A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [114]
“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