A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [154]
We were silent. The contained roar of the gas and then, a minute later, the first sizzling of meat juices, took on the volume and weight of oracular mutterings, almost intelligible. With a feeling of punching through a wall, I said, “I need a thousand dollars.”
Ty widened the opening. “I have a thousand dollars in my pocket, from the rent on my place. Fred brought it by last night, but I didn’t have a chance to put it in the bank.”
I held out my hand. He took a wad of money out of his pocket. It felt large and solid in my palm, larger and solider than it was. I went to the hall tree and took down my coat and scarf, then I went to the key hook and took the keys to my car, and with the meat broiling in the oven and the potatoes and sprouts boiling on the stove, I walked out the door. When he saw, I suppose, that I really meant to get in and drive away, Ty yelled, “I gave my life to this place!”
Without looking around at him, I yelled back, “Now it’s yours!” The night was dark already, and moonless. I stumbled over a rut in the yard that threw me against the cold metal skin of the car. I reached for the door handle, but the money was still in my hand, so I thrust it into the pocket of my coat.
In Mason City, I ate a hot dog at the A and W.
In St. Paul, I found a room at the YWCA. They didn’t ask any questions when I didn’t write down a home address on the registration slip.
Book Six
42
ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT, even over the hum of the air conditioner in the summer, you could hear the cars passing my apartment on Interstate 35. I liked the same thing about that as about working my waitressing job at Perkins, where you could get breakfast, the food of hope and things to be done, any time. There was nothing time-bound, and little that was seasonal about the highway or the restaurant. Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people’s heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The lamps in the restaurant, above the highway, in my neighbors’ windows, in the parking lot of my apartment building, cast intersecting orbs of light that I could just walk into, that I didn’t have to generate. The noise was the same, continuous, reassuring: human intentions (talking, traveling, eating) perennially renewing themselves whether I happened to sleep or wake, feel brisk or lazy.
The thing I loved most about the restaurant was the small talk. People bantered and smiled, thanked you, made polite requests, chatted about early visits or the weather or where they were headed. It went on and on, day and night, pleasant and meant to create pleasantness. Eileen, the manageress, encouraged us to follow company guidelines about creating small talk when it was absent, because, she said, people always ate more and enjoyed their food if they didn’t have to concentrate on it too single-mindedly. Mostly, though, you didn’t have to work at it. You could walk into the small talk the way you walked into the lighted dining room, and it would carry you. Some of the girls didn’t like the small talk, so they sounded a tad mechanical when they said, “And how was your meal, sir?” but for me, it was like a tune playing in my head, and the phrases I produced—“What may I bring you?” “Will that be all?” “Thanks for stopping, come in again”—were me picking up my part of the harmony.
I saw this as my afterlife, and for a long time it didn’t occur to me that it contained a future. That it didn’t, in fact, was what I liked about it. I felt a semisubmerged conviction that I had entered upon the changeless eternal. A toothbrush, a beat-up sofa bed, a lamp I found in a trash bin, shaped like a palm tree but perfectly functional,