The Honey Bus

by Meredith May

  “It’s me,” Matthew said, sticking his head inside the room.

  He came into the room and reached for my hand, and we ran past our balled-up mother, out of the house, through the fence and to our grandparents’ house. Granny and Grandpa were watching TV when we thundered into the living room, talking over each other in a hysterical rush of words.

  “Whoa, slow down,” Granny said. “One at a time.”

  I tried to explain but sputtered halfway into sobs, so Matthew finished for me, telling Granny what he’d seen. Grandpa reached for the lever on his recliner and bolted himself upright. Granny scowled and snapped off the television. “Well, what did you do to upset her?”

  “Ruth honey!” Grandpa said, shooting her a pleading look that did absolutely no good. He had corrected her, and she was incredulous.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said to Grandpa, like she was berating one of her insolent students.

  Grandpa turned to me. “Are you hurt?”

  “She doesn’t look that hurt to me,” Granny said, squinting at me from across the room. She turned for the bedroom, complaining to an invisible audience as she walked away. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another. I swear to Almighty God I’m going to get some peace one day before I meet my Maker.”

  I heard the clacking of the rotary dial as she called Mom, followed by murmurs of consolation. It was going to be Mom’s word against mine.

  Grandpa shook his head in disgust, and I thought he might make a complaint, but he held on to whatever was on his mind. He stood and let out his breath, like he had been holding it awhile.

  “Let’s go on outside,” he said.

  Without needing to discuss it first, the three of us walked toward Grandpa’s beehives. There was more activity than usual outside them, and at first I thought one of the colonies might be swarming. But as we got closer, I could see it was only a group of bees circling outside the hive. They took to the air, made a small loop in front of the hive and then returned to the landing board. They repeated the pattern over and over, as if they kept losing their courage to travel.

  “What are they doing?” Matthew asked.

  “Practicing,” Grandpa said, handing me a hive tool and the smoker to Matthew. Grandpa and I lifted the lid off the first hive while Matthew smoked the entrance.

  “Practicing what?” I asked.

  When a house bee grows up and is ready to start gathering nectar, it doesn’t just one day zip out of the hive ready to go, Grandpa explained. It has to learn to fly first.

  “Every day at about this time, the bees have a flying class. They make lazy eights in front of the hive, memorizing landmarks and the angle of the sun, so they will be able to find their way home. Each day they make bigger and bigger loops, following the older bees until they are steady on their wings. They don’t go to the flowers until they feel ready.”

  “How long does it take them to learn?” I asked.

  “I dunno. It all depends on the individual bee, wouldn’t you say?”

  It made sense. I didn’t just one day race out of the house and know how to read, or do math. I had to go to elementary school down the street and practice. Then when I got older and more confident, I traveled farther on the bus to middle school and studied some more. Soon my circle would widen again when I’d start high school. Like the bees, I learned by trying and failing, over and over again until I got it right.

  He lifted out a frame and tilted it in the sunlight, checking the comb for eggs. I watched the bees repairing cracks in the wax, grooming one another with their forelegs and mandibles, and dipping their heads into the brood cells to feed the larvae. Everything was as it should be inside the hive. I could rely on the bees to always be working, each with a purpose and a rhythm that soothed me. I felt the knot of apprehension in my stomach unclench and my shoulders relax.

  Grandpa held a honeycomb frame in front of his face, and spoke to us from the other side.

  “Do you feel like talking about your mom?” he asked.

  My brother and I looked at each other, each waiting for the other to go first.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” I said.

  “You two can stay here tonight,” Grandpa said. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.”

  My brother plucked green grass and stuffed it in the spout of the smoker, and handed it back to Grandpa.

  “What set her off?” Grandpa said.

  Matthew looked away to the neighbor’s yard, as if the memory was too much for him to repeat.

  “I was sneaking hot water.”

  Grandpa shook his head. “That woman,” he muttered.

  Just then, Granny’s voice floated over to us. She was standing in the doorway with the phone receiver in her hand, stretched all the way across the kitchen.

  “Meredith! Come apologize to your mother.”

  I flinched. What I’d done was wrong, but how Mom responded was more wrong. I was not going to apologize.

  As I lay trapped beneath her, a terrible suffering had poured out of her in a fugue, revealing a brokenness in my mother that completely unnerved me. She had been yelling at someone in her past, but hitting me in real time. This was not something that an apology could even begin to fix. Mom was having serious trouble, yet no one seemed to want to take it seriously.

  Seven years had passed since we left Rhode Island, and Mom was still as despondent as the day we arrived, if not more. Each year that her luck didn’t change, her downward spiral sped up a little more, making it increasingly difficult for anyone to pull her out of her funk. I had hoped work would give her a diversion, but she clung to her victimhood even harder. She came home from the bank outraged at how rude customers were to her when she couldn’t approve their loans. Her boss was incompetent, and her back hurt from being on her feet all day. Her coworkers were lazy imbeciles, and she was always being called in to cover their shifts. Nothing was ever, ever right. The anger was building inside her, in layers, a little bit more each day until eventually it would consume her.

