A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [89]
“But he doesn’t overwhelm you! You stand right up to him!”
“He likes that. All those dates and escapes when I was in high school? It made him think he had to subdue me. He liked it.”
“You sound like you were trying to keep him interested!”
“Well, I was afraid he’d try something with Caroline, and she was only eight or ten. But I was flattered, too. I thought that he’d picked me, me, to be his favorite, not you, not her. On the surface, I thought it was okay, that it must be okay if he said it was, since he was the rule maker. He didn’t rape me, Ginny. He seduced me. He said it was okay, that it was good to please him, that he needed it, that I was special. He said he loved me.”
I said, “I can’t listen to this.”
Rose sat quiet, looking at me. There were three quick thunderclaps, the heavy pressure of rain against the house. I concentrated on that.
“Ginny.”
“What?”
“He went into your room. I watched him.”
“Maybe I was asleep. Maybe he was just thinking about it and decided not to do it for some reason. Maybe you were prettier.”
“That’s not the way it works. I’ve read a little about it. Prettier doesn’t make any difference. You were as much his as I was. There was no reason for him to assert his possession of me more than his possession of you. We were just his, to do with as he pleased, like the pond or the houses or the hogs or the crops. Caroline was his, too. That’s why I don’t know about her.”
Of course I was staring, registering the shifting expressions on her face, the flickering play of the light. Of course I was wondering whether she would lie to me. When we were children, young children, nine and seven or so, she had done a lot of lying. I had been the blurter, always stumbling into self-betrayal without a moment’s thought. She had been more calculating, and even said to me once, “Why do you answer every question they ask you? Just tell them what they like and they’ll leave you alone.” She steadily returned my gaze. Finally, I threw myself back against the couch and exclaimed, “Rose, you’re too calm. You’re so calm that it’s more like you’re lying than it is like you’re dredging up horrors from the past.”
“I am calm. This is a surprise for you, if you say so. But it isn’t a surprise for me. I’ve thought about it for years. I told Pete, too, after my broken arm.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Pete would believe Daddy’s capable of anything. His attitude toward me is more complicated. He knows how he should feel, and he tries to feel that way. It helps that we have daughters. If Daddy did anything to them, Pete would kill him. That’s partly why I stay married to him.”
I glanced toward the stairs, suddenly certain that Linda and Pammy were sitting at the top, taking this all in. The stairs were empty. I said, “Is that why you keep them away from Daddy?”
“And why I send them to boarding school. Though it gave me a little shiver, having him driving all over, down to Des Moines and everything. I’m not sure the school would prevent them from going out with him.”
It took me a while to get out my next question. It felt as if fear had literally jammed wadding into my mouth. Finally, I said, “Has he ever—”
“Not that I know of. I bought the books, and we went through all the drills and stuff. I prepared them without mentioning Daddy. And I’ve kept my eyes peeled. And we were in our teens.”
“It didn’t happen to me, Rose.”
She shrugged a little.
I spoke angrily all of a sudden, surprising myself, “I don’t know what to say! This is ridiculous!” All at once I started to cry. “I mean, the strangest thing is how idiotic I feel, how naive and foolish. God, I am so sorry he did that.”
Rose sat calmly, almost impassive. “Don’t make me feel sorry for myself. That’s the hardest. The more pissed off I am, the better I feel.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay.”
She moved close to me and put her arms around me. We sat quietly beside each other for a few minutes. I tried to stop crying, but it was