A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  "I don't think there are any male strippers in Mason City."

  "Did you see that on Phil Donahue?" Rose grinned.

  "Last Wednesday? Where they were wearing about three square inches of shiny blue underwear?"

  "The one guy was in black."

  "The blond guy."

  "I didn't know you were watching that. I was kind of embarrassed to be having it on."

  "I turned off the picture and listened to the sound, like it was on the radio."

  "You did not!"

  "You're right," I said. "I watched every minute, even after they had their clothes on."

  Rose laughed giddily, then exclaimed, "There's a whorehouse in Mason City, did you know that? Pete told me. It's next door to the Golden Corral. There's the USDA office on one side and the whorehouse on the other."

  "How does Pete know?"

  "Those guys he hired to help him paint the barn last summer told We paused in front of Lundberg's and gazed at the dresses. Rose said, "But we don't have to go that far just to scandalize Daddy. I think shopping would actually do the trick."

  "What a relief."

  We went in. It was not lost on me that Rose hadn't bought anything to wear since the diagnosis, had possibly not paused for very long in front of a mirror since that time. I concentrated on a rack of blouses, trying to relax the vigilance that kept asserting itselfattention to what sizes she was looking at, what sort of cut she was attracted to; whatever dress she chose to try on first, I wanted it to be flattering. When she took her limit, four, into the dressing room, I lingered outside, looking distractedly at some sweaters. She was in there for a long time, and at one point she said, quietly, "I see your feet," so I had to move off. When she came out, she was subdued again. She handed the dresses to the saleslady with a smile and moved toward the door. I pretended to rummage through some belts, but when she went out into the street, I followed her.

  We looked in the next shop window, a shoe store, and the next, the live-and-ten. She stared for a long time at the cold-mist humidifiers.

  I said, "You heard from Caroline?"

  "No."

  "Who do you think's going to make the first move?"

  She turned and looked at me, raising her hand to shade her eyes from the sunlight. "Has Daddy ever made a first move? I mean in a reconciliatory way?"

  "Well, no. But that's with us. This is with Caroline."

  "When water runs uphill is when he'll make a first move."

  "You'd think she'd be more careful."

  Rose started walking again. "She doesn't have to be careful. She's got an income. Being his daughter is all pretty abstract for her, and I'm sure she wants to keep it that way. Mark my words. She and Frank will get married and produce a son and there'll be a lot of coming together around that. She always does what she has to do."

  "You sound annoyed with her, too. She was coming up the steps.

  It was Daddy who slammed the door."

  "But there didn't have to be any production at all, no breach, no reconciliation, no drama. She just can't stand to be one of us, that's the key. Haven't you ever noticed? When we go along, she balks.

  When we resist, she's sweet as pie."

  "Maybe."

  "Shit! I remember when she was all of about live years oldbefore Mommy died, at any rate. I was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, and Mommy was cooking dinner and Caroline was coloring, and she looked at each of us and said right out, 'When I grow up, I'm not going to be a farmwife." So Mommy laughed and asked her what she was going to be, and she said, 'A farmer."

  I laughed. We walked on, agreeing wordlessly to avoid the subject of Caroline. My stomach growled. I said, "Rosie, let's eat at Golden Corral and see if we can get a look at what the prostitutes wear to work."

  "I think I'd rather go home. There's food there."

  -'Are you tired?"

  'Yeah."

  I didn't argue. I never have with Rose. When we got in the car, she said, "You know when we came out of the clinic, and we saw those flower beds that we hadn't seen when we were walking in?

  That was so unexpected, I think it made me delirious somehow.

  And then it seemed like if we just threw off all restraints and talked wildly and ate wildly and shopped wildly, it would just turn up the delirium, and make it even better, or permanent somehow, but I forgot.

  I'm not really to the point where I can take off my clothes in a dressing room yet." She sighed. I pulled out of the parking lot.

  A few minutes later, she said, "What's the hardest thing for you?"

  "Well, I don't know. Probably being comfortable with people outside the family."

  'What do you mean?"

  'Oh, you know. I either act too shy, or else I want the person to be my friend so much that I act like an idiot. I never believe that Marlene Stanley or anyone else actually likes me, even though I suppose I know they do."

  "God! This is just like how you used to talk in junior high."

  I stiffened a little. "What practice have I had since then? Anyway, in junior high, you used to say, 'Wouldn't you like to be friends with so-and-so? Let's bring some cookies and offer one to so-andso, then maybe she'll be our friend."

  Rose laughed a full-throated, merry laugh. "Usually it worked, too."

  We drove in silence for a few minutes.

  Finally, she said, "You know what? The hardest thing for me is not grabbing things. One of the main things I remember about being a kid is Mommy slapping my hands and telling me not to grab.

