned back and looked directly at Mom, to make sure she had her full attention. “Sometimes it’s lonely.”
“It’s better to be lonely alone than lonely married.”
Betty cocked an eyebrow at Mom as if to say she wanted proof. Mom launched into Exhibit A—the time she was returning from a walk with me in the buggy, and Dad hollered down to her from the upstairs window to come quick. Terrified something was wrong with Matthew, she left me in the buggy on the sidewalk and streaked into the house and up the stairs, only to find the crisis was a diaper that needed changing.
Mom’s voice turned indignant. “Isn’t child rearing supposed to be fifty-fifty?”
Betty let out a low commiserating whistle. I wanted to ask if Mom ever went back outside for me in the buggy, but knew it wasn’t the time to remind them I was listening.t
“Betty, listen to me. Don’t marry anyone without first asking one crucial question.”
Betty’s fingers froze in my hair temporarily, waiting for the secret to marital bliss.
“Ask if he’s willing to change diapers. Depending on his answer, he’ll treat you as his equal, or his employee.”
I lifted my head like a cat to prod Betty’s fingertips and remind her of her job. Her fingers automatically hooked a strand of my hair and began winding it into a knot. I knew that I was not to repeat anything that was said on the couch. It made me feel a little squirmy to eavesdrop on them, but I liked the head scratching too much to pull myself away.
I must have fallen asleep under the bouncy horse, because I didn’t remember how I got into bed when Mom pushed open my bedroom door with such force it slammed into the wall, jarring me awake. She yanked open dresser drawers, and tossed fistfuls of my clothing into a white suitcase with satiny orange lining. I sat up and tried to adjust my focus, but she was moving so fast she stayed blurry.
“Five minutes,” she said, standing still for a second. “I’m going to get your brother. Be dressed by the time I get back.”
Mom whizzed out of my room. It was dark outside. My body felt like concrete, and I didn’t want to go out into the cold. Mom had done this before. She’d shake us awake in the middle of the night, hurry us into snow pants and hats and mittens, and run down the stairs screaming that she was going to run away. Dad would let her scurry around the house packing until she tired herself out, then he’d eventually get her to sit next to him on the couch to talk. He had a low soothing voice, and she was like a too-loud TV. From the top of the stairs, I’d listen until there was no more yelling and I heard her sniffling, the signal that the argument had passed and it was time for everybody to go back to sleep.
I decided to wait Mom out this time. When she reappeared in my door frame with Matthew on her hip, I was still sitting like a question mark in bed.
“Where are we going?”
“Not now, Meredith. I’m in no mood.”
Balancing my brother in one arm, she tugged off my pajamas and wrestled me into daytime clothes. Mom was scooting me toward the door when I turned back.
“Can I bring Morris?”
Morris was a stuffed pink cat with a skirt that my parents had bought at a drugstore on the way home from the navy hospital nursery after I was born. I had named him Morris after the cat in the TV commercial, and he was my most prized possession. I had grown so dependent on him, especially lately, that I couldn’t fall asleep if he wasn’t tucked under my arm. Mom nodded her permission, and I dug around my sheets, grabbing him just seconds before Mom led me out of the room by my wrist.
As Mom was helping me into my coat in the hallway, Dad passed by, his shoulders slumped in defeat. He opened the front door and walked out into the chilly air. I ran to the living room window and watched as he started up the Volvo under the light of the porch. His breath came in silver puffs as he scraped frost from the windshield. I watched him lift the suitcase into the trunk and get into the driver’s seat while Mom strapped Matthew in the car seat and then came back inside for me. I clutched Morris closer to my chest, and rubbed my chin back and forth against the soft fleece of his pink ears.
“Where are we going?” I asked again, softer this time. Mom zipped up my puffy jacket and put her hands on my shoulders.
“California. To visit Granny and Grandpa.”
Her voice warbled, but she forced a smile and I brightened just a bit. Last summer Granny and Grandpa came for a visit, and because they were guests there was no fighting in our house for a whole week. Grandpa and Dad took me to the beach and taught me how to bodysurf, letting the waves lift and slingshot me into the hissing foam until I glided to a stop on my belly in the sand. Grandpa put me on his shoulders and dug quahogs out of the mud with his toes, teaching me how to spot spurts of water where the clams were siphoning. We brought home a whole bucket and shucked them in the kitchen for dinner. Maybe there’d be quahogs in California.
Inside the car, Mom turned away from Dad and drew wet lines on the frosty window with her finger. Matthew fell back asleep with his head bent toward me, his light brown hair falling into his eyes and his little red lips making a puff noise instead of an actual snore. Unlike me, who came into the world screaming, my brother arrived, blinked twice and smiled. Mom liked to say that I had apparently used up all the fussy and left none for him. It was true; Matthew’s soul was calm and trusting. He was a boy who assumed goodness in everyone. What three-year-old smiled while you took candy out of his hand, certain the game would end with something even better in return? I could feel Matthew’s trust in humankind when he curled his hand around my index finger and toddled in a tipsy lockstep with me, certain I wouldn’t let him fall. He followed me everywhere, plucking words out of my sentences and parroting them like my own personal backup singer. It was for those kinds of things that I loved him fiercely, even though he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. But he knew one word that bonded me to him for life. Whenever he awoke from a nap and saw me walk into his room, he’d stand and reach for me with chubby starfish hands.
“Mare-miss!” he’d shout.
I had a super fan, and his adoration gave me a profound sense of distinction.
Dad shifted gears with punching force, and I hugged my knees to my chest and rocked in the back seat, silently willing someone to speak. Mom spoke just once on the ninety-minute drive to the airport in Boston; she asked Dad to detour to Fall River so she could stop at a friend’s house to say a quick goodbye. When we finally pulled into the airport parking lot, suddenly everything was moving too fast. Doors opened and slammed. The four of us speed-walked in silence. As the glass panels of the revolving door spun around us, I felt like I was falling down a well. I didn’t understand what was happening, other than it was big, and that I wasn’t supposed to ask about it. I grabbed Mom’s hand and held on.
Dad bought our tickets and handed our suitcase to the woman behind the counter, and I watched it glide away on a conveyor belt and disappear through an opening in the wall. When we reached the gate, Dad brought me to the window and pointed out the plane we were going to take to visit Granny and Grandpa. It gleamed in the morning light, a sleek bird with upturned wings, and I felt a flutter inside, imagining myself soaring inside it. I peppered Dad with questions—how high would the plane go, how did it stay in the air, would he sit next to me? When it was time to board, Dad knelt down and squeezed me so hard that I felt him shaking.
“You be good, kiddo,” he said, forcing a smile. “Love you.”
My body suddenly turned cold. I felt something rip inside my stomach as Dad sank into an airport chair and Mom tugged me toward the door leading to the plane. This wasn’t right. Dad was supposed to come with us. Mom pulled me by the arm as I leaned in the opposite direction, unwilling to take another step without Dad.
“Come ON,” she huffed.
“What about Dad?” I demanded, digging in my heels. But she was stronger, and I was forced to hop in her direction as I struggled against her weight.
“Don’t make a scene.”
I let myself go slack. Conversation around me became muffled, like I was underwater. I fell silent, feeling myself get pulled into the breezeway, and when I looked back to find Dad, there were too many people behind me, blocking my view. My mind swirled as I let Mom steer me down the aisle and into a window seat, where I pressed my forehead to the chilly oval until I saw a tall figure with ink-black hair and plaid pants standing behind the plate glass of the terminal. Dad looked like he was in a television. I lifted my hand, but he didn’t see me. He didn’t move from his spot as the plane pushed back from the gate. I kept my eyes locked on him until he became smaller and smaller, until the plane turned away.
During the flight, Mom blew smoke at the folding tray in front of her and picked at her copper-colored nail polish with trembling hands. She seemed to be crumbling. I snuck peeks at her while pretending to draw in the coloring book the stewardess had given me. Mom still looked pretty to me, but her skin seemed grayer under the overhead light. At home, she was careful about the way she looked, and never went outside without first covering her freckles with beige cream and putting shimmery blue shadow on her eyes. I liked to watch her ritual, and all the tools that came with it. A blow-dryer to make her short curly hair stand up higher, fat brushes to put pink powder on her cheeks, and that clamper thing she squeezed on her eyelashes to curl them up. Sometimes she’d let me choose her lipstick from dozens of tubes she kept in the bathroom. The final touch was a cloud of smelly spray all around her head, to make her hair stay in place.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a little chubby, as long as you have a pretty face,” she’d say, threading gold wire hoops through her ears. She never left the house with out her movie-star sunglasses, two big brown circles as large as drink coasters.
Mom had some rolls around her middle but her legs were thin, so she covered her shape with dresses that had busy designs and loud colors. The dresses stopped above her knee, which made her look like a bouquet of flowers on two stems. I thought she was beautiful. My favorite part of watching her get dressed was when she picked out her shoes. She kept a row of heels in a perfect line on her closet floor, toes facing in, in every color of the rainbow. I wasn’t allowed to touch her things, but I admired her footwear, imagining myself perched high like a lady, strutting down the sidewalk to my grown-up job. Once she’d put on her outfit, she’d turn left and right in the mirror and ask me if she looked fat. I never thought so, but she always looked disappointed when she looked at her reflection.
