The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver

  I noticed that practically all the kids' drawings had guns in them somewhere, and huge bullets suspended in the air, hanging on the dotted lines that flowed like waterfalls out of the gun barrels. There were many men in turtle-shaped army helmets. One picture showed a helicopter streaming blood.

  The living room had no windows, just doors opening off in four directions. An older woman came in with a cardboard box and looked at me with surprise, asking something in Spanish. I had never before seen anyone whose entire body looked sad. Her skin just seemed to hang from her, especially from her arms above the elbows, and her jaw.

  "Esperanza," I said, and she nodded toward a door at the back.

  That room seemed to belong in another house--it was empty. The walls were an antique-looking shade of light pink, completely bare except for a cross with two palm fronds stuck behind it, over one of the beds. The two beds were neatly made up with rough-looking blue blankets that surely no one would sleep under in this weather. Esperanza was not in either bed, but sitting up in a straight-backed chair by the window. She looked up when I knocked on the door casement.

  "Hi, I came to see how you were doing."

  She got up from the chair and offered it to me. She sat on the bed. I don't believe she had been doing anything at all, just sitting with her hands in her lap.

  We looked at each other for a second, then looked at other things in the room, of which there were painfully few. I didn't know why I'd thought I'd have the nerve to do this.

  "How are you feeling now? Are you feeling better? Your stomach's okay?" I put my hand on my stomach. Esperanza nodded, then looked at her hands.

  I had lost my directions somewhere when I came into the house. I looked out the window expecting to see Roosevelt Park, but this was not that window. We were at the back of the house. From here you got a terrific bird's-eye view of Lee Sing's back garden. I wondered if you might catch a peek at Lee Sing's old mother from up here, if you stayed at your post long enough.

  "I've been meaning to tell you," I said, "I think Esperanza's a beautiful name. Estevan told me it means to wait, and also to hope. That in Spanish the same word means both things. But I thought it was pretty even before I knew it meant anything. It reminded me of, I don't know, a waterfall or something."

  She nodded.

  "Taylor doesn't mean anything that interesting. A tailor hems up people's pants and stuff like that."

  Her mouth stretched a little bit in the direction of a smile. But her eyes looked blank. Dark, black holes.

  "You understand basically everything I'm saying, right?"

  She nodded again.

  "I think that's how Turtle is, too, but people always forget. They think she doesn't take in any more than she puts out, but I know better, I can tell she understands stuff. It's something about the way she looks at you."

  Esperanza kept staring at her empty hands. I wished I had something to put in them, something that would be wonderful for her to look at.

  "I hope you don't mind me talking about Turtle."

  Her eyes flew up at me like a pair of blackbirds scared out of safe hiding.

  "Estevan told me about Ismene," I said. "I'm sorry. When I first found out you'd taken pills, I couldn't understand it, why you'd do such a thing to yourself. To Estevan. But when he told me that. God, how does a person live with something like that?"

  She looked away. This conversation would have been hard enough even with two people talking. No matter what I said, it was sure to be the exact wrong thing to say to someone who recently swallowed a bottle of baby aspirin. But what would be right? Was there some book in the library where you could look up such things?

  "I guess the main thing I came up here to tell you is, I don't know how you go on, but I really hope you'll keep doing it. That you won't give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is try and think of reasons to stick it out."

  She had tears in her eyes, but that seemed better somehow than nothing at all. "It's terrible to lose somebody," I said, "I mean, I don't know firsthand, but I can imagine it must be. But it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse."

  After a long time I said, "He's crazy about you."

  I went over and took one of the hands in her lap and held it for a second. Her skin felt cold and emptied-out, like there was nobody home.

  As I left to go back to work I saw the woman with the cardboard box, still in the living room. She was sorting through a handful of possessions she had laid out on the sofa--a black skirt, a small book bound in red vinyl, a framed photograph, a pair of baby's sneakers tied together by the laces--and carefully putting them back into the box.