  What's worse is I have this recurring nightmare about grabbing things that hurt me, like that straight razor Daddy used to have, or a jar of some poison that spills on my hands. I know I shouldn't, and I watch myself, but I can't resist."

  "I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It's always the lunch line in ninth grade."

  "Nakedness dreams are very common.

  "I suppose they are.

  We drove the rest of the way silently. A glaring haze lay over the fields to either side of the road, and the rows ofjust-sprouted corn fanned into the distance like seams of tiny bright stitches against dark wool. When I dropped Rose at her house, she kissed me on the cheek. The fact was that we had known each other all our lives but we had never gotten tired of each other. Our bond had a peculiar fertility that I was wise enough to appreciate, and also, perhaps, wise enough to appreciate in silence. Rose wouldn't have stood for any sentimentality.

  CARoLINE WAS SIX WHEN our mother died, and at first there was talk that she would go live with my mother's cousin in Rochester, Minnesota.

  Cousin Emma was a nursing administrator at the Mayo Clinic, unmarried and without children, and I think there was talk about this "solution" to the "problem" of Caroline during my mother's illness, and I think that some of the church ladies, who were well read in the literature of orphanhood from their own early lives, saw this as a desirable and even romantic course of action. Cousin Emma had plenty of money from her job, so there would be nice clothes, plus grammar school and high school in town. My father, though, simply declared that Rose and I were old enough to care for our sister, and that was that.

  She was an agreeable child, not difficult to do for. She played with her dolls that had been our dolls, ate what was put in front of her, listened when she was told to put away her doll clothes or keep her dress clean. She had no interest in the farm equipment-gravity wagons filled with grain, augers, tractors, cornpickers, trucks. She stayed away from the hogs, even the dogs and cats who lived on the place from time to time. She never wandered into the road or went out of sight of the house. She never, as far as I knew, went near the grate over a drainage well. We were lucky, and were able to devote ourselves to the aspects of child raising that we knew best-sewing dresses and doll clothes, baking cookies, reading books aloud, enforcing rules about keeping clean, eating properly, going to bed at a set time, saying ma am to ladies and "sir" to Daddy and other men, and doing homework. We had no principles beyond those that were use
d with us, but it was true, as Daddy often said, that she was a better child than we had been, neither stubborn and sullen, like me, nor rebellious and back talking, like Rose. He praised her for being a Loving Child, who kissed her dolls, and kissed him, too, when he wanted a kiss. If he said, "Cary, give me a kiss," that way he always did, without warning, half an order, halfa plea, she would pop into his lap and put her arms around his neck and smack him on the lips. Seeing her do it always made me feel odd, as if a heavy stone were floating and turning within me, that stone of stubbornness and reluctance that kept me any more from being asked.

  We got more serious principles when Caroline's freshman year of high school rolled around. We agreed that she was going to have a normal high school life, with dates and dances and activities after school.

  She wasn't going to be chained to the school bus. She was going to have friends, and she was going to be allowed to sleep over with them in town if she was invited. Rose, who was working at the time, gave her money for clothes. I gave her an allowance. If she got invited to a birthday party, we gave her money to buy a nice present. These were our principles, and they stood in opposition to Daddy's proclaimed view that home was best, homemade was good enough, and if we had to pay for the school bus, then by golly she was going to use it. We were her allies. We covered for her and talked Daddy out of his angers. Junior and senior years, I even talked him into letting her invite a boy to the Sadie Hawkins dance. Rose bought her a subscription to Glamour, and got adept at copying some of the simpler clothing styles that were nevertheless unavailable in Zebulon County.

  We got along well with her. She was as agreeable as she had been as a child. She made good grades, conceived large ambitions, and went off as we had planned, no farmwife, or even a farmer, but something brighter and sharper and more promising. Sometimes, without thinking, she would marvel at us, saying, "Lord! Why didn't either of you ever leave? I can't believe you never had any other plans!"

  Such remarks would annoy Rose no end, but I liked them. They showed how well and seamlessly we had adhered to our principles.

  I made up my mind to call her after I dropped Rose at her house, but when I drove past Daddy's, his pickup was parked in the driveway, and I could see him through the front window, sitting bolt upright in his La-Z-Boy, staring out. There was something about this sight that drove all other thoughts out of my mind. I was too cowardly to turn right around and investigate, but when I got to our place a minute or so later, I couldn't bring myself to get out of the car. I could see the headline in the Pike Weekly News-oCAz FARMER SUCCUMBS IN LIVING RooM.

  If Rose had asked me, not what I had the most trouble with, but what my worst habit was, I would have said it was entertaining thoughts of disaster.

