The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver

  I remembered my gas-station travel brochures. "Sure," I said. "It's a place they set aside for birds, where nobody's allowed to shoot them."

  "That's right. They've got them for people too." This was all she was inclined to say on the subject.

  Usually the people were brought and taken away by the blue-jeans priest in the station wagon I'd seen that first day. He also wore an interesting belt buckle, not with a scorpion but with an engraving of a small stick figure lost in a kind of puzzle. Mattie said it was an Indian symbol of life: the man in the maze. The priest was short, with a muscular build and white-blond, unruly hair, not really my type but handsome in a just-rolled-out-of-bed kind of way, though I suppose that saying such things about a priest must be some special category of sin. His name was Father William.

  When Mattie introduced us I said, "Pleased to meet you," making an effort not to look at his belt buckle. What had popped into my head was "You are old, Father William." Now where did that come from? He was hardly old, and even if he were, this isn't something you'd say.

  He and Mattie went to the back of the shop to discuss something over coffee and pie while I held down the fort. It came to me a little later while I was testing a stack of old whitewalls, dunking them in the water and marking a yellow chalk circle around each leak. I remembered three drawings of a little round man: first standing on his head, then balancing an eel straight up on his nose, then kicking a boy downstairs. "You Are Old, Father William" was a poem in a book I'd had as a child. It had crayon scribbles on some pages, so it must have been a donation from one of Mama's people whose children had grown up. Only a rich child would be allowed to scribble in a hardback book.

  I decided that after work I would go down to one of Sandi's New To You toy stores and find a book for Turtle. New To You was just like Mama's people, only you had more choice about what you got.

  After I had marked all the tires I rolled them across the lot and stacked them into leaky and good piles. I congratulated myself on my steady hand, but later in the day Mattie saw me jump when some hotdog Chevy backfired out in the street. She was with a customer, but later she came over and said she'd been meaning to ask what I was always so jumpy about. I thought of that column in Reader's Digest where you write in and tell your most embarrassing moment. Those were all cute: "The Day My Retriever Puppy Retrieved the Neighbor's Lingerie Off the Clothes Line." In real life, your most embarrassing moment is the last thing in the world you would want printed in Reader's Digest.

  "Nothing," I said.

  We stood for a minute with our hands folded into our armpits. Mattie's gray bangs were more salt than they were pepper, cut high and straight across, and her skin always looked a little sunburned. The wrinkles around her eyes reminded me of her Tony Lama boots.

  Mattie was like a rock in the road. You could stare at her till the cows came home, but it wouldn't budge the fact of her one inch.

  "Just don't tell me you're running from the law," she said finally. "I've got enough of that on my hands."

  "No." I wondered what exactly she meant by that. Out on the street a boy coasted by on a bicycle, his elbow clamped over a large framed picture of a sportscar. "I have a fear of exploding tires," I said.

  "Well, of all things," she said.

  "I know. I didn't ever tell you because it sounds chickenshit." I stopped to consider if you ought to say "chickenshit" in a place called Jesus Is Lord's, but then the damage was done. "Really it's not like it sounds. I don't think there's a thing you could name that I'm afraid of, other than that."

  "Of all things," she said again. I imagined that she was looking at me the way you do when you first notice someone is deformed. In sixth grade we had a new teacher for three weeks before we realized his left hand was missing. He always kept his hanky over it. We'd just thought it was allergies.

  "Come over here a minute," Mattie said. "I'll show you something." I followed her across the lot. She took a five-gallon jerry can, the type that Jeeps have strapped on their backs, and filled it a little better than halfway up with water.

  "Whoa!" I said. While I wasn't paying attention she'd thrown the heavy can at me. I caught it, though it came near to bowling me over.

  "Knocked the wind out of you, but it didn't kill you, right?"

  "Right," I said.

  "That's twenty-eight pounds of water. Twenty-eight pounds of air is about what you put in a tire. When it hits you, that's what it feels like."

  "If you say so," I said. "But I saw a guy get blown up in the air once by a tire. All the way over the Standard Oil sign. It was a tractor tire."

