Lost in the Beehive

by Michele Young-Stone

  “What were you two doing before you were caught?”

  She wanted details.

  “Kissing.”

  “Kissing where?” Her sleeves flounced up to her elbows and she smoothed them down. “I need remorse, Gloria. Where did you put your mouth? Where did she put her mouth? Why were the police there?”

  I replayed the scene every day, sometimes more than once in a session. My mouth had been in a private place, a place where it didn’t belong. The police were there because my parents had been in a car accident. They’d come to take me to the hospital. Mrs. Black, Isabel’s aunt, had thrown my clothes at me. I’d been mortified, terrified, even as the police said, “Your parents are going to be okay, just cuts and bruises.”

  “You sinned,” Mrs. Dupree said, “but it doesn’t matter how many times I say it. You’re the one who has to say it. You have to own it. You have to confess what you did. You have to confess that it was wrong and ask the Heavenly Father to forgive and guide you.”

  “I was wrong.” I remembered Isabel there, standing on her aunt’s porch in a pink silk robe, biting her painted nails, her dark hair fallen down about her face. “It’ll be okay,” I told her. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then I ducked into the back of the police car, but it wasn’t okay. It would never be okay after that.

  At the hospital, a nurse took me to see my father first. He’d been driving. He’d swerved to miss a deer. When he saw me, he smiled, holding up his bandaged left hand as explanation. “I can’t move my fingers, but I can move my thumb a little bit.”

  Then, I saw my mother. She looked terrible: bruises for eyes. The lower part of her face was bandaged. I tried to hold her, but I was afraid that I would hurt her. “Oh, Mommy,” I said, “are you okay?”

  She managed to say, “It hurts to talk.” She had gotten twenty-three stitches at the jawline. My mother said, “I’ll have a scar.”

  Mrs. Dupree said, “What happened next?”

  “I telephoned Isabel’s house. Her aunt picked up and said, ‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough? You’re a terrible girl.’ ”

  “And then? Did you know that she was telling the truth? That you had done a terrible thing?”

  “Isabel left a note on my front porch. It said that she was leaving, that I would never see her again.”

  Mrs. Dupree shook her head. “What did you think?”

  “I thought that she couldn’t mean it. I thought that she loved me.”

  “But she didn’t, did she? She used you.”

  I remembered my mother wore lipstick. She looked like a clown with the black eyes and red lips, the stitches like a horror show. She and my father came home. “Mrs. Black telephoned my parents. She told them what she knew.”

  “And did she say that you’d done a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “But you should know, Gloria.”

  “Isabel went home.”

  “Why are you here, Gloria, if not to be changed?”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  I was at Belmont because our neighbor Maria Montefusco had a cousin who’d reportedly been cured of homosexuality at the institute. Mrs. Montefusco told my mother, “I bet they can help Gloria. You should give them a call.” My parents telephoned the institute and received a discreet brown-paper package, which included a twenty-four-page brochure about the causes and cures for homosexuality. The pamphlet described their nondenominational Christian approach to treating the disease, including detailed information about the four phases that ensured full recovery. Phase one: Removal. It began with the patient’s isolation from triggers. No social contact with the outside world. Phase two: Revelation. The patient was guided to reveal his or her sin(s) with as much detail as possible, not once but daily, while the counselor confronted the sinful acts, retelling each perverted story. Then came Admonition, accepting that the acts were wholly deviant. This was the stage with which I was having difficulty. Nothing about my relationship with Isabel had felt deviant or unnatural. Lastly, there was stage four: Forgiveness and Rebirth. All would be forgiven. I would be reborn, released upon the world with a step-by-step plan of action. I would live a happy, normal life in God’s light.

  Even as my parents read aloud from the booklet, asking if this was something I was willing to try, I wasn’t fully listening. “Gloria,” my mother said, “we only want to help. You’re not eating. You’re not talking. We’re worried about you. Tell us what you need.” In truth, I thought that nothing could be worse than the sadness I felt at losing Isabel. I was dramatic and emotional. I was sixteen, and I was mistaken. The institute was far worse than a broken heart.