  If she attacked me without warning today, odds were good that she could attack me tomorrow, or next month, or next year. Apologizing was tacitly agreeing Mom’s aggression was nothing to be concerned about, and that I in some way brought it on myself. I knew better now. Going forward, I vowed to stay as far away from Mom as possible.

  Granny repeated her demand, a little louder this time. I looked at Grandpa. I needed him to stand up for me.

  “Wait here,” Grandpa whispered. “I’ll tell her you’re too shook up right now.”

  Grandpa was able to postpone my apology, and Matthew and I went to bed early to avoid the constant volley of phone calls from Mom trying to reach me. As I lay under the covers waiting for sleep to come, I remembered the night Dad had asked me if I’d rather live with him. He had also asked if Mom ever hit me, and I’d been shocked by the suggestion. Had he been trying to warn me? What did he know about Mom that made him think she might do this?

  “You awake?” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” Matthew said.

  “Thanks.”

  Matthew sniffed. I couldn’t tell if he was crying. “You’d do the same for me.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  My cheek was still hot where she’d scratched me.

  “I will be.”

  I slept in fitful snatches, interrupted by worries that I’d picked the wrong parent.

  The next morning, I looked into the bathroom mirror and saw evidence of last night’s row: four long welts on one cheek where Mom’s fingernails had raked from my eye to my chin. They were sore and enflamed, protruding from my face like fat, red worms. I looked ghastly, but there was no way I was going to stay home from school. It was safer there. If anybody asked, I’d say that Matthew and I had been roughhousing. I stuck to my story, but some of my te
achers hesitated a beat before deciding to believe my lie.

  Matthew and I continued to stay the night in the little red house for the next few days, while Granny kept in nightly phone consultation with Mom. It never made sense to me why they communicated this way, at arm’s length, when one of them could have simply walked the twenty steps separating their homes so they could talk in person. I sensed something serious was being negotiated, and at some point apologies were going to be extracted from Mom and me. I assumed there would be consequences, but none ever came.

  Instead, Matthew and I got on a plane for our annual summer visit to Rhode Island, and we didn’t mention anything to Dad, afraid he’d pull us out of California to a life we didn’t know. Mom’s outburst became another unmentionable, obscured behind the thick curtain of family history.

  While we were away, Granny bought a used camping trailer, and had Grandpa tow it to the house and park it near the honey bus. It was a white aluminum box with a set of rear wheels, about fifteen feet long and fit no more than two people at a time inside. It had windows with horizontal glass partitions that cantilevered outward, a twin bed on one side and a dinette opposite, with a sink, mini-fridge and closet in between. It smelled slightly moldy, had no heat and made absolutely no sense because our family did not go camping.

  When we returned from the East Coast, Granny announced that the trailer would be Matthew’s new bedroom. We were getting too old to share a bedroom, she said by way of explanation. My brother and I took this information as truth because Granny had said it, but at twelve, and ten, we had never felt burdened by one another in our shared room. I felt ashamed by the implication that my brother and I had been doing something wrong, and didn’t understand why getting older could be a bad thing. Instead of the gratitude Granny was expecting, we stared at her blankly, both of us feeling a vague sense of loss.

  Matthew and I stepped into the trailer and looked around, testing the firmness of the mattress and opening drawers. He turned the tap, but no water came out because Grandpa hadn’t yet hooked up the hose. I instantly became envious. I was the one Mom fought with, why wasn’t I the one getting rescued? Now I was alone in the house with her. What if Matthew couldn’t hear me the next time I screamed? My brother saw my long face and tried to cheer me up, telling me that I could come inside whenever I wanted. It was a consolation, of sorts.

  Granny stuck her head in and handed Matthew the keys.

  “Wait,” I called to her as she started to walk away. “Why does he get the trailer?”

  She turned to face me, her hands on her hips.

  “He’s the boy,” Granny said, as if that settled it.

  “But I’m older.”

  “Girls shouldn’t sleep alone outside.”

  In the pause that fell between us, so much was said. She had to know this new sleeping arrangement left me vulnerable, but she remained silent, daring me to poke our family’s secret.

  “But what about me?”

  “You have your own room now.”

  “But what about—”

  Granny cut me off. “You can stay in our second bedroom if you have to,” she said. “But don’t make a habit of it.”

  Rather than admonishing Mom, holding a family meeting, or seeking professional counseling, instead of trying to figure out how to help Mom, Granny papered over the problem by getting Matthew and me panic rooms. Her solution tacitly reinforced Mom’s behavior along with the idea that Matthew and I were the ones who needed to adapt to her unchecked moods. Mom couldn’t cope with her own life, so Granny did it for her. My brother and I were remnants from a former life that Mom wanted to erase from memory. We were constant reminders of a future that was ripped away from her, our very existence making her feel an inexorable sense of failure. Granny’s loyalty lay with her child; she would do whatever she could to soothe our mother and keep unpleasant realities away, even if that meant removing the unwanted burden of us from her.

