Jenn Marie Nunes

 In Her Walls

Nobody else knew about the bees. Michael had lived in the room first, before the attic was ready, and never said a thing. Their mother had moved him in and out and arranged Myra’s furniture, and she hadn’t noticed anything either, so Myra was pretty sure they hadn’t even been there before. They had come when she had come.

Like the bow on a present. She had her own room, and on top of that she had the bees.

They lived in the wall. She knew that, too. They didn’t come in through the window at all. There was a crack by the closet, and she had seen them crawl out of it like drops of resin squeezed out by the weight of the August sun. From March to October the sun pressed the insides out of everything in the south.

When she laid her ear against the wall above the opening she could hear them living in there.

Before that, the bees were dead ones. She found them on the floor near the crack on her first night in her new room. They were curled slightly and their wings lay separate from their bodies. She watched them in silence for a long time before she went to get the hand broom and dust pan. They were more beautiful than any one of the rings in the blue velvet case on her mother’s dresser.

They were also frightening. Bigger then the honey bees she had seen up north, sharper, shinier under their fuzz, black legs thick and marked with tiny thorns. These were not bees made from white clover or the faintly pink apple blossoms that were as clean and precious as snow. They fed from fat, waxy blossoms the color of fire, smelling of fire, wide as fists.

“Good for you,” her mother said as Myra emptied the dust pan into the garbage under the kitchen sink. Myra decided right then not to tell her. Even before the move happened, Myra had grown suspicious of her mother.

She lay out the wrong way across her new bed flipping through a catalogue of doll-sized dress patterns. Come September she would start the fourth grade. Myra would have been one of the big kids at her elementary school in New York. Allowed to join the choir and eat lunch at the tables outside in nice weather.

“You’re getting too old for dolls,” her mother had told her, threatening to give them all away to charity before the move. “We can’t take our whole lives with us!” She had snatched the baby doll Myra was holding out of her arms. “We all have to make sacrifices for Granny.”

Myra had bundled her three favorite dolls into a blanket and secreted them in the bottom corner of a large box marked Kitchen. Really, it was her mother who was angry about making sacrifices. Her mother who spent more and more time out of their lavish apartments as the moving day drew near. Her mother who eased the word Granny out through her teeth like she were afraid it would split open her lips.

Myra had shared her grandmother’s room while her father had the attic finished. Her grandma was feeling alright then and said she would teach Myra to sew so she and her dolls could go out as southern ladies. It was something thrilling to imagine, those lace-edged, puff-sleeved dresses appearing under her own stubby fingers.

“You’ll be the perfect little lady,” her grandmother told her. “A daughter like I always wanted.” Myra had found the old dress-pattern catalogue a month ago in a box of things her mother had hauled down from the attic to throw away. She plotted with Granny every morning after breakfast and knew the patterns by heart.  

“Granny’s tired, Myra,” her mother said one day when she had called three times for help with the dusting. “Don’t bother her with that. You can find something else to do.”

*

Spread out on top of the decorative quilt, Myra traced the outline of her favorite dress with one finger. She could hear the muffled sound of her parents’ voices rising sharply into words somewhere outside her door.

“I have to work tomorrow,” her father said.

“Well I can drive myself.”

“Yes, but who’s going to take care of Mother? Who? Myra?”

“You can’t just check in on her? She’s not going anywhere.” Her mother’s voice sounded pinched and nasal in a way that made Myra feel embarrassed.

 “You know this case is important. I have to focus.”

“Just for a day, Howie. Just to see the city.”

Myra pressed her finger harder and harder against the thin page, moving her hand faster and faster in a great effort of concentration. Then she paused. Something had dropped onto her pillow. Moving only her eyes, she made out the motion of an insect, its body twisting in circles, its legs grasping at the air.

With the measured precision of solitude, Myra turned her head and then shoulders and elbows. The yellow and black stood out against the pale blue pillowcase and the wings vibrated and were still, vibrated and were still.

“Myra, it’s bed time now.”

Her hand shot out and flipped the pillow over.

“Myra? You hear me in there?” Her mother opened the door a crack and her tan face pushed in like a coffee stain spreading against the white wall. Her eyes sparkled wetly and her gazed jumped unsteadily around the room.

“Ok, Mama. I’m going.”

“Good girl.” Her face receded. Myra heard her mother call up to the attic, “Michael! Turn that music down. Mama’s been on the phone to New York all afternoon and her head hurts. As if being holed up in this house weren’t enough.” Her footsteps faded down the hall.

