The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

August took Rosaleen’s hand and pulled her over, then went on holding it, the way she used to hold May’s sometimes, and it struck me that she loved Rosaleen. That she would like to change Rosaleen’s name to July and bring her into their sisterhood.

August reached over and touched Zach’s arm. She said, “Well, now, I guess I could say if I’d told May from the beginning about you getting arrested, instead of keeping it from her, none of this would’ve happened. Or if I’d stopped May from going out to the wall that night, none of this would’ve happened. What if I hadn’t waited so long before going out there and getting her—” She looked down at May’s body. “It was May who did it, Zach.” I was afraid, though, the blame would find a way to stick to them. That’s how blame was.

Aristaeus,”

Aristaeus.

I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.”

I think it was because Queenie hated to cover the whiteness of her hair, which she was proud to have,

manna. A salted mixture of sunflower, sesame, pumpkin, and pomegranate seeds drizzled with honey and baked to perfection. They ate it by the handfuls, saying they wouldn’t dream of sitting with the dead without eating seeds. Seeds kept the living from despair, they explained.

August passed around a paper bag full of manna, and we scooped up handfuls and threw the seeds into the hole with the coffin, and my ears were filled with nothing but bee hum. That night, in my bed, when I closed my eyes, bee hum ran through my body. Ran through the whole earth. It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.

It takes honeybee workers ten million foraging trips to gather enough nectar to make one pound of honey. —Bees of the World

Life was so funny. I’d spent over a month here dillydallying around, refusing to tell August about my mother when I could have done it so easy, and now that I really needed to tell her, I couldn’t. You just don’t interrupt somebody’s mourning with your own problems.

I said, “If I was a Negro girl—” He placed his fingers across my lips so I tasted his saltiness. “We can’t think of changing our skin,” he said. “Change the world—that’s how we gotta think.”

pedal pushers

I tried not to look at him, his tight skin sparkling with sweat, his dogtag hanging from the chain around his neck, his shorts slung low on his hips, the little tuft of hair starting under his navel.

Mabelee, who could not have measured five feet tall in spike heels, practically needed a stepladder to get up to his mouth. Neil crouched down and opened wide. “This is the body of the Mother,” Mabelee said, and popped it in. I did not know one thing, really, about the Catholic Church, but somehow I felt sure the pope would have keeled over if he’d seen this.

Me, I had never seen grown-ups feed each other, and I watched with the feeling I might burst out crying. I don’t know what got to me about it, but for some reason that circle of feeding made me feel better about the world.

I wished it could have been Zach standing next to me so I could lay the cake on his tongue. I would have said, I hope this softens you toward the world. I hope it brings you a tender feeling.

“What is bound will be unbound. What is cast down will be lifted up. This is the promise of Our Lady.”

They all seemed to be sunk in their meditating, or whatever it was they were doing. Everyone’s eyes were closed, except Zach’s. He stared right at me.

“A few of the fish were already dead, but most of them flapped around with their eyes staring at me, looking scared. I realized if I swam out into the water up to my neck, they could breathe. I got as far as my knees, but then I turned back. I was too afraid to go any further. I think that was the worst part. I could’ve helped them, but I didn’t.”

“We can’t be together now, Lily, but one day, after I’ve gone away and become somebody, I’m gonna find you, and we’ll be together then.” “You promise?” “I promise.” He lifted the chain with his dogtag from around his neck and lowered it over my head. “So you won’t forget, okay?” The silver rectangle dropped down under my shirt, where it dangled cold and certain between my breasts. Zachary Lincoln Taylor, resting there, along my heart. Wading in up to my neck.

If the queen were smarter, she would probably be hopelessly neurotic. As is, she is shy and skittish, possibly because she never leaves the hive, but spends her days confined in darkness, a kind of eternal night, perpetually in labor…. Her true role is less that of a queen than mother of the hive, a title often accorded to her. And yet, this is something of a mockery because of her lack of maternal instincts or the ability to care for her young. —The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men

On her bedside tables were beeswax candles, melted down into brass holders. I wondered if they could be the ones I’d personally created. It gave me a little thrill to think so, how I had helped to light August’s room when it was dark.

Sometimes Mary was brunette and brown-eyed, other times blond and blue-eyed, but gorgeous every time. She looked like a Miss America contestant. A Miss Mississippi. You can usually count on the girls from Mississippi to win. I couldn’t help wishing to see Mary in a swimsuit and heels—before her pregnancy, of course.

