The Bean Trees

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 wok 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.