Barbara Kingsolver - The Bean Trees

I had considered putting Turtle’s bed out there on the porch too, but Lou Ann said it wouldn’t be safe, that someone might come along and slash the screen and kidnap her before you could say Jack Robinson. I never would have thought of that.

But it didn’t matter. The house was old and roomy; there was plenty of space for Turtle’s bed in my room. It was the type of house they called a “rambling bungalow” (the term reminded me somehow of Elvis Presley movies), with wainscoting and steam radiators and about fifty coats of paint on the door frames, so that you could use your thumbnail to scrape out a history of all the house’s tenants as far back as the sixties, when people were fond of painting their woodwork apple green and royal blue. The ceilings were so high you just learned to live with the cobwebs.

It wasn’t unreasonably hot yet, and the kids were bouncing around the house like superballs (this was mainly Turtle, with Dwayne Ray’s participation being mainly vocal), so we took them out to sit under the arbor for a while. The wisteria vines were a week or two past full bloom, but the bees and the perfume still hung thick in the air overhead, giving it a sweet purplish hue. If you ignored the rest of the park, you could imagine this was a special little heaven for people who had lived their whole lives without fear of bees.

Lou Ann was full of gossip from her weekend with the Ruiz cousins. Apparently most of them spoke English, all the men were good-looking and loved to dance, and all the women had children Dwayne Ray’s age. She had about decided that every single one of them was nicer than Angel, a conclusion to which they all heartily agreed, even Angel’s mother. A large portion of the flock were preparing to move to San Diego.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, “first Manny and Ramona, you remember, the friends I told you about that saw the meteor shower? And now two of Angel’s brothers and their wives and kids. You’d think they’d discovered gold out there. Angel used to always talk about moving to California too, but I’ll tell you this right now, Mama would have had an apoplectic. She thinks in California they sell marijuana in the produce section of the grocery store.”

“Maybe they do. Maybe that’s why everybody wants to live there.”

“Not me,” Lou Ann said. “Not for a million, and I’ll tell you why, too. In about another year they’re due to have the biggest earthquake in history. I read about it someplace. They say all of San Diego might just end up in the ocean, like noodle soup.”

“I guess the sharks will be happy,” I said.

“Taylor, I swear! These are my relatives you’re talking about.”

“Angel’s relatives,” I said. “You’re practically divorced.”

“Not to hear them tell it,” Lou Ann said.

Turtle was staring up at the wisteria flowers. “Beans,” she said, pointing.

“Bees,” I said. “Those things that go bzzzz are bees.”

“They sting,” Lou Ann pointed out.

But Turtle shook her head. “Bean trees,” she said, as plainly as if she had been thinking about it all day. We looked where she was pointing. Some of the wisteria flowers had gone to seed, and all these wonderful long green pods hung down from the branches. They looked as much like beans as anything you’d ever care to eat.

“Will you look at that,” I said. It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees.

On the way home Lou Ann went to the corner to buy a newspaper. She was seriously job-hunting now, and had applied at a couple of nursery schools, though I could just hear how Lou Ann would ask for a job: “Really, ma’am, I could understand why you wouldn’t want to hire a dumb old thing such as myself.”

Turtle and I walked the other way, since we needed to stop in at the Lee Sing Market for eggs and milk. Lou Ann refused to set foot in there these days, saying that Lee Sing always gave her the evil eye. Lou Ann’s theory was that she was mad at her for having had Dwayne Ray instead of a girl, going against some supposedly foolproof Chinese method of prediction. My theory was that Lou Ann suffered from the same disease as Snowboots: feeling guilty for things beyond your wildest imagination.

In any case, today Lee Sing was nowhere to be seen. She often went back to check on her famous century-old mother, the source of Mattie’s purple beans, whom neither Lou Ann nor I had ever laid eyes on, though not for lack of curiosity. According to Mattie no one had sighted her for years, but you always had the feeling she was back there.

Lee Sing had left her usual sign by the cash register: BE BACK ONE MINUTE, PLEASE DO NO STEAL ANY THING. LEE SING. I spotted Edna Poppy in paper goods, the next aisle over from the dairy case. As best I could see, Edna was sniffing different brands of toilet tissue.

“Edna! Miss Poppy!” I called out. When I needed to call her by name I generally hedged my bets and used both first and last. Her head popped up and she seemed confused, looking all around.

“It’s me, Taylor. Over here.” I came around into the aisle where she had parked her cart. “Where’s Mrs. Parsons today?” I stopped dead in my tracks. Edna had a white cane.

“Virgie is ill in bed with a croup, I’m sorry to say. She sent me out to get fresh lemons and a drop of whiskey. And of course a few other unmentionables.” She smiled, dropping a package of orange toilet paper into the cart. “Can you tell me, dear, if these are lemons or limes I have?” She ran her hand over her goods and held up a lopsided plastic bag of yellow fruits.

Edna Poppy was blind. I stood for a minute staring, trying to reorganize things in my mind the way you would rearrange a roomful of furniture. Edna buying all her clothes in one color, ever since age sixteen. Virgie’s grip on her elbow. I remembered the fantasy I’d constructed the day of our dinner party: Edna happily discovering red bobby pins in the drugstore. I’d had it completely wrong. It would have been Virgie Mae who found them, plucked them down off the rack of Oreo-cookie barrettes, and purchased them for her friend.

“Are you with me, dear?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Lemons. They’re kind of small, but they look just fine.”

When I got home I asked Lou Ann if she knew. She insisted I was making the whole thing up. “Is this a joke?” she kept asking. “Because if it is, it’s a sick one.”

“It’s not a joke. She had a white cane. She asked me if what she had was lemons or limes. Think about it, the way she kind of looks over your head when she talks. The way Virgie leads her around. How Virgie always says everybody’s name when the two of them come into a room.”

Lou Ann was horrified. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my merciful heavens, I feel about this big. When I think about all the times I’ve just bounced over there and said, ‘See ya this! See ya that! Thanks for keeping an eye on Dwayne Ray.’”

“I don’t think she’d mind. Her eyes are her hands. And Virgie. She has her own special ways of keeping an eye on things,” I told Lou Ann, and this seemed to make her feel better.

On Monday afternoon I asked if it would be okay if I went up to see Esperanza. I had never been upstairs at Mattie’s and for some reason I felt it was off limits, but she said fine, to go on up. I went through the cramped study, which of course was still piled high with Mattie’s dead husband’s magazines (I knew by now that he had been dead many years, so it seemed unlikely that his mess would clear up any time soon) and on up the staircase into Mattie’s living room.

It had the same crowded, higgledy-piggledy look as the office downstairs, though the stuff here had more to do with everyday living: junk mail, bills, pencils, magazines with color pictures of people like Tom Selleck and the President (not Jesus), a folded newspaper with a half-worked crossword puzzle, the occasional pliers or screwdriver. It was the type of flotsam and jetsam (a pair of words I had just learned from the dictionary) that washes up on your coffee table, lies around for a week or so, and then makes way for whatever comes in on the next tide.