The Secret Life of Bees (2 page)

‘You’re charming enough,’ Rosaleen had said, washing the vomit out of the sink basin.

‘You don’t need to go to some highfalutin school to get charm.’

‘I do so,’ I said.

‘They teach everything. How to walk and pivot, what to do with your ankles when you sit in a chair, how to get into a car, pour tea, take off your gloves…’ Rosaleen blew air from her lips.

‘Good Lord,’ she said.

‘Arrange flowers in a vase, talk to boys, tweeze your eyebrows, shave your legs, apply lipstick…’

‘What about vomit in a sink? They teach a charming way to do that?’ she asked. Sometimes I purely hated her. The morning after I woke T. Ray, Rosaleen stood in the doorway of my room, watching me chase a bee with a mason jar. Her lip was rolled out so far I could see the little sunrise of pink inside her mouth.

‘What are you doing with that jar?’ she said.

‘I’m catching bees to show T. Ray. He thinks I’m making them up.’

‘Lord, give me strength.’

She’d been shelling butter beans on the porch, and sweat glistened on the pearls of hair around her forehead. She pulled at the front of her dress, opening an airway along her bosom, big and soft as couch pillows. The bee landed on the state map I kept tacked on the wall. I watched it walk along the coast of South Carolina on scenic Highway 17. I clamped the mouth of the jar against the wall, trapping it between Charleston and Georgetown. When I slid on the lid, it went into a tailspin, throwing itself against the glass over and over with pops and clicks, reminding me of the hail that landed sometimes on the windows. I’d made the jar as nice as I could with felty petals, fat with pollen, and more than enough nail holes in the lid to keep the bees from perishing, since for all I knew, people might come back one day as the very thing they killed. I brought the jar level with my nose.

‘Come look at this thing fight,’ I said to Rosaleen. When she stepped in the room, her scent floated out to me, dark and spicy like the snuff she packed inside her cheek. She held her small jug with its coin-size mouth and a handle for her to loop her finger through. I watched her press it along her chin, her lips fluted out like a flower, then spit a curl of black juice inside it. She stared at the bee and shook her head.

‘If you get stung, don’t come whining to me,’ she said, ‘‘cause I ain’t gonna care.’

That was a lie. I was the only one who knew that despite her sharp ways, her heart was more tender than a flower skin and she loved me beyond reason. I hadn’t known this until I was eight and she bought me an Easter-dyed biddy from the mercantile. I found it trembling in a corner of its pen, the color of purple grapes, with sad little eyes that cast around for its mother. Rosaleen let me bring it home, right into the living room, where I strewed a box of Quaker Oats on the floor for it to eat and she didn’t raise a word of protest. The chick left dollops of violet-streaked droppings all over the place, due, I suppose, to the dye soaking into its fragile system. We had just started to clean them up when T. Ray burst in, threatening to boil the chick for dinner and fire Rosaleen for being an imbecile. He started to swoop at the biddy with his tractor grease hands, but Rosaleen planted herself in front of him.

‘There is worse things in the house than chicken shit,’ she said and looked him up one side and down the other.

‘You ain’t touching tha chick.’

His boots whispered uncle all the way down the hall. I thought, She loves me, and it was the first time such a far-fetched idea had occurred to me. Her age was a mystery, since she didn’t possess a birth certificate. She would tell me she was born in 1909 or 1919, depending on how old she felt at the moment. She was sure about the place: McClellanville, South Carolina, where her mama had woven sweet-grass baskets and sold them on the roadside.

‘Like me selling peaches,’ I’d said to her.

‘Not one thing like you selling peaches,’ she’d said back.

‘You ain’t got seven children you gotta feed from it.’

‘You’ve got six brothers and sisters?’ I’d thought of her as alone in the world except for me.

‘I did have, but I don’t know where a one of them is.’

She’d thrown her husband out three years after they married, for carousing.

