The Bean Trees (12 page)

“What program did you want to see?” Edna asked. “I hope we haven’t spoiled it by coming late?”

“That was it, we just saw it,” I said, though it seemed ridiculous. Thirty seconds and it was all over. “She’s a friend of ours,” I explained.

“All I could make out was some kind of trouble with illegal aliens and dope peddlers,” said Mrs. Parsons. “Dear, I need a pillow for the small of my back or I won’t be able to get out of bed tomorrow. Your cat has just made dirt in the other room.”

I went for a cushion and Lou Ann rushed to put the cat out. Estevan and Esperanza, I realized, had been sitting together on the ottoman the whole time, more or less on the fringe of all the commotion. I said, “I’d like you to meet my friends…”

“Steven,” Estevan said, “and this is my wife, Hope.” This was a new one on me.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Edna said.

Mrs. Parsons said, “And is this naked creature one of theirs? She looks like a little wild Indian.” She was talking about Turtle, who was not naked, although she didn’t exactly have a shirt on.

“We have no children,” Estevan said. Esperanza looked as though she had been slapped across the face.

“She’s mine,” I said. “And she
is
a little wild Indian, as a matter of fact. Why don’t we start dinner?” I picked up Turtle and stalked off into the kitchen, leaving Lou Ann to fend for herself. Why she would call this old pruneface a nice lady was beyond my mental powers. I did the last-minute cooking, which the recipe said you were supposed to do “at the table in a sizzling work before the admiring guests.” A sizzling wok, my hind foot. Who did they think read those magazines?

A minute later Esperanza came into the kitchen and quietly helped set the table. I touched her arm. “I’m sorry,” I said.

It wasn’t until everyone came in and sat down to dinner that I really had a chance to look these women over. The fact that they couldn’t possibly have had time to dress up for dinner made their outfits seem to tell everything. (Though of course Mrs. Parsons would have had time to powder her nose and reach for the little white hat.) Edna even had red bobby pins in her hair, two over each ear. I couldn’t imagine where you would buy such items, a drugstore I suppose. I liked thinking about Edna finding them there on the rack, along with the purple barrettes and Oreo-cookie hair clips, and saying, “Why, look, Virgie
Mae, red bobby pins! That’s my color.” Virgie Mae would be the type to sail past the douche aisle with her nose in the air and lecture the boy at the register for selling condoms.

Estevan produced a package, which turned out to be chopsticks. There were twenty or so of them wrapped together in crackly cellophane with black Chinese letters down one side. “A gift for the dishwasher,” he said, handing each of us a pair of sticks. “You use them once, then throw them away.” I couldn’t think how he knew we were going to have Chinese food, but then I remembered running into him a day or two ago in the Lee Sing Market, where we’d discussed a product called “wood ears.” The recipe called for them, but I had my principles.

“The dishwasher thanks you,” I said. I noticed Lou Ann whisking a pair out of Dwayne Ray’s reach, and could hear the words “put his eyes out” as plainly as if she’d said them aloud. Dwayne Ray started squalling, and Lou Ann excused herself to go put him to bed.

“What is it, eating sticks?” Edna ran her fingers along the thin shafts. “It sounds like a great adventure, but I’ll just stick to what I know, if you don’t mind. Thank you all the same.” I noticed that Edna ate very slowly, with gradual, exact movements of her fork. Mrs. Parsons said she wasn’t game for such foolishness either.

“I never said it was foolishness,” Edna said.

The rest of us gave it a try, spearing pieces of chicken and looping green-pepper rings and chasing the rice around our plates. Even Esperanza tried. Estevan said we were being too aggressive.

“They are held this way.” He demonstrated, holding them like pencils in one hand and clicking the ends together. I loved his way of saying, “It is” and “They are.”

Turtle was watching me, imitating. “Don’t look at me, I’m not the expert.” I pointed at Estevan.

Lou Ann came back to the table. “Where’d you learn how to do that?” she asked Estevan.

“Ah,” he said, “this is why I like chopsticks: I work in a Chinese restaurant. I am the dishwasher.”

