The Bean Trees (10 page)

I promised her that I wouldn’t give Turtle anything smaller than a golf ball. I amused myself by thinking about the cabbage: would you have to take into account the size of one leaf compressed into golf-ball shape? Or could you just consider the size of the entire cabbage and call the whole thing safe?

Lou Ann was fanning a mouthful that was still too hot to swallow. “I can just hear what my Granny Logan would say if I tried to feed her Russian cabbage soup. She’d say we were all going to turn communist.”

Later that night when the kids were in bed I realized exactly what was bugging me: the idea of Lou Ann reading magazines for child-raising tips and recipes and me coming home grouchy after a hard day’s work. We were like some family on a TV commercial, with names like Myrtle and Fred. I could just hear us striking up a conversation about air fresheners.

Lou Ann came in wearing her bathrobe and a blue towel wrapped around her hair. She curled up on the sofa and started flipping through the book of names again.

“Oh, jeez, take this away from me before I start looking at the boy section. There’s probably fifty thousand names better than Dwayne Ray, and I don’t even want to know about them. It’s too late now.”

“Lou Ann, have a beer with me. I want to talk about something, and I don’t want you to get offended.” She took the beer and sat up like I’d given her an order, and I knew this wasn’t going to work.

“Okay, shoot.” The way she said it, you would think I was toting an M-16.

“Lou Ann, I moved in here because I knew we’d get along. It’s nice of you to make dinner for us all, and to take care of Turtle sometimes, and I know you mean well. But we’re acting like Blondie and Dagwood here. All we need is some ignorant little dog named Spot to fetch me my slippers. It’s not like we’re a
family
, for Christ’s sake. You’ve got your own life to live, and I’ve got mine. You don’t have to do all this stuff for me.”

“But I want to.”

“But I don’t
want
you to.”

It was like that.

By the time we had worked through our third beers, a bag of deep-fried tortilla chips, a pack of individually-wrapped pimiento-cheese slices and a can of sardines in mustard, Lou Ann was crying. I remember saying something like “I never even
had
an old man, why would I want to end up acting like one?”

It’s the junk food, I kept thinking. On a diet like this the Bean Curd kids would be speaking in tongues.

All of a sudden Lou Ann went still, with both hands
over her mouth. I thought she must be choking (after all her talk about golf balls), and right away thought of the Heimlich Maneuver poster on the wall at Mattie’s store. That’s how often she fed people there. I was trying to remember if you were or were not supposed to slap the person on the back. But then Lou Ann moved her hands from her mouth to her eyes, like two of the three No-Evil monkey brothers.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m drunk.”

“Lou Ann, you’ve had three beers.”

“That’s all it takes. I
never
drink. I’m scared to death of what might happen.”

I was interested. This house was full of surprises. But this turned out to be nothing like the cat. Lou Ann said what she was afraid of was just that she might lose control and do something awful.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. How do I know? Just something. I feel like the only reason I have any friends at all is because I’m always careful not to say something totally dumb, and if I blow it just one time, then that’s it.”

“Lou Ann, honey, that’s a weird theory of friendship.”

“No, I mean it. For the longest time after Angel left I kept thinking back to this time last August when his friend Manny and his wife Ramona came over and we all went out to the desert to look at the shooting stars? There was supposed to be a whole bunch of them, a shower, they were saying on the news. But we kept waiting and waiting, and in the meantime we drank a bottle of José Cuervo plumb down to the worm. The
next morning Angel kept saying, ‘Man, can you believe that meteor shower? What, you don’t even remember it?’ I honestly couldn’t remember a thing besides looking for the star sapphire from Ramona’s ring that had plunked out somewhere. It turned out she’d lost it way before. She found it at home in their dog’s dish, can you believe it?”

I was trying to fit Angel into some pigeonhole or other in the part of my brain that contained what I knew about men. I liked this new version of an Angel who would go out looking for shooting stars, but hated what I saw of him the next morning, taunting Lou Ann about something that had probably never even happened.

“Maybe he was pulling your leg,” I said. “Maybe there never was any meteor shower. Did you ask Ramona?”

“No. I never thought of that. I just assumed.”

“Well, why don’t you call her up and ask?”

“She and Manny moved to San Diego,” she wailed. You’d think they had moved for the sole purpose of keeping this information from Lou Ann.

“Well, I’m sorry.”

