The Bean Trees (17 page)

He laughed. Everything about him, even his teeth, were so perfect they could have come from a book about the human body. “I have always thought you had a wonderful way with words,” he said. “You don’t need to go fishing for big words in the dictionary. You are poetic, mi’ija.”

“What’s miha?”

“Mi hija,” he pronounced it slowly.

“My something?”

“My daughter. But it doesn’t work the same in English. We say it to friends. You would call me mi’ijo.”

“Well, thank you for the compliment,” I said, “but that’s the biggest bunch of hogwash, what you said. When did I ever say anything poetic?”

“Washing hogs is poetic,” he said. His eyes actually twinkled.

His bus pulled up and he stepped quickly off the curb, catching the doorway and swinging himself in as it pulled away. That is just how he would catch a bus in Guatemala City, I thought. To go teach his classes. But he carried no books, no graded exams, and the sleeves of his pressed white shirt were neatly rolled up for a night of dishwashing.

I felt depressed that evening. Mattie, who seemed to know no end of interesting things, told me about the history of Roosevelt Park. I had just assumed it was named after one of the Presidents, but it was for Eleanor. Once when she had been traveling across the country in her own train she had stopped here and given a speech right from a platform on top of her box car. I suppose it would have been a special type of box car, decorated, and not full of cattle and bums and such. Mattie said the people sat out in folding chairs in the park and listened to her speak about those less fortunate than ourselves.

Mattie didn’t hear Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech, naturally, but she had lived here a very long time. Thirty years ago, she said, the homes around this park belonged to some of the most fortunate people in town. But now the houses all seemed a little senile, with arthritic hinges and window screens hanging at embarrassing angles. Most had been subdivided or otherwise transformed in ways that favored function over beauty. Many were duplexes. Lee Sing’s was a home, grocery, and laundromat. Mattie’s, of course, was a tire store and sanctuary.

Slowly I was coming to understand exactly what this meant. For one thing, people came and went quietly. And stayed quietly. Around to the side of Mattie’s place, above the mural Lou Ann and I called Jesus Around the World, there was an upstairs window that looked out over the park. I saw faces there, sometimes Esperanza’s and sometimes others, staring across the empty space.

Mattie would occasionally be gone for days at a time, leaving me in charge of the shop. “How can you just up and go? What if I get a tractor tire in here?” I would ask her, but she would just laugh and say, “No chance.” She said that tire dealers were like veterinarians. There’s country vets, that patch up horses and birth calves, and there’s the city vets that clip the toenails off poodles. She said she was a city vet.

And off she would go. Mattie had numerous cars that ran, but for these trips she always took the four-wheel Blazer and her binoculars, and would come back with the fenders splattered with mud. “Going birdwatching” is what she always told me.

After she returned, a red-haired man named Terry sometimes came by on his bicycle and would spend an hour or more upstairs at Mattie’s. He didn’t look any older than I was, but Mattie told me he was already a doctor. He carried his doctor bag in a special rig on the back of his bike.

“He’s a good man,” she said. “He looks after the ones that get here sick and hurt.”

“What do you mean, that get here hurt?” I asked.

“Hurt,” she said. “A lot of them get here with burns,” for instance.”

I was confused. “I don’t get why they would have burns,” I persisted.

She looked at me for so long that I felt edgy. “Cigarette burns,” she said. “On their backs.”

The sun was setting, and most of the west-facing windows on the block reflected a fierce orange light as if the houses were on fire inside, but I could see plainly into Mattie’s upstairs. A woman stood at the window. Her hair was threaded with white and fell loose around her shoulders, and she was folding a pair of men’s trousers. She moved the flats of her hands slowly down each crease, as if folding these trousers were the only task ahead of her in life, and everything depended on getting it right.

True to his word, Angel came back. He didn’t come to move in, but to tell Lou Ann he was going away for good. I had taken Turtle for a doctor’s appointment so I didn’t witness the scene; all I can say is that the man had a genuine knack for dropping bombshells at home while someone was sitting in Dr. Pelinowsky’s waiting room. But of course, I had no real connection to Angel’s life. It was just a coincidence.