Michael shouted after her, “What else am I supposed to do in this place? Hunt fucking alligator’s?”

“Language!”

Carefully, Myra lifted up the pillow, breathing out between her teeth in a low whistling call. The bee didn’t answer.

She lay the pillow down and smoothed it with her hand. She undressed and slid under the top sheet. She slept with her bee.

*

It was not easy to be busy during the day. In New York there had been friends, parties, trips to the pool, the museum. Here there was inside and outside. Inside, it was dim and quiet. Granny, worse now, lay in the square bedroom off of the kitchen, a muting presence, requiring low voices, low blinds. Outside was hot as stew and wild. There were snakes under the back steps and the pond was overgrown with strange grasses, taller than she was. 

Daddy stayed in his office. Michael stayed in the attic, and when he did come down he ignored her. He was starting high school in the fall and had begun to run with the big boys back home. There was a kid about his age who lived way down the street and once and a while Michael would grab his bike and disappear. Myra didn’t know how to bike. She was no good to him.

Mama didn’t play games. She had to take care of Granny, she had to make calls to New York, she had to bring Michael his lunch up in his room. Myra would start fourth grade this year and she imagined how she’d swish into class in her beautiful hand-sewn dress – better than the store – and her classmates would all come to her and sit down and ask her for more stories of New York. But it was summer and they lived in the country now.

Myra didn’t cry about it. She didn’t cry about it. She was better than that.

The bees told her so.

The second night, she lay on her back and waited. Then she lay on her back and watched the two bees whirl around the room, knock up against the overhead light, get spun around in the current of the fan. One and then the other dropped and lay buzzing on the wooden floor. In the yellowed light they looked like faded prints of themselves.

She sat up and watched until their legs stopped reaching. One and then the other she pinched by its shiny wings and carried to her bed. She placed them under her pillow and began to undress, humming to herself.

*

It was not easy to be busy during the day, but she had to be. The bees only came out of the wall at night, when the light drew them.

It was easy to be in her room at night. After dinner, everyone in the family retreated to where they had come from. 

Myra had 26 bees under her pillow. She had grown very still in her sleep, so only a few, the first few, were missing wings or lay in two pieces, heads snapped from their bodies. Every night they would come in and she would watch until they fell to the floor or the striped bedspread or into one of her open drawers. Then she would collect them and count them and sleep.

Sometimes, she helped them out of the air with a deft swing of her hand. She was no longer afraid of the bees. One had landed on her blanket, wings weak, and crawled up and over the mounds of her toes.

She placed her palm down on the bed in the bee’s path and it crawled onto the back of her hand. She lifted it slowly and followed the bee’s uncertain, itchy progress down the length of her middle finger. At the tip it wobbled and dropped to the bed and lay on its side. Dumb, she thought. Sad. Weak.

Carefully, she had taken the bee by its wing and slipped it under her pillow.

*

There was no need to wait for the bees to die. Once they fell, she could scoop them up on a piece of paper, or if they were very slow she could take them by the wings, and put them under her pillow.

If they didn’t fall, they would buzz and buzz and buzz in the corners of the window and she would gently tap them with her rolled-up magazine, restore order.

At night she sat cross-legged on her bed over her bees. Looking down on the tiny bodies, she felt like she was on the peak of a mountain.  A world lay spread out beneath her, neat and still. Peopled by her neat, nice, shiny little rows of bees.

*

Myra was kind to her bees. She laid them out on the cotton sheet so they didn’t overlap or crowd each other. She spoke to them every night, wished them sweet dreams. She didn’t tell anyone else. They could live in her wall, and when they came in to her she did not squish them and sweep them up and throw them away like trash.

And they knew this. She knew they did, because they would not sting her.

Michael had gone outside to get the mail and stepped on a bee. His foot swelled up like a fat pink ham and Mama didn’t even scold him when he swore.

“If I find those fucking bees I’ll spray the hell out of them.”

Myra pressed her lips together. She resisted the urge to check on her bees. To tell him to stay out of her room. That would make him suspicious.

They were her bees. Of course they had stung him.

*

Above the crack a dark spot appeared, turning the yellow and gold wallpaper brown like paper sacking. Myra pretended not to notice it at first. Things in her room were the way they should be. She didn’t want them to change.

The stain began to spread and then down, reaching a long finger toward the floor, and she could not pretend. Myra smelled it. It had a sweet smell. She dabbed at the stain. It stuck easily to the pad of her finger. She sniffed again and then flicked her tongue. If she did it quick enough, light enough, she could say she hadn’t. If it were bad.

