A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  I gazed at her. She pushed her hair out of her face, which had a tipsy, unbuttoned look.

  She said, “It’s never been good. It was exciting once in a while, because Pete was so unpredictable, but—” She stopped, turned, and faced me. Her face was the color of the moon, and thin. Her eyes were in shadow. “All I wanted when I met Pete was someone exciting enough to erase Daddy. And I thought sure Pete would end up in Chicago, playing music, somewhere Daddy wouldn’t even visit. That was at the very beginning. But he wasn’t making any money at it. I mean, gigs were twenty-five bucks a night, or less. So then, we were going to move back here just until these friends of his got a record contract in L.A. and called us. That was supposed to take a summer, tops. One summer. But Pete had this fight with them, and we lost touch, and they put me on at the grammar school, and then I thought that was the way to make some money. We had a new plan every month, but Pete always screwed them up, with his temper, or else by being overenthusiastic and needy and driving people away. When Pammy was born and then Linda right afterward, I just gave up. But it was never good! It wasn’t ever even uneventful, the way it was with you and Ty!”

  I knew if I kept my mouth shut, all questions would be answered soon enough.

  Rose looked across the road and said, “I’m so tempted just to walk over there and go in, but I know Pammy will wake up.”

  “Go where?”

  She motioned at the big square facade of the Chelsea.

  “What on earth for?”

  She gave me a sideways glance.

  My understanding, slower than my own reply, kept exact pace with hers, so that it felt like I was forming the words with my lips as she did. “To get in bed with Jess.” Then, “Oh, don’t look at me in that shocked way. I don’t want to deal with it.” She turned and began walking down the road, south. I watched her go, then ran after her. She said, “Ask me a question. Any question.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to tell you the truth.”

  “Then just tell me.” I said it, but I knew I didn’t want to hear it.

  She said, “I realize that having lovers is not something that women around here do, though I suspect it goes on more than we think. I know you disapprove, but it’s important to me that you understand. He’s the first one I trust.”

  “The first one?” I was only parroting her. I didn’t really have the sense that I knew what I was saying, but she seemed satisfied that my responses were adequately conversational.

  “Okay, yes.” She rocked back on her heels. “I was promiscuous in college, and maybe a little in high school, too, but since Pete, there’s only been one before Jess. I always thought one of them would have to supersede Daddy eventually. That was what I thought at the beginning. Later I thought if there were enough of them it would sort of put him in context, or diminish him somehow.” She looked at me again. “You know what Pete always said? That I had what he called frenzied dislike of sex. Anyway, I didn’t tell him about Daddy for a long time.”

  “Who was the one since Pete?” I expected her, frankly, to say Ty.

  “It was Bob Stanley, but it was nothing. It lasted a summer.”

  Then she said, “This is love.”

  I said, “What does that mean?” I’m sure I sounded hostile, but she chose to take this as a real question. I was staring right at her. The look on her face evolved from challenging to doubtful to speculative to careful.

  She said, “Well, of course it’s exciting. But I know that will go away. It’s only been about three weeks that we’ve been sleeping together, and it’s hard to find the privacy, as you can imagine.”

  She paused, then went on. “He seems to have this sense about my body—” She eyed me, went gingerly on, “He just looks at it a lot, you know, touches it as if he appreciates it. He says, you know, that my shoulders are a nice shape, or that he likes my backbone. He sees me differently than other men have.”

  I remembered what he said about the fiancée, her eyes and teeth. He’d admired my ankles. I remembered how I had carefully protected and revisited that compliment for reassurance that Jess had seen and valued the real me.

  “I know that stops. I know all that physical appreciation of the other person stops, but it’s nice. I mean, yes I know it stops, but I can’t get enough of it as long as it lasts. But it’s not really the important thing.”

  “When that stops, doesn’t everything stop? I mean, isn’t that what affairs are all about?”

  “Well, this is going on. This is it.”

