A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [28]
Finally, she said, “You know what? The hardest thing for me is not grabbing things. One of the main things I remember about being a kid is Mommy slapping my hands and telling me not to grab. What’s worse is I have this recurring nightmare about grabbing things that hurt me, like that straight razor Daddy used to have, or a jar of some poison that spills on my hands. I know I shouldn’t, and I watch myself, but I can’t resist.”
“I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It’s always the lunch line in ninth grade.”
“Nakedness dreams are very common.”
“I suppose they are.”
We drove the rest of the way silently. A glaring haze lay over the fields to either side of the road, and the rows of just-sprouted corn fanned into the distance like seams of tiny bright stitches against dark wool. When I dropped Rose at her house, she kissed me on the cheek. The fact was that we had known each other all our lives but we had never gotten tired of each other. Our bond had a peculiar fertility that I was wise enough to appreciate, and also, perhaps, wise enough to appreciate in silence. Rose wouldn’t have stood for any sentimentality.
10
CAROLINE WAS SIX WHEN our mother died, and at first there was talk that she would go live with my mother’s cousin in Rochester, Minnesota. Cousin Emma was a nursing administrator at the Mayo Clinic, unmarried and without children, and I think there was talk about this “solution” to the “problem” of Caroline during my mother’s illness, and I think that some of the church ladies, who were well read in the literature of orphanhood from their own early lives, saw this as a desirable and even romantic course of action. Cousin Emma had plenty of money from her job, so there would be nice clothes, plus grammar school and high school in town. My father, though, simply declared that Rose and I were old enough to care for our sister, and that was that.
She was an agreeable child, not difficult to do for. She played with her dolls that had been our dolls, ate what was put in front of her, listened when she was told to put away her doll clothes or keep her dress clean. She had no interest in the farm equipment—gravity wagons filled with grain, augers, tractors, cornpickers, trucks. She stayed away from the hogs, even the dogs and cats who lived on the place from time to time. She never wandered into the road or went out of sight of the house. She never, as far as I knew, went near the grate over a drainage well. We were lucky, and were able to devote ourselves to the aspects of child raising that we knew best—sewing dresses and doll clothes, baking cookies, reading books aloud, enforcing rules about keeping clean, eating properly, going to bed at a set time, saying “ma’am” to ladies and “sir” to Daddy and other men, and doing homework. We had no principles beyond those that were used with us, but it was true, as Daddy often said, that she was a better child than we had been, neither stubborn and sullen, like me, nor rebellious and back talking, like Rose. He praised her for being a Loving Child, who kissed her dolls, and kissed him, too, when he wanted a kiss. If he said, “Cary, give me a kiss,” that way he always did, without warning, half an order, half a plea, she would pop into his lap and put her arms around his neck and smack him on the lips. Seeing her do it always made me feel odd, as if a heavy stone were floating and turning within me, that stone of stubbornness and reluctance that kept me any more from being asked.
We got more serious principles when Caroline’s freshman year of high school rolled around. We agreed that she was going to have a normal high school life, with dates and dances and activities after school. She wasn’t going to be chained to the school bus. She was going to have friends, and she was going to be allowed to sleep over with them in town if she was invited. Rose, who was working at the time, gave her money for clothes. I gave her an allowance. If she got invited to a birthday party, we gave her money to buy a nice present. These were our principles,