In two weeks they were on their way north.
Years later, when Val and George were well into their forties and living in a funky apartment near Cocoa Beach, Florida—the last place they shared before George took off for good—George went to an art auction he read about in the paper. He came back having spent most of their savings—eight thousand dollars, if memory serves me—on a bunch of artwork he told my mother they could resell for three times what he paid, or more. A few days later he arranged for an appraiser to come over and take a look at his collection.
Among his purchases that day was a painting alleged to have been made by Salvador Dalí, and another that was by Fernand Léger, and a Frederic Remington statue of a cowboy, and a drawing the auctioneer attributed to a student of Leonardo da Vinci, with a letter taped on the back supposedly confirming this.
It took the appraiser less than five minutes to examine the collection. They were all fakes. George had fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.
The appraiser was just getting up to go when he spotted a portrait over our couch, of a woman in a red hat, smoking a cigarette. “Who did this one?” he said, with a tone of renewed interest. “You’ve actually got something here.”
The painting was Val’s. We had a storage room full of more of her work. There was no market for them, however—then or ever. Eventually, in her later years, after George was long gone, she made a little money doing greeting cards and pastel portraits of people’s children. Fifty dollars a portrait, seventy-five if there were two heads in the frame rather than one.
All in all, we were about as unlikely a family as you could imagine to have befriended people like the Planks. We didn’t exactly befriend them, of course. In fact, over the many years we kept receiving cards and letters from Plank Farm—forwarded from some previous address more often than not—Val often commented to us on the strangeness of Connie’s stubborn insistence that the two families remain in touch.
One night Val read a letter out loud to us over our dinner of lentils and celery and beet juice, imitating Connie’s voice as she might have spoken the words, and laughing in a way that struck me even then as unfair.
“Tell Dana for us that our Ruth has now entered the beautiful and special phase of womanhood,” Connie had written. “I know she’d enjoy hearing from Dana about her own experiences in that regard.”
My brother, Ray, had practically spit up his juice, hearing this. “The special phase of womanhood!” he said, gagging.
“Like I’d really write a letter to some girl I hardly know,” I said. About menstruation, of all things.
We made fun of the Plank family, if we thought of them at all, which wasn’t that often, though there was always the Christmas card, and oddly enough, Val always sent them a Christmas letter—which was a linoleum print she made, sometimes accompanied by the photograph George took of us each year, using a timer on the camera so he could be in it too. We even paid a visit to the farm stand most summers, usually around the time of Ruth’s and my birthday, which was strawberry season.
I think it actually mattered to Val more than she liked to admit, to know what this family was doing, and what they thought of us. Connie Plank was like that kind of hungry and determined cat that shows up at your door with such persistence—not all the time, but often enough—that you finally decide you might as well start feeding it.
“I feel sorry for Edwin,” Val said one time. “He goes along with that woman, but you know she drives him crazy. He should never have married someone like her.”
But here was the oddest thing: somewhere along the line, on one of those Christmases when the letter from the Planks arrived as it always did, with the same reports (how many calves were born that spring, the girls’ education, church events and the annual bazaar, followed by the yearly thanks to God for all his many blessings), it occurred to me that if the day ever came when Connie ceased to write, I would miss the presence of the Planks in our life. I had come to enjoy, in particular, our summer visits to the farm stand. I liked the dependability of the farm, for one thing—the fact that there was one place in my life—one place only, perhaps—that was always going to be there, where nothing much was ever going to change.
And I loved learning about the farm—those times on our strawberry season visits when (busy as he was, and he was always busy) Edwin Plank would drop what he was doing and show me some new development. He explained to me the reason he kept two kinds of cows—Guernseys for cream, Holsteins for milk. He was trying out a certain kind of Chinese bean with seeds brought to him by his one Chinese customer. (“Chinaman” was the term he used. This was the early sixties. That was what you said in those days.)
Another time he had reached into his pocket and pulled out for me a potato he said he’d noticed while digging up one of the hills.
“What do you make of this?” he said. “Darned thing’s the spitting image of Lyndon Johnson.”
Looking back, it was surprising how he seemed to recognize, early on, that I was a person who’d be interested in such things. I remember one year he was excited (as excited as a person like Edwin ever appears) over a new variety of butter-and-sugar corn that blended the best of both worlds: the flavor of yellow corn with the sweetness and crunchiness of white corn. Another time he told me the story of the Big Boy tomato, the first real commercial hybrid variety, developed by the son of a Ukrainian farmer, that was brought out by the Burpee company the year before my birth and Ruth’s—1949.
“Imagine thinking up a whole new vegetable,” he told me, as he handed me a sample.
“Now that would be a legacy to leave your grandchildren,” he said.
