The Good Daughters (6 page)

A Little Off

W
E WERE LIVING
in Maine at this point. The clam shack period, although the clam shack had become a vegetable juice stand, and that hadn’t worked very well. And anyway, it was the off-season now, which was what had gotten George back into his songwriting again. In an attempt to bring in a little money, Val had put her mind to making one-of-a-kind greeting cards, and actually, the watercolors she was producing for these were beautiful. The problem came from the sayings she came up with, that she lettered inside each card with a special calligraphy pen. Every one was a little off.

“Just because your life isn’t going too well doesn’t mean you can’t dance in the moonlight.”

“When the water freezes
,
sharpen your ice skates.”

“Love is like a robin’s egg. Blue. And it breaks.”

We had no money. Evidently Val had a few shares left of Uncle Ted’s bubble-gum stock, which she’d been holding on to, but then she sold those. I remember because I came home from a job I had feeding our neighbors’ animals while they were away on Christmas vacation—and there were all these bags
on the floor of our front hall, of things she’d bought after the check came in: a jacket for my brother made out of the softest leather, and a lamp that reflected little flecks of light on the ceiling like constellations, and for me, a field guide to the birds of New England with a long-playing record as part of the set, so you could learn to identify birdsongs. In all the years of my growing up it was the only time a present Val gave me showed any sign of having been chosen with me in mind—me as I really was and not her idea of the kind of daughter she might have liked better.

Some people in our financial situation might have put the money in the bank, but after she’d taken care of a few basics like our electric bill, and stocked up on things like dried fruit and lentils, she’d bought all these presents. She had made a trip to Boston, in our old blue Rambler. “I thought I’d go visit a museum,” she said.

She had evidently picked up some postcards in the gift shop though. The one I remember showed a woman sitting on a chair, wrapped from head to toe, almost like a mummy, with some kind of white fabric, sitting on a couch, propped on a bunch of pillows.

This was a woman who had so much money she hired a famous artist to paint her portrait, Val said. After she died they turned her house into the museum Val had visited in Boston that day.

When I asked her if she had a good time there, a look came over her, as if this was too hard a question to answer.

“It was too crowded,” she said. “I left.”

Like Birds

S
OMETIME AROUND JUNIOR
high—around the time my father and I had our unlikely encounter with Val Dickerson at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—the tradition of our annual spring pilgrimage to see the Dickersons ended. The next time I saw them was at our farm stand during strawberry season, the summer I turned thirteen.

I’d been out picking in the field that morning. With the weekend coming up—Fourth of July, our busiest weekend until Labor Day—I’d loaded up a bunch of flats on the back of the wagon hitched to our tractor to bring in to the stand, when I spotted my father out in back of the barn, talking to someone. It was an unusual sight, seeing him standing still that way, that time of year in particular. Even before I recognized who he was talking to, it was this fact that struck me—that anything would keep him from his normal watering and fertilizing. During his busiest season.

He was talking with Val Dickerson. She was wearing a very beautiful summer dress—sleeveless, with a cinched waist and a full skirt with lace on the pockets. Her hair, which I was used to seeing in a ponytail, was falling
loose on her shoulders. She reminded me of Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary
.

From the looks of things, Mrs. Dickerson was upset. She was moving her hands in the air. My father was standing very still, in his work boots and overalls, same as always, holding a sack of fertilizer he must have been carrying over to the truck when she’d stopped him.

She wasn’t all dressed up like the last time I’d seen her, but she looked incredibly pretty. Noting this, I felt a small and surprising stab of protectiveness for my mother. My mother was more or less the same age probably, but had gotten a lot heavier in recent years, and her face—which had been firm and solid, like her body, when she was younger, seemed to have puffed out and sagged at the same time. Except for that one time Nancy Edmunds had put the hair dye on her—a mistake, for sure—she made no efforts to conceal the encroaching effects of growing older. At church they taught us not to care about the physical body, and that vanity was a sin, but still I thought it would make her sad, seeing Mrs. Dickerson looking so young and beautiful.

I didn’t go over to say hello to Mrs. Dickerson, and there was no sign of Dana, who must have been at the farm stand, I figured, not that I felt a need to see her anyway. The person I approached, instead, was her brother, Ray, who was off in a far corner of the parking lot, juggling three different varieties of summer squash, or trying to.

I wouldn’t normally have thought of speaking to a boy as old as Ray Dickerson—seventeen, probably—but he had waved. As always, just the sight of him brought on a warm feeling in me, unsettled but pleasurable at the same time.

“Leave it to my mother,” he said, “to take a forty-five-minute detour off the highway to buy strawberries. She says yours are the best.”

“I thought you lived in Maine,” I said.

