The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [59]
I was confused. Was there an elephant somewhere in this story? “Lou Ann, honey, you’re not making sense. Do you want to go home?”
She shook her head.
“Then should we go on into the zoo?”
She nodded. I managed to get everybody through the turnstile and settled on a bench in the shade between the duck pond and the giant tortoises. The sound of water trickling over a little waterfall into the duck pond made it seem cool. I tried to get the kids distracted long enough for Lou Ann to tell me what was up.
“Look, Turtle, look at those old big turtles,” I said. The words “childhood identity crisis” from one of Lou Ann’s magazines sprang to mind, but Turtle seemed far more interested in the nibbled fruit halves strewn around their pen. “Apple,” she said. She seemed recovered from her doctor’s visit.
“He said something about the Colorado-Montana circuit, which I don’t even know what that means, only that he’s leaving town. And he said he might not be sending any checks for a while until he’d got on his feet. He actually said on his foot, can you believe that? The way Angel sees himself, it’s like he’s an artificial leg with a person attached.”
A woman on a nearby bench stopped reading and tilted her head back a little, the way people do when they want to overhear your conversation. She had on white sneakers, white shorts, and a visor. It looked as if she must have been on her way to a country club to play tennis before some wrongful bus change landed her here.
“It’s her husband that’s the problem,” I told the woman. “He’s a former rodeo man.”
“Taylor!” Lou Ann whispered, but the woman ignored us and took a drag from her cigarette, which she balanced beside her on the front edge of the bench. She shook out her newspaper and folded back the front page. It showed a large color picture of Liz Taylor with a black man in a silver vest and no shirt, and there was a huge block headline that said, WORLD’S YOUNGEST MOM-TO-BE: INFANT PREGNANT AT BIRTH. Apparently the headline wasn’t related to the picture.
A kid with orange foam-rubber plugs in his ears whizzed by on a skateboard. Another one whizzed right behind him. They had a fancy way of tipping up their boards to go over the curbs.
“They shouldn’t allow those in here. Somebody will get killed,” Lou Ann said, blowing her nose. I noticed that one of the giant tortoises in the pen was pursuing another one around and around a clump of shrubby palm trees.
“So what about Angel?” I asked.
A woman in a flowery dress sat down on the bench with the country-club woman. She had very dark, tightly wrinkled skin and wore enormous green high-heeled pumps. The country-club woman’s cigarette, on the bench between them, waved up a little boundary line of smoke.
“He said there would be papers to sign for the divorce,” Lou Ann said.
“So what’s the problem, exactly?” I didn’t mean to be unkind. I really didn’t know.
“Well, what am I going to do?”
“Well, to be honest, I don’t think it much matters what you do. It probably doesn’t make any difference what kind of a divorce you get, or even if you get one at all. The man is gone, honey. If he stops sending checks I don’t imagine there’s anything to be done, not if he’s out riding the range in God’s country. I guess you’ll have to look for a job, sooner or later.”
Lou Ann started sobbing again. “Who would want to hire me? I can’t do anything.”
“You don’t necessarily have to know how to do something to get a job,” I reasoned. “I’d never made a french fry in my life before I got hired at the Burger Derby.” She blew her nose again.
“So how’d she get born pregnant?” the green-shoes woman asked the woman with the newspaper.
“It was twins, a boy and a girl,” the woman told her. “They had sexual intercourse in the womb. Doctors say the chances against it are a million to one.”
“Yeah,” the green-shoes woman said in a tired way. She bent over and shuffled through a large paper shopping bag, which was printed with