The Honey Bus

by Meredith May

  “Tell me,” I said gently. “What happened to you?”

  She looked out the window toward Granny’s house.

  “My father was horrible to me, absolutely horrible.”

  She lowered her voice and spoke confidentially, as if she were ashamed of what she was about to say. She crossed her arms and grabbed hold of her shoulders, unconsciously protecting herself.

  “Horrible how?” I asked.

  “Every possible way you can think of.”

  Mom took a seat next to me, and with shaking hands pushed a piece of nicotine gum out of a small plastic tray and popped the tablet in her mouth. Apparently my brother’s campaign to get her to quit smoking by taping magazine photos of blackened, cancerous lungs to the fridge was working. She chewed for a moment and scowled at the taste.

  “Mom, tell me. What happened to you?”

  She took a deep breath, and the words tumbled out of her.

  “My father used to keep a long, thin tree branch, he called it his ‘whipping stick,’ on the mantel where I could see it,” she said.

  The first time her father hit her, she said, she must have been about three or four. Sometimes he used his bare hands, but he preferred his whip.

  I flinched, as I pictured a horseback rider with a crop. Then I imagined a grown man, using the same instrument on a preschooler. I saw his hand rise up in slow motion, heard the whiz of the whip through the air and the piercing scream of a child. Mom had to be exaggerating; she couldn’t have been that young. I asked her if she was certain she was remembering correctly.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “He’d make me go outside to choose the branch. I remember I wore these little red boots.”

  My face flushed with pointless vengeance. I couldn’t go back and stop what had happened; I couldn’t protect her from the rest of her own story.

  “Oh, Mom.”

  Although her words were shocking, they had a ring of familiarity to them. It felt like I already knew Mom had been abused, but I’d never let myself truly believe it because it was too awful. It had been easier not to know. But I’d noticed little things; how she could barely stand to be in the same room with her father that one and only time we visited him. That Granny was so perturbed by her ex-husband that she couldn’t bring herself to say his name, referring to him only as, “good-ole-what’s-his-face.” When I’d met this other grandfather, I’d had the uneasy feeling that I was about to be scolded. All I knew was that there was something dark and off-limits about him, something our family had purposely buried deep underground. But to ignore it was also to ignore Mom and the scars that remained inside her.

  “How often did he hit you?”

  Mom snorted derisively.

  “Every couple of weeks? I don’t know, so often I couldn’t remember the reasons why anymore.”

  Mom spoke matter-of-factly, as if she were recounting the details of someone else’s life, or a novel she had just read. Tears welled in my eyes at the thought of a grown man beating the innocence out of a little girl. But the thing that really cracked my heart was how casually she told her story, how she spoke as if it were an ordinary hardship not worth mentioning all this time. Time had dulled her outrage to the point that she nearly accepted the violence as her fate. But back when she was a little girl, how could she have ever understood that she had done nothing wrong? How can a kid make sense of adult rage?

  I asked Mom why her father was so angry.

  “There was no reason,” Mom said.

  Mom explained that her punishments weren’t really in response to anything she’d done; her father beat her because he didn’t like who she was.

  “My own father despised me,” she said. He told her she was fat, that she was stupid. He hit her for being ugly. For moving too slowly.

  “And you believed it...”

  “I was just a child,” she said.

  “But you don’t believe it anymore, right?”

  Mom looked away without answering.

  He’d trained her how to hate herself, blocking her from ever being able to love another person. Of course Mom was a bewildered parent. She’d never been shown unconditional love. So many things were starting to make sense. Mom’s constant struggle with her weight, her crushing insecurity, her envious comments about how easily I made friends, how much I enjoyed high school. Why her divorce must have felt like her mythical glass slipper smashed to bits. Now I could understand why she chose to withdraw from a life she felt had cheated her at every turn. She had been groomed into victimhood; knocked down so many times it was safer to just stop trying.

  She remembered her father lashing his leather belt on her for not clearing the table fast enough. After the whipping, she was sent back to finish collecting plates, but was so nervous that she dropped and shattered a porcelain sugar bowl.

  “Then I got beat for the spilled sugar, too.”

  My breath caught in my throat. Mom was jumping from story to story now, as if telling tales at a dinner party. It wasn’t sympathy or forgiveness she wanted from me, it was something much simpler. She wanted me to understand.

  When she was five, she devised a method of escape. There was an oak tree in their front yard with long branches that grew low to the ground. One day Mom studied the tree and thought she might be able to dart up one of the long branches and disappear into the canopy if she got a good running start from the ground. So when her father was at work, she practiced, running and falling, running and falling off several different branches until she could do it. I pictured a plucky girl, like Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, running barefoot in overalls, her hair messed up and scratches all over her skin, finally scampering successfully into the tree.

  “Did you ever have to run into the tree?”

  Mom chuckled.

  “All the time. The first time I did it, he got so mad his face turned purple. I sure showed him!”

