The Good Daughters

by Joyce Maynard

  I worried that while we were waiting for that ship of his, George would spend all the money. If he didn’t sell his book, then where would we be? I was in the third grade at this point, but as it turned out I was right. Where we would be, and were, was in a trailer park in Pennsylvania, and after that, a house in Vermont without indoor plumbing. It’s unclear to me now how George and Valerie decided on these places for us to settle down, for a while anyway. We never stayed for long.

  We were living in the Vermont house when George announced that he was going to become a country-and-western songwriter. He had an idea for a romantic ballad that would be perfect for Les Paul and Mary Ford—though by the time he got it together to record his demo, they were getting divorced. But even without the problem of the singers’ relationship, there seemed to be some pretty big obstacles to this plan.

  “Don’t you have to know how to play the guitar or something if you want to write songs for people?” I said. He thought this was a good idea, and bought one, along with a book on how to learn to play guitar in fourteen days. I did not find this reassuring.

  Back in the days of reel-to-reel tapes, he created a recording studio to work on his demos, in what had been the garage of the house we rented, this time in Connecticut. I wasn’t sure the owner of the house would appreciate it that my father cut a hole in the garage door to let in more light, never mind what he was going to do in wintertime, when it would get pretty chilly in that uninsulated garage.

  By winter the checks would have started rolling in, George told me. Then he could get himself a real place to work on his music, and things like an electric organ. We might even move to Nashville, he said. That’s where the action was in country music.

  Even then, I knew this wasn’t happening, as did Val and my brother probably, though I was the one in the family with the firmest grasp on reality. Even as a kid, I always had the ability to see down the line to where trouble lay, or truth. George used to complain that I expected the worst out of life, but it wasn’t that. I simply recognized that just because the sun was shining one day didn’t mean it would the next. Frost would come, and so would snow. The fact of rain did not rule out the possibility of drought. You could call it pessimism. I based my attitudes on what I saw in the world around me. Not what I dreamed up.

  “Dana has her feet firmly grounded on earth,” one of my teachers wrote about me on a report card. I remembered this because to me it seemed like the nicest kind of compliment, but I could see that for my mother, this was a disappointment.

  “Don’t you ever want to use your imagination?” she said, but I was more the type who based her thinking on what was real—the things I could touch and see.

  I was not one to believe, the way my father did, that things would always turn out the way you wanted them to, or—like my mother—that we should surround ourselves only with what was beautiful. Life wasn’t like that. Even as a child, I knew and accepted this.

  I think I always had an understanding of the seasons and recognized that all of them—winter as much as summer, fall as much as spring—were necessary to sustain the cycle of life. I might be the youngest, but I kept track of the bills. Where the others whistled in the dark, I considered how we might get by in the event of a worst-case scenario. From what I’d seen of the world, those were far more likely to take place than the paydays George kept expecting.

  I loved my brother, Ray. He was the only one in our family who showed me a certain interest, for a while there anyway. But I understood that I was the only truly reasonable person living under whatever roof happened to be sheltering us that season.

  Except for one uncle, we saw no relatives. No cousins. There was one grandparent that I met one time and one time only. All I knew of my heritage was George’s story: that his father had performed in silent movies, where he met my grandmother—the woman, he told us, who had posed for that image we saw at the beginning of every movie made by Columbia Pictures to this day. He called her a legendary beauty of Hollywood. He said she could stop traffic with her amazing body, well into her sixties.

  Traffic? What traffic? My grandparents had lived in Vermont. Due to some kind of falling-out that had something to do with my mother, though we never got the details, I met my grandma only once, when I was five or six, but in distant memory she was an ordinary-looking person who served us meat loaf and called my father Georgie.

  George was a fair-weather type. He wanted every day to be sunny, and never believed, as long as it was, that the sky would ever darken again, as it always did over the broad green horizons he imagined for us all. He liked the idea of having children and being a father, but only long enough to cook up some project for us, which he’d forget about shortly after.

  A picture from our Vermont days: One time at the feed store, where he was buying materials to build a pen for the baby chicks he’d gotten my brother and me for Easter—with no idea what we were going to do with them when they got big—George spotted a wildflower seed mix for sale. He came up with this idea of digging up our lawn and planting the whole thing with wildflower seed instead.

  Back at our rented house, he gave my brother and me paper cups filled with seeds and instructed us to toss them in the ground wherever we wanted, to make the flowers grow in a more natural-looking pattern. He had abandoned the idea of rototilling up the lawn at this point. George preferred to let the seed find its own way into the soil, he said, filling in the patches where the grass was thin.

  I knew, even then, no seedlings would take root that way. Even as he was telling Val how we’d set up a flower stand in summer, selling bouquets, I knew we wouldn’t.

  After his first round of the country-and-western phase, George had a fling with photography. He took up puppeteering. He had this idea he could make a living taking educational puppet shows to schools, teaching children about the importance of good nutrition.

