Social Insect
1982
Staying out of Mom’s way became considerably easier once I started middle school. I slipped out of our bed an hour earlier now, and walked to my old elementary school to catch a yellow school bus for a half-hour drive to Carmel. Bus seating was based on a pecking order that had been handed down over generations: the eighth-graders in back sitting lengthwise to command entire two-person seats all for themselves, the seventh-graders sprinkled in the middle always politicking for a seat upgrade, and the sixth-graders forced to sit near the crabby driver where he could mean-mug us in the rearview mirror for misbehaving.
But the hierarchy faded once the bus pulled up to the Carmel Middle School campus, which pulsed with several hundred students from all over the Monterey Peninsula. Suddenly I was moving between five different classrooms a day, each with a different mix of people from Carmel and Pebble Beach and Big Sur. This made me gloriously anonymous. Nobody had to know I was the girl who couldn’t listen to the Beatles without crying, or the one whose family was too weird to get her a proper Halloween costume. I blended into the mosaic of everybody, perfectly happy to be one little tile on the wall.
Granny chose my electives, enrolling me in typing and German, and to my great delight, home economics, where I learned to cook and use a sewing machine. The class was entirely female, but I didn’t consider it wife-training; I saw it as planning for the adulthood Grandpa promised was coming, when I’d finally cook my own meals without burning them, and never again would I have to wear other people’s cast-off clothes.
When a new after-school computer class started, Granny bought a thin floppy disk about the size of a potholder so I could learn to program a machine called an IBM. When the director of the school yearbook asked for volunteers to work on weekends helping him cut and paste all the student portraits onto production pages, I threw my hand up. Whatever my new school offered, I wanted it. I was surprised and delighted that there was so much going on outside our house, and I wanted to try all of it.
Middle school felt like a do-over to my life that had started on the wrong foot, and for the first few weeks I studied people, looking for potential new friends. There was one girl in my English class who held my attention and squeezed. Sophia had the kind of beauty that hushed a room; she was lithe and graceful and looked a bit like Brooke Shields in her Calvin Klein jeans. She carried herself with the cool indifference of a European exchange student who has seen more of the globe than her teachers.
She picked up German faster than anyone in class, and when she sat next to me in English, her long, dark hair swished when she flipped it out of her face. She smirked a lot, and I desperately wanted to know what she was thinking, what kind of music she listened to and where she went after school. She told me that she was allowed to drink red wine with dinner, and that her mother sometimes took the passenger seat and let her drive their stick-shift LeCar to school. I didn’t doubt it. Sophia was so beguiling that high school boys were already dedicating love songs to her on KSPB, the radio station at the private school in Pebble Beach. During written tests, whenever she leaned toward me to whisper that she didn’t know an answer, I turned my paper so she could copy mine. I didn’t care if I got caught.
One day I got up the nerve to ask her what shampoo she used to make her hair smell so good.
“Something from my mom’s salon,” she said.
The word salon lit up like the Hollywood sign in my mind. I was still going to the village barber and getting a lollipop after he chopped my hair into the same helmet cut. I muttered something about how great it must be to get expensive shampoo for free, then immediately regretted sounding so unsophisticated.
“I can get you some,” she offered. “Come with me to my mom’s salon after school. She won’t mind.”
Imaginary game show glitter shimmered down all around me.
“You sure?” I said, doing my best to appear undecided.
The rest of the day was a blur, and after the last school bell, I met Sophia behind the gym. She led me on a shortcut through an open field that emptied fifteen minutes later at The Barnyard, a boutique shopping center designed to look like a cluster of barns surrounding a big windmill. It was a touristy place where visitors bought cashmere sweaters or oil paintings of the Central Coast, but its flagship store was geared more to the locals: a massive bookstore with an organic café in back. Sophia led me along The Barnyard’s brick garden paths, up a flight of stairs and down a balcony. I heard the whine of hair dryers and knew we were close. Sophia pushed open the door, and an Adam Ant dance song came thumping out, all trumpets and drums.
“Honey, is that you?” called a voice from behind a screened partition. “I’ll be out in a sec.”
Sophia slid into one of the architectural leather and chrome chairs in the waiting area, drooped one leg over the arm and flipped through a Vogue magazine. She studied each outfit with laser focus, absentmindedly licking her fingertips before flicking each page. It now made sense why Sophia glided through campus on her own invisible runway; she was homeschooled in fashion. I heard a faucet shut off, and Adam Ant faded from concert volume to background music.
