A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  Even when my father was a young man, there were so many lakes and pothole ponds in Zebulon County that the idea of building a swimming pool would have been ludicrous, but now every town of any size either had built one or wanted to, and the county newspapers cited these and the three table-flat nine-hole golf courses as “some of Zebulon County’s numerous recreational facilities.”

  We changed, passed through the showers, and spread our towels with self-conscious care about a third of the way down from the shallow end. Pammy opened her swimming bag, pulled out a pair of black and white polka-dotted sunglasses, and put them on. Linda said, “Where did you get those?”

  “When we were in Iowa City. I bought them with my own money.”

  “Can I wear them?”

  I said, “May I wear them.”

  “May I wear them?”

  “No.” The sunglasses glanced toward me. “Well, maybe. We’ll see.” Pammy leaned back, arranged herself on her elbows, and surveyed the assembled crowd. Just in that moment, it was easy to believe she was twelve, almost thirteen, though her figure was still wiry and thin. Not even that first layer of softness underneath the skin had begun to develop. Linda reached into her bag and pulled out a Teen magazine, which she spread open on her towel and began to peruse with concentration. I looked over. The article she was reading was entitled “How Much Makeup Is Too Much?” and began, “Every morning before school, Freshman Tina Smith spends forty-five minutes on her face.”

  I smiled to myself and looked around. There were two women I knew, both my father’s age, with their grandchildren. One of them, Mary Livingstone, waved to me. She had been a friend of my mother’s, and they had served on some church committees together. I took out my Family Circle. If you lay flat and gripped the edges of the magazine tightly, the wind wasn’t as bothersome.

  Pammy said, “There’s Doreen Patrick.” She pushed her polka dots up the bridge of her nose. “She has a cute suit on.” She turned to me and said, “If she comes over here, Aunt Ginny, may I go lie with them?”

  “Sure. But you don’t have to wait till she comes over here. You could just go up and say hi.”

  “I don’t know those other kids. It doesn’t matter.”

  I watched her watching them. A few minutes later, Doreen Patrick and another girl walked past us toward the snack bar. Doreen glanced at Pammy but didn’t say anything. I said, “Pam, nobody’s going to recognize you with those sunglasses on.” She didn’t respond.

  Mary Livingstone came over with her two grandsons, who looked to be about four and five. “Well, Ginny!” she said. “How’s your dad?” She lowered herself to the edge of my towel, no mean task. “Remember Todd and Toby? Margaret’s boys? This must be Pammy and Linda. Weren’t you girls away for school this year?”

  Linda murmured, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Didja like it?”

  Again, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, Linda, you take the boys and play with them. They’ve got some toys over by the ladder there.” Linda got to her feet. “Go with Linda, boys. She’ll play some nice games with you. Granny’s tired.” Mary was like my father in her assumption that children were born to serve their elders, and that their service was to be directed rather than requested. I glanced over at Pammy. She seemed to have shrunk into herself a little. Mary let out a long “Hoooohah,” then pinned me with her gaze. “You heard we’re selling the farm, didn’t you, Ginny?”

  “I guess I didn’t.”

  “Selling it to the Stanleys, the boy and the two nephews. We’re gonna live there through harvest, but they bought the crops in the field, too.”

  “The house?”

  “House and everything. We got a trailer down in Bradenton, Florida, for the winter, and then next spring, Dad’s gonna buy us a place up near Hayward, Wisconsin, for the fishing. A nice little two-bedroom cabin on a lake, or something like that. They got some places up there with two or three little cottages for when the grand-kids come.” She stretched out her legs and stared at them for a moment. “Nothing big or fancy. There’s just the two of us.”

  “We’ll be sorry to see you go.”

  “I’ll miss some people.”

  One of the Livingstone sons had been killed in Vietnam, the other in a car accident between Pike and Zebulon Center. I wondered why neither of the daughters wanted the farm, with land prices going so high, but that could be a touchy subject, so I didn’t say anything. Mary looked at me. “It was Marv Carson who told us what a good time it is to sell. We’ve got more than a million dollars now. Can you believe that? I never thought I’d see that. We kept some out for new places to live, and a new car, but we put the rest in these treasury bills.” My gaze followed hers over to Linda and the boys. Linda was laughing, and the boys were, too. Mary said, “We never had savings before. One time in the Depression, all we had was a dollar to last us a week. That was right after we got married, before Annabeth was born. You know Annabeth’s girl is going to Grinnell, now? Smart girl.”

  “Sounds like you have a lot of good news, Mary.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. We’ll see if it’s good. How’s your dad?” She gave me a piercing look, and I wondered if she had seen him on one of his odysseys. I said he was fine.

  “How about Rose? I heard Rose got cancer.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pammy wince. I said, “She’s fine. She’s really made a good recovery.” Pammy took off her sunglasses, folded them, wrapped them in her towel, and tucked them inside her swimming bag. Then she said, in an even voice, “Aunt Ginny, I’m going to go swim now.” She went over to a spot along the edge of the pool about ten feet from Doreen Patrick and her group, and dove in. Mary said, “These girls know about Rose’s cancer, don’t they? I didn’t mean—”

  “Of course they knew about it, but Rose has kept it very quiet. I’m sure she wants them to know it’s there, but not to think about it.”

