The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [68]
In any case, today Lee Sing was nowhere to be seen. She often went back to check on her famous century-old mother, the source of Mattie’s purple beans, whom neither Lou Ann nor I had ever laid eyes on, though not for lack of curiosity. According to Mattie no one had sighted her for years, but you always had the feeling she was back there.
Lee Sing had left her usual sign by the cash register: BE BACK ONE MINUTE, PLEASE DO NO STEAL ANY THING. LEE SING. I spotted Edna Poppy in paper goods, the next aisle over from the dairy case. As best I could see, Edna was sniffing different brands of toilet tissue.
“Edna! Miss Poppy!” I called out. When I needed to call her by name I generally hedged my bets and used both first and last. Her head popped up and she seemed confused, looking all around.
“It’s me, Taylor. Over here.” I came around into the aisle where she had parked her cart. “Where’s Mrs. Parsons today?” I stopped dead in my tracks. Edna had a white cane.
“Virgie is ill in bed with a croup, I’m sorry to say. She sent me out to get fresh lemons and a drop of whiskey. And of course a few other unmentionables.” She smiled, dropping a package of orange toilet paper into the cart. “Can you tell me, dear, if these are lemons or limes I have?” She ran her hand over her goods and held up a lopsided plastic bag of yellow fruits.
Edna Poppy was blind. I stood for a minute staring, trying to reorganize things in my mind the way you would rearrange a roomful of furniture. Edna buying all her clothes in one color, ever since age sixteen. Virgie’s grip on her elbow. I remembered the fantasy I’d constructed the day of our dinner party: Edna happily discovering red bobby pins in the drugstore. I’d had it completely wrong. It would have been Virgie Mae who found them, plucked them down off the rack of Oreo-cookie barrettes, and purchased them for her friend.
“Are you with me, dear?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Lemons. They’re kind of small, but they look just fine.”
When I got home I asked Lou Ann if she knew. She insisted I was making the whole thing up. “Is this a joke?” she kept asking. “Because if it is, it’s a sick one.”
“It’s not a joke. She had a white cane. She asked me if what she had was lemons or limes. Think about it, the way she kind of looks over your head when she talks. The way Virgie leads her around. How Virgie always says everybody’s name when the two of them come into a room.”
Lou Ann was horrified. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my merciful heavens, I feel about this big. When I think about all the times I’ve just bounced over there and said, ‘See ya this! See ya that! Thanks for keeping an eye on Dwayne Ray.’”
“I don’t think she’d mind. Her eyes are her hands. And virgie. She has her own special ways of keeping an eye on things,” I told Lou Ann, and this seemed to make her feel better.
On Monday afternoon I asked if it would be okay if I went up to see Esperanza. I had never been upstairs at Mattie’s and for some reason I felt it was off limits, but she said fine, to go on up. I went through the cramped study, which of course was still piled high with Mattie’s dead husband’s magazines (I knew by now that he had been dead many years, so it seemed unlikely that his mess would clear up any time soon) and on up the staircase into Mattie’s living room.
It had the same crowded, higgledy-piggledy look as the office downstairs, though the stuff here had more to do with everyday living: junk mail, bills, pencils, magazines with color pictures of people like Tom Selleck and the President (not Jesus), a folded newspaper with a half-worked crossword puzzle, the occasional pliers or screwdriver. It was the type of flotsam and jetsam (a pair of words I had just learned from the dictionary) that washes up on your coffee table, lies around for a week or so, and then makes way for whatever comes in on the next tide.
Every surface