“I didn’t know that. How long have you worked there?” I asked, realizing that I had no business thinking I knew everything about Estevan. His whole life, really, was a mystery to me.

“One month,” he said. “I work with a very kind family who speak only Chinese. Only the five-year-old daughter speaks English. The father has her explain to me what I must do. Fortunately, she is very patient.”

Mrs. Parsons muttered that she thought this was a disgrace. “Before you know it the whole world will be here jibbering and jabbering till we won’t know it’s America.”

“Virgie, mind your manners,” Edna said.

“Well, it’s the truth. They ought to stay put in their own dirt, not come here taking up jobs.”

“Virgie,” Edna said.

I felt like I’d sat on a bee. If Mama hadn’t brought me up to do better, I think I would have told that old snake to put down her fork and get her backside out the door. I wanted to scream at her: This man you are looking at is an English teacher. He did not come
here so he could wash egg foo yung off plates and take orders from a five-year-old.

But Estevan didn’t seem perturbed, and I realized he must hear this kind of thing every day of his life. I wondered how he could stay so calm. I would have murdered somebody by now, I thought, would have put a chopstick to one of the many deadly uses that only Lou Ann could imagine for it.

“Can I get anybody anything?” Lou Ann asked.

“We’re fine,” Edna said, obviously accustomed to being Virgie Mae’s public-relations department. “You children have made a delightful meal.”

Esperanza pointed at Turtle. It was the first time I ever saw her smile, and I was struck with what a lovely woman she was when you really connected. Then the smile left her again.

Turtle, wielding a chopstick in each hand, had managed to pick up a chunk of pineapple. Little by little she moved it upward toward her wide-open mouth, but the sticks were longer than her arms. The pineapple hung in the air over her head and then fell behind her onto the floor. We laughed and cheered her on, but Turtle was so startled she cried. I picked her up and held her on my lap.

“Tortolita, let me tell you a story,” Estevan said. “This is a South American, wild
Indian
story about heaven and hell.” Mrs. Parsons made a prudish face, and Estevan went on. “If you go to visit hell, you will see a room like this kitchen. There is a pot of delicious stew on the table, with the most delicate aroma you can imagine. All around, people sit, like us. Only they are dying of starvation. They are jibbering and
jabbering,” he looked extra hard at Mrs. Parsons, “but they cannot get a bite of this wonderful stew God has made for them. Now, why is that?”

“Because they’re choking? For all eternity?” Lou Ann asked. Hell, for Lou Ann, would naturally be a place filled with sharp objects and small round foods.

“No,” he said. “Good guess, but no. They are starving because they only have spoons with very long handles. As long as that.” He pointed to the mop, which I had forgotten to put away. “With these ridiculous, terrible spoons, the people in hell can reach into the pot but they cannot put the food in their mouths. Oh, how hungry they are! Oh, how they swear and curse each other!” he said, looking again at Virgie. He was enjoying this.

“Now,” he went on, “you can go and visit heaven. What? You see a room just like the first one, the same table, the same pot of stew, the same spoons as long as a sponge mop. But these people are all happy and fat.”

“Real fat, or do you mean just well-fed?” Lou Ann asked.

“Just well-fed,” he said. “Perfectly, magnificently well-fed, and very happy. Why do you think?”

He pinched up a chunk of pineapple in his chopsticks, neat as you please, and reached all the way across the table to offer it to Turtle. She took it like a newborn bird.

O
f all the ridiculous things, Mama was getting married. To Harland Elleston no less, of El-Jay’s Paint and Body fame. She called on a Saturday morning while I’d run over to Mattie’s, so Lou Ann took the message. I was practically the last to know.

When I called back Mama didn’t sound normal. She was out of breath and kept running on about Harland. “Did I get you in out of the yard?” I asked her. “Are you planting cosmos?”

“Cosmos, no, it’s not even the end of April yet, is it? I’ve got sugar peas in that little bed around to the side, but not cosmos.”

“I forgot,” I told her. “Everything’s backwards here. Half the stuff you plant in the fall.”

