“I wonder if that Valerie Dickerson ever feeds Dana anything besides nuts and berries,” my mother said one time. The family had moved to Pennsylvania by now, but they’d been passing through—and because it was strawberry season, and our birthdays, they’d stopped by the farm stand. Dana and I must have been nine or ten, and Ray was probably thirteen, and tall as my father. I was bringing in a load of peas I’d spent the morning picking when he spotted me. It was always an odd thing—how, even when I was young, and the difference between our ages seemed so vast, he always paid attention to me.
“You still making pictures?” he said. His voice had turned deep but his eyes were the way I remembered, and looking at me hard, like I was a real person and not just a little girl.
“I was reading this in the car,” he said, handing me a rolled-up magazine. “I thought you’d like it.” Mad magazine. Forbidden in our family, but my favorite.
It was on this visit—the first of what became a nearly annual tradition of strawberry runs—where the word had come out that Valerie was now a vegetarian. This was back in the days when it was almost unheard of for a person not to eat meat. This fact shocked my mother, as so much about the Dickersons did.
“Some say the American consumer eats too much beef,” my father said—a surprising view for a farmer to set forward, even if his main crop was vegetables. My father liked his steak, but he possessed an open mind, whereas anything different from how we did things appeared suspect to my mother.
“Dana seems like a particularly intelligent girl, didn’t you think, Edwin?” she said, after they pulled away, in that amazing car of Valerie’s, a Chevrolet Bel Air with fins that seemed to me like something you’d expect to be driven by a movie star, or her chauffeur. Then, to me, she mentioned that my birthday sister had won their school spelling bee that year, and was also enrolled in the 4-H Club, working on a project involving chickens.
“Maybe it’s about time you thought about 4-H,” she said to me.
This kind of remark—and there were many such—no doubt formed the basis for my early resentment of Dana Dickerson. As the two of us moved through childhood and then adolescence, the girl seemed to provide the standard against which my own development and achievements should be measured. And when this happened, I could pretty much rely on falling short, in anything but the height category.
Most of the time, of course—given the irregularity of the reports—we didn’t know where things stood with Dana Dickerson. Then my mother made do with speculating. When I learned to ride a bike, my mother had commented, “I wonder if Dana can do that yet,” and when I got my period—early, just after turning twelve—she considered what might be going on for Dana now. One time, on my birthday—mine and Dana Dickerson’s—my mother gave me a box of stationery with lilacs going up the side. “You can use this to write letters to Dana Dickerson,” she said. “You two should be pen pals.”
I didn’t write. If there was one girl in the world I didn’t want to correspond with, that girl would be Dana Dickerson. Our families had nothing in common and neither did we.
The one Dickerson who interested me was Dana’s older brother, Ray, four years older than us. He was a tall, impossibly long-limbed person, like his mother, Valerie, and though he wasn’t handsome in the regular way of high school boys you saw on TV (Wally Cleaver and the older brothers on My Three Sons, or Ricky Nelson), there was something about his face that made my skin hot if I looked at him. He had blue eyes that always gave you the sense he was about to burst out laughing, or cry—by which I mean, I suppose, that there was always so much feeling evident—and eyelashes so long they shaded his face.
Ray had this way of coming into a room that took your breath away. Partly it was the look of him, but more so it was his crazy energy, and all the funny and amazing ideas he thought up. He did things other boys didn’t, like building a raft out of old kerosene drums and taking it down Beard’s Creek, where it got stuck in the mud, and performing magic tricks wearing a cape he’d evidently sewed himself. He had taught himself ventriloquism, so one time, at Plank’s, he made this pair of summer squashes talk to each other without moving his lips. Years before, when I was five or six, he pulled a silver dollar out of my ear, so for the next few days I was forever checking to see what else might be in there, but nothing ever was.
One spring Ray Dickerson built a homemade unicycle using a few old bike parts he’d found at the dump. That was Ray for you. When other boys were out on the ball field, he rode that contraption around town playing his harmonica.
