The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

The music she played was the kind that sawed through you, cutting into the secret chambers of your heart and setting the sadness free.

June’s music turned into air, and the air into aching. I swayed on my feet and tried not to breathe it in.

I could hear my heart thudding. I wondered if August could hear it over there across the room. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. In spite of the panic that goes along with it, there’s something familiar and strangely comforting about hearing your heart beat like that.

I could not take my eyes off it. It had grown out of her head and now perched there like a thought she had left behind on the brush. I knew then that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how many jars of honey you threw, no matter how much you thought you could leave your mother behind, she would never disappear from the tender places in you.

Me and my mother. I didn’t care about anything on this earth except the way her face was tipped toward mine, our noses just touching, how wide and gorgeous her smile was, like sparklers going off. She had fed me with a tiny spoon. She had rubbed her nose against mine and poured her light on my face.

I looked down at the picture, then closed my eyes. I figured May must’ve made it to heaven and explained to my mother about the sign I wanted. The one that would let me know I was loved.

A queenless colony is a pitiful and melancholy community; there may be a mournful wail or lament from within…. Without intervention, the colony will die. But introduce a new queen and the most extravagant change takes place. —The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard. If God said in plain language, “I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,” a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

I would walk to the pink house to use the bathroom and think, My mother sat on this same toilet, and then I would hate myself for thinking it. Who cared where she sat to pee?

In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional. I was the girl abandoned by her mother. I was the girl who kneeled on grits. What a special case I was.

August had said, “I guess you need to grieve a little while. So go ahead and do it.” But now that I was doing it, I couldn’t seem to stop.

At least no one prodded, or asked questions, or said, “For Pete’s sake, snap out of it.”

“Regrets don’t help anything, you know that.”

“Well, for starters, I’ll be going to the white high school this year.” I was speechless. I squeezed the phone in my hand. “Are you sure you wanna do that?” I said. I knew what those places were like. “Somebody’s got to,” he said. “Might as well be me.”

When she finally wound down and said good night, I watched her climb the stairs wearing her red-and-white voter-registration dress, and I wished again that I’d been there. Regrets don’t help anything, August had told June, you know that. I ran up the stairs and grabbed Rosaleen from behind, stopping her with one foot poised in the air, searching for the next step. I wrapped my arms around her middle. “I love you,” I blurted out, not even knowing I was going to say this.

spring fever.

Next I gathered up the mouse bones that I’d kept in my pockets, realizing I didn’t need to carry them around anymore. But I knew I couldn’t throw them away either, so I tied them together with a red hair ribbon and set them on the shelf by the fan. I stared at them a minute, wondering how a person got attached to mouse bones. I decided sometimes you just need to nurse something, that’s all.

Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

‘Deborah Fontanel, every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?’

I am in the center of the universe, where everything is sung to life.

“Our Lady is not some magical being out there somewhere, like a fairy godmother. She’s not the statue in the parlor. She’s something inside of you.

“You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.”

“You don’t have to put your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life,” she said. “You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.”

“All those times your father treated you mean, Our Lady was the voice in you that said, ‘No, I will not bow down to this. I am Lily Melissa Owens, I will not bow down.’ Whether you could hear this voice or not, she was in there saying it.”

“When you’re unsure of yourself,” she said, “when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she’s the one inside saying, ‘Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.’ She’s the power inside you, you understand?”

And when you get down to it, Lily, that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love—but to persist in love.”

“This Mary I’m talking about sits in your heart all day long, saying, ‘Lily, you are my everlasting home. Don’t you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.’”

He kicked at me, his boot landing in my calf, like I was a tin can in the road that he might as well kick because it was there in front of him.

Even as he said it, I could tell he didn’t want me, didn’t want me back on the farm, didn’t want to be reminded of her. Another part of him—the good part, if there was such a thing—might even be thinking that I’d be better off here. It was pride now, all pride. How could he back down?

“If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.” T. Ray needed a face-saving way to hand me over, and August was giving it to him.

I watched till he was gone from sight, then turned and looked at August and Rosaleen and the Daughters on the porch. This is the moment I remember clearest of all—how I stood in the driveway looking back at them. I remember the sight of them standing there waiting. All these women, all this love, waiting.

I remember thinking that he probably loved me in his own smallish way. He had forfeited me over, hadn’t he?

A person shouldn’t look too far down her nose at absurdities.

I keep my mother’s things on a special shelf in my room, and I let Becca look at them but not touch. One day I will let her pick them up, since it seems that’s what a girlfriend would do. The feeling that they are holy objects is already starting to wear off. Before long I’ll be handing Becca my mother’s brush, saying, “Here, you wanna brush your hair with this?” “You wanna wear this whale pin?”

I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

She is a muscle of love, this Mary.

And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.