Though I was still young when we had these conversations—once a year at most, walking the rows, while back at the house Connie served Val coffee from the percolator, not instant—I liked our visits. I appreciated Edwin Plank’s sober reflection on the pride and comfort he found, early mornings in the barn, milking the cows, and most of all, running his old Massey Ferguson across his fields, knowing the furrows he was carving out were the very same ones his own father and grandfather before him had turned over in decades past.
“They’re long dead now, of course,” he said. “The only things that carry on for sure are the seasons and the crops.”
Young as I was, hearing him say this moved me. Some part of me admired the Plank family’s steadiness and constancy, the order with which their lives unfolded, particularly measured against the untidiness of our own. I loved the idea that a handful of corn seeds, properly planted and tended, would lead to tall, straight stalks, and food. Girls weren’t supposed to care about these things—particularly in those days—but I was never a girl who cared about Barbie dolls or dresses. Even though Val, who loved those things, kept giving them to me.
I liked to put my hands in the dirt, felt drawn to it. I wished I could drive a tractor. Upstairs, alone in my room, I tried on my brother’s jeans and rolled up the cuffs. I used to say, when people asked me, that I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up. That or a mother, because that was what girls said in those days, even a girl like me, with a mother like mine.
I told no one this, but the truth was, I dreamed of being a farmer like Edwin Plank.
RUTH
A Long Line
FOR ALL THE generations of the family I grew up in—ten of them, by the time I came along—it was having a son to carry on the farm that mattered most, and so, for a Plank, the birth of nothing but daughters, one after the other, had to have been a cruel disappointment on at least one level. But my father never treated the fact of our gender as anything besides a marvel. He spoke of us as “my girls,” and it always seemed, when he did, that he took a particular pride in the fact of having fathered such a brood. If he ever allowed himself to imagine the son he didn’t have, he never let us know.
But there remained a question nobody spoke of, though we all knew it was there: what would happen to the farm when he was no longer able to tend the land? Who would carry on, aft
er?
I was never so young that I didn’t know what it meant to be a Plank—that we were marching at the end of a long line dating back a few hundred years with the responsibility to tend our land well and turn it over to the next generation. The people would come and go. It was the farm that endured, and in our family and the world at large, it was believed this was a man’s job.
Nobody ever doubted that my father loved us all, but it had not been a natural idea for him to share his work with a girl child. With my older sisters, there seemed no interest on their part to know our father’s world of the barn and the fields, but I longed to be with him. Not so much for love of farming, perhaps, as for the love of him. And perhaps because by the time I came along, he’d given up on fathering a son, he acquiesced to my joining him for his morning chores.
I had to wake before dawn if I wanted to accompany him out to the barn, his workday began so early. Those mornings I’d jump out of bed and pull on my pants and shirt, step into my Keds without even lacing them, and scurry down the stairs just as he set his coffee mug down and headed out the door with our dog, Sadie, close behind. He might greet me, might not. My father inhabited another world when he had milking and crops on his mind.
I usually trudged a few steps behind him. I had a hard time keeping up, his stride was so long, but it was important to get to the barn when he did, so I could slip in with him. The door, on its heavy iron hinges, was way too heavy for me to open by myself, but he held it open for me, as long as I didn’t lollygag.
Entering the barn, I’d be hit with the aroma of the manure and the fragrant hay up in the loft, where my father had put up a swing for my sisters and me. Hanging on the wall were the worn leather harnesses and collars our old workhorses used to wear. They’d been retired back when I was very little, but my father always said they deserved to live out their days in the home they started out in and the pastures they knew.
First off we headed to the feed supplies. This would be when my father might at last look up at me and nod. “You want to lend a hand here, Ruthie?” he said.
One by one then, we fed the animals—my father up ahead, and me, his eager helper following behind. Wordlessly, my father forked the silage into a wheelbarrow, then worked his way down the rows, making sure every cow got her share. I followed along, trying to whistle the way he did. I’d use my hoe to gather up the manure and then scrape it into the gutter, which ran the length of the barn, where we collected it.
As I worked I loved to think about how connected everything was on our farm—that the hay and silage our cows were munching had been grown here on our land, and that the manure the cows would create, from eating it, would ripen and be returned to that same land come spring, to fertilize the soil and start the process all over again.
While the cows were eating my father did the milking. My job: filling a bucket with a mix of water and disinfectant for wiping down the udders of each of our four cows—two Guernseys, two Holsteins—to keep them healthy. And sometimes, if I finished before my father, I climbed up into the prized Model T Ford he kept in the barn, and sat behind the steering wheel, pretending to drive.
My father said we didn’t need a fancy milking setup. The old-fashioned way was good enough. He’d lower his long frame onto a three-legged stool, with his forehead leaned against the cow’s flank and his fingers rhythmically working the teats, with a bucket below to catch the warm stream of milk and our old barn cat, Susan, waiting expectantly for her share. Her reward, my father said, for keeping the mouse population in check.
