A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [162]
I was unable to find a bed at Rose’s house, Daddy’s house, that I could lie in. I ended up on the white brocade couch at three in the morning, and then rain outside entered my dreams, soaking the couch, making it swell and buckle, causing me to fight with someone whose identity in the dream wasn’t clear.
The next day I got to the hospital in the morning and Rose was sitting up, eating cubes of lime Jell-O. Her jaw was sharp as a blade and her neck had that stalklike famine-victim look, but it was clear that the force of life was coursing more surely within than it had been the day before.
I said, “The girls want to know when you might be coming home.”
“Couple days.”
“I’m bringing them after school today.”
“It’s a long drive.”
“They want to make it.”
She shrugged and finished her Jell-O cubes. Finally, she said, “I’m all right with them. I didn’t just leave everything unsaid with them the way Mommy did with us. I wasn’t enigmatic, either. I laid it out for them in July when I saw what was happening.” Her voice itself was weak, but her tone was absolutely assured; she was going to die in a state of perfect self-confidence. I felt myself disappear into the anger I had been harboring for so long, but I struggled to smooth and soften my voice. I said, “I’m certainly glad of that.”
She smiled an amused smile.
I couldn’t resist. I exclaimed, “I’m impressed by the way you’ve tied up all the loose ends.” I gave in completely. “Bossy to the end, huh?”
Her arms, at her sides on the green blanket, were stringy and her hands spread like spiderwebs, then folded, then spread again as if they hurt, but not as if she hurt. I remembered this sensation from the first cancer, my feeling that she was so apart from her body that I had to address the two halves of her separately. She said, “Are you looking for a way to hurt my feelings?”
“Probably.”
“Still fighting over a man, huh?”
“Jess?”
“If that’s the man you’re fighting over.”
“Somehow, he made a bigger impression on me than Ty did. For every one thought I’ve had about Ty, I’ve had twenty about Jess.”
“That’s because you didn’t sleep with him enough, or do practical things with him. Eventually, you would have gotten fed up.”
“Did you?”
“Almost. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. I would have been fed up by the summer.”
“Thanks.” I meant, shut up. She ignored me. She said, “There were all these routines. No more than three eggs a week, always poached and served on browned but never burned wheat toast. Steel-cut oatmeal from some organic store in San Francisco. Ginseng tea three times a day. Meditation at sunrise. If we didn’t check the paper the day before and find out the sunrise time to the minute, he was anxious all day. And we had to calculate the difference in time between the sunrise in the paper and the sunrise on the farm. It was something like two and three-fourths of a minute.”
“He was a kind man. You could have accepted some quirks.”
“Ty was kinder. You couldn’t stand that.” She gazed at me. “Jess Clark wasn’t the way you thought he was, Ginny. He was more self-centered and calculating than you gave him credit for.”
I parroted her. “He wasn’t the way you thought he was, he was kinder and had more doubts than you gave him credit for.” We stared at each other aggressively for a long minute, then Rose lifted one of her spiderweb hands and brushed back a wisp of hair. Her hair was short and thin. Brushing it back reminded her of her condition, and she said, “What you’re really saying is that he’d like me better if he knew I was in the shape I’m in. Kindness wasn’t freely given with him, Ginny, it was a way to get where he wanted to go.”
“I guess we differ.”
“The difference is that I loved him without caring whether he was good. He was good enough and I wanted him and he slipped away. You know what? At the end, he was too good! When it came right down to building something on what we had, it scared him to build