She persisted. “But that’s not even really the point. It wasn’t just that I’d missed something important. I kept on thinking that if I could miss a whole meteor shower, well, I’d probably done something else ridiculous. For all I know I could’ve run naked through the desert singing ‘Skip to My Lou.’”

I shuddered. All those spiny pears and prickly whatsits.

She stared mournfully into the empty bag of chips.

“And now it’s Valentine’s Day,” she said. “And everybody else in the whole wide world is home with their husband smooching on the couch and watching TV, but not Lou Ann, no sir. I ran off both my husband
and
the TV.”

I couldn’t even think where to begin on this one. I thought of another one of Mama’s hog sayings: “Hogs go deaf at harvest time.” It meant that people would only hear what they wanted to hear. Mama was raised on a hog farm.

Lou Ann looked abnormally flattened against the back of the sofa. I thought of her father, who she’d told me was killed when his tractor overturned. They’d found him pressed into a mud bank, and when they pulled him out he left a perfect print. “A Daddy print,” she’d called it, and she’d wanted to fill the hole with plaster of Paris to keep him, the way she’d done with her hand print in school for Mother’s Day.

“I always wondered if that night we got drunk had something to do with why I lost him,” she said. I was confused for a second, still thinking of her father.

“I thought you were glad when Angel left.”

“I guess I was. But still, you know, something went wrong. You’re supposed to love the same person your whole life long till death do you part and all that. And if you don’t, well, you’ve got to have screwed up somewhere.”

“Lou Ann, you read too many magazines.” I went into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator for about the fifteenth time that night. It was still the same: cabbages and peanut butter. I opened a cabinet
and peered behind the cans of refried beans and tomato sauce. There was a bottle of black-strap molasses, a box of Quick Hominy Grits, and a can of pink salmon. I considered all of these things in various combinations, then settled for another bag of tortilla chips. This is what happens to people without TVs, I thought. They die of junk food.

When I came back to the living room she was still depressed about Angel. “I’ll tell you my theory about staying with one man your whole life long,” I said. “Do you know what a flapper ball is?”

She perked up. “A whatter ball?”

“Flapper ball. It’s that do-jobbie in a toilet tank that goes up and down when you flush. It shuts the water off.”

“Oh.”

“So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here’s what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: ‘Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s kind of my philosophy about men. I don’t think there’s an installation out there that could use all of my parts.”

Lou Ann covered her mouth to hide a laugh. I wondered who had ever told her laughing was a federal offense.

“I’m serious, now. I’m talking mental capacity and everything, not just parts like what they cut a chicken into.” By this time she was laughing out loud.

“I tell you my most personal darkest secret and you laugh,” I said, playing vexed.

“They can always use a breast or a thigh or a leg, but nobody wants the scroungy old neckbones!”

“Don’t forget the wings,” I said. “They always want to gobble up your wings right off the bat.” I dumped the rest of the bag of chips out into the bowl on the ottoman between us. I was actually thinking about going for the jar of peanut butter.

“Here, let me show you this Valentine’s card I got for Mama,” I said, digging through my purse until I found it. But Lou Ann was already having such a fit of giggles I could just as well have shown her the electric bill and she would have thought it was the funniest thing in recorded history.

“Oh, me,” she said, letting the card fall in her lap. Her voice trailed down from all those high-pitched laughs like a prom queen floating down the gymnasium stairs. “I could use me a good wrench around here. Or better yet, one of them…what do you call ’ems? That one that’s shaped like a weenie?”

I had no idea what she meant. “A caulking gun? An angle drill? A battery-head cleaner?” Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view. “The Washington Monument?” I said. This set Lou Ann off again. If there really had been a law against laughing, both of us would have been on our way to Sing Sing by now.

“Oh, Lordy, they ought to put that on a Valentine’s card,” she said. “I can just see me sending something like that to
my
Mama. She’d have a cow right there on the kitchen floor. And Granny Logan jumping and twisting her hands saying, ‘What is it? I don’t get it.’
She’d go running after the mailman and tell him, ‘Young man, come back in here this minute. Ask Ivy what’s supposed to be so funny.’

“Oh, Lordy, Lordy,” Lou Ann said again, drying her eyes. She put a chip in her mouth with a flourish, licking each of her fingers afterward. She was draped out on the sofa in her green terry bathrobe and blue turban like Cleopatra cruising down the Nile, with Snowboots curled at her feet like some insane royal pet. In ancient Egypt, I’d read somewhere, schizophrenics were worshiped as gods.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Lou Ann said. “When something was bugging Angel, he’d never of stayed up half the night with me talking and eating everything that wasn’t nailed down. You’re not still mad, are you?”

