A Thousand Acres (7 page)

In fact, the appointment went beautifully. The moment we walked in the door, the nurses greeted her with happy warmth, and it was hard not to be comforted by just that, as if they already knew good news, and all they had to do was tell it to us. The doctor found nothing at all suspicious, and congratulated Rose on how much movement and strength she had gotten back in her arm, "in so short a time." Rose smiled at his wording, and I did, too, but just hearing him say it lightened those long, heavy months, somehow, the worst months of the year in our part of the country, when the sky is like iron day after day, and the wind is endless, chill, and hostile, even on those days when a little weak sunlight blossoms through the clouds. It was easy, while he was giving us the good news, to marvel at how depressed we'd been, almost without knowing it, easy to regard his round pink face with affection, easy to feel transformed as we came out of the hospital into the pleasant May air, which was sweetened and colored by the flowering crab apples and beds of tulips and Dutch iris that flanked the entrance, a display we hadn't even noticed upon going in. "It is a nice day!"

exclaimed Rose, inhaling deeply, and for once her left hand didn't stray to the lost muscles just under her arm. This was a habit she had fallen into that hurt me to see, just a light touch, the lingers asking, feathering across, discovering anew. Her hand never went anywhere else-it was as if the other, the breast, the chest muscles, were okay, well lost, an acceptable sacrifice, but this, too? She said, "Hey! Let's eat meat!"

"They've got meat at the Brown Bottle."

"No, I mean, let's go somewhere expensive, like the Starlight Supper Club. Remember when we went for your tenth anniversary?

They had three kinds of herring on the salad bar and some kind of garlic toasts that had been fried slowly in butter until they were as hard as canning jar lids, except that they fragmented and vanished as soon as you put them on your tongue?"

"I can't believe you remember the food like that. It was six years ago.

"I haven't thought about it since, I bet. It's just that I really believe him, you know? I really believe everything he said, and now I want to drink it all in, all the stuff I was going to miss, that I'd pretty much made up my mind not to think about."

We came to the corner, waited for the light, and crossed. I had no idea where we were going. I said, "I didn't realize you were so depressed."

"I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em all carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was."

I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we'd been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again, and unimaginable disaster was averted.

She stopped when we got to the opposite corner and ran her hand through her hair. She said, "Anyway, Ginny, I know this was only the three months exam. There's the six months exam and the year exam and live more year exams, and then I'll only be forty. I haven't forgotten that, but I still want to do something special. Something that would scandalize Daddy. Just to mark the occasion.

"I don't think there are any male strippers in Mason City."

"Did you see that on Phil Donahue?" Rose grinned.

"Last Wednesday? Where they were wearing about three square inches of shiny blue underwear?"

"The one guy was in black."

"The blond guy."

"I didn't know you were watching that. I was kind of embarrassed to be having it on."

"I turned off the picture and listened to the sound, like it was on the radio."

"You did not!"

"You're right," I said. "I watched every minute, even after they had their clothes on."

Rose laughed giddily, then exclaimed, "There's a whorehouse in Mason City, did you know that? Pete told me. It's next door to the Golden Corral. There's the USDA office on one side and the whorehouse on the other."

"How does Pete know?"

"Those guys he hired to help him paint the barn last summer told We paused in front of Lundberg's and gazed at the dresses. Rose said, "But we don't have to go that far just to scandalize Daddy. I think shopping would actually do the trick."

"What a relief."

We went in. It was not lost on me that Rose hadn't bought anything to wear since the diagnosis, had possibly not paused for very long in front of a mirror since that time. I concentrated on a rack of blouses, trying to relax the vigilance that kept asserting itselfattention to what sizes she was looking at, what sort of cut she was attracted to; whatever dress she chose to try on first, I wanted it to be flattering. When she took her limit, four, into the dressing room, I lingered outside, looking distractedly at some sweaters. She was in there for a long time, and at one point she said, quietly, "I see your feet," so I had to move off. When she came out, she was subdued again. She handed the dresses to the saleslady with a smile and moved toward the door. I pretended to rummage through some belts, but when she went out into the street, I followed her.

We looked in the next shop window, a shoe store, and the next, the live-and-ten. She stared for a long time at the cold-mist humidifiers.

I said, "You heard from Caroline?"

"No."

"Who do you think's going to make the first move?"

She turned and looked at me, raising her hand to shade her eyes from the sunlight. "Has Daddy ever made a first move? I mean in a reconciliatory way?"

"Well, no. But that's with us. This is with Caroline."

"When water runs uphill is when he'll make a first move."

"You'd think she'd be more careful."

Rose started walking again. "She doesn't have to be careful. She's got an income. Being his daughter is all pretty abstract for her, and I'm sure she wants to keep it that way. Mark my words. She and Frank will get married and produce a son and there'll be a lot of coming together around that. She always does what she has to do."

"You sound annoyed with her, too. She was coming up the steps.

It was Daddy who slammed the door."

"But there didn't have to be any production at all, no breach, no reconciliation, no drama. She just can't stand to be one of us, that's the key. Haven't you ever noticed? When we go along, she balks.

When we resist, she's sweet as pie."

"Maybe."

"Shit! I remember when she was all of about live years oldbefore Mommy died, at any rate. I was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, and Mommy was cooking dinner and Caroline was coloring, and she looked at each of us and said right out, 'When I grow up, I'm not going to be a farmwife." So Mommy laughed and asked her what she was going to be, and she said, 'A farmer."

I laughed. We walked on, agreeing wordlessly to avoid the subject of Caroline. My stomach growled. I said, "Rosie, let's eat at Golden Corral and see if we can get a look at what the prostitutes wear to work."

"I think I'd rather go home. There's food there."

-'Are you tired?"

'Yeah."

