A Thousand Acres (44 page)

"You've got to have the last word, huh."

"Well, have it. I don't care.

But neither of us said anything, leaving Wendy's and crossing the parking lot and street and the Perkins lot to his Malibu. He unlocked the driver's door, then turned to me with a gesture that took in the street, the restaurants, the parking lot, and me. He said, "I don't understand living like this, this ugly way. But I guess I'm gonna be getting used to it." That was the last word. We waved simultaneously as he drove off and that was the last gesture. It made a little pair with the first thing I ever saw him do. He was a senior; I was in junior high. For once, Daddy had let me go to a football game with some other girls, early in the season when it was still hot. I was taking off my sweater when I saw a rangy, good-looking older boy waving at me. I was flattered, so I smiled and waved back in spite of my habitual fearfulness. It was Ty, and when he saw me wave at him, his face went blank. I looked around. The girl he was waving at was two rows in back of me. After we started dating, live years later, he swore he could not remember this incident, and I'm sure he didn't, but it was burned into my memory as a reminder of the shame you courted if ever you made the mistake of thinking too well of yourself.

ALTHOUGH Ty would have sworn that my loyalty to Rose was unshaken, and probably pathological, he would have been wrong.

I could not bear getting an envelope from her. Her notes were never more than a paragraph. They were friendly and matter-of fact, with a slight undertone of setting me straight which was simply in the nature of our relationship. It was clear from them that she was still, and consciously, allowing me to define how we would be sisters, and that her patience with me was inexhaustible. That there was, in addition, no escaping being sisters was implicit in every word, even in the address, "Ginny Cook Smith," and the return address, "Rose Cook Lewis."

It was largely because I feared calls from Rose that I never had a telephone installed.

Even so, when she really wanted me, she got me. In the October after the April that Ty stopped, the phone rang at the restaurant during my break, and it was Rose. I knew it would be as I walked to the cashier's desk where the incoming phone sat, its receiver so threateningly, demandingly off the hook.

he was at the hospital in Mason City. That was one thing. The girls were alone on the farm. That was another. She wanted to see me. That was the third. I said, "I'll be there by three."

Eileen, I knew, would give me the time off. She had been pushing me to take time off for a year. I wore my uniform, which seemed like it would protect me, and it didn't occur to me to pack anything.

I left from work with only my handbag, just as if I were going home.

When I got to Mason City, I stopped at a phone booth and called her doctor, who came at once to the phone. He told me that the resurgence of her cancer was already far advanced. The second radical mastectomy had been performed in July, during the summer lull in farm work.

Radiation and chemotherapy into August had bought Rose another harvest.

Now the harvest was over.

She was thin, and little in the bed. When I came into the room, her eyelids lifted like velvet curtains. Her gaze was a spectacle you couldn't look away from. She pushed herself up an inch or two in the bed and patted a spot 011 the edge where I was to sit. I sat. She said, "At the peak of the harvest I drove fifteen truckloads a day to the elevator. We got $3.06 a bushel for corn."

"Sounds like a good price."

"We should have made Daddy show us more, and let us get more into the habit of working. If I'd been in the habit of doing it day after day, like Ty or Loren, it wouldn't have been so hard." She took some deep breaths, then reached for a glass and sipped some water through a straw. She said, "Take the girls back with you.

They're ready to go."

"You mean, they're packed?"

"More or less."

I thought she meant that I was to get them at the farm and take them back to St. Paul that night. I said, "Rose, that's ridiculous."

"Tell me you'll take them."

"Of course I'll take them."

"Tomorrow we'll talk about when."

"Okay."

She spoke in bursts that seemed to issue forth rather than in words formed by her tongue and lips. And it tired her. That was all she said for about an hour, and then her eyelids rose again, and she said, "Go home and make them some dinner. Make them fried chicken."

I stood up. "Rose, I've got as long as I want. I haven't taken any vacation time in three years."

She nodded heavily.

Linda wasn't surprised to see me, only surprised that I'd bothered to knock. I was surprised to see her, though. In the last three years, I had sent presents at birthdays and Christmas, but, actually, I had thrown away their thank-you notes unopened, afraid to face the loss of them along with everything else. I composed myself on the porch, and stepped inside. Ty's snapshot hadn't prepared me for the actuality of her height, her flesh, her fifteen-year-old air of confidence, or her deep voice when she called out, "Pam! Aunt Ginny's here!" I stepped across the threshold and she embraced me tightly. Pammy came in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. She said, "Oh, Aunt Ginny!

You were supposed to take live minutes longer so that I could get the dishes put away!"

The house looked less functionally bare than it had in Daddy's day, and the white brocade couch formed the center piece of a living room suite that included a new co-ordinating wing-back chair and an oak side table. A lamp with a white pleated shade and a cut-glass base completed the picture. Daddy's old armchair was nowhere to be seen.

Pete's piano sat in the corner. There were no pictures on it.

Furniture filled the room exactly to the brim, inviting entrance, civilized at last.

I sat down in the new chair, and said, "The place looks great.

Your grandfather always thought his chair facing the window and a stack of magazines within reach was a good enough way to decorate."

They sat together on the couch. They smiled at my remark.

Pammy reached for a remote control, then turned off the television.

She said, "It's just 'Wheel of Fortune."

I said, "I saw your mom.

Linda said, "She called us."

"I guess I'm going to be staying for a while."

Pammy said, "You could stay closer to the hospital if you want.

We're old enough to stay alone."

"That seems kind of lonely."

Linda nodded at this. Pammy said, "For you or for us?"

"I guess for everybody."

After a moment, Linda said, "Are they going to let her come home soon?

She thinks they are, but I don't really believe her."

I shrugged. "All she told me was to come and make you some fried chicken. I picked up a chicken on the way.

Pammy said, "We've been Vegetarians for three years."

"Do you think you've lost the ability to digest meat?"

Linda giggled. They looked at each other, and finally she said, "We eat meat at school. We even go to Kentucky Fried Chicken sometimes.

Are you going to make mashed potatoes and cream gravy?"

"Would you like me to?"

They both nodded.

I thought I was doing quite well. I stood up easily and walked into the kitchen without a hitch. I found the cast iron chicken fryer and a pan for the potatoes. The only trouble was, the kitchen seemed arctic.

The blue gas flames of the burner fluttered coldly. The grease in the pan popped chillingly. When it spattered my hand, the burned dots felt frozen. I looked around, then took Rose's old beige sweater off the hook behind the door. I huddled into it, browning chicken and shivering. It seemed an impossible defeat that I was back in this kitchen, cooking. Since seeing Ty, I had reduced my links to the old life even more by investing in a microwave oven. For six months, I had microwaved every meal I didn't eat at the restaurant, and my pantry was full of oval plastic dishes that I thought might come in handy someday.

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 inabook."

"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 light 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 lighting over a man, huh?"

"Jess?"

"If that's the man you're lighting 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.