Honeybee (6 page)

From San Antonio to Abilene I never turned my windshield wipers off. That's four straight hours. The hills were flush with rain. Junction reminded me of a cinnamon roll three months ago. I turned my Bob Dylan CD up loud so I could hear it over the thunder. Bob kept me steady on the flooded two-lane. I passed Menard with its historic ditch. Big day for a ditch. In Eden I bought a juice called Nirvana and took a wrong turn. The girl said,
We have only one stoplight.
…but I missed it. Bob was not quite there yet but he was getting closer and closer. It was raining too hard to see. Then a massive silver cross in a field at Ballinger scared me, the way oversized things did when I was a kid. Why do people do that? Make things too big? This did not seem like the route I used to take. I pulled off to read the map. Where was Coleman? Where was that old windmill with only two blades? I used to sit around with kids in the Buffalo Gap cemetery and let them make grave rubbings. Now there were ugly subdivisions, big mistakes slapped up outside towns. Then I passed a restaurant where we once had the worst meal in the state of Texas and felt right at home again.

We did not mean to hurt my mother's feelings when we filled out the application form in her name in response to the Help Wanted sign in the window of the bakery. She was startled to be called for an interview regarding a job to which she had not applied. We were trying to ease her loneliness. She & my father had recently moved to a different city, leaving both their children behind. She had not yet found many new friends or activities. My father & I were taking a walk together in the unfamiliar neighborhood, discussing her melancholia, when we saw the sign. It was not the first mistake in anyone's life. She could walk to work. Passing the groomed suburban houses in their impeccable isolation & the ragtag apartments & the cleaners & the video store & the grocery where the carts bunched up around the poles in the parking lot by early afternoon…wearing a hat against the serious Texas sun, perhaps a straw hat she might wear to work in a garden…carrying a purse with a wallet, a coupon for Handi-Wrap & one for cat food…what did you do in a bakery besides measure, mix, bake, arrange, slide new trays onto shelves, dust crumbs, talk to ladies wearing nice
linen jackets or tank tops, take orders, fill sacks, make change? It sounded comforting. Sugar shakers and honey bears. Cake doughnuts or French? Glazed or powdered? We did not know about the secret album under the cash register that people would ask for in a glinting manner, or that our own mother would be asked to lift it forth & open it before their eyes, cakes shaped like breasts, single or double, with luscious nipples, the giant pink or chocolate penis cakes, the Sock It To Me! cakes, innuendos of plump cleavage sculpted into lemony icing. That she would have to ask,
This way or that?
about things she had never discussed either with her children or husband or her own parents—sparkles, ripples, & curves. Where the candles might go, for example, in such an instance. Who the cake should be delivered to, exactly, & what was the occasion, what words should be inscribed? It is easy to imagine her never smiling through any of these transactions, keeping a stern face, taking the money as you would touch something that had fallen into a toilet. She blamed us. Sure she did. As if we had known. The thought of these things being baked into cake had never occurred to me on this earth, even in my oddest fantasy, nor to my
father; the two innocents, as we depicted ourselves during her rages. To us, the only thing to worry about in a bakery was what kind of shortening they used in the cookies or how long the cupcakes had been in the case. We had tricked her into bondage to a bakery of shame.
So quit!
we begged her.
Quit!
But her German Lutheran upbringing which said something about never running from a task once your name was on the time chart was something we could not reckon with. I think a few seasons passed. People in leopard-printed coats bought cakes for bachelor parties. Secretaries selected long cakes for wild office bashes. A mother bought a cake for her son who was turning 18. My mother glared fiercely, slamming her money down. My father & I lived in fear. Of course large numbers of people who knew nothing about the secret cakes dropped in to pick up regular sacks of cookies on their way home from the drugstore or glossy red cupcakes for a great-nephew on St. Valentine's Day—these were the people my mother lived for, the pure hearts, clean of ulterior intent. Eventually she eased back into Montessori teaching, her preferred & regular vocation. But I think she was
marked by the album under the counter. It left a shadow in her spirit, a spooky truth—your most familiar people could open the door to the underworld without even knowing it & not be able to rescue you, once you toppled through.

Even though my parents had seen the French movie starring Omar Sharif in a theater and called it “very depressing,” I checked it out of the library. But something was wrong with it. We pressed the English text button, the subtitles did not appear. French people were breaking piggybanks, moving in and out of neighborhood grocery stores. A teenage boy stared wistfully through the second-story window of his bedroom. We had no dialogue to connect the scenes.
Where are the words?
we kept saying.
This is kooky! Rewind it! Find the words!
But they wouldn't come up. We actually thought the movie might be too large for our screen—were the words appearing in the air below the TV set? We shrank the picture and still they didn't appear. Suddenly a sentence flashed and we sat forward in our seats—but the sentence, apparently spoken by Omar Sharif's elderly storekeeper character, was “I am not an Arab.” That was it. No other text followed, even when the boy in the movie responded rapidly. I remembered how Egyptians often make a distinction between themselves and other Middle Easterners. But when the same line appeared five minutes later, spoken by another character, this time a blond woman in a tight dress, “I am not an Arab”—it
seemed confusing. The same line occurred a third time, popping out of someone else's mouth—an incidental old lady character who had just walked into the grocery—“I am not an Arab”—followed, most mysteriously, by “never on a Sunday.” And that was it. No other words appeared, though everyone kept talking at a rapid French pace. We wondered if the maker-of-subtitles had fallen asleep on the job, and we turned off the movie shortly thereafter. The world is too frustrating already to watch movies without any sound. And all the Arabs I know are Arabs on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc., as well as on Sunday. Despite what the world might think, they actually like it.

(For E. B. White)