The Good Daughters (5 page)

The Idea of Love

T
HE FIRST THING
people noticed about Val was usually her height, which was closing in on six feet. She stood a little taller than George, in fact. But that wasn’t the only striking aspect to her appearance. She had this long blond hair, and blue eyes, and she moved like a dancer. Her fingers, though they were always covered with paint, were the kind you’d see in a magazine advertisement for hand lotion or diamond rings, not that she had one. She wasn’t beautiful in the way movie stars and fashion models might be, but she had this very long, thin face, with a surprisingly wide space between her nose and her upper lip, which gave her a faintly animal appearance. She was the type of person other people looked at when she came into a room, without her making any effort to produce that result.

Unlike myself. I was short, with hair of a shade people tend to call dirty brown, and where my mother’s legs stretched long and thin, with elegant narrow ankles and high arches like a ballerina’s, I had thick calf muscles and wide, broad feet. Even in girlhood—long before menopause sealed the deal—I had a short, thick waist that inspired my mother to comment that I had the kind of body high-waisted dresses were invented for.

But the truth was, I didn’t like any kind of dresses. I have always felt most comfortable in jeans or overalls or, if the situation calls for it, wide, cuffed men’s trousers with a tucked-in shirt, never mind if it makes me look boyish and thick. Why pretend? I am.

The way Val kept presenting me with frilly clothes and things to put in my hair, even after I’d cut most of it off, always seemed bizarre to me. Every year on my birthday I got a new Barbie doll that I might never have taken out of the box if it hadn’t been for those times Ruth Plank and her sisters came to visit. I would have given them the whole lot, but I knew my mother wouldn’t want me to. She was the one who really loved those dolls.

Who she wanted for a daughter was someone she could have done things with, like try on clothes, or play with hairstyles, or do craft projects and make dollhouses. Val loved making things with fabric and bright colors and glued-on sequins—beaded necklaces, hand-painted shawls, ruffled outfits. Dirty as her fingernails were most of the time from painting, she would probably have loved going to one of those nail salons to get a manicure.

I never got the impression that there was love between Val and George, but Val had a big-time romantic streak. She used to do things like turn out all the lights and put candles all over the house, if George had been away for a while on one of his trips, and she’d have music going, like maybe Peggy Lee or Dean Martin, and then she’d meet him at the door in some amazing outfit she’d cooked up, with scarves and lace and possibly not that much else, which freaked out my brother in particular. He learned to make himself scarce on those nights.

I got the feeling she always ended up disappointed though. Val was a woman who loved the idea of love—more, possibly, than the reality of loving someone. She liked the trappings and the drama.

Her real love—more than George, and more than my brother and me when you got down to it, though I believe she loved us in her way—was going into whatever odd, cramped little space she’d made for herself in whatever place we’d touched down, and making artwork.

She painted faces mostly, generally women. Sometimes she cut pictures out of magazines to use for inspiration. She painted herself often, though always in
made-up circumstances—riding a horse, on a trapeze, dressed in an evening gown at some imaginary ball. I used to wish she’d make a painting of me, but if she had, she would have had to study my face for a long time, and I had the oddest feeling that she didn’t like to look at me. Not that she didn’t love me. She just preferred not to consider my face too closely, having surely recognized long before that it contained not even the faintest sign of what she loved best, which was beauty.

I KNEW, VERY YOUNG, THAT
I liked a certain kind of woman, a strong one. A woman nothing like my mother, though I could be drawn to beauty too.

The first woman I remember having a crush on was the actress who played Perry Mason’s secretary on TV, Della Street. Perry might win the cases, and his big tall buddy, Paul Drake, stepped in when a little muscle was needed, but Della had this cool, calm, organized manner, like nothing ever flustered her, and underneath her gentle exterior there was a firmness and command I liked. Unlike the woman I lived with—my mother—this one had a handle on things.

I imagined how it would be if Della came to our house. How she’d get rid of all those variously dated and mostly out-of-date yogurt cultures on the windowsill, the frozen orange juice cans with paintbrushes lying around, my father’s tapes spooling off the reels, my brother’s
Mad
magazines, my mother’s sequins and hair ornaments littering the floor, and all those unopened bills from the phone company and some recording studio where George made a demo one time, forwarded from whatever town we’d lived in before.