Turtle was healthy as corn, but as time went by I got to thinking she should have been taken to a doctor, in light of what had been done to her. (Lou Ann’s main question was: Shouldn’t you tell the police? Call 88-CRIME or something? But of course it was all in the past now.) I had thought of asking Terry, the red-haired doctor on the bicycle, but couldn’t quite get up the gumption. Finally I called for an appointment with the famous Dr. P., on Lou Ann’s recommendation, even though he wasn’t exactly the right kind of doctor. His nurse agreed that he could see my child this once.

We found the doctor’s office all right, but checking her in was another story. They gave me a form to fill out which contained every possible question about Turtle I couldn’t answer. “Have you had measles?” I asked her. “Scabies? Date of most recent polio vaccination?” The one medical thing I did know about her past was not on the form, unless they had a word for it I didn’t know.

Turtle was in my lap but had turned loose of me completely, since she needed both arms to turn through the pages of her magazine in search of vegetables. She wasn’t having much luck. Every other woman in that waiting room was pregnant, and every magazine was full of nursing-bra ads.

I knew how to trample my way through most any situation, but you can’t simply invent a person’s medical history. I went up and tapped on the glass to get the nurse’s attention. I saw that she was actually pregnant too, and I felt an old panic. In high school we used to make jokes about the water fountains outside of certain home rooms.

“Yes?” she said. Her name tag said Jill. She had white skin and broad pink stripes of rouge in front of her ears.

“I can’t answer these questions,” I said.

“Are you the parent or guardian?”

“I’m the one responsible for her.”

“Then we need the medical history before we can fill out an encounter form.”

“But I don’t know that much about her past,” I said.

“Then you are not the parent or guardian?”

This was getting to be a trip around the fish pond. “Look,” I said. “I’m not her real mother, but I’m taking care of her now. She’s not with her original family anymore.”

“Oh, you’re a foster home.” Jill was calm again, shuffling through a new stack of papers. She blinked slowly in a knowing way that revealed pink and lavender rainbows of makeup on her eyelids. She handed me a new form with far fewer questions on it. “Did you bring in your DES medical and waiver forms?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, remember to bring them next time.”

By the time we got in to see Dr. Pelinowsky I felt as though I’d won this man in one of those magazine contests where you answer fifty different questions about American cheese. He was fiftyish and a little tired-looking. His shoulders slumped, leaving empty space inside the starched shoulders of his white coat. He wore black wing-tip shoes, I noticed, and nylon socks with tiny sea horses above the ankle bones.

Turtle became clingy again when I pulled off her T-shirt. She squeezed wads of my shirttail in both fists while Dr. Pelinowsky thumped on her knees and shined his light into her eyes. “Anybody home?” he asked. The only time she perked up at all was when he looked in her ears and said, “Any potatoes in there?” Her mouth made a little O, but then she spaced out again.

“I didn’t really think she’d turn out to be sick, or anything like that. She’s basically in good shape,” I said.

“I wouldn’t expect to turn up anything clinically. She appears to be a healthy two-year-old.” He looked at his clipboard.

“The reason I brought her in is I’m concerned about some stuff that happened to her awhile ago. She wasn’t taken care of very well.” Dr. Pelinowsky looked at me, clicking his ballpoint pen.

“I’m a foster parent,” I said, and then he raised his eyebrows and nodded. It was a miracle, this new word that satisfied everyone.

“You’re saying that she was subjected to deprivation or abuse in the biological parents’ home,” he said. His main technique seemed to be telling you what you’d just said.

“Yes. I think she was abused, and that she was,” I didn’t know how to put this. “That she was molested. In a sexual way.”

Dr. Pelinowsky took in this information without appearing to notice. He was scribbling something on the so-called encounter form. I waited until he finished, thinking that I was going to have to say it again, but he said, “I’ll give her a complete exam, but again I wouldn’t expect to turn up anything now. This child has been in your care for five months?”

“More or less,” I said. “Yes.”