‘You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backward,’ she liked to say. I often wondered what that bird would do with Rosaleen’s brain. I decided half the time it would drop shit on your head and the other half it would sit on abandoned nests with its wings spread wide. I used to have daydreams in which she was white and married T. Ray, and became my real mother. Other times I was a Negro orphan she found in a cornfield and adopted. Once in a while I had us living in a foreign country like New York, where she could adopt me and we could both stay our natural color. My mother’s name was Deborah. I thought that was the prettiest name I’d ever heard, even though T. Ray refused to speak it. If I said it, he acted like he might go straight to the kitchen and stab something. Once when I asked him when her birthday was and what cake icing she preferred, he told me to shut up, and when I asked him a second time, he picked up a jar of blackberry jelly and threw it against the kitchen cabinet. We have blue stains to this day. I did manage to get a few scraps of information from him, though, such as my mother was buried in Virginia where her people came from. I got worked up at that, thinking I’d found a grandmother. No, he tells me, my mother was an only child whose mother died ages ago. Naturally. Once when he stepped on a roach in the kitchen, he told me my mother had spent hours luring roaches out of the house with bits of marshmallow and trails of graham-cracker crumbs, that she was a lunatic when it came to saving bugs. The oddest things caused me to miss her. Like training bras. Who was I going to ask about that? And who but my mother could’re understood the magnitude of driving me to junior cheerleader tryouts? I can tell you for certain T. Ray didn’t grasp it. But you know when I missed her the most? The day I was twelve and woke up with the rose-petal stain on my panties. I was so proud of that flower and didn’t have a soul to show it to except Rosaleen. Not long after that I found a paper bag in the attic stapled at the top. Inside it I found the last traces of my mother. There was a photograph of a woman smirking in front of an old car, wearing a light-colored dress with padded shoulders. Her expression said, ‘Don’t you dare take this picture,’ but she wanted it taken, you could see that. You could not believe the stories I saw in that picture, how she was waiting at the car fender for love to come to her, and not too patiently. I laid the photograph beside my eighth-grade picture and examined every possible similarity. She was more or less missing a chin, too, but even so, she was above-average pretty, which offered me genuine hope for my future. The bag contained a pair of white cotton gloves stained the color of age. When I pulled them out, I thought, Her very hands were inside here. I feel foolish about it now, but one time I stuffed the gloves with cotton balls and held them through the night. The end-all mystery inside the bag was a small wooden picture of Mary, the mother of Jesus. I recognized her even though her skin was black, only a shade lighter than Rosaleen’s. It looked to me like somebody had cut the black Mary’s picture from a book, glued it onto a sanded piece of wood about two inches across, and varnished it. On the back an unknown hand had written ‘Tiburon, S.C.’

For two years now I’d kept these things of hers inside a tin box, buried in the orchard. There was a special place out there in the long tunnel of trees no one knew about, not even Rosaleen. I’d started going there before I could tie my shoelaces. At first it was just a spot to hide from T. Ray and his meanness or from the memory of that afternoon when the gun went off, but later I would slip out there, sometimes after T. Ray had gone to bed, just to lie under the trees and be peaceful. It was my plot of earth, my cubbyhole. I’d placed her things inside the tin box and buried it out there late one night by flashlight, too scared to leave them hanging around in my room, even in the back of a drawer. I was afraid T. Ray might go up to the attic and discover her things were missing, and turn my room upside down searching for them. I hated to think what he’d do to me if he found them hidden among my stuff. Now and then I’d go out there and dig up the box. I would lie on the ground with the trees folded over me, wearing her gloves, smiling at her photograph. I would study ‘Tiburon, S.C.’ on the back of the black Mary picture, the funny slant of the lettering, and wonder what sort of place it was. I’d looked it up on the map once, and it wasn’t more than two hours away. Had my mother been there and bought this picture? I always promised myself one day, when I was grown-up enough, I would take the bus over there. I wanted to go everyplace she had ever been. After my morning of capturing bees, I spent the afternoon in the peach stand out on the highway, selling T. Ray’s peaches. It was the loneliest summer job a girl could have, stuck in a roadside hut with three walls and a flat tin roof. I sat on a Coke crate and watched pickups zoom by till I was nearly poisoned with exhaust fumes and boredom. Thursday afternoons were usually a big peach day, with women getting ready for Sunday cobblers, but not a soul stopped. T. Ray refused to let me bring books out here and read, and if I smuggled one out, say, Lost Horizon, stuck under my shirt, somebody, like Mrs. Watson from the next farm, would see him at church and say, ‘Saw your girl in the peach stand reading up a storm. You must be proud.’

