A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [77]
“Sure.”
“You are such a nice person. How come you and Ty don’t have any kids?”
“Well, I’ve had five miscarriages.”
“Jesus. Oh, Ginny.”
“Ty only knows about three. He couldn’t stand it after that, so I’ve sort of kept the fact that we’re still trying to myself.” A harsh look crossed Jess’s face, and I felt another jolt of fear. I reached for my jeans, saying, “Well, of course I shouldn’t deceive him. I know—”
“It’s the fucking water.”
“What?”
“Have you had your well water tested for nitrates?”
“Well, no.”
“Didn’t your doctor tell you not to drink the well water?”
“No.”
He stood up and started pulling on his jeans, then sat down and put both his socks on without speaking. I could tell he was very upset. I said, “Jess—”
He exploded. “People have known for ten years or more that nitrates in well water cause miscarriages and death of infants. Don’t you know that the fertilizer runoff drains into the aquifer? I can’t believe this.”
“It wasn’t that. It just hasn’t worked. Rose drank the water—”
“It’s not uniform. It doesn’t affect everyone the same, and not all wells are the same. Yours might be closer to the drainage wells.”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you still trying?”
We looked at each other, both contemplating the absurdity of this question in the circumstances, and smiled. “Not today,” I said. “I put in my diaphragm.”
“Hey—” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue plastic capsule. I said, “What’s that?”
“A condom. Except that I forgot I remembered to bring it.” I took it and rolled it around in the palm of my hand. It was comforting, his forethought. I handed it back to him and he jumped out of the truck bed, then helped me down. We kissed, tenderly and thoughtfully, the way, maybe, people do when they have become unafraid to kiss one another, and then I ducked around the wild rosebushes and headed for home without looking back. I felt distinctly calm, complete and replete, as if I would never have to do that ever again.
At the supper table, after telling me about his trip to Zebulon Center, who he saw and how my father acted, Ty said, “Say, Gin, were you protected last night?”
I looked up from my plate and then pushed it away from me. It knocked against the water glass. I said, “Well, not exactly. But I just finished my period. It’s all right.”
“You sure?”
I snapped, “Does that question mean you doubt my knowledge or my truthfulness? Which one?”
He snapped back, “It means that there are things I’m not ready for yet.”
“It’s been almost two years.”
“It’s been almost three years.”
He was right. It was the fourth one I’d been thinking of. I could feel my face get hot. I raised my voice. “All right, then. It’s been almost three years. That proves my point even more.”
He got up and left the kitchen, closing the screen door carefully behind him. I watched him out the door without moving from the table. He stepped into the road and turned toward the corner of 686 and Cabot Street Road. I watched him stride away, and listened to the thin sound of his boots on the blacktop. I sat there for a long time, staring out the door, struck for the first time at what I had done and thought and felt that day, how, to the eyes of almost any outsider, it would look like I had become my own enemy and the enemy of all my family and friends. That was when the fear settled over me for good. After a while I went upstairs and took out my diaphragm and washed it and put it in its case.
22
YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT LONG if you had some money to spend and were set on putting up new farm buildings, hardly long enough for a few second thoughts. And it didn’t take long, after you looked at the brochures, for your eyes to travel automatically to the best equipment—farrowing crates, ventilation equipment, feed- and waste-handling equipment, heated floors. For five years, Ty had been saying that he would like to double the size of our hog operation, from five hundred finished hogs per year to a thousand, with a small breeding operation on the side—the “Boar Boutique”