  I summoned a note of sympathy into my voice. We had walked a couple of hundred yards, so I turned back. I didn’t think Pammy should be left entirely alone, but I also yearned to be in sight of Jess Clark’s windows. “Rose,” I said, low and easy-sounding, “Jess’s a restless person. He’s never settled down. This stuff with Harold isn’t going to help him settle down, either. He’s had plenty of women, too. I would bet on that. Unless he positively commits himself—”

  “But he has! I’ve been much more standoffish than he has. He’s always pushing me to just—”

  “Just what?” I sounded so idle.

  “Well, that’s what we can’t decide. Where. What. The girls. I mean, I even felt some loyalty to Pete after all the years and all the shit. Ginny, you’re white as a sheet.”

  “Just keep walking. Did you tell Pete about Jess?”

  “Yes.”

  “That last day?”

  “Weeks ago. Well, a week ago.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was going to kill Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “I kid you not. His response to the news that I was going to leave him for Jess Clark was that he was going to kill Daddy, and if Harold got in the way, he would kill him, too.”

  I pondered this.

  “He emptied the water tank on Harold’s fertilizer tank.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Pete did.”

  Now this was shocking, something else I had not suspected at all. I said, “Jesus. What in God’s name was he thinking of?”

  “He was thinking Daddy might be doing some farm work. He said he saw Daddy on Harold’s tractor in the morning, then ran into Loren and Harold at the café. He put two and two together and came up with his usual sum, which was three.” Her laugh resounded in the night.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, shit, Ginny. He was incredibly focused on Daddy. He blamed him for everything that went wrong in our lives. He always said he was afraid he might kill Daddy in a rage, but I actually think he couldn’t have—Daddy was too strong. But then Daddy got weaker, and when I told him about Jess he went out and drank every night, and every night he drove over to Harold’s place and sat outside in the truck, staring at the windows of the house and drinking. Frankly, it was all right with me. It was better than having him sit across the room staring at me, the way he used to.”

  “Is Daddy over there still?”

  Rose shrugged. “I told Pete he’d probably gone to Des Moines, but he was nuts. He said he’d seen him. I don’t know.”

  I said, “Don’t you think that’s really the strangest thing?”

  “What?”

  “That after all these years, we don’t know where Daddy actually is.”

  We looked at each other. Rose said, “I think of that as freedom.”

  After a moment, she said, “Anyway, I’m sure Pete’s dying regret was that he hadn’t gotten back at Daddy.”

  “I don’t know what to say. Wasn’t he mad at you?”

  “Daddy was the one. He just looked past me and saw Daddy. He was jealous, Ginny! I often thought that when you got right down to it, he was jealous as hell, but too afraid until he saw Daddy weakening—” She stopped and gave a harsh little laugh. “Even then, he couldn’t actually do anything up front. Just threaten.” She sniffed, and then, “Shit, Ginny. At the core, they’re all like that.”

  “We think that because of Daddy. If he hadn�
�t—If he had been—”

  She sat up and looked at me. “Say the words, Ginny! If he hadn’t fucked us and beat us we would think differently, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “But he did fuck us and he did beat us. He beat us more than he fucked us. He beat us routinely. And the thing is, he’s respected. Others of them like him and look up to him. He fits right in. However many of them have fucked their daughters or their stepdaughters or their nieces or not, the fact is that they all accept beating as a way of life. We have two choices when we think about that. Either they don’t know the real him and we do, or else they do know the real him and the fact that he beat us and fucked us doesn’t matter. Either they themselves are evil, or they’re stupid. That’s the thing that kills me. This person who beats and fucks his own daughters can go out into the community and get respect and power, and take it for granted that he deserves it.”

  “Mommy spanked us, too.”

  “But she didn’t whip us. She didn’t slap our faces or use a strap, or even exert all her strength. He did! And when she tried to stop him, he yelled at her, too.”