I watched
The Patty Duke Show,
about two identical cousins—one of whom grew up in London, the other in a place near New York City called Brooklyn. The proper, refined London girl, Cathy, comes to live with the family of the Brooklyn girl, Patty, who is a fun, wild, American teenager type. But I always liked Cathy best. She was sensible and cautious, where Patty was boy-crazy and immature. Patty got on my nerves.

In fact, I watched television a lot in those days, searching for women to model myself on. I liked Julia Child’s big, confident voice and how she handled a roasting chicken, and the runner, Wilma Rudolph, who won three medals at the 1960 Olympics even though she’d been born with polio. I liked Donna Reed, not only because she was beautiful, but because she seemed kind, and steady, in a way I longed for my own parents to be. I loved
The Beverly Hillbillies,
but not because the ridiculous antics of the Clampett family amused me. The one I related to was the no-nonsense secretary Miss Jane Hathaway, the one sane character in the bunch. Something about her long thin frame and her plainness, even homeliness—particularly set off by the frilly excesses of Elly May—stirred my heart.

I was thirteen when I realized that how I felt about these women differed from how my brother viewed certain male celebrities and hero types.

For me, the women whose images covered the walls in my room were not simply people I admired, or ones whose music or performances appealed to me. I didn’t just
like
these women. I thought about kissing them, and for the first time that I remember—having been all my life a person seemingly lacking in imagination—I imagined what I’d like to do with them.

I pictured the women wrapping their arms around me, and their legs, and pressing their hands into my flesh, running their fingers through my hair and down my neck.

I didn’t know the word for who I was or how I felt, when I first started getting these feelings. I only knew I wasn’t like other girls, who screamed when they saw the Beatles on television, or hung pictures of Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson on their bedroom walls.

I didn’t want a boy, I wanted girls—real girls, girls at my school—to feel about me as they did about some boy. To show that kind of interest, but in me this time. How could it be, I wondered, that they could fall all over themselves for some pimply loser with a bulging Adam’s apple who snapped their bra strap, when I would kiss them tenderly and love them?

The first time I ever acted on my feelings for a girl was in seventh grade,
shortly after we moved to Vermont. Her name was Jenny Samuels, and we had math together, and gym. Our lockers were next to each other, which meant we’d change side by side. This was wonderful and terrible, having her naked, or almost naked, up that close to me, and wanting so badly to look at her, and afraid if I did she’d know.

Most of the girls were modest about getting naked at that stage. A few even changed in the toilet cubicles, rather than let anyone see them without their underwear on. Or they’d come out of the shower with their towel around their chest, and shimmy into their underpants with the towel still on. Then turn around and hook their bra with their back to you, so the most you’d see was a flash of their nipples as they slipped their breasts into the cups. Not much to see in most cases, this being seventh grade.

My own breasts were so small I didn’t really need a bra, and didn’t want one, but Val said if I didn’t have one on it would look funny, and there might be these two dark dots showing under my shirt if I wore something light-colored.

“I’ll wear an undershirt,” I said, but she said no, that’s not what girls do.

This particular day, I had my bra and panties on already. I had made sure to get out of the shower quick, to be ahead of Jenny, so I’d have more time to position myself. I had this plan to be fiddling with my locker combination at the moment that she dropped the towel, and to drop the lock at the exact same moment, so I’d have an excuse to get down on the floor and then look up, which would be the moment I’d catch a glimpse of her.

Jenny had amazingly large breasts for a seventh grader. The boys had all commented widely on this. She must have been accustomed to having her breasts be a topic of interest at our school, but not in the girls’ locker room, generally.

As it turned out, we were the only ones in our part of the room that day, because all the other girls had stayed in the gymnasium a few extra minutes to get the lowdown on cheerleading tryouts and see a demonstration of the cartwheel and the jumps they’d be asked to execute. The cheering coach herself had shown up, to offer pointers for those who wanted a little one-on-one work, which turned out to be everyone but two.

I had no interest in being a cheerleader, not that they ever would have picked me. Somewhat to my surprise, given her body, neither did Jenny.

