Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [11]
“Hey, that happens. You never did like him much.”
“I did so. At first.” She drops her voice. “Not to live with, but I thought he’d improve. Under the influence of good cooking.”
“You can’t rehabilitate a man who collects light bulbs.”
“No, it’s headlights.”
“Headlights. Is that actually true?”
“Off old cars. Any old car parts really, as long as they don’t make any noise. You should see my living room. I feel like I’ve died and gone to the junkyard.”
“Well, come live with us. Taylor leaves all her car parts at work. We need you, Alice. Taylor hates to cook, and I’m criminal at it.”
“There’s no hanging crimes you can do in the kitchen,” Alice says. “I give a man extra points just for trying.”
“Your daughter doesn’t give a man extra points just for anything.”
Alice has to laugh. “That’s a fact.”
“She says I cook like a caveman.”
“Well, forever more.” Alice laughs harder. Clark Gable with a gold earring and stooped shoulders and a club. “What does that mean?”
“No finesse, apparently.”
“Well, I couldn’t move in with Taylor. I’ve told her that fifty times. I’d be in your way.” Alice has never lived in a city and knows she couldn’t. What could she ever say to people who pay money to go hear a band called the Irritated Babies? Alice doesn’t even drive a car, although few people know this, since she walks with an attitude of preferring the exercise.
“I don’t think Taylor loves me anymore,” Jax says. “I think she’s got her eye on Danny, our garbage man.”
“Oh, go on.”
“You haven’t seen this guy. He can lift four Glad Bags in each hand.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ve got your good points too. Does she treat you decent?”
“She does.”
“You’re in good shape, then. Don’t worry, you’d know. If Taylor don’t like somebody, she’ll paint the barn with it.”
Jax laughs. “She does wish you’d come visit,” he says.
“I will.” Alice has tears in her eyes.
“I do too,” he says, “I wish you would come. I need to meet this Alice. When Taylor says she wants you to live with us, I’m thinking to myself, this is ultra. Everybody else I know is in a twelve-step program to get over their dysfunctional childhoods.”
“Well, it’s my fault that she don’t give men the extra points. I think I turned her against men. Not on purpose. It’s kind of a hex. My mama ran that hog farm by herself for fifty years, and that’s what started it.”
“You have a hog farm in your maternal line? I’m envious. I wish I’d spent my childhood rocked in the bosom of swine.”
“Well, it wasn’t all that wonderful. My mother was a Stamper. She was too big and had too much on her mind to answer to ‘Mother,’ so I called her Minerva, just the same as the neighbors and the creditors and the traveling slaughter hands did. She’d always say, ‘Mister, if you ain’t brung it with you, you won’t find it here.’ And that was the truth. She had hogs by the score but nothing much to offer her fellow man, other than ham.”
“Well,” says Jax. “Ham is something.”
“No, but she’d never let a man get close enough to see the whites of her eyes. And look at me, just the same, chasing off husbands like that Elizabeth Taylor. I’ve been thinking I raised Taylor to stand too far on her own side of the plank. She adopted the baby before she had a boyfriend of any kind, and it seemed like that just proved out the family trend. I think we could go on for thirteen generations without no men coming around to speak of. Just maybe to do some plumbing once in a while.”
“Is this the Surgeon General’s warning?”
“Oh, Jax, honey, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m a lonely old woman cleaning my kitchen cupboards to entertain