A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [53]
He met me at the back door. “It’s bright day.” His tone was accusing. It meant, I’m hungry, you’ve made me wait, and also, you’re behind, late, slow. I said, “I had a few things to do.”
“At six o’clock in the morning?”
“I just picked up the house a little.”
“Hmp.”
“Sorry.”
He backed away from the door and I entered the mudroom and put on the apron that hung from a hook there. He said, “Nobody shopped over the weekend. There’s no eggs.”
“Oh, darn. I meant to bring them down. I bought some for you yesterday, but I forgot them.” I looked him square in the eye. It was my choice, to keep him waiting or to fail to give him his eggs. His gaze was flat, brassily reflective. Not only wasn’t he going to help me decide, my decision was a test. I could push past him, give him toast and cereal and bacon, a breakfast without a center of gravity, or I could run home and get the eggs. My choice would show him something about me, either that I was selfish and inconsiderate (no eggs) or that I was incompetent (a flurry of activity where there should be organized procedure). I did it. I smiled foolishly, said I would be right back, and ran out the door and back down the road. The whole way I was conscious of my body—graceless and hurrying, unfit, panting, ridiculous in its very femininity. It seemed like my father could just look out of his big front window and see me naked, chest heaving, breasts, thighs, and buttocks jiggling, dignity irretrievable. Later, after I had cooked the breakfast and he had eaten it, what I marveled at was that I hadn’t just gone across the road and gotten some eggs from Rose, that he had given me the test, and I had taken it.
By the time I was frying the bacon and eggs and covertly watching him stare out the living-room window toward our south field, my plan to let him have it seemed liked another silly thing. I couldn’t find a voice to speak in, to say, “Were you down in Des Moines Thursday or not?” or “Caroline thought you hung up on her when she called.” This is something I do often, this phrasing and rephrasing of sentences in my mind, scaling back assertions and direct questions so that they do not offend, so that they can slip sideways into someone’s consciousness without my having really asked them.
It was one thing, Monopoly nights, to sit around and laugh at or deplore some of the things that Daddy and Harold did or said. It was another to confront the monolith that he seemed to be. Ty’s attitude intruded itself, soothing me, counseling me to let things slip over me like water or something else harmless but powerful. So I served up his food silently and told myself that he wasn’t senile—it would be insulting to treat him like a child and make him account for his time and his money. My job remained what it had always been—to give him what he asked of me, and if he showed discontent, to try to find out what would please him. At that moment, standing by the stove with my arms crossed over my chest, waiting to pour him more coffee, that seemed like a simple and almost pleasant task.
I have to say that when I called Caroline at nine, she didn’t see things my way at all. Yes, it was Daddy who had been to her office (had there really been any doubt?) and the receptionist who had seen him said he was acting weird. Admittedly she was only nineteen, and she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what he was doing that was weird, looking around all the time, gawking at everyone, but more than that, throwing his head around sort of the way an animal does when it is frightened or in pain. I said to Caroline, “Well, we asked him at Sunday dinner whether he’d been down there, and he wouldn’t tell us. He’s as stubborn