Now she was coming over to our spot with her towel on. Now she was wiggling into her panties under the towel, on schedule. Now I was fiddling with the locker, dropping the lock, just as the towel fell on the floor beside me.

I looked up.

Jenny Samuels loomed over me, naked from the waist up, those two enormous breasts of hers sticking out so far I couldn’t even see her face at first. Surprisingly, she was making no effort to put on her brassiere. The two bare pink breasts of Jenny Samuels that I’d longed to catch sight of all that fall were right there—even bigger and fuller than I had imagined.

She was just sitting on the bench that way, with her round pink nipples and her white freckled skin and her pink flower panties with lace around the edges cutting into her full pink thighs, and her breasts were hanging down even more dramatically than they might have if she were upright, because she was bent over now, with her hands over her eyes. She was crying.

I was almost too stunned to speak but I managed. “What’s the matter?” I said. And then, because of my guilt, “What did I do?”

“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “It’s all those boys that are always hanging around watching me. A bunch of them were waiting on the bleachers for the cheering tryout. I could tell they were figuring they’d get to see me jumping. That’s the kind of thing they do. I get so sick of it.”

It took me a second to get what she meant.

“These,” she said, touching the gigantic, perfect breasts I had dreamed about touching. And more. “They like to watch them jiggle.”

I put my arm around her. Not the way I’d pictured, when I imagined the two of us in a field someplace together, naked, mud wrestling. Or scrubbing each other in the shower and, afterward, putting our tongues in each other’s mouths, and Jenny bending over me then, when we lay down side by side, and lowering her gorgeous breasts over my face, guiding her perfect pink nipples into my mouth.

The way I put my arm around her then was strictly for comfort, the way my brother put his arm around me sometimes, when I was feeling bad about something that happened at school.

For that moment, anyway, I was more like a sister, a friend. “They shouldn’t make you feel that way,” I said. “They’re idiots.”

“I wish I was flat like you,” she said. “No offense.”

“I think you’re beautiful,” I whispered. I couldn’t help myself then. “I love them.” Her breasts, I meant. I couldn’t say the word, and the word
boobs,
that all the other girls used, seemed ridiculous and inadequate. Like what they had on top was some kind of a joke, instead of something wonderful and beautiful.

I kissed her. On the mouth.

She let out a noise, not like a scream exactly. More like my mother when she opened one of the yogurt containers and found a bunch of mold on top.

“You’re a freak,” she said, grabbing the towel. “I’m telling Miss Kavenaugh.”

When I was older, looking back on this moment, the realization would come to me that if anyone in our school was likely to understand how I had felt at that moment, it might have been Miss Kavenaugh, our gym teacher. But at the time, all I knew was I had ruined everything.

By three o’clock our whole school would know, Dana Dickerson was a lesbo. This part was true. The only saving grace was that our family moved a few months later. For once I was glad we had never stayed anyplace that long.

Outside the Rules

B
ESIDES OUR VISITS
to the laboratories and barns of the University of New Hampshire College of Agriculture, I can remember only one other occasion, ever, when I went someplace besides the feed store or the dump with my father.

It happened over Christmas vacation the year I was in seventh grade, right after my mother left for Wisconsin to attend the funeral of her father—an event that had not seemed to fill her with much grief, I noted. She took my sisters, but when I told her I’d just as soon stay home, she didn’t argue.

The five of them planned to take a Greyhound bus over that stretch of days between Christmas and New Year’s, when nothing much was happening at the farm. Every year, as dependable as sunrise, my father would receive his new Burpee’s catalog and the one from Ernie’s A-1 Seeds, on January 2, and get to work with the ordering, but until then even he had time on his hands.

Two days after Christmas—a year in which my father had given my mother a new hay rake for the tractor as her gift, the same thing she’d given him—we drove my mother and sisters to the bus station in Boston, my sisters in their
church clothes for the trip, my mother in a suit. I figured we’d head home right after, or maybe, if I was lucky, stop at Schrafft’s for an ice cream. I knew about that place from the one other time I’d been to Boston, when our mother took us there to hear Bishop Fulton J. Sheen preach. Not a Lutheran, but she’d made an exception in his case.