“Missy, I’m in a tither,” she said. She called me Taylor in letters, but we weren’t accustomed to phone calls. “With Harland and all. He treats me
real good, but it’s happened so fast I don’t know what end of the hog to feed. I wish you were here to keep me straightened out.”

“I do too,” I said.

“You plant things in the fall? And they don’t get bit?”

“No.”

At least she did remember to ask about Turtle. “She’s great,” I said. “She’s talking a blue streak.”

“That’s how you were. You took your time getting started, but once you did there was no stopping you,” Mama said.

I wondered what that had to do with anything. Everybody behaved as if Turtle was my own flesh and blood daughter. It was a conspiracy.

Lou Ann wanted to know every little detail about the wedding, which was a whole lot more than I knew myself, or cared to.

“Everybody deserves their own piece of the pie, Taylor,” Lou Ann insisted. “Who else has she got?”

“She’s got me.”

“She does not, you’re here. Which might as well be Red Taiwan, for all the good it does her.”

“I always thought I’d get Mama out here to live. She didn’t even consult me, just ups and decides to marry this paint-and-body yahoo.”

“I do believe you’re jealous.”

“That is so funny I forgot to laugh.”

“When my brother got married I felt like he’d deserted us. He just sends this letter one day with a little tiny picture, all you could make out really was dogs, and tells us he’s marrying somebody by the
name of She-Wolf Who Hunts by the First Light.” Lou Ann yawned and moved farther down the bench so her arms were more in the sun. She’d decided she was too pale and needed a tan.

“Granny Logan liked to died. She kept saying, did Eskimos count as human beings? She thought they were half animal or something. And really what are you supposed to think, with a name like that? But I got used to the idea. I like to think of him up there in Alaska with all these little daughters in big old furry coats. I’ve got in my mind that they live in an igloo, but that can’t be right.”

We were sitting out with the kids in Roosevelt Park, which the neighbor kids called such names as Dead Grass Park and Dog Doo Park. To be honest, it was pretty awful. There were only a couple of shade trees, which had whole dead parts, and one good-for-nothing palm tree so skinny and tall that it threw its shade onto the roof of the cooler-pad factory down the block. The grass was scraggly, struggling to come up between shiny bald patches of dirt. Mostly it put me in mind of an animal with the mange. Constellations of gum-wrapper foil twinkled around the trash barrels.

“Look at it this way, at least she’s still kicking,” Lou Ann said. “I feel like my mama’s whole life stopped counting when Daddy died. You want to know something? They even got this double gravestone. Daddy’s on the right hand side, and the other side’s already engraved for Mama. ‘Ivy Louise Logan, December 2, 1934—to blank.’ Every time I see it it gives me the willies. Like it’s just waiting there for
her to finish up her business and die so they can fill in the blank.”

“It does seem like one foot in the grave,” I said.

“If Mama ever got married again I’d dance a jig at her wedding. I’d be thrilled sideways. Maybe it would get her off my back about moving back in with her and Granny.” Dwayne Ray coughed in his sleep, and Lou Ann pushed his stroller back and forth two or three times. Turtle was pounding the dirt with a plastic shovel, a present from Mattie.

“Cabbage, cabbage, cabbage,” she said.

Lou Ann said, “I know a guy that would just love her. Did you ever know that fellow downtown that sold vegetables out of his truck?” But Turtle and Bobby Bingo would never get to discuss their common interest. He had disappeared, probably to run off with somebody’s mother.

“Your mother wouldn’t be marrying Harland Elleston,” I told Lou Ann, getting back to the subject at hand.

“Of course not! That big hunk is already spoken for.”

“Lou Ann, you’re just making a joke of this whole thing.”

“Well, I can’t help it, I wouldn’t care if my mother married the garbage man.”

“But Harland Elleston! He’s not even…” I was going to say he’s not even related to us, but of course that wasn’t what I meant. “He’s got warts on his elbows and those eyebrows that meet in the middle.”

“I’ll swan, Taylor, you talk about men like they’re a hangnail. To hear you tell it, you’d think man was
only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.”

“That’s not true, I like Estevan.” My heart sort of bumped when I said this. I knew exactly how it would look on an EKG machine: two little peaks and one big one.

