The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver

This is not to say that I was unfamiliar with the back seat of a Chevrolet. I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer’s wife.

“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.”

“I don’t know. I hate to say it, but I really don’t know. I can’t even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.” “You live in that world,” he said quietly, and I knew this, but I didn’t want to.

“How can I just be upset about Turtle, about a grown man hurting a baby, when the whole way of the world is to pick on people that can’t fight back?”

You’d think that life alone would be punishment enough for those people, but then the cops come around waking them up mornings, knocking them around with their sticks. You’ve seen it. And everybody else saying hooray, way to go, I got mine, power to the toughest. Clean up the neighborhood and devil take the riffraff.”

I remembered my pep talk to Esperanza a few months before, and understood just how ridiculous it was. There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you’ll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

On the basis of leaves and bones, she would advise people on what to do with their lives. No wonder she was rich. It seems like almost anything is better than having only yourself to blame when you screw things up.

I stared for a long time at the picture of the Aztec man carrying the passed-out woman, thinking about whatever Latin American tragedy it stood for. Thinking, naturally, of Esperanza and Estevan. Though I knew that more often than not it was the other way around, the woman carried the man through the tragedy. The man and the grandma and all the kids.