A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  Pete was an aggressive Monopoly strategist, building houses and hotels every time he could, and letting his liquid assets drop dangerously low. He also managed to predict three times that he was going to land on Boardwalk in time to purchase it, and twice it was Boardwalk with a hotel on it that broke the back of his most threatening rival, once Jess and once myself. Pete definitely counted on winning. But Rose, by slowly and steadily accumulating money, buying properties only with a certain percentage of it and hoarding the rest, managed to move toward a million dollars without ever actually winning a game.

  One thing I noticed about these Monopoly nights was a shift in my feelings about Pete. It had been a long time since I’d realized what fun he was (when I mentioned this to Rose, she said it had been a long time since he’d had fun or been fun, actually), but it was more than that, more a realization that he had certain powers. Those nights he flexed them: he teased me; he charmed his daughters and included them in the game, even allowing them to decide strategy when his play was at a crisis; he topped Jess’s stories, and, in some ways, his style of telling them; he sang verses of songs, both familiar and obscure, that were entertaining, but best of all, appropriate, so that you had private realizations, sharp but silly to express, of how everything that was happening at that moment seemed marvelously to fit—that was Pete’s gift, and it demonstrated to me an intelligence that I wasn’t used to allowing him. In our family life, the inappropriate had always been Pete’s special domain.

  One night, Jess told us that Harold had a remodeling project in mind for the July lull in farm work. We were grinning already when Pete said, “I’ve got to hear this.”

  “Well, he’s going to rip out the linoleum and the subfloor of the kitchen. You know, the kitchen isn’t over the cellar, it’s over a crawl space. So he’s going to put a new concrete floor in the kitchen, green-tinted concrete that slopes to a drain so he can just hose it down when it gets dirty.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Rose.

  “Nope. He said if that works out the way he thinks it will, he’s going to try it in the downstairs bathroom, too.”

  We laughed.

  Ty said, “Is he going to run the hose in from outside?”

  Pete said, “He could put in a hose spigot easy enough.”

  We laughed again.

  I said, “What does Loren think?”

  “He doesn’t care. He said, ‘It’s his place, he can do what he wants to it.’ ”

  I rolled the dice, landed on St. Charles Place, and paid Rose her rent. She divvied it up between her spend pile and her save pile, and I said, “He’s never going to get married at this rate. Nobody wants to cook in a concrete kitchen that slopes toward a drain.”

  “Harold thinks this is an idea he can patent. He can’t figure out why no one’s ever done it before.”

  Pete said, “I can’t wait till he tells Larry this one. Larry will go bananas.”

  “Or he’ll want a concrete kitchen of his own,” said Rose. “Or he’ll want to go Harold one better and do the whole downstairs, with sheet vinyl on the walls so he could wash those down, too.”

  We laughed, but the next day, I saw the delivery truck from the lumberyard in Pike pass our house and turn in at my father’s. I watched while the driver shouted for Daddy, and when he couldn’t roust him, I ran down there to find out what was going on. It was a pantry cabinet, a sink, four base cabinets, and two wall cabinets, as well as eight feet of baby blue laminated countertop, the floor display in the kitchen department of the lumberyard, which my father had bought for a thousand dollars, said the driver ($2500 value, according to the display card taped to the sink). Neither the wood nor the door pattern matched what my father already had—yellow painted cabinets original to the house and linoleum countertops edged in metal—but the display wasn’t large enough to replace what was there. I called for Daddy all over the house and out to the barn, but though his truck was there, he wasn’t. The driver and his helper unloaded the display onto the driveway, and when I said I didn’t have my checkbook, he said the cabinets were already paid for and drove off. I had to laugh, remembering how we’d predicted something the night before, then went home and forgot about it until Ty came in for dinner and told me that he had offered to help Daddy carry the new cabinets into the house and Daddy had said he hadn’t decided where he was going to put them yet, so he was going to leave them sit. Pete got the same response at suppertime.