“He’s taken. Who else?”

“Just because I don’t go chasing after every Tom’s Harry Dick that comes down the pike.”

“Who else? You never have one kind thing to say about any of your old boyfriends.”

“Lou Ann, for goodness’ sakes. In Pittman County there was nothing in pants that was worth the trouble, take my word for it. Except for this one science teacher, and the main thing he had going for him was clean fingernails.” I’d never completely realized how limited the choices were in Pittman. Poor Mama. If only I could have gotten her to Tucson.

“Well, where in the heck do you think I grew up, Paris, France?”

“I notice you didn’t stick with home-grown either. You had to ride off with a Wild West rodeo boy.”

“Fat lot of good it did me, too.”

“Well, you did get Dwayne Ray out of the deal.” I remembered what Mama always said about me and the Jackson Purchase.

“But oh, Taylor, if you could have seen him. How handsome he was.” She had her eyes closed and her face turned up toward the sun. “The first time I laid eyes on him he was draped on this fence like the Marlboro man, with his arms out to the sides and one boot up on the bottom rung. Just chewing on a
match and hanging out till it was time to turn out the next bull. And do you know what else?” She sat up and opened her eyes.

“What?” I said.

“Right at that exact moment there was this guy in the ring setting some kind of a new world’s record for staying on a bull, and everybody was screaming and throwing stuff and of course me and my girlfriend Rachel had never seen a rodeo before so we thought this was the wildest thing since Elvis joined the army. But Angel didn’t even look up. He just squinted off at the distance toward the hay field behind the snack bar. Rachel said, ‘Look at that tough guy over by that fence, what an asshole, not even paying attention.’ And you know what I thought to myself? I thought, I bet I could get him to pay attention to me.”

A child in a Michael Jackson tank shirt rumbled down the gravel path on a low-slung trike with big plastic wheels, making twice as much noise as his size would seem to allow for. “This is a O-R-V,” he told us. Now I knew.

“I know you.” He pointed at Lou Ann. “You’re the one gives out money at Halloween.”

Lou Ann rolled her eyes. “I’m never going to live that down. This year they’ll be coming in from Phoenix and Flagstaff to beat down our door.”

“Watch out when the bums come,” he told us. “Go straight home.” He tore off again, pedaling like someone possessed.

The gravel path cut through the middle of the park from a penis-type monument, up at the street near Mattie’s, down to the other end where we liked to sit
in a place Lou Ann called the arbor. It was the nicest thing about the park. The benches sat in a half-circle underneath an old wooden trellis that threw a shade like a cross-stitched tablecloth. The trellis had thick, muscly vines twisting up its support poles and fanning out overhead. Where they first came out of the ground, they reminded me of the arms of this guy who’d delivered Mattie’s new refrigerator by himself. All winter Lou Ann had been telling me they were wisteria vines. They looked dead to me, like everything else in the park, but she always said, “Just you wait.”

And she was right. Toward the end of March they had sprouted a fine, shivery coat of pale leaves and now they were getting ready to bloom. Here and there a purplish lip of petal stuck out like a pout from a fat green bud. Every so often a bee would hang humming in the air for a few seconds, checking on how the flowers were coming along. You just couldn’t imagine where all this life was coming from. It reminded me of that Bible story where somebody or other struck a rock and the water poured out. Only this was better, flowers out of bare dirt. The Miracle of Dog Doo Park.

Lou Ann went on endlessly about Mama. “I can just see your mama…. What’s her name, anyway?”

“Alice,” I said. “Alice Jean Stamper Greer. The last thing she needs is an Elleston on top of all that.”

“…I can just see Alice and Harland running for the sugar shack. If she’s anything like you, she goes after what she wants. I guess now she’ll be getting all the paint and body jobs she needs.”

“He’s only half owner, with Ernest Jakes,” I said. “It’s not like the whole shop belongs to him.”

“Alice and Harland sittin’ in a tree,” she sang, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

I plugged my ears and sang, “I’m going back someday! Come what may! To Blue Bayou!” Turtle whacked the dirt and sang a recipe for succotash.

