The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd

 

I was thinking, Well, it’s not just marriage that’s set up like that. What about me waiting on T. Ray hand and foot, and we were just father and daughter? Pour me some more tea, Lily. Polish my shoes, Lily. Go get the truck keys, Lily. I sincerely hoped she didn’t mean this sort of thing went on in a marriage.

“Weren’t you ever in love?” I asked.

“Being in love and getting married, now, that’s two different things. I was in love once, of course I was. Nobody should go through life without falling in love.”

“But you didn’t love him enough to marry him?”

She smiled at me. “I loved him enough,” she said. “I just loved my freedom more.”

We glued labels till we ran out of jars. Then, for the heck of it, I moistened the back of one more and pressed it onto my T-shirt, in the gully between my breasts.

August looked at the clock, announcing we’d done so good with our time we had a whole hour left before lunch.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s do bee patrol.”

 

Though I’d done bee patrol with Zach, I hadn’t been back to the hives with August since that first time. I pulled on long cotton pants that used to be June’s and August’s white shirt, which needed the sleeves rolled up about ten turns. Then I placed the jungle helmet on my head, letting the veil fall down over my face.

We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.

“There is one thing I don’t get,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“How come if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink?”

She laughed. “That was May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest color I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’”

“All this time I just figured you liked pink,” I said.

She laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart—now, that matters. The whole problem with people is—”

“They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.

“I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

I couldn’t locate a stray bee anywhere. The hives looked like an abandoned neighborhood, the air groggy with heat. You got the impression the bees were inside having a big siesta. Maybe all that excessive work had finally caught up with them.

“Where are they?” I said.

August placed her finger to her lips, signaling me to be quiet. She lifted off her helmet and laid the side of her face flat against the top of the hive box. “Come listen,” she whispered.

I removed my hat, tucking it under my arm, and placed my face next to hers so that we were practically nose to nose.

“You hear that?” she said.

A sound rushed up. A perfect hum, high-pitched and swollen, like someone had put the teakettle on and it had come to a boil.

“They’re cooling the hives down,” she said, and her breath broke over my face with the smell of spearmint. “That’s the sound of one hundred thousand bee wings fanning the air.”

She closed her eyes and soaked it in the way you imagine people at a fancy orchestra concert drinking up highbrow music. I hope it’s not too backward to say that I felt like I had never heard anything on my hi-fi back home that came out that good. You would have to hear it yourself to believe the perfect pitch, the harmony parts, how the volume rolled up and down. We had our ears pressed to a giant music box.

Then the whole side of my face started to vibrate as if the music had rushed into my pores. I could see August’s skin pulsating the tiniest bit. When we stood back up, my cheek prickled and itched.

“You were listening to bee air-conditioning,” August said. “Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.”

I loved the idea of bees having a secret life, just like the one I was living.

“What other secrets have they got?” I wanted to know.

“Well, for instance, every bee has its role to play.”

She went through the whole thing. The nest builders were the group that drew the comb. I told her the way they created hexagons, they must be the ones who could do math in their heads, and she smiled and said, yes, nest builders had true math aptitude.

Field bees were the ones with good navigation skills and tireless hearts, going out to gather nectar and pollen. There was a group called mortician bees whose pitiful job it was to rake the dead bees out of the hive and keep everything on the clean side. Nurse bees, August said, had a gift for nurturing, and they fed all the baby bees. They were probably the self-sacrificing group, like the women at church socials who said, “No, you take the chicken breast. I’m just fine with the neck and gizzard, really.” The only males were the drones who sat around waiting to mate with the queen.

“And of course,” August said, “there’s the queen and her attendants.”

“She has attendants?”

“Oh, yes, like ladies-in-waiting. They feed her, bathe her, keep her warm or cool—whatever’s needed. You can see them always circled around her, fussing over her. I’ve even seen them caress her.”

August returned her helmet to her head. “I guess I’d want comfort, too, if I did nothing but lay eggs all day long, week in and week out.”

“That’s all she does—lay eggs?” I wasn’t sure what I expected, it wasn’t like she wore a crown and sat on a throne giving out royal orders.

“Egg laying is the main thing, Lily. She’s the mother of every bee in the hive, and they all depend on her to keep it going. I don’t care what their job is—they know the queen is their mother. She’s the mother of thousands.”

The mother of thousands.

I put on my helmet as August lifted the lid. The way the bees poured out, rushing up all of a sudden in spirals of chaos and noise, caused me to jump.

“Don’t move an inch,” said August. “Remember what I told you. Don’t be scared.”

A bee flew straight at my forehead, collided with the net, and bumped against my skin.

“She’s giving you a little warning,” August said. “When they bump your forehead, they’re saying, I’ve got my eye on you, so you be careful. Send them love and everything will be fine.”

I love you, I love you, I said in my head. I LOVE YOU. I tried to say it thirty-two ways.

August pulled out the brood frames not even wearing her gloves. While she worked, the bees spun around us, gathering strength till they made soft wind on our faces. It reminded me of the way the bees had flown out of my bedroom walls, stranding me at the center of a bee whirlwind.

I watched the different shadows on the ground. The funnel of bees. Me, still as a fence post. August bent over the hive, inspecting the frames, looking for wax buildup on the comb, the half-moon shape of her helmet bouncing along.

