The Secret Life of Bees (20 page)

August laughed, and I saw the softening come around June’s eyes, how she was trying not to laugh, but it was like the Dutch boy pulling his finger out of the dike—the minute she softened her eyes, the whole thing collapsed. I could almost see her smack her forehead, thinking, I am wrestling with a fourteen-year-old girl over a garden sprinkler. This is ridiculous. She let go and sprawled back on the grass in convulsions of laughter. I plopped down next to her and laughed, too. We could not stop. I wasn’t exactly sure of everything we were laughing about—I was just glad we were doing it together. When we got up, June said, ‘Lord, I feel woozy, like somebody has pulled the plugs in my feet and drained me out.’

Rosaleen, May, and August had returned to the business of being water nymphs. I looked back down at the ground where our bodies had lain side by side, the wet grasses pressed down, perfect depressions in the earth. I stepped over them with the utmost care, and, seeing how careful I was, June stepped over them, too, and then, to my shock, she hugged me. June Boatwright hugged me while our clothes made sweet, squishy sounds up and down our bodies. If the heat goes over 104 degrees in South Carolina, you have to go to bed. It is practically the law. Some people might see it as shiftless behavior, but really, when we’re lying down from the heat, we’re giving our minds time to browse around for new ideas, wondering at the true aim of life, and generally letting things pop into our heads that need to. In the sixth grade there was a boy in my class who had a steel plate in his skull and was al- ways complaining how test answers could never get through to him. Our teacher would say, ‘Give me a break.’

In a way, though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like eleva- tor doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that’s just my opinion. August, May, June, and Rosaleen were supposedly over in the pink house in their rooms lying under the fans with the lights on. In the honey house I reclined on my cot and told myself I could think about anything I wanted, except my mother, so naturally she was the only thing that wanted on the elevator. I could feel things unraveling around me. All the fraying edge of the dream world. Pull one wrong thread and I would be stand- ing in wreckage to my elbows. Ever since I’d called T. Ray, I wanted so badly to tell Rosaleen about it. To say, If you’ve been wondering whether my leaving has caused T. Ray to examine his heart, or change his ways, don’t waste your time. But I couldn’t bring myself to admit to her that I’d cared enough to call him. What was wrong with me that I was living here as if I had nothing to hide? I lay on the cot and stared at the glaring square of window, exhausted. It takes so much energy to keep things at bay. Let me on, my mother was saying. Let me on the damn elevator. Well, fine. I pulled out my bag and examined my mother’s picture. I wondered what it had been like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in her darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us. The wanting-her was still in me, but it wasn’t nearly so fierce and raging as before. Pulling on her gloves, I noticed how tight they fit all of a sudden. By the time I was sixteen, they would feel like baby gloves on my hands. I would be Alice in Wonderland after she ate the cake and grew twice her size.

My palms would split the seams of the gloves, and I would never wear them again. I peeled the gloves from my sweaty hands and felt a wave of jitteriness, the old saw-edged guilt, the necklace of lies I could not stop wearing, the fear of being cast out of the pink house.

‘No,’ I breathed. The word took a long time to work its way to my throat. A scared whisper. No, I will not think about this. I will not feel this. I will not let this ruin the way things are. No. I decided that lying down from the heat was a hick idea. I gave up and walked to the pink house for something cold to drink. If I ever managed to get to heaven after everything I’d done, I hoped I would get just a few minutes for a private conference with God. I wanted to say, Look, I know you meant well creating the worm and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn’t stick with your original idea of paradise? People’s lives were a mess. When I came into the kitchen, May was sitting on the floor with her legs straight out and a box of graham crackers in her lap. That would be about right—me and May the only two who couldn’t lie peaceful on the bed for five minutes.

‘I saw a roach,’ she said, reaching into a bag of marshmallows that I hadn’t noticed was there. She pulled one out and pinched off little pieces of it. Crazy May. I opened the refrigerator and stood there staring at the contents like I was waiting for the grape-juice bottle to jump in my hand and say, Here, drink me. I could not seem to register what May was doing. Sometimes things of magnitude settle over you with excruciating slowness. Say you break your ankle and don’t feel it hurting till you’ve walked another block. I had nearly finished a glass of juice before I let myself look at the little highway of broken graham crackers and marshmallow bits that May was constructing across the floor, how it started at the sink and angled toward the door, thick with golden crumbs and smudges of sticky white.