I didn't argue. I never have with Rose. When we got in the car, she said, "You know when we came out of the clinic, and we saw those flower beds that we hadn't seen when we were walking in?

That was so unexpected, I think it made me delirious somehow.

And then it seemed like if we just threw off all restraints and talked wildly and ate wildly and shopped wildly, it would just turn up the delirium, and make it even better, or permanent somehow, but I forgot.

I'm not really to the point where I can take off my clothes in a dressing room yet." She sighed. I pulled out of the parking lot.

A few minutes later, she said, "What's the hardest thing for you?"

"Well, I don't know. Probably being comfortable with people outside the family."

'What do you mean?"

'Oh, you know. I either act too shy, or else I want the person to be my friend so much that I act like an idiot. I never believe that Marlene Stanley or anyone else actually likes me, even though I suppose I know they do."

"God! This is just like how you used to talk in junior high."

I stiffened a little. "What practice have I had since then? Anyway, in junior high, you used to say, 'Wouldn't you like to be friends with so-and-so? Let's bring some cookies and offer one to so-andso, then maybe she'll be our friend."

Rose laughed a full-throated, merry laugh. "Usually it worked, too."

We drove in silence for a few minutes.

Finally, she said, "You know what? The hardest thing for me is not grabbing things. One of the main things I remember about being a kid is Mommy slapping my hands and telling me not to grab.

What's worse is I have this recurring nightmare about grabbing things that hurt me, like that straight razor Daddy used to have, or a jar of some poison that spills on my hands. I know I shouldn't, and I watch myself, but I can't resist."

"I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It's always the lunch line in ninth grade."

"Nakedness dreams are very common.

"I suppose they are.

We drove the rest of the way silently. A glaring haze lay over the fields to either side of the road, and the rows ofjust-sprouted corn fanned into the distance like seams of tiny bright stitches against dark wool. When I dropped Rose at her house, she kissed me on the cheek. The fact was that we had known each other all our lives but we had never gotten tired of each other. Our bond had a peculiar fertility that I was wise enough to appreciate, and also, perhaps, wise enough to appreciate in silence. Rose wouldn't have stood for any sentimentality.

CARoLINE WAS SIX WHEN our mother died, and at first there was talk that she would go live with my mother's cousin in Rochester, Minnesota.

Cousin Emma was a nursing administrator at the Mayo Clinic, unmarried and without children, and I think there was talk about this "solution" to the "problem" of Caroline during my mother's illness, and I think that some of the church ladies, who were well read in the literature of orphanhood from their own early lives, saw this as a desirable and even romantic course of action. Cousin Emma had plenty of money from her job, so there would be nice clothes, plus grammar school and high school in town. My father, though, simply declared that Rose and I were old enough to care for our sister, and that was that.

She was an agreeable child, not difficult to do for. She played with her dolls that had been our dolls, ate what was put in front of her, listened when she was told to put away her doll clothes or keep her dress clean. She had no interest in the farm equipment-gravity wagons filled with grain, augers, tractors, cornpickers, trucks. She stayed away from the hogs, even the dogs and cats who lived on the place from time to time. She never wandered into the road or went out of sight of the house. She never, as far as I knew, went near the grate over a drainage well. We were lucky, and were able to devote ourselves to the aspects of child raising that we knew best-sewing dresses and doll clothes, baking cookies, reading books aloud, enforcing rules about keeping clean, eating properly, going to bed at a set time, saying ma am to ladies and "sir" to Daddy and other men, and doing homework. We had no principles beyond those that were used with us, but it was true, as Daddy often said, that she was a better child than we had been, neither stubborn and sullen, like me, nor rebellious and back talking, like Rose. He praised her for being a Loving Child, who kissed her dolls, and kissed him, too, when he wanted a kiss. If he said, "Cary, give me a kiss," that way he always did, without warning, half an order, halfa plea, she would pop into his lap and put her arms around his neck and smack him on the lips. Seeing her do it always made me feel odd, as if a heavy stone were floating and turning within me, that stone of stubbornness and reluctance that kept me any more from being asked.

We got more serious principles when Caroline's freshman year of high school rolled around. We agreed that she was going to have a normal high school life, with dates and dances and activities after school.

She wasn't going to be chained to the school bus. She was going to have friends, and she was going to be allowed to sleep over with them in town if she was invited. Rose, who was working at the time, gave her money for clothes. I gave her an allowance. If she got invited to a birthday party, we gave her money to buy a nice present. These were our principles, and they stood in opposition to Daddy's proclaimed view that home was best, homemade was good enough, and if we had to pay for the school bus, then by golly she was going to use it. We were her allies. We covered for her and talked Daddy out of his angers. Junior and senior years, I even talked him into letting her invite a boy to the Sadie Hawkins dance. Rose bought her a subscription to Glamour, and got adept at copying some of the simpler clothing styles that were nevertheless unavailable in Zebulon County.

We got along well with her. She was as agreeable as she had been as a child. She made good grades, conceived large ambitions, and went off as we had planned, no farmwife, or even a farmer, but something brighter and sharper and more promising. Sometimes, without thinking, she would marvel at us, saying, "Lord! Why didn't either of you ever leave? I can't believe you never had any other plans!"

Such remarks would annoy Rose no end, but I liked them. They showed how well and seamlessly we had adhered to our principles.

I made up my mind to call her after I dropped Rose at her house, but when I drove past Daddy's, his pickup was parked in the driveway, and I could see him through the front window, sitting bolt upright in his La-Z-Boy, staring out. There was something about this sight that drove all other thoughts out of my mind. I was too cowardly to turn right around and investigate, but when I got to our place a minute or so later, I couldn't bring myself to get out of the car. I could see the headline in the Pike Weekly News-oCAz FARMER SUCCUMBS IN LIVING RooM.