A Recipe for Bees

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  “What was I saying?”

  “You were swearing. Like you’d hurt yourself.”

  “Could have been any number of days. I’m always whacking my thumb, bumping into things.”

  “I can’t stay. It’s a long drive back and Joy will be home soon. I told Karl I’d be there to make supper.”

  “I understand. Can we get together again sometime? Just for coffee?”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “Are you happy with the boy now? Has he been good to you?”

  Augusta nodded. “I think so. He’s a good man. He tries so hard. And I love him.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The waitress came by with more coffee, and after she was gone they both stared in opposite directions for a while. “I should be going,” said Augusta, finally.

  “Are you sure we couldn’t have a coffee now and again, as friends?”

  “I’m not willing to risk everything I’ve built. Not any more.”

  “Then I guess you better be on your way.”

  Augusta stood and put on her coat. “Are you staying?”

  “Yes. I’ll buy.”

  “We’re agreed, then? I won’t tell Joy?” Joe nodded and squeezed her hand before she left the café.

  Augusta never did tell Joy about Joe. She thought she’d set her mind at ease, convinced her Karl was her father. As she so rarely spoke her mind openly and she was hardly ever home, Augusta was never quite sure what she was thinking. On graduating Joy took jobs, any job she could find. Babysitting, housekeeping. She even waitressed at Yep Num’s café, though now it was called the Chase Café and was filled with loggers and layabouts. Yep Num had long since returned to China, and the café had passed through the hands of many owners. Joy was good at waitressing; she seemed to find a smile when tips were at stake. Or perhaps it was only for Augusta that she couldn’t find one. Augusta hated to think so. For all their difficulties, Augusta was proud of her. She was self-reliant in a way Augusta had rarely been. Yet Joy had no specific plans. There had been no talk of college. Boys came and went, picking her up and depositing her. The bit of time Joy spent at home, she spent closeted in her room.

  Then Augusta found the piggy bank, a large ceramic pig with a slot in the top that Augusta had bought and painted herself. Joy had seemed to like it. She had kept it on the nightstand by her bed. But one day Augusta found it broken open and lying on the ground around back of the barn. In the midst of the cracked pieces she found a penny. It was a shock, that was all. She’d put so much patience and effort into painting that pig, and here it was all bashed apart. It hurt. She went into the barn and told Karl about it. “Maybe she dropped it,” he said. “By accident.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. It was deliberate.”

  Karl’s face closed and he went back to shovelling, and Augusta knew that Joy was there behind her, listening. She turned to her. “I saved nearly two hundred dollars,” Joy said. Augusta said nothing. Stupidly she found her eyes watering. Joy would only think her sulky. “It was my piggy bank,” Joy said.

  “I don’t see why you had to break it.”

  “It had no hole in it, to take the money out.”

  “Well, you should have thought of that before you put the money in!”

  Augusta knew even then that they weren’t just arguing over the piggy bank, but some other thing, some larger thing. Joy was readying herself to leave, and that was what hurt and angered her mother.

  “You control everything I do!” Joy screamed. “I can’t turn around but you’re on me, nagging me! Telling me what to do! You never shut up!”

  Augusta closed her eyes. Joy knew she couldn’t bear being thought of as a nag. And here was Karl shovelling behind them, hearing every word. She and Joy listened for a moment to the chunk of the shovel in the packed manure. Then Joy said, “I’m leaving!” and stormed off into the house.

  Joy packed her few things and marched off into some boy’s car—a friend, she said, just a friend—for a ride to the bus depot. She’d got herself a waitressing job and an apartment to share with a girl in Kelowna. Not so very far away. But she was already distant getting in that car. Crying, Augusta tried to hug her goodbye, but after giving Karl a kiss on the cheek Joy gave Augusta only a shoulder and pulled away. She was steely-faced, closed as a banker’s door.