  6

  DAYS PASSED SLOWLY AT THE institute. I was permitted no telephone calls or correspondence because I hadn’t repented. Mrs. Dupree and Dr. Belmont needed me to believe that I was sick, that my feelings for Isabel and even Amelia had been part of a greater illness, a sinfulness that was corrupting the very core of my identity. They wanted tears, lots of them. I remembered Sheff telling me to save the boohooing for the counselors. He hadn’t exaggerated.

  Mrs. Dupree asked about my relationship with my parents, and I told her about the twins, about my mother’s depression. “I need details,” she said. “Tell me exactly what you remember about the day you lost your mother.”

  No one had ever put it in those words, but that was precisely how it had felt: not like the day my mother lost the twins, but like the day I lost my mother. I said, “My mother’s babies were born too soon.”

  “You’re not listening, Gloria,” Mrs. Dupree said. “I need you to really remember. How old were you?”

  “Seven?”

  “What time was it?”

  “I don’t know. Early in the morning. When I woke up, she was gone.”

  “Who was there? Was your father there?”

  I shook my head.

  “Who was there? Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning. Let yourself go back there. You’re safe here. Try to remember.”

  I didn’t want to remember.

  “Tell me the story,” Mrs. Dupree urged. “Tell me your story.”

  I looked at her before I spoke. Her scars were hidden, her hands clasped together.

  I remembered the bees gathered outside my window seat. I’d been watching them since I’d woken up. “It was June second. The babies weren’t supposed to come until August.”

  “Good,” she said. “Keep going. You’re at your house. What do you see, Gloria?”

  “Grace Kelly.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “On the cover of Life magazine.”

  “What else?”

  “Bees.”

  “Where are the bees?”

  “They’re swarming where I threw up.”

  “When did you throw up? Never mind. Let’s start at the beginning. See it in your mind’s eye. God is in there with you. You believe in the Holy Spirit, don’t you?”

  I did. “I do.”

  “Then, relax. Start at the beginning. Start when the sun came out.” She talked with her hands. Her sleeves flounced up to her forearms. Her burn scars were exposed to the natural light coming through the window. She was so caught up with my story, she forgot to hide them.

  I remembered Gwen Babineaux standing at the kitchen counter, drinking a cup of coffee. “My neighbor was there. She asked me what I wanted for breakfast. I asked her, ‘Where’s my mom?’ and she said, ‘Your mom had to go to the hospital, and your dad went too.’

  “I asked Mrs. Babineaux, ‘Is she okay?’ and she said, ‘I’m sure everything will be fine. Your dad’s going to call as soon as he knows something.’ Then, she made scrambled eggs and toast and told me I had to eat, but I wasn’t hungry. I was worried about my mother.”

  “You’re doing great, Gloria,” Mrs. Dupree said.

  “I remember that Mrs. Babineaux said, ‘You should pray for your mother.’ Then the telephone rang, and I tried to get it. I thought it would be my father, telling me that my m
other and the babies were coming home from the hospital. Mrs. Babineaux reached over and grabbed the receiver before I could get it. I went and sat at the kitchen table. That’s where Grace Kelly was. There was a full-color photograph of her and Prince Rainier III of Monaco on the magazine cover. I was looking at that photograph when Mrs. Babineaux said, ‘Oh no.’

  “Then I was looking at her. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked. ‘Is Mother okay?’

  “She shook her head. ‘Oh no. I’m so sorry.’

  “Then I ran through the den, out the front door to the stoop, where the honeybees zipped from tulip to tulip. The sun was shining. I threw up the scrambled eggs and toast I’d eaten. Then, one of the bees landed on my scalp and stung me. It felt like an electric charge. My skin, every pore, pulsing. Someone once told me that the skin is the body’s largest organ, and I remember that when I got stung, my whole body shuddered, the poison seemed to surge from nerve to nerve, connect-the-dots, a million needles piercing me. I had never felt so alive and so simultaneously vulnerable. Even as Mrs. Babineaux came onto the porch, resting her hand on my back, I was feeling that sting: Was my mother going to be okay?

