The Bean Trees

"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!'"