And he would half kill me. What kind of person is against reading? I think he believed it would stir up ideas of college, which he thought a waste of money for girls, even if they did, like me, score the highest number a human being can get on their verbal aptitude test. Math aptitude is another thing, but people aren’t meant to be overly bright in everything. I was the only student who didn’t groan and carry on when Mrs. Henry assigned us another Shakespeare play. Well actually, I did pretend to groan, but inside I was as thrilled as if I’d been crowned Sylvan’s Peach Queen. Up until Mrs. Henry came along, I’d believed beauty college would be the upper limit of my career. Once, studying her face, I told her if she was my customer, I would give her a French twist that would do wonders for her, ad she said—and I quote—‘Please, Lily, you are insulting your fine intelligence. Do you have any idea how smart you are? You could be a professor or a writer with actual books to your credit. Beauty school. Please.’

It took me a month to get over the shock of having life possibilities. You know how adults love to ask, ‘So…what are you going to be when you grow up?’ I can’t tell you how much I’d hated that question, but suddenly I was going around volunteering to people, people who didn’t even want to know, that I planned to be a professor and a writer of actual books. I kept a collection of my writings. For a while everything I wrote had a horse in it. After we read Ralph Waldo Emerson in class, I wrote ‘My Philosophy of Life,’ which I intended for the start of a book but could get only three pages out of it. Mrs. Henry said I needed to live past fourteen years old before I would have a philosophy. She said a scholarship was my only hope for a future and lent me her private books for the summer. Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, ‘Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?’ The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head-Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by. Without books in the peach stand, I often passed the time making up poems, but that slow afternoon I didn’t have the patience for rhyming words. I just sat out there and thought about how much I hated the peach stand, how completely and solutely I hated it. The day before I’d gone to first grade, T. Ray had found me in the peach stand sticking a nail into one of his peaches. He walked toward me with his thumbs jammed into his pockets and his eyes squinted half shut from the glare. I watched his shadow slide over the dirt and weeds and thought he had come to punish me for stabbing a peach. I didn’t even know why I was doing it. Instead he said, ‘Lily, you’re starting school tomorrow, so there are things you need to know. About your mother.’

For a moment everything got still and quiet, as if the wind had died and the birds had stopped flying. When he squatted down in front of me, I felt caught in a hot dark I could not break free of.

‘It’s time you knew what happened to her, and I want you to hear it from me. Not from people out there talking.’

We had never spoken of this, and I felt a shiver pass over me. The memory of that day would come back to me at odd moments. The stuck window. The smell of her. The clink of hangers. The suitcase. The way they’d fought and shouted. Most of all the gun on the floor, the heaviness when I’d lifted it. I knew that the explosion I’d heard that day had killed her. The sound still sneaked into my head once in a while and surprised me. Sometimes it seemed that when I’d held the gun there hadn’t been any noise at all, that it had come later, but other times, sitting alone on the back steps, bored and wishing for something to do, or pent up in my room on a rainy day, I felt I had caused it, that when I’d lifted the gun, the sound had torn through the room and gouged out our hearts. It was a secret knowledge that would slip up and overwhelm me, and I would take off running—even if it was raining out, I ran—straight down the hill to my special place in the peach orchard. I’d lie right down on the ground and it would calm me. Now, T. Ray scooped up a handful of dirt and let if fall out of his hands.

‘The day she died, she was cleaning out the closet,’ he said. I could not account for the strange tone of his voice, an unnatural sound, how it was almost, but not quite, kind.

Cleaning the closet. I had never considered what she was doing those last minutes of her life, why she was in the closet, what they had fought about.

‘I remember,’ I said. My voice sounded small and faraway to me, like it was coming from an ant hole in the ground. His eyebrows lifted, and he brought his face closer to me. Only his eyes showed confusion.