As we pulled onto the road leading out toward the Charles River, my father handed me a Coke from the cooler in the back. “What do you say we take in an art museum, since we’re in the neighborhood?” he said.

He might as well have said, “What do you say we go to a bar and get drunk?” or “Let’s go bet on horses.” The suggestion was that bizarre. But wonderful.

The place he had chosen to visit, oddly enough, was not the Museum of Fine Arts. That one I’d discover on my own years later, when I went to school not far from there. But that day we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. You had to wonder how he’d heard about it.

“When I was a boy, my father took me once to Fenway Park, to watch Lefty Grove pitch,” he said. “Seems like the kind of thing a dad should do at least once in his child’s life, take her someplace out of the ordinary.”

The fact that it was only me he was doing this with, and that he had chosen an art museum—rather than the Old North Church, or the Museum of Science, or the ballpark—filled me with pride. I had worried, when we walked in the doors and saw the admission price—four dollars—that he might decide the museum was too expensive, but he didn’t hesitate. He opened his wallet and took out the bills, counted them one by one, and handed me my ticket so I could give it to the woman at the entry spot myself.

“You might want to hold on to the stub,” he said. “Memento and all.”

We were walking up the staircase to the first room of exhibits—running ahead, I was so excited to be at a place like this, a mansion—when my father called out to me.

“What do you know, Ruthie,” he said. “Look who’s over there.”

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum definitely didn’t seem like the kind of place my father and I would have run into anyone we knew, so for a moment
all I could think was that he’d spotted a celebrity—the newscaster we watched on the local Boston station maybe, or some player on the Red Sox, though it didn’t seem too likely they’d be in this place either.

But it was Val Dickerson, coming up the steps with her ticket stub. No Dana or Ray with her. Just Val.

Other times I’d seen her over the years, she was usually dressed in her painting clothes, some old pair of jeans and a man’s shirt—George’s no doubt—rolled up around her elbows, with her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. This time, she was wearing a dress and high-heeled shoes, which made her even taller than usual, of course, and she had lipstick on. I hadn’t realized before how beautiful she was.

“What a surprise,” she said, standing back as if to assess me. Maybe she was doing the same thing my mother always seemed to do, comparing me with Dana. Suddenly I felt awkward, gangly, stupid-looking. My pants legs were too short, and I had a pimple on my chin.

But Val Dickerson wasn’t looking at me in the way I had come to expect from my mother—finding fault. Her eyes were locked so intently on my face that I had to look away. She stroked my cheek then, and when I looked at her again, I saw there were tears in her eyes.

I didn’t know what to make of that. In all my twelve years, I’d never seen my mother cry, not even hearing the words she’d recently received from Wisconsin. But it wasn’t news to me that Val Dickerson was nothing like my mother. Who could say what went on in her head? I was thinking that maybe being around all this great art touched her off. With Val you never could tell.

I didn’t know what to do, so I studied my museum brochure, with a map in it of where to find the different artworks.

“She’s beautiful, Eddie,” Val said. This was the only time I’d ever heard anyone call my father Eddie. To my mother, he was Edwin. To his brothers, Ed.

“She’s lucky she didn’t inherit her old pop’s mug,” he said. “Dodged a bullet there, I’d say.”

“How amazing that you two would have shown up here the same day as
me,” she said. Though this didn’t begin to say it, actually. The amazing thing was that we were here at all. That my father, a man who’d never visited an art museum in his life, would have brought me to this one, on the very day Val Dickerson, who lived somewhere in Maine at the time, if I remembered right, would also have dropped in on this, of all museums, and on this same marble staircase, at the very moment he and I were mounting the steps together.

“What do you say we get a cup of coffee, Val?” my father said. “Catch up.”

Something about the tone of his voice seemed odd to me, unfamiliar. My father was always quiet, and shy, but he had an agitated sound as he spoke, and his voice seemed to have gone up a half octave. Maybe he registered this, too, because he cleared his throat.

“We just got here,” I said. “I want to see the paintings.”

“Of course she does,” said Val. She seemed to have gotten ahold of herself a little by this point, though her eyes were still moist, as if she was a minute from tears even though she probably wasn’t really.

“Ruth here’s a real art lover,” he told her. “You should see the pictures she brings home from school. That’s something you two have in common.”