I held up two fingers. “Peace, sister,” I said, knowing full well that only a complete hillbilly would say this in the 1980s. Love beads came to Pittman the same year as the dial tone.

“Peace and love, get high and fly with the dove,” she said.

A
red Indian thought he might eat tobacco in church!” Lou Ann had closed her eyes and put herself in a trance to dig this item out of her fourth-grade memory, the way witnesses at a holdup will get themselves hypnotized to recollect the color of the getaway car. “That’s it! Arithmetic!” she cried, bouncing up and down. Then she said, “No offense to anyone present, about the Indian.” No one seemed offended.

“Oh, sure, I remember those,” Mattie said. “There was one for every subject. Geography was: George eats old gray rutabagas and picks his—something. What would it be?”

“Oh, gross,” Lou Ann said. “Gag a maggot.”

I couldn’t think of a solitary thing George might pick that started with Y. “Maybe you haven’t got it quite right,” I told Mattie. “Maybe it’s something else, like ‘pulls his yarn.’”

“Plants his yard?” offered Lou Ann.

“Pets his yak,” said the dark, handsome man, who was half of a young couple Mattie had brought along on the picnic. Their names I had not yet gotten straight: Es-something and Es-something. The man had been an English teacher in Guatemala City. This whole conversation had started with a rhyme he used to help students remember how to pronounce English vowels. Then we’d gotten onto spelling.

“What’s a yak?” Lou Ann wanted to know.

“It’s a type of very hairy cow,” he explained. He seemed a little embarrassed. Lou Ann and I had already told him three or four times that he spoke better English than the two of us combined.

We were flattened and sprawled across the rocks like a troop of lizards stoned on the sun, feeling too good to move. Lou Ann’s feet dangled into the water. She insisted that she looked like a Sherman tank in shorts but had ended up wearing them anyway, and a pink elastic tube top which, she’d informed us, Angel called her boob tube. I’d worn jeans and regretted it. February had turned mild again right after the frost, and March was staying mainly on the sweaty end of pleasant. Lou Ann and Mattie kept saying it had to be the warmest winter on record. The old-timers, somewhere down the line, would look back on this as the year we didn’t have a winter, except for that freeze God sent on Valentine’s Day so we’d have green-tomato pie. When the summer wildflowers started blooming before Easter, Mattie said the Lord was clearly telling us to head for the hills and have us a picnic. You never could tell about Mattie’s version of
the Lord. Mainly, He was just one damn thing after another.

We’d come to a place you would never expect to find in the desert: a little hideaway by a stream that had run all the way down from the mountains into a canyon, where it jumped off a boulder and broke into deep, clear pools. White rocks sloped up out of the water like giant, friendly hippo butts. A ring of cottonwood trees cooled their heels in the wet ground, and overhead leaned together, then apart, making whispery swishing noises. It made me think of Gossip, the game we played as kids where you whisper a message around a circle. You’d start out with “Randy walks to the hardware store” and end up with “Granny has rocks in her underwear drawer.”

It had been Lou Ann’s idea to come here. It was a place she and Angel used to go when she first came to Tucson with him. I didn’t know if her choice was a good or bad sign, but she didn’t seem unhappy to be here without him. She seemed more concerned that the rest of us would like it.

“So is this place okay? You’re sure?” she asked us, until we begged her to take our word for it, that it was the most wonderful picnic spot on the face of the earth, and she relaxed.

“Me and Angel actually talked about getting married up here,” she said, dipping her toes in and out. There were Jesus bugs here, but not the long-legged, graceful kind we had back home. These were shaped like my car and more or less careened around on top of the water. The whole gang of them together looked like graduation night in Volkswagen land.

“That would have been a heck of a wedding,” Mattie said. “A hefty hike for the guests.”

“Oh, no. We were going to do the whole thing on horseback. Can’t you just see it?”

I could see it in
People
magazine, maybe. What with my disgust for anything horsy, I always forgot that Angel had won Lou Ann’s heart and stolen her away from Kentucky during his days as a rodeo man.