  They were ahead of their time, Val and George, as health food types, vegetarians. George’s plan to make a killing selling vegetable juicers, and juicer franchises, came sometime after that. Then there was the yogurt culture he bought from a guy he met at a truck stop in Virginia, that we would use to set up a yogurt-making business, with pure Vermont honey (we were back up north by this point) for sweetener. After that failed (and despite the fact that neither of them touched seafood) came the clam shack in Maine. In between these projects there were inventions and—this never changed—country songs.

  The years we lived in New Hampshire—where I was born in July of 1950—represented the only time I can remember in which my father held down regular employment. I was eight when we moved, my brother, Ray, twelve. But for years after that, my mother reminisced about the house we lived in there—a place way out on a dirt road that we’d actually bought with a five-thousand-dollar down payment given to my parents by my mother’s uncle Ted, who had made some money from part ownership in a bubble-gum company, of all things.

  Maybe it was the knowledge that a person could get rich from something like bubble gum (or if not rich, that he could end up with an extra five thousand dollars in his pocket, anyway) that inspired George’s own dreams of overnight fame and fortune. Though, quick as he’d earned the bubble gum money, my mother’s uncle had lost the majority of the cash, reinvesting the proceeds, as my mother told me, in a scheme for edible crayons or something like that.

  Perhaps it was a similarity to this uncle of ours that first attracted Val to George. Though what kept them together was harder to figure. And whatever it was, it didn’t keep them together much. The clearest picture I have of George is the sight of him with that briefcase of his, walking out the door headed to some greener pasture, or the twinkling lights of some city where someone had an amazing deal for him, or some grand harbor where, just over the horizon, our ship was coming in.

  RUTH

  Just Fine

  THERE WERE FIVE girls in our family: Naomi, Sarah, Esther, Edwina, and me, the youngest, Ruth. Edwina was the only one who bypassed the biblical name, p
erhaps because by then my mother had begun to realize there might not be a son to carry on her husband’s name, and this would have to do. Once her fifth daughter came along, she had accepted daughters as her destiny and returned to the Old Testament for inspiration.

  My mother did not actually come from New Hampshire, where we lived, but from the Midwest, Wisconsin. Cheese country, she said, and it was cheese that brought her to the farm. The Planks raised cows, and wanted to learn cheese making.

  Her father had come east to deliver some kind of cheese-making equipment. He’d brought his daughter on the trip, to mark her high school graduation and show her the world. As it would turn out, this was as much of it as she would get to see beyond prayer groups in Maine, now and then, and those road trips to check in with the Dickersons.

  She was eighteen when she met my father, nineteen when she married him, though he was seven years older. There were hardly any men around in those days, with the war going on, but my father had been granted an exemption from military service, to stay back home and run the family farm. As the oldest of the three Plank brothers, the rest of whom had enlisted in the armed services to fight in Europe, my father was needed at home, and even the government agreed.

  All his life, the fact that he had not fought in the war was a source of shame and guilt to my father, but the absence of competition in the form of other available suitors had no doubt also made it possible to persuade my mother to marry him, even if, as she told us regularly, the role of farmer’s wife had never been her ambition.

  Once she was installed on Plank Farm, though, she did not question it, or him. For all the years of my growing up, and plenty after that, my mother put in fourteen-hour days, in the kitchen mostly—baking bread and tending the baked beans and feeding our laundry through the wringer washer, hanging my father’s overalls on the line every morning, canning vegetables in the pressure cooker to get us through the winters and, of course, running our farm stand.

  Ours wasn’t the kind of family she’d grown up in—the cheese business having been more lucrative, evidently, than farming was for us—but she displayed not an ounce of nostalgia for the life she’d left back in Wisconsin, and anyway, that was over. Once she made her bed, she liked to say, she’d lie in it.

  For my father, there was never a day in his life he didn’t know who he was or where he was headed: to the barn first, to milk our cows, then out to the fields, to start up the Massey Ferguson. Except for winters, that’s how his days went, and he waited out the winters with a controlled impatience, preparing to start the cycle all over again in the new year, beginning with the arrival, every January second, of the new catalog from Ernie’s A-1 Seeds.

  My father’s family were lackluster Presbyterians, but my mother brought a stronger dose of God into the mix, coming as she did from midwestern Lutheran stock. And though, in most departments, my father’s word dictated how we lived our lives, when it came to religion, my mother steered our course.

  Back then she was a rare midwestern transplant in New England. Her two sisters and her parents remained out in Wisconsin. Money being in short supply, and with a family our size, we didn’t go there. That was the reason our mother gave us at the time, anyway, for why we never visited. I never questioned this, or wondered why, among the framed photographs of Plank ancestors that covered our mantel and every wall on our old farmhouse, no image of her own family was part of the display. I questioned little in those days.

  I think now my mother must have led a lonely life on the farm—my father not much of a talker, the women of the church having all come from around those parts and, even after twenty years, after thirty, viewing my mother as something of an outsider. She attended women’s Bible study and Rainbow Girls gatherings during which recipes and household hints were exchanged, and remedies for childhood ailments, and where, once a year, the women got together to perform skits based on lessons from the New Testament.