At least once a month, she got dressed up to visit the Vanderbilt mansion. The towering limestone “summer cottage” had seventy rooms and looked like six houses pushed together, perched on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic. It was a five-minute drive from our apartment, and we entered through the wrought-iron gates, Mom’s dress rustling softly and Charlie perfume wafting behind her, as she pushed Matthew in the stroller past topiaries clipped to scientifically precise triangles, the pea gravel pathway crunching underfoot. We never went inside for the tour, but we had our favorite bench where Mom had a view of the top floor windows. My brother picked pebbles out for me to throw into the garden fountains as she conducted surveillance on the windows, hoping for a glimpse of one of the heirs who reportedly lived in the attic apartment.
Mom was absolutely engrossed during her mansion visits, as if familiarizing herself with opulence so that she’d be ready when prosperity came for her. She read books with Pygmalion plots about regular people being plucked from obscurity for greatness, gravitated toward movies about unearthing hidden treasure, and game shows of all kind. Mom was a dreamer without a plan, and as the years piled up without her Cinderella transformation, she felt more and more cheated out of the grandeur she was entitled to, and increasingly disappointed in my father for not providing it. She was forever waiting for life to happen to her and becoming more befuddled as to why it was not.
The plane made a little hop as it encountered some weather, and I snuck another glance Mom’s way. She appeared drowsy, her eyes open but no expression behind them. Wadded Kleenex collected in her lap, and black makeup ran down her cheeks, smudged in places where she’d tried to wipe it away so it looked like bruises. Every once in a while she gave out a long, body-slumping sigh that sounded like all the air was coming out of her. I patted her arm, and she put her hand over mine absentmindedly. I wanted to ask why Dad wasn’t coming with us, but knew I wouldn’t get an answer. Even though her body was in the chair next to mine, her mind was somewhere else. I flipped the metal cover of the ashtray embedded in the armrest—open, closed, open, closed—hoping the noise would become so irritating that she’d have to talk, to tell me to knock it off.
If only Mom would say something. I wanted her to cry, or shout, or throw something to send me a signal that things were still the same. But she was eerily quiet, and that was terrifying. At least with an outburst, I could tell what was on her mind. Silence was not her style, so that meant something serious was happening. Dread dripped in the back of my throat, an acrid taste like burned walnuts.
I tried to keep a vigil over her, but eventually the engine hum inside the cabin lulled me to sleep. I dreamed there was a small reservoir in the floor of the plane near my feet, with a long lever protruding from it. I unfastened Matthew’s seat belt and shoved him into the hole and pulled the lever. Hissing steam rose, and when I released my grip, Matthew had turned into a blue glass totem, about the size of a soda can. He was trapped in the glass, and I could hear him screaming to be let out. I shoved him into my pocket, promising him that I would turn him back into a boy, but for now, this was the best way to keep him safe until we arrived at Granny and Grandpa’s house.
My intuition was telling me that I needed to protect my little brother. During the flight, I could sense that Mom was receding from us. I felt a slipping away that I couldn’t put words to, a change as subtle as growing taller that couldn’t be perceived until it had already happened. By the time we landed, her eyes were vacant and looked right through me. Somewhere thirty thousand feet up over Middle America, she had relinquished parenthood.
2 (#ulink_c69e8154-7122-514b-bb7d-0d647c4dac80)
Honey Bus (#ulink_c69e8154-7122-514b-bb7d-0d647c4dac80)
Next Day—1975
Granny was waiting for us at the Monterey Peninsula Airport, standing with arms crossed in a wool dress and a crisp, high-collared blouse with puffy sleeves. Her tawny bouffant was salon-sculpted into frozen waves, and protected by a clear plastic headscarf tied under her chin to shield her hairdo from the elements. She was an exclamation point of perfect posture, jutting above the glut of less-mannered travelers flagrantly kissing their relatives in public. She scrutinized our approach through cat-eye glasses, lips pursed in a thin line. When Mom saw her, she let out a wounded cry, and reached for a hug just as Granny pulled out a wadded hanky from her sleeve cuff and held it out to Mom to avoid an embarrassing scene. Mom took it and just stood there, unsure of what to do. Granny observed manners, and one did not blubber in public.
“Let’s have a seat,” Granny whispered, grabbing Mom’s elbow and guiding her to the row of hard plastic chairs. Mom blew her nose and gulped back sobs as Granny made soft clucking noises and rubbed her back. I stood there awkwardly, looking while at the same time trying not to look. Granny handed Matthew and me two quarters from her coin purse and pointed to a row of chairs with small black-and-white televisions mounted on the armrests. Delighted, we ran to the chairs to watch a TV show while Mom and Granny had a Very Important Conversation. Matthew and I squeezed together in one of the chairs, dropped the quarter in and spun the dial until we landed on a cartoon.
When Granny and Mom finally stood up to go, we were the last people left in the boarding area. Granny came over, and I instinctively stopped slouching. “Your mother is just tired,” she said, leaning down to kiss my cheek. She smelled like lavender soap.
Matthew and I rode in the wayback of Granny’s mustard-yellow station wagon, far enough from Granny and Mom so we couldn’t hear what they were saying. I looked out the back window to inspect California sliding past. It was February, but oddly there wasn’t any snow. We drove over rolling brown hills with horse ranches and up a steep grade with hairpin turns, pushing the car higher and higher. The car groaned with effort, and my stomach dropped when I realized that we were on top of a ring of mountains, like we were driving on the edge of a gargantuan bowl. Beneath us, the earth fell away in deep folds and grooves all the way to the valley below, and an idea came to me that we must be driving over the dinosaurs, whose bodies had turned into mountains after they’d died.
I also noticed that the trees in California were different—solitary, massive oaks with outstretched octopus arms twisting just a few feet above the ground, nothing at all like the fiery maples or crowded forests of skinny birch trees back home. When we finally started to descend, I could see all of Carmel Valley below us, a vast green basin with a silver river snaking along one side of it. My ears popped on the way down until we reached the bottom of the bowl, the mountains now a towering fortress around us. Carmel Valley felt like a secret garden in one of my fairy tales, sealed off from the rest of the universe. It was warmer here, and the sun seemed to slow everything down: the ambling pickup trucks, the sleepy crows, the unhurried river.
We drove by a community park and public swimming pool, then made a right turn onto Via Contenta and passed an elementary school with tennis courts. The rest of the residential street was lined with one-story ranch homes separated by juniper hedges and oak trees for privacy. Granny slowed in front of a volunteer fire station where some men were washing red engines out front, passed a small cul-de-sac with a handful of identical wood-shingled bungalows, and then reached her destination—a small red home perched in the middle of an acre of land, bordered on four sides by overgrown trees.
Granny skipped her front gravel driveway and instead took the back way to the house, turning onto a short dirt lane that ran along her fence and was canopied by a row of mammoth walnut trees with branches reaching all the way to the ground, engulfing us in a tunnel of green leaves. Walnut shells popped under our tires as we followed the curving drive to the backyard. She parked next to a clothesline, where her square-dancing petticoats were flapping in the breeze.
Granny took great pride in living on one of the largest lots on her street, and she was quick to remind anyone who forgot that she was among the first residents of Carmel Valley Village, arriving in 1931 from Pennsylvania with her mother when she was eight. They’d driven across the country in a convertible Nash Coupe after Granny’s father had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, because her mother wanted to escape the tragedy in a warmer place with good swimming. This history, Granny believed, conferred on her a pedigree that allowed her to complain about the influx of newcomers over the next forty years. However, she was comforted that the oak, walnut and eucalyptus trees demarcating her property had grown to screen the neighbors from view. And the neighbors in turn were spared the sight of Grandpa’s accumulating junk heaps that now pervaded the king-size lot.
I stepped out of the car and saw several haystack-size piles of tree trimmings, at least three toolsheds, mounds of gravel and bricks, two rusting military jeeps, a flatbed trailer, a backhoe and two beaten-down pickups. A trellis of grapevines led in a sloping line from the laundry to the back fence, where there was a small city of stacking beehives resting on cinder blocks, each one four and five wooden boxes high. From this far away, it looked like a mini-metropolis of white filing cabinets.
Something caught my eye through the billowing laundry. I walked through the rainbow of swirling skirts to get closer, and found myself standing before a faded green military bus. Rain had chewed away a ring of rust holes around the roof, leaving brown streaks trailing down its sides. Weeds choked the tires, its wraparound front windshield was cracked and cloudy, and a massive rhubarb bush sprouted from under the front bumper. It seemed to have driven right out of World War II and wheezed to a stop right by Grandpa’s vegetable garden, from an era when vehicles were all fat curves instead of sleek edges, making the bus look more animal than machine. The rounded hood was sculpted like the snout of a lion, with vent holes for nostrils and globe headlight eyes that stared back at me. Below its nose was a row of grinning grille teeth, and under that, a dented metal bumper that looked an awful lot like a lower lip. In peeling white paint above the windshield, it read U.S. ARMY 20930527. Captivated by the incongruity of it, I felt compelled to investigate.
Kicking a path through waist-high weeds, I tried to see inside but the windows were too high. I circled to the back of the bus, and near the tailpipe I found a crooked stack of wooden pallets that improvised as stairs leading to a narrow door. I scrambled up, the makeshift staircase wobbling beneath me, and pressed my nose to the filmy glass.