“Anyway,” she went on, “we could never have gone through with it on account of Angel’s mother. She said something like, ‘Okay, children, go ahead. When I get thrown off a horse and bash my brains out on the rocks, just step over me and go on with the ceremony.’”

The English teacher spoke softly in Spanish to his wife, and she smiled. Most of our conversation seemed to be getting lost in the translation, like some international form of the Gossip game. But this story had come from Mrs. Ruiz’s Spanish (Lou Ann claimed that the only English words her mother-in-law knew were names of diseases) into English, and went back again without any trouble. A certain kind of mother is the same in any language.

Esperanza and Estevan were their names. It led you to expect twins, not a young married couple, and really there was something twinnish about them. They were both small and dark, with the same high-set, watching eyes and strong-boned faces I’d admired in the bars and gas stations and postcards of the Cherokee Nation. Mattie had told me that more than half the people in Guatemala were Indians. I had no idea.

But where Estevan’s smallness made him seem compact and springy, as though he might have steel bars inside where most people had flab and sawdust, Esperanza just seemed to have shrunk. Exactly like a wool sweater washed in hot. It seemed impossible that her hands could be so small, that all the red and blue diamonds and green birds that ran across the bosom of her small blouse had been embroidered with regular-sized needles. I had this notion that at one time in life she’d been larger, but that someone had split her in two like one of those hollow wooden dolls, finding this smaller version inside. She took up almost no space. While the rest of us talked and splashed and laughed she sat still, a colorful outgrowth of rock. She reminded me of Turtle.

There had been something of a scene between her and Turtle earlier that day. We’d driven up in two cars, Lou Ann and me and the kids leading the way on my brand-new retreads and the other three following in Mattie’s pickup. When we got to the trail head we parked in the skimpy shade you find under mesquite trees—like gray lace petticoats—and pulled out the coolers and bedspreads and canteens. The last two things out of the car were Dwayne Ray and Turtle.

Esperanza was just stepping out of the cab, and when she saw the kids she fell back against the seat, just as if she’d been hit with twenty-eight pounds of air. For the next ten minutes she looked blanched, like a boiled vegetable. She couldn’t take her eyes off Turtle.

As we hiked up the trail I fell in behind Estevan and made small talk. Lou Ann was in the lead, carry
ing Dwayne Ray in a pouch on her back and holding his molded-plastic car seat over her head like some space-age sunbonnet. Behind her, ahead of us, went Esperanza. From behind you could have mistaken her for a schoolgirl, with her two long braids swinging across her back and her prim walk, one small sandal in front of the other. The orange plastic canteen on her shoulder looked like some burden thrust upon her from another world.

Eventually I asked Estevan if his wife was okay. He said certainly, she was okay, but he knew what I was talking about. A little later he said that my daughter looked like a child they’d known in Guatemala.

“She could be, for all I know.” I laughed. I explained to him that she wasn’t really my daughter.

Later, while we sat on the rocks and ate baloney sandwiches, Esperanza kept watching Turtle.

Estevan and I eventually decided to brave the cold water. “Don’t look,” I announced, and stripped off my jeans.

“Taylor, no! You mustn’t,” Lou Ann said.

“For heaven’s sake, Lou Ann, I’ve got on decent underwear.”

“No, what I mean is, you’re not supposed to go in for an hour after you eat. You’ll drown, both of you. It’s something about the food in your stomach makes you sink.”

“I know I can depend on you, Lou Ann,” I said. “If we sink, you’ll pull us out.” I held my nose and jumped in.

The water was so cold I couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t just stayed frozen up there on the snow-topped
mountain. The two of us caught our breath and whooped and splashed the others until Lou Ann was threatening our lives. Mattie, more inclined to the direct approach, was throwing rocks the size of potatoes.

“If you think I’d go in there to drag either one of you out, you’re off your rocker,” Mattie said. Lou Ann said, “If you all want to go and catch pee-namonia, be my guest.”

Estevan went from whooping to singing in Spanish, hamming it up in this amazing yodely voice. He dog-paddled over to Esperanza and rested his chin on the rock by her feet, still singing, his head moving up and down with the words. What kind of words, it was easy to guess: “My sweet nightingale, my rose, your eyes like the stars.” He was unbelievably handsome, with this smile that could just crack your heart right down the middle.