  We were a little perplexed, but the affair of the kitchen cabinets seemed mostly funny until two days later, when we got up and saw that it was going to rain soon, certainly before noon. Ty ate quickly, then walked down the road with me to help Daddy put the cabinets under cover, maybe in the barn at least, while I was making breakfast. Daddy was sitting at the table drinking coffee. I said, “Looks like a good rain today. The radio said it could last till late tomorrow.”

  “Would have been better for the corn last week. Corn’s behind.”

  I said, “Is it?”

  Ty said, “It’s not that far behind. Anyway, if we get those cabinets in the house, Ginny will probably be just putting breakfast on the table.”

  Daddy said, “You eating?”

  “No, I ate.”

  “Then you better cultivate those beans down on Mel’s corner, because it’s kind of low down there, and you won’t get the Deere into that field this week if you let it go till after this rain.”

  “I was going to do that. The tractor’s down there already.”

  “You left the tractor down there?”

  I glanced at Ty. There was nothing unusual about leaving the tractor out when work in Mel’s corner was planned, since it was the farthest field from the barn and took longer to get there by tractor over the road than on foot across the fields. He caught my look and gave a little shrug, then said, “How about these cabinets? I won’t have time to help you with them later, and Pete’s got to go into Zebulon Center and file some papers this morning.”

  Daddy said, “I’m tired of hearing about that damn kitchen junk. I’ll move them when I’m good and ready.”

  “Daddy, you don’t want them to warp in the rain, do you? They’re solid oak. They’re nice wood.”

  He drank down his coffee and said, “Quit telling me what to do.” He glared at us, until finally Ty turned and went out. I wished Rose was there, since she knew how to talk back to him, but at last I said, “What are you doing, leaving them out in the rain? Showing Harold a thing or two?” I tried to make my voice cajoling, as inoffensive as possible.

  He said, “I’m minding my own business.”

  I made him breakfast, pointedly not speaking, but he didn’t seem to notice. Afterward, he got in his truck and drove off, and I went home. I watched the sky, though, and when it started to rain, a steady soaker, I put on my slicker and walked down to his place. The cabinets stood mournfully in the gravel drive, shedding water in rivulets. I didn’t know what to think.

  I found out that night. Rose was throwing off jokes like a Fourth of July sparkler. Her favorite notion was that Daddy intended to start breeding rabbits on the revolving shelves of the pantry and chickens in the wall cabinets. I could tell she was furious, because she wouldn’t drop the subject. Pete was angry, too, and he encouraged her to dwell on it. Finally Ty said, in his mild way, “Larry’s done silly things before.”

  Rose said, “A thousand dollars! Right out the window. He bought them just to top Harold, and then he’s too lazy to put them in the house.”

  Jess said, “Maybe he never intended to put them in the house.”

  “Why would you have such nice cabinets in the workshop? Most people put the old ones in the workshop and the new ones in the house.”

  Play around the Monopoly board matched the accelerated rhythm of the conversation, and it was hard for me to keep track of who owed me what. At her turns, Rose threw the dice off the table and banged her tiny metal shoe around the spaces. I began to feel tense.

  “No,” said Jess, “I mean,
maybe it’s just a gesture that’s supposed to denigrate whatever Harold does.”

  “Kind of, ‘This is what I think about kitchens,’ ” said Ty.

  “He’s crazy,” said Rose. “Anyway, Ginny, you’re running out of money and you have all the expensive rentals left before you get to Go. You want to sell your two railroads?”

  “Don’t sell them to her,” said Pete, the edge in his voice not quite playful.

  “He is crazy,” said Rose. “He gets in his truck every morning and drives off without telling anyone where he’s going. He bought a couch, too. Did he tell you that? It hasn’t been delivered yet, because he bought it at a place down in Marshalltown and they haven’t had time to send a truck up this way. Marshalltown must be two hours from here, so he’s not just tooling around the back roads. I don’t like his driving down there.”

