A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [120]
He was an orderly man. I’d never had any complaints about that. He threw his socks and underwear in the hamper, his work clothes in the work clothes bin. He walked around the room for a minute or two, but I don’t know whether he looked at me, because I was staring at the magazine. When he went into the bathroom, I turned the page to “New! Quick and Easy Strip Quilting.” I heard the shower go on. The first line of the article was, “Love to quilt but hate to cut out those pieces one at a time?” I read it over, concentrating on each word. None of them made sense. The shower went off. Ty’s footsteps returned to the bedroom. A drawer clattered, then slammed. The next line of the article was, “A new technique, utilizing a pizza-wheel-type cutter, makes quick work of a once arduous step. Quilters all over the nation are—” Ty’s weight lifted my side of the bed. His skin radiated the coolness of the shower he’d taken, and he smelled of Right Guard soap. “—enthusiastic. ‘I used to dread—’ ” He said, “We’re ready to pour the subfloor for the grower building and the footings for the interior walls in the barn. I called the company, too. They’re going to have the framing lumber out here by six a.m. It’s already on the truck.”
“That’s good news.”
“I think so.”
“Well, we’d better get to sleep then.” I raised my head. His weight shifted in the bed. He said, “When did you bury those things?”
“Last Thanksgiving, about. The day after.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know.” This was short for, it’s too complicated to go into.
“What are those bloodstains from?”
“Well, I had a miscarriage.” The next line of the article I was staring at instead of looking at him said, “the cutting-out part, especially diamonds, since they’re so hard to—”
“Lots of secrets around here.” This came out so mildly that I looked right at him, so that he said, “That’s number five, right?”
“Number five?”
“After number four from that trip to the State Fair that Rose told me not to tell you she told me about.”
“I’m surprised Rose would betray me like that.”
“Your desires aren’t at the top of Rose’s agenda, Ginny.”
“What is?”
“I wonder about that myself.”
“I know you think Rose and I are plotting something, but we aren’t.”
“What I think is that you can’t stand up to Rose. She bulldozes you every time.”
I still couldn’t look at him. I was staring out the bedroom door, across the hall at the corner of the bed in the guest room. “And so do you and so does Daddy. You want to know why I kept it secret about the pregnancies and the miscarriages? Because I didn’t agree with you about stopping, but you drew the line. I didn’t ever want to draw the line. I wanted to keep trying forever, but I couldn’t stand up to you. Compared to anything having to do with Rose, that’s what’s important. People keep secrets when other people don’t want to hear the truth.”
“I just couldn’t take it, the big buildup and the letdown. I’d think you would understand that.”
“But I could take it. I wanted to take it. Taking it was better than not trying at all, just giving in. You always just give in! You think whatever happens, if we just wait a while it’ll turn out okay! I can’t live like that any more!”
“I do think patience is a virtue.” His voice seemed to regard this as if it were just one of his interesting quirks.
“I think you think patience is everything!” I turned on my knees and faced him. “I feel like I’m waking up from a dream! A dream where you just go along and go along and whatever you do, you’re just looking on, you’re not affecting anything! At least Rose isn’t like that. At least she takes what she wants. I mean, Jess said to me that the reason for the miscarriages is probably in the well water. Runoff in the well water. He says people have known about it for years! We never even asked