  “I always thought—I always thought kids on farms should be made to face facts early on. That’s their only hope, seems to me.”

  We watched the swimmers and sunbathers and I thought about this. Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts there were to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind.

  Mary said, “We might not see you before we leave. Dad isn’t much for going around and saying good-bye, and I’m not, either.”

  “It isn’t for months yet. I’m sure—”

  “Well, I want to tell you something.”

  “Oh.”

  “This thing with Rose reminds me. You girls were about this age when your mom was sick, and your mom used to call me. She was afraid she would die, so afraid.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It was a remark that shouldn’t have shocked me—aren’t we all afraid to die—but did, because I remembered her illness and death as very sober, almost muffled. When Rose and I cried, we did it under the covers in her bed or mine, with the corners of our pillows stuffed into our mouths. We did most of our crying during the sickness, and what we told each other was that if our mother saw us cry, it would scare her and disturb her.

  “I said I would help.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “She was so afraid for you girls, and I said I would help. I said I would be a real friend to you.”

  “No one can help a dying person—”

  She looked at me. After a moment, she said, “Ginny, your mother wasn’t afraid for herself. She was never afraid for herself. She had true faith. She was afraid for you. For the life you would live after she died.”

  In the long silence after this, Linda and the boys got out of the pool and headed for us. By the rope, Pammy was at last talking to Doreen Patrick. As I watched, Doreen smiled at something Pammy said, and Pammy smiled, too, with good humor but also with relief. Her fears were not being realized, and she appreciated that. When L
inda reached us, before Mary could say anything, I handed her a couple of dollars and said, “They have Popsicles at the snack bar. Would you boys like a Popsicle? Take them for Popsicles, sweetie, and then we’ll talk about what’s next. And don’t forget, you have to stay in the snack area with food.”

  When they were out of earshot, Mary went on, “She knew what your father was like, even though I think she loved him.” Her gaze traveled over my face. After a moment, she went on, “For one thing, she wanted you to have more choices. I know she wanted you to go to college. She never wanted you to marry so young, before seeing some other places and trying some other things. She used to say, ‘The Twin Cities aren’t such a big deal. The Twin Cities aren’t the New Jerusalem!’ Then she would throw her head back and laugh. She had a great laugh when she let it out.” Mary looked at me then, and I’m sure she could see the tears standing in my eyes. She said, “Lord, Ginny, I shouldn’t have brought this up, but I did promise to be a friend to you, and to try and give you some of the things your mom wanted you to have, but then Jimmy had his accident, and I could hardly move myself, I was so, uh, so, well, it almost killed me. So I let it go. I have to say that before I leave here, even though it must hurt you. I’ve just thought about it every day for years and years.”

  I said, “It’s okay, Mary. I was just wondering what facts there were that I haven’t faced. Anyway, I don’t know that I would have had a different life if Mom had lived. Daddy didn’t make me marry Ty. I wanted to. And he’s very nice.”

  “Well, his father was a nice man, though I never knew Ty at all. There was another thing, too—” She eyed me. I said, “What was that?” Our gazes locked. Finally, she said, “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing really.”

  I found myself a touch disconcerted, so I said, “Rose went to college. She had the choices Mom wanted, and she chose the farm. Caroline chose the city, and she’s been everywhere now, New York, Washington. So, in a way, Mom really got what she wanted.”

  Mary smiled. “Maybe so, dear. She was most worried about you. She used to say, ‘Ginny won’t stand up to him,’ but if you’re happy, then it’s all worked out. I’ll say one thing, and that is that you’re a good girl, and unselfish, and you will be rewarded. I believe that.”

  “Thanks, Mary.” I picked up Pammy’s towel and scrubbed my face with it. Linda returned with the boys, both of them streaked with red Popsicle drippings. Mary heaved to her feet, saying, “Come on, you two. You need to be dipped in the pool.” Then she smiled at Linda, a genuine approving smile, and said, “You’re a sweet child, Linda. You tell your mom that Mary said so.” She walked away.

  “Toby’s cute,” said Linda, almost regretfully.

  I said, “You were nice to watch them.”

  “It was okay. I wish Mom would let me baby-sit, but nobody nearby has any babies, and she said if she had to drive me, she would charge me mileage.”

  “That sounds like a joke to me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Maybe. You can’t really tell with Mom. Anyway, she thinks I’m too young.”

  I realized that I was almost panting, and I consciously steadied my breath. Linda scanned the pool, then went back to her Teen magazine. I said, “I’m going for a dip.” She nodded without looking up.

