The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

were near downtown. The first was a big old ramshackle house with about twelve kinds of wind chimes hanging on the front porch. One was made from the silver keys of some kind of musical instrument like a flute or clarinet, and even Turtle seemed interested in it. A woman came to the door before I even knocked.
    She let me inside and called out, “The prospective’s here.” Three silver earrings—a half moon, a star, and a grinning sun—dangled from holes in her left ear so that she clinked when she walked like some human form of wind chime. She was barefoot and had on a skirt that reminded me of the curtains in my room at the Republic. There was no actual furniture in the room, only a colorful rug and piles of pillows here and there, so I waited to see what she would do. She nested herself into one of the piles, flouncing her skirt out over her knees. I noticed that she had thin silver rings on four of her toes.
    Another woman came out of the kitchen door, through which I was relieved to see a table and chairs. A tall, thin guy with a hairless chest hunkered in another doorway for a minute, rubbing a head oforange hair that looked like a wet cat. He had on only those beachcomber-type pants held up by a fake rope. I really couldn’t tell how old these people were. I kept expecting a parent to show up in another doorway and tell Beach Blanket Bingo to put on his shirt, but then, they could have been older than me. We all settled down on the pillows.
    “I’m Fay,” the toe-ring woman said, “spelled F-E-I, and this is La-Isha and that’s Timothy. You’ll have to excuse Timothy; he used caffeine yesterday and now his homeostasis is out of balance.” I presumed they were talking about his car, although I was not aware of any automotive uses for caffeine.
    “That’s too bad,” I said. “I wouldn’t do anything with caffeine but drink it.”
    They all stared at me for a while.
    “Oh. I’m Taylor. This is Turtle.”
    “Turtle. Is that a spirit name?” La-Isha asked.
    “Sure,” I said.
    La-Isha was thick-bodied, with broad bare feet and round calves. Her dress was a sort of sarong, printed all over with black and orange elephants and giraffes, and she had a jungly-looking scarf wrapped around her head. And to think they used to stare at me for wearing red and turquoise together. Drop these three in Pittman County and people would run for cover.
    F-E-I took charge of the investigation. “Would the child be living here too?”
    “Right. We’re a set.”
    “That’s cool, I have no problem with small people,” she said. “La-Isha, Timothy?”
    “It’s not really what I was thinking in terms of, but I can see it happening. I’m flex on children,” La-Isha said, after giving it some thought. Timothy said he thought the baby was cute, asked if it was a boy or a girl.
    “A girl,” I said, but I was drowned out by Fei saying, “Timothy, I really don’t see that that’s an issue here.” She said to me, “Gender is not an issue in this house.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Whatever.”
    “What does she eat?” La-Isha wanted to know.
    “Mainly whatever she can get her hands on. She had half a hot dog with mustard for breakfast.”
    There was another one of those blank spells in the conversation. Turtle was grumpily yanking at a jingle bell on the corner of a pillow, and I was beginning to feel edgy myself. All those knees and chins at the same level. It reminded me of an extremely long movie I had once seen about an Arabian sheik. Maybe La-Isha is Arabian, I thought, though she looked very white, with blond hair on her arms and pink rims around her eyes. Possibly an albino Arabian. I realized she was giving a lecture of some kind.
    “At least four different kinds of toxins,” she was saying, more to the room in general than to me. Her pink-rimmed eyes were starting to look inflamed. “In a hot dog.” Now she was definitely talking to me. “Were you aware of that?”
    “I would have guessed seven or