The Good Daughters (9 page)

Ship Coming In

T
HE LAST PATENT
George pursued, to my knowledge, was for something called the Talking Guitar Tuner. This one was designed for anyone who really wanted to play the guitar, only they were tone deaf—both of which applied to George. He had constructed this machine with some kind of tuning fork mechanism inside and a minicassette with a woman’s voice that registered the notes of the string you were trying to tune and said things like “That’s just a little high” or “You’ve almost got it now. Just turn the knob a little in a counter-clockwise direction.” Of all the ideas he ever had, he told Val, this was the best. “Keep your eye out the window, Valerie,” he told her. “Because this man’s ship is coming in.”

Shortly after my graduation from high school, George and Val made what turned out to be their last move together, to St. Pete Beach, Florida—a location George chose for them on the theory that living in a warm climate was better for the creative process. Still waiting for the big payday on his invention, George returned to songwriting. He’d heard a new country duo on the radio—one of those couples who enjoyed a single hit and disappeared as quickly as
they arrived on the scene. But something about the way their two voices wove together (combined, he said, with the inspiration of those nightly sunsets over the Gulf ) got him writing again.

In spite of the instructional tapes, he’d never really learned to play guitar, but he took it out anyway and started strumming chords. For one afternoon, he sat on the porch at their beach apartment (a row of plastic flamingos in the postage-stamp yard, courtesy of Val) working out a melody and lyrics, which he got Val to type up for him.

“I met this guy at a bar with great contacts in Nashville,” he said. Val and I made no comment.

George mailed off the tape, along with a single sheet of paper containing the lyrics, to someone he’d heard of who worked in a place called Music Row.

Mission to the Moon

A
T THE SUGGESTION
of my art teacher, I had applied to art school in Boston. Without telling my mother, I had filled out the application, along with the ones to which she’d given her blessing: nursing school in Manchester; the state university where my father and I had traveled that time to see the prize bull; the state teachers’ college up north. “You could be a teacher,” she said. “Until you settle down with kids of your own.”

For the art school application, samples of my work were necessary. My father helped me put these together, borrowing a camera from his older brother, driving the film to Concord to have the images made into slides.

“You know what we should do with the extras?” he said, when he brought them home the week after, waiting until my mother wasn’t home (not an accident) to take them out and study the images.

“We should send a few of these to Val Dickerson. Her being an artist and all, she’d appreciate them.”

I didn’t think we even had the Dickersons’ address anymore, but evidently my father did.

That April—the time of pea planting and spinach, which was how we measured time around our farm—the envelope arrived from Boston. I’d been accepted, and better yet, awarded a scholarship. We’d already heard from the other places that I was in, but now we had a good case for my choosing Boston.

“We’ll tell her over dinner,” my dad said.

“What if she doesn’t go along with it?”

“I can convince her,” he said.

SO I WAS GOING TO
art school in September. That summer, I weeded the strawberries and worked more hours at the farm stand than usual to make up the money I’d need for books and supplies—which would be more, my mother pointed out, than if I were attending a so-called normal school.

All summer, I didn’t take a day off. Even my mother spoke of how hard I’d worked. More than the other four girls put together she said, with a certain wonderment.

Sometime in early August, a man stopped by the farm stand in search of cheese—a product we sold, thanks to the Wisconsin connection. “I need a big hunk of the stuff to put on the back of my motorcycle,” he said. “I’m headed to Woodstock.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. Working as hard as I had those last three months, the only news of the world beyond our farm that had filtered through had to do with the upcoming Apollo mission to the moon. But now the man was explaining to me—as if I’d been living in a cave—about the music festival coming up in a few days. The biggest and best ever. He began naming the artists who were due to sing there. Just about everyone. (Though not my idol, Bob Dylan.)

“You’re around eighteen, right?” he said. “You should go. Someday your grandchildren will ask you about it, and you can say you were there.”

“My parents would never give me permission,” I told the man as I was ringing up his cheese, and a bag of fresh plums from a bushel I’d just picked that morning.

“Baby,” he said. “If you have to ask permission to go to Woodstock, you shouldn’t be there.”

WE SNEAKED OUT IN THE
night and caught the bus from Concord. My sister Edwina came with me. Winnie and I hardly ever did things together like this, but she was going through a rebellious phase and this seemed to qualify as the kind of thing a person would do if she wanted to get the message across to her parents that she was no longer a good Lutheran churchgoing girl.

The Greyhound company got us as far as Albany, New York. From there it was easy enough to hitchhike that weekend, particularly if you were a couple of young girls unaccompanied by a boy.