‘The roaches will follow this out the door,’ May said.

‘It works every time.’

I don’t know how long I stared at the line on the floor, at May’s face turned toward mine, eager for me to say something, but I couldn’t think what to say. The room filled with the steady whir of the refrigerator motor. I felt a strange, thick feeling inside. A memory. I stood there waiting, letting it come…Your mother was a lunatic when it came to bugs, T. Ray had said. She used to make trails of graham cracker crumbs and marshmallows to lure roaches outside. I looked again at May. My mother couldn’t have learned the roach trick from May, I thought. Could she? Ever since I’d set foot in the pink house, some part of me had kept believing that my mother had been here. No, not believing it so much as daydreaming it and running it through a maze of wishful thinking. But now that the actual possibility seemed to be right in front of me, it seemed so far-fetched, crazy. It couldn’t be, I thought again. I walked over and sat down at the table. Shadows from late afternoon pushed into the room. They were peach tinted, fading in and out, and the kitchen was completely silent. Even the refrigerator hum had died away. May had turned back to her work. She seemed oblivious to me sitting there. My mother could have learned it from a book, maybe from her mother. How did I know that households everywhere didn’t use this particular roach-ridding method? I stood up and walked over to May. I felt a trembly feeling at the back of my knees. I put my hand on her shoulder. Okay, I thought, here goes. I said, ‘May, did you ever know a Deborah? Deborah Fontanel? A white woman from Virginia? It would have been a long time ago.’

There wasn’t a trace of cunning in May, and you could depend on her not to overthink her answers. She didn’t look up, didn’t pause, just said, ‘Oh, yes, Deborah Fontanel. She stayed out there in the honey house. She was the sweetest thing.’

And there it was. There it all was. For a moment I felt light-headed. I had to reach for the coun tertop to steady myself. Down on the floor the trail of crumbs and marshmallows looked half alive. I had a million more questions, but May had started humming ‘Oh! Susanna.’

She set down the box of crackers and got up slowly, starting to sniffle. Something about Deborah Fontanel had set her off.

‘I think I’ll go out to the wall for a little while,’ she said. And that’s how she left me, standing in the kitchen, hot and breathless, the world tilted under me. Walking to the honey house, I concentrated on my feet touching down on the hard-caked dirt in the driveway, the exposed tree roots, fresh-watered grass, how the earth felt beneath me, solid, alive, ancient, right there every time my foot came down. There and there and there, always there. The things a mother should be.

Oh, yes, Deborah Fontanel. She stayed out there in the honey house. She was the sweetest thing. In the honey house I sat on the cot with my knees drawn up, hugging them with my arms and making a shelf for the side of my face to rest on. I looked at the floor and the walls with brand new eyes. My mother had walked about in this room. A real person. Not somebody I made up but a living, breathing person. The last thing I expected was to fall asleep, but when there’s a blow to the system, all the body wants to do is go to sleep and dream on it. I woke an hour or so later in the velvety space where you don’t yet remember what you’ve dreamed. Then suddenly the whole thing washed back to me. I am constructing a spiraling trail of honey across a room that seems to be in the honey house one minute and the next in my bedroom back in Sylvan. I start it at a door I’ve never seen before and end it at the foot of my bed. Then I sit on the mattress and wait. The door opens. In walks my mother. She follows the honey, making twists and turns across the room until she gets to my bed. She is smiling, so pretty, but then I see she is not a normal person. She has roach legs protruding through her clothes, sticking through the cage of her ribs, down her torso, six of them, three on each side. I couldn’t imagine who sat in my head making this stuff up. The air was now dusky rose and cool enough for a sheet. I pulled it around my legs. My stomach felt icky, like I might throw up. If I told you right now that I never wondered about that dream, never closed my eyes and pictured her with roach legs, never wondered why she came to me like that, with her worst nature exposed, I would be up to my old habit of lying. A roach is a creature no one can love, but you cannot kill it. It will go on and on and on. Just try to get rid of it. The next few days I was a case of nerves. I jumped out of my skin if somebody so much as dropped a nickel on the floor. At the dinner table I poked at my food and stared into space like I was in a trance. Sometimes the picture of my mother with roach legs would leap into my head, and I would have to swallow a spoonful of honey for my stomach. I was so antsy I couldn’t sit through five minutes of American Bandstand on television, when ordinarily I was glued to Dick Clark’s every word. I walked around and around the house, pausing here and there to picture my mother in the various rooms. Sitting with her skirt spread over the piano bench. Kneeling beside Our Lady. Studying the recipe collection that May clipped from magazines and kept taped on the refrigerator. I would stare at these visions with my eyes glazed over, only to look up and see August, or June, or Rosaleen watching me. They clucked their tongues and felt my face for fever. They said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s got into you?’

