The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [73]
“You were just looking for a disaster, that’s all. You can’t deny you hunt for them, Lou Ann, even in the paper. If you look hard enough you can always come up with what you want.”
“Am I just completely screwed up, Taylor, or what? I’ve always been this way. My brother and I used to play this game when we were little, with a cigar box. That box was our best toy. It had this slinky lady in a long red dress on the inside of the lid, with her dress slit way up to here. It’s a wonder Granny Logan didn’t confiscate it. She was holding out a cigar I think, I s’pose she was a Keno girl or something, but we said she was a gypsy. We’d make believe that you could say to her, ‘Myself at the age of fourteen.’ Or whatever age, you know, and then we’d look in the box and pretend we could see what we looked like. My brother would go all the way up to ninety. He’d say, ‘I see myself with a long beard. I live in a large white house with seventeen dogs’ and on and on. He loved dogs, see, and Mama and Granny would only let him have just Buster. But me, I was such a chicken liver, I’d just go a couple of weeks into the future at the very most. I’d look at myself the day school was going to start in September, maybe, and say, ‘I am wearing a new pink dress.’ But I’d never, never go up even to twenty or twenty-five. I was scared.”
“Of what?”
“That I’d be dead. That I’d look in the box and see myself dead.”
“But it was just pretend. You could have seen yourself any way you wanted to.”
“I know it. But that’s what I thought I’d see. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing?”
“Maybe it was because of your father. Maybe you got kind of hung up on death, because of him dying.”
“I’m just totally screwed up, that’s all there is to it.”
“No, Lou Ann. You have your good points too.”
Usually Lou Ann spit out compliments you tried to feed her like some kind of nasty pill, but that night her blue eyes were practically pleading with me. “What good points?” she wanted to know.
“Oh gosh, tons of them,” I faltered. It’s not that it was a hard question, but I was caught off guard. I thought a minute.
“The flip side of worrying too much is just not caring, if you see what I mean,” I explained. “Dwayne Ray will always know that, no matter what, you’re never going to neglect him. You’ll never just sit around and let him dehydrate, or grow up without a personality, or anything like that. And that would be ever so much worse. You read about it happening in the paper all the time.” I meant it; she did. “Somebody forgetting a baby in a car and letting it roast, or some such thing. If anything, Lou Ann, you’re just too good of a mother.”
She shook her head. “I’m just a total screwed-up person,” she said. “And now I’m doing the same thing to poor Dwayne Ray. But I can’t help it, Taylor, I can’t. If I could see the future, if somebody offered to show me a picture of Dwayne Ray in the year 2001, I swear I wouldn’t look.”
“Well, nobody’s going to,” I said gently, “so you don’t have to worry about it. There’s no such thing as dream angels. Only in the Bible, and that was totally another story.”
In June a package came from Montana, all cheery and colorful with stamps and purple postage marks. It contained, among other things, a pair of child-sized cowboy boots—still years too big for Dwayne Ray—and a beautiful calfskin belt for Lou Ann. It was carved or stamped somehow with acorns, oak leaves, and her name. There was also a red-and-black Indian-beaded hair clip, which was of course no use to Lou Ann at this particular point in the life of her hair.
Angel had changed his mind about the divorce. He missed her. He wanted her to come up and live in Montana in something called a yurt. If that was not an acceptable option, then he would come back to Tucson to live with her.
“What in the heck is a yurt anyway?” Lou Ann asked. “It sounds like dirt.”
“Beats me,” I said.