The Good Daughters (20 page)

Bound to Leave

A
FTER WE GOT
the news about Clarice, nothing else seemed to matter. I milked the goats and filled the cheese molds with fresh curds and kept the strawberries weeded and picked and the farm stand stocked, though I gave up on those bouquets of zinnias we used to sell by the side of the road. It was too much effort, and what was the point?

As for Clarice, she pretended for a while that nothing had happened, and since she wanted to inhabit the state of denial for a while, I let her. Soon enough it would not be possible.

I marched along then, keeping up a show of normal life. When the call came from Val’s husband in Rhode Island—a man I barely knew—to say Val had died, I had been typing Clarice’s notes for a humanities lecture. Her fingers no longer worked well enough to do this herself.

I would not have expected the news of Val’s death to hit me hard. By the time she died, Val had been so nearly absent from my life for so long that her complete departure from earth was not likely to make much of a difference, or so I believed. I’d go to her service, of course—relieved that there was someone else
now to take care of the arrangements—but Val was less like a parent to me than a distant and frequently maddening acquaintance. Though we were never close, I had made a point of calling her once a week, but I hardly ever visited.

The last time I’d seen her she’d seemed the same as ever. She was a little vague and dreamy, preoccupied with her artwork as usual. When I’d mentioned our goats, she responded by telling me about a class she was taking at RISD extension in raku pottery and a trip she and David were going to take to Quebec.

Then she was dead, and once I got the news, a surprising thing happened. I was hit by a strange and terrible wave of grief, for all the things we’d never got around to talking about. My relationship with Clarice, for starters.

I never pictured her having a hard time with that. Val was not the type of person who would have been shocked by the idea of two women loving each other. If anything, I might have risen in her estimation for the originality of my choice in a partner. One of the things that always bothered Val about me was, I suspect, what she took to be my conventionality, my complete lack of an artistic spirit.

My not being an artist was true enough. But keeping to convention was never my problem, as Clarice could have attested. If you wanted conventional, you didn’t have to look any further than the five Plank sisters—the oldest four, anyway, who, to my great surprise, showed up at Val’s service, held at the yoga studio.

I had told Clarice about that old “birthday sister” routine Connie Plank had insisted on promoting all those years and the uncomfortable and pointless visits their family used to make to see us. And now here came the Planks again, marching into our life as if to reassert a connection I’d never understood in the first place.

These were women who believed in following the rules all right. They filled the better part of a whole row at the yoga center in nearly identical navy blue suits, each with a strand of pearls around her neck. All of them wore their hair in roughly the same short, neatly blow-dried style. Their bodies were the same shape, more or less—short and thick around the waist, with surprisingly
large and well-developed calves, for women who did not appear to spend time in a gym.

All those other times, occasions I stopped by the farm stand, the only Planks I’d seen on those visits had been Connie and Edwin, and occasionally Ruth, so this was the first time I’d seen them since we were children. Now when I did, what I registered first was how out of place they seemed in a roomful of Val’s yoga students and artist friends—how unlikely it was that they’d be here at all, with Tibetan prayer flags fluttering over their heads and a tape playing Native American flute.

I wore pants to the service. (Dress pants, topped by a nice blouse and a suit jacket.) The Plank women looked like they stepped out of the pages of a Talbots catalog. But if you stripped away the surface things—makeup, clothes, jewelry, wedding rings—it became clear: the four sisters bore a startling resemblance to me.

I was not the only one who noticed. Clarice, spotting them coming in, had assumed these must be relatives of mine I’d mysteriously failed to mention in our many years together.

“They’re Planks,” I said. The only one missing was the only one to whom I bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever, Ruth.

OVER THE YEARS, VAL HAD
compiled a list of songs she wanted to have played at her funeral. She had the unexpected foresight to entrust the list to her husband, and now the number was so great the musical selections alone took over an hour.

After the flute music came Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” (though my mother’s eyes were blue, I knew she felt the words applied to her) and Paul McCartney and Cat Stevens and Jackson Browne. Mostly these were very romantic or sentimental songs celebrating some woman or other who possessed traits my mother must have seen as similar to her own, but there were other surprising musical selections too—Etta James
singing “I’d Rather Go Blind” and James Brown, singing “I Feel Good,” followed, strangely, by a selection from Enya.

The musical prelude went on for nearly an hour—long enough for the four Plank sisters and me to study each other, which we did.

Because of how we were seated, the sisters’ primary view of me was of the back of my head, and I could practically feel the combined gaze of four pairs of eyes. I turned around when I could, pretending to scan the room for some relative or another, but each time I found myself staring at a Plank sister who was staring back at me.

There were two shockers for them to absorb, only one of which was my being seated next to Clarice, who had an arm around my shoulders. More troubling no doubt was the sight of my short, solid, and utterly familiar build, my square and startlingly recognizable face.

Back when we were younger, we might all have seemed like a bunch of interchangeable girls—Esther, Sarah, Naomi, Edwina—even Ruth, who had not yet started shooting up to that dramatic height that earned her the nickname of Beanpole. Back then our similarities in appearance might almost have been chalked up to age, dress, and the sweatiness of a summer day that made everybody’s face red and their hair stick to their faces. It would take another few decades for the resemblance to become what it was now.

Given how long the music went on, I had ample time to consider what this meant. I found myself scrolling back over the years, pulling out odd images of those intermittent but invariably disturbing times our two families’ lives intersected.

I thought about Edwin Plank, who always stood in the background, as if his role on these occasions was nothing more than that of family chauffeur. Still, I had always been drawn to him. A thin, tall man, he would get down low to the ground when he spoke to me—which he did in an authentic, grown-up voice, not the baby talk so many adults use when talking to a child.

