The Bean Trees (14 page)

“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.

“Here’s squash seeds,” I said. “Here’s pepper seeds, and here’s eggplants.” Turtle looked thoughtfully at the little flat disks.

“That’s just going to discombobble her,” Mattie said. “Those seeds don’t look anything like what you’re saying they’ll grow into. When kids are that little, they don’t take much on faith.”

“Oh,” I said. It seemed to me that Turtle had to take practically everything on faith.

“Show her something that looks like what you eat.”

I scooped a handful of big white beans out of one of Mattie’s jars. “These are beans. Remember white bean soup with ketchup? Mmm, you like that.”

“Bean,” Turtle said. “Humbean.”

I looked at Mattie.

“Well, don’t just sit there, the child’s talking to you,” Mattie said.

I picked up Turtle and gave her a hug. “That’s right, that’s a bean. And you’re just about the smartest kid alive,” I told her. Mattie just smiled.

As I planted the beans, Turtle followed me down the row digging each one up after I planted it and putting it back in the jar. “Good girl,” I said. I could see a whole new era arriving in Turtle’s and my life.

Mattie suggested that I give her some of her own beans to play with, and I did, though Lou Ann’s warning about windpipes and golf balls was following me wherever I went these days. “These are for you to keep,” I explained to Turtle. “Don’t eat them, these are playing-with beans. There’s eating beans at home. And the rest of these in here are putting-in-the-ground beans.” Honest to God, I believe she understood that. For the next half hour she sat quietly between two squash hills, playing with her own beans. Finally she buried them there on the spot, where they were forgotten by all until quite a while later when a ferocious thicket of beans came plowing up through the squashes.

On the way home Turtle pointed out to me every patch of bare dirt beside the sidewalk. “Humbean,” she told me.

Lou Ann was going through a phase of cutting her own hair every other day. In a matter of weeks it had gone from shoulder length to what she referred to as “shingled,” passing through several stages with figure-skaters’ names in between.

“I don’t know about shingled,” I said, “but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere or you’re going to end up like this guy that comes into Mattie’s all the time with a Mohawk. He has ‘Born to Die’ tattooed onto the bald part of his scalp.”

“I might as well just shave it off,” said Lou Ann. I don’t think she was really listening.

She was possessed of the type of blond, bone-straight hair that was, for a brief period in history, the envy of every teenaged female alive. I remember when the older girls spoke so endlessly of bleaching and ironing techniques you’d think their hair was something to be thrown in a white load of wash. Lou Ann would have been in high school by then, she was a few years older than me, but she probably missed this whole craze. She would have been too concerned with having the wrong kind of this or that. She’d told me that in high school she prayed every night for glamour-girl legs, which meant that you could put dimes between the knees, calves, and ankles and they would stay put; she claimed her calves would have taken a softball. I’m certain Lou Ann never even noticed that for one whole year her hair was utterly perfect.

“It looks like it plumb
died
,” she said, tugging on a straight lock over one eyebrow.

I was tempted to remind her that anything subjected so frequently to a pair of scissors wouldn’t likely survive, but of course I didn’t. I always tried to be positive with her, although I’d learned that even compliments were a kind of insult to Lou Ann, causing her to wrinkle her face and advise me to make an appointment with an eye doctor. She despised her looks, and had more ways of saying so than anyone I’d ever known.

“I ought to be shot for looking like this,” she’d tell the mirror in the front hall before going out the door. “I look like I’ve been drug through hell backwards,” she would say on just any ordinary day. “Like death warmed over. Like something the cat puked up.”

I wanted the mirror to talk back, to say, “Shush, you do not,” but naturally it just mouthed the same words back at her, leaving her so forlorn that I was often tempted to stick little notes on it. I thought of my T-shirt, Turtle’s now, from Kentucky Lake. Lou Ann needed a
DAMN I’M GOOD
mirror.

On this particular night we had invited Esperanza and Estevan over for dinner. Mattie was going to be on TV, on the six-o’clock news, and Lou Ann had suggested inviting them over to watch it on a television set we didn’t have. She was constantly forgetting about the things Angel had taken, generously offering to loan them out and so forth. We’d settled it, however, by also inviting some neighbors Lou Ann knew who had a portable TV. She said she’d been meaning to have them over anyway, that they were very nice. Their names were Edna Poppy and Virgie Mae Valentine Parsons, or so their mailbox said. I hadn’t met them, but before I’d moved in she said they had kept Dwayne Ray many a time, including once when Lou Ann had to rush Snowboots to the vet for eating a mothball.

Eventually Lou Ann gave up on berating her hair and set up the ironing board in the kitchen. I was cooking. We had worked things out: I cooked on weekends, and also on any week night that Lou Ann had kept Turtle. It would be a kind of payment. And she would do the vacuuming, because she liked to, and I would wash dishes because I didn’t mind them. “And on the seventh day we wash bean turds,” I pronounced. Before, it had seemed picayune to get all bent out of shape organizing the household chores. Now I was beginning to see the point.

