A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [71]
She cleared her throat, and I took this as my cue to fall silent. She said, “Shit, Ginny.”
I laughed. I guess I had expected her mouth to open and some other voice, some oracular voice, to issue forth, echoing and deep. She pursed her lips, rapidly recomposing herself into the Rose I knew and relied on. She rolled her eyes, seemed about to make a joke at Daddy’s expense, or mine. That would have been okay, too. Finally, she said, “I don’t hate you, Ginny. I know what I was saying, but I don’t know what it means, exactly. Or how to tell you what it means. Or something. Let’s say the real story here is what you think. He’s a pain in the butt, we divvy up the work. Maybe rules will do the trick. We can try it.”
“I can’t describe what it was like, just to say to him, okay you have to do this, and you can’t do that. I mean, it’s so simple.”
“Famous last words.” She put her arms around me, and her grip was strong, stronger than it had been. I said, “Love ya, sis,” in a kind of play tough voice.
She said, “Me, too. United front, right?”
“Right.”
21
TY AND I DIDN’T PURSUE our conversation, didn’t thrash out what it was I had learned or what it meant. I acted more decisive and made rules. I sensed that Ty disapproved, but it was a touchy subject, and I was afraid to talk about it because I hated friction with Ty. It was easy to discount his unvoiced opinion, too. After all, his dad had died so conveniently, just when the son was old enough to appreciate afresh what the father knew, while they were still working smoothly together, before age made the father unreliable or cantankerous. Ty loved his father, who was a kindly man, not very ambitious, and it had always been easy for him just to shift that love to my father. When I thought about it, new things came clear, about Ty and my father and us all. One was that Daddy’s and Pete’s storms gave a quiet steady worker like Ty lots of power, because not only would he calmly pursue his aims while they ranted, more often than not each of them would appeal to him for support. He would propose a solution, his solution. One reason for discounting his disapproval, I started to think, was the new way I saw him pursuing his self-interest all these years, all in the guise of going along and getting along. It made me sort of mad, to tell the truth.
And then there was the willful positive thinking, the self-induced illusion that everything would turn out fine, when we had all kinds of evidence that it wouldn’t. If I was angry at myself for dopily accepting everything that had come to me, I was angry at Ty, too, because every fear I’d had of trying something new, of resisting, of creating conflict was a fear that he’d encouraged. I associated this with his father, with all his family’s decades on the farm, never losing any ground, but never gaining any, either. It may have been impossible that someone as hesitant as myself could be seen as potentially wild or impulsive, but in our house I supplied the zip—the hint of the unpredictable, even if it was only an attempt at a Chinese recipe taken from the “Today” section of the Des Moines Register. I told myself that it wasn’t what Rose and I were going to try with Daddy that Ty objected to, but the fact that we were going to try anything.
I knew that I shouldn’t be mad at Ty for being what he’d always been, patient, understanding, careful, willing to act as the bulwark against my father, but I was mad at him.
Jess Clark thought Rose and I were taking exactly the right line.
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories. On the one hand, we had my father’s story—the incidents were the occasions of his increasingly erratic behavior, and the representations of that were here and there; the kitchen cabinetry buckling and swelling in the driveway, his impounded truck at wherever the state troopers kept such vehicles, the front right fender, it turned out later, smashed flat against the wheel, the hollowed-out headlight, the bumper twisted up under