  It was nearly harvest when Joy left home. The corn stalks were blushing crimson and the base leaves were curling brown. Augusta and Karl herded lambs through the corn to graze on the weeds growing between the rows. That day was so hot that the crows had given up flying and instead paced in the dirt with their mouths open, panting like dogs. Augusta was irritable, mean with the heat. The huge leaves of the corn prickled and scraped against her face and arms; they made a rasping sound as she moved through them. The whole world was corn, a great golden-green sea of it with tassels like the tips of waves pointing to heaven, and beneath them the fluid roll of deep, shining green betraying the lay of the land. Augusta’s honeybees were everywhere, flying from tassel to tassel collecting pollen. There was nothing beyond but blue sky and shimmering air and the sun on their heads. She was glazed with sweat; Karl was drowning in it. Halfway down the field he took off home for some relief. “I’m getting some water,” he said. But when he came back he carried no jug or even a tin cup for her, only his red handkerchief wound in a knot. Look at that, she thought. He gets himself water and brings me nothing. I could die of thirst and heatstroke for all he cares.

  But when Karl reached her he took her wrist and turned it, exposing the tender underside, and placed his water-soaked handkerchief on her hot skin. It was ice-cold; he’d tucked bits of ice into his handkerchief to cool her. She pulled her hand away. She said, “What are you doing?” It was a shock, cold on skin that hot. But Karl took her other hand anyway, and bathed this wrist in cold. She gritted her teeth and let him, not understanding at first, not letting the cool soak into her. She watched his face slip from red into pink and then into no shade of embarrassment at all. His shyness melted away in all that heat. Wondering at this, Augusta found her own body relaxing, easing under his touch. She closed her eyes and felt the wet cloth on her face, wiping away the meanness, smoothing away the maddening heat. She bowed her neck and let him wash the sweat from her shoulders. With her eyes closed she still saw the sun and the corn before it, rows and rows of corn, silks streaming. She would become silk, she would bow in the breeze like tassels. She would lie in the sweet earth of the furrows between these rows and sleep.

  All at once she realized that he was undoing the buttons of her dress. She opened her eyes to watch him. The redness was back in his face, but so was determination. Where had he found the courage? He looked once full into her face, and then back at his hands at work on the buttons. She wanted to say, What are you doing? Not here! And to take his hands and make them stop. But they were sheltered by corn, and there was no one to see but the bees, and the cool air he let flow on her breasts was a blessed relief. She let him slip the dress off her shoulders and down to the furrow at her feet. She let him unhook her brassiere and slide her panties down her thighs. And when this was done she let him bathe her. He wiped the sweat from her cleavage and then lifted each breast and wiped the sweat from beneath it. He wiped the shine off her belly and cooled her thighs and relieved the hot places behind her knees. He bathed her, there in the heat in the cornfield, with his old red handkerchief, and when he was done he left her, just left her standing there, eyes closed and naked, and kept on walking the lambs down the rows. The shock of his leaving was worse than his first cold touch. She wanted more and he knew it. There was a hint of triumph in the set of his shoulders. It was so unlike him, not a thing she could imagine Karl doing. Had he planned this, Augusta now wondered, or was it something he had happened on, like a shell-less egg in a hen’s hidden nest? Had it taken him too by surprise?

  Nine

  THAT ONE SUMMER was all Augusta and Karl needed to practise their dance; the time it took
for corn to sprout and turn crimson was long enough for them to get back into rhythm. Long enough that Karl gave Augusta a new engagement ring to replace the one lost to dishwater, a diamond this time, and a gold wedding band to match it. He presented the rings to her wrapped in a series of boxes, one inside another, so at first she thought he was giving her a vacuum cleaner. But then, as soon as they weren’t bumping into each other in the kitchen or grouching at each other over the don’t-matter-much things, old habits put to the side during this second courtship slipped back into their days; not all the old habits, but most.

