by Jane Smiley
“How has he been acting?”
She smiled, actually looking at me for the first time. She said, “He isn’t very talkative, is he? When the doctors were working on him, right at first? Well, one of them said, ‘You know, I think he can talk. He just won’t.’ That’s kind of unusual.” She spoke brightly.
I said, “Not for him, lately. Is that all? We can just leave now?”
She lowered her voice. “You can. But I think the police will be calling you. It takes about ten days for the blood level test to come back, though.”
“You mean the blood alcohol level?”
“But you can be thankful he wasn’t seriously injured. He’s just fine, really.” She returned to her spot behind the desk.
He was sitting in the backseat, on the passenger side. After I got in and arranged myself, Ty turned and said, “Ready to go, Dad?” but there wasn’t any response. We turned out of the hospital parking lot and onto the empty avenue of light and gloom that we had just turned off. Each house, large and close to its neighbors, rose like a solid and discreet blossom out of its neat lawn and thick embracing shrubbery. It was nearly midnight. Every window on the long protected block was dark.
My father was so quiet that it was easy to believe that he had learned his lesson, that there would have to be no discussion of keys or drinking or of the whole situation we found ourselves in. It was easy to believe that he was quiet because chastened, even embarrassed. Ty, too, was quiet. Perhaps they had already talked, come to some agreement, and Ty would present me with that when we got home. I said, “Daddy, have you got those pills the nurse gave you?”
The question went unanswered, so unanswered that it got to be like a question that no one had ever expected would be answered. Whether or not he had the pills turned out to be none of my business. That was the answer.
In the silence, it was easy for my mind to drift, and it drifted back to the thoughts of Ty and Jess and my future that I had been thinking a very short time—half an hour—before. With my father in the car, such thoughts took on a new coloring. What had seemed scary but pleasant, even innocent (only thoughts after all), now seemed real and shocking. Even the comfort I had felt in Ty’s and my privacy as we were driving in the dark seemed fugitive, luxurious. I looked again at the houses we passed, now not so prosperous as those around the hospital, and I saw a new meaning in them, in the obvious differences between them—junk on a porch here, two nice cars in an open garage there, a painted swing set and a homemade sandbox across the street. The families who lived here had only the most tenuous links to one another. Each lived a distinct style, to divergent ends. That was what was to be envied, not, as I had thought as a child, the closeness or the sociability, but the uniqueness of each family’s fate, each family’s, each couple’s, freedom to make or find something apart from the others.
My father groaned. I froze, staring ahead. Ty said, “Are you having some pain, Larry? You sure you want to leave the hospital? We can go right back.” To this there was no response either. We were left to assume that our course of action, taking him home, was what he wanted. We drove on. The front end of the car looked higher. I caught myself listening to the engine, as if we were hauling a trailer, as if carrying my father home were taxing more than just my peace of mind.
Ty and I traded a couple of secretive, eye-rolling glances, and he smiled at me. His smile told me what to do—be patient, endure, maintain hope—and I wondered where it came from with him, this endless stoicism. It was so heavy and dumb and good! So foolishly receptive! When would taking it turn into asking for it? Maybe it already had. Maybe if we had conducted our lives differently in the past, had not been so accommodating, nor so malleable—how was it that everyone had left the land and we had stayed behind? How was it that I had not even thought of college, of trying something else, of moving to Des Moines or even Mason City? Then there was the image that things always looped back to, those five miscarried children. It was my habit to think that if I could be a certain way, embody a certain attitude, a child would come to me and stay with me. The attitudes I had tried were obvious—receptive to conception, then protective. Now I saw my error, though. Who would stay with a mother who merely waited? Who accepted things so dully, who could say so easily, something will happen, we’ll get another chance. No! It was time to sit up, to reach out, to choose this and not that! Ty’s steadiness was getting us, getting me, nowhere. I shifted in my seat and noticed that we were turning onto Cabot Street Road. Almost home. I spun around and said, “Daddy!”
