The Bean Trees

  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?'"

  "Exactly! It's like, did you ever have this feeling when you're standing next to a cliff, say, or by an upstairs window, and you can just picture yourself jumping out? The worst time it happened to me was in high school. On our senior trip we went to the state capitol, which is at Frankfort. Of course, you know that, what am I saying? So, what happened was, you can go way up in the dome and there's only this railing and you look down and the people are like little miniature ants. And I saw myself just hoisting my leg and going over. I just froze up. I thought: if I can think it, I might do it. My boyfriend, which at that time was Eddie Tubbs, it was way before I met Angel, thought it was fear of heights and told everybody on the bus on the way home that I had ackero-phobia, but it was way more
complicated than that. I mean, ackero-phobia doesn't have anything to do with being afraid you'll holler out something god-awful in church, does it?"

  "No," I said. "I think what you mean is a totally different phobia. Fear that the things you imagine will turn real."

  Lou Ann was staring at me, transfixed. "You know, I think you're the first person I've ever told this to that understood what I was talking about."

  I shrugged. "I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can't remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench."

  The six o'clock news was half over by the time we got the TV plugged in. There had been a mix-up with the women next door, who were waiting for us to come over and get the television. They didn't realize they had been invited for dinner.

  Meanwhile, Estevan and Esperanza arrived. Estevan played the gentleman flirt, saying how nice I looked, and didn't he perhaps know my tomboy sister who worked with a used-tire firm? "Exquisite" was what he actually said, and "tom boy" as if it were two words. I batted my eyelashes and said yes indeed, that she was the sister who got all the brains of the family.

  I suppose I did look comparatively elegant. Lou Ann had parted my hair on the side ("What you need is one of those big blowzy white flowers behind one ear," she said, and "God, would I kill for black hair like yours." "Kill what?" I asked. "A skunk?") and forced me into a dress she had purchased "before Dwayne Ray" in an uptown thrift shop. It was one of those tight black satin Chinese numbers you have to try on with a girlfriend--you hold your breath while she zips you in. I only agreed to wear it because I thought sharing our clothes might shut her up about being a Sherman tank. And because it fit.

  But Esperanza was the one who truly looked exquisite. She wore a long, straight dress made of some amazing woven material that brought to mind the double rainbow Turtle and I saw on our first day in Tucson: twice as many colors as you ever knew existed.

  "Is this from Guatemala?" I asked.

  She nodded. She looked almost happy.

  "Sometimes I get homesick for Pittman and it's as ugly as a mud stick fence," I said. "A person would have to just ache for a place where they make things as beautiful as this."

  Poor Lou Ann was on the phone with Mrs. Parsons for the fourth time in ten minutes, and apparently still hadn't gotten it straight because Mrs. Parsons and Edna walked in the front door with the TV just as Lou Ann ran out the back to get it.

  One of the women led the way and the other, who appeared to be the older of the two, carried the set by its handle, staggering a little with the weight like a woman with an overloaded purse. I rushed to take it from her and she seemed a little startled when the weight came up out of her hands. "Oh my, I thought it had sprouted wings," she said. She told me she was Edna Poppy.

  I liked her looks. She had bobbed, snowy hair and sturdy, wiry arms and was dressed entirely in red, all the way down to her perky patent-leather shoes.

  "Pleased to meet you," I said. "I love your outfit. Red's my color."

  "Mine too," she said.

  Mrs. Parsons had on a churchy-looking dress and a small, flat white hat with a dusty velveteen bow. She didn't seem too friendly, but of course we were all dashing around trying to get set up. I didn't even know what channel we were looking for until Mattie's face loomed up strangely in black and white.

  Signatory to the United Nations something-something on human rights, Mattie was saying, and that means we have a legal obligation to take in people whose lives are in danger.

  A man with a microphone clipped to his tie asked her, What about legal means? And something about asylum. They were standing against a brick building with short palm trees in front. Mattie said that out of some-odd thousand Guatemalans and Salvadorans who had applied for this, only one-half of one percent of them had been granted it, and those were mainly relatives of dictators, not the people running for their lives.

  Then the TV showed both Mattie and the interview man talking without sound, and another man's voice told us that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had returned two illegal aliens, a woman and her son, to their native El Salvador last week, and that Mattie "claimed" they had been taken into custody when they stepped off the plane in San Salvador and later were found dead in a ditch. I didn't like this man's tone. I had no idea how Mattie would know such things, but if she said it was so, it was.

  But it was all garbled anyhow. Mrs. Parsons had been talking the whole time about not being able to sit in a certain type of chair or her back would go out, and then Lou Ann flew in the back door and called out, "Damn it, they're not home. Oh."

  Mrs. Parsons made a little sniffing sound. "We're here, if you want to know."

  "What program did you want to see?" Edna asked. "I hope we haven't spoiled it by coming late?"

