A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [39]
When we were children, Rose and I used to swim in the farm pond down toward Mel’s corner. The pond, an ancient pothole that predated the farm, was impressively large to us, with a tire swing hanging over the deep end. Not long before the death of our mother, Daddy drained the pond and took out the trees and stumps around it so he could work that field more efficiently.
This was the first swim of the year for the girls, and they should have been excited, but after we had gotten our suits and were in the car headed toward Pike, they grew quiet. I said, “Do you wish your mom were going?”
Pammy shook her head.
“We’ll have fun, you know. Anyway, it’s awfully hot to stay home.”
Linda sat forward and put her head over the back of the seat. She said, “Aunt Ginny, we don’t have any friends there any more.”
“Sure you do. All those kids will be glad to see you. You’ll be the new faces now.”
“I don’t see why we have to go to boarding school. Nobody else does.”
“Your mom has good reasons. Anyway, I thought you liked it there.”
Pammy said, “It isn’t bad. The teachers are nice.”
“But the kids are all city kids. They’re all rich.”
“I can’t believe they’re all rich.”
“They pretend like it,” said Linda. “We have nicknames.”
I felt a tiny pain in my throat, like the pressure of a knife point. I said, “Well, let’s hear them.”
Pammy spoke up reluctantly, and I suspected that the nicknames had been something she intended to keep from us. She said, “Well, mine was Lambie, because I gave this oral report about having lambs for 4-H, and Linda’s was Mac, for Old MacDonald.”
“We wanted them to just call us Pam and Linda.”
“Do other kids have nicknames?”
“Some of them.”
Now came the hardest question. “Just the unpopular kids?”
Pammy rode silently, and Linda sat back in her seat. After a few moments, she said, “No, not really. But mostly it’s the boys with nicknames. Not too many girls.”
“Well,” I said, “nicknames are a sign of affection.”
Linda looked at me. “Not with kids, Aunt Ginny.”
Pammy said, “Anyway, none of those kids are around here. We don’t have any friends around here any more.”
“Did anyone write you?”
Linda leaned forward and said with wise condescension, “Aunt Ginny, kids don’t write!”
I had to laugh.
After we passed through Cabot, I said, “I don’t think it will take long to make friends again. You’ll feel uncomfortable for a while, but that’s all you’ll have to worry about. If you’re friendly, they will be friendly.”
It sounded good, but the fact was that I really didn’t believe it myself. There was a way in which I could look at my life as an unending battle to make friends, and the girls’ worries resonated with my own, worries that came in waves, sometimes pricking me and goading me until all I could think was that there were parties all over the county that I wasn’t being invited to, and tempting me to drive around to the farms of all our friends, just to see the truth at last. When I complained of this as a teenager, after my mother died, Daddy used to say, “You ought to stay home, anyway. People ought to stay home.” I didn’t complain very often. It wasn’t the boys that I longed to be with, it was the girls. I would have traded any dance at school for any slumber party. It didn’t matter that slumber parties weren’t allowed for Rose and me; I wanted to be invited.
Rose went out anyway. She didn’t even bother to climb out her window and onto the front porch, which she could have done. She walked right out the front door and climbed into the car with whoever was picking her up. She didn’t have to reciprocate in order to get invitations, either. She did no driving, no party giving, no inviting to our house of any kind. She was a prize, and her repeated escapes part of her legend. When Daddy confronted her, she talked back, as always. The confrontations weren’t as regular as the sneaking out, but there were some terrific