by Meredith May
“But you said a hive can only have one queen,” I countered.
A colony raises more queens than they need for insurance, he explained. The first virgin queen to emerge races to tear open the other queen cells and stings her rivals to death. Grandpa wiggled his eyebrows at me for dramatic effect.
“Really?” I whispered. Grandpa had convinced me that bees were gentle, and now they seemed capable of terrible brutality. I bit my lower lip, unsure of what to think.
“Why would I kid you?” Grandpa said. “You can even hear the queen fights. They let out a battle cry that sounds like a duck quacking. Yeah, it goes like this—waaaah...waaaah...waaaah...wah-wah-wah.”
It was an astonishing thought, to replace your mother. What if humans could do that? I imagined a store that sold mothers, and I all had to do was walk down the aisles of ladies packaged in Barbie boxes and choose. What kind of mother would I pick? Mine would have long, shiny blond hair and a name like Gloria. She would wear pantyhose that came in those plastic eggs, and her high heels would click-click-click when she walked. She would come to my classroom and help all the kids with their art projects, and put Snoopy Band-Aids on my knees when I fell down. I imagined us driving in a convertible, and she’d have a long yellow scarf that would blow behind her. She would always let me pick the song on the radio, and take me to a drive-through for burgers and fries whenever I wanted.
Grandpa tapped my shoulder and my daydream popped. He had another frame in his hands, but on this one the honeycomb in the center of the frame was not orange with honey, but the cells were sealed shut with dark wax the color of a brown paper bag. He pointed again, and at the tip of his finger I saw two small antennae poking through a very small hole in the brown wax, where a bee was emerging. From behind the wax, the bee pushed and bit at the hole until it was large enough to poke its head through. The fuzz on its head was bright butter yellow, and matted down like it was wet. Its antennae swiveled as it explored the outside. Several bees ran over to touch the newcomer, and it startled and retreated back into the cell. Grandpa pulled a dry weed out of the ground and used the tip to pull the wax away from the cell opening, giving the baby bee a clear path to come out. It ambled out on wobbly legs, stood for a moment and stretched its wings. The newborn immediately began begging for food from passing bees, and within seconds an older bee stopped and linked tongues with it to pass honey, and the baby ate greedily.
I had no idea there were so many things going on inside a beehive. Grandpa examined all thirty of his colonies, and each one was different from the next. Some hives were swelling with bees, and others looked lonely for company. Some had cranky bees that ran over the comb like they had the heebie-jeebies, and some had sweet bees that ignored us as we inspected. Some were busy making queens, and others were hoarding pollen. Some colonies made wacky wax sculptures inside, and others formed precision sheets of straight comb. One hive even had two queens, which while rare sometimes happened when the queens decided to be friends, which made me relax a little bit about the power struggles over the throne. I was beginning to see that every hive had its own mind, and a good beekeeper keeps track of which hive needs what kind of attention.
The sun had settled down to the waterline by the time Grandpa had finished, and the beehives were making long shadow bars on the grass. As we walked back to the truck, two quail parents heard us coming and hustled their brood behind the safety of the sagebrush, the babies scurrying like cotton balls blown by the wind. Once we were settled back in the truck, he reached down under his seat to see if Rita licked his fingers. Satisfied she was onboard, he put the truck in gear and we bounced back up the pitted dirt road, but this time I knew Grandpa had it under control.
“I like it here,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too. A person can think in Big Sur.”
I understood exactly what he meant. I’d just spent the last several worry-free hours thinking about nothing but bees.
Once we reached the smooth pavement again, Grandpa pointed south down the Coast Highway and told me that when he was in fifth or sixth grade, every day he’d hike five miles up Bixby Canyon to work on the Chapman Ranch with the Trotter brothers. The siblings were teenagers, already huge for their age, and they taught Grandpa how to haul hay, split redwood into timber, brand cattle and shear sheep. Eventually, they were the ones who taught Grandpa how to be a plumber. Grandpa paused his story for a moment as if remembering something, then he began explaining the proper way to pull a lamb out of a ewe.
