by Jane Smiley
I held up my soil-blackened hands. “Maybe you better tell me what they are.”
“Well, Ginny.” He hesitated over the friendly form of my name. “Your dad is suing you to get the farm back. Your sister Caroline is a party to the suit, too. You better find yourself a lawyer.”
“I thought you were our lawyer.”
“I can’t be. It’s not ethical.” Now he met my gaze fully. “Besides, I have to say that I don’t want to be, either. I don’t think you’ve treated your dad right, to be honest.”
“We didn’t ask for the farm.”
“I don’t feel I can be talking about the case. You get yourself a lawyer from Mason City or Fort Dodge or somewhere. That’s the best thing to do.” He set the papers down on the porch swing and got past me down the porch steps without looking at me again. I felt as though I’d been slapped.
31
WHEN CAROLINE WAS ABOUT FOURTEEN and I was twenty-two, already married for almost three years, she came over after supper one evening, and said that she’d been given the lead in the high school play, over all the other older girls. She was to play Maisie in The Boyfriend. Maisie was a flapper, and had to sing and dance and wear sleeveless flapper dresses. Daddy, she thought, wouldn’t like it. I agreed to cover for her rehearsals, and also to pick her up at school two hours after the school bus left. I told Daddy she had a special English project, not too far from the truth, since one of the English teachers was also the drama coach, and I helped with her farm chores when she was late. During rehearsals, I got in the habit of going early to get her and sitting in the auditorium for fifteen minutes, watching her.
She was terrible. She had obviously been picked for her voice—she had the most songs to sing, and every other girl on the stage was shrill and off-key compared to Caroline, whose pitch and volume were at least respectable. But she spoke her lines stiffly and her dancing—two Charleston numbers and a waltz—made me wince. When she had to kiss the boy lead once, a thread of saliva stretched between them as they moved away from one another, and caught the light. Everyone on the stage snickered, and the boy turned red. Caroline remained mercifully oblivious. She didn’t get any better, either. All the way through the dress rehearsal, her dancing was awkward and her voice pitched every line high at the end, as if she were asking a question no matter what she was saying. I dreaded opening night and was glad that I’d kept her project a secret even from Ty. I called Rose at college that night and together we thrilled with whispered horror over the coming humiliation.
The next day she acted completely normal—no stage fright, no anxiety. She came over before school to get the costume I had been altering, an aquamarine flapper dress with feathers on the shoulders and rhinestones around the hem, and she ate the crusts of toast off my plate, using them to wipe up bits of jelly, and she talked idly about a boy who wasn’t even involved in the play. She went off to the school-bus stop with the dress slung casually over her shoulder. I had been intending to get Ty to go to the play with me at the last moment, but I decided to go alone. I sat in the back, near the door. The auditorium was full—lots of feed caps—and there was our name right in the program for every farmer and every farmwife and every person in the township to read.
But the audience inspired her. She knew exactly how to sense us without ever looking at us, exactly how to let us see her smile and cavort and flirt. She even knew how to kiss the boy lead in our presence, and to make him kiss her so that he seemed gawky from passion rather than youth. She kicked up her heels and sang to the back row, and at the end they gave her a standing ovation. Afterwards, I was giddy with the pleasure I felt in this unexpected sight of her. We would bring Daddy. Ty and I would kidnap Daddy and just bring him and sit him down and give him this surprise. Caroline was as calm as ever. Ty could come, she said, but only Ty. Daddy still wasn’t to know. I disagreed about his approval. I thought he would be swayed by the others in the audience, by the obvious manifestation of her talent and energy, but that wasn’t it. She just wanted this life to herself, and she swore me to secrecy.
