by Jane Smiley
In addition to that, although I knew that I would certainly have come had Rose told me about her condition, it galled me that I hadn’t even begun to resist. The summons, backed up by the word “hospital,” had been enough. I turned the chicken pieces over. It was already dark as midnight outside, and not even six-thirty in the evening. The restaurant would be filling up at this hour, each cheerfully lit table bright with menus and paper place mats. On the other side of the black windows of Rose’s kitchen, though, there was only outer space, a lightless, soundless vacuum that on this thousand acres came right down to the ground. I went to the back door, fumbled for the switch, and turned on the yard lights, three spots on tall poles that lit the way between the house and the barn and the machine shed. They helped, but I didn’t really believe them.
Linda stood in the living room doorway. She said, “Pam has a history report due tomorrow, but I can help you.”
“You don’t have homework?”
“I did my geometry in study hall. I have to read some chapters in a book.”
“What book?”
“David Copperfield.”
“I read that.”
“It’s pretty long.”
“That was the first school book I ever liked.”
“I liked Giants in the Earth. We read that last year. This one is hard to read because the writing is funny.”
“You mean old-fashioned?”
“Yeah.” She sat down at the kitchen table and watched me. After a moment, I said, “Are you cold? The kitchen seems cold.”
She said, “No.”
I looked at her for a long moment. She looked unsuspecting. I said, my voice idle as could be, “Has your mom got canned stuff down in the cellar, or what?”
“There’s some. We don’t do as much as we used to, like beans or things. We tried drying some stuff.”
“Huh. That’s interesting.” I waited.
“There’s lots left in the other house. It was too much trouble to bring over here.”
“I suppose.” I started peeling potatoes and dropping them into a bowl of cold water. She watched me attentively. At first, it made me nervous, but then I realized that there was some purpose in her watching, and that it would bear fruit if I were patient. After I had peeled four potatoes, she said, “Could you peel some more, so there can be leftovers? Mommy makes mashed potato pancakes for breakfast.” I kept peeling. It felt to me like Rose had been gone for weeks, but obviously that wasn’t true. I said, “When did your mom go to the hospital?”
“Monday.”
Three days before.
“Have you been to see her?”
“She doesn’t want Pam driving the pickup, and she’s got the car. Anyway, she said she’d be back soon enough.”
That wasn’t what I guessed. I said, “Do you want to go see her?”
“I don’t think she’ll let us. She doesn’t want us to see her.”
“But do you want to see her?”
She thought for a long moment. “Yeah.”
“Pammy, too?”
“Yeah.”
“So, why should Rose make all the decisions?”
I intended this rhetorically, a remark to punctuate opening the refrigerator door and looking for some broccoli or something else green, but Linda said, “She always does.”
“Not this time. We’ll go tomorrow after school.”
She was biting her lips. “I’ll tell Pam.”
I lay in bed after the girls fell asleep, uneasy and restless. Finally I got up and went to the phone and called Vancouver information. There was a Jess Clark, and it wasn’t too late to call that time zone, so I dialed the number. I felt so cold that I had to sit with the quilt wrapped around my shoulders while it rang. On the fifth ring, an American man’s voice did answer, but when I asked whether this was the Jess Clark who’d once lived in Iowa, he said no. I thought I recognized his voice. There was a baby crying in the background.
I was unable to find a bed at Rose’s house, Daddy’s house, that I could lie in. I ended up on the white brocade couch at three in the morning, and then rain outside entered my dreams, soaking the couch, making it swell and buckle, causing me to fight with someone whose identity in the dream wasn’t clear.
The next day I got to the hospital in the morning and Rose was sitting up, eating cubes of lime Jell-O. Her jaw was sharp as a blade and her neck had that stalklike famine-victim look, but it was clear that the force of life was coursing more surely within than it had been the day before.
I said, “The girls want to know when you might be coming home.”
“Couple days.”
“I’m bringing them after school today.”
“It’s a long drive.”
“They want to make it.”
She shrugged and finished her Jell-O cubes. Finally, she said, “I’m all right with them. I didn’t just leave everything unsaid with them the way Mommy did with us. I wasn’t enigmatic, either. I laid it out for them in July when I saw what was happening.” Her voice itself was weak, but her tone was absolutely assured; she was going to die in a state of perfect self-confidence. I felt myself disappear into the anger I had been harboring for so long, but I struggled to smooth and soften my voice. I said, “I’m certainly glad of that.”
She smiled an amused smile.
I couldn’t resist. I exclaimed, “I’m impressed by the way you’ve tied up all the loose ends.” I gave in completely. “Bossy to the end, huh?”
Her arms, at her sides on the green blanket, were stringy and her hands spread like spiderwebs, then folded, then spread again as if they hurt, but not as if she hurt. I remembered this sensation from the first cancer, my feeling that she was so apart from her body that I had to address the two halves of her separately. She said, “Are you looking for a way to hurt my feelings?”
“Probably.”
“Still fighting over a man, huh?”
“Jess?”
“If that’s the man you’re fighting over.”