Inside, all the seats were gone, and in their place was some sort of factory of whirligigs, crankshaft gears and pipes. A metal basin about the size of a hot tub rested on the floor, and contained a hefty flywheel powered by pulleys as large as manhole covers. Behind the driver’s seat were two massive steel barrels with cheesecloth stretched across their open tops. An overhead network of galvanized steel pipes was suspended from the ceiling with fishing lines.
The equipment ran the length of one wall, and on the other side Grandpa had stacked a bunch of wooden boxes, each about six inches tall and two feet wide, and painted white. Each rectangular box, taken straight from his hives, was open on the top and bottom and contained ten removable wood-framed sheets of wax honeycomb. The frames hung in neat rows, supported by notches inside the box. I would later learn from Grandpa that these were the “honey supers,” the removable top-tier boxes of a modular beehive where the bees stored nectar in the wax honeycomb and thickened it into honey by fanning their wings. The supers rested atop the larger brood boxes at the base of the hive where the queen lays her eggs.
There must have been three dozen boxes of honeycomb inside the bus. Glistening honey trickled down the stacks, collecting in shiny pools on the black rubber floor.
I could see glass jars on the dashboard that had turned purple in the sun, and sunflower-yellow bricks of beeswax that Grandpa had made by melting wax honeycomb and straining it through pantyhose into bread pans to harden. Electrical cords snaked everywhere, and construction lights dangled from the ceiling handrails. I cupped my hands over my eyes to shield the glare, and from out of the shadows someone inside pressed their nose to mine. I startled and nearly fell backward, just as Grandpa popped out the back door.
“Boo!” he said.
Bees buzzed around his head, and he slammed the door quickly to keep them from getting inside the bus. He was wearing threadbare Levi’s a couple inches too short and no shirt. He had Einstein hair sticking out every which way, as if electricity had just zapped through it, and a round face tanned to a chestnut color that settled into an expression of bemusement with life, as if he was forever chuckling at a private joke. In one hand he held a can with smoke pouring out of a spout on top. He yanked a tuft of green grass out of the ground, jammed it into the spout to stifle the flame and set his bee smoker on a pile of bricks. Then he dropped down on one knee and opened his arms wide, signaling me to fall into them.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, squeezing me tight.
I peeled my arms from Grandpa’s neck and pointed at the bus.
“Can I go in?”
His workshop held a Willy Wonka–like spell over me. He’d built it himself, out of hand-me-down beekeeping equipment and spare plumbing parts, and powered it with a gas-powered motor taken from a lawn mower. When he bottled honey inside during the hottest days of summer, the whole bus rumbled as if it were about to drive off, and the indoor temperature shot above one hundred. Nothing in his secret workshop was official, or safety-checked, and the sweltering, sticky danger of it all made entry that much more irresistible. It seemed like magic to me that Grandpa brought honey supers inside, and emerged hours later with jars of golden honey that tasted like sunlight. Grandpa had the power to harness nature, like Zeus, and I wanted him to teach me how.
Grandpa stood up and blew his nose into a grease-stained rag, then shoved it in his back pocket.
“My honey bus? It’s not a place for little kids,” he said. “Maybe when you’re fifty, like me.” The bus was too hot and dangerous inside, he said. I could lose a finger.
Grandpa reached his long arm to the roof of the bus, where he’d stashed a piece of rebar that was bent at a right angle. He inserted one end of the rod into a hole where the back door handle used to be, and twisted to lock the bus. Then he put the homemade key back on top of the bus, out of my reach.
“Franklin, would you come get the suitcase!” Granny called out, in a way that sounded more like an order than a question. Granny had honed her leadership skills with decades of practice keeping elementary schoolchildren in line. I was a little afraid of her, and always tried to be on good behavior because her presence inherently demanded it. Not only of me, but of everyone in her orbit. Grandpa’s ears perked at the sound of her voice.
I followed Grandpa to the station wagon. He fetched our one shared suitcase from the back and we walked to the front door, trailed by a handful of bees attracted to the honey stuck to Grandpa’s boots.
My grandparents lived in a tiny red house with a flat, white gravel roof that looked like year-round snow. Grandpa said it turned away the sun and was cheaper than air-conditioning. The house had two bedrooms, and a kitchen wrapped by an L-shaped room with redwood paneling that served as both the living and dining room. A large brick fireplace that took up half of one wall was the main source of heat. Next to it was a windup grandfather clock, and on the opposite side of the house, floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Santa Lucia Mountains, which formed a natural barrier between our house and Big Sur on the other side. The kitchen was painted baby blue and was home to Grandpa’s black dachshund, Rita, who slept under the stool next to the washing machine. There was one bathroom, decorated with brown-and-silver-striped wallpaper, and a low-flow showerhead that misted weakly.
Granny led us to the spare bedroom that used to be Mom’s when she was a girl. It had since been painted a cantaloupe color. I stepped inside and immediately saw my world shrink: Matthew would sleep in a cot in the corner, and I would share the double bed with Mom. We would put our clothes into a Victorian marble-topped vanity with two lavender-scented drawers. My room in Rhode Island suddenly seemed like a castle in comparison to this small box, so crowded by beds there was no space to play.
Mom immediately closed the curtains to the sun, sending a shadow over the walls. Granny steered Matthew and me back into the hallway.
“Your mother needs some peace and quiet,” she whispered. “Go on and play outside.”
Granny had a voice that never suggested, but always instructed. We immediately understood the first unspoken rule of our new home—Granny was in charge. She would be the one to set our daily routine, plan the meals and make decisions for Mom, Grandpa, us.
Mom didn’t join us for dinner that night, so Granny put a bowl of tomato soup and toast on a tray for her instead. She set a crystal vase with a rose next to the bowl, like hotel service.
“Someone get the door,” Granny said, standing before Mom’s bedroom.
I twisted the doorknob and pushed, sending a wedge of yellow light into the darkened room, and a plume of cigarette smoke billowed out. The air was so thick I could feel it pour into my lungs as I inhaled. I took a step back and let Granny go in first. She gently approached the bed, where Mom was curled in a fetal position, crying softly. A glass ashtray the color of amber rested on the headboard, filled with a cone of ash.
“Sally?”
Mom moaned by way of answer.
“You should eat something.”
Mom uncurled herself and sat up. She winced and squeezed her temples.
“Migraine,” she whispered. Her voice was so thin, it sounded like it might tear. Granny flicked on the light, and I could see Mom’s face was flushed and her eyes were puffy.
“Tylenol?” Granny offered, fishing the plastic bottle out of her pocket and rattling it.
Mom extended her arm, and Granny dropped two pills in her palm. Granny held out a water glass and Mom gulped twice, handed it back, then flopped back down into the pillows.
“The light,” she said.
I reached up and turned it back off.
Mom seemed so weak, like she couldn’t even hold her head up. I thought of that time I found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. It was pink, and I could see the blue of its bulging eyes that had yet to open. The poor thing’s head lolled to the side when I tried to pick it up.
“I’ll just leave this here,” Granny said, setting the tray at the foot of the bed. Mom waved it away. Granny stood over the bed for a few seconds, waiting for Mom to change her mind. She bent down and adjusted the pillows to make Mom more comfortable, then Mom closed her eyes again and turned away from us. Granny picked up the tray and we shuffled out.
That first night Matthew slept in his new cot, while I crawled into the big bed where Mom was burrowed into the middle, the sheets tightly wound around her like a burrito. I carefully tugged on the sheet, trying not to wake her. She mumbled in her sleep and half-heartedly tugged back, then scooted aside to make room for me. She sniffled and fell into a light snore.
I moved to the edge of the mattress, as far as I could possibly be from Mom without falling out of the bed. I faced the window, which ran the length of the wall, tracing the moonlight that leaked in around the perimeter of the curtains with my finger. I didn’t want our bodies to touch, as if her tears were contagious.
I felt twitchy and sleep wouldn’t come. I wondered what Dad was doing at that moment, if he was walking through the empty rooms of our house, changing his mind and deciding to come to California after all. I hoped that whatever had just happened to our family was temporary, but I didn’t understand what had broken, so I couldn’t imagine how to fix it. I had a new uneasiness in the pit of my stomach because I now knew the injustice of random bad luck, that it was possible to have a family one day and lose it the next. I wanted to know why I was being singled out for punishment, and tried to retrace my steps to pinpoint what I had done wrong to have my life upended this way. It was baffling, but I had the sense that going forward, I had to choose my words, and my steps, more carefully, so I could do my part to comfort my mother and slowly, craftily, coax her happiness back. I had to be good, and patient, and maybe my luck would turn around.
Mom’s and Matthew’s snores settled into a syncopated rhythm, and I tried to match my breathing to theirs so I could relax into sleep. I lay motionless and fell into a self-induced trance, humming “Yellow Submarine” quietly until I receded somewhere deep inside my skull and blinked out.
Over the next few weeks, Mom remained bedridden. Granny tried various strategies to cheer her up and brought her all sorts of bedside meals, trying to find something she could stomach. But Mom refused most of it, accepting only sugary coffee, canned soda and the occasional bowl of cottage cheese. Granny fetched hot pads for her back, cold compresses for her forehead and murder mysteries from the library. Still Mom’s migraines wouldn’t go away. When she complained of sore muscles, Granny dug around in the hall closet and produced a gadget that looked like a handheld electric mixer; only this thing had one stem protruding from it that ended in a flat metal disc. Granny plugged it in and the disc heated up and vibrated. She sat on the bed and moved the vibrator across Mom’s back in lazy arcs, loosening the tension while Mom sighed with relief.