Sophia’s mom walked into the room, and suddenly I felt as if I had stumbled right into an MTV music video. She was the spitting image of Pat Benatar, an elfin beauty with spiky black hair, high cheekbones and stage-ready makeup. She shimmered in a gold jumpsuit with shoulder pads, one forearm sheathed in sparkly bangles, her pixie body perched on stiletto-heel boots. She’d accentuated her eyes with heavy kohl and more mascara than I knew eyelashes could hold. Her eyelids were metallic purple that blended to neon blue toward her brows, and the only missing accessory was an electric guitar. She scooped Sophia into a hug and kissed her on both cheeks as if it had been years, not hours, since they were last together.
Then Sophia introduced me, and Dominique leaned in to leave lipstick prints on my face, too. Like a weak plant that had finally been moved into the sun, I lifted my cheek to meet her halfway.
“Enchantez,” she purred.
“Means nice to meet you,” Sophia said.
“On shon tay,” I repeated, too starstruck to find my own words.
Dominique and Sophia chattered and giggled like two best friends at a coffee shop, swapping stories about their day and finishing one another’s sentences. Dominique made jokes about a rude customer, and Sophia told her mom that our English teacher was on her Don Quixote kick again, making the class rehearse lines from the play even though there were no plans for a school performance. I studied them with a mixture of wonder and longing.
Dominique asked me how I liked school, and I told her I loved everything about it except for dodgeball. Whenever it rained, the PE classes were stuck inside the gym where the teacher separated us into two teams, gave us a rubber ball and ordered us to hurl it at each other. I cowered in the back rows, hoping I’d somehow get through the ordeal without too many bruises. Bullies were the only kids who appreciated dodgeball.
“So barbaric,” Dominique said, reaching her fingers into my hair to feel the texture. “Needs moisture,” she said, and led me to the shelves of bottles. Dominique pulled down three potions and unscrewed the caps, letting me smell them. I chose the one that smelled like tangerines.
“Good choice,” Dominique said. She put it in a small gift bag with handles, and it looked like a birthday present.
Sophia and I spread our homework on the coffee table in the waiting area. Dominique set a bottle of Pellegrino before us and handed Sophia some cash, and told us to get sandwiches so we could eat while we studied. I practically floated on the brick path to the bookstore-café. Sophia had my Fantasy Mom.
After her last customer, Dominique drove us home in the yellow LeCar. I sat in the back while Sophia rode in the passenger seat and reached over to shift gears when her mother pressed the clutch and called out a number. Sophia was so practiced that she didn’t even have to look at the diagram on the shifter when her mother accelerated, proving she had been telling the truth when she said she already knew how to drive. On the way to the Valley, I learned that they lived just a few miles from me, and Sophia had an older sister. The three of them lived together, also without a dad at home. Yet whatever had split their family apart didn’t freeze them in tragedy. Dominique was still Sophia’s mother, all the way.
When Dominique asked about my family, I abbreviated and said that I lived with my grandparents. I relaxed when neither Dominique nor Sophia asked for an explanation. I directed Dominique to our driveway, and as I was getting out, she pointed at the honey bus.
“What’s that?”
“Grandpa’s honey bus.”
“Honey bus?”
“He makes honey in there.”
“He’s a beekeeper?”
They had a zillion more questions. They wanted to know where his beehives were, how bees make honey, how we get it out of the hives and how many times I’ve been stung. I led an impromptu beekeeping 101 lesson, describing the hive as a superorganism with one collective brain.
There’s a queen, but no king, I explained, but the queen isn’t the ruler. All the bees work and make decisions together. Bees are loyal and generous, but they also have a brutal side and will toss out the weak, the sick and the males once they become useless to the community. Bees have their own language, and will hum with delight, shriek in distress, fall silent with grief, and growl with menace when threatened. Even the queen has her own special battle cry when rivals challenge her throne.
I basked in the attention of my audience, growing more confident as I tried to talk to them the way Grandpa spoke to me, in stories with a little bit of pizzazz layered on. I made them guess how many eyes bees have (five), then added that their hairy eyeballs can see ultraviolet light, picking up psychedelic flower colors and patterns we can’t see. Dominique asked if it was dangerous to open beehives. Beekeepers can’t be scared, I said ominously, because bees can smell your fear.
Dominique and Sophia exchanged a look.
“Grandpa says it’s true,” I added.