“I’d love to see your work someday,” Val said. Nobody else had ever referred to the drawings I made as my “work.” To my mother, they were pictures.

“I guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen my girl here,” my father said. “She’s shot up since the last time. Must be all the good vegetables.”

Val was studying my father’s face now too. She had stepped back a little, the way a person would if she touched an electric fence. “You took me by surprise here, Edwin,” she said. (Edwin now, not Eddie.) “I don’t know what to say.”

“Maybe we could take this place in together,” my father said. “You could probably tell us about the artists, Valerie. I’m not much for knowing this stuff myself.”

For a moment, then, the two of them had just stood there. My father was looking at Val Dickerson, it seemed to me, in a way I had never seen him look at my mother, a way I’d never known my father might look. The thought came to me that he must be in love with her. As for Val, the person she was looking at
again was me. Then it seemed as if the two of them collected themselves—or Val did, anyway, and she turned back to my father.

“Isabella Stewart Gardner was a wild woman,” she said. “She lived outside the rules, ahead of her time. This place used to be her home, you know.”

I had run ahead now, impatient to get to a room I saw down the wide corridor, with golden furniture inside and a velvet couch, and paintings of angels on the ceiling. Though maybe part of it was not wanting to see what I guessed I might if I’d stayed standing in that spot. Whatever the two of them said to each other after that, I didn’t want to know. I was looking at a portrait of a woman in an old-fashioned dress by an artist named John Singer Sargent. This was safer, and also interesting.

A minute later, my father joined me.

“What happened to Mrs. Dickerson?” I said.

“Something came up,” he told me, his voice back to normal, more or less. “She had to go. I guess we won’t be having that coffee after all. But when we’re done, I’ll buy you a hot chocolate at the refreshment stand.”

That was how much my dad knew about art museums. He thought they had refreshment stands.

We didn’t stay at the museum that long. My father seemed to think that what you did at a place like this was stroll through the rooms, reading the brass plaques posted next to every artwork, stopping just long enough to take in the name of the artist and when he was born and died—or she, in the case of the one I liked best, a painter named Mary Cassatt.

The unfamiliar agitation I’d observed in him when we ran into Val Dickerson stayed with him. He seemed anxious and distracted, so I did not protest when he finally said, “What do you say we call it a day? There’s a barnful of cows waiting for me who don’t know it’s Christmas vacation.”

He said almost nothing, driving home, but somewhere around Peabody he commented, “It might be best if your mother didn’t know we ran into Val Dickerson. You know how she is about those Dickersons.”

I did know and I didn’t. Our relationship with the Dickersons had always
baffled me, and now there was one more event involving a Dickerson that made no sense. Or—this was worse—an event that seemed comprehensible, but in a way that frightened me. Suppose my father and Mrs. Dickerson were in love? Suppose they ran away together, and left me alone with my mother and my sisters? And then Dana Dickerson would get my dad. And what then of my secret love for Ray Dickerson?

Only I knew my father would never leave Plank Farm. Whatever it was he felt about Val Dickerson—and seeing her, I thought, how could he not?—my father would never abandon us, or his crops and animals, or our farm.

Still, I struggled to make sense of the afternoon. How was it, for instance, that Mrs. Dickerson—who must have just paid the four-dollar admission when we ran into her—would leave without seeing a single room in the museum? Why was she so dressed up? When did she start calling my father Eddie?

“She had a long drive back to Maine,” my father said, as if this explained it, instead of just the opposite.

The next week, a package arrived from Maine with my name on it. Inside was a note saying this was a late Christmas present, though in fact our family and the Dickersons had never exchanged presents in the past, beyond the occasional set of pot holders from my mother.

Only I received a gift. I knew even before opening it what it must be, the shape of the box was so familiar to me, as it was to any girl in those days who felt the way I did about Barbie.

Fashion Queen Barbie, in a strapless evening gown, with three wigs, each one a different color and hairstyle. My mother would disapprove of course, and did. “What is that woman thinking, sending a gift like that to a girl from a God-fearing family?” she said. Never mind that I was a little old for dolls.

“I thought you should have one of these,” Val had written. “In my opinion, every girl needs at least one Barbie.”