By the time we got to Woodstock, there was a steady caravan of cars and Volkswagen buses heading in the direction of the festival. Two minutes after I stuck out my thumb, a carload of guys a few years older than we were picked us up. I thought about what my mother would say if she saw them. My father would observe that they needed two things: a bath and a job.

“She your best girlfriend, huh?” the driver said to me as we climbed in the back, nodding in the direction of Winnie.

“We’re sisters,” I told him, scrunching up my legs—a problem I had with riding in the backseats of VW Bugs even when they didn’t already have five other people in them.

“You sure don’t look like sisters,” he said. “You might want to have a talk with your mom. Or the milkman.”

“We don’t have a milkman,” Winnie said. “We grew up on a farm with our own cows.” All of my sisters were unusually earnest, literal people, with virtually no trace of a sense of humor. Winnie was possibly the most severe case.

“I’ll take the short one,” said his friend. “The joker.”

My sister gave me a look. They were passing a joint around. She didn’t take it, but I did.

The closest their car could get was a couple of miles from where the festival was happening—some guy’s farm, the boys had told us. I tried to imagine my
father saying, “Sure, you want to have a music festival for a few hundred thousand hippies? Come on over.” Evidently this Max Yasgur was a different type of farmer.

Once we got out of their car and started walking, we left those boys. It had started to rain, and they had found some girls better suited to partying. I had on clogs and my sister, Weejuns. We had worn our bell-bottoms from Penney’s but we didn’t look like people who belonged there.

“I never should have let you talk me into this,” Winnie said.

“If you don’t like it you can go home,” I told her, though I was having second thoughts myself. But we kept on walking.

In the end, we found a place to lay out our stuff about a half mile from the stage, next to a family with a baby and a couple who were dancing in a way that seemed to have no connection to the music. The woman’s shirt was off.

The rain was coming down harder now. The PA system blared announcements about what to do if you were having a bad acid trip, and where to go if you went into labor. Someone said Santana was onstage but it was hard to know from where we sat, there were so many people standing up, and the main sound we heard was the generator.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Winnie said. “I think I’m getting my period.” She was crying.

After she left, I started to walk around in the mud in between people’s blankets. I had taken my shoes off in hope of keeping them from getting ruined, though I figured the damage was probably done.

“Hey, beanpole,” someone called out. In automatic reaction, I looked over, though the voice was nothing like my father’s. A random guy. It had not occurred to me before, the nickname was obvious.

Seemingly from nowhere, a girl put a small orange pill in my palm. “Try this,” she said. Things started to look twisted, like what happens when you draw with a ballpoint pen on Silly Putty and start stretching it. The sound came in on waves, so beautiful I felt like crying one minute, then like screaming. Up on the stage, Santana was singing “Evil Ways.”

“I love you,” someone called out.

“I love everyone,” someone else yelled.

I was soaking now, and covered with mud. A lot of the people around me had taken their clothes off, not just their shirts either. It was the first time I had ever actually seen a man’s naked body, not in a painting in a book or one of the statues at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. People were slathering mud on each other’s skin, marking their faces as if it was war paint, massaging the mud into the women’s stomachs and breasts, including some who were pregnant.

For the first time in my life, I felt homesick. I thought about my parents—my father in particular. I imagined him heading out to the barn with his coffee to begin his day, whistling “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” then wondering why I hadn’t shown up to help with the milking. Going in to look for me, finally, and finding the note on my bed from the night before. I pictured him calling to my mother.

“The girls are gone, Connie,” he was saying. “Winnie and Ruth.”

It may have been the effect of the orange pill, but I started crying. I had no idea anymore how to get back to the spot where my sister and I had set up our sleeping bag. I looked at the sky. Hard to tell what time it was, due to the rain, but I was guessing my mother would have the beans on to cook. We were into corn season now. Worried as they’d be about us, they might or might not eat tonight.

I sat down on the muddy ground. When I pictured coming here, I had imagined I’d make drawings of people. I had actually stuffed a sketch pad and some colored pencils in my backpack. As if this might have been a sketching trip.

I was crying when I heard the voice. “Ruth Plank. I don’t believe it. Of all the people.”

For years his long, handsome face had featured prominently in my middle-of-the-night fantasies, lying in my bed at night, or weeding the lettuce, but now that I saw him in the flesh it took a minute to place this person, he was so wet—clean shaven unlike so many of the men here, but with hair down his back. Ray Dickerson.

“You grew up,” he said. He took my hands and pulled me out of the mud so I was facing him. We were almost the same height.