“We did. My parents are thinking of moving back to Vermont now. George tried selling clams and lobster rolls, and then these health food juices, but it didn’t pan out. He’s up in Burlington now, checking out some deal.”

“You graduate this June?”

“One more year,” he said. “Soon as I get finished with school, I’m taking off for California. Where the action is.”

I had heard about this, a little. San Francisco. At youth group, the minister had made us all pray for strength to resist the temptations of sex and drugs, as promoted in the rock-and-roll music that was coming from some place called Haight-Ashbury. The fact that Ray Dickerson might be headed there filled me with respect.

“You got taller,” he said. Ray himself was well over six feet now. His arms, tossing the Hacky Sack, had a wild, birdlike grace. I knew what my parents would have said about his long hair, never mind the eyelashes—
looks like a girl
—but he didn’t, remotely.

I was afraid he might know what I was thinking, so I studied the berries in the flat I was holding. He stretched a long arm over the box and picked up a particularly red and juicy-looking one, which he popped in his mouth, stem and all. A thin stream of juice trickled out the side of his mouth, as if he were a vampire.

“You know what would be cool,” he said. “If people fed each other strawberries out of each other’s mouths, like birds.”

I must’ve just stood there. Nothing that ever happened in my life before had prepared me for this.

“You know your face is red as a strawberry now,” he said. “What’re you afraid of?”

“I was just bringing these in,” I said. All I could think of. Deep down, in that place between my legs that sometimes got damp when I drew my pictures in the barn, I felt a strange and thrilling current run through me.

“Like this,” he said. He had popped another berry in his mouth. He leaned down, low enough for his mouth to meet mine—not so difficult, since I was tall too. He placed his hands on my shoulders and pressed his mouth against my own. I tasted the berry juice on his lips. I opened mine to receive the fruit.

This is what happened when Adam met Eve, I thought. Here comes the devil.

Strawberries

I
ALWAYS HAD
an interest in growing things. I liked gathering seedpods and taking them apart. I started beans in plastic containers left over from my mother’s yogurt projects, and though I was probably only five or six at the time, somehow I knew, without anyone explaining, that you should not only poke holes in the bottom for drainage, but layer the dirt you put in. A little sand on the bottom. Richer soil on top. Don’t overwater, but it’s important not to underwater either. The worst thing you can do to a plant on a windowsill is give it just enough moisture that the roots come to the top and bake in the sun.

And there was more. I started avocado plants from the pit and got a sweet potato vine sprouting. I put in morning glories, and catnip, and sent away one time to a company that advertised you could grow your own peanuts, but they must not have been talking about Vermont when they promised you’d be eating nuts come harvesttime.

I had this idea once of making a playhouse using real live sunflowers for the walls, and I persuaded George to buy a packet of sunflower seeds for me that I planted in a circle and watered all that summer. We moved right around the time
they were finally getting tall and about to flower, so I never got to put my idea in action, but it would have worked. After we left, I always wondered what that circle of sunflowers I’d cultivated would have ended up looking like by the end of the season. I was going to tie the stalks together at the top, so they formed a kind of flowering teepee, and put a chair inside, where I could go and read my biographies of important people in history. But by that August we were long gone, on to the next place.

I loved manure. Years later, when I said that to Clarice—the woman who became my love, she looked at me like I was crazy, though later she came to know me so well she understood what that manure signified for me—nourishment for the soil, food for growing things.

“I love the smell of it, even,” I told her—not the greenest manure, but once it’s aged to the point you can pick up a clump of the stuff in your hand. (This also offended Clarice at first.)

A lot of people don’t appreciate good manure, no doubt. Sometimes, on walks, if we were going through a pasture where cattle grazed, I’d bend over and pick up a clod of the stuff and work it over in my hand, scattering the bits as I went. I liked to think about all the things that went into this particular piece of manure: grass, grain, seeds of other plants, chewed up and passed out through the cow’s intestine, to start the process going all over again. When you think about this, it’s a beautiful thing, I told Clarice. Eventually she understood.

It was as much a part of me as loving women, and not men, the way the sights and smells and, most of all, feelings concerning the cultivation of crops—the rituals of planting and cultivation and harvest—were hardwired into me. Other than George’s interest in growing a little pot, back in our Vermont days in particular, it was certainly nothing passed on to me by George and Valerie. Though maybe, I used to think, I’d picked it up at Plank Farm, on those strawberry season visits of ours. Usually around the time of our birthdays, Ruth’s and mine.

The fact that we did this at all was strange enough, considering Val’s dislike for Connie Plank, and George’s inattention and lack of interest in just about
anything not directly related to his own get-rich-quick projects. Though in later years, George didn’t accompany us on these excursions, any more than he accompanied us other places. The one who took us to Plank Farm was Val. Some force pulled her back to that farm. Once we were there, I felt it myself.