The bees began to light on my shoulders the ways birds sit on telephone wires. They sat along my arms, speckled the bee veil so I could scarcely see through it. I love you. I love you. They covered my body, filled the cuffs of my pants.

My breath came faster, and something coiled around my chest and squeezed tighter and tighter, until suddenly, like somebody had snapped off the panic switch, I felt myself go limp. My mind became unnaturally calm, as if part of me had lifted right up out of my body and was sitting on a tree limb watching the spectacle from a safe distance. The other part of me danced with the bees. I wasn’t moving a lick, but in my mind I was spinning through the air with them. I had joined the bee conga line.

I sort of forgot where I was. With my eyes closed, I slowly raised my arms, weaving them through the bees, until finally I stood with them stretched out from my sides in a dreamy place I’d never been before. My neck rolled back and my mouth opened. I was floating somewhere, somewhere that didn’t rub too close against life. Like I’d chewed the bark from a toothache tree and it had made me dizzy.

Lost in the bees, I felt dropped into a field of enchanted clover that made me immune to everything, as if August has doused me with the bee smoker and quieted me down to the point I could do nothing but raise my arms and sway back and forth.

Then, without warning, all the immunity wore off, and I felt the hollow, spooned-out space between my navel and breastbone begin to ache. The motherless place. I could see my mother in the closet, the stuck window, the suitcase on the floor. I heard the shouting, then the explosion. I almost doubled over. I lowered my arms, but I didn’t open my eyes. How could I live the whole rest of my life knowing these things? What could I ever do that would be good enough to make them go away? How come we couldn’t go back and fix the bad things we did?

Later my mind would remember the plagues God had been fond of sending early in his career, the ones designed to make the pharaoh change his mind and let Moses take the people out of Egypt. Let my people go, Moses said. I’d seen the plague of locusts at the movies, the sky filled with hordes of insects looking like kamikaze planes. Back in my room on the peach farm, when the bees had first come out at night, I had imagined they were sent as a special plague for T. Ray. God saying, Let my daughter go, and maybe that’s exactly what they’d been, a plague that released me.

But here, now, surrounded by stinging bees on all sides and the motherless place throbbing away, I knew that these bees were not a plague at all. It felt like the queen’s attendants were out here in a frenzy of love, caressing me in a thousand places. Look who’s here, it’s Lily. She is so weary and lost. Come on, bee sisters. I was the stamen in the middle of a twirling flower. The center of all their comforting.

“Lily…Lily.” My name came across the blue distances. “Lily!”

I opened my eyes. August stared through her spectacles. The bees had shaken the pollen dust off their feet and were starting to settle back into the hive. I could see tiny grains of it drifting in the air.

“Are you okay?” August said.

I nodded. Was I? I had no idea.

“You know, don’t you, that the two of us need to have a good talk. And this time not about me. About you.”

I wished I could do like the bees, just bump her forehead with a warning, tap it with my finger. I got my eye on you. Be careful. Don’t go any further.

“I suppose,” I answered.

“What about right now?”

“Not right now.”

“But, Lily—”

“I’m starved,” I said. “I think I’ll go on back to the house and see if lunch is ready.”

I didn’t wait for her to speak. Walking to the pink house, I could almost see the end of the line. I touched the place on my shirt where I’d stuck the black Mary. She was starting to come unglued.

 

The whole house smelled like fried okra. Rosaleen was setting the table in the kitchen while May dipped down in the grease and brought up the golden brown kernels. I didn’t know what had brought on the okra, since it was usually bologna sandwiches and more bologna sandwiches.

May had not had a crying jag since June performed her tomato-throwing fit, and we were all holding our breath. After going this long, I worried that even something as simple as burned okra might send her over the edge.

I said I was hungry, and Rosaleen said to hold my wild horses. Her lower lip was plumped out with Red Rose snuff. The smell followed her around the kitchen like it was on a leash, a combination of allspice, fresh earth, and rotten leaves. Between the okra and the snuff I could not get a decent breath. Rosaleen walked across the back porch, leaned out the door, and spit a tiny jet stream across the hydrangeas.

Nobody could spit like Rosaleen. I’d had fantasies of her winning a hundred dollars in a spitting contest and the two of us going to a nice motel in Atlanta and ordering room service with the prize money. It had always been my fond wish to stay in a motel, but at that moment if you had told me I could’ve had my choice of luxury motels with heated pools and television sets right in the room, I would’ve turned it down flat for the pink house.

There had been a few times, though, just after I woke up, when I thought about my old house, and I would miss it for a second or two before I remembered kneeling on the kitchen floor with grits digging into my kneecaps or trying to step around a great big pile of T. Ray’s nasty mood but usually landing right in it. I would remember him tearing into me, shouting Jesus H. Christ, Jesus H. Christ! The worst slap across the face I ever got was when I interrupted him to ask just what did the H. stand for anyway? One quick walk down memory lane and the old-home feeling would blow right over. I would take the pink house any day.

Zach shuffled into the kitchen behind August.

“My, my. Okra and pork chops for lunch. What’s this about?” August asked May.

May sidled over to her and said in a low voice, “It has been five days since I’ve been to the wall,” and I could see how proud of this fact she was, how she wanted to believe her days of hysterical crying were behind her, how this okra lunch was a celebration.

August smiled at her. “Five days, really? Well, that deserves a feast,” she said. And May, she beamed.