The Bean Trees

"It's over between me and Angel. I know it is."

"Just the same. I don't want you to have to choose him or me."

She dug through her purse looking for a clean handkerchief. "I just can't get over him leaving like that."

"When, now or last October?" I was starting to get annoyed. "He moved out over six months ago, Lou Ann. Did you think he'd just stepped out for some fresh air? It's April now, for God's sake."

"Did you see that?" Lou Ann pointed at Turtle. Her head had bobbed up like an apple on a string, and her eyes fixed on me as if she had seen the Lord incarnate.

"What's up, Turtle?" I asked, but she just stared fearfully from her pile of peanuts.

"She did that one other time that I know of. When we were talking about the phone bill you thought we'd got gypped on," Lou Ann said.

"So what are you saying, that she understands when we're mad? I already knew that."

"No, I'm saying that bill was for April. She looks up when you say April, especially if you sound mad."

Turtle did look up again.

"Don't you get it?" Lou Ann asked.

I didn't.

"That's her name! April's her name!" Now Lou Ann was kind of hopping in her seat. "April, April. Looky here, April. That's your name, isn't it? April!"

If it was her name, Turtle had had enough of it. She had gone back to patting the sides of her peanut mound.

"You have to do it scientifically," I said. "Say a bunch of other words and just casually throw that one in, and see if she looks up."

"Okay, you do it. I can't think of enough words."

"Rhubarb," I said. "Cucumber. Porky Pig. Budweiser. April." Turtle looked up right on cue.

"May June July August September!" Lou Ann shouted. "April!"

"Lord, Lou Ann, the child isn't deaf."

"It's April," she declared. "That's her legal name."

"Maybe it's something that just sounds like April. Maybe it's Mabel."

Lou Ann made a face.

"Okay, April, that's not bad. I think she's kind of used to Turtle though. I think we ought to keep calling her that now."

A fat duck with a shiny green head had finally decided Turtle's cache of peanuts was too much to ignore. He came up on shore and slowly advanced, stretching his neck forward.

"Ooooh, oooh!" Turtle shouted, shaking her hands so vigorously that he wheeled around and waddled back toward the water.

"Turtle's okay for a nickname," Lou Ann said, "but you have to think of the future. What about when she goes to school? Or like when she's eighty years old? Can you picture an eighty-year-old woman being called Turtle?"

"An eighty-year-old Indian woman, I could. You have to remember she's Indian."

"Still," Lou Ann said.

"April Turtle, then."

"No! That sounds like some weird kind of air freshener."

"So be it," I said, and it was.

We sat for a while listening to the zoo sounds. There were more trees here than most places in Tucson. I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level. Between the croaks and whistles of the blackbirds there were distant cat roars, monkey noises, kid noises.

"I'll swan, the sound of that running water's making me have to go," Lou Ann said.

"There's bathrooms over by where we came in."

Lou Ann took a mirror out of her purse. "Death warmed over," she said, and went off to find a bathroom.

The giant tortoise, I noticed, had caught up to its partner and was proceeding to climb on top of it from behind. Its neck and head strained forward as it climbed, and to tell the truth, it looked exactly like a bald, toothless old man. The knobby shells scraping together made a hollow sound. By the time Lou Ann came back from the bathroom, the old fellow on top was letting out loud grunts that rang out all the way down to the military macaws.

"What on earth? I could hear that noise up by the bathrooms," Lou Ann declared. "Well, I'll be. I always did wonder how they'd do it in those shells. That'd be worse than those panty girdles we used to wear in high school to hold our stockings up. Remember those?"

A teenage couple holding hands bounced up to investigate, giggled, and moved quickly away. A woman with an infant on her hip turned the baby's head away and walked on. Lou Ann and I laughed till we cried. The country-club woman gave us a look, folded her paper, stabbed out her cigarette, and crunched off down the gravel path.