Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [58]
Alice is making conversation with Turtle. “Do you hate it when old ladies make a big fuss and tell you you’ve grown two feet?”
Turtle shakes her head.
“Well, you have.” She bends her gray head close to Turtle’s and speaks seriously, without condescension. “You’re a big long-legged girl now, not a baby anymore.” Taylor watches the cards of her own childhood played out at the table. Alice always knows what you need. Being near her mother makes Taylor aware of all her inside parts, cradled soft things like the livers in supermarket chickens.
“Taylor says you know how to write your name.” Alice fishes in her huge purse for a pen, and turns a napkin on the table in front of Turtle. “Can you show me?”
Turtle shakes her head again.
“Doesn’t matter. You still know how, right? If you need to sign a check or something, then we know we can count on you. No sense wasting a signature on a napkin.”
She leaves the pen on the table. From the casino someone’s voice shouts out “Ho-ly,” followed by the chattering rain of quarters into the jackpot bucket. Taylor is afraid she’s going to cry again and send Turtle into a tailspin, so she keeps her face behind the plastic menu. “What do you want for dinner, Turtle?” she asks. “A glass of milk and what else?”
Turtle shrugs. Taylor can see the gesture without even looking.
“Grilled cheese?”
“Okay.”
Taylor looks over the top of the daily special and tells Alice, “You get kind of hypnotized, sitting there listening to the quarters ding. Then you start thinking, ‘It’s been this long, my number’s got to be almost up.’ And then you put your hand in your pocket and pull out a gum wrapper.”
Alice holds on to her hand.
At a table nearby, a wife and husband are having a fight. They have on matching outfits, jeans and fringed shirts that cowboys might wear, or people in a cowboy-related industry. The woman has colorless flippy hair molded together with hairspray so that it all comes along when she turns her head. The man looks very old. “Five hundred dollars,” he keeps saying, again and again, like the talking change machines out in the casino that will turn your paper cash into silver dollars. The woman says different things each time, including “Like hell” and “You don’t know your butthole from the road to China.” Suddenly she stands up and starts hitting him on the side of the head with her purse. Her stiff hair wags excitedly. The man bends his head down and accepts the blows as if he has known all this time they were coming, like pie for dessert. Taylor is relieved that Turtle has her back to this event.
“I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t said you’d drop everything and come,” she tells Alice. “I swear I was at the end of my tree.”
“Well, it was good timing,” Alice says. “I’d run out of marriage and I needed a project. Have you heard any more about,” she moves her eyes slowly toward Turtle and back.
“It’s okay to talk about it, Mama. Turtle knows. I called Jax last night and he said there was nothing new.”
They both look at Turtle, who has put the menu very close to her face and is quietly reciting the names of different foods.
The woman who was hitting her husband sits down for a breather. She drags heavily on her cigarette, as if her only possible oxygen must come through that less than ideal source.
“This is the twilight zone of humanity,” Taylor announces. “That’s what Jax would say right now: ‘We have arrived at the twilight zone of humanity. Let us bow our heads in a moment of silent prayer.’”
“I believe he’s making