“Because you weren’t ready to know about her. I didn’t want to risk you running away again. I wanted you to have a chance to get yourself on solid ground, get your heart bolstered up first. There’s a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course. That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

I was pressed so close to her I felt her heart like a small throbbing pressure against my chest. Her hands rubbed my back. She didn’t say, Come on now, stop your crying, everything’s going to be okay, which is the automatic thing people say when they want you to shut up. She said, “It hurts, I know it does. Let it out. Just let it out.” So I did. With my mouth pressed against her dress, it seemed like I drew up my whole lifeload of pain and hurled it into her breast, heaved it with the force of my mouth, and she didn’t flinch.

Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said, You are unlovable, Lily Owens. Unlovable. Who could love you? Who in this world could ever love you?

“Listen to me now,” said August, tilting my chin to her face. “That’s a terrible, terrible thing for you to live with. But you’re not unlovable. Even if you did accidentally kill her, you are still the most dear, most lovable girl I know. Why, Rosaleen loves you. May loved you. It doesn’t take a wizard to see Zach loves you. And every one of the Daughters loves you. And June, despite her ways, loves you, too. It just took her a while longer because she resented your mother so much.”

“I swear, it makes me think you were meant to find us.” I was meant to, I didn’t have a doubt about it. I just wish I knew where I was meant to end up.

Where had I been that I didn’t know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and reminds you who you could be with a little work.

“The part I will never figure out is why she married him.” “I don’t think your father was always like he is now. Deborah told me about him. She loved the fact he was decorated in the war. He was so brave, she thought. Said he treated her like a princess.” I could have laughed in her face. “This isn’t the same Terrence Ray, I can tell you that right now.” “You know, Lily, people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different. I don’t doubt he started off loving your mother.

“She called me right after you were born. She said you were so pretty it hurt her eyes to look at you.” Something about this caused my own eyes to sting like sand had flown into them. Maybe my mother had cooed over me after all. Made embarrassing baby talk. Twirled my newborn hair like the top of an ice cream cone. Done it up with pink bows. Just because she didn’t plan on having me didn’t mean she hadn’t loved me.

“I guess he didn’t know what else to do for her, but she wasn’t crazy. She was depressed, but not crazy.”

“Depressed people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

“What made her so depressed like that?” I said. “I don’t know the whole answer, but part of it was her being out on the farm, isolated from things, married to a man she really didn’t want to be married to.”

I tried, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of my heart. One minute I hated my mother, the next I felt sorry for her.

katydids,

Knowing can be a curse on a person’s life. I’d traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn’t know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

“Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We’re all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.” “Good night,” I said, and rolled onto my side. “There is nothing perfect,” August said from the doorway. “There is only life.”

A worker [bee] is just over a centimeter long and weighs only about sixty milligrams; nevertheless, she can fly with a load heavier than herself. —The Honey Bee

You want the one you’re praying to at least to look capable. I dragged myself out of bed and went to see her anyway. I decided that even Mary did not need to be one hundred percent capable all the time. The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say, You poor thing, I know how you feel. Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around.

The terrible thing, the really terrible thing, was the anger in me.

I didn’t want to be angry. I told myself, You’re not angry. You don’t have any right to be angry. What you did to your mother is a lot worse than what she did to you. But you can’t talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you’re not.

I wanted to throw something all the way to heaven and knock God clean off his throne.

I lay in the emptiness, in the tiredness, with everything—even the hating—drained out. There was nothing left to do. No place to go. Just right here, right now, where the truth was.

I looked at the wrecked room. I felt embarrassed, ridiculous, stupid.

Mercurochrome

I looked at the row of seashells on the window ledge, knowing how truly they belonged here even though we were a hundred miles from the ocean.

For a second the anger I’d felt the night before flared up, and it crossed my mind to slam the shell against the tub, but I took a breath instead. Throwing fits wasn’t that satisfying, I’d found out.

She was kind as she could be, but she’d always looked at me like there was something indescribably sad written across my forehead, like she wanted to come over and scrub it off.

I heard the bitter tone in my voice, and it came to me how I could lock that tone into my voice forever. From now on, every time I thought of my mother, I could, so easy, slip off into a cold place where meanness took over.