It wasn’t bad. It was honey.

She had forgotten all about the honey. All this time, that was what the bees were doing. They were making honey.

Movement caught her eye and she looked down. A bee emerged from the wall by her shin. It hung for a moment at the edge of its hole and then toppled to the floor. It made an angry stuttering sound. A sharp, metallic whir. It buzzed and was still, buzzed and was still. Buzzed.

Leaning over, Myra lay her hand backside down on the floor next to the bee. Something was wrong with it.

With her other hand, she slid her fingers behind the bee and flicked up, under its prone body, flipping it into her palm. Its wings scraped her skin like dried petals. It had no weight.

There was sharp pain in her hand.

She flinched before she could help it and flung the bee’s body against the wall. It landed in the corner by her dresser.

Myra looked at the red welt rising out of her palm. It hurt. Had she been stung? Had the bee stung her?

The tears came before she realized, before she saw the stinger buried in the center of her hand.

“Myra?” Her mother stood over her. “What happened? Let me see?” She let her mother tilt her hand into the light. “You got stung.”

Myra looked up at her, unsure.

“Don’t worry, honey, we just sprayed. I came to tell you. You’ll have to sleep with me and Daddy tonight. Michael saw the bees coming in and out of a crack in the siding and we got the ones we could, but we’ll have to spray in the wall after dark. They might move in this way.” Myra let out a small sob. “Ok, ok. Let’s go put some baking soda on it.” Her mother moved toward the door. “Come on. Let’s go.” Myra couldn’t move. She knew if she moved it would be over. The bees would be over.

“Here,” her mother bent down and for the first time in five years took her daughter into her arms and lifted her off the floor. “Whew. Big girl. Too heavy to cry. Ok. Mama’s got you. We’ll take care of those bees.” Myra stared back over her mother’s shoulder and focused hard on being silent. On stillness. On crying only to herself.

*

Her mother didn’t used to cook. But she had to, now, for Granny. That’s what Myra’s Daddy had said.

“You can’t cook some soup? You can’t cook for my dying mother? What did you go to Wellesley for? To sit around all day and talk on the phone? What did I marry you for?”

“It wasn’t to look pretty on your arm at company parties?”

“Miriam, don’t start. You had years in New York with nothing to do but look pretty. Now, you buy some cook books, you cook for my mother.”

Myra pulled a chair up to the stove and peered into the big pot. She could hear her mother’s voice from the hallway. It was high, bright. Talking to Karen about some play, some restaurant, some gallery opening.

Slipping the open mouth of the pillowcase over the rim of the pot, Myra lifted the bottom and watched the bees spill into the simmering chicken stock. Her palm still throbbed faintly.

She stirred once and clambered down from the chair, careful to return it to its original position.

*

She was telling her first boyfriend the story, both of them naked in his twin bed, lying on their backs and sweating in the early October heat, boldly smoking cigarettes even though when his parents came home the next day they’d be sure to smell the stale smoke in the tiny apartment. As she described the final act, pouring the bee carcasses into the soup, she realized she couldn’t explain what she’d been thinking when she’d done it. She had wanted to honor them and she had wanted to hurt her mother. Her mother for taking the bees away. For knowing she’d been stung.

But the soup was meant for her grandmother, mostly. Myra knew that as much then as now. And what could those dead bees have done anyway? Boiled to nothing in that cauldron of a stock pot.

She thought she might have had vague ideas of poison. Her mother taking a small taste, blowing on the wooden spoonful and slurping it up, clutching her throat just above the string of pearls. Her eyes bulged out, throat puffed closed.  One hand fluttering at Myra, unable to speak. Silent. And Myra would have spoken. She would have had the time to tell her mother what the bees had meant to her.  Explain how the family should be. Put things in order.

That was an awful lot to ask of the bees. Of course they didn’t do that.

They made her mother scream instead. They were light in death as in life, floating at the top of the bubbling broth. Her mother screamed. Loud, piercing.

“You get in trouble?” the boy asked.

Myra stood up and walked to the open window. She flicked the cigarette butt in a long arc out over the railing of the wrought iron balcony and into the darkened street. She thought of her father alone in that big house and wondered if he actually didn’t know his daughter was gone, didn’t know she had snuck out again.

Myra padded back to the bed, but instead of lying down she found the pack of cigarettes on the bed stand, tapped one out and lit it. “My mother never blamed me. She blamed the house. The south. My father. That’s how she escaped. Took Michael and went back to New York. She never blamed me.”