“Somehow, he made a bigger impression on me than Ty did. For every one thought I’ve had about Ty, I’ve had twenty about Jess.”
“That’s because you didn’t sleep with him enough, or do practical things with him. Eventually, you would have gotten fed up.”
“Did you?”
“Almost. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. I would have been fed up by the summer.”
“Thanks.” I meant, shut up. She ignored me. She said, “There were all these routines. No more than three eggs a week, always poached and served on browned but never burned wheat toast. Steel-cut oatmeal from some organic store in San Francisco. Ginseng tea three times a day. Meditation at sunrise. If we didn’t check the paper the day before and find out the sunrise time to the minute, he was anxious all day. And we had to calculate the difference in time between the sunrise in the paper and the sunrise on the farm. It was something like two and three-fourths of a minute.”
“He was a kind man. You could have accepted some quirks.”
“Ty was kinder. You couldn’t stand that.” She gazed at me. “Jess Clark wasn’t the way you thought he was, Ginny. He was more self-centered and calculating than you gave him credit for.”
I parroted her. “He wasn’t the way you thought he was, he was kinder and had more doubts than you gave him credit for.” We stared at each other aggressively for a long minute, then Rose lifted one of her spiderweb hands and brushed back a wisp of hair. Her hair was short and thin. Brushing it back reminded her of her condition, and she said, “What you’re really saying is that he’d like me better if he knew I was in the shape I’m in. Kindness wasn’t freely given with him, Ginny, it was a way to get where he wanted to go.”
“I guess we differ.”
“The difference is that I loved him without caring whether he was good. He was good enough and I wanted him and he slipped away. You know what? At the end, he was too good! When it came right down to building something on what we had, it scared him to build on dea
th and bad luck and anger and destruction. Listen to this. One night he was late for dinner. It was a complicated squash soup that we’d made together, and he didn’t get home till eight, and I was annoyed, but I didn’t think that much of it, until he started acting sheepish and guilty. Well, it turned out he’d been to see Harold! Those old ladies had made a big deal out of it, and Harold had been nice to him, and after that it was just like watching your lover go back to his wife. Whatever you have, however passionately you want it and he seems to want it, what he wants more and more is to fit in and be a good boy. Then everything he feels for you feels wrong to him. The stronger he feels it, the more wrong it feels, and he starts repudiating stuff. A while later we got this material in the mail about green manures, and he came in and saw it and didn’t open it, and I knew that was it, and it was. He packed up ten days later and left without saying exactly where he was going, and it turned out he’d gone to stay a week with Harold before going back to Seattle. I’m sure Vancouver’s the perfect place for him. He felt as pure as the driven snow when he was there before.” She sniffed, then caught my gaze. “I might have killed him if I’d known what he was planning.”
She said this last with flat conviction. I believed it. Or, at least, I believed that she had sojourned in the land of the unimaginable, as I had. Now she lay back, gray and tired, and let her lids drop over her great eyes. I said, “Do you ever hear from him?” But she waved her hand, dismissing the question, or, maybe, just too exhausted to answer it. I mulled over whether to tell her about the call I had made the night before, but instead, I picked up a Ladies’ Home Journal by her bed. I read an article about planting annuals in window boxes and other containers, then an article about ways to eliminate fat from your diet without missing it. She would know when the phone bill came, maybe. She fell asleep. After all, he was far too young for her now. We all were.
I went for a walk in the hospital parking lot, which was busy and lifted my spirits with all those converging and diverging intentions, even though some of the people in the parking lot were visibly ill or injured. When I came back, Rose had been served her dinner, which she was not eating.
I said, “You could eat the canned pears. Those go down easy.”
“I’ve gotten to where I hate it if I can tell what something is, or was. Hospitals should have some kind of nutrient-rich kibble. ‘Patientchow’ they could call it.” She pushed the tray and it rotated toward me.
I said, “I’m going to leave in an hour to get the girls. It’s almost noon.”
“I want to tell you some things first. Practical things.”
“Okay.” I was still wearing my waitressing uniform. I pulled the skirt down over my knee.
She said, “I’m leaving the farm to you and Caroline, not to the girls.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t want it to come to them. I want all of this to stop with our generation.”
“I don’t want to farm. Ty’s in Texas. Caroline doesn’t want to farm.”
“Three years ago I would have said rent it out. You could get ninety dollars an acre. But if it were up to me, I wouldn’t do that now. It’s too encumbered with debt.” She glanced at me, then looked out the window. “Anyway, Marv Carson’s going to make you sell. I don’t know what there’s going to be above and beyond paying off the debt and the taxes. I just don’t know. It’s a bad time to sell.” She sighed.
After a moment, I said, “What if there’s nothing? What do you think about that?”
“Pam and Linda know they might have to work, and if they want to go to college, they might have to go into the service. I warned them about that.”
I waited.
