The Honey Bus. Meredith May
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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.
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.
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