  “How much did he spend on that?” asked Ty.

  “He said that wasn’t any of my business. I only know about the couch because I saw the salesman’s card on the kitchen table and I asked him about it. He was proud of himself!”

  “We think it was sometime last week,” said Pete, “around the same time he bought the cabinets.”

  I landed on Park Place, and pushed my B&O and Reading Railroad cards over to Rose. She handed me three thousand dollars. It was clear that I was losing this particular game, and I tried to decide whether to quit while I still had some money to add to my total score, but the conversation jangled me. A thousand dollars and more was a lot of money, but Rose seemed too mad even for that much money. On the other hand, Ty acted like he didn’t grasp that to spend money like this was a new departure for Daddy, not his routine “silly thing.”

  Pammy came up to the table next to me, and I put my arm around her waist. She said, “Can I make some popcorn?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  She said, “Will you help me?” She knew one of the great family truths, that aunts always help, while moms always think it would be good for you if you did it yourself. Anyway, I was glad to get away from the others.

  In the kitchen, she said, “Is Grandpa crazy?”

  I said, “What do you think crazy means?”

  “Yelling and screaming and acting weird. And going to a hospital.”

  “Your mom’s just exaggerating. Grandpa has been doing some things that we don’t understand.”

  She shook the pot carefully, eager, as always, to do a good job. She said, “Mom won’t let us go over there. And she told us not to open the door if he comes over when she isn’t there.”

  “Well, that seems a little unnecessary to me, but she must have her reasons.” The popcorn finished popping and I held out the bowl. Pammy took off the lid and set it on one of the cool burners, then poured the popcorn into the bowl. She had always been Rose’s own daughter in the precision with which she went about things and her determination to do things right, but there was a difference—Rose always did things right as an assertion of herself. Pammy did things right so that she wouldn’t get into trouble. Linda, a year younger, was more carefree. I loved Pammy and was close to her. Linda, who was very pretty and graceful, I admired and delighted in from afar. I said, “Butter?”

  Pammy nodded.

  I said, “Does Grandpa scare you?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You should have seen what it was like when we were kids. We had all sorts of hiding places, but if he called our names, we had to answer within ten seconds. That’s just the way he is. Your mom isn’t afraid of him for a moment, though, so you just rely on her, okay?”

  Pammy nodded, and we took the popcorn into the living room.

  Rose was saying, “Maybe he has Alzheimer’s.”

  Jess said, “Is he forgetful? That’s the first symptom of Alzheimer’s.”

  “Just the opposite,” said Pete. “He remembers everything you ever said, every time you ever looked at him cross-eyed, every time you ever doubted some instruction he gave you. Is that a disease?”

  “He could try to order us around with the farm work,” said Ty. “That’s what I was afraid would happen, but he stays out of the way, or else he asks whether there’s something he can do. If I say there is, then he does it.”

  “But that doesn’t stop the complaints,” said Pete. “He’s full of complaints about what we do do.”

  “Well,” said Ty, “I’d rather have that than constant interference. I don’t even listen to the complaints half the time.”

  Rose said, “A thousand dollars! I still can’t believe the waste. And it just makes me sick to see them out in the weather. I mean, somebody built those! It’s actually sad somehow.”

  I said, “I thought that, too.”

  “He’s out of control,” said Rose.

  I was tempted to agree.

  13

  THE NEXT DAY WAS ONLY the fifteenth of June, but it was hot, ninety-five and windy. Pammy and Linda wandered down to my house about ten—Rose had already sent them outside because she hated complaining. She was rather like our mother in the brisk way she treated them. I didn’t always approve; I suspected I would have been more of a pushover. At least, Pammy and Linda knew where to go when they wanted a favor. I offered to take them swimming in Pike that afternoon if they entertained themselves until dinnertime.

  When we were children, Rose and I used to swim in the farm pond down toward Mel’s corner. The pond, an ancient pothole that predated the farm, was impressively large to us, with a tire swing hanging over the deep end. Not long before the death of our mother, Daddy drained the pond and took out the trees and stumps around it so he could work that field more efficiently.