She acted in another play in her sophomore year, The Crucible. She played the second most important of the accusing girls, and had no song to sing. Once again, her performance was stiff until opening night, round and full after that. But the stress of secret rehearsals and performances was too great—there was always the chance that someone would mention to Daddy at the feedstore or the implement dealer’s that he’d seen her in the play. So she took up debating, which Daddy considered odd but respectable. Whenever he asked her, she told him that a given debate was to be held in Des Moines or Iowa City or Dubuque. Once again, she squirmed away from having him watch her, as if the very substance that fed her ready and focused performances would vanish if he were in the audience. At the time, she said it was a kind of superstition, the kind you get with baseball players. I colluded.
She did well in school, too, especially in English and history and languages, and especially when there was just a little additive of performance to an exercise. She did not shine at all in science courses, especially those pivoting on experiments and lab reports. Even in her math classes, a proof she was asked to write on the board was always right, while she might make a careless error or two in the same proof, worked out painstakingly the night before in her homework.
I had such hope for her, such a strong sense that when we sent her out, in whatever capacity, she would perform well, with enthusiasm and confidence that were mysteriously hers alone. If we kept her home, she would languish, do badly, seem like nothing special. Caring for her changed from dressing her and feeding her and keeping her out of trouble to collaborating with her, supporting her plans. She talked readily to me about all sorts of things, it seemed, but mostly about the question, What next?
Rose and I always thought we’d done well with her, guiding her between the pitfalls and sending her out to success.
I washed my hands inside and went out and picked up the papers. They stated that my father had chosen to avail himself of the revocation clause in the preincorporation agreement, which stated that Rose’s and my shares in the farm were revocable under certain conditions of “mismanagement or abuse.” This was a phrase that I only dimly remembered reading in the original papers. I did remember Ty saying, “Well, Larry taught us to farm, and we farm just like he does, so I don’t see why we don’t let that stand.” I also remembered how eager I had been to get everything over with, how much I wanted to get to the door and see if Caroline had really driven away. The transfer hadn’t been an occasion I savored, had it?
Caroline joined my father in invoking the revocation clause. I supposed that I had to carry the papers into the house, but it was hard to do so, like swallowing something large and distasteful. I realized that I had forgotten to ask if Rose was to get a set of papers all her own, or if I had to tell her about them. That was what I shrank from, in the end, all the telling there was, followed by all the hearing. Mostly I saw Rose as my savior, showing me the way through this quagmire we had gotten into, but sometimes she affected me that barking dog way, never resting for all the alarms there were to sound. And the dog in me was one of those other, less alert but still excitable animals who couldn’t help joining in and barking with equal frenzy.
I read the papers and put them on the dining-room table for Ty, weighted down with his coffee cup. Something else not to talk about.
It was a hot day, but as I dialed the phone I began to shiver. When the receptionist at her office answered, it was all I could do to firm up my voice, which came out as if my teeth were chattering, which they were. I gripped the phone, determined that Caroline would take my call, but when she did, I was dumbstruck with surprise, and could only come out with, “Oh, hi.”
“Hi.”
“What’s going on?” These ways of speaking that were neither conciliatory nor tentative came roughly to my tongue exactly when a tone was needed that would not offend.
She said, “I should ask you that.”
&
nbsp; “Maybe you should have asked me that before this. But what I want to know is more immediate. What’s this suit?”
“I can’t talk about that. If you want to talk about that, then I’ll have to hang up.”
I decided not to bring up the ingratitude part, just exactly because it drew me so, because the sound of her voice made it shine more and more brightly. I said, “You were out of this. It’s not your business.”
“Frankly, I don’t consider it business at all. You may, now that you’ve got control of the farm.”
“I didn’t bring the suit! I didn’t push things out of the personal realm into the legal realm!”
“I told you I can’t talk about the suit.”
I shouted, “Well, it takes up all the floor space, doesn’t it? It drives everything else out, doesn’t it?”
“Not in my mind. What drives everything else out in my mind is the thought of Daddy out in that storm.”
“He went! He just went! We weren’t going to bodily hold him back!”
She breathed in skeptical silence.