At one point, he’d tried to teach his sister how to ride the unicycle, and Dana had taken a fall bad enough that her arm ended up in a sling. You’d think Mrs. Dickerson would have confiscated the thing after that—or that she’d be upset at least, but it didn’t seem to bother her, though my mother had a fit.
Not much bothered Val Dickerson, or appeared to. She was an artist, and generally absorbed in that more than whatever might be going on with her children, was my impression. Where my mother kept close tabs on every single thing my sisters and I did, Val Dickerson would disappear into a room she called her studio for hours at a time, leaving Dana and Ray with an enormous bowl of dry Cheerios and some odd assignment like “go put on a play” or “see if you can find a squirrel and teach him to do tricks.” The strange thing was, they might. When Ray talked to animals, they seemed to listen.
My father couldn’t ever take time off in summer, because of all the jobs that needed doing at our farm, but my mother established a tradition of making a road trip every year during February vacation, when there wasn’t so much that needed doing on the farm, and what there was he could, reluctantly, trust to his helper, a small, wiry boy by the name of Victor Patucci who’d first shown up at our door when he was only fourteen or so, looking for work. Victor was about as unlikely a person as you could have chosen to be a farmer—a smoker, who wore so much Brylcreem his hair reflected light, who followed race car driving and turned up his transistor radio whenever they played an Elvis Presley song, and never seemed to go to school. His father worked in the shoe factory, and my father said he wasn’t a good man—words that stood out for me because my father so seldom spoke ill of anyone.
“The boy could use a helping hand,” my father said when he’d signed Victor up—and though initially my mother protested the thirty-dollar-a-week expense, it was Victor’s presence on our farm that made our annual Dickerson visit possible, and for that she was thankful.
So every March we set out to see the Dickersons. Before embarking on our road trip, my mother filled a cooler with sandwiches and jars of peanut butter and things like beef jerky that didn’t go bad. Then my sisters and I would pile into the backseat of our old Country Squire station wagon with the fake wood paneling and a stack of coloring books and Mad Libs to keep us busy. We’d play I Spy or look for license plates from unusual states and now and then we’d stop at battlefields and historic monuments, and sometimes a museum, but our ultimate destination was whatever run-down house or trailer (and one time, a converted Quonset hut) the Dickersons were living in that year.
The point of this, as always, was what my mother imagined to be my attachment to Dana Dickerson, but for me, the one significant attraction of the trip was knowing I’d get to see Ray Dickerson.
Young as I was, I understood he was handsome, and the knowledge of that made me shy, though I was drawn to him too. The odd thing was that even when I was very young—eight or nine, and he twelve or thirteen—he seemed to take an interest in me over my sisters. On one of our visits, he had spotted a drawing I’d made in the car, of a camel I’d copied off an empty cigarette pack I’d found—only I added a man dressed like Lawrence of Arabia riding on it, and a girl tied up, like a prisoner, on the camel’s other hump.
“Cool picture,” he said. “I’ll give you a Lifesaver for it.”
I would’ve given Ray Dickerson my picture for nothing, but I couldn’t speak.
After that, whenever we made trips
to the Dickersons, I had lots of pictures ready. Things boys might like: spacemen and cowboys, and a portrait of my father’s favorite player on the Red Sox, Ted Williams.
“Just a few more hours, girls,” my mother would say when we complained about the length of the journey, the discomfort of all those hours in the car. But the most uncomfortable part was what happened when we arrived, and Mrs. Dickerson greeted us with that bemused and irritated expression (even as a child, I could see that), offering us lemonade, but never a meal.
The first year after they moved we drove to Pennsylvania to see them, and though that time we fit in a visit to the Liberty Bell, to round out the trip, most of the later trips we made—to Vermont, Connecticut, Vermont again—were made for the sole purpose of catching up with the Dickersons. My mother told Mrs. Dickerson that we were passing through. (Passing through? To where?) The visit might last an hour. Never more than two.