  She paced around me in a circle. When she spoke again, her voice came out strong and confident. She said, “I was thinking leaving here was the only alternative. But then Pete did me this favor. Us. Not Pammy or Linda. I know that. But me.” She turned to face me. “I want what was Daddy’s. I want it. I feel like I’ve paid for it, don’t you? You think a breast weighs a pound? That’s my pound of flesh. You think a teenaged hooker costs fifty bucks a night? There’s ten thousand bucks. I wanted him to feel remorse and know what he did and what he is, but when you see him around town and they talk about him, he’s just senile. He’s safe from ever knowing. People pat him on the head and sympathize with him and say what bitches we are, and he believes them and that’s that, the end of history. I can’t stand that.” Her voice thrilled up the scale.

  I said, “I feel weird. I must be really tired,” but I knew it wasn’t fatigue. Then I said, “Okay. Here’s a question. Did you know that Jess Clark slept with me?”

  She smiled. “Oh, sure.”

  It hurt more than I had expected it to, even though I wasn’t surprised. I said, “Had he slept with you by that time?”

  She paused, then said, “No.”

  “He told you?”

  “At some point. A while ago.”

  “I guess that means he and I don’t have anything private together, huh?”

  “He loves me, Ginny. You don’t think I would let him have anything private with my own sister, do you?”

  “I didn’t know you were jealous like that.”

  “Wheels within wheels, Ginny. Don’t you remember how Mommy said I was the most jealous child she ever knew? I mean, I control it better now. When Pammy or Linda goes to you for something, I know in my mind that’s good for them, but I’m always jealous. That was how Jess got me to sleep with him. He talked about what a sweet person you are and how much he liked you and what a shame it was you don’t have kids. He’s your big fan, Ginny. He still is. You don’t understand him. He doesn’t lie, he’s just got more sides than most people we know.” I recognized the tone she was using—frank and sincere, almost charming, in a way. She’d used it on me countless times. The drink had broadened it a little, added bravado and hardness to it. I caught my breath at the thought of how she’d seen Pammy and Linda and myself. I said, “I guess you want everything for yourself, huh.”

  “Well, shit, yeah. I always have. It’s my besetting sin. I’m grabby and jealous and selfish and Mommy said it would drive people away, so I’ve been good at hiding it.”

  I’m sure I spoke as bitterly as I felt. “You sound like you forgive yourself completely.”

  “You sound like you don’t forgive me at all.”

  I lightened my tone. “I’m just surprised at this side of you.”

  “You notice that Mommy never said to me, ‘Rose, just be yourself’?” She laughed.

  “I don’t think it’s funny.”

  She kept laughing. After a bit, she stopped, took another sip of the drink she had carried outside with her, and looked at me for a long minute. Finally, she said, “The difference is, Ginny, that you can trust me. You can and the girls can. I won’t hurt you.”

  But she had, hadn’t she?

  She saw that I was skeptical, and pressed me. “Even when I tell you the truth, it’s not to hurt you. It’s because it’s the truth, and you have to accept it. But I’m not going to sacrifice you to principle, or make you the victim of my mean streak, or tell myself I’m doing something for you when I’m doing it to you, or pretend I’m not doing it at all, when I am.”

  I didn’t believe her. More than that, I had no way of comprehending what she was saying to me. The distinctions had become too fine. My head was spinning. I stepped back to the edge of the blacktop. I said, “Rose, I have to go home. I can’t stand this.”

  Walking back, feeling her behind me, not following me but watching me for sure, I felt almost close to Pete. I felt that sense he’d had of being outside his own body, of watching it and hoping for the best. The sun was rising. I was as alert as a weasel, though, and all my swirling thoughts had narrowed to a single prick of focus, the knowledge that Rose had been too much for me, had done me in. I didn’t agree with her that Pete’s last thought had been of Daddy. Surely, surely it had been of Rose herself, that she had ineluctably overwhelmed and crushed him.

  39

  ONE BENEFIT, WHICH I HAVE LOST, of a life where many things go unsaid, is that you don’t have to remember things about yourself that are too bizarre to imagine. What was never given utterance eventually becomes too nebulous to recall.

