The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
I began to suspect that sharing harmonious space with an insightful Virgo might require even greater credentials than being a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona.
The main consideration, though, was whether or not I could locate the address on my Sun-Tran maps of all the various bus routes. At the end of the week I made up my mind to check out a couple of possibilities. One ad said, among other things, "Must be open to new ideas." The other said, "New mom needs company. Own room, low rent, promise I won't bother you. Kids ok." The first sounded like an adventure, and the second sounded like I wouldn't have to pass a test. I put on a pair of stiff, clean jeans and braided my hair and gave Turtle a bath in the sink. She had acquired clothes of her own by now, but just for old time's sake I put her in my DAMN I'M GOOD T-shirt from Kentucky Lake. Just for luck.
Both places were near downtown. The first was a big old ramshackle house with about twelve kinds of wind chimes hanging on the front porch. One was made from the silver keys of some kind of musical instrument like a flute or clarinet, and even Turtle seemed interested in it. A woman came to the door before I even knocked.
She let me inside and called out, "The prospective's here." Three silver earrings--a half moon, a star, and a grinning sun--dangled from holes in her left ear so that she clinked when she walked like some human form of wind chime. She was barefoot and had on a skirt that reminded me of the curtains in my room at the Republic. There was no actual furniture in the room, only a colorful rug and piles of pillows here and there, so I waited to see what she would do. She nested herself into one of the piles, flouncing her skirt out over her knees. I noticed that she had thin silver rings on four of her toes.
Another woman came out of the kitchen door, through which I was relieved to see a table and chairs. A tall, thin guy with a hairless chest hunkered in another doorway for a minute, rubbing a head of orange hair that looked like a wet cat. He had on only those beachcomber-type pants held up by a fake rope. I really couldn't tell how old these people were. I kept expecting a parent to show up in another doorway and tell Beach Blanket Bingo to put on his shirt, but then, they could have been older than me. We all settled down on the pillows.
"I'm Fay," the toe-ring woman said, "spelled F-E-I, and this is La-Isha and that's Timothy. You'll have to excuse Timothy; he used caffeine yesterday and now his homeostasis is out of balance." I presumed they were talking about his car, although I was not aware of any automotive uses for caffeine.
"That's too bad," I said. "I wouldn't do anything with caffeine but drink it."
They all stared at me for a while.
"Oh. I'm Taylor. This is Turtle."
"Turtle. Is that a spirit name?" La-Isha asked.
"Sure," I said.
La-Isha was thick-bodied, with broad bare feet and round calves. Her dress was a sort of sarong, printed all over with black and orange elephants and giraffes, and she had a jungly-looking scarf wrapped around her head. And to think they used to stare at me for wearing red and turquoise together. Drop these three in Pittman County and people would run for cover.
F-E-I took charge of the investigation. "Would the child be living here too?"
"Right. We're a set."
"That's cool, I have no problem with small people," she said. "La-Isha, Timothy?"
"It's not really what I was thinking in terms of, but I can see it happening. I'm flex on children," La-Isha said, after giving it some thought. Timothy said he thought the baby was cute, asked if it was a boy or a girl.
"A girl," I said, but I was drowned out by Fei saying, "Timothy, I really don't see that that's an issue here." She said to me, "Gender is not an issue in this house."
"Oh," I said. "Whatever."
"What does she eat?" La-Isha wanted to know.
"Mainly whatever she can get her hands on. She had half a hot dog with mustard for breakfast."
There was another one of those blank spells in the conversation. Turtle was grumpily yanking at a jingle bell on the corner of a pillow, and I was beginning to feel edgy myself. All those knees and chins at the same level. It reminded me of an extremely long movie I had once seen about an Arabian sheik. Maybe La-Isha is Arabian, I thought, though she looked very white, with blond hair on her arms and pink rims around her eyes. Possibly an albino Arabian. I realized she was giving a lecture of some kind.
"At least four different kinds of toxins," she was saying, more to the room in general than to me. Her pink-rimmed eyes were starting to look inflamed. "In a hot dog." Now she was definitely talking to me. "Were you aware of that?"