While he examined her he explained about abrasions and contusions and the healing process. I thought of how I’d handled Jolene Shanks exactly this way, as calm as breakfast toast, while her dead husband lay ten feet away under a sheet. “After this amount of time we might see behavioral evidence,” Dr. P. said, “but there is no residual physical damage.” He finished scribbling on the form and decided it would be a good idea to do a skeletal survey, and that sometime soon we ought to get her immunizations up to date.

I was curious to see the x-ray room, which was down a hall in another part of the office. Everything was large and clean, and they had a machine that turned out the x-rays instantly like a Polaroid camera. I don’t believe Dr. Pelinowsky really understood how lucky he was. I used to spend entire afternoons in a little darkroom developing those things, sopping the stiff plastic sheets through one and another basin of liquid, then hanging them up on a line with tiny green clothespins. I used to tell Mama it was nothing more than glorified laundry.

We had to wait awhile to see him again, while he saw another patient and then read Turtle’s x-rays. I hung around asking the technician questions and showing Turtle where the x-rays came out, though machines weren’t really her line. She had one of her old wrestling holds on my shoulder.

When we were called back to Dr. Pelinowsky’s office again he looked just ever so slightly shaken up. “What is it?” I asked him. All I could think of was brain tumors, I suppose from hanging around Lou Ann, who had learned all she knew about medicine from
General Hospital
.

He laid some of the x-rays against the window. Dr. Pelinowsky’s office window looked out onto a garden full of round stones and cactus. In the dark negatives I could see Turtle’s thin white bones and her skull, and it gave me the same chill Lou Ann must have felt to see her living mother’s name carved on a gravestone. I shivered inside my skin.

These are healed fractures, some of them compound,” he said, pointing with his silver pen. He moved carefully through the arm and leg bones and then to the hands, which he said were an excellent index of age. On the basis of height and weight he’d assumed she was around twenty-four months, he said, but the development of cartilage in the carpals and metacarpals indicated that she was closer to three.

“Three years?”

“Yes.” He seemed almost undecided about telling me this. “Sometimes in an environment of physical or emotional deprivation a child will simply stop growing, although certain internal maturation does continue. It’s a condition we call failure to thrive.”

“But she’s thriving now. I ought to know, I buy her clothes.”

“Well, yes, of course. The condition is completely reversible.”

“Of course,” I said.

He put up more of the x-rays in the window, saying things like “spiral fibular fracture here” and “excellent healing” and “some contraindications for psycho-motor development.” I couldn’t really listen. I looked through the bones to the garden on the other side. There was a cactus with bushy arms and a coat of yellow spines as thick as fur. A bird had built her nest in it. In and out she flew among the horrible spiny branches, never once hesitating. You just couldn’t imagine how she’d made a home in there.

Mattie had given me the whole day off, so I had arranged to meet Lou Ann at the zoo after Turtle’s appointment. We took the bus. Mattie and I hadn’t gotten around to fixing the ignition on my car, so starting it up was a production I saved for special occasions.

On the way over I tried to erase the words “failure to thrive” from my mind. I prepared myself, instead, for the experience of being with Lou Ann and the kids in a brand-new set of hazards. There would be stories of elephants going berserk and trampling their keepers; of children’s little hands snapped off and swallowed whole by who knows what seemingly innocent animal. When I walked up to the gate and saw her standing there with tears streaming down her face, I automatically checked Dwayne Ray in his stroller to see if any of his parts were missing.

People were having to detour around her to get through the turnstile, so I led her to one side. She sobbed and talked at the same time.

“He says he’s going to join up with any rodeo that will take a one-legged clown, which I know isn’t right because the clown’s the hardest job, they jump around and distract them so they won’t tromple on the cowboys’ heads.”

I was confused. Was there an elephant somewhere in this story? “Lou Ann, honey, you’re not making sense. Do you want to go home?”

She shook her head.

“Then should we go on into the zoo?”

She nodded. I managed to get everybody through the turnstile and settled on a bench in the shade between the duck pond and the giant tortoises. The sound of water trickling over a little waterfall into the duck pond made it seem cool. I tried to get the kids distracted long enough for Lou Ann to tell me what was up.