Bees don’t like bad breath, either, I continued. Or dark colors, so beekeepers brush their teeth and wear white suits so the bees don’t mistake them for bears. Sophia and her mother hung on to my words, so I even told them the gross stuff—that bees have sex in the air and the male bee dies after mating because his thingy breaks off inside the queen. I told them honey is actually nectar that bees have barfed up and fanned with their wings until it thickens. I was really working it, trying to wow them.
When I finished, it was silent in the car for a moment. I think they were deciding whether I had an active imagination.
“That’s so...cool,” Sophia said.
It felt backward, her admiring me, but it was the best kind of wrong I’d ever felt. I knew now, without a doubt, that we would be friends. We both had a currency the other wanted.
“Don’t forget this,” Dominique said, handing me the shampoo I’d forgotten on the back seat. “Come back again anytime.”
“Tomorrow?” Sophia asked.
Yes, yes indeed.
We fell into stride after that, walking to the salon together several times a week. I ate dinner with Sophia’s family so often that I was like their foreign exchange student, such a part of the routine that Dominique put out a toothbrush for me and Sophia gave me her old Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and Lacoste sweaters.
Granny granted me permission to spend time at Sophia’s house, and I lived vicariously through my chic new friend. She and her mother took me to French restaurants and introduced me to escargot and my first taste of red wine, and they took me to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High, my first R-rated movie. Even though we were the same age, Sophia seemed more like a grown-up to me. Her bedroom was filled with cubist Scandinavian furniture that we were forever stacking into different configurations. We blasted her stereo and redecorated for hours, stopping every now and then when a boy called her private telephone line. I sat nearby and pretended not to listen to her flirt, but in truth was taking meticulous notes so that if anyone ever fell in love with me, I’d know what to say. Sophia liked to stay up late watching movies, and on the nights I fell asleep at her house, her mother took us both to school in the morning.
I couldn’t envy Sophia because she treated me like a sister. But the more time I spent with her family, the harder it became to return to mine. Mom’s absence was amplified now that I’d spent time in a home filled with laughter, dinner parties and music. In Sophia’s house, single motherhood was not the defeat that it was in ours. Dominique was built of something stronger than my mother, and that made me increasingly impatient with Mom because it seemed like she wasn’t really trying. What was the statute of limitations on sadness?
As Sophia and her mother let me borrow more and more of their happiness, I felt increasingly selfish because I could never reciprocate. A few times Sophia asked if she could come to my house, but I always deflected, saying vaguely that my mother was sick. I felt ashamed of my mother’s weakness, and didn’t know how to explain that she had retreated behind a closed door. My life seemed so flat compared to Sophia’s, and I was afraid to let her see how much sharing my family had to do, of beds, of bathrooms, of grief. I didn’t think Sophia would understand, and I wasn’t sure if I could have explained it in a way that would have made sense to her, anyway.
I spent less time sharing the bed with Mom, which I think suited both of us. She didn’t ask where I was, so I didn’t mention Sophia, assuming Granny must have filled her in. More and more, I began to feel like I was leading a double life.
Early one Saturday morning, I awoke to the smell of hazelnut coffee and found Mom at the kitchen table warming her hands on a steaming mug with the Monterey Herald spread before her. She never followed the news, so I peered over her shoulder to see what she was reading. She was circling garage sales, selecting the ones in the high-end neighborhoods. She blew out a column of smoke and looked up at me.
“If we leave now, we can get there before all the good stuff is sold,” she said.
“We?”
“Got anything better to do?”
I wasn’t sure if this was the best idea. My last outing with Mom had ended with a near arrest in a bowling alley. She fished the keys out of her purse.
“C’mon. I’ll let you pick out one thing.”
Sold. I couldn’t resist a free gift.
The Gremlin complained as Mom forced it up the snaking, two-lane Los Laureles Grade in a high gear. She slowed before mailboxes to check the house numbers, until she found the one listed in the paper, and wound the car through a pillared gate toward a home as big as a hotel, with a view of the entire valley. I spotted a tennis court and the turquoise of a swimming pool through a slatted fence. We parked near a fountain with a bubbling stream coming from a fish’s mouth and walked to the garage, where a woman was pulling books out of a box and setting them up on a folding table. We were an hour early.
“Oh, you’re...the first ones here,” she said, pulling back her cuff to check the time.
“That’s great!” Mom said. “Then you can show me the good stuff.”
The woman forced a smile and brought Mom to a table with crystal vases and china plates.
“It was my aunt’s wedding set,” the woman said.
Mom slowly perused the wares, turned over each item to inspect the price tag, and then gently placed each thing back down again.
