A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [128]
Daddy said, “Now he’s a good boy.”
Ten minutes later, I was in my car heading east. My head was throbbing, and I barely knew where I was going. The air seemed intensely hot, though I remembered that it had been cool enough before. Even so. I had to keep my window rolled up so that I could lean my head against it from time to time. I saw Loren and his truck in Harold’s farmyard. The others must have gone inside. I sped up as I passed, and he did not wave.
Rose was sewing on her machine. The girls were not in evidence, but even if they had been, I would have burst through the door with my question: “Rose, what color was your coat when you were five or so?”
Rose, never startled, finished her seam, lifted her foot off the pedal, raised the presser foot, and cut the threads. Then she said, “The only nice coat I ever had was that brown velveteen thing Mommy got from some cousin in Rochester. Little billed cap, too. I hated that thing.”
“What color of a coat did you want?”
“Oh, pink, probably. I adored pink for years.”
“Did Caroline get that coat?”
“No. Mommy cut it up for glass polishing rags because I threw up something on it and she could never get the stain out.” She looked at me. She said, “Ginny, you look terrible.”
I fell into an armchair. I said, “I was in Roberta’s and Daddy and Caroline came in. I can’t tell you the tone of voice he used to her. All soft and affectionate, but with something underneath that I can’t describe. I thought I was going to faint.”
She set down her sewing and stood up. There was a fan sitting on the television, and each time it turned toward me and blew in my face, I felt calmer. Rose gazed down at me with utter seriousness, her eyes deep and dark, her mouth carved from marble. She said, “Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say it.”
“It happened like you said. I realized it when I was making the bed for Jess Clark in my old room. I lay down on the bed, and I remembered.”
She went back to the sewing machine. She didn’t speak, but the methodical way she assembled her pieces, transformed them into a pair of tan slacks, was reassuring enough.
Book Five
35
WHEN I WAS THREE AND A HALF YEARS OLD, Ruthie Ericson fed me twenty-seven baby aspirin while I was sitting on the toilet. I know that they were cube-shaped and yellow and sweet, and I know I lay on my back and was rolled under circular lights, which must have been at the hospital in Mason City. What I think of as a distinct part of this memory is that I suspected that eating the pills was forbidden, and somehow this was related to my sitting on the toilet. It must have been summer; I remember the yellow of my halter top, my pink stomach beneath that, the V of my thighs splitting above the dark basin of the toilet and the white semicircle of the seat running between them. I was wearing dark blue sneakers. Their rounded, rubber toes dangled above mottled gray linoleum. My shorts lay on the floor beneath my feet. I wonder if vivid self-consciousness was my normal state, or if the forbidden pills carried it into me, and thus imprinted my memory.
When I contemplate this memory, I feel on the verge of remembering what childhood felt like, that its hallmark was the immediacy of one’s every physical sensation, and also the familiar strangeness of one’s parts—feet and hands, especially, but also chest, knees, stomach. I think I remember meditating on these attached objects, looking at them, touching them, feeling them from the outside and from the inside, wondering about them because there was wondering to be done, not because there were answers to be found.
There must have been some component of anxiety in this wondering, because it was borne in upon me daily that I was “getting out of hand.” That was the phrase my parents used. Daddy would tell Mommy that I was getting out of hand, or Mommy would tell me that. I knew, too, whose hand I was getting out of, just as I knew what it meant to be in her hands. If Mommy wasn’t around, the hands were Daddy’s. We were told, when we had been “naughty”—disobedient, careless, destructive, disorderly,