My brother and I were not allowed in the bedroom during daytime because Mom needed to recuperate, but Granny would sit at her bedside for hours in deep conversation, and despite my eavesdropping I caught only snatches of it. Mostly I heard Granny reassuring Mom that it wasn’t her fault, that she could put this behind her, that men were worthless when you really get right down to it, and not worth this much fussing over. I’d hear Mom sniffling and asking wounded questions. Why me? What am I supposed to do now? What did I ever do to deserve this? Her questions were similar to my own, and I strained to hear an answer from Granny that would explain. One never came, and eventually I grew weary of spying and gave up.
Spring came, and the almond tree in the front yard erupted in white flowers. Mom entered her third month of bed rest, yet her despondency only grew. Mom’s bad luck invoked in Granny an inexhaustible pity. While Granny gave Mom a safe haven and unlimited time to regain her strength, she worked double-time to hold up appearances that my younger brother and I weren’t really semiorphans. She never spoke to us about what was happening to our mother, instead forging ahead as if nothing was amiss. Granny bought and washed our clothes, took us to the doctor for checkups, made us brush our teeth before bed and wrote scathing letters to our father demanding he send more money to support us. Granny adapted to her second motherhood with a sense of family duty, which gave Mom permission to carve out a new identity as a woman scorned. Granny looked after Matthew and me in an obligatory way, without the affection she reserved for her daughter. Mom was her child, and we were more like unexpected foster kids. In her most frustrated moments, she blamed Matthew and me for ruining her life plans, letting us know that if it weren’t for that no-good father of ours, she could have been enjoying her retirement.
Her suggestion to go outside and play became a refrain. Granny now had more laundry to do, more food to make, more dirt tracked in the house to clean up and she couldn’t keep up with it if we were constantly underfoot.
Outside there was plenty to mess with, and as we were loosely supervised by our grandparents, we were free to roam the yard as long as I kept an eye on my little brother. That first summer Matthew and I gorged on Grandpa’s blackberry vines until our lips and fingertips were purple. We climbed into two hollowed-out army jeeps rusting in the yard and drove them through dozens of imaginary wars. We unearthed plastic soldiers and old glass marbles that someone had buried in “olden times,” and we came upon an enormous pruning pile that Grandpa had been contributing to since before we were born—a colossal hill of fruit tree branches—and scaled it on all fours like lizards climbing a wall. We discovered that if we jumped up and down on the heap, we got excellent bounce, just like a trampoline. We fell off and bruised ourselves only a few times.
We quickly adjusted to the outdoor sounds of Carmel Valley, no longer jumping in terror when one of the peacocks on the hilltops let out a squeal like a woman being throttled, and learned to differentiate between the ambulance and fire sirens coming from the volunteer fire station down the block. We much preferred outside to inside, which felt more like a library than a home with everyone talking in hushed voices and being careful not to slam cupboards or clang dishes that might disturb Mom.
My brother and I ran loose and were becoming slightly feral, wearing the same jeans so many days in a row that the denim became more brown than blue, and bathing only when we remembered, which didn’t seem to bother anyone because it was right and good to save water in drought-prone California. Which is why Matthew and I got in supremely big trouble when we got caught hiding behind the oak trees at the top of the driveway with the garden hose going full blast, dousing unsuspecting drivers with sudden rainstorms. It was bad enough we’d pulled a dangerous prank, but it was even worse that we wasted precious water with a looming drought. Grandpa was letting his fruit trees die, and he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough flowers for his bees to make honey. Neighbors were rescuing gasping steelhead trout from what was left of the Carmel River, transferring them into water tanks in the back beds of their pickups and driving the fish to the mouth of the river, closer to the ocean, to release them.
I tried arguing that we had crimped the hose in between cars, but it didn’t win any points. Granny ordered Grandpa to spank us anyway. But he did it in a way that was more symbolic than painful, making a big showy swing with his arm and slowing to a pat by the time his hand reached our bums. But we yowled from the shame of it all.
The real lesson we learned from the spanking was that our grandparents were exact opposites. She was the disciplinarian, and he was the softie. When they shared the newspaper in the morning, she fretted over the political news and he laughed at the comics. She worried about reputation and appearances; he wore tattered undershirts dribbled with coffee stains and never bothered to clean the black grime from under his fingernails. She was tidy; he never threw anything away, collecting his possessions into indoor and outdoor piles that grew taller and thicker by the year, which in a certain light matched the professional definition of hoarding. She detested the outdoors; he had to be coaxed inside.
When Granny met Grandpa during a square dance at the elementary school in Carmel Valley, she was a forty-year-old single mother living in the little red house with Mom, who was then nineteen. Barely a few months divorced, Granny was trying to socialize again, and Grandpa, three years younger, was perfectly satisfied being single. When Grandpa twirled Granny around, she noticed the strength in his upper body, the care he took to get the steps correct. It didn’t hurt that she’d read about him already in Big Sur’s monthly newsletter, The Roundup, which dubbed him Big Sur’s Handsome Bachelor.
Grandpa wasn’t looking for a mate; he was just fine with his bees, and he earned a steady income as a plumber, learning from friends how to make water flow to remote cabins where there was no centralized water system; digging wells and climbing the steep Santa Lucia Mountains to divert natural springs and creeks to homes below.
Ruth and Franklin were an odd couple but a good dancing pair, and began attending square dances together, even traveling to the faraway ones in Salinas and Sacramento. On their third date, at a square dance in South Lake Tahoe, Granny asked him what his intentions were, and when he tried to dodge her question, she literally told him to “fish or cut bait.” No one had ever confronted him so directly, and he was impressed. He agreed to marry her, and she convinced him right then and there to drive across the border into Nevada so they could tie the knot immediately, giving him no time to change his mind. They drove until they located a Carson City courthouse that offered around-the-clock weddings, summoned a janitor to serve as witness, and at nine that night became husband and wife. Mom was a little surprised and somewhat dubious of her sudden stepfather, but she didn’t have time to get to know Grandpa. Four months after he moved in, she transferred from Monterey Peninsula College to study sociology at California State University, Fresno.
My grandparents knew scant little about one another when they married, but over time they learned to love their differences. He liked a cold beer; she preferred Manhattans. He spoke only when he had something to say; she spoke in monologues. But they fit, mainly because she liked to lead and he, averse to confrontation, willingly followed. He had no interest in power, prestige or money, and handed his income to Granny so she could figure out the bills and the taxes. They parted every morning for their separate worlds—hers in the classroom, his in the Big Sur wilderness—and then came together every night at the dinner table where he ate in silence as she lectured on a never-ending list of topics. Grandpa admired her mind, although he also had an Olympian appetite and could fill his plate four times in one sitting. This made him an excellent listener.
It didn’t take long for Matthew and me to adjust to the rhythms of our grandparents’ schedules. Granny preferred her afternoon cocktail lying down. After a full day of teaching grammar and arithmetic to a roomful of trying fifth-graders, her first order of business was to mix a Manhattan and recline on the orange shag rug in the living room, her head propped on a pillow and a newspaper spread before her. By now she had taught me how to make her drink, and I liked the daily ritual of it almost as much as she did. I poured brown bourbon into a tall blue plastic tumbler until it was two fingers high, splashed in some sweet vermouth from the green glass bottle and added two ice cubes and a neon red maraschino cherry. I swirled it around with a dinner spoon and brought it to her.
“Grazie,” she said, reaching up from the floor.
With a loud licking of her fingers, she flipped the pages of the free Carmel Pinecone that she’d picked up at Jim’s Market and told anyone within earshot what she thought about local politics.
“Goddammit all to hell, I can’t believe they want to put streetlights in the village! Excuse my French.”
Her outbursts were not invitations to respond. She kept her head down and continued her conversation of one.
“What do we need lights for? We don’t even have any sidewalks. Damn Monterey County supervisors!” she said, taking another gulp from her tumbler. Outsider politicians were always trying to modernize unincorporated Carmel Valley Village and ruin the reason people moved out to the country in the first place, she said.
I kept listening as I climbed into Grandpa’s recliner and wiggled the handle on the side, trying to get the chair to go flat. I believed Granny was exceptionally smart, and knew things that regular people didn’t. My opinion came from two sources: Granny herself, who had told me several times that her 140 score on an IQ test proved she was a genius; and secondly that she could predict the weather. I didn’t know that forecasts were printed in the newspaper, so when I’d ask her what the weather was going to be like and she’d foresee sun or rain or frost, I thought she had some direct line to the universe.
She dropped phrases in Latin and Italian every once in a while, which sounded cosmopolitan to me. As the cocktail hours piled up, I was slowly starting to adopt her worldview, dividing people into those who were wrong and those who were right. I didn’t know what a Democrat or a Republican was, but I had heard the words so often that I knew we were on the Democrat team. Granny’s world was black and white, and therefore easy to follow. She was right, and anyone who disagreed was dim-witted and therefore deserved our pity.
“It’s tedious being smart,” she’d sigh, swirling the ice in her drink. “Waiting for everyone else to catch up to you. One day you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Granny was now reading about the gasoline shortage and flipping the pages with more force. I went to the kitchen and helped myself to one of her cocktail cherries, and then slipped away to Mom’s bedroom. The door, as usual, was shut, and there was no sound from inside. Mom had been in bed so long that she was becoming shimmery around the edges like a memory. I felt my mother more than I saw her, when she curled her body around me at night.
