Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

A kid with orange foam-rubber plugs in his ears whizzed by on a skateboard. Another one whizzed right behind him. They had a fancy way of tipping up their boards to go over the curbs.

“They shouldn’t allow those in here. Somebody will get killed,” Lou Ann said, blowing her nose. I noticed that one of the giant tortoises in the pen was pursuing another one around and around a clump of shrubby palm trees.

“So what about Angel?” I asked.

A woman in a flowery dress sat down on the bench with the country-club woman. She had very dark, tightly wrinkled skin and wore enormous green high-heeled pumps. The country-club woman’s cigarette, on the bench between them, waved up a little boundary line of smoke.

“He said there would be papers to sign for the divorce,” Lou Ann said.

“So what’s the problem, exactly?” I didn’t mean to be unkind. I really didn’t know.

“Well, what am I going to do?”

“Well, to be honest, I don’t think it much matters what you do. It probably doesn’t make any difference what kind of a divorce you get, or even if you get one at all. The man is gone, honey. If he stops sending checks I don’t imagine there’s anything to be done, not if he’s out riding the range in God’s country. I guess you’ll have to look for a job, sooner or later.”

Lou Ann started sobbing again. “Who would want to hire me? I can’t do anything.”

“You don’t necessarily have to know how to do something to get a job,” I reasoned. “I’d never made a trench fry in my life before I got hired at the Burger Derby,” She blew her nose again.

“So how’d she get born pregnant?” the green-shoes woman asked the woman with the newspaper.

“It was twins, a boy and a girl,” the woman told her. “They had sexual intercourse in the womb. Doctors say the chances against it are a million to one.

“Yeah,” the green-shoes woman said in a tired way. She bent over and shuffled through a large paper shopping bag, which was printed with a bright paisley pattern and had sturdy-looking green handles. All three of us waited for her to say something more, or to produce some wonderful answer out of her bag, but she didn’t.

Lou Ann said to me, in a quieter voice, ‘You know, the worst thing about it is that he wouldn’t ask me to come with him.”

“Well, how in the world could you go with him? What about Dwayne Ray?”

“It’s not that I’d want to, but he could have asked. He did say if I wanted to come along he wouldn’t stop me, but he wouldn’t actually say he wanted me to.”

“I don’t follow you, exactly.”

“You know, that was always just the trouble with Angel. I never really felt like he would put up a fight for me. I would have left him a long time ago, but I was scared to death he’d just say, ‘Bye! Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.’ ”

“Well, maybe it’s not that he doesn’t want you, Lou Ann. Maybe he’s just got better sense than to ask you and a four-month-old baby to come along on the Montana-Colorado circuit, or whatever. I can just see it. Dwayne Ray growing up to be one of those tattooed midgets that do somersaults in the sideshow and sell the popcorn at intermission.”

“It’s not a circus, for God’s sake, it’s a rodeo.” Lou Ann honked in her handkerchief and laughed in spite of herself.

At the edge of the pond there was a gumball machine full of peanuts, for feeding to the ducks, I presumed. But these ducks were so well fed that even where peanuts were scattered by the fistful at the water’s edge they just paddled right on by with beady, bored eyes.

Turtle dug one out of the mud and brought it to me. “Bean,” she said.

“This is a peanut,” I told her.

“Beanut.” She made trip after trip, collecting peanuts and mounding them into a pile. Dwayne Ray, in his stroller, was sleeping soundly through his first zoo adventure.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the x-rays, and how Turtle’s body was carrying around secret scars that would always be there. I wanted to talk to Lou Ann about it, but this wasn’t the time.

“So why are you taking his side?” Lou Ann wanted to know.

“I’m not taking his side. Whose side?”

“You are too. Or at least you’re not taking mine. Whenever I complain about Angel you won’t agree with me that he’s a scum bucket. You just listen and don’t say anything.”

I picked up a green bottle cap and threw it in the duck pond. The ducks didn’t even turn their heads. “Lou Ann,” I said, “in high school I used to lose friends that way like crazy. You think he’s a scum bucket now, but sooner or later you might want him back. And then you’d be too embarrassed to look me in the eye and admit you’re still in love with this jerk whose anatomical parts we’ve been laughing about for the last two months.”

“It’s over between me and Angel. I know it is.”

“Just the same. I don’t want you to have to choose him or me.”

She dug through her purse looking for a clean handkerchief. “I just can’t get over him leaving like that.”

“When, now or last October?” I was starting to get annoyed. “He moved out over six months ago, Lou Ann. Did you think he’d just stepped out for some fresh air? It’s April now, for God’s sake.”

“Did you see that?” Lou Ann pointed at Turtle. Her head had bobbed up like an apple on a string, and her eyes fixed on me as if she had seen the Lord incarnate.

“What’s up, Turtle?” I asked, but she just stared fearfully from her pile of peanuts.

“She did that one other time that I know of. When we were talking about the phone bill you thought we’d got gypped on,” Lou Ann said.

“So what are you saying, that she understands when we’re mad? I already knew that.”

“No, I’m saying that bill was for April. She looks up when you say April, especially if you sound mad.”

Turtle did look up again.

“Don’t you get it?” Lou Ann asked.

I didn’t.

“That’s her name! April’s her name!” Now Lou Ann was kind of hopping in her seat. “April, April. Looky here, April. That’s your name, isn’t it? April!”

If it was her name, Turtle had had enough of it. She had gone back to patting the sides of her peanut mound.

“You have to do it scientifically,” I said. “Say a bunch of other words and just casually throw that one in, and see if she looks up.”

“Okay, you do it. I can’t think of enough words.”

“Rhubarb,” I said. “Cucumber. Porky Pig. Budweiser. April.” Turtle looked up right on cue.

“May June July August September!” Lou Ann shouted. “April!”

“Lord, Lou Ann, the child isn’t deaf.”

“It’s April,” she declared. “That’s her legal name.”

“Maybe it’s something that just sounds like April. Maybe it’s Mabel.”

Lou Ann made a face.

“Okay, April, that’s not bad. I think she’s kind of used to Turtle though. I think we ought to keep calling her that now.”

A fat duck with a shiny green head had finally decided Turtle’s cache of peanuts was too much to ignore. He came up on shore and slowly advanced, stretching his neck forward.

“Ooooh, oooh!” Turtle shouted, shaking her hands so vigorously that he wheeled around and waddled back toward the water.

“Turtle’s okay for a nickname,” Lou Ann said, “but you have to think of the future. What about when she goes to school? Or like when she’s eighty years old? Can you picture an eighty-year-old woman being called Turtle?”

“An eighty-year-old Indian woman, I could. You have to remember she’s Indian.”

“Still,” Lou Ann said.

“April Turtle, then.”

“No! That sounds like some weird kind of air freshener.”