  I got out of the car and shut the door, then opened it, got back in, and drove down the road. Through the window I could see that he was still sitting upright in his chair, but I couldn't help thinking that that could be the arms holding him. I saw him lift his hand to his chin. I turned into the driveway relieved, surprised, another near miss averted. When I walked in the door, he said, "What's the matter?"

  "Nothing."

  "You drove by, and then you drove back for something."

  "I drove back to see what you were doing."

  "I was reading a magazine."

  There were no magazines near his chair, or on the table beside him.

  "I was looking out the window."

  "That's lnie."

  "You bet it's fine."

  "Do you need anything?"

  "I had some dinner. I warmed it up in that microwave oven.

  "Good."

  "It gets colder faster if you warm it up that way. My dinner was stone cold before I was finished eating it."

  "I've never heard that before."

  "Well, it's a fact."

  "I took Rose to the doctor today."

  He shifted in his chair. I followed his gaze and saw Ty cultivating far off to the west. In the silence I could just hear the roar of the John Deere reduced to a rough buzz by distance. My father said, "She okay?"

  "Yeah, she is. The doctor was pleased about everything."

  "Something happens to her, and those kids of hers will be stuck."

  My father had a way of making unanswerable remarks. Was he intending to show disapproval of Pete? Of my qualilications to step in and raise them? Or was he reflecting on our history since the death of my mother? On his opinion of Rose's primary responsibilities?

  Or was this some sort of general reflection on animal breeding? Ty would have said that he meant that he would be stuck, we would be stuck, but he didn't dare to say it. Sometimes I thought it was naive of us to attribute softer sentiments to my father. I said, "She's good. We don't have to worry.

  "We don't have to worry about that. There's plenty to worry about."

  "Well, yes, of course.

  I looked around for some bit of housework to do, to make my return seem as routine as possible. One thing about my habit of expecting the worst was that it embarrassed me; I didn't want people to suspect I'd imagined that they had died. But apart from cooking, clothes washing, and major housecleaning, my father needed little help with his domestic routine. The dishes from his dinner were already rinsed and in the dish drainer. The counters were wiped and the floor swept. In fact, he had always been a living example of the maxim, "Clean as you go."

  There was nothing to do. I let my eyes travel back to his face. He was staring out the window. I said, "Okay.

  Well, I made a strawberry rhubarb pie. I'll bring some down for your supper. I've got some strawberry plants bearing already, did I tell you that?"

  "Why is he cultivating that field? They done planting the beans?"

  "I don't know. Almost, I think."

  He stared silently at the tractor crawling from the left side of the big window to the right.

  "Daddy? You can come up to our place for supper if you want.

  You could ask him then."

  His face was reddening, staring.

  "Daddy?"

  He didn't glance at me or respond, even to dismiss me. I got nervous, watching him, impatient to leave, as if there were something here to flee. "Daddy? You want anything before I leave? I'm leaving." I paused at the kitchen door and watched the unyielding back of his head for a few seconds. When I drove past the front of the house again, he hadn't moved. I couldn't shake my sense that his attention menaced Ty, the guiltless cultivator, concentrating innocently on never deviating from the rows laid out before him. The green tractor inched back and forth, and my father's look followed it like the barrel of a rifle.

  About an hour and a half later, Rose called and said, "Why is Daddy sitting in the front window of the house, staring across your south field?"

  "Is he still at it?"

  "He was there when I went to Cabot for bread and he was there when I got back. I stopped the car in the middle of the road and watched him.

  He didn't move a muscle."

  "Where's Pete?"

  "He's welding something on the planter. He's been at it since before we got back from Mason City."

  "Is Ty still cultivating out there? I can't see the back end of the field from here."

  "When I drove by, he was starting up along the fencerow next to the road."

  "I'm sure Daddy's watching him. I'm sure there's some light going on.

  He was mad about something and didn't pay any attention to me when I stopped there."

  "Well, lucky for you. He didn't ask you to do anything for him."

  "Don't you think this is weird?"

  "Well, guess what. This is what his retirement is going to be, him eyeballing Pete or Ty, second-guessing whatever they do. You didn't think he was going to go fishing, did you? Or move to Florida?"

  "I didn't think that far ahead."

  "Perfecting that death's-head stare will be his lifework from now on, so we'd better get used to it."

  She hung up.

  I had to smile at the tho
ught of her stopping the car and watching him.

  She would stand at the foot of the hill, her lists on her hips, her own stare roaring up to meet his. Neither would acknowledge the other.

  They were two of a kind, that was for sure.

  I pressed down the telephone button and let it up again, ready to dial Caroline's work number, except that suddenly I felt a shyness, as if there were a breach between the two of us that I had to brave.