But she was off on her own somewhere. From time to time she would gaze over to where the kids were asleep on the blue bedspread. And who could blame her, really? It was a sweet sight. With the cottonwood shade rippling over them they looked like a drawing from one of those old-fashioned children’s books that show babies in underwater scenes, blowing glassy bubbles and holding on to fishes’ tails. Dwayne Ray had on a huge white sailor hat and had nodded forward in his car seat, but Turtle’s mouth was open to the sky. Her hair was damp and plastered down in dark cords on her temples, showing more of her forehead than usual. Even from a distance I could see her eyes dancing around under eyelids as thin as white
grape skins. Turtle always had desperate, active dreams. In sleep, it seemed, she was free to do all the things that during her waking life she could only watch.

We went back at that time of evening when it’s dusky but the headlights don’t really help yet. Mattie said she was stone-blind this time of night, so Estevan drove. “Be careful now,” she warned him as the three of them climbed into the cab. “The last thing we need is to get stopped.” Lou Ann and the kids and I followed in my car.

Fortunately the parking lot had a good slant to it so getting started was a piece of cake. I hardly had time to curse, and we caught right up. Mattie needn’t have worried; Estevan was a careful driver. As we puttered along Lou Ann had to keep reaching into the back seat, which wasn’t really a seat but a kind of pit where one used to be, to get the kids settled down. They had both slept through the entire hike back, but now were wide awake.

“Oh, shoot, I’ve sunburned the top half of my boobs,” she said, frowning down her chest. “Stretch marks and all.”

Mattie’s pickup stopped so fast I nearly rear-ended it. I slammed on the brakes and we all pitched forward. There was a thud in the back seat, and then a sound, halfway between a cough and a squeak.

“Jesus, that was Turtle,” I said. “Lou Ann, that was her, wasn’t it? She made that sound. Is her neck broken?”

“She’s fine, Taylor. Everybody’s fine. Look.” She
picked up Turtle and showed me that she was okay. “She did a somersault. I think that sound was a laugh.”

It must have been true. She was hanging on to Lou Ann’s boob tube for dear life, and smiling. We both stared at her. Then we started at the tailgate of the truck in front of us, stopped dead in the road.

“What in the tarnation?” Lou Ann asked.

I said I didn’t know. Then I said, “Look.” In the road up ahead there was a quail, the type that has one big feather spronging out the front of its head like a forties-model ladies’ hat. We could just make out that she was dithering back and forth in the road, and then we gradually could see that there were a couple dozen babies running around her every which way. They looked like fuzzy ball bearings rolling around in a box.

Our mouths opened and shut and we froze where we sat. I suppose we could have honked and waved and it wouldn’t have raised any more pandemonium than this poor mother already had to deal with, but instead we held perfectly still. Even Turtle. After a long minute or two the quail got her family herded off the road into some scraggly bushes. The truck’s brakelights flickered, like a wink, and Estevan drove on. Something about the whole scene was trying to make tears come up in my eyes. I decided I must be about to get my period.

“You know,” Lou Ann said a while later, “if that had been Angel, he would’ve given himself two points for every one he could hit.”

Knowing that Turtle’s first uttered sound was a laugh brought me no end of relief. If I had dragged her halfway across the nation only to neglect and entirely botch her upbringing, would she have laughed? I thought surely not. Surely she would have bided her time while she saved up whole words, even sentences. Things like “What do you think you’re doing?”

I suppose some of Lou Ann had rubbed off on me, for me to take this laugh as a sign. Lou Ann was the one who read her horoscope every day, and mine, and Dwayne Ray’s, and fretted that we would never know Turtle’s true sign (which seemed to me the least of her worries), and was sworn to a strange kind of logic that said a man could leave his wife for missing a meteor shower or buying the wrong brand of cookies. If the mail came late it meant someone, most likely Grandmother Logan, had died.

But neither of us could interpret the significance of Turtle’s first word. It was “bean.”

We were in Mattie’s backyard helping her put in the summer garden, which she said was way overdue considering the weather. Mattie’s motto seemed to be “Don’t let the grass grow under your feet, but make sure there’s something growing everywhere else.”

“Don’t let the grass grow under your feet, but make sure there’s something growing everywhere else.”

“Looky here, Turtle,” I said. “We’re planting a garden just like Old MacDonald in your book.” Mattie rolled her eyes. I think her main motive, in insisting that Turtle watch us do this, was to straighten the child out. She was concerned that Turtle would grow up thinking carrots grew under the rug.