The Honey Bus

by Meredith May

  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 doo
r. 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.