The Bean Trees

But that night I looked at the four of us there on the sofa and my heart hurt and I thought: in a different world we could have been the Family of Dolls.

Turtle wiggled. "No," she said, before she was even awake.

"Yes," I said. "Time for bed." I carried her in and tucked her under the sheet, prying her hand off my T-shirt and attaching it to her yellow stuffed bear, which had a pink velvet heart sewed onto its chest.

"Sleep tight, don't let the potato bugs bite."

"Tato bite," she said.

When I came back Snowboots had moved from Estevan's lap and curled into the little depression where I had been. I sat in the space between them with my feet tucked under me. I no longer felt self-conscious, though I could feel almost a pull, like a flow of warm water, at the point where our knees touched.

"It seems like, if you get to know them well enough, everybody has had something awful happen to them. All this time I've been moping around because of having the responsibility of Turtle forced on me, and now I feel guilty."

"That responsibility is terrible if you don't want it."

"Oh, big deal. The exact same thing happened to about sixty percent of the girls in my high school, if not the whole world."

"If you look at it that way," he said. He was falling asleep.

"I guess that's just the way the world has got to go around. If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days' examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month's time."

"Some people wouldn't send them back," he said. "I would have kept Ismene." His eyes were closed.

"Did you get up in the middle of the night to do the feeding and diapering?"

"No," he said, smiling a little.

"I can't believe I'm even asking you that. Does it hurt you a lot to talk about Ismene?"

"At first, but not so much now. What helps me the most is to know her life is going on somewhere, with someone. To know she is growing up."

"Sure," I said, but I knew there was another side to this, too. Where she was growing up, what they would raise her to be. I thought of Turtle being raised by Virgie Mae Parsons, learning to look down her nose and wear little hats, and then I got it mixed up with police uniforms. A little later I realized I had been asleep. We both rolled in and out of sleep in a friendly way. You can't be nervous if you're sleeping on the same sofa with somebody, I thought. Letting your mouth fall open any old way.

Snowboots jumped off the sofa. I heard his claws scratch the carpet as he covered up his sins.

"Why did they call you Nutters?" I remember Estevan asking at some point. I thought and thought about it, trying to fight my way out of some dream where Turtle and I were trying to get to the other side of a long, flat field. We had to follow the telephone wires to get to civilization.

"Nutters," I said finally. "Oh, because of walnuts. In the fall, the kids that lived in the country would pick walnuts to earn money for school clothes."

"Did you have to climb the trees?" Estevan amazed me. That he would be interested in details like that.

"No. Basically you waited till they fell, and then picked them up off the ground. The worst part was that to get the hulls off you'd have to put them in the road for cars to run over, and then you'd pick the nuts out of the mess. It stained your hands black, and then you were marked. That was the worst part, to go to school with black hands and black fingernails. That was proof positive you were a Nutter."

"But otherwise you would have no new clothes."

"Right. So you were damned if you didn't and damned if you did. I guess the ideal thing," I conjectured, half dreaming, "would have been to get clothes with good, deep pockets." I meant so that you could hide your hands, but I had a picture in my mind of skirts and trousers with pockets full of pounds and pounds of walnuts. Ten cents a pound is what we got for them. A hundred and fifty pounds equaled one pair of Levi's.

Later I woke up again, feeling the pressure of Snowboots's feet walking down my leg, then hearing them thump on the floor. Estevan and I were curled like spoons on the sofa, his knees against the backs of my knees and his left hand on my ribs, just under my breast. When I put my hand on top of his I could feel my heart beating under his fingers.

I thought of Esperanza, her braids on her shoulders. Esperanza staring at the ceiling. She would be lying on a cot somewhere, sweating the poison out of her system. Probably they had given her syrup of ipecac, which makes you keep throwing up until you can feel the sides of your stomach banging together. All of Esperanza's hurts flamed up in my mind, a huge pile of burning things that the world just kept throwing more onto. Somewhere in that pile was a child that looked just like Turtle. I lifted Estevan's hand from my ribcage and kissed his palm. It felt warm. Then I slid off the sofa and went to my own bed.