High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [60]
The sooner we can let go the fairy tale of families functioning perfectly in isolation, the better we might embrace the relief of community. Even the admirable parents who’ve stayed married through thick and thin are very likely, at present, to incorporate other adults into their families—household help and baby-sitters if they can afford them, or neighbors and grandparents if they can’t. For single parents, this support is the rock-bottom definition of family. And most parents who have split apart, however painfully, still manage to maintain family continuity for their children, creating in many cases a boisterous phenomenon that Constance Ahrons in her book The Good Divorce calls the “binuclear family.” Call it what you will—when ex-spouses beat swords into plowshares and jump up and down at a soccer game together, it makes for happy kids.
Cinderella, look, who needs her? All those evil stepsisters? That story always seemed like too much cotton-picking fuss over clothes. A childhood tale that fascinated me more was the one called “Stone Soup,” and the gist of it is this: Once upon a time, a pair of beleaguered soldiers straggled home to a village empty-handed, in a land ruined by war. They were famished, but the villagers had so little they shouted evil words and slammed their doors. So the soldiers dragged out a big kettle, filled it with water, and put it on a fire to boil. They rolled a clean round stone into the pot, while the villagers peered through their curtains in amazement.
“What kind of soup is that?” they hooted.
“Stone soup,” the soldiers replied. “Everybody can have some when it’s done.”
“Well, thanks,” one matron grumbled, coming out with a shriveled carrot. “But it’d be better if you threw this in.”
And so on, of course, a vegetable at a time, until the whole suspicious village managed to feed itself grandly.
Any family is a big empty pot, save for what gets thrown in. Each stew turns out different. Generosity, a resolve to turn bad luck into good, and respect for variety—these things will nourish a nation of children. Name-calling and suspicion will not. My soup contains a rock or two of hard times, and maybe yours does too. I expect it’s a heck of a bouillabaise.
THE SPACES BETWEEN
The drive from Tucson to Phoenix is a trip through merciless desert, where tall saguaros throw up their arms in apparent surrender to the encroaching cotton fields. Some of the land belongs to farmers holding tight to a parched midwestern dream; some belongs to the state of Arizona, mainly because nobody in particular ever bothered to want it. And a big chunk of what we were passing through belongs to the Gila River Reserve, the state’s oldest Indian reservation, though nothing I could see from the highway set those particular cacti and irrigated farmlands apart from the rest, as Indian country.
Because Camille was five, and liked to know what to expect at all times, I reminded her that we were on our way to visit the Heard Museum, which was all about Native Americans. “Indians,” I clarified. “You know who Indians are, right?”
“Sure,” she said. “People that lived a long time ago.”
I felt between my shoulder blades the weight of this familiar frustration. We were driving past fields being tended this very morning, presumably, by Maricopa and Pima Indians. My daughter played routinely with children from other nations including the Tohono O’odham and Yaqui. She had been a guest at their dances and passed almost daily through the Yaqui village that lies between our house and town. But five-year-olds will hear what you tell them, and merrily go right on believing what they see. Movies and storybooks say that Indians lived long ago, period, and there’s so little else for a modern child to go on.
As a woman with some Cherokee ancestors