A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [87]
I wondered, too, what Jess Clark would say to all this. It seemed like nothing could batter that out of me. Impossibilities disguised as possibilities floated out of the depths—Jess must have told, Jess must have entertained Harold and Loren with the story, and Harold told Daddy, even if Jess didn’t tell, he probably thinks about me the same way, no, he doesn’t think that way at all, he knows me better than that, he would stick by me if I asked him to—
Rose said, “Well, the almighty has spoken. Trembling yet?” Her tone was drawling and blasé.
“You were shaking. You could barely turn the TV knob before.”
“Shit, Ginny, I’m still shaking. I wish I hadn’t stopped smoking. God, I want a cigarette.”
“I want to throw up.”
“Oh, honey.”
“Just try to maintain the right attitude, or we’ll cry.”
“I’m not going to cry, and you aren’t either.”
“Say, ‘He’s crazy.’ ”
“He is crazy. He’s bananas. You can always tell when they go on and on about some conspiracy at work. Or sex. When they bring up sex that’s a sure sign.”
“Was this what you call foaming at the mouth?”
“Remember that guy who used to pilot the spray plane when Daddy was having the crops sprayed from the air? He supposedly got very crazy as he got older. They used to find him in the crawl space under the kitchen, hiding out.”
“Who told you that?”
“Marlene Stanley heard it from Bob, who knew that family up near Mason City. And he had this terrible rash. They didn’t know if it was some reaction to all those chemicals, or whether it was from crawling around under the house.”
“You think Daddy’s having some reaction to chemicals?”
She shrugged. “Remember last Christmas when Harold Clark was going on and on about how he didn’t expect to live five more years, and his dad had died at ninety-two? If you drive around, you can pass all the houses. This one lived to be ninety, this one eighty-seven, this couple ninety-three and ninety-two. That generation is gone, though.”
“Grandpa Cook was only sixty-six. Daddy’s two years older than that now. And Grandpa Davis was seventy.”
“Well, I don’t know if they were like the others. Don’t you wonder if they all didn’t just implode? First their wives collapse under the strain, then they take it out on their children for as long as they can, then they just reach the end of their rope. I used to fantasize that Mommy had escaped and taken an assumed name, and someday she would be back for us. You want to hear the life I had picked out for us?”
Sure.
“She was a waitress at the restaurant of a nice hotel, and we lived with her in a Hollywood-style apartment, you know, its own door, two floors, two bedrooms and a bathroom up and living room and kitchen down. Nice shag carpeting, white walls, little sounds from the neighbors on either side, sliding door out to the back deck. There had to be neighbors on both sides. I thought it would be scary to live on the end.”
“I guess I never really thought about not living on the farm. Isn’t that funny? I wanted it to be different, though, in some ways.”
“Ginny, you sound so mild. Aren’t you furious?”
“What good is that? If it is some chemical thing, what good does it do to be furious? We still have to deal with it.”
“It wasn’t any chemical thing twenty years ago.”
“Well, he’s always had rages, I admit. Maybe I would have been more conciliatory tonight if I hadn’t suddenly remembered—”
The phone rang, and I answered it, even though you weren’t supposed to in a thunderstorm. Ty wanted to know if Daddy had reappeared, if I thought the storm was letting up. I said, “No to both. Not there, either, huh?” Rose came over and sat down next to me on the couch. I hung up the phone. The light from the kerosene lamp seemed marvelously bright now that I had adjusted to it, and Rose’s face seemed to gather it and reflect it, her skin the warm glowing color of the light itself. In this forgiving