The rent and utilities we split fifty-fifty. Lou Ann had savings left from Angel’s disability insurance settlement—for some reason he hadn’t touched this money—and also he sent checks, but only once in a blue moon. I worried about what she would do when the well ran dry, but I’d decided I might just as well let her run her own life.

For the party I was making sweet-and-sour chicken, more or less on a dare, out of one of Lou Ann’s magazines. The folks at Burger Derby should see me now, I thought. I had originally planned to make navy-bean soup, in celebration of Turtle’s first word, but by the end of the week she had said so many new words I couldn’t have fit them all in Hungarian goulash. She seemed to have a one-track vocabulary, like Lou Ann’s hypochondriac mother-in-law, though fortunately Turtle’s ran to vegetables instead of diseases. I could just imagine a conversation between these two: “Sciatica, hives, roseola, meningomalacia,” Mrs. Ruiz would say in her accented English. “Corns, ’tato, bean,” Turtle would reply.

“What’s so funny?” Lou Ann wanted to know. “I hope I can even fit into this dress. I should have tried it on first, I haven’t worn it since before Dwayne Ray.” I had noticed that Lou Ann measured many things in life, besides her figure, in terms of Before and After Dwayne Ray.

“You’ll fit into it,” I said. “Have you weighed yourself lately?”

“No, I don’t want to know what I weigh. If the scale even goes up that high.”

“I refuse to believe you’re overweight, that’s all I’m saying. If you say one more word about being fat, I’m going to stick my fingers in my ears and sing ‘Blue Bayou’ until you’re done.”

She was quiet for a minute. The hiss of the steam iron and the smell of warm, damp cotton reminded me of Sunday afternoons with Mama.

“What’s Mattie going to be on TV about? Do you know?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. It has something to do with the people that live with her.”

“Oh, I’d be petrified to be on TV, I know I would,” Lou Ann said. “I’m afraid I would just blurt out, ‘Underpants!’ or something. When I was a little girl I would get afraid in church, during the invocation or some other time when it got real quiet, and I’d all of a sudden be terrified that I was going to stand up and holler, ‘God’s pee-pee!’”

I laughed.

“Oh, I know it sounds ridiculous. I mean, I didn’t even know if God had one. In the pictures He’s always got on all those robes and things. But the fact that I even wondered about it seemed like just the ultimate sin. If I was bad enough to think it, how did I know I wasn’t going to stand up and say it?”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “There’s this Catholic priest that comes to Mattie’s all the time, Father William. He’s real handsome, I think he’s your type, maybe not. But sometimes I get to thinking, What if I were to strut over and say something like, ‘Hey good looking, whatcha got cooking?’”

“Exactly! It’s like, did you ever have this feeling when you’re standing next to a cliff, say, or by an upstairs window, and you can just picture yourself jumping out? The worst time it happened to me was in high school. On our senior trip we went to the state capitol, which is at Frankfort. Of course, you know that, what am I saying? So, what happened was, you can go way up in the dome and there’s only this railing and you look down and the people are like little miniature ants. And I saw myself just hoisting my leg and going over. I just froze up. I thought: if I can think it, I might do it. My boyfriend, which at that time was Eddie Tubbs, it was way before I met Angel, thought it was fear of heights and told everybody on the bus on the way home that I had ackero-phobia, but it was way more complicated than that. I mean, ackero-phobia doesn’t have anything to do with being afraid you’ll holler out something god-awful in church, does it?”

“No,” I said. “I think what you mean is a totally different phobia. Fear that the things you imagine will turn real.”

Lou Ann was staring at me, transfixed. “You know, I think you’re the first person I’ve ever told this to that understood what I was talking about.”

I shrugged. “I saw a
Star Trek
episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can’t remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench.”

The six o’clock news was half over by the time we got the TV plugged in. There had been a mix-up with the women next door, who were waiting for us to come over and get the television. They didn’t realize they had been invited for dinner.

Meanwhile, Estevan and Esperanza arrived. Estevan played the gentleman flirt, saying how nice I looked, and didn’t he perhaps know my tomboy sister who worked with a used-tire firm? “Exquisite” was what he actually said, and “tom boy” as if it were two words. I batted my eyelashes and said yes indeed, that she was the sister who got all the brains of the family.

I suppose I did look comparatively elegant. Lou Ann had parted my hair on the side (“What you need is one of those big blowzy white flowers behind one ear,” she said, and “God, would I kill for black hair like yours.” “Kill what?” I asked. “A skunk?”) and forced me into a dress she had purchased “before Dwayne Ray” in an uptown thrift shop. It was one of those tight black satin Chinese numbers you have to try on with a girlfriend—you hold your breath while she zips you in. I only agreed to wear it because I thought sharing our clothes might shut her up about being a Sherman tank. And because it fit.