  On Wednesday, just as I was finishing up the last patch of the day and getting ready to head for home, I spotted Lou Ann stepping off the bus at the Roosevelt stop. I yelled for her to wait up, and she came over and talked to me while I used the water hose to wash the black dust off my hands. One thing I can tell you right now about tires: they're dirty business.

  Lou Ann had just been for a job interview at a convenience store on the north side. She'd left Turtle and Dwayne Ray with Edna and Mrs. Parsons.

  "So the first thing the guy says to me is 'We get a lot of armed robberies in here, sweetheart.' He kept on calling me sweetheart and talking to my boobs instead of my face, this big flabby guy with greasy hair and you just know he reads every one of those porno magazines they keep behind the counter. 'Lots of stickups, sweetheart, how do you hold up under pressure?' he says. Holdup, that was his idea of a big hilarious joke. Jeez, the whole thing gave me the creeps from the word go."

  I could see that she had dressed up for this interview: a nice skirt, ironed blouse, stockings, pumps. In this heat. The humiliation of it made me furious."Something better's bound to come along," I said. "You can hold out." I wiped my hands on a towel, hollered goodbye to Mattie, and we headed down the sidewalk.

  "I hate that place," she said, nodding back over her shoulder at Fanny Heaven.

  "Yeah," I said. "But on the bright side, Mattie says they don't do a whole lot of business. She thinks having a place called Jesus Is Lord right next door kind of puts a hex on it."

  Lou Ann shuddered. "That door's what gets me. The way they made that door handle. Like a woman is something you shove on and walk right through. I try to ignore it, but it still gets me."

  "Don't ignore it, then," I said. "Talk back to it. Say, 'You can't do that number on me you shit-for-brains,' or something like that. Otherwise it kind of weasels its way into your head whether you like it or not. You know those hard-boiled eggs they keep around in jars of vinegar, in bars? It's like that. After a while they get to tasting awful, and it's not the egg's fault. What I'm saying is you can't just sit there, you got to get pissed off."

  "You really think so?"

  "I do."

  "The thing about you, Taylor, is that you just don't let anybody put one over on you. Where'd you ever learn to be like that?" Lou Ann wanted to know.

  "Nutter school."

  ELEVEN

  Dream Angels

  In the third week of May, Lou Ann got a job as a packer in the Red Hot Mama's salsa factory. This meant that she stood elbow to elbow with about a hundred other people in a sweaty packing line dicing chiles and tomatillos and crushing garlic cloves into moving vats, with so much salsa slopping onto the floor that by the end of the day it sloshed around their ankles. The few who hoped to preserve their footwear wore those clear, old-fashioned rainboots that button on over your shoes. Most people gave up the effort. On days when they were packing extra hot, their ankles burned as if they were standing on red ant hills.

  The ones that handled the chiles grew accustomed to tingling fingertips, and learned never to touch their eyes or private parts (or anyone else's), not even on their days off. No matter how they scrubbed their hands, the residue of Red Hot Mama had a way of sticking around, as pesty and persistent
as a chapter one at a high school dance.

  Truly this was a sweatshop. Half the time the air conditioner didn't work at all, and all the time the fumes made everyone's eyes water so furiously that contact lenses could not be worn on the premises. Lou Ann's vision was 20/20, so this wasn't a problem, nor was any of the rest of it for that matter. Lou Ann loved her job.

  If Red Hot Mama's had given out enthusiastic-employee awards Lou Ann would have needed a trophy case. She brought home samples and tried out recipes, some of which would eventually be printed on the jar labels, and some of which would not, God willing. She gave us lectures on how the tiniest amount of cilantro could make or break the perfect salsa. Six months ago I'd never heard of salsa. Now I was eating it on anything from avocados to pot roast.

  It came in three speeds: the jars with green lids were "mild," whereas pink meant "hot." The red-lidded jars were so-called "firecracker style." The latter was not a big hit with the kids. Turtle would cry and pant at just the slightest taste, fanning her tongue and eying Lou Ann like she was some spy that had tried to poison us. Dwayne Ray had better sense than to let the stuff enter his mouth.

  "Enough already," I told Lou Ann. "How about we just put the jar on the table and use the honor system?" On my nights to cook I made the blandest things I could think of: broiled white fish and mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese, to give our taste buds a chance to grow back.

