The Bean Trees

When I came back to the living room she was still depressed about Angel. “I’ll tell you my theory about staying with one man your whole life long,” I said. “Do you know what a flapper ball is?”

She perked up. “A whatter ball?”

“Flapper ball. It’s that do-jobbie in a toilet tank that goes up and down when you flush. It shuts the water off.”

“Oh.”

“So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here’s what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: ‘Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.’ That’s kind of my philosophy about men. I don’t think there’s an installation out there that could use all of my parts.”

Lou A

“I’m serious, now. I’m talking mental capacity and everything, not just parts like what they cut a chicken into.” By this time she was laughing out loud.

“I tell you my most personal darkest secret and you laugh,” I said, playing vexed.

“They can always use a breast or a thigh or a leg, but nobody wants the scroungy old neckbones!”

“Don’t forget the wings,” I said. “They always want to gobble up your wings right off the bat.” I dumped the rest of the bag of chips out into the bowl on the ottoman between us. I was actually thinking about going for the jar of peanut butter.

“Here, let me show you this Valentine’s card I got for Mama,” I said, digging through my purse until I found it. But Lou A

“Oh, me,” she said, letting the card fall in her lap. Her voice trailed down from all those high-pitched laughs like a prom queen floating down the gymnasium stairs. “I could use me a good wrench around here. Or better yet, one of them… what do you call ’ems? That one that’s shaped like a weenie?”

I had no idea what she meant. “A caulking gun? An angle drill? A battery-head cleaner?” Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view. “The Washington Monument?” I said. This set Lou A

“Oh, Lordy, they ought to put that on a Valentine’s card,” she said. “I can just see me sending something like that to my Mama. She’d have a cow right there on the kitchen floor. And Gra

“Oh, Lordy, Lordy,” Lou A

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Lou A

I held up two fingers. “Peace, sister,” I said, knowing full well that only a complete hillbilly would say this in the 1980s. Love beads came to Pittman the same year as the dial tone.

“Peace and love, get high and fly with the dove,” she said.

SEVEN

A red Indian thought he might eat tobacco in church!” Lou A

“Oh, sure, I remember those,” Mattie said. “There was one for every subject. Geography was: George eats old gray rutabagas and picks his-something. What would it be?”

“Oh, gross,” Lou A

I couldn’t think of a solitary thing George might pick that started with Y. “Maybe you haven’t got it quite right,” I told Mattie. “Maybe it’s something else, like ‘pulls his yarn.’ ”

“Plants his yard?” offered Lou A

“Pets his yak,” said the dark, handsome man, who was half of a young couple Mattie had brought along on the picnic. Their names I had not yet gotten straight: Es-something and Es-something. The man had been an English teacher in Guatemala City. This whole conversation had started with a rhyme he used to help students remember how to pronounce English vowels. Then we’d gotten onto spelling.

“What’s a yak?” Lou A

“It’s a type of very hairy cow,” he explained. He seemed a little embarrassed. Lou A

We were flattened and sprawled across the rocks like a troop of lizards stoned on the sun, feeling too good to move. Lou A

We’d come to a place you would never expect to find in the desert: a little hideaway by a stream that had run all the way down from the mountains into a canyon, where it jumped off a boulder and broke into deep, clear pools. White rocks sloped up out of the water like giant, friendly hippo butts. A ring of cottonwood trees cooled their heels in the wet ground, and overhead leaned together, then apart, making whispery swishing noises. It made me think of Gossip, the game we played as kids where you whisper a message around a circle. You’d start out with “Randy walks to the hardware store” and end up with “Gra

It had been Lou A

“So is this place okay? You’re sure?” she asked us, until we begged her to take our word for it, that it was the most wonderful picnic spot on the face of the earth, and she relaxed.

“Me and Angel actually talked about getting married up here,” she said, dipping her toes in and out. There were Jesus bugs here, but not the long-legged, graceful kind we had back home. These were shaped like my car and more or less careened around on top of the water. The whole gang of them together looked like graduation night in Volkswagen land.

“That would have been a heck of a wedding,” Mattie said. “A hefty hike for the guests.”