The Honey Bus. Meredith May

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