A Thousand Acres: A Novel (41 page)

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.

O
NE 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.

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.

I thought about how convenient it was for Rose that Pete had died. How the trap that was our life on the farm had so neatly opened for her.

All my life I had identified with Rose. I’d looked to her, waited a split second to divine her reaction to something, then made up my own mind. My deepest-held habit was assuming that differences between Rose and me were just on the surface, that beneath, beyond all that, we were more than twinlike, that somehow we were each other’s real selves, together forever on this thousand acres.

But after all, she wasn’t me. Her body wasn’t mine. Mine had failed to sustain Jess Clark’s interest, to sustain a pregnancy. My love, which I had always believed could transcend the physical, had failed, too—failed with Ty, failed with my children and Rose’s, failed, in a bizarre way, with Daddy, who in his fashion loved Caroline and Rose but not me, failed with Jess Clark, and now had failed with Rose herself, who clearly understood how to reach past me, to put me aside, to take what she wanted and be glad of it. I was as stuck with my old life as I was with my body, but thanks to Pete’s death, a whole new life could bloom for Rose out of her body. More children to set beside Pammy and Linda. With bottled water and
careful diet and Jess’s informed concern about risks, there wouldn’t be a single miscarriage, a single ghostly child in the house.

What was transformed now was the past, not the future. The future seemed to clamp down upon me like an iron lid, but the past dissolved beneath my feet into something writhing and fluid, and at the center of it, the most changed thing of all, was Rose herself. It was clear that she had answered my foolish love with jealousy and grasping selfishness.

She would have been better off telling me nothing, because now I saw more than she wanted me to see. I saw Daddy, and I also saw her.

It was unbearable.

After the funeral, Rose and Jess must have decided to lie low for a while as a couple, so I almost never saw them together, but I saw them separately often enough. Rose’s manner was delicate, speaking eloquently of our changed sisterly condition. I was given to know that my feelings were paramount, that it was up to me to establish the degree of closeness that would be comfortable and the appropriate way for us to behave toward one another. I saw that the delicacy and concern were necessary to her, because they were a thrilling reminder of everything new and delicious.

Jess was friendly, kind, and mildly apologetic. I seemed to be seeing him more than I had been, and then I realized that he had carefully avoided me for some weeks, possibly for most of the summer. Now he was everywhere, speaking to me, joking with me, dropping by for a cup of coffee, once even stopping his run to help me weed the garden, putting our friendship on a new footing, a footing that looked forward to the future. His open, happy kindness that approached tenderness galled me most of all.

It was a tangle. I vacillated among three or four routes into the tangle. I told myself that I had to decide what I really wanted and settle for that—every course of action is a compromise, after all. Then at night I would wake up deeply surprised, amazed at the day’s accumulation of bitterness and calculation. This couldn’t be me, in this old familiar nightgown, this old familiar body, hateful as this?