a blue glass totem, about the size of a soda can. He was trapped in the glass, and I could hear him screaming to be let out. I shoved him into my pocket, promising him that I would turn him back into a boy, but for now, this was the best way to keep him safe until we arrived at Granny and Grandpa’s house.
My intuition was telling me that I needed to protect my little brother. During the flight, I could sense that Mom was receding from us. I felt a slipping away that I couldn’t put words to, a change as subtle as growing taller that couldn’t be perceived until it had already happened. By the time we landed, her eyes were vacant and looked right through me. Somewhere thirty thousand feet up over Middle America, she had relinquished parenthood.
Next Day—1975
Granny was waiting for us at the Monterey Peninsula Airport, standing with arms crossed in a wool dress and a crisp, high-collared blouse with puffy sleeves. Her tawny bouffant was salon-sculpted into frozen waves, and protected by a clear plastic headscarf tied under her chin to shield her hairdo from the elements. She was an exclamation point of perfect posture, jutting above the glut of less-mannered travelers flagrantly kissing their relatives in public. She scrutinized our approach through cat-eye glasses, lips pursed in a thin line. When Mom saw her, she let out a wounded cry, and reached for a hug just as Granny pulled out a wadded hanky from her sleeve cuff and held it out to Mom to avoid an embarrassing scene. Mom took it and just stood there, unsure of what to do. Granny observed manners, and one did not blubber in public.
“Let’s have a seat,” Granny whispered, grabbing Mom’s elbow and guiding her to the row of hard plastic chairs. Mom blew her nose and gulped back sobs as Granny made soft clucking noises and rubbed her back. I stood there awkwardly, looking while at the same time trying not to look. Granny handed Matthew and me two quarters from her coin purse and pointed to a row of chairs with small black-and-white televisions mounted on the armrests. Delighted, we ran to the chairs to watch a TV show while Mom and Granny had a Very Important Conversation. Matthew and I squeezed together in one of the chairs, dropped the quarter in and spun the dial until we landed on a cartoon.
When Granny and Mom finally stood up to go, we were the last people left in the boarding area. Granny came over, and I instinctively stopped slouching. “Your mother is just tired,” she said, leaning down to kiss my cheek. She smelled like lavender soap.
Matthew and I rode in the wayback of Granny’s mustard-yellow station wagon, far enough from Granny and Mom so we couldn’t hear what they were saying. I looked out the back window to inspect California sliding past. It was February, but oddly there wasn’t any snow. We drove over rolling brown hills with horse ranches and up a steep grade with hairpin turns, pushing the car higher and higher. The car groaned with effort, and my stomach dropped when I realized that we were on top of a ring of mountains, like we were driving on the edge of a gargantuan bowl. Beneath us, the earth fell away in deep folds and grooves all the way to the valley below, and an idea came to me that we must be driving over the dinosaurs, whose bodies had turned into mountains after they’d died.
I also noticed that the trees in California were different—solitary, massive oaks with outstretched octopus arms twisting just a few feet above the ground, nothing at all like the fiery maples or crowded forests of skinny birch trees back home. When we finally started to descend, I could see all of Carmel Valley below us, a vast green basin with a silver river snaking along one side of it. My ears popped on the way down until we reached the bottom of the bowl, the mountains now a towering fortress around us. Carmel Valley felt like a secret garden in one of my fairy tales, sealed off from the rest of the universe. It was warmer here, and the sun seemed to slow everything down: the ambling pickup trucks, the sleepy crows, the unhurried river.
We drove by a community park and public swimming pool, then made a right turn onto Via Contenta and passed an elementary school with tennis courts. The rest of the residential street was lined with one-story ranch homes separated by juniper hedges and oak trees for privacy. Granny slowed in front of a volunteer fire station where some men were washing red engines out front, passed a small cul-de-sac with a handful of identical wood-shingled bungalows, and then reached her destination—a small red home perched in the middle of an acre of land, bordered on four sides by overgrown trees.
Granny skipped her front gravel driveway and instead took the back way to the house, turning onto a short dirt lane that ran along her fence and was canopied by a row of mammoth walnut trees with branches reaching all the way to the ground, engulfing us in a tunnel of green leaves. Walnut shells popped under our tires as we followed the curving drive to the backyard. She parked next to a clothesline, where her square-dancing petticoats were flapping in the breeze.
Granny took great pride in living on one of the largest lots on her street, and she was quick to remind anyone who forgot that she was among the first residents of Carmel Valley Village, arriving in 1931 from Pennsylvania with her mother when she was eight. They’d driven across the country in a convertible Nash Coupe after Granny’s father had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, because her mother wanted to escape the tragedy in a warmer place with good swimming. This history, Granny believed, conferred on her a pedigree that allowed her to complain about the influx of newcomers over the next forty years. However, she was comforted that the oak, walnut and eucalyptus trees demarcating her property had grown to screen the neighbors from view. And the neighbors in turn were spared the sight of Grandpa’s accumulating junk heaps that now pervaded the king-size lot.
I stepped out of the car and saw several haystack-size piles of tree trimmings, at least three toolsheds, mounds of gravel and bricks, two rusting military jeeps, a flatbed trailer, a backhoe and two beaten-down pickups. A trellis of grapevines led in a sloping line from the laundry to the back fence, where there was a small city of stacking beehives resting on cinder blocks, each one four and five wooden boxes high. From this far away, it looked like a mini-metropolis of white filing cabinets.
Something caught my eye through the billowing laundry. I walked through the rainbow of swirling skirts to get closer, and found myself standing before a faded green military bus. Rain had chewed away a ring of rust holes around the roof, leaving brown streaks trailing down its sides. Weeds choked the tires, its wraparound front windshield was cracked and cloudy, and a massive rhubarb bush sprouted from under the front bumper. It seemed to have driven right out of World War II and wheezed to a stop right by Grandpa’s vegetable garden, from an era when vehicles were all fat curves instead of sleek edges, making the bus look more animal than machine. The rounded hood was sculpted like the snout of a lion, with vent holes for nostrils and globe headlight eyes that stared back at me. Below its nose was a row of grinning grille teeth, and under that, a dented metal bumper that looked an awful lot like a lower lip. In peeling white paint above the windshield, it read U.S. ARMY 20930527. Captivated by the incongruity of it, I felt compelled to investigate.
Kicking a path through waist-high weeds, I tried to see inside but the windows were too high. I circled to the back of the bus, and near the tailpipe I found a crooked stack of wooden pallets that improvised as stairs leading to a narrow door. I scrambled up, the makeshift staircase wobbling beneath me, and pressed my nose to the filmy glass.
Inside, all the seats were gone, and in their place was some sort of factory of whirligigs, crankshaft gears and pipes. A metal basin about the size of a hot tub rested on the floor, and contained a hefty flywheel powered by pulleys as large as manhole covers. Behind the driver’s seat were two massive steel barrels with cheesecloth stretched across their open tops. An overhead network of galvanized steel pipes was suspended from the ceiling with fishing lines.
The equipment ran the length of one wall, and on the other side Grandpa had stacked a bunch of wooden boxes, each about six inches tall and two feet wide, and painted white. Each rectangular box, taken straight from his hives, was open on the top and bottom and contained ten removable wood-framed sheets of wax honeycomb. The frames hung in neat rows, supported by notches inside the box. I would later learn from Grandpa that these were the “honey