  This was the first swim of the year for the girls, and they should have been excited, but after we had gotten our suits and were in the car headed toward Pike, they grew quiet. I said, “Do you wish your mom were going?”

  Pammy shook her head.

  “We’ll have fun, you know. Anyway, it’s awfully hot to stay home.”

  Linda sat forward and put her head over the back of the seat. She said, “Aunt Ginny, we don’t have any friends there any more.”

  “Sure you do. All those kids will be glad to see you. You’ll be the new faces now.”

  “I don’t see why we have to go to boarding school. Nobody else does.”

  “Your mom has good reasons. Anyway, I thought you liked it there.”

  Pammy said, “It isn’t bad. The teachers are nice.”

  “But the kids are all city kids. They’re all rich.”

  “I can’t believe they’re all rich.”

  “They pretend like it,” said Linda. “We have nicknames.”

  I felt a tiny pain in my throat, like the pressure of a knife point. I said, “Well, let’s hear them.”

  Pammy spoke up reluctantly, and I suspected that the nicknames had been something she intended to keep from us. She said, “Well, mine was Lambie, because I gave this oral report about having lambs for 4-H, and Linda’s was Mac, for Old MacDonald.”

  “We wanted them to just call us Pam and Linda.”

  “Do other kids have nicknames?”

  “Some of them.”

  Now came the hardest question. “Just the unpopular kids?”

  Pammy rode silently, and Linda sat back in her seat. After a few moments, she said, “No, not really. But mostly it’s the boys with nicknames. Not too many girls.”

  “Well,” I said, “nicknames are a sign of affection.”

  Linda looked at me. “Not with kids, Aunt Ginny.”

  Pammy said, “Anyway, none of those kids are around here. We don’t have any friends around here any more.”

  “Did anyone write you?”

  Linda leaned forward and said with wise condescension, “Aunt Ginny, kids don’t write!”

  I had to laugh.

  After we passed through Cabot, I said, “I don’t think it will take long to make friends again. You’ll feel uncomfortable for a while, but that’s all you’ll have to worry about. If you’re friendly, they wil
l be friendly.”

  It sounded good, but the fact was that I really didn’t believe it myself. There was a way in which I could look at my life as an unending battle to make friends, and the girls’ worries resonated with my own, worries that came in waves, sometimes pricking me and goading me until all I could think was that there were parties all over the county that I wasn’t being invited to, and tempting me to drive around to the farms of all our friends, just to see the truth at last. When I complained of this as a teenager, after my mother died, Daddy used to say, “You ought to stay home, anyway. People ought to stay home.” I didn’t complain very often. It wasn’t the boys that I longed to be with, it was the girls. I would have traded any dance at school for any slumber party. It didn’t matter that slumber parties weren’t allowed for Rose and me; I wanted to be invited.

  Rose went out anyway. She didn’t even bother to climb out her window and onto the front porch, which she could have done. She walked right out the front door and climbed into the car with whoever was picking her up. She didn’t have to reciprocate in order to get invitations, either. She did no driving, no party giving, no inviting to our house of any kind. She was a prize, and her repeated escapes part of her legend. When Daddy confronted her, she talked back, as always. The confrontations weren’t as regular as the sneaking out, but there were some terrific battles that I anxiously ignored.

  The Pike swimming pool, somewhat past the town on the west side of Pike’s Creek, was almost new, and the red maples and beeches planted around it were about ten feet tall and narrow as baseball bats. The glaring white gravel parking lot was full of big American cars and pickups. It was so windy you had to shade your eyes against the grit. Flat land ranged on every side, punctuated only by the blue-painted concrete-block bathhouse. There were plans to turn the acreage along the creek into a park, of which the pool would be the centerpiece, but pool revenues hadn’t yet generated those funds, so the land was still planted, this year in beans.