“Mom?”
I tapped lightly on the bedroom door. Nothing. I knocked a little harder. Her voice sounded like it came from under the covers, thick and muffled.
“Go away.”
Her words pinched, and I winced reflexively. Mom still liked me; I knew that. I reminded myself that she just wasn’t herself right now. Granny rounded the corner and spotted me lingering where I wasn’t supposed to be. “Come with me,” she said, placing a hand in the small of my back and guiding me to the kitchen. She lifted a wicker basket of wet clothes off the counter, and I followed her outdoors to hang the laundry. She dropped the basket on the ground with a thump under the wire clothesline that Grandpa had strung up between two T’s made out of plumbing pipes.
“Hand me the clothes,” she ordered. “I can’t bend down on account of my bad back.”
I passed her one of Grandpa’s white cotton undershirts, encrusted with drips of plumber’s putty and worn so thin I could see through the fabric. She snapped it into the wind once, then pinned it with clothespins. Then she reached toward me for the next item. I pulled out her floor-length quilted nightgown, the one covered in pink roses.
She cleared her throat.
“You know your mother is going to need everybody’s help to get better,” she said, contemplating the clothing in her hands. I knew what was coming. I was in trouble for knocking on the bedroom door again.
“I just needed Morris.”
Granny paused and faced me.
“Aren’t you getting a little old for a teddy bear?”
Her words were so horrible that I momentarily forgot what I was doing and dropped my favorite green-checkered dress on the ground. I couldn’t sleep without Morris tucked in my arms. He was my only possession, the only thing left from Before.
“Dad gave him to me!”
Granny bent down to pick up my dress, and she grunted like it really hurt. It looked like she was stuck, but she put her hand to her back and rose slowly, puffing out her cheeks with the effort. She shook the dirt off my dress and continued pinning.
“That’s another thing,” she said. “I don’t want you and Matthew mentioning your father around her. It only upsets her.”
Dad was the only thing I wanted to talk about, but his name had not come up once since we landed in California. Everyone acted as if Dad didn’t exist, and I was beginning to wonder if Matthew even remembered him. He had even started to refer to Grandpa as Daddy. Each time, Grandpa gently reminded him that he was a grandpa, not a daddy. It was like our life in Rhode Island was a movie, and the movie had ended, and that was that. Over and forgotten. If everyone pretends your dad doesn’t exist, does he?
Granny was staring at me, waiting for me to agree to never say Dad’s name. It was pointless to argue, because I would be taking Dad’s side against hers and that would have repercussions I could only shudder to imagine. It’s true I wanted Mom to get better. I didn’t want to keep thinking of her as a sick person, someone with a weak heart and faraway eyes. I wanted her to braid my hair again, read Winnie-the-Pooh to me, take me with her to the grocery store. If that meant having silent conversations about Dad in my head, then that’s what I would do. But before I submitted to Granny’s ultimatum, I had to ask a question.
“When’s he coming?”
Granny reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She shook one out, lit it and relaxed her shoulders with the first exhale. She stared at the honey bus as if searching it for my answer.
“Your father is not a very good man,” she said, keeping the back of her head to me. Then she indicated to me to hand her the next thing in the basket. Conversation over.
I put my tongue between my teeth to keep from calling Granny a liar. How dare she pick sides, as if she could just snip Dad out of my life with a swipe of her scissors? I had bat-ears; I knew that she talked about Dad with Mom sometimes, when their whispers floated out the gap at the bottom of the closed bedroom door. It wasn’t right that they could talk about him but I couldn’t—he was my father after all. I wasn’t dumb; I’d figured out that Mom and Dad were having a fight and this wasn’t a “visit” to California, but that didn’t make my dad bad and my mom good. He was my dad, and he was coming back. Granny had everything all wrong.
The sun was low in the sky, and the honey bus looked stage-lit with orange and yellow bulbs. Through the windows I could make out the shapes of three men crowded inside with Grandpa, passing honeycomb frames between them and shouting over the rat-a-tat of the machines inside.
I crept forward to get a closer look. The men had taken off their shirts in the heat and tied them to the overhead handrail. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but could tell they were swapping jokes, slapping one another on the back and doubling over with laughter. The men had an action-figure quality to them, their barrel chests rippling and shining with sweat as they hefted hive boxes and stacked jars of honey into towering pyramids. I studied their every move, even how their Adam’s apples bobbed with each swig of beer, and I silently willed them to wave me inside with a swing of their Popeye arms. These were the Big Sur friends Grandpa grew up with, the ones who had taught him to rope cattle and dive with a snorkel for the iridescent abalone shells that I had found in the backyard. These were big men with big hands who showed Grandpa how to build log cabins from redwood trees, how to hunt wild boar, or clear landslides off the coast highway with heavy equipment. They were living Paul Bunyans, the Big Sur mountain men who fended for themselves in the wild.
I patted down the tall weeds and made a little burrow for myself where I could sit and watch them work. They used thick, heavy knives blackened with burnt sugars to gently slice open wax-sealed honeycomb, exposing the orange honey underneath. They lowered honeycomb frames into the massive spinner, and cranked a handle protruding above it from left to right, using two hands and all their body weight to shift its position. I saw one of the men yank on a pull-cord several times and heard the lawn-mower motor sputter to life. The flywheel started to rotate and whine, and as it picked up speed, the bus began to rock slightly from side to side. The pump kicked in and forced the honey from the bottom of the extractor, up through the overhead pipes, and directed it to cascade in two streams into the holding tanks. It was nothing short of miraculous; like striking gold.
I stayed in my spot until the sun slipped behind the ridgeline and the crickets came out to sing. The men flicked on the construction lights in the bus and hung them from the handrails so they could keep working into the night.
I was drawn to the bus like a moth to flame, by an irrepressible longing that I felt as a physical ache, a gnawing in my belly to disappear into the secluded protection of an enclosed space like a submarine, or a bus. The honey bus looked like it was warm inside, and safe. I wanted the men to invite me to join their secret club, and to teach me how to make something beautiful with my hands. My pulse sped up when I watched them work together in a harmony of familiar dance movements, passing frames of dripping honeycomb between them and taking turns capturing the honey into glass jars as it flowed out of the spouts. I could tell the bus made them happy, and I believed it could do the same for me.
I was struck by a certainty, from some deep place inside myself, that something important was waiting for me in the bus, like the answer to a question that I hadn’t yet asked.
All I had to do was get inside.
3 (#ulink_4db8a07d-5e33-5cea-8c04-a24415cdbe39)
The Secret Language of Bees (#ulink_4db8a07d-5e33-5cea-8c04-a24415cdbe39)
1975—Late Spring
I didn’t limit my snooping to the outdoors. I brazenly opened drawers, rifled through closets, and took a keen interest in what Granny and Grandpa had tucked away inside the house. Because my grandparents were old people, their stuff was old, too, and I enjoyed hunting for rare artifacts forgotten in the far corners of their history. I found arrowheads that Grandpa had unearthed while digging pipelines in Big Sur, and inside the cedar chest I dusted off a stack of LIFE magazines with JFK, Elvis, and the first astronauts on the covers. The kitchen cupboards held a boneyard of cooking gadgets that Granny had tried once and then deemed ridiculous.
One morning I dug out an Osterizer blender from deep in the back of the cabinet under the sink. I wedged the glass pitcher onto the base, put the lid on, pressed one of the buttons and it whined to life. For a bored girl with few toys, I suddenly possessed this most miraculous machine and a whole kitchen packed with mystifying things pickled in mason jars. I opened the pantry and selected a jar containing a bright green Jell-O-looking substance, unscrewed the lid and sniffed: mint jelly. That could taste good—I liked mint gum, as well as jelly on toast—so I scooped it into the blender and added milk. Figuring I needed more than two things to make a smoothie, I did another quick scan of the kitchen until my eyes rested on the cereal boxes lined up on top of the fridge. I dragged the stool over and pulled down the corn flakes, thinking it would make my drink thicker. I pressed the button for the highest speed and whirred it into a concoction resembling runny, lumpy toothpaste, which I poured into a ceramic mug and brought to Grandpa, who was at the dining room table watching the birds peck at seed he’d sprinkled on the deck railing.
Grandpa would eat anything. He chewed chicken gizzards, said cow tongue was so delicious it put hair on his chest, and devoured artichoke leaves whole. He’d even developed a technique to pull every kernel clean off an ear of corn, using only his lower teeth and running the cob back and forth before his mouth like the carriage return on a typewriter. I presented him with my milkshake. He took a swig and then needed a few seconds to come up with an adjective.
“Refreshing!” he said, chasing it down with coffee. “What’s it called?”
“Mintshake,” I said.
He nodded thoughtfully and strummed his fingers on the table, like a gourmand considering a tasting note.
“Let’s share it,” he said, sliding the cup back toward me.
It was a dare, all right. I could tell Grandpa was trying to keep a straight face as I reached for it, but just as I was about to take a drink, a low hum distracted us from our standoff. Grandpa reflexively turned toward the sound and tracked something flying in the air. I followed his gaze until I saw what he did—a honeybee hovering over the dining room table. It was suspended in the air with its legs dangling beneath its body, keeping itself in place by beating its wings so fast they became invisible. I set the cup down and leaned back in slow motion. The bee, watching my every move, began to slowly come toward me, flying in slow arcs left and right, inching closer with each swing.