“What a rip!” Mom whispered to me too loudly, and I cringed, hoping the woman hadn’t heard. Mom walked the perimeter of the garage, handling everything as if she were looking for clues. She held sweaters up to her chest and checked the arm length. She flipped through books. She even examined things I know she had no intention of buying, like a power drill and a set of skis.
I tried to fade into the wall, watching the homeowner watch her. We were trying to figure out what, exactly, she was doing. Then, it dawned on me. She wasn’t shopping at all; she was only here because she enjoyed sifting through other people’s lives. Rich people’s lives.
I tugged on her sleeve. “Can we go?”
“We’ll go when I say it’s time to go,” she hissed under her breath. Then she turned from me to the homeowner, her face soft and kind.
“Excuse me, would you mind if I used your bathroom? I’m so sorry to have to ask.” She lowered her voice and whispered confidentially, “It’s medical.”
The homeowner looked startled. She hesitated, and then asked Mom to be quick—she couldn’t leave her yard sale unattended. The woman let us in and down a hallway with windows in the ceiling that let in columns of light that made bright yellow squares on the terra-cotta floor. Mom followed slowly so she could catalog her surroundings. She ran her finger along a glistening countertop, took note of a refrigerator that poured ice and water right from the door, and quickly glanced inside rooms. I tagged behind, humiliated that Mom would stoop to such bull honky to get inside the house. The woman showed her to a bathroom, and Mom clicked the door behind her. I could hear her opening cupboards and medicine cabinets, looking for clues to what her life might have been had it gone the way it was supposed to. The homeowner and I stood next to one another, awkwardly clearing our throats and listening to Mom rummaging.
“You okay in there?” the lady said, rapping on the door. I heard footsteps, then a flush, then Mom ran the tap for a second and whipped open the door.
“Oh, hi!” Mom said cheerfully. “I just love that spa tub you have in there.”
The woman gave a wan smile, and there was an uncomfortable silence. “Well, we really should get back outside.”
We fell in line behind our reluctant tour guide, but Mom wasn’t ready to give up so easily. She kept up her squirrel chatter behind the woman’s back.
“Who is your contractor? It’s so hard to get a good one these days. My husband wants to remodel the bathroom with a spa tub, and at first I was against it because we already have an outdoor hot tub. One of those redwood ones, you know? But looking at yours, now I’m starting to change my mind again. Do you use it a lot?”
The woman didn’t answer, and once we were outside, she strode away from us and rushed up to a man I assumed was her husband, because he immediately glared in our direction. I was mortified that Mom had crossed a line, got caught and wasn’t even aware of it. She had stolen something from these people, even if it wasn’t an actual thing you could hold in your hand. She had taken a little piece of their privacy for herself. I was ashamed, and I needed to get Mom back in the car before she caused any more damage.
“Mom, we should go.”
She opened her mouth as if to protest, then caught the man looking our way. She linked her arm with mine and leaned in as if to tell me something in private, but projected her voice. “Nothin’ but a buncha overpriced crap here, anyway.”
I tugged her toward the car and picked up the pace.
“What’s with you?” she said.
“I’m just cold.”
Mom had several more sales on her list, but I talked her into taking me home, saying that Grandpa was waiting for me to check the bees. It wasn’t exactly true, but I could easily make it true once I got home and found him tinkering around in the yard. All I had to do was tell him I felt like seeing the bees, and he’d drop whatever tool was in his hand and pick up a veil. I just needed to get Mom home within the safety of four walls again, where she couldn’t embarrass me, or get in a fight with someone.
Ever since we’d arrived in California, I’d carried a constant hope that she’d return to society. But the few times she’d left the house, it seemed that nothing ever went right for her. She had a knack for getting herself removed from every place we tried to go, and her self-righteousness afterward always embarrassed me. Her anger was capricious but always guaranteed; she flared at the slightest thing—a driver who forgot to signal, a grocery checker who refused an expired coupon.
As my perimeter expanded beyond Via Contenta, I was increasingly beginning to suspect that Mom’s unpredictable moods were a part of her personality, not just a temporary sadness over losing Dad or her difficult lot in life. All that bed rest hadn’t improved her outlook. She moved through the world defensively, assuming the worst in others, and she was even more convinced that people were out to get her. I worried that if I upset her, she could just as easily turn against me. Sometimes I even thought it would be safest if she stayed in bed permanently.
