A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [141]
“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.
39
ONE 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