Edwin Plank may have been the first person to notice my interest in plants. One time he inquired about the sweet potato vine I’d been growing on our windowsill. He studied the leaves on a rosebush my mother had been struggling
with, commenting that it needed more nitrogen, and we should pinch the suckers while we were at it. It was he, I now remembered, who had shown me what I might do to increase the height and sturdiness of some sunflower seedlings I’d started, taught me how to renovate a strawberry bed, and, later, trusted me with his precious daughter plants—the result of his years of meticulous crossbreeding of strawberry varieties.

As I sat there at Val’s funeral, more pictures from the past came back to me. What I saw in every remembered scene—whether it was playing Barbies with Ruth, buying strawberries at Plank Farm, or talking about corn with Edwin—was a shadowy figure, always somewhere in the background, unable to take her eyes off me. The only other person in my life, possibly, besides Clarice, who had looked at me with so much love and longing. Connie.

IT WAS ON THE DAY
we buried Val that I realized the truth: Val Dickerson had not been my mother. Connie Plank was.

Connie, who—whenever she saw me—went for me like a bird dog. Went
at
me, a person might have said, her embrace was so fierce and smothering. Connie, who practically demanded to see my report cards, and inquired about my religious education, who sent my mother so many letters imploring her to get me baptized that finally Val had written back with the lie that the rite had been performed. Connie, who brought gifts to me (always me, not my brother): the Junior Bible, and a small paperback book called
Way to Inner Peace
by Bishop Sheen, and—the year I turned twelve—a locket in which there was room for two photographs. One of the oval frames remained empty. In the other she had inserted a tiny photograph of herself.

Considering how long the musical buildup took, the actual content of Val’s service, as laid out in the xeroxed program, appeared blessedly brief—a reflection and meditation from her husband and one of her yoga students, followed by remarks from anyone who wished to speak.

I was feeling shaken, not so much by the fact of Val’s death than by the sight of the women I suddenly realized must be my sisters. I took out the piece of
paper with the statement I’d prepared about Val’s love of beauty, her dedication to her painting.

“My mother loved art,” I said. (For this occasion, at least, I would refer to Val as my mother.) What I did not add was that whatever love might have been left over for me had been largely overshadowed by a feeling I got from her all my life, that I had disappointed her. I always felt that I was not the daughter she had wanted.

And I wasn’t, of course. For the first time, I understood why I’d always felt that way. It finally made sense. The person who should have been sitting here in the front row was not myself at all but Ruth.

After I was finished speaking, David asked if anyone else present wanted to add a few words. At first no one moved. And then one of the Planks—Edwina—walked to the front of the room.

“My sister Ruth is having a baby today,” she said, unfolding a piece of lined paper. “She asked me to read this.”

It was only a handful of sentences. I pictured Ruth writing them, in the early stages of labor perhaps. I wondered if she knew already what had become clear to me within that last hour.

“Our families met when Dana and I were born at the same hospital on the same day,” she read, a little stiffly. “And you might not think that would form the basis of any particular bond. But if I’d never met Val, growing up, I might never have known a woman could be an artist. Because she was one. And that made me believe I could become an artist myself.”

Edwina refolded the paper and took her seat. It seemed that the service was finished, with nothing to add but a brief Sufi prayer. But a gaunt figure I had not noticed before, who’d been seated in the back, rose and moved toward the front of the room now. It took me a moment to realize who this was.

More than twenty years had passed since I’d seen Ray. I might have supposed that after all this time of what had no doubt been a difficult life, those good looks of his that made women love him wherever he went might have disappeared. He was certainly thin, with a deeply lined face—a suit jacket that looked as if
it might have been purchased from a thrift shop, with sleeves that ended a good five inches up his long, thin wrists. His hair was as short as an inmate’s.

It didn’t matter. Even now, Ray was a handsome man, but it was something else that struck me, seeing him again after all that time: the old flair and charm that I—the stolid one, the one lacking all capacity to impress anyone by any other means besides sheer hard work and constancy—had so admired and envied in my dazzling older brother. I would not have expected him to smile as he spoke, but when he did I saw the flash of surprisingly white teeth, and those eyelashes people always used to say should have been mine instead of going to a boy.

He told a story about the summer we’d packed up and moved to Maine to take over George’s friend’s clam shack on roughly twenty-four hours’ notice.

“When we got there, it turned out the place had been condemned by the health department,” my brother said, shaking his head. “All clam digging in the Gulf of Maine had just been suspended due to red tide, which inspired Val to turn the place into a takeout smoothie joint, selling fruit drinks and vegetable juices. Not much market for those yet, as it turned out. I guess you could say she was a woman ahead of her time. So George lost his shirt on that venture, as usual, and my mother just kept painting pictures. She wasn’t really cut out to be the mother type, if you want to know the truth. Though she could make fantastic yogurt.”

This was meant to be a funny story, and you could make out a little ripple of uneasy laughter, but the group quickly fell silent after my brother finished speaking. Mostly what his words conveyed was how directionless our family had been, how lost.

You were never sure, with Val and George, where you were or how long you were going to be there, or where you were going next or even who you were. In my case, anyway, I was right to wonder. For over forty years, I’d gotten it wrong.

When Ray was finished speaking, he just stood there for a surprisingly long time. Then he reached into his pocket, and for a second I could almost feel our small, uncomfortable group considering the possibility that my brother might be one of those postal worker shooter types. Who knew? He might pull out a gun.

But it was a harmonica. He started playing “Shenandoah”—sad, slow, and sweet. He cut it off abruptly, right in the middle, in the part where, if a person was singing, the words would be “I’m bound to leave you,” which may or may not have had any significance. Then he put the harmonica back in his pocket and returned to his seat.

After the service was over, I scanned the group, looking for Ray. At first I thought he must have stepped into the men’s room, but when he didn’t appear I understood. Once again, my brother had vanished.