  "Well that's another whole can of beans," Mattie said. "If we get a tractor tire in here, I'll handle it."

  I had never thought of tire explosions in relative terms, though it stood to reason that some would be worse than others. By no means did this put my fears to rest, but still I felt better somehow. What the hell. Live free or bust.

  "Okay," I said. "We'll handle it together, how's that?"

  "That's a deal, hon."

  "Can I put this down now?"

  "Sure, put it down." She said it in a serious way, as if the can of water were some important damaged auto part we'd been discussing. I blessed Mattie's soul for never laughing at any point in this conversation. "Better yet," she said, "pour it out on those sweet peas."

  There was a whole set of things I didn't understand about plants, such as why hadn't the sweet peas been killed by the frost? The same boy sped by again on his bike, or possibly a different boy. This time he had a bunch of roses in a white paper funnel tucked under his arm. While the water glugged out over the sweet peas I noticed Mattie looking at me with her arms crossed. Just watching. I missed Mama so much my chest hurt.

  Turtle had managed to get through her whole life without a book, I suppose, and then had two of them bought for her in one day. I got her one called Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House, which showed pictures of Old MacDonald growing celery in windowboxes and broccoli in the bathtub and carrots under the living-room rug. Old MacDonald's downstairs neighbors could see the carrots popping down through the ceiling. I bought it because it reminded me of Mattie, and because it had stiff pages that I hoped might stand up to Turtle's blood-out-of-turnips grip.

  While I was downtown I also looked for a late Valentine's card to send Mama. I still felt kind of awful about leaving her, and changing my name just seemed like the final act of betrayal, but Mama didn't see it that way. She said I was smarter than anything to think of Taylor, that it fit me like a pair of washed jeans. She told me she'd always had second thoughts about Marietta.

  I found just the right card to send her. On the cover there were hearts, and it said, "Here's hoping you'll soon have something big and strong around the house to open those tight jar lids." Inside was a picture of a pipe wrench.

  Lou Ann, meanwhile, had bought one of those name-your-baby books in the grocery checkout line. When I came home she had it propped open on the stove and was calling out names from the girl section while she made dinner. Both Turtle and Dwayne Ray were propped up at the table in chairs too big for them. Dwayne Ray's head was all flopped over, he was too little to hold it up by himself, and he was wiggling toward the floor like Snake Man escaping from his basket. Turtle just sat and stared at nothing. Or rather, at something on the table that was as real to her as Snowboots's invisible poop was to him.

  Lou Ann was banging pot lids to wake the dead and boiling bottles. She had stopped nursing and put Dwayne Ray on formula, saying she was petrified she wouldn't have enough milk for him.

  "Leandra, Leonie, Leonore, Leslie, Letitia," she called out, watching Turtle over her shoulder as though she expected her to spew out quarters like a slot machine when she hit the right combination of letters.

  "Lord have mercy," I said. "Have you been doing this all the way from the Agathas and Amys?"

  "Oh, hi, I didn't hear you come in." She acted a little guilty, like a kid caught using swear words. "I thought I'd do half today and
the rest tomorrow. You know what? Lou Ann is on the exact middle page. I wonder if my mother had a book like this."

  "The book our mothers had was the Bible, not some fifty-cent dealie they sell from the same rack as the National Enquirer." I knew very well that none of my various names had come out of a Bible, nor Lou Ann's either, but I didn't care. I was just plain in a bad mood. I put Turtle over my shoulder. "What do you really expect her to do if you say the right name, Lou Ann? Jump up and scream and kiss you like the people on those game shows?"

  "Don't be mad at me, Taylor, I'm just trying to help. She worries me. I'm not saying she's dumb, but it seems like she doesn't have too much personality."

  "Sure she does," I said. "She grabs onto things. That's her personality."

  "Well, no offense, but that's not personality. Babies do that automatically. I haven't worked in a hospital or anything, but at least I know that much. Personality has to be something you learn."

  "And reading off a list of every name known to humankind is going to teach her to have personality?"