  Mom was laughing now, relishing the one table scrap of childhood joy when she held power over him. I smiled with her, but it was forced. All these years, I hadn’t known she carried this in her. Maybe if I had, I would have had more patience with her. Maybe if our family talked about the past, Mom could have healed. Instead we kept silent, and the abuse recycled through the generations. Her story spread like a spiderweb over the two of us, ensnaring us in its secrets.

  I did a quick calculation. Mom hit me, her father hit her, so somebody must have hit him. I asked Mom what she knew about her father’s childhood. Just the basics, she said: that his mother abandoned him when he was in elementary school, taking his sister with her. He was left behind with an alcoholic father who turned his fists on him.

  Mom’s beatings continued throughout middle and high school, she said, only stopping when her parents divorced, not long before she left for college.

  “Happiest day of my life was when he finally left.”

  It took me a second to absorb what she had just said. Her father hadn’t crossed the line a handful of times. She had been traumatized her entire childhood.

  “Where was Granny all this time?” I whispered.

  Mom frowned.

  “She knew what was going on but said nothing. I just hid the bruises and didn’t talk about it. The one time I asked her why Daddy was so mad at me, she said that he wasn’t a bad man, he was just tired.”

  I didn’t know which was worse. The physical abuse or the mental torment of Granny gaslighting Mom into believing nothing was wrong.

  “Granny never stood up for you?”

  “She was afraid of him. He hit her, too.”

  I asked Mom how she could ever forgive Granny.

  “She’s my mother. She’s all I have.”

  Her answer was profound, yet simplistic at the same time. Yes, we only get one mother. But are we required to forgive her? Where does a mother’s needs stop and her child’s begin? I told Mom I wasn’t s
ure what I would have done in her shoes.

  Times were different then, Mom explained, there was no such a thing as child protective services. Once, when her father hit her with a spatula and sliced open her thumb, Granny took her to the doctor’s office and told the doctor exactly what had happened. He nodded knowingly and simply stitched Mom’s thumb and sent them back home.

  In a perverse way, the violence brought Mom and Granny closer later in life. They are survivors of the same war, Mom said, and eventually forgave each other for not thinking clearly when they were in the thick of it.

  “Granny was trying to manage in her own way,” Mom said. “She’s certainly making up for it now. You should be thankful. If it weren’t for her, we’d be living on the streets.”

  I could see why Granny took Mom in again and pampered her, trying to erase her guilt with a second chance at motherhood. They each overcompensated to fill a deep hole in the other, as if they were two broken humans who fused together into one whole person. Today they were emotionally inseparable. I always thought it was Mom who lacked the stamina to leave her mother’s side, but now I could see how much Granny needed her to stay.

  “Still, I wish Granny had protected you.”

  “Mom was in the house, but she just wasn’t there,” Mom said.

  The echo of my own voice ricocheted around the room, mocking me. I had said the exact same words, countless times. Suddenly, my mother and I had something in common, and I felt a fleeting connection with her. We shared a similar suffering, one that maybe could be a starting place for us to try to understand one another.

  I hoped that living apart would be good for Mom and me. We wouldn’t be able to disappoint each other anymore. Maybe she could turn into the person she always felt Matthew and I prevented her from becoming. Maybe we still had a chance.

  If there ever was a better moment for us to admit we wished things had been different, it was now. I longed to tell her that I still hoped we could love each other one day. But after all the years of girding myself against her, the words felt like naive platitudes. I was too afraid to say them and have them not become true.

  Instead I put my arm around Mom’s shoulders and squeezed.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “You did the best that you could.”

  Mom sniffed, and dabbed at her eyes with the dish towel.

  “Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Go to college and get a job. Make sure you don’t need a man before you marry one.”

  I gave her my word.

  “Oh, and I almost forgot,” she said, putting another pastry in the microwave. “I packed up some of your things you don’t use anymore. You should go through the box and see what you want to take with you to Mills. What you don’t want, I’ll take to Goodwill.”

  Inside the box, I found my high school letterman’s jacket, decorated with patches from the diving, field hockey and softball teams. I ran my fingers over the red brushed felt where my name was embroidered in cursive. My high school yearbooks were in the box, as well as my favorite quilt, my baseball mitt and cleats. Of course they were things I wouldn’t use in college, but they were sentimental things I didn’t want to give away to strangers, either.

  Then, at the bottom of the box, my hand touched a book with a padded cloth cover. I recoiled, instantly recognizing my pink baby book. I had pored over the photos inside it as a little girl, trying to remember my forgotten family. By the time I was in second grade, I had memorized every page.

  My skin went cold. Mom was not just clearing out my things; she was deleting all trace of me. A baby book was not something that went into the giveaway pile like an old coat. It was the one thing people grabbed when their house was burning down, the irreplaceable record of precious family history. The photos and memories written on these pages contained the only proof that Mom and I started out happy. I understood that Mom wanted to forget the past, but why couldn’t she separate her children from the divorce? It was as if she, too, had been eagerly awaiting my college to begin, so she could finally be relieved of my constant reminder of her failed life. Ironically, she was throwing out the very thing that could have saved her. Matthew and I could have been her salvation, if she had allowed it.

