Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

“I do believe you’re jealous.”

“That is so funny I forgot to laugh.”

“When my brother got married I felt like he’d deserted us. He just sends this letter one day with a little tiny picture, all you could make out really was dogs, and tells us he’s marrying somebody by the name of She-Wolf Who Hunts by the First Light.” Lou Ann yawned and moved farther down the bench so her arms were more in the sun. She’d decided she was too pale and needed a tan.

“Granny Logan liked to died. She kept saying, did Eskimos count as human beings? She thought they were half animal or something. And really what are you supposed to think, with a name like that? But I got used to the idea. I like to think of him up there in Alaska with all these little daughters in big old furry coats. I’ve got in my mind that they live in an igloo, but that can’t be right.”

We were sitting out with the kids in Roosevelt Park, which the neighbor kids called such names as Dead Grass Park and Dog Doo Park. To be honest, it was pretty awful. There were only a couple of shade trees, which had whole dead parts, and one good-for-nothing palm tree so skinny and tall that it threw its shade onto the roof of the cooler-pad factory down the block. The grass was scraggly, struggling to come up between shiny bald patches of dirt. Mostly it put me in mind of an animal with the mange. Constellations of gum-wrapper foil twinkled around the trash barrels.

“Look at it this way, at least she’s still kicking,” Lou Ann said. “I feel like my mama’s whole life stopped counting when Daddy died. You want to know something? They even got this double gravestone. Daddy’s on the right hand side, and the other side’s already engraved for Mama. ‘Ivy Louise Logan, December 2, 1934-to blank.’ Every time I see it it gives me the willies. Like it’s just waiting there for her to finish up her business and die so they can fill in the blank.”

“It does seem like one foot in the grave,” I said.

“If Mama ever got married again I’d dance a jig at her wedding. I’d be thrilled sideways. Maybe it would get her off my back about moving back in with her and Granny.” Dwayne Ray coughed in his sleep, and Lou Ann pushed his stroller back and forth two or three times. Turtle was pounding the dirt with a plastic shovel, a present from Mattie.

“Cabbage, cabbage, cabbage,” she said.

Lou Ann said, “I know a guy that would just love her. Did you ever know that fellow downtown that sold vegetables out of his truck?” But Turtle and Bobby Bingo would never get to discuss their common interest. He had disappeared, probably to run off with somebody’s mother.

“Your mother wouldn’t be marrying Harland Elleston,” I told Lou Ann, getting back to the subject at hand.

“Of course not! That big hunk is already spoken for.”

“Lou Ann, you’re just making a joke of this whole thing.”

“Well, I can’t help it, I wouldn’t care if my mother married the garbage man.”

“But Harland Elleston! He’s not even…” I was going to say he’s not even related to us, but of course that wasn’t what I meant. “He’s got warts on his elbows and those eyebrows that meet in the middle.”

“I’ll swan, Taylor, you talk about men like they’re a hangnail. To hear you tell it, you’d think man was only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.”

“That’s not true, I like Estevan.” My heart sort of bumped when I said this. I knew exactly how it would look on an EKG machine: two little peaks and one big one.

“He’s taken. Who else?”

“Just because I don’t go chasing after every Tom’s Harry Dick that comes down the pike.”

“Who else? You never have one kind thing to say about any of your old boyfriends.”

“Lou Ann, for goodness’ sakes. In Pittman County there was nothing in pants that was worth the trouble, take my word for it. Except for this one science teacher, and the main thing he had going for him was clean fingernails.” I’d never completely realized how limited the choices were in Pittman. Poor Mama. If only I could have gotten her to Tucson.

“Well, where in the heck do you think I grew up, Paris, France?”

“I notice you didn’t stick with home-grown either. You had to ride off with a Wild West rodeo boy.”

“Fat lot of good it did me, too.”

“Well, you did get Dwayne Ray out of the deal.” I remembered what Mama always said about me and the Jackson Purchase.

“But oh, Taylor, if you could have seen him. How handsome he was.” She had her eyes closed and her face turned up toward the sun. “The first time I laid eyes on him he was draped on this fence like the Marlboro man, with his arms out to the sides and one boot up on the bottom rung. Just chewing on a match and hanging out till it was time to turn out the next bull. And do you know what else?” She sat up and opened her eyes.

“What?” I said.

“Right at that exact moment there was this guy in the ring setting some kind of a new world’s record for staying on a bull, and everybody was screaming and throwing stuff and of course me and my girlfriend Rachel had never seen a rodeo before so we thought this was the wildest thing since Elvis joined the army. But Angel didn’t even look up. He just squinted off at the distance toward the hay field behind the snack bar. Rachel said, ‘Look at that tough guy over by that fence, what an asshole, not even paying attention.’ And you know what I thought to myself? I thought, I bet I could get him to pay attention to me.”

A child in a Michael Jackson tank shirt rumbled down the gravel path on a low-slung trike with big plastic wheels, making twice as much noise as his size would seem to allow for. “This is a O-R-V,” he told us. Now I knew.

“I know you.” He pointed at Lou Ann. “You’re the one gives out money at Halloween.”

Lou Ann rolled her eyes. “I’m never going to live that down. This year they’ll be coming in from Phoenix and Flagstaff to beat down our door.”

“Watch out when the bums come,” he told us. “Go straight home.” He tore off again, pedaling like someone possessed.

The gravel path cut through the middle of the park from a penis-type monument, up at the street near Matties, down to the other end where we liked to sit in a place Lou Ann called the arbor. It was the nicest thing about the park. The benches sat in a half-circle underneath an old wooden trellis that threw a shade like a cross-stitched tablecloth. The trellis had thick, muscly vines twisting up its support poles and fanning out overhead. Where they first came out of the ground, they reminded me of the arms of this guy who’d delivered Mattie’s new refrigerator by himself. All winter Lou Ann had been telling me they were wisteria vines. They looked dead to me, like everything else in the park, but she always said, “Just you wait.”

And she was right. Toward the end of March they had sprouted a fine, shivery coat of pale leaves and now they were getting ready to bloom. Here and there a purplish lip of petal stuck out like a pout from a fat green bud. Every so often a bee would hang humming in the air for a few seconds, checking on how the flowers were coming along. You just couldn’t imagine where all this life was coming from. It reminded me of that Bible story where somebody or other struck a rock and the water poured out. Only this was better, flowers out of bare dirt. The Miracle of Dog Doo Park.

Lou Ann went on endlessly about Mama. “I can just see your mama… What’s her name, anyway?”

“Alice,” I said. “Alice Jean Stamper Greer. The last thing she needs is an Elleston on top of all that.”

“… I can just see Alice and Harland running for the sugar shack. If she’s anything like you, she goes after what she wants. I guess now she’ll be getting all the paint and body jobs she needs.”