"I would have guessed seven or eight," I said.
"Nitrites," said Timothy. He was gripping his head between his palms, one on the chin and one on top, and bending it from side to side until you could hear a little pop. I began to understand about the unbalanced homeostasis.
"We eat mainly soybean products here," Fei said. "We're just starting a soy-milk collective. A house requirement is that each person spend at least seven hours a week straining curd."
"Straining curd," I said. I wanted to say, Flaming nurd. Raining turds. It isn't raining turds, you know, it's raining violets.
"Yes," Fei went on in this abnormally calm voice that made me want to throw a pillow at her. "I guess the child..."
"Turtle," I said.
"I guess Turtle would be exempt. But we would have to make adjustments for that in the kitchen quota...."
I had trouble concentrating. La-Isha kept narrowing her eyes and trying to get Fei's attention. I remembered Mrs. Hoge with her shakes, always looking like she was secretly saying, "Don't do it" to somebody behind you.
"So tell us about you," Fei said eventually. I snapped out of my daydreams, feeling like a kid in school that's just been called on. "What kind of a space are you envisioning for yourself?" she wanted to know. Those were her actual words.
"Oh, Turtle and I are flex," I said. "Right now we're staying downtown at the Republic. I jockeyed fried food at the Burger Derby for a while, but I got fired."
La-Isha went kind of stiff on that one. I imagined all the little elephants on her shift getting stung through the heart with a tiny stun gun. Timothy was trying to get Turtle's attention by making faces, so far with no luck.
"Usually little kids are into faces," he informed me. "She seems kind of spaced out."
"She makes up her own mind about what she's into."
"She sure has a lot of hair," he said. "How old is she?"
"Eighteen months," I said. It was a wild guess.
"She looks very Indian."
"Native American," Fei corrected him. "She does. Is her father Native American?"
"Her great-great-grandpa was full-blooded Cherokee," I said. "On my side. Cherokee skips a generation, like red hair. Didn't you know that?"
The second house on my agenda turned out to be right across the park from Jesus Is Lord's. It belonged to Lou Ann Ruiz.
Within ten minutes Lou Ann and I were in the kitchen drinking diet Pepsi and splitting our gussets laughing about homeostasis and bean turds. We had already established that our hometowns in Kentucky were separated by only two counties, and that we had both been to the exact same Bob Seger concert at the Kentucky State Fair my senior year.
"So then what happened?" Lou Ann had tears in her eyes. I hadn't really meant to put them down, they seemed like basically good kids, but it just got funnier as it went along.
"Nothing happened. In their own way, they were so polite it was pathetic. I mean, it was plain as day they thought Turtle was a dimwit and I was from some part of Mars where they don't have indoor bathrooms, but they just kept on asking things like would I like some alfalfa tea?" I had finally told them no thanks, that we'd just run along and envision ourselves in some other space.
Lou Ann showed me the rest of the house except for her room, where the baby was asleep. Turtle and I would have our own room, plus the screened-in back porch if we wanted it. She said it was great to sleep out there in the summer. We had to whisper
"He was just born in January," Lou Ann said when we were back in the kitchen. "How old's yours?"
"To tell you the truth, I don't even know. She's adopted."
"Well, didn't they tell you all that stuff when you adopted her? Didn't she come with a birth certificate or something?"
"It wasn't an official adoption. Somebody just kind of gave her to me."
"You mean like she was left on your doorstep in a basket?"
"Exactly. Except it was in my car, and there wasn't any basket. Now that I think about it, there should have at least been a basket. Indians make good baskets. She's Indian."
"Wasn't there even a note? How do you know her name's Turtle?"
"I don't. I named her that. It's just temporary until I can figure out what her real name is. I figure I'll hit on it sooner or later."
Turtle was in a high chair of Lou Ann's that must have been way too big for a kid born in January. On the tray there were decals of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, which Turtle was slapping with her hands. There was nothing there for her to grab. I picked her up out of the chair and hefted her onto my shoulder, where she could reach my braid. She didn't pull it, she just held on to it like a lifeline. This was one of our normal positions.