My muscles tensed, and I willed the bee to please, please, go take a hike. But it was attracted to the sugary smell inside my cup, and determined to have a taste. When it was about to land on the rim, I swatted at it.
The bee emitted a shrill zzztttt! in response, and zoomed in an anxious circle above our heads.
Grandpa jumped out of his chair and grabbed my forearm so tightly I could feel him pressing bone. I startled, frightened by the sudden aggressiveness of his touch. He’d never gotten mad at me before; he always fake-spanked Matthew and me when Granny forced him to punish us for misbehaving. He leaned toward me until we were nearly touching noses and locked eyes. His words were deliberate and forceful, each one like the clap of a church bell.
“You. Must. Never. Hurt. Bees.” He didn’t look away until he was certain his words had landed in my brain. I must have done something truly awful for Grandpa to scold me, but I was confused. Bees stung people. They were pests, like mosquitos. Who cares if I smashed one? Wouldn’t I be doing the right thing by protecting myself?
“It was going to sting me!” I protested.
Grandpa’s eyebrows sprang up in disbelief. “Why do you say that?”
The bee was now slamming itself into the window trying to fly away. Its buzz rose to a shriek. I thought perhaps we should be having this conversation in a different room, but Grandpa was unperturbed by the sight of a stinging insect going berserk. I kept one eye on the frenzied bee as I tried to answer Grandpa’s question.
“Because bees always sting.”
“Come here,” Grandpa said.
I followed him into the kitchen, where he searched the cupboards until he found an empty honey jar.
“Go get a piece of paper,” he said.
I was eager to do anything to get back on his good side. I raced to Granny’s desk and pulled out a piece of her fancy stationery, and practically bowed as I offered it to him.
“Listen,” he said, cupping his ear and cocking his head toward the buzz. “It’s high-pitched,” Grandpa said. “It’s in distress. Do you see it?”
I followed the sound until I saw the bee gliding in a wobbly circle around the room, looking for a way out, until it rested on the dining room window facing the deck.
“There!” I pointed.
Grandpa crept softly toward it, hiding the jar behind his back. When he was directly behind the bee, he reached up and imprisoned it in one swift motion. With his free hand, he slipped the paper between the window and the mouth of the jar, forming a temporary lid. He stepped away, holding the trap in his hands, and the bee crawled up the glass, tapping the inside of the jar with its antennae.
“Okay, come get the door for me,” he said.
We stepped outside together, and instead of releasing the bee, Grandpa sat on the back step and patted the space next to him, signaling me to sit near.
“Hold out your arm.”
He tilted the jar as if he was going to release the bee onto my forearm. I jerked my hand back.
“It’s going to sting me!” I wailed.
He sighed like he was summoning all his patience, and then turned to me again.
“Bees won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt them.”
Most of my information about bees came from cartoons in which bees always traveled in bloodthirsty swarms terrorizing all manner of people, coyotes, pigs and rabbits. I mentioned this to Grandpa.
“That’s make-believe,” he said. “Honeybees don’t go on the attack. They will only sting to defend their home. They know that if they sting they will die, so they’ll give you plenty of warnings first.”
Grandpa reached for my arm again, but I tucked it behind my back, still uncertain. The bee was now incensed, banging into the walls of its glass prison. Grandpa set the jar down and spoke to me slowly and carefully.
“Bees can talk, but not with words. You need to watch how they behave to understand their language. For example,” he said, lifting a finger to numerate his points. “If you open a hive and hear a soft chewing sound, that means the bees are busy and happy. If you hear a roar, that means they are upset about something.”
I watched the bee get more frantic by the second.
“Two,” he said, holding up a second finger. “Bees will ask you to back away from the hive by head-butting you. It’s a polite warning to step away so they don’t have to sting you.”
I was starting to understand that Grandpa might know bees in a different way than everybody else. He spent every day with them, so he probably could tell what they were thinking. But that didn’t mean that I wanted a bee to crawl on me. I trusted Grandpa wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, but I couldn’t say the same for the trapped bee, who by the looks of things was now totally, royally, pissed. He reached for the jar again and brought it over to me. I shook my head no.
“You mustn’t be afraid around bees,” he said. “They can sense fear, and it will make them scared, too. But if you are calm, they will stay calm.”
“I’m still scared,” I whispered.
“The bee is more frightened of you,” he said. “Can you imagine how scary it is to be this small in a world that is so big?”
He was right, I wouldn’t want to change places with a bee. A little bit of my trepidation melted knowing the bee was also scared. I knew I wouldn’t hurt it, but the bee couldn’t know that for sure. I stretched my arm out again, ever so gently.
“You ready?”
I nodded as I watched the bee fall onto its back inside the jar, its six legs scrabbling to find footing.
“Bees are sensitive, so no sudden movements, and no loud noises, okay? You must always move slowly and quietly around bees to make them feel safe.”
I promised to hold still, an easy pact because I was too terrified to move. I tried to summon calming thoughts, but it was impossible to do on command. Grandpa tapped the jar on the underside of my wrist, and the bee tumbled out. It stood still as I held my breath, then it took a few tentative steps.
“Tickles,” I whispered. This close, I could see that a honeybee’s body was a miracle of miniature interlocking parts, like the insides of a watch. Its antennae, two L-shaped sticks that swiveled in sockets on its forehead between its eyes, searched the air and tapped on my skin, reminding me of a person without sight using a cane to get a mental picture of a place.
“What’s it doing?”
“Checking you out,” Grandpa said. “A bee’s antennae can smell, feel and taste.”
Imagine that. Having a body part that is a nose, fingertip and tongue together. As the bee got used to me, I got used to it. Grandpa was right. This small insect was not my enemy. I carefully lifted my arm until I could see into its eyes, shaped like two glossy black commas on the side of its head. Fear gave way to fascination as I studied how it was put together, so small, so perfect.
Veins crisscrossed its shimmering wings. It was furry, and its abdomen expanded and contracted with each breath. I looked closer at the stripes, and noticed that the orange bands had small hairs and the black ones were slick. The bee’s legs tapered to tiny hooks, and it was now using its front two pair to stroke its antennae. Cleaning or scratching them, I guessed.
“What do you think?” Grandpa asked.
“Can I keep it?”
“’Fraid not. It will die of loneliness if you separate it from its hive.”
I was beginning to understand that bees have emotions, like people, and like people they live in families where they feel safe and loved. They will lose their spirit if they don’t have the security of their hive mates. I was about to ask if we should return this bee to its hive when it parted its mandibles and unfurled a long red tongue.
“It’s going to bite me!” I shrieked.
“Shhhh, hold still,” Grandpa whispered. The bee tasted my arm tentatively, realized that I was not a flower and recoiled its tongue. The bee put its hind end in the air and fanned its wings so rapidly that I could feel a vibration on my skin. Then it lifted off and was gone.
Grandpa stood, reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet.
“Meredith, never kill something unless you are going to eat it.”
I gave him my word.
That night when I got under the sheets, Mom was already snoring. I cleared my throat hoping that would wake her, and when that didn’t work, I jiggled the bed, just a little bit.
“Hmmmm?”
“Hey, Mom.”
She grunted and turned toward me with eyes closed. “What?”
“Did you know bees die after they sting?”
“Shhhh. You’ll wake your brother.”
I lowered my voice and whispered.
“Their guts come out with the stinger.”
“That’s nice.”
Mom rolled me away from her, then tucked her knees under mine and drew me to her stomach. I was about to brag about picking up a bee with my bare hands, but I felt her legs twitch and realized that she had fallen back asleep.
I lay there, my mind swimming with new questions about bees. Grandpa had just cracked open a portal to a secret microcosmos in our backyard, and now that I knew bees lived in families, I wanted to know everything about them. Which bees are the parents? How many bees in one family? How do they remember which hive they live in? What does it look like inside a beehive? Do they sleep at night? How do they make honey in there?
Grandpa had proven to me that I could get close to a honeybee without getting stung. I was coming around to the opinion that fearsome animals and insects rarely live up to the reputations foisted on them by circuses and monster movies. Grandpa was teaching Matthew and me that all creatures were sacred, with their own inner emotional lives. As part of our education, after dinner each night we climbed into the recliner with Grandpa to watch his favorite nature shows. I’d been astonished to watch male lions play with their cubs, aquarium octopuses reach from the water to embrace their human handlers, or elephants dig stairs leading out of a deep mudhole so a drowning baby could clamber to safety. So it made me wonder, what if bees were compassionate like that, and what if I could teach myself how to see it? As a girl needing to know that love existed naturally all around her, it was thrilling to realize that I didn’t have to wait for Wild Kingdom or Jacques Cousteau to be reassured. The mysteries of the animal kingdom were within my reach, anytime I wanted. That night when I went to bed, the confines of our small room expanded ever so slightly. I had found one good thing—a reason how California might make me happy.
I awoke to the percolator bubbling on top of the stove, so I knew my grandparents were up. I tiptoed down the hall and pushed open their bedroom door. Granny was reading aloud to Grandpa from the Monterey Herald while he looked at the photos in a beekeeping magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture. On weekends, they liked to ease into the day. I climbed onto their small four-poster bed, wedged myself in between them and asked Grandpa if he could show me his beehives.
