A Thousand Acres: A Novel (12 page)

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.

T
HE 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 will 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.

Even when my father was a young man, there were so many lakes and pothole ponds in Zebulon County that the idea of building a swimming pool would have been ludicrous, but now every town of any size either had built one or wanted to, and the county newspapers cited these and the three table-flat nine-hole golf courses as “some of Zebulon County’s numerous recreational facilities.”

We changed, passed through the showers, and spread our towels with self-conscious care about a third of the way down from the
shallow end. Pammy opened her swimming bag, pulled out a pair of black and white polka-dotted sunglasses, and put them on. Linda said, “Where did you get those?”

“When we were in Iowa City. I bought them with my own money.”

“Can I wear them?”

I said,
“May
I wear them.”

“May
I wear them?”

“No.” The sunglasses glanced toward me. “Well, maybe. We’ll see.” Pammy leaned back, arranged herself on her elbows, and surveyed the assembled crowd. Just in that moment, it was easy to believe she was twelve, almost thirteen, though her figure was still wiry and thin. Not even that first layer of softness underneath the skin had begun to develop. Linda reached into her bag and pulled out a
Teen
magazine, which she spread open on her towel and began to peruse with concentration. I looked over. The article she was reading was entitled “How Much Makeup Is Too Much?” and began, “Every morning before school, Freshman Tina Smith spends forty-five minutes on her face.”

I smiled to myself and looked around. There were two women I knew, both my father’s age, with their grandchildren. One of them, Mary Livingstone, waved to me. She had been a friend of my mother’s, and they had served on some church committees together. I took out my
Family Circle
. If you lay flat and gripped the edges of the magazine tightly, the wind wasn’t as bothersome.

Pammy said, “There’s Doreen Patrick.” She pushed her polka dots up the bridge of her nose. “She has a cute suit on.” She turned to me and said, “If she comes over here, Aunt Ginny, may I go lie with them?”

“Sure. But you don’t have to wait till she comes over here. You could just go up and say hi.”

“I don’t know those other kids. It doesn’t matter.”

I watched her watching them. A few minutes later, Doreen Patrick and another girl walked past us toward the snack bar. Doreen glanced at Pammy but didn’t say anything. I said, “Pam, nobody’s going to recognize you with those sunglasses on.” She didn’t respond.

Mary Livingstone came over with her two grandsons, who looked
to be about four and five. “Well, Ginny!” she said. “How’s your dad?” She lowered herself to the edge of my towel, no mean task. “Remember Todd and Toby? Margaret’s boys? This must be Pammy and Linda. Weren’t you girls away for school this year?”

Linda murmured, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Didja like it?”

Again, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, Linda, you take the boys and play with them. They’ve got some toys over by the ladder there.” Linda got to her feet. “Go with Linda, boys. She’ll play some nice games with you. Granny’s tired.” Mary was like my father in her assumption that children were born to serve their elders, and that their service was to be directed rather than requested. I glanced over at Pammy. She seemed to have shrunk into herself a little. Mary let out a long “Hoooohah,” then pinned me with her gaze. “You heard we’re selling the farm, didn’t you, Ginny?”

“I guess I didn’t.”

“Selling it to the Stanleys, the boy and the two nephews. We’re gonna live there through harvest, but they bought the crops in the field, too.”

“The house?”

“House and everything. We got a trailer down in Bradenton, Florida, for the winter, and then next spring, Dad’s gonna buy us a place up near Hayward, Wisconsin, for the fishing. A nice little two-bedroom cabin on a lake, or something like that. They got some places up there with two or three little cottages for when the grand-kids come.” She stretched out her legs and stared at them for a moment. “Nothing big or fancy. There’s just the two of us.”