A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [143]
All my life I had identified with Rose. I’d looked to her, waited a split second to divine her reaction to something, then made up my own mind. My deepest-held habit was assuming that differences between Rose and me were just on the surface, that beneath, beyond all that, we were more than twinlike, that somehow we were each other’s real selves, together forever on this thousand acres.
But after all, she wasn’t me. Her body wasn’t mine. Mine had failed to sustain Jess Clark’s interest, to sustain a pregnancy. My love, which I had always believed could transcend the physical, had failed, too—failed with Ty, failed with my children and Rose’s, failed, in a bizarre way, with Daddy, who in his fashion loved Caroline and Rose but not me, failed with Jess Clark, and now had failed with Rose herself, who clearly understood how to reach past me, to put me aside, to take what she wanted and be glad of it. I was as stuck with my old life as I was with my body, but thanks to Pete’s death, a whole new life could bloom for Rose out of her body. More children to set beside Pammy and Linda. With bottled water and careful diet and Jess’s informed concern about risks, there wouldn’t be a single miscarriage, a single ghostly child in the house.
What was transformed now was the past, not the future. The future seemed to clamp down upon me like an iron lid, but the past dissolved beneath my feet into something writhing and fluid, and at the center of it, the most changed thing of all, was Rose herself. It was clear that she had answered my foolish love with jealousy and grasping selfishness.
She would have been better off telling me nothing, because now I saw more than she wanted me to see. I saw Daddy, and I also saw her.
It was unbearable.
After the funeral, Rose and Jess must have decided to lie low for a while as a couple, so I almost never saw them together, but I saw them separately often enough. Rose’s manner was delicate, speaking eloquently of our changed sisterly condition. I was given to know that my feelings were paramount, that it was up to me to establish the degree of closeness that would be comfortable and the appropriate way for us to behave toward one another. I saw that the delicacy and concern were necessary to her, because they were a thrilling reminder of everything new and delicious.
Jess was friendly, kind, and mildly apologetic. I seemed to be seeing him more than I had been, and then I realized that he had carefully avoided me for some weeks, possibly for most of the summer. Now he was everywhere, speaking to me, joking with me, dropping by for a cup of coffee, once even stopping his run to help me weed the garden, putting our friendship on a new footing, a footing that looked forward to the future. His open, happy kindness that approached tenderness galled me most of all.
It was a tangle. I vacillated among three or four routes into the tangle. I told myself that I had to decide what I really wanted and settle for that—every course of action is a compromise, after all. Then at night I would wake up deeply surprised, amazed at the day’s accumulation of bitterness and calculation. This couldn’t be me, in this old familiar nightgown, this old familiar body, hateful as this?
In the mornings I wouldn’t think about it for a while—after all, I was still busy seeking perfect order and cleanliness—but then Rose would call or Jess would drop off a half dozen doughnuts, and their voices and their bodies expressed such barely contained voluptuous lust for their future together that I knew I had to do something to rid myself of the sight and sense of their nearness.
It was not entirely lost on me that Ty was himself in a crisis. Elsewhere in the state, and even in the county, intermittent dry spells had lowered production, but we had had perfect weather, and the corn and the beans were both healthy and thriving. It was clear that without Pete and without Daddy, Ty would be hard put to harvest almost