“Whoa, Nelly,” Grandpa said, putting down his magazine. “I haven’t had my think-juice yet.”
“Excellent point,” Granny said. “Sounds like the coffee’s done, Franklin.”
Grandpa dutifully threw back the covers and slid his feet into slippers, and I heard his joints crack as he pushed himself upright. I sighed dramatically, but nobody acknowledged it. I was in for a long wait. On Saturdays and Sundays they savored several cups of coffee in bed, as Granny curated the newspaper front to back, reading aloud particularly important paragraphs to Grandpa, enhanced by her commentary. Grandpa would often get weary at a certain point, but he never complained. Instead, he would distract her by gripping sections of the paper with his strong toes and dropping the pages on her lap. Granny thought it was repulsive; Grandpa thought it was a riot.
I wandered outside and spotted Matthew lifting his chubby leg and stomping on something near the vegetable garden. When I got closer, I could see that he was killing snails. He smiled when he saw me approach, and lifted his shoe to display the slimy puddle he’d made on the ground. He was helping Grandpa, who’d shown him how to hunt the marauders who ate his crops. Snails and gophers were the only exceptions to Grandpa’s no-kill rule.
“Gross,” I said, slightly unnerved by how much my brother was enjoying himself.
He held a snail between a thumb and forefinger and dropped it on the ground.
“You do it,” he commanded.
I reached for his hand instead. “Come on, I have another job for you.”
His eyes widened, and he bounced alongside me as I walked him toward the honey bus. There was about a foot and a half of clearance under the chassis. If we crawled underneath, we could hopefully find a rusted-out hole or some type of entry and maybe climb through to get inside the bus. I’d already tried pushing all the windows, and had inserted all manner of sticks and screwdrivers and butter knives inside the opening where the back door handle used to be, hoping to pop the lock. This was my last idea. I figured I’d need Matthew if we found an opening too small for me.
I slid under first on my back, as it was more Matthew’s nature to see if something was safe before trying it. He watched my legs disappear and waited for my report. A tangle of weeds blocked my view of the undercarriage, so I used a snow angel technique to knock them down. I pressed here and there on the bus floor with my foot to test for weak spots. The metal was rusty, but solid. I kicked at the exhaust pipe, and it rattled some, showering me in fine dirt. I scooted toward the front of the bus, and bumped into a discarded tire. Other than that, the only thing I found under the bus was a graveyard of corroded five-gallon Wesson Oil cans.
I gave up searching and rested for a moment on my back, trying to think. There had to be a solution that I was overlooking. Matthew called out to me, and when I turned to look over my shoulder, I saw him on his hands and knees peering under the bus. Then two legs appeared and framed my brother.
“What’s so interesting under there?” I heard Grandpa ask my brother.
“Mare-miss,” my brother said, pointing. His tongue still hadn’t mastered my three-syllable name.
Grandpa got down on his belly next to Matthew, and now both of them were staring. I held still because I felt like I had just been caught doing something, not anything bad, just something slightly embarrassing.
“Whatcha doing under there?”
“Trying to get in.”
“Don’t you know the door’s up here?”
“It’s locked.”
“To keep little kids out.”
Grandpa reached under the bus and crooked his finger, signaling me to come to him. I scrabbled out, and as he helped me to my feet, he brushed the dirt from my back and plucked off the burrs. Whatever was in the bus would have to wait. Until I got bigger, whenever that was. The only people admitted entry were Grandpa’s friends, so I imagined I would have to wait until I was an adult, which might as well be never.
“I thought you wanted to see the bees,” Grandpa said.
His counteroffer was exquisitely played, and I perked up immediately. As my part of the deal, I had to come inside for breakfast first.
Belly properly filled with pancakes, I followed Grandpa to the back fence, where he kept a row of six beehives. The sun was shining on the slit entrances at the base of the hives, illuminating the landing boards where the bees were flitting in and out. A small cloud of bees hovered before each hive, all the foragers waiting for a clear shot to get back inside. I noticed that the bees were buzzing in a different way than the one we caught in the house; their sound didn’t have the urgency of a shout, it was more contented and calm like a person humming a song. I stood in front of the right-most hive, about a foot away from the entrance so I could watch them. I felt Grandpa’s hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t stand there,” he said. “See what’s happening behind you?”
I turned and saw a traffic jam of bees jiggling in the air, unwilling to go around me to get into the hive. The backup was growing by the second.
“You’re in their flight path,” he said, guiding me to the side of the hive. As soon as I stepped out of the way, the clot of waiting bees whooshed in a comet back to their hive. I knelt down next to the hive so I was eye level with the bees. One by one they marched to the entrance, cleaned their antennae, then crouched and launched like a jet fighter.
“What do you see?”
“Lots of bees coming and going,” I said.
“Look closer.”
I did, and saw the same thing. Bees flying in. Bees flying out. So many it was hard to keep my eye on one bee at a time. Grandpa took a comb out of his back pocket and whisked it through his hair in three practiced swipes, top and sides, waiting for me to see whatever it was I was supposed to see. Then he pointed at the landing board. “Yellow!” he announced.
All I saw were bees.
“There’s orange! Gray! Yellow again!”
And then I saw it. Some of the returning bees had something stuck to their back legs. Every fifth or sixth honeybee that returned waddled in carrying small balls like the pills that collect on a favorite sweater, some loads no bigger than the head of a pin, others the size of a lentil, so large the bee strained under the weight.
“What is it?”
“Pollen. From flowers. The color tells you which flower they came from. Tan is from the almond tree. Gray is the blackberries. Orange is poppy. Yellow is mustard, most likely.”
“What’s it for?”
“Bee bread.”
Now he was just messing with me. Bees can’t bake bread. All they make is honey. Everybody knew that.
“Grandpa!”
“What? You don’t believe me?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself. Bees mix the pollen with a little spit and nectar and feed it to their babies. Bee bread.”
It made some sense, but it was just too weird. I waited for him to giggle at his own joke, but he kept a straight face. Grandpa had told the truth when he said it was safe to let a bee crawl on me, so I guessed he knew what pollen was for. For the moment, I played along.
“They’re making bread in there?”
“They push the pollen off their legs, chew it with nectar and store it in the honeycomb.”
“Can I see?”
“Not today. I don’t want to disturb them right now. They are building new wax.”
Just then the fattest bee I’d ever seen lumbered out of the hive. It was wider and stockier than all the others, and its head was comprised almost entirely of two massive eyes. I watched it approach several of the regular-size bees and tap its antennae against theirs. Every bee it touched backed up and walked around it, as if irritated by being bumped.
“Is that the queen bee?”
Grandpa picked it up and put it in his palm. “Nope. A drone…a boy bee. He’s begging for food.”
I asked Grandpa why he didn’t just get his own food.
“Boy bees don’t do any work. All those bees you see with pollen? All girls. Boys don’t collect nectar or pollen for the hive, they don’t feed the babies and they don’t make wax or honey. They don’t even have stingers, so they can’t protect the hive.”
Grandpa returned the drone to the hive entrance where it resumed the search for handouts. Finally, one of the returning girl bees paused and linked tongues with him. Feeding him nectar, Grandpa said.
“He only has one job, but I’ll explain it to you when you’re a little older.”
Grandpa had set up two stumps near his apiary, and we took seats and watched the bees flying as one would watch a fire, or the sea, lulled by all the individual movements that combined together into a single flow. I liked interpreting the patterns of their routine, to know that the bees weren’t just flying willy-nilly; there was an order to what they were doing. They were out grocery shopping for bread and nectar. A beehive could seem chaotic if you didn’t understand that bees had a plan for everything.
I could have never guessed that a beehive is a female place, a castle with a queen but no king. All the worker bees inside are female; around sixty thousand daughters that look after their mother by feeding her, bringing her water droplets and keeping her warm at night. The colony would wither and die without a queen laying eggs. Yet without her daughters taking care of her, the queen would either starve or freeze to death.
Their need for one another was what kept them strong.
4 (#ulink_909c519b-84b5-576d-ab23-3dd002fc4e47)
Homecoming (#ulink_909c519b-84b5-576d-ab23-3dd002fc4e47)
1975—Summer
Our grandparents had the incredible good fortune to live only steps away from the Carmel Valley Airfield, where two-seater planes landed and took off a handful of times a month. It was nothing more than a dirt landing strip, with just one runway and a taxiway, and no lights, fences or security of any kind. There were no markings or signs to direct pilots and the tattered wind sock was rendered useless. Pilots had to radio in to a neighbor with a view of the runway and ask which way the wind was blowing.
Uprooted as we were without access to our playthings or our former playmates, Matthew and I had to get creative in our diversions and make use of whatever was readily available. We tried to build pyramids with Granny’s poker cards, we put out birdseed and waited for birds, but an airport with real live planes was an entertainment jackpot.
All it took was the rumble of an incoming propeller, and Matthew would drop whatever was in his hand and go streaking out of the house to look for a plane. He was mad for those planes, falling into a near trance as he watched them come in for a landing. He’d run for Grandpa and yank him by the hand, urging him to take us across the street so we could stand by the runway and feel the wind wash over us as the plane whooshed down from the skies.