I shook my head.

‘Nothing,’ I lied.

‘Nothing.’

In truth I felt as if my life was stranded out on the high dive, about to leap into unknown waters. Dangerous waters. I only wanted to postpone the plunge awhile, to feel my mother’s closeness in the house, to pretend I wasn’t afraid of the story that had brought her here or that she might go and surprise me the way she had in the dream, turning up six-legged and ugly. I wanted to march up to August and ask why my mother had been here, but fear stopped me. I wanted to know, and I didn’t want to know. I was all hung up in limbo. Late Friday afternoon, after we had finished cleaning the last of the supers and storing them away, Zach went out to take a look under the hood of the honey wagon. It was still acting funny and overheating, in spite of Neil having worked on it. I wandered back to my room and sat on my cot. Heat radiated from the window. I considered getting up to turn on the fan but only sat there staring through the panes at the milky-blue sky, a sad, ragged feeling catching hold inside. I could hear music coming from the truck radio, Sam Cooke singing ‘Another Saturday Night,’ then May calling across the yard to Rosaleen, something about getting the sheets off the clothesline. And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between liw ing my life and not living it. I couldn’t go on biding time like there was no end of it, no end to this summer. I felt tears spring up. I would have to come clean. Whatever happened…well, it would just happen. I went over to the sink and washed my face. Taking a deep breath, I stuffed my mother’s black Mary picture and her photograph into my pocket and started toward the pink house to find August. I thought we would sit down on the end of her bed, or out in the lawn chairs if the mosquitoes weren’t bad. I imagined August would say, What’s on your mind, Lily? Are we finally gonna have our talk? I would pull out the wooden picture and tell her every last thing, and then she would explain about my mother. If only that had happened, instead of what did. As I strode toward the house, Zach called to me from the truck.

‘Wanna ride to town with me? I’ve gotta get a new radiator hose before the store closes.’

‘I’m going to talk to August,’ I said. He slammed down the hood and smeared his hands front and back on his pants.

‘August is with Sugar-Girl in the parlor. She showed up crying. Something about Otis using their life savings to buy a secondhand fishing boat.’

‘But I’ve got something really important to talk to her about.’

‘You’ll have to get in line,’ he said.

‘Come on, we’ll be back before Sugar-Girl leaves.’

I hesitated, then gave in.

‘All right.’

The auto-parts store sat two doors down from the movie theater. As Zach pulled into a parking space in front, I saw them—five or six white men standing by the ticket booth. They milled around, casting quick glances up and down the sidewalk, like they were waiting for someone, all of them so nicely dressed, wearing ties with clips on them like store clerks and bank tellers. One man held what looked like the handle from a shovel. Zach turned off the honey wagon and stared at them through the windshield. A dog, an old beagle with an age-white face, wandered out of the auto-parts store and began to sniff at something on the sidewalk. Zach drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and sighed. And I suddenly realized: it was Friday, and they were out here waiting for Jack Palance and the colored woman. We sat there a minute not speaking, the sounds in the truck magnified. The squeak in a spring under the seat. The tapping of Zach’s fingers. The sharp way I was breathing. Then one of the men yelled, causing me to jump and bang my knee against the glove compartment. He gazed across the street and shouted, ‘What are you staring at over there?’