“Ginny, you don’t like me to say what I really think. I need you. I don’t want to alienate you. I haven’t changed my mind about Daddy or the farm or what was done to us, but if I repeat myself, you could just walk out of here. I don’t trust you.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“Well, there you are then. Except that what is there about me not to trust? I’m stuck here.” She stretched out her spiderweb hands and spread her skinny arms wide. Tears prickled in my eyes. I said, “I guess I was all set to fight it out longer.”
“Yeah. I’m thirty-seven. It shits, doesn’t it?”
I said, “It’s hard to bear.” At the moment it seemed nearly impossible to bear. I exclaimed, “Oh, Rose.”
She sniffed, dismissing this upsurge. After a moment, she said, “Don’t do that to me. We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.”
“I don’t know if I can do that. Especially without you to goose me. I just fall back into this muddle. At the hearing, I was so shocked. I mean, he was so lost and diminished. I felt like I couldn’t remember what we were so afraid of except that you could, so I could. And then I could see you so clearly all the last three years, how you’d always had your way at my expense, and you’d been selfish all your life. I just saw those words in red letters, ‘Rose is selfish,’ and I didn’t have any trouble being hard and having everything you did and said and had ever done and said go for evidence that you were immovably selfish, and that’s bad. I mean, if we don’t know that being selfish is bad, then what did we learn as children?”
Rose laughed. In the drab hospital room, it was a jolly sound. I liked it and was offended at the same time, so I confessed, maybe just to impress her, make her serious again. I said, “I thought I was going to be angry with you forever, but now I’m not! I mean, I wanted to kill you!”
“So what? I want to kill people all the time.”
“No! I don’t mean that I said, ‘Gee, I could kill that guy.’ I mean, I set out to kill you. I made poisoned sausage for you, and canned it, and waited for you to eat it.”
She looked at me, surprised at last. Finally, she said, “Well, must have worked, huh?”
“Don’t you remember? That liver sausage and sauerkraut I brought over?” She shook her head. “Right around dinner, late in the summer?”
“Vaguely. So much was going on, I must have forgotten about it. Then, of course, I was swept up in the Jess Clark life-style, so I would have spurned liver sausage even if I’d remembered.” She drank some water through a straw.
I said, “Aren’t you even impressed?”
“I guess I think if you’d really wanted to kill me, you would have shot me or something. Ty had a shotgun. So did Daddy and so did Pete. Anyway, you didn’t have to bother. All that well water we drank did the trick.”
I nodded, limp from my confession, slumping in my green chair and damp with sweat. Rose, on the other hand, looked invigorated. I said, “It must be still in your cellar, then.”
“Everything else is. But that house has been boarded up since I moved across the road.”
I felt a surprising flush of relief. We exchanged our first real smile since I’d come.
“I should leave if I want to get home before the girls do. They want to come this afternoon.” Then I said, “What am I going to do without you?”
“Exercise caution while making up your own mind, as always.”
I stood up. “I should go. I promised them.”
She reached for my hand. Hers was cool, and her thumbnail dug into my palm. She jerked me toward her. She said, “I have no accomplishments. I didn’t teach long enough to know what I was doing. I didn’t make a good life with Pete. I didn’t shepherd my daughters into adulthood. I didn’t win Jess Clark. I didn’t work the farm successfully. I was as much of a nothing as Mommy or Grandma Edith. I didn’t even get Daddy to know what he had done, or what it meant. People around town talk about how I wrecked it all. Three generations on the same farm, great land, Daddy a marvelous farmer, and a saint to boot.” She used my hand to pull herself up in the bed. “So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex
. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.”
I extricated my hand.
Rose closed her eyes and waved me out the door.
45
WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE FARM on the day before the sale, one of those iron-chill days in early March, I saw that Caroline, like me, had brought a truck. Marv Carson wanted to be generous with us—we could take whatever personal possessions we liked, and he wasn’t going to say a word about it. “You girls deserve that much,” was what he told me over the phone.
It wasn’t even ten—I’d left St. Paul by six, stopped and had breakfast on the way. Linda and Pam had been stirring, but they knew where I was going, and I didn’t want to talk about it with them any more. Pam, I knew, would get in the car, Rose’s old car, and drive herself to school and follow the course of activities prescribed for her. Linda might or might not. She had cut school seventeen times since moving in with me after Thanksgiving. We no longer fought about it.
I’d intended to stop at my old house, first, and pick up some kitchen equipment for Pam, who was doing most of our cooking, and at least look through my clothes and books, but when I saw from a distance that Caroline had already pulled into Daddy’s driveway, I got suddenly eager to be there, eager and anxious and ready.
She was wearing wool slacks and a beautiful sweater with an elaborate snowflake pattern around the yoke. She was standing in the kitchen, and she glanced around, startled, when I opened the back door. I was wearing Levi’s belonging to Pam and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt (Pam had started to date a boy who had a passion for the U of M, who liked to see them both dressed in as much U of M clothing as he could). I was going to the U of M, too, at night; my plan was to major in psychology. The house was cold—the heat and electricity had been off since the first of December. I thought that we would divvy up what we wanted and let what was left be auctioned. In my experience, there would be buyers for everything, even the old shoes and boots and coveralls.