Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

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?’ ”