A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [121]
“Oh, Jess. He’s got the most harebrained ideas.”
“You don’t know! You haven’t read the books he has! You just don’t know!”
“I know enough! I follow the instructions! I’m careful!”
“Don’t the tile lines lead right into the drainage wells that lead right into the aquifer that leads right into the drinking well?”
“The ground filters everything out!”
“Who says that?”
“Everybody knows that! Well water’s the best you can drink.”
“If I got pregnant again, I wouldn’t drink it.” We were facing each other, our foreheads about six inches apart. Simultaneously, we both realized that talking about my getting pregnant again was a dangerous enterprise. I leaned over the side of the bed and picked up my magazine, smoothed the pages. Ty said, “You hid things from me. You lied to me. That’s the fact, and you turn it around. You simply lied. I think that’s a fairly straightforward issue.”
Possibly he didn’t know the half of it. Possibly he did. At any rate, the accusation, true as it was, cowed me. I felt my face heat up and my scalp prickle with that old familiar sense of shame. I remembered the Sunday school teacher we had in junior high, a man who only taught us for a few months, making us repeat as a group, “Sins lead to other sins. Sin piles on sin. Lord, keep me from committing the first sin.” Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin. It was a powerful and frightening word. I took some deep breaths. What about Caroline? Didn’t he have a secret there? That accusation stood rampant in my brain, wanted to batter its way out. Ty sat back. I looked at him. It was clear to me that there was a deeper level for us to fight on, a level where nothing could be held back, and the true import of our conflicting loyalties would express itself. The next shot was mine, and he was waiting for it. But this was a new world for me, for us. We had spent our life together practicing courtesy, putting the best face on things, harboring secrets. The thought of giving that up, right now, with my next remark, was terrifying.
Finally, I summoned a firm voice, in which I said, “If I were always perfectly open and truthful, then most of the work of being sure that I agree with you on everything would be already done for you, wouldn’t it?”
“There was a time I thought we did agree on everything.” He said this in a quiet, and, I thought, sentimental voice. I said, “You’re patronizing me.”
He said, “I want to stay with you, Ginny. That’s one of those virtues in me you seem to hate now, but it’s true. I think you’ll come back to me. I think we’ll go back to having what we had before. That’s all I ever wanted.”
“Well, it’s not all I ever wanted, and I can’t go back to it.” I said this with a sense of lifting a lid, just for a peek, just to test the temptation of it.
“Do you really hate me that much?”
“Oh, come off it. I don’t hate you.”
But just saying that smote me unexpectedly. Hadn’t I hated him a little recently, for talking to Caroline behind my back, for failing to defend me when Daddy denounced us, for never bothering to tell me that he didn’t agree with what Daddy said, and even just now, for undermining my trust in Rose? And I hated myself for going along to get along, so didn’t I hate him, too? The fact was, I didn’t feel hatred right then. If I had, I thought, I would have been willing to say anything, do anything, have everything about me be known. My strongest feeling right then was that the feelings that he seemed to think were simple enough were too complicated for me to name, which seemed like a form of lying, felt like a form of coercion. These, my Sunday school teacher might possibly have said, are the wages of sin.
His voice suddenly barbed with resentment, he said, “Well, you might feel like you’re waking from a dream, but I feel like I’m having a nightmare. I was so excited about the hog