  When the annual holiday bazaar rolled round, she made her pot holders to raise money for starving children in Africa, but my parents didn’t socialize with anyone outside church. My father didn’t go out anyplace but the feed store and to meetings of the volunteer firemen. Evenings, our mother read Agatha Christie novels, or the Bible, though once we got our television, she developed a deep and surprising affection for Dinah Shore—a woman of the Jewish persuasion, she said. But with a voice like an angel.

  “If that Dinah Shore lived here in town, I know we’d be friends,” she told me once. Later, when Dinah took up with a younger man, Burt Reynolds, I found a copy of the National Enquirer at the bottom of my mother’s sewing basket, with a photograph of Burt and Dinah on the front. Whatever my mother made of that one, she never said.

  My mother’s only real-life friend (not counting Val Dickerson, and Val Dickerson could not be counted) was Nancy Edmunds, wife of our insurance agent, who lived down the road. The two of them got together for coffee—not often, because my mother was always busy with the chores, but every now and then. Nancy liked to do hair, and though my mother would never have paid money to visit a beauty parlor, she let Nancy give her a permanent wave once, and another time (this was long after, when they both must have been nearing fifty) Nancy dyed my mother’s hair. It came out jet black, and if the objective had been to make her look younger—to cover the gray—the experiment failed.

  “You were just fine the way you were, Connie,” my father said, when he saw the results. The closest to a compliment I ever heard out of him, perhaps, though you might say it was just the opposite, and said less about how good she’d looked before the hair dye than how odd she had looked after.

  A few years before this, around the time the oldest of the Edmunds kids and I were entering high school, it was discovered that Nancy’s husband, Ralph—our agent with Granite State for as long as my father had run the farm—had been embezzling money from the company. Next thing you knew, Ralph Edmunds disappeared.

  A week later it turned out he’d taken a train to Las Vegas, in the hopes that he might win back everything he’d lost, but that wasn’t what happened. They found him at some motel next to a casino, hanging from the shower rod, with a note on the bed addressed to Nancy, apologizing for ruining her life.

  Most people in our town stopped having much to do with Nancy and her kids after that, but my mother stuck by her friend, even after they lost their house and their car and Nancy Edmunds had to take a job at Perry’s Meat Market. My mother found some Bible verse that applied to the situation, she said, but really, I think, it was more the upbeat Dinah Shore philosophy than the scriptures that guided her. A person didn’t abandon her friend in hard times. That’s when they needed you most.

  Dana

  Roots

  AFTER THE NEW Hampshire house was sold, we became renters, and we were always renters after that. This may explain why one of my earliest resolutions for my own life was that I would own a piece of land some day. What kind of structure might stand on it barely mattered, but soil did, and a deed of ownership. Roots.

  Val and George never cared about those things that much—though Val wanted one thing, which was a place to do her art. All those years, there was always paint under her fingernails and some picture in the works, though more often than not, when we moved, she’d have to leave her canvases behind. When she died, there was almost nothing to show of all those years she’d spent making those strange, sad pictures. They were of faces, mostly, and people she dreamed up, places that didn’t exist.

  As a young girl growing up in Pennsylvania, my mother had wanted to be an artist, but there was never any money for art school, and anyway, she told me once, her parents—her father worked at a steel mill; her mother kept house—didn’t think “artist” was a real job.

  She was working as a waitress in Pittsburgh when a man had given her his card. “With that long, thin figure of yours, you could be a model,” he told her—an old story, but not one she’d ever heard. “Call me if you come to New York City and I’ll set you up.”<
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  She didn’t care about modeling. But New York sounded good, and getting away from her parents sounded better. Uncle Ted fronted her a hundred dollars, and five days later she was on a bus to the big city.

  It turned out the modeling job involved walking around a Times Square bar in four-inch heels carrying a tray of cigarettes and candy and wearing an outfit that was basically underwear decorated with bits of fluff and a few sparkles. “A Peachy Puff Girl,” she was called. Thursday nights she went to look at the art at the Metropolitan Museum and sometimes brought a sketch pad to copy some painting she liked.

  But art school wasn’t happening. Simply coming up with rent money was enough of a challenge, particularly for a girl like Valerie, who was never good with finances, and who—every time she had a few extra dollars—did something crazy with it like buying a deluxe set of pastels or a gold leather purse she saw in the window of Macy’s, even though she had no place to take it.

  It was on her rounds as a Peachy Puff girl that she met George, who was having a drink at the bar where she worked. He told her he was a writer. He had come to the city to meet with an editor who wanted to publish his novel. They were working out a few last details of the deal. (Later, it turned out the details included a five-hundred-dollar down payment, from George to his publisher, for getting Vanquished Desire into print. But that night, at least, George was one step away from becoming the next Erle Stanley Gardner.)

  After all the traveling salesmen she’d met (though soon enough, she’d be married to one) the idea of knowing a writer struck Valerie as exciting. She told him she wanted to be an artist.

  “Hey, we should go someplace like Vermont or New Hampshire and live off the land,” he said. “I’d write best-selling novels and you’d make beautiful paintings.”