For Val, I think it had something to do with Edwin Plank—about as unlikely a person as you could imagine for her to connect with on the surface of things. In the later years, she appeared to develop a surprising interest in Ruth, too—as if she both wanted to know more about her, and didn’t at the same time. As for me, trips to Plank Farm were about the land, and my talks with Edwin.

There was this one time we stopped by, on one of our moves—having gone out of our way to do so, as we always did. It was Fourth of July weekend, and we were headed to Maine, meaning the traffic was terrible—the weather hot and humid, no air-conditioning in our old Rambler, with boxes of our possessions stuffed into the seat between my brother and me and a crate of my mother’s paintings and art supplies roped to the roof. George had gone on ahead of us, having gotten a call from some guy he’d met in a bar sometime back, who owned a bowling alley and needed a person to take over on short notice while he took his wife to Boston for cancer treatments. God knows why, he thought George and Val might be good candidates.

It was a Friday afternoon when we pulled up at the stand, and the parking lot was full. Val had gone off—to buy strawberries, she said. My brother was in his own world, as usual. He was smoking a lot of pot by this point so he was no doubt high at the time, though my mother never figured that part out.

Ray only had a year of high school left, and I knew he was marking time till he could leave us and head out west. I did not expect that once he’d left we’d see much of him anymore, and it made me sad, recognizing how eager he was to get away. We had grown up in the same house, with the same two parents—two people who never should have had children in the first place—though we were such different kinds of people we’d dealt with that situation in completely different ways. I worked my after-school babysitting jobs to save up for college, nose to the grindstone. Ray drifted.

Still, I worshipped my brother, and the thought that the one relative I really loved would be going away left a terrible emptiness. Whatever else separated us, we were bonded in one powerful way, like a couple of shipwrecked sailors stranded on an island in the middle of the ocean, the sole survivors of our parents’ upbringing. Once he was gone, there would be nobody around who could understand, and it was hard to imagine what force other than the death of one of our parents—and not even that, maybe—might be enough to bring him back home. That summer, as his departure grew imminent, I lived in fear of the day he’d leave me alone with them. I knew it was coming.

The day we’d driven to the Planks for the strawberries, he stayed in the parking lot playing Hacky Sack. I made my way over to the barn, and beyond that, to the rich green, strawberry-dotted expanse of acreage that constituted the farm that had passed down through generations of Plank men, ending up with Edwin.

I’d been here before over the years, those times Edwin took me aside and showed me some interesting thing like how to cut the eye out of a potato to get a new plant started or how to pinch the extra leaves off a tomato plant, but this was the first time I’d ever gotten to explore the farm on my own. I was thirteen years old, and I felt myself pulled by some force real as gravity, only this one took me out over the fields—past strawberries, past spinach and broccoli, through cauliflower, eggplant, chard, peppers, into corn.

The stalks came only up to my waist. The season was still young. I studied the ears of corn, just starting to form, the way the soil had been mounded up around the base of the stalks, the bean plants between them. Nobody had taught me about this yet, but I think I understood by instinct that the planting of beans in among the corn must have had something to do with balancing the chemical content of the soil—the beans providing nutrients the corn might have depleted.

I looked up to the sky, gauging the time. Noon, or close enough. The day was hot, but the sun felt good on my skin. I was far enough away from everyone that I could peel up my shirt, exposing my stomach and my small flat breasts. The memory of Jenny Samuels still haunted me, the soft ripe fruit of her body
against the hardness of mine. I lay down and dug my fingers in the soft, loose soil, wrist-deep. I breathed in the smell. I fell asleep, as if I’d been born in this spot, or had been buried here.

It was the sound of a tractor working its way through the rows that awakened me. Then the engine cut out, and I heard the familiar voice of Edwin Plank.

“That you, Dana? Your mother’s been looking all over creation for you.”

I pulled down my shirt. The tall, sunburnt form of Edwin in those old overalls of his stood over me. He was smiling.

“You know something?” he said. “I’ve been known to catch a few winks here myself.”

I could have been embarrassed but I wasn’t. “Hop on,” he said, indicating the tractor. “I’ll give you a ride.”

That’s how he brought me back to the barn and the parking lot, where my mother and Ray were waiting with the strawberries. I remember thinking that was the best ride I ever took.

“Too bad you and Ruth missed seeing each other,” Mr. Plank said. “She must have gone up to the house.”

“That girl’s really grown up since we saw her last,” Val said. “You must’ve seen her, right, Ray?”

“Yup,” said my brother. “She gave me some strawberries.”