Dana and I shared nothing (she was a tomboy; I was interested in art), but her mother would always suggest we go upstairs to play, at which point I would ask Dana to show me her Barbies—Barbie being a kind of doll my mother didn’t believe in, due to her physique and the provocative clothes the Mattel Company made for her, not that we would have spent the money anyway.
Dana never seemed interested in dolls herself, but Valerie kept giving her new ones, along with an incredible collection of official Barbie outfits, unlike the kind most girls I knew back home had—home sewn by their mothers and grandmothers, often crocheted and picked up at church fairs.
The real Barbie ensembles all had names that I knew from studying the Barbie catalog. My favorite was called “Solo in the Spotlight”—a strapless evening dress with sparkles on the hem that came with a tiny plastic microphone, for nights Barbie performed in nightclubs.
Once, when Dana was in the bathroom, I had stuffed the Barbie gown into my pocket. Dana had so little interest in this kind of thing she hadn’t noticed, but as we were leaving their house, Ray had put an arm around my shoulder and whispered, “You forgot something.” He handed me an odd-shaped package, wrapped in many layers of toilet paper and sealed with tape, and later, when we were on the highway, I opened it. The microphone.
I thought about him all that year. How had he known, for starters—though, of course, it was already proven he was magic. But more important: what did it mean, that Ray Dickerson, so much older than me, and so handsome, had chosen to present me with the treasured item?
The next spring, when we made our pilgrimage to see the Dickersons, I brought him a present of my own—a harmonica I’d bought with money I earned from weeding the strawberries, with mother-of-pearl on the case. But Ray—the main attraction of the trip—was off on his unicycle, so I never got to see him that time. Meanwhile, downstairs, my parents and Valerie Dickerson chatted about people back home, barely known to Valerie, and my mother inquired after Dana’s religious education, such as it was. She’d brought a Junior Bible as a gift.
“That was so thoughtful, Connie,” Mrs. Dickerson told her. “I wish I could invite you to stay for dinner, but I’m taking an art class.”
“Art lessons, a woman her age,” my mother commented to my father as we made our way home along that same long stretch of road, after the lemonade—my father’s back straight at the wheel, his eyes on the road and no place else. “What is Valerie Dickerson thinking?”
“I guess she’s got talent,” he said. Then, after a minute’s silence in the car, or even longer, he added, “Maybe Ruth should take art lessons. She’s got that gift too.”
Sitting in the backseat—the way-back, actually, this being the days before seat belt regulations—I felt a small, hopeful surge of promise, like a faint, thin shaft of light coming through the door, or the hint of breeze on a sweltering day. I loved to draw, a fact my mother hadn’t seemed to notice.
My mother said nothing. Why would she want to pursue any activity that linked me closer to Val Dickerson? Even as my mother sought the woman out, she seemed so filled with judgment and reproach.
“There’s a Howard Johnson’s up ahead, girls,” she said. “We’ll get you each a cone. Just not chocolate. It stains.”
Afterward, standing in the parking lot, licking my ice cream—the one person in our family who chose coffee, when everybody else favored strawberry or vanilla—I thought about a picture I’d seen on the wall at the Dickersons.
It was a print by an artist who was popular at the time, an image of a thin girl with straggly hair and big eyes that filled up half her face. She was holding a flower. The feeling it gave you, looking at this picture, was that the girl the artist had painted was the only person in the world (and very likely this was the only flower). Nobody could be more alone than that girl. And the funny thing was that though I lived in a big family—with my four sisters, crammed into three bedrooms—this was how I felt, too, growing up in that house.
Not that she ever did anything so different, but I had a sense that in some odd way I could not understand, but registered in my heart, my mother never took to me as she did to my sisters. I would feel it when I saw her with one of the others—Naomi, whose hair she liked to braid, or Esther, for whom she had found the nickname “Tootsie,” or Sarah, known as “Honeybun.”