I said, “You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened or what it was like.” I tried to say this in a calmer voice, less shrill.
“Daddy was there. Ty was there.”
“Ty?”
“He was standing right there.”
“You’ve talked to Ty?”
She didn’t answer this, but it was evident that she had. My vision seemed momentarily to close over in red and black clouds. When it cleared, I said, “We did everything for you! We fed you and clothed you and taught you to read and helped you with your homework! We found a way to get you whatever you wanted!”
“That’s not the issue here.”
“We saved you from Daddy! We made a space for you that we never had for ourselves! Rose—he—” I floundered to a halt.
“Did I have to be saved from Daddy? From my own father? There are plenty of niceties of my upbringing we can talk about someday, Ginny. At this point, I don’t really blame you and Rose for the way you raised me. I really don’t. Actually, I would like to go into it someday. I think that would be healthy, but right now, this is a personal call, and I have a meeting and everything.” She hung up.
I held the receiver in my hand for a moment and then replaced it on the cradle.
32
WHAT IT FELT LIKE WAS THE FLU, so much so that I went upstairs and took my temperature. My temperature was normal, but I took two aspirin anyway. The relief I longed for was physical; though I had no fever, I felt hot and breathless. I decided to go swimming, just to get in the car and go swimming.
The trouble was, as I drove toward Pike, the town seemed to repel me, to cause my car to slow to a crawl, to resist my entering it as if by protective shield. All the self-consciousness I had intermittently felt over the years, that was sometimes soothed by people’s friendliness and sometimes inflamed by slights that I suspected, seemed to resurrect itself whole. As much as I yearned for relief (now it seemed only water, only total, refreshing immersion, could clear my mind) the idea of putting on my bathing suit and walking across the flat, exposed pavement of that swimming pool was an impossible one. I turned north and headed for an old quarry up near Columbus that I hadn’t been to, or thought of, in ten years. With the kind of rains we’d had, it would certainly be full.
It gave you a moment’s pause to go to the quarry, but it was the biggest body of water anywhere nearby, blue and sparkling on a sunny day, or so I remembered it. High school kids had always claimed it as their own; the sheriff scattered them two or three times a year, and somebody repaired the cyclone fence surrounding it. No stone was quarried there any longer; even the company that owned it had gone out of business and no one in the county knew who was liable. It existed, manmade but natural, too, the one place where the sea within the earth lay open to sight.
Except that when I got there, the water that filled it was brown and murky. Thistles and tall native grasses (“Big bluestem,” Jess would have said, “switchgrass, Indian grass”) just about hid the rusting cyclone fence, grew all the way to the indistinct, crumbling edge. The thick water was nearly to the top, and I had forgotten where the shallows and the depths were. You certainly couldn’t dive in—I remembered how we had always pulled rusty objects out of the water with guileless curiosity—hubcaps, tin cans, bashed-in oil drums. Now I saw the place with a new darkened vision. No telling what was in there.
Still, there was no going home, no going to Pike or Cabot, no driving away, either. The turbid water lay still; there was not even the ghost of a breeze. Some of the junk half buried in weeds around the periphery had been there so long that paths circumnavigated it, and I started up one of these, toward a stand of hackberries and hawthorns. Wild rosebushes clumped here and there, the blossoms now become swelling hips with their golden tufts. Bindweed coiled everywhere, the pearly white flutes beginning to close in the afternoon sunshine.
At home, it was galling to think of how others were talking about us, bad enough to think of their ridicule or disapproval, but worse to think how they were surely entertained by us, how this stinging, goading, angry self-consciousness that impelled me every day, every minute, to seek relief was nothing to them, something they couldn’t feel and hardly ever gave a thought to. All these neighbors, close enough to know our business, but too infinitely far from us to feel a particle of what we were feeling, themselves feeling animated, more than anything, by the pleasures of curiosity. Away from the farm, though, that was okay, too. Their indifference constituted the goal, the promise that life, my life, the life of our family, was bigger, longer, more resilient than the difficulties we now found ourselves caught in. At the quarry, it was easier to feel that the main requirement was simple endurance.