“Got any berries?” he said. Smack on the mouth he kissed me.

THERE IS NOT MUCH POINT
going into how things went the next two days. I have heard enough people describe their acid trips—the unearthly colors and sounds, the love that filled them, not only for their fellow human beings but for the ant crawling up their leg, each blade of grass. I have heard, more times than a person need go into, about the miraculous transformation these individuals experienced, in which the meaning of life was revealed and life as they’d known it ended, the mind-blowing sex. In my case, all of this occurred over the course of the two days I spent with Ray Dickerson—all but the sex part. The consummation, anyway. Strangely enough, considering everything that was going on around us, he did not enter my body, though we did just about everything else.

Partly it was the rain, and the mud, and how many people were around all the time. Even stoned out of his mind at Woodstock, Ray was a romantic, with an oddly old-fashioned streak, and so was I.

“I want to be alone with you,” he told me. “I want to lay you out on a bed of moss and rub oil into your body. I want to massage you.”

These were not the kinds of things a girl like me grew up hearing people suggest. The strange thing was, they were all the pictures I had in my head too. Being with Ray Dickerson was like being with a male version of myself. I was looking in a mirror and seeing who I would have been, if I’d been a boy. I loved this person.

The drug seemed to invest me with whole new sense, another way of taking in the world. Everything was intensified, a little like what happens when a person holds a magnifying glass over a piece of grass at just the right angle so the sunlight hits it, and the grass actually gets scorched. Over those days I discovered new colors different from any in the rainbow, and sounds that seemed to have been created by instruments from another planet, frequencies
undetectable until now. My skin vibrated with sensation. I was inside the heads of people around me. I knew what they saw and what they were feeling—Ray especially. I entered his brain.

AT SOME POINT OVER THE
course of those two days I thought about my sister, and wondered, briefly, what happened to her, but I didn’t feel guilty. Guilt seemed to be one of the emotions the LSD had wiped out, and anyway, I had understood since we first set out on our trip that what she’d wanted to get from coming here had nothing to do with hanging out in the company of her little sister. Maybe she was dancing naked with some guy, too, though I doubted it, and in fact I was right. Shortly after taking off for the latrines that first day Winnie had found a family whose little girl was freaking out from the crowds, and she hitched a ride with them as far as Buffalo, where she called the boy she’d been dating for the last year and a half, Chip, to come get her.

In a rare moment of imagined closeness we’d shared on the bus coming here, she’d confessed to me that she found Chip boring and unattractive (an estimation with which I concurred), but Winnie’s Woodstock experience evidently provided the turning point in their relationship. Within a week of her return from the festival they were engaged, and a year later, they got married. Hers was the first grandchild presented to our mother, nine months after that. Charles III. The spitting image of his dad, pimples and all.

With Ray, deficiency of sexual attraction was never an issue. All those years I’d spent dreaming about him—passing strawberries between our mouths, lingering over his naked body as I sketched, imploring him to let me touch him. Now I was finally able to do that, and my hands couldn’t leave him alone. His on me, the same.

What happened afterward is still hazy to me. The festival ended, of course, and slowly then, like refugees from a bombed-out country, we made our way out over the ruined, rutted, garbage-strewn fields of what had once been Max Yasgur’s farm. Farm girl that I was, no longer high, I found myself wondering how
they would ever restore this piece of land, if anything would ever grow in this place again. Hard to imagine crops taking root here, though having been there, I have no doubt that children were conceived in significant numbers that week.

I left Woodstock a virgin, however. Out on the highway, where streams of bedraggled celebrants stood with their thumbs out, and vans covered with flower stickers and muddy streamers crept along the road in a strangely subdued fashion, not unlike a cortege, Ray said good-bye with an abruptness that stunned me.

“I guess I’ll see you sometime,” he told me, getting into a car with a sign on the front that said, simply, “West.” The same person who had covered my body with kisses just hours before took off as if he was headed to the 7-Eleven for a quart of milk. In the absence of any other destination, and knowing that in three weeks I was due to enroll at art school in Boston—my life’s dream—I waved to him and called out “Peace.” But afterward, on the bus, I wept.

When I got home the next day, my parents said less than you might have thought about my absence. Partly this was due to Neil Armstrong’s moon-walk, which everyone was still talking about. There was also a worrisome infestation of corn borers, and my mother’s delirious absorption in the news that Winnie and Chip were engaged. Most of all, I think, she was reluctant to consider what I had been doing all those days I’d been away. Best to pretend they never happened.