  Like the way Karl wouldn’t buy Augusta sanitary napkins, no matter how large she wrote the words on the shopping list or how many times she circled them in red. Or the fact that when he cooked a meal it was always the same: boiled beef ribs loaded with fat and served with unleavened dumplings. He’d make a sort of stew out of the stuff, four meals’ worth, and it must have reminded him of his bachelor days because in winter, rather than scrape out the pan and put the stew in the refrigerator, he’d put the lid on the pan and sit it out by the doorstep to freeze, as he had in the old days at Olaf’s cabin. Or the way he got cranky if Augusta was too chatty during a meal. He’d say, “Well, let’s get this meal eaten before it gets cold.” And she’d feel obliged to sit and eat with him in silence where, before Joy left, she might have taken her cup of coffee and gone to sit on the stump.

  He went on bringing her flowers, too, like the moccasin flower that only he knew where to find, someplace down on the edge of the ravine; the bunch of wild roses he brought her as soon as they were in bloom; or the pearly everlastings he brought her every year on their anniversary. And if she wanted to do something nice for him, she’d bake a lemon pie.

  Augusta kissed the smooth skin on the top of Karl’s head where that single upstart hair grew. He awoke and looked up at her, bewildered.

  Rose, stretching out of sleep, said, “You hear about May Stonehill? She ran down the corridor at the home naked one night to Andy Wallbank’s room and tucked herself into his bed. The night nurse caught them at it and shooed May back to her room. That must have been a sight, eh?”

  “Why didn’t the nurse step back out the door?” said Augusta. “She should have left them to it. Neither of them are children.” Although Andy spent most of his time thinking he was eighteen and working in a mine. Who would be worse off if May crawled down into that mine with him for a night? she wondered. Only the night nurse’s stiff sensibility would be dented by it.

  Augusta supposed the young never thought of the lovemaking that went on between old bodies, or if they did it was material for jokes. She still wanted to be found beautiful, desirable. No one ever outgrew that. Yet she knew how the boys on the train today had seen her, how they had laughed at her. They could not conceive of growing old—metamorphosing in this odd way—any more than Augusta could have at their age. They expected to grow older, to sprout manly muscles, but not to progress to grey brittleness, as she had. Could they have imagined that she had once been smooth-skinned, young, like them? A different animal altogether, and yet the same. Right there on the train she had glanced down at her lap, expecting to see those smooth young hands gripping her purse, and been surprised to find these old things instead. She didn’t feel any different than she had at thirty, except for the aches and pains. She had expected that her desires would slacken after the possibility of a child was gone, but they hadn’t. She almost wished they had. What cruel joker gave old women such heated desires at the very time in their lives when they were likely widowed, or when any menfolk they had were grown flaccid and tired? I’m not being fair to the old guys, she thought. What was that psalm? Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength fails.

  There were certainly some old men still willing and able. Or willing, anyway. There were a couple of men at the seniors’ centre always making the rounds of the women. One turned up for lunch every day dressed in a different outfit. One day it was a sailor’s get-up, complete with captain’s hat, his pot belly hanging over his bell-bottom pants. Another day he was dressed as a pirate. Once it was a 1970s white suit with a shiny disco shirt. He sidled up to that noisy Faye Risby with his usual line of “Married? Got a lover? No? Well, now.” Faye didn’t waste any time with him. She said, “Who are trying to kid? You couldn’t get it up if your life depended on it.” She had a voice that carried; she caused quite a commotion in the lunch room. Mr. Dress-Up had a wife who wouldn’t go anywhere with him. Augusta didn’t wonder at it.

  The few men who came to the dances were gallant; they did try, each of them, to dance with each woman. Lance Reed, tall and so skinny that his hipbones wore the fabric on his pants, came alone, as his wife, Maeve, was long past dancing. As Augusta could no longer dance, Karl was now a popular man. Faye Risby commandeered him with something very near ownership, and had most of the dances with him except the polkas. Rose got the polkas. Augusta sat at the table at the door taking toonies from everyone who came, and seeing that they signed in, and rattled on about bees to anyone who would listen. As much as the members would have liked them to be, these dances weren’t the rollicking affairs of the forties. Music was provided by a tape machine or sometimes a balding, oily-scalped man who brought his keyboard and played requests, though he rarely played anything faster than a foxtrot.