"I can't get over it," Lou Ann said, "that somebody would just dump her like an extra puppy."
"Yeah, I know. I think it was somebody that cared for her, though, if you can believe it. Turtle was having a real rough time. I don't know if she would have made it where she was." A fat gray cat with white feet was sleeping on the windowsill over the sink. Or so I thought, until all of a sudden it jumped down and streaked out of the kitchen. Lou Ann had her back to the door, but I could see the cat in the next room. It was walking around in circles on the living-room rug, kicking its feet behind it again and again, throwing invisible sand over invisible cat poop.
"You wouldn't believe what your cat is doing," I said.
"Oh, yes, I would," Lou Ann said. "He's acting like he just went potty, right?"
"Right. But he didn't, as far as I can see."
"Oh, no, he never does. I think he has a split personality. The good cat wakes up and thinks the bad cat has just pooped on the rug. See, we got him as a kitty and I named him Snowboots but Angel thought that was a stupid name so he always called him Pachuco instead. Then a while back, before Dwayne Ray was born, he started acting that way. Angel's my ex-husband, by the way."
It took some effort here to keep straight who was cats and who was husbands.
Lou Ann went on. "So just the other day I read in a magazine that a major cause of split personality is if two parents treat a kid in real different ways, like one all the time tells the kid it's good and the other one says it's bad. It gives them this idea they have to be both ways at once."
"That's amazing," I said. "Your cat ought to be in Ripley's Believe It or Not. Or one of those magazine columns where people write in and tell what cute things their pets do, like parakeets that whistle Dixie or cats that will only sleep on a certain towel with pictures of goldfish on it."
"Oh, I wouldn't want anyone to know about Snowboots, it's too embarrassing. It's just about proof-positive that he's from a broken home, don't you think?"
"What does Pachuco mean?"
"It means like a bad Mexican boy. One that would go around spray-painting walls and join a gang."
Pachuco alias Snowboots was still going at it in the living room. "Seriously," I said, "you should send it in. They'd probably pay good money--it's unbelievable what kinds of things you can get paid for. Or at the very least they'd send you a free case of cat chow."
"I almost won a year of free diapers for Dwayne Ray. Dwayne Ray's my son."
"Oh. What does he do?"
Lou Ann laughed. "Oh, he's normal. The only one in the house, I guess. Do you want some more Pepsi?" She got up to refill our glasses. "So did you drive out here, or fly, or what?"
I told her that driving across the Indian reservation was how I'd ended up with Turtle. "Our paths would never have crossed if it weren't for a bent rocker arm."
"Well, if something had to go wrong, at least you can thank your stars you were in a car and not an airplane," she said, whacking an ice-cube tray on the counter. I felt Turtle flinch on my shoulder.
"I never thought of it that way," I said.
"I could never fly in an airplane. Oh Lord, never! Remember that one winter when a plane went right smack dab into that frozen river in Washington, D.C.? On TV I saw them pulling the bodies out frozen stiff with their knees and arms bent like those little plastic cowboys that are supposed to be riding horses, but then when you lose the horse they're useless. Oh, God, that was so pathetic. I can just hear the stewardess saying, 'Fasten your seat belts, folks,' calm as you please, like 'Don't worry, we just have to say this,' and then next thing you know you're a hunk of ice. Oh, shoot, there's Dwayne Ray just woke up from his nap. Let me go get him."
I did remember that airplane crash. On TV they showed the rescue helicopter dropping down a rope to save the only surviving stewardess from an icy river full of dead people. I remember just how she looked hanging on to that rope. Like Turtle.
In a minute Lou Ann came back with the baby. "Dwayne Ray, here's some nice people I want you to meet. Say hi."
He was teeny, with skin you could practically see through. It reminded me of the Visible Man we'd had in Hughes Walter's biology class. "He's adorable," I said.
"Do you think so, really? I mean, I love him to death of course, but I keep thinking his head's flat."
"They all are. They start out that way, and then after a while their foreheads kind of pop out."
"Really? I never knew that. They never told me that."