  “Mrs. Babineaux sat beside me, gathering her robe between her legs. ‘Your mother’s going to be just fine,’ she said.

  “I was so relieved, I bent forward and sobbed. Then Mrs. Babineaux said, ‘The boys didn’t make it.’

  “I didn’t understand what she meant.

  “ ‘They were just too small. Your baby brothers are with God now.’ She kept talking, but I stopped listening, feeling that sting, a honeybee flitting in and out of my peripheral vision.”

  Mrs. Dupree said, “How was your mother when she came home?”

  “She wasn’t fine. She was sad.”

  Mrs. Dupree shook her head. Then, she saw her burns and smoothed down her sleeves. “I’m sorry, Gloria, for you and for your mother. This is really an important breakthrough. I think it’s possible that your attraction to females stems from your mother’s desertion.” She made notes on her pad of paper.

  “She didn’t desert me.” Even as I said this, I remembered the woman my mother had been before the twins died. She was funny. I had memories of her puffing on my father’s cigar, doing impressions of Groucho Marx, baking bread and chocolate-chip cookies, sitting in the backyard reading dog-eared paperbacks, reciting her favorite parts. Our bookshelves were lined with famous American authors like Cheever, O’Connor, Welty, Hemingway, and Faulkner, and poets like Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. She was always reading and rereading her favorite books. “Good prose is poetry and vice versa,” she would tell me. I remembered her reading Bishop aloud. The cover looked like a mainsail and jib. There was this one poem, “The Fish,” my favorite, and this one line about how the “oil spread a rainbow around the rusted engine,” how “everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.” I remembered the way she said it with such force, such passion. She could recite the whole thing. The words really meant something to her.

  Before the twins came, I had asked her if she’d always wanted to be a housewife, and she’d laughed. “Not exactly. It’s what you do, Gloria …” Then, she’d smiled. “But I knew this boy before your father.” I remember that we were in the kitchen, rolls rising on the counter, the smell of yeast permeating the room. She had this otherworldly, sweet look on her face. “It was so long ago. I guess he was my first boyfriend. He went to Columbia. He wanted me to be unconventional.” I was five or six. I didn’t know what unconventional meant. She explained, “He wanted me to break the rules. We used to meet on the roof of our building and talk about literature and philosophy.” She laughed. “He always called me Red, never Molly.”

  “Before you met Dad?” I asked.

  “Of course before your father.” She smiled again. “A long time ago.”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “No.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He moved. That’s all.”

  “Did he want you to move with him?”

  “Yes, but you didn’t do that. That’s not what you did. That’s not what I did.” Whenever she felt nostalgic, she talked about philosophers, poetry, and the boy who went to Columbia.

  After the twins died, she was a different person. She rarely talked about the boy, gave up the Groucho Marx impersonations and the cookie baking. She stacked her favorite books like a pagoda on the coffee table. She was going to donate them to a church sale. Mrs. Babineaux was flipping through one when my mother said, “Take them, Gwen. Take whatever you want.”

  “I’ll borrow them,” Mrs. Babineaux said. “You might want them back.”

  “They’re all yours.”

  I remembered trailing Mrs. Babineaux to the door. I wanted the Bishop. I needed the poem about the fish. I needed those rainbows. At the front door, Mrs. Babineaux patted my arm. “Things will get back to normal soon.”

  But I knew they wouldn’t. It felt like we were past the point of no return. “I want the Bishop,” I said.

  “Which one is that?”

  I pulled it from her pile.

  Mrs. Babineaux bent down and kissed my cheek.

  For the rest of that awful year, the bees trailed me. When my bedroom window was closed, they butted against it. I thought they were a sign, a reminder that my life was not going to be like Grace Kelly’s.

  Mrs. Dupree and I made a breakthrough. My mother was to blame. It was hard to fathom. Mrs. Dupree said, “Tell me about life after the twins died. What changed?”

  Everything had changed, but I knew she wanted specifics, so I told her about the Lavach family, how I was sent each morning to their house when my father went to work. Gwen Babineaux and her husband, Eugene, were on holiday in Switzerland. Otherwise, I would’ve gone there.