  The water was chilly and refreshing, and I felt the pressure of my mother and her fears for me like a ballooning, impinging presence. My mother died before I knew her, before I liked her, before I was old enough for her to be herself with me. As a mother, her manner was matter-of-fact and brisk. I used to watch her feeding Caroline and changing her diapers, lifting her out of messes and trouble. She did everything quickly and never lingered affectionately over these operations, though she could be gently teasing or humorous, joking with even the youngest and most oblivious infant. She bottle-fed Caroline and I’m sure she bottle-fed us, in spite of the fact that farmwives never willingly take on extra work, and her demeanor during the feedings was rather impersonal as I later recalled it. There was no melding with the child into symbiotic fleshy warmth. Her dresses, even her housedresses, were structured and public-seeming, with tucks and darts, decorative buttons and appliqué work. The span of her motherhood was a short one, just over a decade, only a moment, really, no time for evolution. I have noticed that a mother left eternally young through death comes to seem as remote as your own young self. It’s as easy to judge her misapprehensions and mistakes as it is to judge your own, and to fall into a habit of disrespect, as if all her feelings must have been as shallow and jejeune as you think yours used to be.

  That that young woman foresaw my life so clearly unnerved me, as if something intensely private had suddenly been exposed and discussed by people I barely knew. Simultaneously, I recognized and pitied her frustration and fear. That is another bequest from an early-dying parent, her image ever more childlike and powerless compared to your own advancing age.

  I hadn’t actually made the parallel between Rose’s situation and my mother’s, no doubt because my main thoughts during Rose’s treatment had been selfish ones—my life’s companion, little Rose, always four to my six, the way she was when I first became really conscious of her (when I first became really conscious). But of course, when you thought about it, Rose was quite like my mother in many ways—her manner, her looks, even, in part, the name (Ann Rose Amundson—while I swam I formed my mother’s maiden name with my lips). Virginia—that was a pretentious name for our family, taken from a book, as was Caroline.

  But even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries. For a moment I toyed with a magic solution—that Rose, in herself, in her reincarnation of our mother, would speak, or act out, the answers. All I had to do was be mindful of the relationship between them (mindful in secret, in a way no one else could be mindful), and gather up the answers, glean the apparently harvested field for overlooked bits. But no. There could be a quest—I might go around to people we knew, or who had known her, and ask them about her. I could, maybe, call her brother in Arizona or New Mexico, if he was still alive, if someone dimly remembered the town he used to live in. I could ask my father about her. I could become her biographer, be drawn into her life, and into excuses for her or blame of her, but that seemed like an impractical, laborious, and failing substitute for what I had missed in the last twenty-two years. I was, after all, my father’s daughter, and I automatically did believe in the unbroken surface of the unsaid. After seven laps, I hauled myself out of the water and sat in the hot wind. I noticed that Pammy had peeled away from Doreen Patrick’s group and rejoined Linda. Her polka-dotted sunglasses were firmly in place.

  There was no reason to go home. The weather was relentless, and I didn’t look forward to the hot night to come. Our house had a few shade trees close to it, but my father’s house was stationed proudly up a little rise, four or five feet, but the only rise in the area, adjacent to an equally proud stand of ornamental evergreens that looked nice but did nothing for the heat. You could see his roof, radiant tin, from a good ways off, but if it warded off the heat, I wasn’t aware of it.

  Even so, sitting around the pool felt like a kind of penance. Pammy said nothing about Doreen Patrick, nor about anyone else, but she raked the area ceaselessly with her gaze, stopping and staring for a few seconds, then starting again. Once or twice she picked up her book, but she couldn’t stick with it. Linda finished her magazine and went to play by herself in the water. I couldn’t read for the glare, so I sat for a while at the edge of the shallow end and dangled my feet. What Rose and I once did in our pond, simply float on our backs for what seemed like hours, soaking up the coolness of the water and living in the blue of the sky, was impossible here. There were too many hurtling bodies. There was nowhere to be privately, contemplatively immersed, one of summer’s joys. The energy we had brought with us, the expectation of fun, seeped away, and left us even more listless
ly reluctant to go home.

  It was nearly six when we got into the car. The pool was still crowded; Pike was deserted, air conditioners humming, blinds drawn. Occasional grills on patios ventilated eastward-pointing arrows of smoke. I felt shocked and dull. Supper, Daddy, Rose wondering when the children would be getting home, Ty’s patience, all seemed exceptionally remote. The girls sat quietly, both in the backseat. Pammy’s sunglasses had been put carefully in their case, and she was holding that in her hand. I knew that all children had certain precious belongings, odd things that represented happiness to them, but the way she cradled that case in her hand seemed poignant to me, emblematic of some sort of deprivation that she could feel but not define, or, maybe, admit to. I must have sighed, because Linda sat forward and said, “We had a good time, Aunt Ginny. Anyway, next time, I’m going to call someone and ask them to meet me there.”

  14

  WHEN WE GOT HOME, Ty and Pete were installing a new room air conditioner in one of the north-facing windows of our living room. They were just setting it on the platform they had nailed out from the windowsill, lifting and grunting and telling each other what to do. I herded the girls into the kitchen, where I found Rose drying the last lettuce of the season for a salad. She said, “Jess’s coming over at seven. I fed Daddy. He was bound and determined to eat smack on the dot at five, even though I told him he should come over here and eat with all of us.”

  “It’s your night to have him at your house.”

  “Yes, and this is what I decided that our family was going to do. You know, it’s pretty crazy to have to do the same thing every Friday, week after week, same food, same time. It would have been good for him—”