A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [66]
“How’s that?”
“You could just endure it. You could just cross each bridge as you come to it.”
“As if things aren’t getting worse.”
“I don’t know if they’re getting worse.”
“You must be blind.”
“And what if they are getting worse? Taking this attitude isn’t going to make them better.”
“What attitude?”
“An attitude like Rose’s. Making everything he does into a big deal.”
“I think going in a ditch and getting picked up for drunk driving is a big deal.”
“Well, that is. That is. But this other stuff—” Ty glanced at me, rubbed the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, then slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. He looked at me for a long time. He said, “Ginny, I don’t exactly know what to do, but I’ve always thought the best way to deal with your father is to sort of hunker down and let it blow over. In one ear and out the other. Grin and bear it. Water off a duck’s back. All those things.”
I stared at him, too. I stared at him from a long distance, seeing his flat cheeks and square face, the creviced fans at the corners of his eyes, the bill of his cap, the plain hopeful visage of a plain man. The other face, Jess’s face, was never out of my mind, leaner and more hawkish, more suspicious, less benign. One face somehow met you, looked back at you, was the impenetrable and almost simple face of innocence. The other, the more you looked at it, the more it escaped you. Its very features seemed elusive, seemed to promise a meaning, or even a truth, that was more complex and interesting than anything you had ever before imagined. I kept staring at Ty. God knows what he was thinking. But I was wondering whose face was truer. He smiled. His upper lip stretched into a long archer’s bow, Ty’s big smile that made him look handsome and mischievous. I smiled, too. I said, “You’re right.” He put the car in drive and pulled back onto the blacktop.
It was easy enough to say. And it was true that I didn’t want to be angry the way Rose was. Ty didn’t like it, and Jess, too, just for that one moment at the game table, had registered a visceral recoil that frightened me. But Rose’s anger! Some of my clearest memories were of watching her, unable to look away, watching her shine with anger. No matter how well you knew to keep back from it, you couldn’t keep back all the time.
It was nearly forty miles from our place to Mason City. We drove it in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing “Jesus Loves Me,” sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known. As if nothing were contradictory and all things could be believed simultaneously. My love for Ty, which I had never questioned, felt simple like that, like belief. But I believed I was going to sleep with Jess Clark with as full a certainty.
20
MY FATHER WAS SITTING UP at one end of a bench, leaning back against the wall with his eyes wide open. A square of white gauze was pressed to his cheek with adhesive tape that ran into his hair. Instinctively, I followed his gaze, just to check on what he might be thinking about before disturbing him. Ty, though, walked right up to him and said, “Dad? Larry? You okay?” He stood up and began to walk out of the emergency room, without speaking to us or to the nurse behind the desk, who called, “Mr. Cook? Mr. Cook?” She looked at me. I stepped forward, announcing that I was his daughter.
“Oh,” she said, still evidently disconcerted. “Oh. Well, he has some Percodan to take for pain, just two pills. If he needs more, he’ll have to get a prescription from his family physician.” Then, apologetically, for some reason, “There wasn’t any