  I said, “Mr. and Mrs. Lavach had four daughters: Peggy, sixteen; Whitney, fourteen; Lucy, eleven; and Sparky, eight. Sparky’s given name was Connie, short for Constance, but everyone called her Sparky because when she was four, she stuck a bobby pin in a light socket. Sparky was a year older than me. I didn’t really like her or her sisters, and I don’t think they liked me, but I had no choice in the matter. When I asked my father why I couldn’t stay home, he said, ‘Because your mother doesn’t feel well.’

  “It felt like the longest summer of my life. Every day, we piled into Mrs. Lavach’s station wagon, and she took us to the community pool. The older girls made fun of my swimsuit, how it sagged down one thigh. Sparky held me underwater, and whenever I tried to be alone, to sit under the umbrella with a notebook and write, Mrs. Lavach said, ‘Go play with the others.’ She drank Bloody Marys. I remember that there was a red lipstick print on the rim of the glass, her celery stalk sticking out.”

  Mrs. Dupree said, “Tell me about your notebooks. You brought two here with you.”

  “And I’d like them back please.”

  “Tell me about them.” She leaned forward, and once again, I could see her scars. Again, I wondered what had happened to her.

  “I was keeping a diary at first,” I said, “and I’d write about my mother, how long she’d been sad, when the twins had died, what I expected them to be like if they’d lived. I named them William and Erik.”

  “Keep going.”

  “But then I started writing stories. I wrote about a woman, a Joan of Arc figure in chain mail, armed with a steel sword. She swept across the nation of Lana in pursuit of a wicked queen. In my story, the queen had once been good and just, but then someone stole her soul and locked it in a box. Joan planned to find the box and release the queen’s soul, but in the meantime, she had to fight the queen and her army. Joan didn’t want to hurt or kill the queen. She wanted to save her.”

  “Did the queen have a name?”

  “No. Just ‘queen.’ ”

  “And the warrior was called Joan?”

  “Yes, like Joan of Arc. She had short hair and pretended to be a boy.” I knew that I was the warrior, but I wasn’t going to offer th
at insight to Mrs. Dupree. She could figure it out on her own. I continued, “The story ended with a huge battle. Joan wounded the queen. The queen was going to die, but then Joan had a vision. The box that held the queen’s soul was under a mossy log. Before the queen died, Joan found the box and opened it. The soul escaped, returning to the queen, and she woke up as if from a nightmare. She was her old kind and good self. She smiled and laughed and ate her daughter’s mud pies. Basically, I wrote the happy ending that I wanted. I wanted animal-shaped pancakes. Instead, I got a bowl of soggy corn flakes and a mother who slept most of the day. I remember begging her to tell me stories about the college boy. Recite the fish poem for me. Do something, anything that resembled my mother. By the time I was eight, I knew the fish poem by heart.”

  Mrs. Dupree adjusted her sleeves again and wrote more notes. I waited, hoping we were done for the day. She kept writing, and then she looked up. “Who’s been raising you? Who took care of you?”

  I shook my head, then tucked my hands under my thighs. “I don’t know.”

  “Think.”

  “The sisters at St. Catherine’s. Our neighbor Gwen Babineaux.”

  Mrs. Dupree stood up from her desk. Beyond her, through the eight-paned window, I could see the sun illuminating the pin oaks and green lawn. “You’ve made real progress today, Gloria. I feel like we’re getting somewhere.” She came over to my side of the desk. The timer dinged, and she picked it up. “Tomorrow, you’ll read the note from Isabel.”

  “Wait,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “What’s you?”

  I had my own breakthrough. “I’ve been taking care of myself.”

  7

  Dear Gloria,

  I hope and pray that your parents are all right.

  I’m going home to Batesville, leaving tomorrow. I’m sorry that things ended so awkwardly. All summer, you talked about our future together, and all summer, I told you that I was going home. We don’t have a future. I’ve tried to be honest with you. After I graduate, I’m marrying Darwin Weeks, and he can’t find out about us. You and I had a lot of fun, but then we got caught. I’m sorry.