Away from the farm, it was easier to think of how people went on from these sorts of troubles, it was easier to see a life as a sturdy rope with occasional knots in it. Every life I knew of in Zebulon County was marked by conflict and loss. Weren’t our favorite conversations about just these things—if not how some present tangle was working itself out, then how past tangles prefigured the present world, had made us and our county what it was? And didn’t it always turn out with these conversations that the fact that we were prospering, getting along, or at least feeling our life strong within our flesh proved that everything that had happened had created the present moment, was good enough, was worth it?
I came to the grove of trees and stood in the dappled shade. Just there, I realized that I had been sensing another presence, perhaps hearing steps or the silence of the meadow birds. For some reason, when a man’s figure stepped up to the edge of the water and threw a handful of stones into it (I could hear the plinkety-plunks even from that distance), I was not surprised by the fact that it was Pete. I stayed in the grove, though, unwilling to let my privacy vanish. He watched the water for a few minutes, then turned and walked toward me. I thought of escaping.
But of course I didn’t. The lesson I could not seem to learn was how to refuse the gifts I was to be given.
My feelings about Pete hadn’t lost the shimmer left over from the Monopoly tournament. On the contrary, it was easy to see how, over the years, Pete’s reponses to Daddy had been more honest than Ty’s, destructive but at least not duplicitous, impolitic but passionate, angry but never self-serving, and almost noble in the last four years, after Rose’s revelations about what Daddy had done to her. Didn’t the fact that she had told him itself constitute a recommendation?
He saw me and paused, smiled for me, came on. When he was just within earshot, I called out, “Playing hooky at the swimming hole?”
He came up to me saying, “I took the alternate route back from Mason City. I suppose you might swim here if you were ready to take your life in your hands.”
We turned together and walked back down the path I’d come, toward my car. I said, “Where’s the truck? I didn’t see anyone when I drove in.”
“There’s an old quarry road that runs in
up on the north end. The gate’s down, so you can get right up to where it disappears into the water. Must be where they took the stone out in the old days.”
“Somebody in Ty’s class in high school drove a car into the quarry once.”
“Hmm. Well, plenty of things have been driven into this quarry over the years. I guess it’s like windows in abandoned buildings. You hate to see that surface go unbroken.”
“What’s Rose doing today?”
“Haven’t you talked to her? Something with the girls. I forget what. What are you doing up here, anyway? I haven’t ever seen you around here before.”
I liked talking to Pete like this, taking an interest, as if we were friends. At home, our relations were circumscribed by work, and other things, too, I supposed. I said, “I just wanted to go somewhere wet. I remembered this place as different, though. Blue.”
“Some days it is blue, but there’s a lot of runoff from the rains. I wouldn’t swim in it blue, either, though. I’d imagine that the bacteria level’s pretty high. Jack Stanley’s got that feedlot back up the creek there.” He pointed toward the northwest horizon.
“The high school kids swim here.”
“Mmm. Slurp slurp. Must be okay, then.”
I laughed. But the reason I was there included Pete, too, didn’t it? He was named in the suit. I felt that awful self-consciousness returning, chasing out the momentary ease I had been enjoying. The rope of my life, coiling into this knot, then out of it, seemed again more like a thread, easily broken. Even if I didn’t tell Pete about the legal papers, that moment of ease was gone. So I said, “I was running away from the suit, actually.”
“What?”
“Caroline is—well, I mean, Daddy, is suing us to get the farm back. That abuse or mismanagement clause.”
“Huh.”
He sounded speculative, hardly interested. We walked on, passing my car and turning west along the south end of the quarry. I said, “It just made me so mad. I had to go somewhere. I felt like all this was giving me a fever.”
