A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [165]
It wasn’t even ten—I’d left St. Paul by six, stopped and had breakfast on the way. Linda and Pam had been stirring, but they knew where I was going, and I didn’t want to talk about it with them any more. Pam, I knew, would get in the car, Rose’s old car, and drive herself to school and follow the course of activities prescribed for her. Linda might or might not. She had cut school seventeen times since moving in with me after Thanksgiving. We no longer fought about it.
I’d intended to stop at my old house, first, and pick up some kitchen equipment for Pam, who was doing most of our cooking, and at least look through my clothes and books, but when I saw from a distance that Caroline had already pulled into Daddy’s driveway, I got suddenly eager to be there, eager and anxious and ready.
She was wearing wool slacks and a beautiful sweater with an elaborate snowflake pattern around the yoke. She was standing in the kitchen, and she glanced around, startled, when I opened the back door. I was wearing Levi’s belonging to Pam and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt (Pam had started to date a boy who had a passion for the U of M, who liked to see them both dressed in as much U of M clothing as he could). I was going to the U of M, too, at night; my plan was to major in psychology. The house was cold—the heat and electricity had been off since the first of December. I thought that we would divvy up what we wanted and let what was left be auctioned. In my experience, there would be buyers for everything, even the old shoes and boots and coveralls.
Caroline looked at me for a long moment before she smiled, and then her smile was formal, you might even say careful. She remarked, “I wasn’t sure when you’d get here.”
“I’m an early riser.”
“That’s my favorite part of the day, too.”
I don’t know that an independent observer would have suspected we were related—the same ethnic stock, perhaps, though my hair was dark, with gray streaks by then, and Caroline’s was almost red, but the difference now ran deeper than our clothes, to body type and stance, to skin and hair, to social class and whether we expected to be seen or not. She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.
I knew I seemed hostile. I said, “There’s a kerosene heater in the barn. I could set that up.”
“Some couple in Johnston died from one of those last year.”
“We could open the window a little. You just need ventilation.”
“We’ll see.”
“Daddy used it for years out in the shop.”
Her eyebrows lifted a millimeter and dropped again. She said, “If we work quickly, we can stand the cold. It’s above freezing.”
“Fine. Where do you want to start?”
“Why not right here?”
“Fine.”
So we started. Taking dishes out of the pantry, and glassware and stainless and old cake plates and coffee makers and cut-glass dessert plates and clear cups and saucers that I hadn’t seen for thirty years, since Mommy would have the Lutheran ladies over for coffee and cake on a Sunday afternoon. I felt a small, chilled inner blossom of surprise. There were Christmas napkins in a drawer that I’d never seen, white linen with embroidered holly wreaths in one corner. A waffle iron, the pressure canner, an electric frying pan with a broken handle. There were three vases with dried-up flower cubes crumbling in their bottoms, a soup tureen shaped like a lemon, a Tupperware cake holder and two Tupperware pie holders, a ten-inch pie plate, a nine-inch pie plate, and four cupcake tins that I knew well, but also a china cream and sugar set with roses painted around the rim that I hadn’t seen in thirty years. There were eight glass jars with lids, old olive jars and pickle jars and peanut butter jars. There was a box of corks that Rose must have thought would come in