  Before that night, I would have said that the state of mind I entered into afterward was beyond me. Since then, I might have declared that I was “not myself” or “out of my mind” or “beside myself,” but the profoundest characteristic of my state of mind was not, in the end, what I did, but how palpably it felt like the real me. It was a state of mind in which I “knew” many things, in which “conviction” was not an abstract, rather dry term referring to moral values or conscious beliefs, but a feeling of being drenched with insight, swollen with it like a wet sponge. Rather than feeling “not myself,” I felt intensely, newly, more myself than ever before.

  The strongest feeling was that now I knew them all. That whereas for thirty-six years they had swum around me in complicated patterns that I had at best dimly perceived through murky water, now all was clear. I saw each of them from all sides at once. I didn’t have to label them as Rose had labeled herself and Pete: “selfish,” “mean,” “jealous.” Labeling them, in fact, prevented knowing them. All I had to do was to imagine them, and how I “knew” them would shimmer around them and through them, a light, an odor, a sound, a taste, a palpability that was all there was to understand about each and every one of them. In a way that I had never felt when all of us were connected by history and habit and duty, or the “love” I had felt for Rose and Ty, I now felt that they were mine.

  Here was Daddy, balked, not by a machine (he had talent and patience for machines), but by one of us, or by some trivial circumstance. The flesh of his lower jaw tightens as he grits his teeth. He blows out a sharp, impatient breath. His face reddens, his eyes seek yours. He says, “You look me in the eye, girly.” He says, “I’m not going to stand for it.” His voice rises. He says, “I’ve heard enough of this.” His fists clench. He says, “I’m not going to be your fool.” His forearms and biceps buckle into deeply defined and powerful cords. He says, “I say what goes around here.” He says, “I don’t care if—I’m telling you—I mean it.” He shouts, “I—I—I—” roaring and glorying in his self-definition. I did this and I did that and don’t think you can tell me this and you haven’t the foggiest idea about that, and then he impresses us by blows with the weight of his “I” and the feathery nonexistence of ourselves, our questions, our doubts, our differences of opinion. That was Daddy.
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  Here was Caroline, sitting on the couch, her dirndl skirt fanned out around her, her hands folded in her lap, her lace-trimmed ankle socks and black Mary Janes stuck out in front of her, her eyes darting from one face to another, calculating, always calculating. “Please,” she says. “Thank you. You’re welcome.” She smiles. Chatty Kathy, and proud of her perfect, doll-like behavior. She climbs into Daddy’s lap, and her gaze slithers around the room, looking to see if we have noticed how he prefers her. She squirms upward and plants a kiss on his cheek, knowing we are watching, certain we are envious.

  Here was Pete, eyes flashing like Daddy’s, but saying nothing. Licking his lips. Waiting for his chance. Watching, focusing, gauging where to land the blow and when to strike. Judging how quick the enemy might be, where the enemy might be weakest. No “I,” like Daddy, that inflated with each declaration, but a diminishing point, losing himself more and more bitterly in contemplating the target.

  Here was Ty, too, camouflaged with smiles and hope and patience, never losing sight of the goal, fading back only to go around, advancing slowly but steadily, stepping on no twigs, making no splash, casting no shadow, radiating no heat, oozing into cracks, taking advantage of opportunity, unfailingly innocent.

  It was amazing how minutely I knew Rose, possibly as a result of nursing her after her surgery. I had sponge-bathed her everywhere—the arches of her feet, the pale insides of her elbows, the back of her neck where the hair circled in a cowlick, the bumps of her spine, her scar, her remaining pear-shaped breast with its heavy nipple and large, dark areola. She had three moles on her back. When we were children, she was always asking me to scratch her back at bedtime, or else she would scratch those moles against the bedpost, the way a sow would.

  And so, here, at last, was Rose, all that bone and flesh, right next to, right in the same bed with, Jess Clark. If I remembered hard enough I could smell her odor, feel the exact dry quality of her skin, smell and feel her the way he did during those mysterious times when I wasn’t around. I could smell and feel and hear and see him, too, with a force unmatched since the first few days after we had sex at the dump. Every time I could not actually see one or the other of them, I had a visceral conviction that they were together.