A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [99]
“You’re not supposed to, don’t you get it? Where’s the fun in being understood? Laurence Cook, the great I AM.” She laughed again.
“I want to.”
“I don’t. Anyway, I understand him perfectly. You’re making it too complicated. It’s as simple as a child’s book. I want, I take, I do.”
“That’s not enough for me. I can’t believe it’s that simple.”
“It is.”
“I can’t imagine it. We’re his children!”
“I’m telling you, if you probe and probe and try to understand, it just holds you back. You start seeing things from his point of view again, and you’re just paralyzed.” Her voice dropped. She said, “That was his goddamned hold over me, Ginny! For all those years! He talked. He made me see things from his point of view! He needed someone! He needed me! I looked so good to him! He loved me, my hair, my eyes, my spunk, even, though it made him mad, surely I understood that, too, how he had to get mad at some of the things I did! Ginny, you don’t want to understand it, or imagine it. You don’t you don’t you don’t.”
But I wanted to.
I said, “We’ve got to talk to him about it.”
Rose whooped.
I tried to summon some authority, but my voice trembled. “I mean it.”
Rose said, “Be realistic.”
“I have to hear what he says.”
The upper sky was now black, but the lower sky was still misted with light.
I thought about what she had said. This did sound strangely like Daddy and cast a reflective credibility backward, over everything else. But it didn’t change my mind. I said, “I’ve still got to hear what he says.”
It was dark on the porch. I could no longer see Rose, so perhaps that is why I could so clearly sense her mulling this over. Finally, she said, “Okay. We’ll see what happens at the church supper. Maybe there will be some kind of opportunity after that.”
28
THE CHURCH HELD A POTLUCK every year on the Sunday after the Fourth of July, to celebrate the anniversary of its founding in 1903. We dressed in our nicest casual clothes, baked our noodle-hamburger casserole and our brownies, and went together, the two families. Rose made us stand up straight so she could survey us before we got in the car. “Respectable to the core,” she declared.
I have to admit that the sight of Daddy startled me. In only five days, he had been transformed. The sight of him stopped me in the doorway of the church hall, so that Rose, coming behind, ran smack into me. I said, “Look at him.”
“Well, I didn’t expect Harold to wash and iron his clothes the way we do. He’s obviously worn the same thing since Monday night.”
“But his hair’s all standing on end. Doesn’t Harold have a comb he can lend him?”
Rose stepped around me. “For that matter, why don’t they go over to Daddy’s house and pick up some of his stuff? It’s none of our business. It just goes to show you.”
“What?”
“How much we were actually doing for him. Namely everything.” Her voice was bitterly triumphant, and she marched into the hall with her pan of brownies, smiling and greeting everyone in the room.
But it wasn’t only the clothes. At first I thought he must have dropped some weight, or that he was ill from the storm, but it wasn’t that. It was that his whole demeanor was a tad abashed, even submissive. It was not like anything I had ever seen, or thought possible, with Daddy. Ty came in from parking the car. I said, “Look at Daddy. Does he seem different?”
Ty stared at him for a moment, then said, “He looks his age, if that’s what you mean.” Then he glanced coolly at me and went to join some of the Stanleys by the soft-drink table.
Harold Clark was talking to Mary Livingstone. I saw his eye fall on Rose, then he turned and looked around until he saw me. He smiled. I smiled back. A moment later, Harold went over to Daddy and stood with him, talking to the people that Daddy was talking to—Henry Dodge, Bob and Georgia Hudson. I noticed Pete, standing alone against a wall, drinking a Coke. He looked like he’d rather be drinking a beer. I remember that his eyes scanned