  But Lou Ann had bought the company propaganda, hook, line, and sinker. "It's good for you," she said. "Some doctors recommend a teaspoon a day to prevent ulcers. Plus it clears your sinuses."

  I informed Lou Ann that, thank you very much, my sinuses had just about vacated the premises.

  Telling it this way it sounds like a lot of fights, but actually I was liking Lou Ann a great deal these days. In the few weeks since she'd started working, she had begun to cut her hair far less often and finally stopped comparing her figure to various farm animals. Having a job of her own seemed to even out some of Lou Ann's wrinkled edges.

  She mostly worked swing shift, which meant that she left at three in the afternoon, leaving the kids with Edna Poppy and Mrs. Parsons until I came home a couple of hours later. For the longest time Lou Ann was scared to say two words to Edna, for fear she might let slip some reference to eyes. Finally I cleared the air, just stating right out to Edna that for a great while we hadn't realized she was blind, because she got on so well. Edna had just assumed we knew all along. She took it as a compliment, that it wasn't the first thing we noticed about her.

  Once she started swing shift Lou Ann's experimental family dinners, featuring Five-Alarm Casserole and so forth, were limited to her days off. Most of the time I fed the kids and put them to bed before Lou Ann came home at eleven. Then she and I would eat a late supper, or on nights when it was still too hot to look a plate of food in the eye, we'd sit at the kitchen table fanning ourselves in our underwear, reading the paper, and drinking iced coffee. Sleep was hopeless anyway. But mostly we'd talk. At first all she could ever talk about was cilantro and tomatillos and the people at Red Hot Mama's, but after a time things got back to normal. She would leaf through the paper and read me all the disasters.

  "Listen at this: 'Liberty, Kansas. The parents and doctor of severely deformed Siamese twins joined at the frontal lobe of the brain have been accused of attempting to murder the infants by withholding medical care.' Lord, you can't really blame them, can you? I mean, what would you do? Is it better to be totally retarded and deformed and miserable, or just plain old dead?"

  "I honestly couldn't say," I said. "Not having been either one." Although, when I thought about it, being dead seemed a lot like not being born yet, and I hadn't especially minded that. But I didn't give it a lot of thought. I was interested in the weather forecast. We hadn't had a drop of rain since that double-rainbow hailstorm back in January, and the whole world was looking parched. When you walked by a tree or a bush it just looked like it ached, somehow. I had to drag the water hose around to the back every day for Mattie's squash and beans. The noise of the cicadas was enough to drive you to homicide. Mattie said it was their love call, that they mated during the hottest, driest weeks of the year, but it was beyond belief that any creature--even another cicada--would be attracted by that sound. It was a high, screaming buzz, a sound that hurt your eyes and made your skin shrink, a sound in the same class with scratched-up phonograph records and squeaking chalk.

  Lou Ann, who had lived here long enough to make the association, said the sound of the cicadas made her hot. For me it went way beyond that. I used the air hose to blast the accursed insects out of the low branches of the Palo Verde trees around Mattie's, sending them diving and screaming off through the air like bottle rockets. Every time I walked past the mural of Jesus Is Lord I begged Him for rain.

  But every day the paper said: No precipitation expected.

  "Remember that time at the zoo?" Lou Ann asked, still occupied with the Liberty, Kansas, horror. "About those Siamese twins born pregnant, or whatever it was?"

  "I remember the giant turtles," I said.

  Lou Ann laughed. "Now how's a turtle manage to be pregnant, I'd like to know. Do they get maternity shells? I almost feel like going back to see how she's doing."

  "Do you know what Estevan told me?" I asked Lou Ann. "In Spanish, the way to say you have a baby is to say that you give it to the light. Isn't that nice?"

  "You give the baby to the light?"

  "Mmm-hmm." I was reading a piece about earthquakes under the ocean. They cause giant waves, but in a ship you can't feel it at all, it just rolls under you.

  I twisted my hair into a knot to try and get it off my sweaty neck. I looked enviously at Lou Ann's blond head, cropped like a golf course.