“If it’s coming out backward, you have to reach in and grab what you can and turn it around.” His voice was grave, as if what he was sharing with me would one day save my life. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I would never, ever, stick my hand inside an animal of any kind, for any reason.
I rolled my window down to let in the salt air. The mountains were turning dusky purple in the fading light, and a red-tailed hawk tracked our passing truck from atop a telephone pole. I felt oddly content, as if nothing bad could happen to me in Big Sur. I had managed to spend a whole day exploring inside a hive, too absorbed in learning about the bees to feel a pang of sadness. Big Sur was like a secret trapdoor to a pleasant dream.
Watching the queen bee work tirelessly for her family, and her children jostle to take care of her, helped me feel a little less bad about the family I had lost. It reassured me that motherhood is a natural part of nature, even among the tiniest of creatures, so maybe there was hope yet that Mom would come back to me. Even though the bees left the hive every day, they always came back. There was never any doubt that a bee had any other purpose than to be with its family. The hive was predictable, and that was reassuring. It was a family that never quit.
6
The Beekeeper
1975—Fall
When Granny took me to the church thrift shop to buy school clothes, I knew that we were going to stay in California for good. I accepted this with a child’s surrender, the feeling of floating down a river on a boat steered by others, watching the turns of my life come into view with a quiet detachment. As was custom in my family, there was no conversation to explain why our visit had become permanent. On the one hand I was thrilled to finally meet kids my age, but I was also sad to forfeit a private hope that one day we’d return to Rhode Island and be a family again.
The thrift shop was in an attic above the church, accessible by a stairway behind the sanctuary. The room was musty, with angles of light from a few small windows at the roofline illuminating the dust motes floating in the air. Granny let me pick out a shirt, and I chose a white button-down, short-sleeved blouse with vertical green stripes. Looking closer, I saw the stripes were actually columns of Girl Scout emblems—little symbols that looked like four-leaf clovers. I couldn’t believe my luck—a real piece of the official Girl Scout uniform. Granny pushed aside the hangers on a crowded circular rack and tugged out an ankle-length padded skirt with a patchwork pattern of gingham and calico squares. It looked very much like she wanted me to wear a quilt to school.
“This is respectable,” she said, holding it aloft.
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew that when Granny made up her mind about something, the proper response was compliance. My shirt and Granny’s skirt together were a train wreck of an outfit—Little House on the Prairie on the bottom and wayward troop leader on top, but this was what I chose for my first day of school, with sneakers.
There was no fanfare on my first day at Tularcitos Elementary. Mom remained in bed, Grandpa left before the sun for a plumbing job down the coast, and Granny whisked Matthew and me out the door with her. Now that the school year had started, she had to leave earlier in the morning to get us to day care at a lady’s house in the village, before she drove to Carmel to ready the day’s lessons before her fifth-graders arrived. I had breakfast with the day care kids, then walked myself to school, using a shortcut through the dirt airport.
It was comm
on in the seventies to see kids walking everywhere by themselves in Carmel Valley. Crime was rare, and the village was so small that everyone knew which kid belonged to whom and kept a collective eye on our whereabouts. Our neighborhood was scarred with footpaths worn through fields and behind homes where kids had created their own transportation networks linking the convenience store to the community pool, the library to the baseball field. So the plan Granny laid out for me was to walk to Tularcitos each morning and back to day care each afternoon, where I’d wait with Matthew until she could retrieve us. I became a latchkey kid without a key.
On the first day of school, I kept to the edge of the road, inhaling the licorice scent of the wild anise bushes and turning to look over my shoulder every now and then to keep a lookout for the occasional car. The street was sleepy and deserted in the early morning; even the neighborhood dogs were still snoozing as the first rays of sun warmed their bellies. I passed a horse corral where two ponies lifted their heads expectantly. Normally, I would have stopped to feed them tufts of green grass through the fence, but this time I hurried along so I wouldn’t be late for my first day of school. I cut through the airport, and finally reached the white ranch house next door to the school with the weathered wagon wheels leaning against the porch. That’s when I heard the glorious cacophony of children’s voices emanating from the schoolyard. I stood there for a moment, just listening to the lovely echo of potential friends.