His eyes had been closed, but now they popped open. He lifted himself in the seat with a grunt. Ty’s head swiveled toward me.
“I know you’re hurt, and I’m sorry you got in an accident, but now’s the time to talk about it. You’re going to be in real trouble pretty soon, when the state troopers come over. You’ve got to take this to heart. You simply can’t drive all over creation, and you especially can’t do it when you’re drinking. It’s not right. You could kill somebody. Or kill yourself, for that matter.”
He looked at me.
“They’re probably going to revoke your license, but even if they don’t, I will, if you do it again. I’ll take away the keys to your truck, and if you do it after that, I’ll sell it. When I was little, you always said that one warning ought to be enough. Well, this is your warning, and I expect you to pay attention to it. And another thing, you’re fully capable of helping around the farm, and I can tell that you’re bored without it. Rose or I will give you your breakfast at the regular time from now on, and you can just go out and work afterwards. We aren’t going to let you sit around. You’re used to working, and there’s no reason why you can’t keep working. Ty and Pete can’t do everything all of a sudden.”
It was exhilarating, talking to my father as if he were my child, more than exhilarating to see him as my child. This laying down the law was a marvelous way of talking. It created a whole orderly future within me, a vista of manageable days clicking past, myself in the foreground, large and purposeful. It wasn’t a way of talking that I was used to—possibly I had never talked that way before—but I knew I could get used to it in a heartbeat, that here I had stumbled on a prerogative of parenthood I hadn’t thought of before (I’d thought only how I would be tender and affectionate and patient and instructive). I eyed the old man. I said, “I mean it about the driving, and Rose will back me up.”
He held my gaze, and said in a low voice, as if to himself, “I got nothing.”
I thought he was just trying to get my sympathy. I said, “There’s enough for everybody, for one thing.” For another, I thought, you gave it away of your own accord. But I didn’t dare say it. It made me too mad.
Ty got him up to bed, but not before I said, “Breakfast at seven, Daddy. Ty will wait for you at our place, and you can work something out about what you want to do tomorrow.”
Back at our place, Ty said, “Maybe he shouldn’t work tomorrow. We don’t know what sort of trauma there’s been.”
“Give him an easy job, for a couple of hours. His life doesn’t have any structure. That’s exactly the problem. Now’s the time to do something about it, when he’s ashamed of himself.”
Ty got out of his pants and sat down to take off his socks. I roamed the room, picking up objects and putting them down. Power pumped through me. I cruised into the bathroom, the two other bedrooms, one used for guests who never came, one for old furniture. I looked out windows in every direction. It was a benign summer night, breezy and thick. Back to our room. Ty was stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head. I said, “I learned something tonight.”
“Take charge?”
“Yes, but more than that. It was something physical, not just in my mind. Not just a lesson.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you believe me?”
“Oh, I believe you.”
“Well, what?”
“Ginny, it’s after midnight. You said you’d have breakfast on your father’s table by
seven. Let’s just see if the thing you learned tonight is true tomorrow, okay?”
“Fine.”
He closed his eyes. I marched across the hallway to the west-facing bedroom and looked toward the Clark farm, staring and staring until I could hear my husband’s breathing deepen and slow.
In the morning, there was a fair amount of grunting and groaning. I was immune to it. I set my father’s breakfast—French toast, bacon, a sliced banana and some strawberries, a pot of coffee—in front of him, and I handed him the syrup and the butter, and the sugar for his coffee, and I straightened up the kitchen after myself. I served him well, but I withheld my sympathy. On the other hand, he didn’t ask for it. He finished eating, pushed his plate away, and stood up. I moved to the window after he banged out the door, and watched him trudge up the blacktop toward our place, where Ty was waiting in the barn. Normally he would have climbed into his truck and driven the quarter mile, so he walked as if he were disoriented, surprised by the very act of walking. He was stiff. His shoulders hunched. His legs swung out and around. That was something he needed, too, more exercise. He didn’t look back, but Rose waited until he was a dot on the road to cross from her place.
