Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

While I was downtown I also looked for a late Valentine’s card to send Mama. I still felt kind of awful about leaving her, and changing my name just seemed like the final act of betrayal, but Mama didn’t see it that way. She said I was smarter than anything to think of Taylor, that it fit me like a pair of washed jeans. She told me she’d always had second thoughts about Marietta.

I found just the right card to send her. On the cover there were hearts, and it said, “Here’s hoping you’ll soon have something big and strong around the house to open those tight jar lids.” Inside was a picture of a pipe wrench.

Lou Ann, meanwhile, had bought one of those name-your-baby books in the grocery checkout line. When I came home she had it propped open on the stove and was calling out names from the girl section while she made dinner. Both Turtle and Dwayne Ray were propped up at the table in chairs too big for them. Dwayne Ray’s head was all flopped over, he was too little to hold it up by himself, and he was wiggling toward the floor like Snake Man escaping from his basket. Turtle just sat and stared at nothing. Or rather, at something on the table that was as real to her as Snowboots’s invisible poop was to him.

Lou Ann was banging pot lids to wake the dead and boiling bottles. She had stopped nursing and put Dwayne Ray on formula, saying she was petrified she wouldn’t have enough milk for him.

“Leandra, Leonie, Leonore, Leslie, Letitia,” she called out, watching Turtle over her shoulder as though she expected her to spew out quarters like a slot machine when she hit the right combination of letters.

“Lord have mercy,” I said. “Have you been doing this all the way from the Agathas and Amys?”

“Oh, hi, I didn’t hear you come in.” She acted a little guilty, like a kid caught using swear words. “I thought I’d do half today and the rest tomorrow. You know what? Lou Ann is on the exact middle page. I wonder if my mother had a book like this.”

“The book our mothers had was the Bible, not some fifty-cent dealie they sell from the same rack as the National Enquirer .” I knew very well that none of my various names had come out of a Bible, nor Lou Ann’s either, but I didn’t care. I was just plain in a bad mood. I put Turtle over my shoulder. “What do you really expect her to do if you say the right name, Lou Ann? Jump up and scream and kiss you like the people on those game shows?”

“Don’t be mad at me, Taylor, I’m just trying to help. She worries me. I’m not saying she’s dumb, but it seems like she doesn’t have too much personality.”

“Sure she does,” I said. “She grabs onto things. That’s her personality.”

“Well, no offense, but that’s not personality. Babies do that automatically. I haven’t worked in a hospital or anything, but at least I know that much. Personality has to be something you learn.”

“And reading off a list of every name known to humankind is going to teach her to have personality?”

“Taylor, I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but all the magazines say that you have to play with children to develop their personality.”

“So? I play with her. I bought her a book today.”

“Okay, you play with her. I’m sorry.” Lou Ann ladled soup out of the big pot on the stove and brought bowls over to the table. Her bowl held about two teaspoons of the red-colored broth. She was starving herself to lose the weight she’d gained with Dwayne Ray, which was mostly between her ears as far as I could see.

“This is Russian cabbage-and-beet soup,” she announced. “It’s called borscht. It’s the beets that turn it pink. You’re supposed to put sour cream on top but that just seemed like calories up the kazoo. I got it out of Ladies’ Home Journal .”

I could imagine her licking her index finger and paging through some magazine article called “Toasty Winter Family Pleasers,” trying to find something to do with all that cabbage I kept bringing home from Mattie’s. I fished out a pink potato and mushed it up in Turtle’s bowl.

“It’s good, Lou Ann. Nothing personal, I’m just in a crappy mood.”

“Watch out, there’s peas in there. A child’s windpipe can be blocked by anything smaller than a golf ball.”

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. Nothing on earth was truly harmless. Along with her clip file of Hispanic bank presidents (which she had started to let slide, now that Angel was talking divorce), she saved newspaper stories of every imaginable type of freak disaster. Unsuspecting diners in a restaurant decapitated by a falling ceiling fan. Babies fallen head-first into the beer cooler and drowned in melted ice while the family played Frisbee. A housewife and mother of seven stepping out of a Wick ‘N’ Candle store, only to be shot through the heart by a misfired high-pressure nail gun at a construction site across the street. To Lou Ann’s way of thinking, this proved not only that ice chests and construction sites were dangerous, but also Wick ‘N’ Candle stores and Frisbees.

I promised her that I wouldn’t give Turtle anything smaller than a golf ball. I amused myself by thinking about the cabbage: would you have to take into account the size of one leaf compressed into golf-ball shape? Or could you just consider the size of the entire cabbage and call the whole thing safe?

Lou Ann was fanning a mouthful that was still too hot to swallow. “I can just hear what my Granny Logan would say if I tried to feed her Russian cabbage soup. She’d say we were all going to turn communist.”

Later that night when the kids were in bed I realized exactly what was bugging me: the idea of Lou Ann reading magazines for child-raising tips and recipes and me coming home grouchy after a hard day’s work. We were like some family on a TV commercial, with names like Myrtle and Fred. I could just hear us striking up a conversation about air fresheners.

Lou Ann came in wearing her bathrobe and a blue towel wrapped around her hair. She curled up on the sofa and started flipping through the book of names again.

“Oh, jeez, take this away from me before I start looking at the boy section. There’s probably fifty thousand names better than Dwayne Ray, and I don’t even want to know about them. It’s too late now.”

“Lou Ann, have a beer with me. I want to talk about something, and I don’t want you to get offended.” She took the beer and sat up like I’d given her an order, and I knew this wasn’t going to work.

“Okay, shoot.” The way she said it, you would think I was toting an M-16.

“Lou Ann, I moved in here because I knew we’d get along. It’s nice of you to make dinner for us all, and to take care of Turtle sometimes, and I know you mean well. But we’re acting like Blondie and Dagwood here. All we need is some ignorant little dog named Spot to fetch me my slippers. It’s not like we’re a family , for Christ’s sake. You’ve got your own life to live, and I’ve got mine. You don’t have to do all this stuff for me.”

“But I want to.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

It was like that.

By the time we had worked through our third beers, a bag of deep-fried tortilla chips, a pack of individually-wrapped pimiento-cheese slices and a can of sardines in mustard, Lou Ann was crying. I remember saying something like “I never even had an old man, why would I want to end up acting like one?”

It’s the junk food, I kept thinking. On a diet like this the Bean Curd kids would be speaking in tongues.

All of a sudden Lou Ann went still, with both hands over her mouth. I thought she must be choking (after all her talk about golf balls), and right away thought of the Heimlich Maneuver poster on the wall at Matties store. That’s how often she fed people there. I was trying to remember if you were or were not supposed to slap the person on the back. But then Lou Ann moved her hands from her mouth to her eyes, like two of the three No-Evil monkey brothers.