  "I was so sure Dwayne Ray was going to be a Siamese twin or something," she said. "Because I was so big. When he was born I had to ask the doctor about fifteen times if he was normal, before it sunk in. I just couldn't believe he was okay."

  "And now you just can't believe he's going to get through a day without strangling or drowning in an ice chest," I said, but in a nice way. I put down the paper and gave Lou Ann my attention. "Why do you think you're such a worry wart, if you don't mind my asking?"

  "Taylor, can I tell you something? Promise you won't tell anybody. Promise me you won't laugh."

  "Cross my heart."

  "I had this dream, one week after he was born. This angel came down, I guess from the sky--I didn't see that part. He was dressed kind of modern, in a suit, you know? With a brown tie? But he was an angel, I'm positive--he had wings. And he said: 'I was sent to you from the future of this planet.' Then he told me my son would not live to see the year two thousand."

  "Lou Ann, please."

  "But no, that's not even the scariest part. The next morning my horoscope said, 'Listen to the advice of a stranger.' Now don't you think that's got to mean something? That part's real, it's not a dream. I cut it out and saved it. And Dwayne Ray's said something about avoiding unnecessary travel, which I took to mean, you know, traveling through life. Not that you could avoid that. So what on earth was I supposed to do? It scared me to death."

  "You were just looking for a disaster, that's all. You can't deny you hunt for them, Lou Ann, even in the paper. If you look hard enough you can always come up with what you want."

  "Am I just completely screwed up, Taylor, or what? I've always been this way. My brother and I used to play this game when we were little, with a cigar box. That box was our best toy. It had this slinky lady in a long red dress on the inside of the lid, with her dress slit way up to here. It's a wonder Granny Logan didn't confiscate it. She was holding out a cigar I think, I s'pose she was a Keno girl or something, but we said she was a gypsy. We'd make believe that you could say to her, 'Myself at the age of fourteen.' Or whatever age, you know, and then we'd look in the box and pretend we could see what we looked like. My brother would go all the way up to ninety. He'd say, 'I see myself with a long beard. I live in a
large white house with seventeen dogs' and on and on. He loved dogs, see, and Mama and Granny would only let him have just Buster. But me, I was such a chicken liver, I'd just go a couple of weeks into the future at the very most. I'd look at myself the day school was going to start in September, maybe, and say, 'I am wearing a new pink dress.' But I'd never, never go up even to twenty or twenty-five. I was scared."

  "Of what?"

  "That I'd be dead. That I'd look in the box and see myself dead."

  "But it was just pretend. You could have seen yourself any way you wanted to."

  "I know it. But that's what I thought I'd see. Isn't that the most ridiculous thing?"

  "Maybe it was because of your father. Maybe you got kind of hung up on death, because of him dying."

  "I'm just totally screwed up, that's all there is to it."

  "No, Lou Ann. You have your good points too."

  Usually Lou Ann spit out compliments you tried to feed her like some kind of nasty pill, but that night her blue eyes were practically pleading with me. "What good points?" she wanted to know.

  "Oh gosh, tons of them," I faltered. It's not that it was a hard question, but I was caught off guard. I thought a minute.

  "The flip side of worrying too much is just not caring, if you see what I mean," I explained. "Dwayne Ray will always know that, no matter what, you're never going to neglect him. You'll never just sit around and let him dehydrate, or grow up without a personality, or anything like that. And that would be ever so much worse. You read about it happening in the paper all the time." I meant it; she did. "Somebody forgetting a baby in a car and letting it roast, or some such thing. If anything, Lou Ann, you're just too good of a mother."

  She shook her head. "I'm just a total screwed-up person," she said. "And now I'm doing the same thing to poor Dwayne Ray. But I can't help it, Taylor, I can't. If I could see the future, if somebody offered to show me a picture of Dwayne Ray in the year 2001, I swear I wouldn't look."

  "Well, nobody's going to," I said gently, "so you don't have to worry about it. There's no such thing as dream angels. Only in the Bible, and that was totally another story."