Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [56]
Some people would say a headfirst child like that was bound to wind up headfirst in the mop bucket. Alice doesn’t think so. In her heart, she knows her daughter would have looked both ways before she went out to play in East Main. Or Yancey would have flagged down the cars. When you’re given a brilliant child, you polish her and let her shine. The universe makes allowances. When Taylor called from a phone booth in Las Vegas with her soul broken in twenty pieces, Alice felt deeply betrayed. The universe has let them down.
The seat-belt sign dings on, and Alice opens her eyes. A stewardess is coming slowly down the aisle taking people’s plastic cups away, like a patient mother removing toys her babies might try to swallow. Alice watches, marveling at the outfit: under her navy blazer she wears a buttoned white shirt and a paisley silk tie with, even, a fine gold chain fastened across it. How long it must have taken her to get it all just right, in spite of her busy life. Alice is a passenger in need of comfort and she takes some from this: the touching effort some people put into just getting dressed in the morning, believing a little gold chain fastened over a silk tie will somehow make a difference.
Taylor and Alice tower over Turtle, holding on to each other with heads together and legs apart, leaning like a crooked teepee. They stand that way for a long time in the airport while people walk around them without looking, desiring only to make their connections. Alice’s empty white sweater sleeves hang from her shoulders. Turtle pushes her head against Taylor and holds the hem of her shirt, since there isn’t anything else. She met her Grandma Alice once before but that time nobody was crying.
“Mama, I haven’t been like this, I swear,” Taylor says. “I didn’t fall to pieces till just this minute.”
Alice rubs her back in a circle. “You go ahead and fall apart. That’s what I’m here for.” Turtle watches the hand with big knuckles move up and down her mother’s back, and waits for something to fall. After a while they move apart. Taylor tries to carry everything Alice has.
“What’d you put in this suitcase?” she asks. “Rocks? Harland’s headlights?”
“I’ll Harland’s headlights you,” Alice says, laughing, smacking Taylor on the bottom.
She comes down to Turtle with a hug. She smells like chewing gum and Kleenex and sweaters. Turtle thinks: this is the telephone Grandma. She is nice and this is how she looks.
“Turtle, you can carry this carry-on bag for Grandma, okay?” Taylor stoops to put the strap over Turtle’s shoulder. “I can’t believe how strong you are. Look, Mom, doesn’t she walk like a queen? I swear I didn’t teach her that. It’s a natural talent, she has perfect posture.”
Turtle leans against the weight of the bag and puts each heel and toe on the long blue line in the carpet.
Alice blows her nose again. “Did you all eat? I’m starved. I had roasted peanuts for lunch.”
“We had apricots for lunch,” Turtle says, and her mother starts crying again. It’s the crying that looks like laughing from the back, but isn’t. The most bad thing would be if her mother goes away and the bad place comes. Turtle wishes she could put the words she said back in her mouth and eat them. They would taste bright and sour, like dimes. She feels the door of her back teeth closing. There are forty or a hundred