One afternoon we heard the telltale engine noise, but Grandpa was working in Big Sur and we didn’t have an escort. But now that we were spending so much time alone together, a budding solidarity was forming between Matthew and me, and sometimes our companionship crossed over into mischief. We hesitated ever so slightly, looked back to the quiet house, then grinned at one another and bolted across the road, huffing it up the small incline to reach the airstrip just as the plane was circling overhead.
Matthew wanted to get closer to the plane this time, so we crept to the median between the two runways and sat down in the grass to wait for the plane to fly over us. I snapped off a mustard blossom and ate it, like I’d seen Grandpa do. I offered a yellow bloom to Matthew, but he wrinkled his nose. We could hear the propeller approaching, beating the air like thunder. Matthew reached for my hand, and we stretched out on our backs and looked skyward.
When the plane’s underbelly crossed not twenty feet overhead, we felt the growling engine in our chests and screamed with the same mix of joy and terror that roller coasters were designed for. I can’t imagine what the pilot must have thought when he saw two small children pop into view at the last minute. We waved, innocently hoping he’d see us; he probably had heart palpitations.
We sat up and watched the plane make a few short screeching hops and then touch down. It rolled toward the end of the landing strip where a collection of similar planes was parked, their wings chained to the ground.
Just then the plane, its blades still whirring, made a U-turn and started slowly approaching us. It was halfway down the runway when the plane stopped and the pilot got out and shouted something at us. We couldn’t hear the words, but picked out the unmistakable tone of an adult who “would like a word” with us. We sprang to our feet and took off, and before I could count to ten, we were back behind our little red house, bent over, sucking in oxygen. I hoped the pilot hadn’t seen which house we ran to, and secretly promised myself never to do that again.
When we caught our breath, we walked as innocently as possible into the kitchen, where Granny was scorching something in the electric skillet. She’d given up on the oven long ago, insisting the temperature dial had a manufacturer’s defect that burned her food. The oven became a tabletop for a square electric frying pan no bigger than a pizza box, and although her cursing had subsided considerably, every breakfast, lunch and dinner still came out blackened and overdone.
“Where have you two been?” she asked, keeping her back to us and furiously scraping at something with the spatula. I put my finger to my lips to remind Matthew we couldn’t tell. He nodded.
“Nowhere. Just outside,” I said.
“Well, stay close. Dinner’s almost ready.”
“We saw a plane!” Matthew piped. The kid just couldn’t help himself. Before the conversation could progress, I quickly grabbed his hand and led him to the living room, distracting him with a suggestion that we build a fort.
Granny had one of those couches that felt as long as a Cadillac, made with two rectangular bottom cushions that when removed made excellent walls. We dismantled the stuffed yellow chair for the roof pieces and assembled a hut in front of the television, leaving a peephole so we could sit inside and watch TV. It was almost like being in the dark of a real movie theater. We settled in to watch Matthew’s favorite show, Emergency!, about two Los Angeles paramedics who carry a hospital phone in a box and rescue accident victims, mostly by jolting them back to life with electrical paddles.
“TV’s too loud!” Granny called from the kitchen.
Just then a car exploded on-screen at full volume.
I was cozy. I didn’t feel like removing a wall and crawling all the way to the TV to reach the volume knob.
“Turn the TV down,” I said to Matthew.
He ignored me. Lately, Matthew’s adoration of me seemed to be waning. This was disturbing on two counts. One, he was no longer following my orders. The other day he’d even refused to let me put every necklace and bangle in Mom’s jewelry box on him, something we did all the time. But worse, he was all I had left of my family, and I couldn’t tolerate the thought of him leaving me, too. I tried not to take his emerging independence personally, it was part of his growing up after all, but I was afraid it signaled something deeper, that he one day wouldn’t need me. The thought of Matthew leaving me was so terrifying that I became meaner to try to keep him in line, to show him that there were severe consequences for disobeying me. So if he wasn’t going to turn the TV down, then he wasn’t going to get to stay in the hut, either. I knocked the sofa cushion nearest me, and our house toppled on us. Matthew howled in outrage as he kicked his way free of the ruins.
Granny appeared in the living room, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She shot us a look that said we were riding her last nerve. Then she cranked down the volume, and that’s when we heard someone knocking on the front door.
How long the visitor had been trying to get our attention, we couldn’t say. Most likely it was one of Grandpa’s honey customers, dropping by unannounced with an empty glass jar in hand. Grandpa wasn’t home, so whoever it was would have to leave their jar on the doorstep with a check or cash in it, and Grandpa would swap the money with honey, then put it back outside so they could fetch it later.
Granny opened the door, and I saw her back stiffen.
Then she shouted my mother’s name over her shoulder. “Sal-leeeee!”
I heard the creak of the bedroom door, and Mom padded into the living room in rumpled sweatpants and T-shirt, an outfit that doubled as her nightgown.
“You don’t have to yell, Mom,” she said, blinking in the afternoon light. Mom came up behind Granny and put one arm on the door frame and leaned in. Then she took a step back.
“David,” she said.
I heard a low male voice, and the hair on the back of my neck prickled up.
Dad!
The vault inside me where I stored all my secret thoughts about Dad flung open, and fireworks exploded out of every pore. Six months of wishing in the lonely quiet of night had worked its magic, and now everything was going to snap back to the way it was before, just like I knew it always would.
I clicked off the TV, and Dad’s silky words swirled into the living room, wrapping me in a tight fabric and pulling me toward him. I knew he would come back. Now we could finally go home, Mom would be happy again, and Matthew and I would get our own rooms back. I looked at my little brother, and he was bouncing up and down, his eyes fixed on the door.
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” he sang.
I leaped in the direction of Dad’s voice, but Mom and Granny wouldn’t step aside or open the door wider than a couple of inches, so all I could see were bits of him—the side of his leather Top-Sider shoe, a patch of ink-black hair. I peered through the crack in the door and spotted our green Volvo parked in the driveway by the eucalyptus tree. He must really want us back if he drove all the way here, I thought.
“Did you bring my portable dishwasher?” Mom demanded. “The kids’ toys?”
I tugged on Granny’s sleeve, but she didn’t respond. I tapped on Mom’s back. Nothing.
My father had just driven across country in Mom’s Volvo to return it to her, and no one had explained this beforehand to Matthew and me. He’d stayed the night at his mother’s house in Pacific Grove, and he’d asked her to follow him to our house the next day and park a few streets away so he could catch a ride back to the airport. He’d anticipated a possible confrontation at our house and wanted to spare his mother from seeing it, so they made a plan for him to walk to the village where there was a one-block strip with a grocery, barbershop, bank and restaurant, and meet her in the parking lot.
I knew none of this. When Dad suddenly appeared on our doorstep, I’d assumed that he was there to fetch us. I looked on, stunned, as Granny blocked him from coming through the door.
Something wasn’t right. Dad must know we were in the house, so why wasn’t he coming inside? What was taking so long? Why weren’t they letting him in? Granny was speaking in clipped sentences, with the same undertone of disgust she saved for bad politicians she read about in the newspapers. I heard Dad mumbling, like he was apologizing, and the air became thick with malice. Their voices were getting louder, darker, sharper, and my muscles clenched with the memory of our last night in Rhode Island. Then Mom’s voiced cracked into thunder.
“How can you do this to me?” Mom shrieked. “Don’t you care about your own children?”
Dad’s fingers flashed into the house and dropped the car keys into Granny’s open palm. She tossed the key ring a few feet onto her writing desk as if it was a stinky shoe that she didn’t want to touch. Mom stepped outside to talk to Dad and Granny closed the door, thumping her butt into it to make sure the latch caught. She pushed the button in the doorknob to lock it, and swiped her palms together in a gesture of finishing something, of wiping flour off her hands. She walked back to the kitchen without glancing our way, as if nothing had happened.
Things were moving too fast. I could hear Mom outside roaring at Dad. I didn’t know what divorce meant, but I caught the finality in her voice as she spat the word at him, and that told me all I needed to know—that whatever was wrong with my parents was unfixable.
“Don’t you want your kids?” she wailed.
Matthew looked at me with wide eyes, searching my face for reassurance. I took a step closer to him, and he wrapped his arm around my leg.
I heard Dad’s voice rise to meet Mom’s, and they became two dogs, barking and growling at each other. A familiar dread pressed down on my rib cage, and I understood that if I didn’t get through that door, I might never see my father again. This was my one chance to try to change his mind. Maybe, if he saw me, if I pleaded with him, he’d stay. I couldn’t let Dad come this close and then slip away without trying. I lunged for the door, unlocking it just in time to see Dad walking down the driveway and toward the road. The neighborhood reverberated with Mom’s voice as she hollered to his back.
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Meredith May
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: The Honey Bus: A Girl Raised by Bees is a memoir about a girl’s journey into the heart of a beehive to find herself.When Meredith May is abandoned by both parents, she ends up learning life lessons about family, generosity and resilience from a rather unexpected source: the honeybees her grandfather keeps in Big Sur.In a converted WWII military bus marooned in the backyard, Grandpa shows her the nuances of harvesting honey while the bees become a guiding force in her life, bonding her to the natural world and modeling a successful community that thrives on industry, democratic decision-making and loyalty.The exquisite relationship between insect and girl becomes a sanctuary from her lonely childhood, but when her increasingly despondent mother turns violent, she must leave her grandfather’s side and strike out alone with only his hive lessons to help her.