I was wiping the range with the dishrag. The screen door slapped, and Rose said, “He’s okay, then?”
“He should check in with Dr. Henry in Pike today, and maybe get some more painkillers. They gave him two Percodans, but I don’t know if he’s taken any. I’ll get him there this afternoon. The state troopers won’t be coming around for another ten days or so, not until the blood test is back from the lab.”
“They ought to put him in jail. I just can’t believe how lenient they are.”
“Nobody got hurt, Rose. It would have been different—”
“That’s pure luck.”
“You get to take credit for that luck, legally, just like if your luck is bad and somebody does get hurt, you have to—”
Rose planted herself in the center of the doorway to the living room, and fisted her hands on her hips. “Jeez, Ginny, don’t you get tired of seeing his side? Don’t you just long to stand back and tell the truth about him for once? He’s dangerous! He’s impulsive and angry, and he doesn’t give other people the same benefit of the doubt that they give him!”
“I know that. Last night I really gave him a talking to—”
“Sometimes I hate him. Sometimes waves of hatred just roll through me, and I want him to die, and go to hell and stay there forever, just roasting!”
“Rose!”
“Why are you saying ‘Rose!’ in that shocked way? Because you’re not supposed to wish evil on someone, or because you really don’t hate him?”
“I don’t. I really don’t. He’s a bear, but—”
“He’s not a bear. He’s not innocent like that—”
I raised my voice above hers. “Last night I told him in no uncertain terms that if he drove drunk again, I’d take the truck keys away from him. He heard me, too. He was looking right at me. Ty’s putting him to work. I think things’ll improve. He’s hard to live with—”
Rose turned on her heel and stomped into the living room. I followed her. She was standing by a little bookcase. Twenty issues or so of Successful Farming magazine were stacked there, brochures for farm equipment, some National Geographics, a Bible, two Reader’s Digests, and a book of American folk songs. Nothing personal, or reminiscent. She was staring down at the Reader’s Digests, tapping the top one with her fingernail. She said, “Sometimes I hate you, too.”
I waited. I thought at once of Linda and Pammy, the way they sometimes confided in me instead of in their mother, the way I liked to give them things, or take them places that Rose wouldn’t have approved of if she’d known. For years, they had been the unspoken issue between us, and I at once felt guilty, sorry that she could justifiably accuse me of undermining her, of wanting them so much to be mine, sometimes, that I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like if they were.
“I hate you because you’re the link between me and him.”
“Who?”
She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Daddy, of course. Don’t be so stupid. You’re such a good daughter, so slow to judge, it’s like stupidity. It drives me crazy.”
I smiled. “Just last night, I was thinking the exact same thing about Ty—”
She ignored me. “Every time I’ve made up my mind to do something—get off this place, leave Pete, go back to teaching just to earn the money—you stop me. When I was little, I mean really little, three or four, you were like this wall between me and him, but now you’re the path, you don’t keep him out, you show him the way in, every time you’re reasonable, every time you pause to wonder about his point of view. Every time you stop and think! I don’t want to stop and think!”
I stared at her. She pushed her hair back with her hand, then put her fist on her hip, defiant. Except that on the way down, her fingers fluttered over the vanished breast, the vanished muscles. She stared me back, then tossed her head and looked out the window. I said, “I’m not like him. I don’t always sympathize with him. But I can’t say I have any faith that he’s going to meet us halfway. I think it’s practical to try and work around him sometimes.”
It was funny how I wasn’t offended by her angry talk, how I thought it was okay, and even something of a relief for her to talk about hating me sometimes, but in a certain tone of voice, an embarrassed tone of voice. I’d thought Rose’s negative feelings would carry more conviction than that. Her embarrassment amounted to a reprieve. I stepped toward her, alive with the sense that I’d had the night before, that the tables could be turned on our father, that he could be taken in hand and controlled; we just had to agree on our plan and stick to it. She looked skeptical. I said, “Anyway, the point is, yes, you’re right, I’ve let him get away with a lot of stuff. We all have. But we can set rules, and I think the rules can be pretty simple.”