  I ducked back into the trailer and shut the door. I took a seat on one side of the dinette opposite Matthew. He had a dazed look of someone who had just lost something that was in their hand a second ago.

  “You’re so lucky,” I said.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Did you ask for your own room?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to stay out here?”

  Matthew shrugged. He was as perplexed as I was, but just as powerless to change it. He pointed to a ledge that hung over the dinette.

  “I can put a stereo up there,” he said.

  I was about to ask him where he was going to get a stereo when someone knocked on the door. Matthew opened it and Mom nudged him to one side and let herself in. With three inside it was like standing in a crowded elevator.

  “Nice place you got,” she said, turning in a circle for the full view. Then she reached for me. “Come here,” she said sweetly.

  She wrapped me in a warm hug. Despite my raw fear of her, I felt myself instinctively relaxing into her embrace. Her warm tears dropped on my shoulder. “I haven’t been getting any sleep,” she sniffed.

  She released me and tilted my chin away from her to look at the fading scratch marks.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not anymore.”

  She looked out the open door and spoke with her head turned away from me.

  “I love you, you know. But sometimes you make me so mad.” I could hear her vigorously rubbing her stuffy nose. “I hate it when we fight. Let’s not fight, okay?”

  Her personality change was bewildering, but I went along with it to avoid any more trouble. “Okay,” I said.

  She hugged me one last time and stood to go. As she exited, Matthew and I watched to make sure she was leaving. She took a couple steps and then turned back around. She wore an impish smile.

  “Hey,” Mom called out. “Do you love me?”

  I stood in the doorway and nodded.

  “Oh yeah?” she said in a baby voice. “How much?”

  This was one of our childhood games that we used to play in Rhode Island. She’d repeatedly ask how much I loved her, and I would answer, “This much,” holding my hands farther apart with each response until they were as wide as they could be, my whole body in the shape of a T proclaiming my love.

  I held my hands a foot apart. That much.

  “How muh-uch?” she cooed, drawing the last word into a singsong of two syllables.

  “This much!” I shouted, reaching my arms as wide as they would go. I felt like an actor playing me in a movie.

  “Me, too!” Mom answered, beaming. And thus Mom decided everything was back to normal. As I watched her walk back to her house, I knew that I would never feel right about us again. Her house was not my home; it was a dangerous place where I needed to keep my wits about me, and a survival plan in place. Starting now, I would simply hang on and wait until I graduated high school and could make my escape. Meanwhile, I would go through the motions of being a daughter. I would stay out of her house as much as possible, and during the times we were together, I’d smile and feign pleasantries. If no one in the family would protect me from her, then I’d have to do it myself.

  “That was weird,” Matthew said.

  “Indeed.”

  14

  Bee Dance

  1984–1986

  My brother’s camper marked our final pulling away from Mom, the turning point when we willfully went our separate ways. By the time I was fourteen, I had outgrown my hope that Mom would revive with a fresh start in a new home, accepting that it had been nothing more than an immature wish, as likely to become real as a child’s prayer for a new pony. Her increasing volatility was never mentioned, but it was the unspoken catalyst for our grandparents to alter our living arrangements so that my brother and I could safely navigate around her.

  Matthew and I gravitated back to the little re
d house to watch TV and do our homework, we ate dinner with our grandparents and afterward Matthew would steal away to his detached room while I lingered to play checkers or cribbage with Grandpa. I waited until dark, when I knew Mom would be settling down to bed, and crept back to my room at the opposite end of the rental house.

  Our retreat drew no complaint or question from Mom, and we saw less and less of her, settling into our separate lanes of mutual avoidance with the relief that comes from no longer trying to force an unnatural relationship.

  By the time Matthew was starting middle school and I was in my first year of high school, the three of us had the physical proximity of neighbors, along with the attendant emotional distance. It was a face-saving compromise that solved the immediate problem of our safety yet not the underlying one of our abandonment, but it worked because it avoided confrontation and gave the illusion that Mom was still our parent. With Granny’s creative problem solving and Grandpa’s silent acquiescence, Matthew and I were forced to accommodate a belief system that robbed us of our mother. It was like we lived with a functioning alcoholic and rather than speaking the truth, our family just kept filling her glass to keep her from antagonizing us.

  Matthew, now twelve, had grown accustomed to living in a detached trailer. At first, he’d been afraid to sleep alone. He’d spent nearly his entire life sharing a room with Mom and me, and it had taken him about a week of tearful nighttime returns to the little red house before he got the hang of it. With the addition of lights and running water, courtesy of a hose and an extension cord, Matthew felt better, and now he spent most of his time sequestered inside. In summer, he left the windows and door open to circulate air, and in winter, when it got so cold in the trailer that he could see his own breath, he burrowed under several electric blankets. He’d decorated the walls with posters from the rock band Rush and installed a cheap stereo Granny picked up at an electronics store, transforming his lair into a thunderous, pulsating sound pod. He had formed a school rock band with a few friends, and he was forever tapping his drumsticks on something, insulated from Mom’s outbursts and lost in a beat only he could hear.