  "Taylor, I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but all the magazines say that you have to play with children to develop their personality."

  "So? I play with her. I bought her a book today."

  "Okay, you play with her. I'm sorry." Lou Ann ladled soup out of the big pot on the stove and brought bowls over to the table. Her bowl held about two teaspoons of the red-colored broth. She was starving herself to lose the weight she'd gained with Dwayne Ray, which was mostly between her ears as far as I could see.

  "This is Russian cabbage-and-beet soup," she announced. "It's called borscht. It's the beets that turn it pink. You're supposed to put sour cream on top but that just seemed like calories up the kazoo. I got it out of Ladies' Home Journal."

  I could imagine her licking her index finger and paging through some magazine article called "Toasty Winter Family Pleasers," trying to find something to do with all that cabbage I kept bringing home from Mattie's. I fished out a pink potato and mushed it up in Turtle's bowl.

  "It's good, Lou Ann. Nothing personal, I'm just in a crappy mood."

  "Watch out, there's peas in there. A child's windpipe can be blocked by anything smaller than a golf ball."

  For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. Nothing on earth was truly harmless. Along with her clip file of Hispanic bank presidents (which she had started to let slide, now that Angel was talking divorce), she saved newspaper stories of every imaginable type of freak disaster. Unsuspecting diners in a restaurant decapitated by a falling ceiling fan. Babies fallen head-first into the beer cooler and drowned in melted ice while the family played Frisbee. A housewife and mother of seven stepping out of a Wick 'N' Candle store, only to be shot through the heart by a misfired high-pressure nail gun at a construction site across the street. To Lou Ann's way of thinking, this proved not only that ice chests and construction sites were dangerous, but also Wick 'N' Candle stores and Frisbees.

  I promised her that I wouldn't give Turtle anything smaller than a golf ball. I amused myself by thinking about the cabbage: would you have to take into account the size of one leaf compressed into golf-ball shape? Or could you just consider the size of the entire cabbage and call the whole thing safe?

  Lou Ann was fanning a mouthful that was still too hot to swallow. "I can just hear what my Granny Logan would say if I tried to feed her Russian cabbage soup. She'd say we were all going to turn communist."

  Later that night when the kids were in bed I realized exactly what was bugging me: the idea of Lou Ann reading magazines for child-raising tips and recipes and me coming home grouchy after a hard day's work. We were like some family on a TV commercial, with names like Myrtle and Fred. I could just hear us striking up a conversation about air fresheners.

  Lou Ann came in wearing her bathrobe and a blue towel wrapped around her hair. She curled up on the sofa and started flipping through the book of names again.

  "Oh, jeez, take this away from me before I start looking at the boy section. There's probably fifty thousand names better than Dwayne Ray, and I don't even want to know about them. It's too late now."

  "Lou Ann, have a beer with me. I want to talk about something, and I don't want you to get offended." She took the beer and sat up like I'd given her an order, and I knew this wasn't going to work.

  "Okay, shoot." The way she said it, you would think I was toting an M-16.

  "Lou Ann, I moved in here because I knew we'd get along. It's nice of you to make dinner for us all, and to take care of Turtle sometimes, and I know you mean well. But we're acting like Blondie and Dagwood here. All we need is some ignorant little dog named Spot to fetch me my slippers. It's not like we're a family, for Christ's sake. You've got your own life to live, and I've got mine. You don't have to do all this stuff for me."

  "But I want to."

  "But I don't want you to."

  It was like that.

  By the time we had worked through our third beers, a bag of deep-fried tortilla chips, a pack of individually-wrapped pimiento-cheese slices and a can of sardines in mustard, Lou Ann was crying. I remember saying something like "I never even had an old man, why would I want to end up acting like one?"

  It's the junk food, I kept thinking. On a diet like this the Bean Curd kids would be speaking in tongues.