I spotted Mrs. Parsons and Edna Poppy coming down the gravel path with their arms linked. From a great distance you could have taken them for some wacked-out geriatric couple marching down the aisle in someone’s sick idea of a garden wedding. We waved our arms at them, and Turtle looked up and waved at us.

“No, we’re waving at them,” I said, and pointed. She turned and folded and unfolded her hand in the right direction.

Now and again these days, not just in emergencies, we were leaving the kids with Edna and Virgie Mae on their front porch to be looked after. Edna was so sweet we just hoped she would cancel out Virgie’s sour, like the honey and vinegar in my famous Chinese recipe. It was awfully convenient, anyway, and Turtle seemed to like them okay. She called them Poppy and Parsnip. She knew the names of more vegetables than many a greengrocer, I’d bet. Her favorite book was a Burpee’s catalogue from Mattie’s, which was now required reading every night before she would go to bed. The plot got old, in my opinion, but she was crazy about all the characters.

“Ma Poppy,” Turtle said when they were a little closer. She called every woman Ma something. Lou
Ann was Ma Wooahn, which Lou Ann said sounded like something you’d eat with chopsticks, and I was just Ma. We never told her these names, she just came to them on her own.

The two women were still moving toward us at an unbelievably slow pace. I thought of a game we used to play in school at the end of recess: See who can get there last. Edna had on a red knit top, red plaid Bermuda shorts, and red ladies’ sneakers with rope soles. Virgie had on a tutti-frutti hat and a black dress printed all over with what looked like pills. I wondered if there was an actual place where you could buy dresses like that, or if after hanging in your closet for fifty years, regular ones would somehow just transform.

“Good afternoon, Lou Ann, Taylor, children,” Mrs. Parsons said, nodding to each one of us. She was so formal it made you want to say something obscene. I thought of Lou Ann’s compulsions in church.

“Howdy do,” Lou Ann said, and waved at a bench. “Have a sit.” But Mrs. Parsons said no thank you, that they were just out for their constitutional.

“I see you’re wearing my favorite color today, Edna,” I said. This was a joke. I’d never seen her in anything else. When she said red was her color, she meant it in a way most people don’t.

“Oh, yes, always.” She laughed. “Do you know, I started to dress in red when I was sixteen. I decided that if I was to be a Poppy, then a Poppy I would be.”

Edna said the most surprising things. She didn’t exactly look at you when she spoke, but instead stared above you as though there might be some
thing wonderful hanging just over your head.

“Well, we’ve heard all about that before, haven’t we?” said Mrs. Parsons, clamping Edna’s elbow in a knucklebone vice-grip. “We’ll be going along. If I stand still too long my knees are inclined to give out.” They started to move away, but then Mrs. Parsons stopped, made a little nod, and turned around. “Lou Ann, someone was looking for you this morning. Your husband, or whatever he may be.”

“You mean Angel?” She jumped so hard she bumped the stroller and woke up Dwayne Ray, who started howling.

“I wouldn’t know,” Virgie said, in such a way that she might as well have said, “How many husbands do you have?”

“When, this morning while I was at the laundromat?”

“I have no idea where
you
were, my dear, only that
he
was
here
.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he would come back later.”

Lou Ann bounced the baby until he stopped crying. “Shit,” she said, quite a few minutes later when they’d moved out of earshot. “What do you think that means?”

“Maybe he wanted to deliver a check in person. Maybe he wants to go on a second honeymoon.”

“Sure,” she said, looking off at the far side of the park. She was still jiggling Dwayne Ray, possibly hadn’t noticed he’d stopped crying.

“Why do you think she puts up with that coot?” I asked.

“What coot, old Vicious Virgie you mean? Oh, she’s harmless.” Lou Ann settled the baby back into his stroller. “She reminds me of Granny Logan. She’s that type. One time Granny introduced me to some cousins by marriage of hers, I was wearing this brand-new midi-skirt I’d just made? And she says, “This is my granddaughter Lou Ann. She isn’t bowlegged, it’s just her skirt makes her look that way.’”