Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “It’s no skin off my teeth if you want to eat the whole bucket of celery, and the artificial grapes besides. For three twenty-five an hour I think you’re entitled.”

She munched kind of thoughtfully for a minute. Her eyelashes were stuck together with blue mascara and sprung out all around her eyes like flower petals. “You know, your little girl doesn’t look a thing like you,” she said. “I mean, no offense, she’s cute as a button.”

“She’s not really mine,” I said. “She’s just somebody I got stuck with.”

Sandi looked at both of us, her elbow cocked on her hip and the salad tongs frozen in midair. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”

Lou Ann’s Grandmother Logan and Lou Ann’s new baby were both asleep in the front room with the curtains drawn against the afternoon heat. For the last two weeks Granny Logan had stomped around the house snapping the curtains shut just as fast as Lou Ann could open them, until finally Lou Ann gave up the effort and they all moved around in the gloom of a dimly lit house. “You’d think somebody had died, instead of just being born,” Lou Ann complained, but the old woman declared that the heat was unnatural for January and would cause the baby to grow up measly and unwholesome.

When she woke up, Granny Logan would deny she had been sleeping. She had said she only needed to rest her eyes for the trip back to Kentucky, three days on the Greyhound.

In the kitchen Ivy Logan and Lou Ann were packing a paper bag with baloney sandwiches and yellow apples and a Mason jar of cold tea. Ivy’s heavy arms and apron-covered front moved around like she was the boss, even in her daughter’s unfamiliar kitchen. Under her breath she hummed one line of a hymn, “All our sins and griefs to bear,” over and over until Lou Ann thought she would scream. It was an old habit.

Lou Ann pushed her damp blond hair back from her face and told her mother she wished she would stay a few days more. Whenever Ivy looked at her Lou Ann could feel the tired half-moons under her own eyes.

“You haven’t hardly had time to say boo to Angel. He’ll have Tuesday off and we could take the truck and all go someplace. We could all fit in some way. Or otherwise I could stay here with Dwayne Ray, and you all go. It’s a shame for you to come all this way from home and not see what you can see.”

Surprisingly, Angel had agreed to move back in until after her mother and grandmother’s visit. He might be hard to talk to and unreasonable in every other way but at least, Lou Ann realized, he knew the power of mothers and grandmothers. If Granny Logan had known they were getting a divorce she would have had an apoplectic. At the very least, she and Ivy would insist that Lou Ann come back home.

“Oh, honey, we seen plenty from the bus,” Ivy said. “Them old big cactus and every kind of thing. Lordy, and them big buildings downtown, all glass it looked to me like. I expect we’ll see a good sight more on the way home.”

“I guess, but it seems like we haven’t done a thing since you got here but set around and look at the baby.”

“Well, that’s what we come for, honey. Now we’ve done helped you have him, and get settled with him, and we’re anxious to get on home. The heat puts Mother Logan in a mood.”

“I know it.” Lou Ann breathed in slowly through her nose. She was beginning to believe that the hot, dry air in her chest might be the poison her grandmother claimed it to be. “I wish I could have put you up better than we did,” she said.

“You put us up just fine. You know her, it wouldn’t make no difference if it was the Queen a Sheba a-putting us up, she’d be crosspatch. She just don’t sleep good out of her own bed.” Ivy untied the borrowed apron and smoothed down the front of her navy-blue dress. Lou Ann remembered the dress from about a hundred church potluck suppers. Just the sight of it made her feel stuffed with potato-chip casseroles and Coca-Cola cake.

“Mama,” she said, and then started over because her voice was too low to hear. “Mama, when Daddy was alive…” She was not sure what she meant to ask. Did you talk to each other? Was he the person you saved things up to say to, or was it like now? A houseful of women for everything, for company. Ivy was not looking at her daughter but her hands were still, for once. “Did Granny Logan always live with you, from the beginning?”

Ivy peered into the brown bag and then rolled the top down tightly. “Not her with us. We lived with her.”

“Is that how you wanted it?” Lou Ann felt embarrassed.

“I guess I always thought it would have been something to go off on our own, like you done. But there was so much work in them days, no time for fun, and besides I’d of been scared to death out someplace all by myself.”

“It wouldn’t be all by yourself. You would have been with Daddy.”

“I s’pose,” Ivy said. “But we didn’t think about it that way.” She turned back to the sink to wash her hands, then pulled the dish towel down from the wooden ring over the sink, refolded it, and hung it back up. “I want you to run on in there now and tell Mother Logan we’ve got to get ready to go.”

Ivy and her mother-in-law were not speaking, on account of one thing or another. Lou Ann could never keep track. She wondered what the trip would be like for them, all those days and nights on the Greyhound. But they were sure to find some way of having a conversation. In the past, in times of necessity, she had seen her mother and grandmother address one another through perfect strangers.

“Granny Logan.” Lou Ann put her hand gently on the old woman’s shoulder, feeling the shoulder bones through the dark, slick cloth of her dress. At the same time she opened her eyes the baby started to cry. “You have a nice catnap, Granny?” she asked, hurrying to pick up the baby and bounce him on her hip. She always thought he sounded like he was choking.

“It was just my eyes, needed a rest. I weren’t sleeping.” She held tightly to the arms of the chair until she knew where she was. “I told you, the heat’s done put that baby into a colic. He needs a mustard plaster to draw out the heat.”

“Mama says tell you it’s time to get your grip packed. She says you all are fixing to leave tonight.”

“My grip’s done packed.”

“All right then. You want a bite of supper before you go?”

“Why don’t you come on home with us, honey? You and the baby.”

“Me and Angel and the baby, Granny. I’ve been married now for practically five years, remember?” She felt like such a sneak, letting on as though her marriage was just fine. It was like presenting her mother and grandmother with a pretty Christmas package to take back with them, with nothing but tissue paper inside. She had never lied to them before, that she could remember, but something in her would not let them be right about Angel.

“Angel’s got good work at the bottling plant,” she told Granny Logan. This, at least, was true. “We like it here.”

“I don’t see how a body could like no place where it don’t rain. Law, I’m parched. Get me a glass of water.”

“I’ll get it for you in a minute,” she said, switching the baby to her other hip, knowing that in a minute Granny Logan would have forgotten her request. “You get used to it. When we first moved out I had sore throats all the time. I was scared to death I’d caught throat cancer like that what’s her name on TV. You know, that had to stop singing?” Lou Ann realized Granny Logan wouldn’t know NBC from pinto beans. “But I turned out to be fine, of course. And it don’t bother him one bit, does it?” She crooked a finger under the baby’s chin and looked into the foggy blue eyes. “Dwayne Ray’s a Tucson boy, aren’t you?”