The centerpiece of the schoolyard was a two-story jungle gym made from old telephone poles, fashioned into two fortresses connected by a chain suspension bridge that swayed perilously when kids ran across it. We were guaranteed to get splinters every time we climbed the structure, and we scorched our bums on the metal slides that got griddle hot in the sun.
When I reached the playground, boys and girls were streaking across the swaying footbridge, hopping over the missing slats and somehow staying upright as it lurched side to side, chasing each other with the delight of renewed rivalries. Other kids zipped down steep metal slides, screaming for those below to get out of their way. Boys crawled on their bellies like soldiers through tunnels created by industrial-sized clay pipes that were half buried in the sand. Girls swung from the monkey bars, their hair flapping behind them as they expertly flew from ring to ring down the line, the metal chiming with each catch and release. In another corner of the sand lot, girls were executing gymnastic tricks on the horizontal bars. One girl in pigtails sat on a crossbar about six feet above the sand as a cluster of her friends chanted from below, “Dead man’s drop! Dead man’s drop!” I watched the girl let go and fall backward, swing around the bar on the back of her knees and somersault into the air to land on her feet.
I felt a zing in my fingertips. I joined the river of kids and let the adults with clipboards guide me to my classroom. Students were gathered on the floor before the teacher, who was taking attendance. As I approached, I heard snickering and immediately flushed. I was disastrously overdressed. The girls wore Ditto jeans with hearts or rainbows sewn on the back pockets. The boys wore Levi’s or corduroy shorts, and T-shirts with surf logos or Adidas stripes. I was woefully out of place with the padded fabric of my skirt that held its dome shape when I walked, so it almost looked like I had some sort of petticoat underneath. This was what happened when you let old people dress you. Granny chose the kind of old-timey clothes she used to wear when she was young.
The girl sitting next to me had hair so blond it was almost white, and in a certain light I thought I detected a green tint to it. She had her hair cut in a bowl shape, like the ice skater Dorothy Hamill. She wore a pink satin jacket.
She told me her name was Hallie.
“Why’s your hair green?” I asked.
She frowned.
“The pool turns it green.”
“You have a pool?”
“Mmm-hmm. I have a trampoline, too.”
She probably had her own room. With a television. During recess, I followed her to an area of the yard reserved for kickball. I was one of the last players picked for a team, and when my turn at home plate came, my ankle-length skirt didn’t allow me enough room to swing my leg and get a good kick. I had to take little doll steps to run the bases, and invariably was thrown out every time. Hallie was such a good athlete that the fielders backed up each time her turn came up. She flew around the bases with long strides just like one of the boys, pumping her arms and exhaling in powerful bursts. She was a marvel. The bell rang to go back to class, and I fell into step with her.
“You’re really good,” I said.
“It’s easier if you wear pants.”
I promised her that I would.
That night I ditched the skirt to a far corner of the bedroom closet, hiding it behind the winter coats. I needed to be more careful not to let Granny embarrass me again. I vowed to pay more attention to my classmates, and do what they did so I would fit in. I observed them with an anthropologist’s eye, looking for clues to what I was supposed to want, how I was supposed to behave. I eavesdropped on their conversations about Disneyland, the zoo and McDonald’s. I copied their slang, memorized the pop songs they sang. I cataloged the items they pulled out of their lunch bags—juice that came in silver pouches, sticks of cheese they pulled apart in strings, flat fruit that they peeled from cellophane. Hallie showed me how to twist her Oreo cookies apart and lick the frosting first. It tasted marvelous, like ice cream that didn’t need to be kept frozen. But no matter how much I wheedled inside the Safeway store every Saturday morning, Granny refused to buy such ridiculous things. Not only did she not understand what they were, they were outrageously expensive. Mom’s lack of income meant I was entitled to free government lunch at school. In the court of Granny, there was no arguing against free.