  I opened the cover. Inside was the mom that could have been. With a new mother’s excitement, she had carefully documented each milestone of my first four years. She listed the dates when I first drank from a cup, the first time I smiled, my first step. There were photos of my first four birthdays, and details of my first trips—in a baby carriage, in a car to Boston, in a plane to visit Granny and Grandpa when I was one. Mom noted that I was doing well in YMCA swimming classes and that I liked school. When I first wrote my name, in shaky block letters, she taped it inside with an exclamation point–laden note about how I was developing ahead of my age group. Mom kept a running list of each new word I uttered, and recorded my first full sentence: “Where is Mommy?”

  I turned the page and saw a wax envelope. Inside was a slippery lock of my brown baby hair, so many shades lighter than the almost black color it became. I shuddered at the thought of strangers pawing through my baby book at Goodwill, opening the envelope, touching my hair. A piece of my body that Mom threw away. Who would even want to buy a stranger’s baby book?

  I walked back into the living room and slipped the book back onto the bookshelf, where I hoped she wouldn’t rediscover it. It seemed backward for me to be the guardian of my own baby book, and even more ridiculous to bring it to college. I wanted my mother to have it, like a normal mother, even if I had to trick her into keeping it.

  I closed the box with my high school mementos and carried it outside. I could store it in Granny’s house, where it would be safe from the Goodwill. Someday, when I was older, maybe even with kids of my own, I’d want to show them my yearbooks, or give them my baseball mitt and teach them to throw. But I left the baby book with Mom, more from stubbornness than anything else. Part of me was insisting she keep it, and part of me was testing her to see if she would.

  I found Matthew in the driveway, bent over the open hood of a maroon Volkswagen Scirocco, tinkering with the engine. Matthew was also working at Will’s Fargo restaurant, and had saved enough to buy the car. He taught himself how to change the oil and maintain the engine, and already had his driver’s permit.

  Matthew waved as I passed.

  “What do you have in the box?” he asked.

  I set it down and came over to see what he was doing.

  “Do you know she wanted to give me back my baby book?” I said.

  Matthew lowered the hood of his car and closed it with a thud.

  “Follow me,” he said, waving a greasy rag toward his trailer.

  He reached into a cupboard over the sink and rummaged around. He pulled out his light blue baby book and tossed it over to me.

  “She gave me mine, too.”

  Matthew started laughing, and then I did, too. The giggles swirled out of us, leaving tears and stomach spasms in their wake. I doubled over to try to stop, but it only made me laugh harder. We both flopped on his bed, grabbing our stomachs, unsuccessfully trying to shush each other. It was magically cathartic to share an inside joke with the only person on the planet who could truly relate. We’d both been dismissed, and therefore each of us could take it less personally.

  Once our eruption settled, I opened his baby book. His was the same size as mine, but less than half the pages were filled. Born a year and a half before the divorce, Matthew had to compete for attention with a crumbling marriage. Mom’s entries were factual and obligatory, lacking the detail and exclamation points of just two years before. Height. Weight. Date of birth. There is no travelogue of Matthew’s first trips. Whereas Mom filled an entire page with each new word I spoke, she listed a mere handful for Matthew. After age two, Matthew’s baby book went blank.

  I handed him the book, an
d he put it back in the cupboard.

  “Sorry to tell you, but you’re not that special,” he said.

  Just then we heard the distinctive chug of the honey bus as it rumbled to life. Grandpa had a bumper summer crop now that the rains had returned, swelling the river and reviving the wildflowers.

  “I’m going to miss that sound,” I said. From the doorstep of Matthew’s trailer, I could see into the bus. Grandpa was lifting the cheesecloth strainers off the top of his honey holding tanks. There were so many supers waiting to be harvested that he barely had space to maneuver.

  “We should go help him,” Matthew said.

  Grandpa was standing on a milk crate peering into the barrels when we let ourselves in through the back door. He didn’t hear us come in over the roar of the motor, and jumped when he saw us walking toward him. He hopped down from his perch and shut down the machinery.

  “Barrels are full,” he said, licking honey from his fingers. “You’re just in time to help me jar. Gotta make more room before we can do another spin.”

  Matthew wriggled past Grandpa, and sat down before the tanks on the upturned milk crate and began filling jars with honey. Grandpa sidled next to him and lifted the gate on the spout of the neighboring drum. I took a position by the cardboard boxes of mason jars on the driver’s seat, and handed them empties when they gave me their full ones. I screwed the lids on tight and stacked the honey jars on a plywood countertop resting over the uncapping trough. Sunlight filtered through the window and lit up the honey, casting spots of speckled amber light everywhere. It reminded me of the stained-glass windows in church.

  The three of us moved together as if in a ballet, the honey passing from hand to hand, both Matthew and Grandpa so practiced that they could exchange their full jar with my empty one, and whisk it under the spout to catch the honey drip before it hit the floor.

  This, I thought. This is what I will miss the most. That feeling of being exactly where I am supposed to be.