A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [3]
It didn’t help that all the men were sitting around complaining about the weather and worrying that there wouldn’t be tractor fuel for planting. Jimmy Carter ought to do this, Jimmy Carter will certainly do that, all spring long.
And it didn’t help that Rose had suddenly made up her mind the previous fall to send Pammy and Linda, her daughters, away to boarding school. Pammy was in seventh grade, Linda in sixth. They hated to go, fought against going, enlisting me and their father against Rose, but she labeled their clothes, packed their trunks, and drove them down to the Quaker school in West Branch. She exhibited a sustained resolve in the face of even our father’s opposition that was like a natural force.
The girls’ departure was unbearable for me, since they were nearly my own daughters, and when Rose got the news from her doctor, the first thing I said was, “Let’s let Pammy and Linda come home for a while. This is a good time. They can finish the school year here, then maybe go back.”
She said, “Never.”
Linda was just born when I had my first miscarriage, and for a while, six months maybe, the sight of those two babies, whom I had loved and cared for with real interest and satisfaction, affected me like a poison. All my tissues hurt when I saw them, when I saw Rose with them, as if my capillaries were carrying acid into the furthest reaches of my system. I was so jealous, and so freshly jealous every time I saw them, that I could hardly speak, and I wasn’t very nice to Rose, since some visceral part of me simply blamed her for having what I wanted, and for having it so easily (it had taken me three years just to get pregnant—she had gotten pregnant six months after getting married). Of course, fault had nothing to do with it, and I got over my jealousy then by reminding myself over and over, with a kind of litany of the central fact of my life—no day of my remembered life was without Rose. Compared to our sisterhood, every other relationship was marked by some sort of absence—before Caroline, after our mother, before our husbands, pregnancies, her children, before and after and apart from friends and neighbors. We’ve always known families in Zebulon County that live together for years without speaking, for whom a historic dispute over land or money burns so hot that it engulfs every other subject, every other point of relationship or affection. I didn’t want that, I wanted that least of all, so I got over my jealousy and made my relationship with Rose better than ever. Still, her refusal to bring them back from boarding school reminded me in no uncertain terms that they would always be her children, never mine.
Well, I felt it and I set it aside. I threw myself into feeding her, cleaning her house, doing her laundry, driving her to Zebulon Center for her treatments, bathing her, helping her find a prosthesis, encouraging her with her exercises. I talked about the girls, read the letters they sent home, sent them banana bread and ginger snaps. But after the girls were sent away, I had a hint, again, for the first time since Linda was born, of how it was in those families, how generations of silence could flow from a single choice.
Jess Clark’s return: something that had looked impossible turning out possible. Now it was the end of May, and Rose felt pretty good. Another possibility realized. And she looked better, too, since she was getting some color back. And the weather would be warm, they said on the TV. My walk along the riverbank carried me to where the river spread out into a little marsh, or where, you could also say, where the surface of the earth dipped below the surface of the sea within it, and blue water sparkled in the still limpid sunlight of mid-spring. And there was a flock of pelicans, maybe twenty-five birds, cloud white against