But sometimes free comes with a price. In the cafeteria I stood in the special lunch line, which everyone knew was for the kids whose families didn’t have enough money for groceries. I envied the students with their Mom-made sack lunches, and listened to the daily frenzy of their bartering as they swapped gummy bears and peanut butter saltines, and sandwiches on white pillowy bread with the crusts cut off. Every day I got a hot meal in an aluminum tray sealed with foil, and no matter what was inside, it always smelled like boiled potatoes and was completely leached of flavor. No one wanted to trade for gray broccoli and limp fish sticks, so I started spending lunch and the recess period that followed inside the classroom with my smelly food, flipping through Dick and Jane books. My teacher urged me to play outside, but I refused so often that eventually she stopped trying. She and I ate together indoors, she working at her desk and me on a beanbag chair, satisfied by silence between us.
I scored low that year on the Social & Emotional Growth section of my progress report:
Works very hard in classroom; I often have to “throw her out” at recess. Complains occasionally that she is bored—both at school sometimes and after school. Have encouraged her to exchange phone numbers with classmates and get together with them.
I gave my progress report to Granny, along with her cocktail. She sipped her drink and glanced at the report, told me I was doing fine in school, then tossed the paper in the fireplace, where Grandpa was jabbing the poker into the orange flames. He made a fire at least once a week, even in warm weather. Our fireplace wasn’t only used to heat the house; it was a tool to get rid of stuff. There was no recycling program, so my grandparents tossed newspapers and milk cartons, and old rags and magazines, and Kleenex and the occasional Sears catalog into the flames. Granny looked content as she watched my report card seize in on itself and turn to ash. She raised her glass as if to make a toast. “Who needs friends? Hell is other people, if you ask me,” she said.
I didn’t exchange phone numbers with anybody. The other students didn’t invite me to their homes, but I didn’t dare invite anyone over to our house, either. There was a secret behind the closed bedroom door in our house. I didn’t want t
o keep Mom hidden, but I didn’t want to explain to a classmate why she wouldn’t come out of the room. I’m not sure I could give a reason, anyway. I already felt like an outsider at school for having grandparents instead of parents, and the inexplicability of Mom would only amplify my weirdness.
When I came to bed later that night, I found Mom asleep on her back, with a big red book splayed across her chest. Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs. Recently Mom had discovered astrology, and pored over books Granny fetched from the library, looking for the cosmic explanation for her divorce. I gently slid the book from under her hand, trying not to wake her. She jerked awake and her eyes flipped open. I saw her eyes register the room, then she relaxed back into the pillows and reached for me. “It’s okay, come on.”
I got under the covers and tucked my bum into her belly, and she drew up her legs and pulled me into our nightly position.
“You’re a good girl,” she said. “For an Aries.”
Mom had divided all the signs into good and bad people. I was a ram, which she explained is sort of a self-centered person, but fun to be around, and deep down, good. But a Taurus was the best, Mom said, because she, Granny and Matthew were all that one. But Grandpa was a ram, so I was happy.
“Mom?”
“Hmmmm.”
“Halloween’s coming.”
The black and orange decorations were already up at school. All the classrooms were planning parties, and the only thing anyone could talk about was their costume. I wanted to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and I asked Mom if she’d sew me a dress. She’d made me a Raggedy Ann costume in Rhode Island, and it was perfect.
“I just can’t,” she said. “Ask your granny.”
Granny was no help. She didn’t sew, plus Halloween was just another way to spoil children, she explained. They didn’t celebrate Halloween when she was a kid, and she turned out just fine. I tried to tell her that Halloween was the most important day of elementary school. The one day when you could eat all the sugar you wanted and blame any bad behavior on your persona. The teachers were promising costume contests, and we were going to carve pumpkins. If I didn’t have a costume, I wouldn’t be participating, so I might as well stay home. Granny harrumphed and reminded me I don’t make the rules in her house.