"Sure. I used to work in a hospital. I saw a lot of newborns coming and going, and every one of them's head was flat as a shovel."
She made a serious face and fussed with the baby for a while without saying anything.
"So what do you think?" I finally said. "Is it okay if we move in?"
"Sure!" Her wide eyes and the way she held her baby reminded me for a minute of Sandi. The lady downtown could paint either one of them: "Bewildered Madonna with Sunflower Eyes." "Of course you can move in," she said. "I'd love it. I wasn't sure if you'd want to."
"Why wouldn't I want to?"
"Well, my gosh, I mean, here you are, so skinny and smart and cute and everything, and me and Dwayne Ray, well, we're just lumping along here trying to get by. When I put that ad in the paper, I thought, Well, this is sure four dollars down the toilet; who in the world would want to move in here with us?"
"Stop it, would you? Quit making everybody out to be better than you are. I'm just a plain hillbilly from East Jesus Nowhere with this adopted child that everybody keeps on telling me is dumb as a box of rocks. I've got nothing on you, girl. I mean it."
Lou Ann hid her mouth with her hand.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing." I could see perfectly well that she was smiling.
"Come on, what is it?"
"It's been so long," she said. "You talk just like me."
SIX
Valentine's Day
The first killing frost of the winter came on Valentine's Day. Mattie's purple bean vines hung from the fence like long strips of beef jerky drying in the sun. It broke my heart to see that colorful jungle turned to black slime, especially on this of all days when people everywhere were sending each other flowers, but it didn't faze Mattie. "That's the cycle of life, Taylor," she said. "The old has to pass on before the new can come around." She said frost improved the flavor of the cabbage and Brussels sprouts. But I think she was gloating. The night before, she'd listened to the forecast and picked a mop bucket full of hard little marbles off the tomato vines, and this morning she had green-tomato pies baking upstairs. I know this sounds like something you'd no more want to eat than a mud-and-Junebug pie some kid would whip up, but it honestly smelled delicious.
If there had been any earthly way around this, I would have found it. I loved Mattie, but you know about me and tires. Every time I went to see her and check on the car I felt like John Wayne in that war movie where he buckles down his helmet, takes a swig of bourbon, and charges across the minefield yelling something like "Live Free or Bust!"
But Mattie was the only friend I had that didn't cost a mint in long distance to talk to, until Lou Ann of course. So when she started telling me how she needed an extra hand around the place I just tried to change the subject politely. She had a lot of part-time help, she said, but when people came and went they didn't have time to get the knack of things like patching and alignments. I told her I had no aptitude whatsoever for those things, and was that a real scorpion on that guy's belt buckle that was just in here? Did she think we'd get another frost? How did they stitch all those fancy loops and stars on a cowboy boot, was there a special kind of heavy-duty sewing machine?
But there was no steering Mattie off her course. She was positive I'd be a natural at tires. She chatted with me and Turtle between customers, and then sent us on our way with a grocery bag full of cabbage and peas, saying, "Just think about it, hon. Put it in your swing-it-till-Monday basket."
When Mattie said she'd throw in two new tires and would show me how to fix my ignition, I knew I'd be a fool to say no. She paid twice as much as the Burger Derby, and of course there was no ridiculous outfit to be dry-cleaned. If I was going to get blown up, at least it would be in normal clothes.
In many ways it was a perfect arrangement. You couldn't ask for better than Mattie. She was patient and kind and let me bring Turtle in with me when I needed to. Lou Ann kept her some days, but if she had to go out shopping or to the doctor, one baby was two hands full. I felt a little badly about foisting her off on Lou Ann at all, but she insisted that Turtle was so little trouble she often forgot she was there. "She doesn't even hardly wet her diapers," Lou Ann said. It was true. Turtle's main goal in life, other than hanging on to things, seemed to be to pass unnoticed.
Mattie's place was always hopping. She was right about people always passing through, and not just customers, either. There was another whole set of people who spoke Spanish and lived with her upstairs for various lengths of time. I asked her about them once, and she asked me something like had I ever heard of a sanctuary.