Remember, you’re 13 years old. It’s another hot, summer night in North Carolina, and you’re bored, restless, and irritated (because you’re 13 years old), and so to get out of the house, you agree to go with your stepmother to water the gardenia bushes for her friend who is away on vacation.
This friend is named Honey Bee, and of course this name is a great source of amusement to you. You can barely contain your snickers whenever you see her. Honey Bee is a voluptuous southern lady. She has a giant brown beehive hairdo piled atop her head, full lips, large eyes wide beneath thick false eyelashes. Her cheeks are round and plump, her breasts, stomach and hips roll with her every movement; it is as if her body can barely control itself from spilling over.
Honey Bee has a deep southern drawl. She is boring and perfunctory in her conversations with you, asking things like, “How is your summer?” or “Are you enjoying school?” and since she is not interested in you in the slightest, you give her boring and perfunctory responses. Honey Bee is a divorcee. Since your stepmother married your dad, Honey Bee is apparently the only divorcee left in this incestuous, insular society of 1970s Winston-Salem. She never had children, another rarity here. She wears skin-tight clothes, high heels at all times, and you note that her red lipstick matches her finger- and toe-nails. She is not, in sum, your type. There are many details about Honey Bee that you will forget as you enter high school, when you turn even more restless and irritated, and one day as you prepare to go to college. But eventually when you are still a teenager, it is mentioned that Honey Bee has cancer. And one day, long after the fact, you learn that she has died.
But now you are 13, accompanying your stepmother in her air-conditioned Cadillac, to Honey Bee’s house. The driveway is dark, and only a dim porch light illuminates the way. Lightening bugs flash as you both head to the backyard. There, a security light turns on. Cicadas sing as your stepmother turns on the hose. You don’t offer to help, not out of rudeness but rather because you are mesmerized.
The entire yard is bordered by gardenia bushes, enclosing you in a perfect square like a room. In full bloom, the white blossoms are effervescent, spilling from the shrubs almost grotesquely. But it is their fragrance which has you riveted in place, intoxicated. Their perfume fills the night air, you breathe it in over and over, and you never want to leave this magical place.
You’re a good girl, so you don’t pick a blossom to bring home, but you do find a fallen one, yellowed, clinging to its last bit of life, fading in your hand. On the way home, you sit in your stepmother’s car breathing in the faint scent of the bloom.
Soon enough, your impatient life will become your own, racing past so quickly you can hardly process it. You will travel and know people who are kind and good, and also people who do you wrong. You will see so much beauty yet also experience things so heartbreaking that you can barely breathe, remembering.
For now you are still 13, on the drive home with the night passing swiftly out the closed car windows. But you don't notice, as your head is filled with something else. You have seen, or did you?, in the close dark of the garden, a woman with long brown hair dancing with abandon, whirling and twirling in this secret place. You alone saw this; it was as if she informed you of something vital, as one would a lost child, yet after this night you will forget.
Interesting to me how young girls seem to "take in" older women so completely - Poor Honey Bee!
Vivid, lyrical, poignant.