The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [52]
“Granny Logan liked to died. She kept saying, did Eskimos count as human beings? She thought they were half animal or something. And really what are you supposed to think, with a name like that? But I got used to the idea. I like to think of him up there in Alaska with all these little daughters in big old furry coats. I’ve got in my mind that they live in an igloo, but that can’t be right.”
We were sitting out with the kids in Roosevelt Park, which the neighbor kids called such names as Dead Grass Park and Dog Doo Park. To be honest, it was pretty awful. There were only a couple of shade trees, which had whole dead parts, and one good-for-nothing palm tree so skinny and tall that it threw its shade onto the roof of the cooler-pad factory down the block. The grass was scraggly, struggling to come up between shiny bald patches of dirt. Mostly it put me in mind of an animal with the mange. Constellations of gum-wrapper foil twinkled around the trash barrels.
“Look at it this way, at least she’s still kicking,” Lou Ann said. “I feel like my mama’s whole life stopped counting when Daddy died. You want to know something? They even got this double gravestone. Daddy’s on the right hand side, and the other side’s already engraved for Mama. ‘Ivy Louise Logan, December 2, 1934—to blank.’ Every time I see it it gives me the willies. Like it’s just waiting there for her to finish up her business and die so they can fill in the blank.”
“It does seem like one foot in the grave,” I said.
“If Mama ever got married again I’d dance a jig at her wedding. I’d be thrilled sideways. Maybe it would get her off my back about moving back in with her and Granny.” Dwayne Ray coughed in his sleep, and Lou Ann pushed his stroller back and forth two or three times. Turtle was pounding the dirt with a plastic shovel, a present from Mattie.
“Cabbage, cabbage, cabbage,” she said.
Lou Ann said, “I know a guy that would just love her. Did you ever know that fellow downtown that sold vegetables out of his truck?” But Turtle and Bobby Bingo would never get to discuss their common interest. He had disappeared, probably to run off with somebody’s mother.
“Your mother wouldn’t be marrying Harland Elleston,” I told Lou Ann, getting back to the subject at hand.
“Of course not! That big hunk is already spoken for.”
“Lou Ann, you’re just making a joke of this whole thing.”
“Well, I can’t help it, I wouldn’t care if my mother married the garbage man.”
“But Harland Elleston! He’s not even…” I was going to say he’s not even related to us, but of course that wasn’t what I meant. “He’s got warts on his elbows and those eyebrows that meet in the middle.”
“I’ll swan, Taylor, you talk about men like they’re a hangnail. To hear you tell it, you’d think man was only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.”
“That’s not true, I like Estevan.” My heart sort of bumped when I said this. I knew exactly how it would look on an EKG machine: two little peaks and one big one.
“He’s taken. Who else?”
“Just because I don’t go chasing after every Tom’s Harry Dick that comes down the pike.”
“Who else? You never have one kind thing to say about any of your old boyfriends.”
“Lou Ann, for goodness’ sakes. In Pittman County there was nothing in pants that was worth the trouble, take my word for it. Except for this one science teacher, and the main thing he had going for him was clean fingernails.” I’d never completely realized how limited the choices were in Pittman. Poor Mama. If only I could have gotten her to Tucson.
“Well, where in the heck do you think I grew up, Paris, France?”
“I notice you didn’t stick with home-grown either. You had to ride off with a Wild West rodeo boy.”
“Fat lot of good it did me, too.”
“Well, you did get Dwayne Ray out of