I sought refuge in the bee yards, and the more time I spent with Grandpa, the more I began to appreciate how easy it was to be with him. We could talk, or not talk; it didn’t matter. We enjoyed each other’s company, and the simple ease of that made me feel that maybe things weren’t so bad after all. I wondered what it was about Grandpa that didn’t come naturally to me and Mom. As I became more curious about this, I started to wonder who he was before I showed up on his doorstep. Who taught him all the things he was teaching me? It dawned on me that Grandpa must have been someone else before he became my grandpa. But I knew very little about this man who had become the most special person in my life.
On one of our drives to Big Sur, I finally asked him why he was a beekeeper.
“Well, my dad kept bees, and his father kept bees, and my cousins kept bees. There were beehives on the Post Ranch, where my mother was born. Her daddy and granddad keep bees, so I guess I just did, too.”
“Why do you like it?”
We slowed to a stop on Highway 1 as an RV in front of us lumbered toward one of the oceanside pullouts, where tourists were snapping photos of the single-arch Bixby Bridge that connected two sections of coastline. Grandpa waited patiently with the truck idling.
“Well...you can work by yourself. People don’t bother you. You have to move slowly when you work the bees, so it’s a job that’s calm, I suppose. And people always like it when I give them honey.”
The RV was out of our way now, and Grandpa exchanged a wave with the driver as we continued south.
“And Big Sur is a good place for bees,” Grandpa continued.
“Why?”
“I have to take good care of them and put them in a place where they can fly free.”
I was confused. Can’t bees fly wherever they wanted?
He unscrewed his thermos while keeping one hand on the steering wheel, and handed the cup to me, signaling me to fill it with coffee. I waited for him to let the caffeine kick in, and then he rolled down his window and rested his elbow on the door, settling in to explain something to me.
“There are three different kinds of beekeepers,” he began.
Hobbyists, he said, keep a handful of hives to learn about bees and harvest a little honey; sideliners like himself run small businesses with more than a hundred hives in fixed locations; and then there are the big guys with thousands of hives who truck their bees across the country to pollinate huge agricultural farms.
“Those migratory beekeepers don’t even bother with honey. They make all their money renting bees to farmers,” he said.
I had never imagined beekeeping any other way than how Grandpa did it. He worked in harmony with the bees, attuned to their needs. It was hard to believe that outside Big Sur it was the other way around. Bees were shuttled on the highways and forced to work for humans.
“Where are all those bees going?”
Mostly to the almond farms in the Central Valley, he said. There aren’t enough bees in the whole state to pollinate all the almond flowers, and the trees depend on bees because their pollen is too heavy for the wind to carry. Beekeepers come in from other states, and use forklifts to lower their hives into the orchards, leaving the bees there for several weeks in spring to pollinate rows and rows of almond trees as far as the eye can see. Bees need a diet of diverse pollen to stay healthy, he said, but traveling bees are forced to eat the same thing, day in and out.
“Imagine eating a hot dog every day for a month; then a hamburger every day for a month,” Grandpa said. “What do you think would happen to you?”
“I’d probably throw up,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Once the bees finish pollinating one farm, the beekeepers retrieve their hives and haul them to the next crop in bloom, unleashing their bees on cherry farms in Stockton or apple orchards in Washington. Bees-for-hire toil from February to August, which means that a typical honeybee in America spends more time on a highway than in the wild.
“That’s why I don’t move my bees,” Grandpa said. “I think those commercial bees are stressed out. It’s not natural to take bees out of their environment. They get disoriented, and it takes them a while to establish themselves again. It’s too hard on their system.”
It’s not the traveling alone that does the bees in, Grandpa said. It’s also the crop pesticides the bees pick up and absorb into the architecture of their hives. Like living in a home with lead-based paint, the exposure can be undetectable at first, but over time the bees develop nervous system disorders, lose the ability to fly and die.
“That’s why I put my bees in a place far away from people, where there are no chemicals. So I can protect them.”
Grandpa’s bees were safe, but now I was worried for the traveling bees. Were they all going to get sick and die?
“Are bees in trouble?”
“Not yet,” Grandpa said. “But if we keep treating them like slaves, we could lose bees for good.”
“Then what?”
“Then we don’t eat.”
There was the answer to my question. Grandpa was a beekeeper because he understood the things that really mattered.
He knew that there should be a balance between the taking and the giving a person does in one lifetime. That a good relationship, between bees and humans, or two middle school classmates, or between a mother and daughter, all needs to start from a mutual understanding that the other is precious.