The Bean Trees (15 page)

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?” Edna 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.

But Estevan didn’t seem perturbed, and I realized he must hear this kind of thing every day of his life. I wondered how he could stay so calm. I would have murdered somebody by now, I thought, would have put a chopstick to one of the many deadly uses that only Lou Ann could imagine for it.

“Can I get anybody anything?” Lou Ann asked.

“We’re fine,” Edna said, obviously accustomed to being Virgie Mae’s public-relations department. “You children have made a delightful meal.”

Esperanza pointed at Turtle. It was the first time I ever saw her smile, and I was struck with what a lovely woman she was when you really connected. Then the smile left her again.

Turtle, wielding a chopstick in each hand, had managed to pick up a chunk of pineapple. Little by little she moved it upward toward her wide-open mouth, but the sticks were longer than her arms. The pineapple hung in the air over her head and then fell behind her onto the floor. We laughed and cheered her on, but Turtle was so startled she cried. I picked her up and held her on my lap.

“Tortolita, let me tell you a story,” Estevan said. “This is a South American, wild
Indian
story about heaven and hell.” Mrs. Parsons made a prudish face, and Estevan went on. “If you go to visit hell, you will see a room like this kitchen. There is a pot of delicious stew on the table, with the most delicate aroma you can imagine. All around, people sit, like us. Only they are dying of starvation. They are jibbering and jabbering,” he looked extra hard at Mrs. Parsons, “but they cannot get a bite of this wonderful stew God has made for them. Now, why is that?”

“Because they’re choking? For all eternity?” Lou Ann asked. Hell, for Lou Ann, would naturally be a place filled with sharp objects and small round foods.

“No,” he said. “Good guess, but no. They are starving because they only have spoons with very long handles. As long as that.” He pointed to the mop, which I had forgotten to put away. “With these ridiculous, terrible spoons, the people in hell can reach into the pot but they cannot put the food in their mouths. Oh, how hungry they are! Oh, how they swear and curse each other!” he said, looking again at Virgie. He was enjoying this.

“Now,” he went on, “you can go and visit heaven. What? You see a room just like the first one, the same table, the same pot of stew, the same spoons as long as a sponge mop. But these people are all happy and fat.”

“Real fat, or do you mean just well-fed?” Lou Ann asked.

“Just well-fed,” he said. “Perfectly, magnificently well-fed, and very happy. Why do you think?”

He pinched up a chunk of pineapple in his chopsticks, neat as you please, and reached all the way across the table to offer it to Turtle. She took it like a newborn bird.

EIGHT

The Miracle of
Dog Doo Park

O
f all the ridiculous things, Mama was getting married. To Harland Elleston no less, of El-Jay’s Paint and Body fame. She called on a Saturday morning while I’d run over to Mattie’s, so Lou Ann took the message. I was practically the last to know.

When I called back Mama didn’t sound normal. She was out of breath and kept running on about Harland. “Did I get you in out of the yard?” I asked her. “Are you planting cosmos?”

“Cosmos, no, it’s not even the end of April yet, is it? I’ve got sugar peas in that little bed around to the side, but not cosmos.”

“I forgot,” I told her. “Everything’s backwards here. Half the stuff you plant in the fall.”

“Missy, I’m in a tither,” she said. She called me Taylor in letters, but we weren’t accustomed to phone calls. “With Harland and all. He treats me real good, but it’s happened so fast I don’t know what end of the hog to feed. I wish you were here to keep me straightened out.”

“I do too,” I said.

“You plant things in the fall? And they don’t get bit?”

“No.”

At least she did remember to ask about Turtle. “She’s great,” I said. “She’s talking a blue streak.”

“That’s how you were. You took your time getting started, but once you did there was no stopping you,” Mama said.

I wondered what that had to do with anything. Everybody behaved as if Turtle was my own flesh and blood daughter. It was a conspiracy.

Lou Ann wanted to know every little detail about the wedding, which was a whole lot more than I knew myself, or cared to.

“Everybody deserves their own piece of the pie, Taylor,” Lou Ann insisted. “Who else has she got?”

“She’s got me.”

“She does not, you’re here. Which might as well be Red Taiwan, for all the good it does her.”

“I always thought I’d get Mama out here to live. She didn’t even consult me, just ups and decides to marry this paint-and-body yahoo.”

“I do believe you’re jealous.”

“That is so funny I forgot to laugh.”

“When my brother got married I felt like he’d deserted us. He just sends this letter one day with a little tiny picture, all you could make out really was dogs, and tells us he’s marrying somebody by the name of She-Wolf Who Hunts by the First Light.” Lou Ann yawned and moved farther down the bench so her arms were more in the sun. She’d decided she was too pale and needed a tan.

“Granny Logan liked to died. She kept saying, did Eskimos count as human beings? She thought they were half animal or something. And really what are you supposed to think, with a name like that? But I got used to the idea. I like to think of him up there in Alaska with all these little daughters in big old furry coats. I’ve got in my mind that they live in an igloo, but that can’t be right.”