  "That was it, we just saw it," I said, though it seemed ridiculous. Thirty seconds and it was all over. "She's a friend of ours," I explained.

  "All I could make out was some kind of trouble with illegal aliens and dope peddlers," said Mrs. Parsons. "Dear, I need a pillow for the small of my back or I won't be able to get out of bed tomorrow. Your cat has just made dirt in the other room."

  I went for a cushion and Lou Ann rushed to put the cat out. Estevan and Esperanza, I realized, had been sitting together on the ottoman the whole time, more or less on the fringe of all the commotion. I said, "I'd like you to meet my friends..."

  "Steven," Estevan said, "and this is my wife, Hope." This was a new one on me.

  "Pleased to make your acquaintance," Edna said.

  Mrs. Parsons said, "And is this naked creature one of theirs? She looks like a little wild Indian." She was talking about Turtle, who was not naked, although she didn't exactly have a shirt on.

  "We have no children," Estevan said. Esperanza looked as though she had been slapped across the face.

  "She's mine," I said. "And she is a little wild Indian, as a matter of fact. Why don't we start dinner?" I picked up Turtle and stalked off into the kitchen, leaving Lou Ann to fend for herself. Why she would call this old pruneface a nice lady was beyond my mental powers. I did the last-minute cooking, which the recipe said you were supposed to do "at the table in a sizzling work before the admiring guests." A sizzling wok, my hind foot. Who did they think read those magazines?

  A minute later Esperanza came into the kitchen and quietly helped set the table. I touched her arm. "I'm sorry," I said.

  It wasn't until everyone came in and sat down to dinner that I really had a chance to look these women over. The fact that they couldn't possibly have had time to dress up for dinner made their outfits seem to tell everything. (Though of course Mrs. Parsons would have had time to powder her nose and reach for the little white hat.) Edna even had red bobby pins in her hair, two over each ear. I couldn't imagine where you would buy such items, a drugstore I suppose. I liked thinking about Edna finding them there on the rack, along with the purple barrettes and Oreo-cookie hair clips, and saying, "Why, look, Virgie Mae, red bobby pins! That's my color." Virgie Mae would be the type to sail past the douche aisle with her nose in the air and lecture the boy at the register for selling condoms.

  Estevan produced a package, which turned out to be chopsticks. There were twenty or so of them wrapped together in crackly cellophane with black Chinese letters down one side. "A gift for the dishwasher," he said, handing each of us a pair of sticks. "You use them once, then throw them away." I couldn't think how he knew we were going to have Chinese food, but then I remembered running into him a day or two ago in the Lee Sing Market, where we'd discussed a product called "wood ears." The recipe called for them, but I had my principles.

  "The dishwasher thanks you," I said. I noticed Lou Ann whisking a pair out of Dwayne Ray's reach, and could hear the words "put his eyes out" as plainly as if she'd said them aloud. Dwayne Ray started squalling, and Lou Ann excused herself to go put him to bed.

  "What is it, eating sticks?" E
dna ran her fingers along the thin shafts. "It sounds like a great adventure, but I'll just stick to what I know, if you don't mind. Thank you all the same." I noticed that Edna ate very slowly, with gradual, exact movements of her fork. Mrs. Parsons said she wasn't game for such foolishness either.

  "I never said it was foolishness," Edna said.

  The rest of us gave it a try, spearing pieces of chicken and looping green-pepper rings and chasing the rice around our plates. Even Esperanza tried. Estevan said we were being too aggressive.

  "They are held this way." He demonstrated, holding them like pencils in one hand and clicking the ends together. I loved his way of saying, "It is" and "They are."

  Turtle was watching me, imitating. "Don't look at me, I'm not the expert." I pointed at Estevan.

  Lou Ann came back to the table. "Where'd you learn how to do that?" she asked Estevan.

  "Ah," he said, "this is why I like chopsticks: I work in a Chinese restaurant. I am the dishwasher."

  "I didn't know that. How long have you worked there?" I asked, realizing that I had no business thinking I knew everything about Estevan. His whole life, really, was a mystery to me.

  "One month," he said. "I work with a very kind family who speak only Chinese. Only the five-year-old daughter speaks English. The father has her explain to me what I must do. Fortunately, she is very patient."

  Mrs. Parsons muttered that she thought this was a disgrace. "Before you know it the whole world will be here jibbering and jabbering till we won't know it's America."

  "Virgie, mind your manners," Edna said.

  "Well, it's the truth. They ought to stay put in their own dirt, not come here taking up jobs."

  "Virgie," Edna said.

  I felt like I'd sat on a bee. If Mama hadn't brought me up to do better, I think I would have told that old snake to put down her fork and get her backside out the door. I wanted to scream at her: This man you are looking at is an English teacher. He did not come here so he could wash egg foo yung off plates and take orders from a five-year-old.