  Very few couples attended these events. A few single men came, but mostly it was women, and they sat in a long line against the windowed wall, watching the dance. Maybe, she thought, they should be sharing the few men who remained, as women did in warrior societies where the young men went off and got themselves killed. There the women clamoured, demanded to share husbands, in bed, at the table, around the house and field. In the society of old women they did share men. They took turns dancing with other women’s husbands, or borrowed them to fix the sink or drive them to doctors’ appointments. Or else they found what they lacked in the company of the women themselves.

  “Oh, there’s the phone!” cried Augusta. “Grab it, Rose, will you? I can never get up quick enough.”

  Rose peered down at the screen on the telephone. “It’s Ernest again.”

  “Good Lord, Ernest, give it up.”

  “Shall I answer?”

  “No. No. I just wish Joy would phone, even to let us know she hasn’t heard anything yet.”

  “What would be the sense in that?” said Karl.

  “It’s all this waiting. I hate the waiting.”

  “About time you got a taste of your own medicine,” said Rose.

  “That’s a cruel thing to say, today of all days.”

  “I was only trying to lighten things up a little.”

  “No you weren’t. You were trying to make me feel guilty. I was the one waiting at the Parksville station today.”

  “What do you mean?” said Rose.

  “It doesn’t take two hours to drive from Courtenay to Parksville.”

  “I hadn’t had my breakfast. I’ll be damned if I’m going to drive that far on an empty stomach. I went out of my way to pick up you and that Indian woman.”

  “Don’t go blaming her again.”

  “I didn’t. I’m just saying—”

  “It wasn’t her fault I got off. I had to use the washroom.”

  “They’ve got washrooms on those trains.”

  “I couldn’t use that one.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just couldn’t.” Augusta had in fact tried to use the train washroom. But the three boys had laughed as she walked past them down the aisle. She could guess what they were laughing at: the hole in her stocking, her puffed ankles, the dangling parrot earrings and the hot pink of her blouse. She ignored them and tried the handle on the bathroom. It was an odd, cantankerous affair that wouldn’t at first turn and, when it finally did, the door didn’t swing out as she expected, but in, towards the toilet. That made the room impossible to enter. The bathroom was tiny, and smelled hotly of cigarette smoke. The steel sink took up much of th
e space. If she slid in there, she wouldn’t be able to turn to close the door. If she did somehow manage that, how would she get out again? How would she manage the cane, and the handle of the door, and her own balance? She couldn’t bear the thought of having to cry for help from that coffin of a room, not with those three young goats guffawing at her.

  She had closed the door to the bathroom and put on a face of disgust, as if she’d seen or smelled some awful thing that made her not want to use it. She switched her cane and purse to her left hand and made her way down the rumbling, shaking aisle to her seat. She sat and glanced at the young men as she placed her purse on her lap. “Is there another stop? Where I can use the bathroom?” she asked Esther. “I can’t use that one.”

  “Parksville’s coming right up. You all right to Parksville?”

  Augusta nodded and sat back in the seat. Travelling—all that sitting—stopped her up terribly, and her doctor had suggested that prunes loosened people up like nothing else, so now prunes were a necessary companion on her trips. She had once read, in some magazine in the doctor’s office, that prunes were provided free of charge in Elizabethan brothels. Back then they were eaten with gusto to promote vigour; now they were foisted on the elderly to encourage bowel movements. A long way to fall, that.

  As the train began to slow for the next stop, Esther sat forward and pointed out the window. “You see all those bushes? Blackberries. Big juicy blackberries. I’d like to pick some of those.” Augusta nodded as the train lumbered to a stop. The conductor marched into the car and yelled, “Parksville!”

  “Here we go,” said Esther. “We’ll get you to the washroom.” Although the station bathroom at Parksville turned out to be not much easier to use than the train bathroom. There was no power in the building, and the windowless ladies’ washroom was pitch-dark. Augusta couldn’t bring herself to navigate around it. Instead she chose the men’s washroom, as it had a window in it. She shut the door, put her purse in the sink, and hung her cane over the doorknob before lowering herself onto the toilet seat. She had only just settled herself when Esther knocked on the door. “Augusta, you okay in there? The train’s going.”