“What’s my nickname?” I asked her one time. She had looked at me with a blank expression then, as if the thought of coming up with yet another endearment was beyond her capacity.
“Ruth,” she said. “That’s a fine name.”
This was when my father stepped in. “I think I’ll call you Beanpole,” he said.
I was different from my sisters. Different from my mother most of all. They didn’t know this about me, but I made up odd stories, and sometimes, as I did, I drew pictures of the things I dreamed up, and sometimes these pictures were so strange, and possibly even shocking, I hid them in my sock drawer. Though there was one person I showed them to, when I had a chance. Ray Dickerson.
The second time we visited them in Vermont, I brought Ray a picture of the two of us—Ray and me—on a spaceship, both of us in spacesuits but still clearly recognizable, with an image of Saturn out the window. At school we’d just done a unit on astronauts and they’d told us about Ham, the chimpanzee they sent into space—an idea that had haunted me, because my teacher never mentioned any plans for bringing the chimp home, only launching him—meaning he was destined to orbit the earth forever, I guessed, until the food ran out and all that was left was a chimp skeleton. In my picture, I was half girl, half chimpanzee. Ray looked like a chimpanzee too.
“Sometimes, I feel like that chimp they launched into space,” he said, when I showed him my picture.
“Only it wouldn’t be so lonely if you had company,” I said, thinking of how in the picture there had been two of us.
He just looked at me then. Maybe he was thinking, What am I doing talking to a little kid? He looked like he might say something—an expression he often had, actually—but he didn’t speak. He just grabbed his unicycle and took off down the driveway, though not before stuffing my picture in his jeans pocket. This was another thing about Ray: he disappeared abruptly. One minute you were having the best conversation. Then he was gone.
Driving home that afternoon, we passed him on the road—his long, angular form cruising on his unicycle. He didn’t see me, but for that one flash of time, I had taken in his face. Long enough to decide I loved this boy.
Dana
Where Trouble Lay
TO MY BROTHER and me, our parents went by their first names, Valerie and George. In all the years we lived with them, I don’t think we ever called them Mom or Dad. It said a lot, our not using those names for them. I’m not sure I ever felt I had parents. Not parents as you normally think of them, anyway.
It’s an odd feeling, growing up in a family where it seems like the adults are the ones who need to grow up. Even when I was very young, I felt that way. They just seemed so unreliable to me. They were so wrapped up in themselves they sometimes seemed to fo
rget they had children.
I was five or six when George quit his job selling ad space at the newspaper in Concord, to write a novel about life on another galaxy where the people wore no clothes. This was the only thing I remember about George’s book. Even when I was little, this fact shocked me. George’s goal was to become a world-renowned writer, which was why we left New Hampshire, the place I was born.
Valerie’s father had just died, and her mother was dead already, and since there were no brothers or sisters, she inherited what he had. This wasn’t much, considering her dad had been a steelworker all his life, but it was enough for George to decide to quit his job and sell the house and live off that money until his ship came in as an author. His goal was not to be simply a writer but “an author.” I never understood what the difference was.
Meanwhile, we’d live in Valerie’s father’s old place, just outside of Pittsburgh. Even then I remember thinking, what if this ship doesn’t come in? I had heard George telling the story for this novel of his—it was something he liked to do on long car rides when we were going somewhere, as was often the case, but every time he did, my mind would wander, which didn’t seem like a good sign. My brother, Ray, also a lover of fantasy, had read me a couple of J. R. R. Tolkien books by now, and C. S. Lewis, and though they were never really my style, either, I could tell a good fantasy from one that made no sense, meaning the kind George was writing.
As for me, as soon as I could read I gravitated to nonfiction, biographies mostly, of people like Annie Oakley and George Washington Carver. Also true stories about animals and nature. My all-time favorite was Ring of Bright Water, about a pair of otters. I loved it that the illustrations were photographs.
The Good Daughters Page 2