Rose walked to the front window and stood with her back to me, staring west across the fields. It was a picture of monochromatic greenness these days. The corn, which grows with mechanical uniformity that can seem a little surreal if you think about it, had put forth six or eight pennant-shaped leaves that floated in smooth jointless arcing opposite pairs, one above the other, and were large enough now to shade out most of the black soil of the field. Corn plants are oddly manlike—the leaves always reminded me of shoulders, the tassels of heads. I stood next to her and looked at her face. After a few moments, she looked back at me. She said, “Ginny, tell me what you really really think about Daddy.”
“Well, I don’t know.” Except that I did know. All sorts of thoughts had been crystal clear to me all night long, but now that she asked for them, their simultaneity made it impossible for me to choose one over the other and have it be the main thing I thought about Daddy. I licked my lips. Rose bit hers, I thought, then, to keep from saying anything that would influence me. I sorted, knowing she meant for me to answer. I was also aware of the crisp morning colors of what we were looking at, the shadow just in front of us, the green field and sunny blue sky beyond. I said, “I love Daddy. But he’s so in the habit of giving orders, no back talk. You know.”
She looked at me.
“I mean, he drinks and everything. I don’t know how that colors things.”
She continued to look at me.
“I’m willing to admit that he’s been drinking a long time, probably as long as we’ve known him. I haven’t really thought about it, but I’m sure if we sat down and worked it out—”
She kept looking at me. I said, “Rose, you’re making me nervous. What do you want me to say? I mean, the type of thing.”
She looked at me, then out the window. I said, “I mean, Mommy hasn’t been around to tell us what to think of Daddy. I wonder about whether they were happy. Whether she liked him. Or he liked her. Though everybody liked Mommy. I think different things.”
She cleared her throat, and I took this as my cue to fall silent. S
he said, “Shit, Ginny.”
I laughed. I guess I had expected her mouth to open and some other voice, some oracular voice, to issue forth, echoing and deep. She pursed her lips, rapidly recomposing herself into the Rose I knew and relied on. She rolled her eyes, seemed about to make a joke at Daddy’s expense, or mine. That would have been okay, too. Finally, she said, “I don’t hate you, Ginny. I know what I was saying, but I don’t know what it means, exactly. Or how to tell you what it means. Or something. Let’s say the real story here is what you think. He’s a pain in the butt, we divvy up the work. Maybe rules will do the trick. We can try it.”
“I can’t describe what it was like, just to say to him, okay you have to do this, and you can’t do that. I mean, it’s so simple.”
“Famous last words.” She put her arms around me, and her grip was strong, stronger than it had been. I said, “Love ya, sis,” in a kind of play tough voice.
She said, “Me, too. United front, right?”
“Right.”
21
TY AND I DIDN’T PURSUE our conversation, didn’t thrash out what it was I had learned or what it meant. I acted more decisive and made rules. I sensed that Ty disapproved, but it was a touchy subject, and I was afraid to talk about it because I hated friction with Ty. It was easy to discount his unvoiced opinion, too. After all, his dad had died so conveniently, just when the son was old enough to appreciate afresh what the father knew, while they were still working smoothly together, before age made the father unreliable or cantankerous. Ty loved his father, who was a kindly man, not very ambitious, and it had always been easy for him just to shift that love to my father. When I thought about it, new things came clear, about Ty and my father and us all. One was that Daddy’s and Pete’s storms gave a quiet steady worker like Ty lots of power, because not only would he calmly pursue his aims while they ranted, more often than not each of them would appeal to him for support. He would propose a solution, his solution. One reason for discounting his disapproval, I started to think, was the new way I saw him pursuing his self-interest all these years, all in the guise of going along and getting along. It made me sort of mad, to tell the truth.