A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [93]
It was imperative that the growing discord in our family be made to appear minor. The indication that my father truly was beside himself was the way he had carried his argument with us to others. But we couldn’t give in to that—we were well trained. We knew our roles and our strategies without hesitation and without consultation. The paramount value of looking right is not something you walk away from after a single night. After such a night as we had, in fact, it is something you embrace, the broken plank you are left with after the ship has gone down.
We knew that first and foremost we had to buy time, though I’m sure we would have disagreed on what we were buying it for. Ty probably thought everything would blow over, or, at least, we would get so far in the building that turning back would be impossible—the new world would have risen around us, harder to dismantle than to keep. He was thinking of Marv Carson. Rose certainly thought that with a little time, Daddy would fall back into our hands, her hands. Linda and Pammy must have felt that everything would get back to normal if we all, or at least they, hunkered down and pretended things were fine enough. Pete may have been struggling hard with himself, buying time for his temper, hoping to be brought willy-nilly to a less furious state of mind. I always imagined that Pete was well-intentioned, that even when he did lose control, he still hoped nothing bad would happen. I wanted time, too, not because I expected it to solve an iota of our problems, but because I would have done anything to put off the future.
Should none of us appear in public, the belief would become universal that we had something to be ashamed of. Rose shopped harder in Pike and Cabot than she had in a year, riffling through every sales rack, bringing home a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries, and deploring my father’s drinking (but in an indulgent, daughterly, respectful sort of way) to five or six inquisitive women, including Marv Carson’s mother.
Pete spent the afternoon sitting around the feedstore in Pike, then the John Deere dealer in Zebulon Center, ostensibly doing business, but really doing the same thing Rose had done.
Ty worked and joked and urged on the builders.
I made Ken LaSalle two pots of coffee and sat with him in our kitchen, eliciting from him his every doubt, his every concern about Daddy, all the worries he had ever had about our farm and our family situation.
Marv Carson came knocking on the door about noon. He had a six-pack of little green bottles of Perrier water from France that he’d ordered from a distributor. I offered him some dinner—we’d had macaroni and cheese. “Oh, Ginny,” he said, “not cheese. Never cheese. Terrible mucus buildup with cheese. Haven’t you noticed that?”
I said, “I thought the point was to eat everything, but keep it running through the system.”
“That is a good basic plan, but I’ve had to modify the profile of my intake over the summer. Do you have any peanut butter?”
I got out the bread and the peanut butter and some crab apple jelly. Then I got down a sealed jar of hot pepper jelly. He picked that up and made himself a sandwich. I was still finishing my salad from dinner. He opened two bottles of the Perrier water and pushed one over to me. He said, “I can’t hide from you I’m worried, Ginny. I’m just worried sick. Everyone down at the bank is worried about this thing with your dad.”
I wrinkled my forehead and made a skeptical, good-humored look. These worries were absurd. We hadn’t even thought of them before Marv