A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [64]
The men didn’t agree that Caroline had done anything especially insulting. The wedding, the marriage, was her business and Frank’s, and they probably didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Ty, especially, was annoyingly dismissive. Pete kept saying, “Come on, let’s play. Rose, take your turn. I’ve heard enough about this goddamned wedding to last me the rest of my life.” He was winning. He had all the green properties and Boardwalk, plus all the railroads. The dice were working for him, and we kept landing on his properties. Every time he laughed in greedy glee, I got more irritated. Ty was driving me crazy, too. He kept muttering, “Ginny, settle down.” I blazed a couple of looks at him, but he didn’t pay any attention. Rose and I locked eyes across the table just as Pete and Ty spoke simultaneously. Pete said, “My turn, pass Go, collect two hundred dollars! Yeah!” And Ty said, “I think if we all just concentrate on the game we’ll have a better time.”
Rose said, “Aren’t you having a good time, Ty?” in a sugary and deeply sarcastic voice, and Ty, taking her seriously, began, “Well, not really—” and the mere fact that he couldn’t read her tone of voice was the last straw for me, and I said, “My God!” with evident exasperation.
I was watching Jess. I had been watching Jess all evening. Along with watching everything else, I had a third eye for Jess alone, a telescopic lens that detected every expression that crossed his face. At the sound of my voice, shrill, angry, yes, I admit it was both those things, his expression was one of irritation, so immediate but fleeting that he himself might possibly have forgotten the flicker of that response. But I could not. Seeing his expression, and recognizing it, was stunning, like running headfirst into a brick wall. Ty said, “Settle down, Ginny.”
Pete said, “Take your turn, Jess. You are looking straight at Boardwalk, brother.”
Rose said, “I’m tired of this game,” and she picked up the table by the legs and dumped the board and the pieces in Pete’s lap.
There was a long silence. Pete’s face reddened and he bit his lip. The girls, on the couch, looked up and stared: Ty looked at me as if this were the result of my failure to settle down, and Jess bent down to pick up his property cards. He said, “Unrestrained capitalism always ends in war. I think Rosa Luxemburg said that. Shall we count our points overall?”
I looked at Pete. He was furious. My own ill-humor vanished and I felt a muscle-clenching anxiety rise in my chest and begin to grip my throat. The fact was that Rose hadn’t complained of him hitting her in about four years—he had reformed after he broke her arm, and there was no reason to believe that he was more likely to strike out tonight than any other of the nights in the last four years when Rose had acted provoking. Even so, I was at once in a panic, much more so than Rose, who seemed rather elated by her action. I have to say about Rose that it often seemed like fear wasn’t in her, or caution, either. In Pete’s worst years, it never seemed to occur to her to scale back her behavior, to seek fewer disagreements, or to be more conciliatory. Most of the time she wouldn’t even live by that basic wifely rule of thumb, “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” He was supposed to know, and supposed to agree, or at least accept. She’d say, “This is the real me, the stand-up me. He’s got to get used to that. If I let him beat me into submission, then what kind of life would I have?”
“What kind of life do you have now?” I would say.
And she would reply, “One with self-respect, at least.”
When he broke her arm, by knocking or pushing her down in the bathroom (I was never quite able to picture it when she told me) so that she fell on her wrist