  All of a sudden Lou Ann went still, with both hands over her mouth. I thought she must be choking (after all her talk about golf balls), and right away thought of the Heimlich Maneuver poster on the wall at Mattie's store. That's how often she fed people there. I was trying to remember if you were or were not supposed to slap the person on the back. But then Lou Ann moved her hands from her mouth to her eyes, like two of the three No-Evil monkey brothers.

  "Oh, God," she said. "I'm drunk."

  "Lou Ann, you've had three beers."

  "That's all it takes. I never drink. I'm scared to death of what might happen."

  I was interested. This house was full of surprises. But this turned out to be nothing like the cat. Lou Ann said what she was afraid of was just that she might lose control and do something awful.

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. How do I know? Just something. I feel like the only reason I have any friends at all is because I'm always careful not to say something totally dumb, and if I blow it just one time, then that's it."

  "Lou Ann, honey, that's a weird theory of friendship."

  "No, I mean it. For the longest time after Angel left I kept thinking back to this time last August when his friend Manny and his wife Ramona came over and we all went out to the desert to look at the shooting stars? There was supposed to be a whole bunch of them, a shower, they were saying on the news. But we kept waiting and waiting, and in the meantime we drank a bottle of Jose Cuervo plumb down to the worm. The next morning Angel kept saying, 'Man, can you believe that meteor shower? What, you don't even remember it?' I honestly couldn't remember a thing besides looking for the star sapphire from Ramona's ring that had plunked out somewhere. It turned out she'd lost it way before. She found it at home in their dog's dish, can you believe it?"

  I was trying to fit Angel into some pigeonhole or other in the part of my brain that contained what I knew about men. I liked this new version of an Angel who would go out looking for shooting stars, but hated what I saw of him the next morning, taunting Lou Ann about something that had probably never even happened.

  "Maybe he was pulling your leg," I said. "Maybe there never was any meteor shower. Did you ask Ramona?"

  "No. I never thought of that. I just assumed."

  "Well, why don't you call her up and ask?"

  "She and Manny moved to San Diego," she wailed. You'd think they had moved for the sole purpose of keeping this information from Lou Ann.

  "Well, I'm sorry."

  She persisted. "But that's not even really the point. It wasn't just that I'd missed something important. I kept on thinking that if I could miss a whole meteor shower, well, I'd pr
obably done something else ridiculous. For all I know I could've run naked through the desert singing 'Skip to My Lou.'"

  I shuddered. All those spiny pears and prickly whatsits.

  She stared mournfully into the empty bag of chips.

  "And now it's Valentine's Day," she said. "And everybody else in the whole wide world is home with their husband smooching on the couch and watching TV, but not Lou Ann, no sir. I ran off both my husband and the TV."

  I couldn't even think where to begin on this one. I thought of another one of Mama's hog sayings: "Hogs go deaf at harvest time." It meant that people would only hear what they wanted to hear. Mama was raised on a hog farm.

  Lou Ann looked abnormally flattened against the back of the sofa. I thought of her father, who she'd told me was killed when his tractor overturned. They'd found him pressed into a mud bank, and when they pulled him out he left a perfect print. "A Daddy print," she'd called it, and she'd wanted to fill the hole with plaster of Paris to keep him, the way she'd done with her hand print in school for Mother's Day.

  "I always wondered if that night we got drunk had something to do with why I lost him," she said. I was confused for a second, still thinking of her father.

  "I thought you were glad when Angel left."

  "I guess I was. But still, you know, something went wrong. You're supposed to love the same person your whole life long till death do you part and all that. And if you don't, well, you've got to have screwed up somewhere."

  "Lou Ann, you read too many magazines." I went into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator for about the fifteenth time that night. It was still the same: cabbages and peanut butter. I opened a cabinet and peered behind the cans of refried beans and tomato sauce. There was a bottle of black-strap molasses, a box of Quick Hominy Grits, and a can of pink salmon. I considered all of these things in various combinations, then settled for another bag of tortilla chips. This is what happens to people without TVs, I thought. They die of junk food.

  When I came back to the living room she was still depressed about Angel. "I'll tell you my theory about staying with one man your whole life long," I said. "Do you know what a flapper ball is?"