Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

Which is to say that at first I had no idea what was going on in those storefronts. One of them that I passed by nearly every day had these two amazing things in the front window. It looked like cherry bombs blowing up in boxes of wet sand, and the whole thing just frozen mid-kaboom. Curiosity finally got the better of me and I walked right in. I knew this was no Woolworth’s.

Inside there were more of these things, one of them taller than me and kind of bush-shaped, all made of frozen sand. A woman was writing something on a card under one of the sand things that was hanging on the back wall, kind of exploding out of a metal frame. The woman had on a pink sweater, white ankle socks, pink high heels, and these tight pants made out of the skin of a pink silk leopard. She came over with her clipboard and kind of eyed Turtle’s hands, which were sticky I’ll admit, but a good two feet clear of the sand bush.

“This is terrific,” I said. “What’s it supposed to be?”

“It’s non-representational,” she said, looking at me like I was some kind of bug she’d just found in her bathroom.

“Excuse me for living,” I said. She was about my age, no more than twenty-five anyway, and had no reason I could see for being so snooty. I remembered this rhyme Mama taught me to say to kids who acted like they were better than me: ‘You must come from Hog-Norton, where pigs go to church and play the organ.”

The thing was sitting on a square base covered with brown burlap, and a little white card attached said BISBEE DOG #6. I didn’t see the connection, but I acted like I was totally satisfied with that. “Bisbee Dog #6,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

Turtle and I went all around checking out the ones on the walls. Most of them were called something relief: ASCENDANT RELIEF, ENDOGENOUS RELIEF, MOTIVE RELIEF, GALVANIC RELIEF. After a while I realized that the little white cards had numbers on them too. Numbers like $400. “Comic Relief,” I said to Turtle. “This one is Instant Relief,” I said. “See, it’s an Alka-Seltzer, frozen between the plop and the fizz.”

On some days, like that one, I was starting to go a little bit crazy. This is how it is when all the money you have can fit in one pocket, and you have no job, and no prospects. The main thing people did for money around there was to give plasma, but I drew the line. “Blood is the body’s largest organ,” I could just hear Eddie Ricketts saying, and I wasn’t inclined to start selling my organs while I was still alive. I did inquire there about work, but the head man in a white coat and puckery white loafers looked me over and said, “Are you a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona?” in this tone of voice like who was I to think I could be on the end of the needle that doesn’t hurt, and that was the end of that.

Down the block from the plasma center was a place called Burger Derby. The kids who worked there wore red caps, red-and-white-striped shirts, and what looked like red plastic shorts. One of them, whose name tag said, “Hi I’m Sandi,” also wore tiny horse earrings, but that couldn’t have been part of the uniform. They couldn’t make you pierce your ears; that would have to be against some law.

Sandi usually worked the morning shift alone, and we got to know each other. My room in the Republic had a hot plate for warming cans of soup, but sometimes I ate out just for the company. The Burger Derby was safe. No one there was likely to ask you where you were holding your tension.

Sandi turned out to be horse-crazy. When she found out I was from Kentucky she treated me like I had personally won the Derby. “You are so lucky,” she said. “My absolute dream is to have a horse of my own, and braid flowers in its mane and prance around in a ring and win ribbons and stuff.” She had this idea that everyone in Kentucky owned at least one Thoroughbred, and it took me some time to convince her that I had never even been close enough to a horse to get kicked.

“In the part of Kentucky I come from people don’t own Thoroughbreds,” I told her. “They just wish they could live like one.” The Thoroughbreds had their own swimming pools. My whole county didn’t even have a swimming pool. I told her what a hoot we all thought it was when these rich guys paid six million for Secretariat after his running days were over, since he was supposedly the most valuable stud on the face of the earth, and then he turned out to be a reticent breeder, which is a fancy way of saying homosexual. He wouldn’t go near a filly for all the sugar in Hawaii.

Sandi acted kind of shocked to hear this news about Secretariat’s sex life.

“Didn’t you know that? I’m sure that made the national news.”

“No!” she said, scouring the steam table like a fiend. She kept looking around to see if anyone else was in the restaurant, but no one was, I’m sure. I always went there around ten-thirty, which is a weird time of day to eat a hot dog, but I was trying to get Turtle and me onto two meals a day.

“What’s it like to work here?” I asked her. There had been a HELP WANTED sign in the window for going on two weeks.

“Oh, it’s fan tas tic,” she said.

I’ll bet, I thought. Serving up Triple Crown Chili Dogs and You Bet Your Burgers and chasing off drunks and broke people who went around the tables eating nondairy creamer straight out of the packets would be fan tas tic. She looked about fourteen.

“You should apply for it, really. They couldn’t turn you down, being from Kentucky.”

“Sure,” I said. What did she think, that I was genetically programmed to fry chicken? “What’s it pay?”

“Three twenty-five an hour. “ Plus your meals.”

“What am I even talking about? I’ve got this kid,” I said. “I’d have to pay somebody more than that to take care of her.”

“Oh no! You could just do what I do, take her to Kid Central Station.”

“You’ve got a kid?”

“Yeah, a little boy. Twenty-one months.”

I had thought Pittman was the only place on earth where people started having babies before they learned their multiplication tables. I asked her what Kid Central Station was.

“It’s free. See, it’s this place in the mall where they’ll look after your kids while you shop, but how do they know? See what I mean? The only thing is you have to go and check in every two hours, to prove you’re still shopping, so I just dash over there on my breaks. The number five bus just goes right straight there. Or I’ll get some friend to go. The people that work there don’t know the difference. I mean, they’ve got these jillion kids crawling all over the place, how are they going to know if somebody’s really one of ’em’s mother?”

Sandi was sliding the little white buckets of cauliflower and shredded carrots and garbanzo beans into the holes in the salad bar, getting ready for the lunch crowd. For some odd reason they had artificial grapes strewed out over the ice all around the buckets.

“I’ll go check it out,” I said, although I already had a good notion of what it would be like.

“If you’re going right now, could you check in for my little boy? His name’s Seattle. I’m sure he’s the only one there named Seattle. Just make sure he’s okay, will you?”

“Like Seattle, Washington?”

“No, like Seattle Slew, the racehorse. He’s a little towhead, you can’t miss him, he looks just like me only his hair’s blonder. Oh, they have a requirement that they have to be able to walk. Can your daughter walk?”

“Sure she walks. When there’s someplace she wants to go.”

A celery stick fell out of the bucket onto the floor, and Sandi swiped it up and took a bite. “Well, I couldn’t very well let a customer eat it,” she said.