After we finished in the barn, we headed out to the truck and began our rounds of the farm. From his silence, you would have thought he didn’t even know I was there, except he’d never start the ignition until I’d climbed up beside him and Sadie, on the seat of his old Dodge truck. On the dashboard he kept his farm log, in which he recorded every day’s observations of rainfall and weather conditions and planting data—with comments like “Poor resistance to bottom rot. Plant in drier ground next time” or “Too much leaf, not enough yield. Don’t use again.”
We made our stops like milkmen—checking in on the cabbages in one field, the carrots next, to see what rows needed weeding or thinning that day, and what crops were ready for harvest. My father always kept a bucket of clippers and knives on the floor for cutting broccoli or cabbage or lettuce when they were ready. Sometimes I’d munch on a carrot he pulled for me as we worked.
We hardly ever talked on those mornings, or if we did, it was just a few words. Mostly he worked in silence, or whistled. But I loved those times with my father, when I had him all to myself. I waited for the end of his long workday to come, when we’d head to the irrigation pond and take a swim—my father in his shorts, me in my underwear, our two pairs of shoes (his heavy boots and my Keds) lined up along the shore, side by side.
My sisters never liked the water, but I was a fish, he said. So he taught me how to hold my breath underwater, and do the crawl, and then, the summer I turned seven or eight, how to dive off the big granite boulder at the far end of the pond. He said I had the build of a diver, meaning the same build as him.
After, we’d head up to the house for dinner with the family. My mother must have noticed our wet hair, but she never made a comment, though I sensed a certain edge of disapproval. She was afraid of the water and kept her distance from the pond, same as my sisters did. Swimming belonged to my father and me alone. The irrigation pond was our spot and ours only.
Dana
Windowsill Garden
WALKING HOME FROM school, sometimes, I’d study other kids with their dads and wonder what it would be like to have a father like that. Mine, when he was home, seemed more like a lodger than a member of our family. He’d turn up in between what he referred to as his business trips, wearing some fancy shirt and, if his latest project had taken him to some warmer climate, a tan. For my brother, George’s greeting was a slap on the back of the kind businessmen or fraternity brothers might give one another. Though even as a kid, Ray was never the backslapping type.
For me there was a kiss on the cheek, or he’d pat my head as if I were a puppy. He brought me hotel soaps and shower caps, and once, a shirt with rhinestones on the front that said I LEFT IT IN LAS VEGAS. I often wondered, did he know me at all? How could he, and think I’d wear that shirt?
With Val, George seemed to adopt a kind of sharp and bitter humor lacking anything that passed for affection. They’d disappear into the bedroom shortly after his return from one or another of those trips, but I never saw them kiss, and when he spoke of her, it was usually to make fun of something—her poor housekeeping skills, her hopeless cooking, how much money she spent on paint.
I was too young to understand, but there was always an edge in his voice that left me anxious. “Your mom find any new boyfriends while I was away?” he’d ask. Or once, to my brother, he said, “Take a piece of advice from me, buddy. You’re better off with an ugly woman. Those are the ones you can count on to stay out of trouble.”
Val never said anything when he made these comments. None of us did. At times like this my brother could be counted on to head off on his unicycle, or pull his harmonica out of his pocket and start blowing on it. Val disappeared into whatever space she’d set up for herself to do her artwork. My father usually headed out for a beer. He no longer gave any indication of working on his novel.
As for me, I went to the library and checked out a new biography of some inspirational figure—Nellie Bly, reporter; Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross; Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad. I tended my windowsill avocado plants and concocted interesting combinations of organic materials—coffee grounds, crumbled-up eggshells, and old vegetable peels put through our juicer—to use as fertilizer. I conducted experiments with bean sprouts and bread mold. I dreamed I was living in the country somewhere, raising chickens and living off the land, with no people around to mess things up.
RUTH
Staying Within th
e Lines
THINGS WERE NEVER easy with my mother, but I adored my dad. My father alone, of all the people in our family, seemed to appreciate me, even if he didn’t always understand what was going on in my head. Where my mother remained distant and dismissive, my father offered nothing but love. Stern as he could be if I’d neglected my chores in the barn, or there was mold on the blueberry bushes I was supposed to be looking after, he seemed only delighted by all the ways in which I revealed myself as different from the others.
“My beanpole,” he called me. “After all these years of tending corn, someone up there must’ve thought I should have a daughter with hair the color of corn silk.”
“I didn’t get a son,” he said. “But I got an artist.”
All those years growing up, I had felt my mother’s coolness toward me. She was never an easily affectionate person. But where her quiet, contained expressions of affection for the other girls came naturally—if not in abundance—with me, she always seemed to have been following directions, going through the motions of brushing my hair or kissing my cheek, in the same diligent manner with which she would go through the steps for canning tomatoes correctly in the pressure cooker or making pickles. There was always, in her behavior toward me, a sense that she was having to remind herself “Don’t leave Ruth out.” Her touch had a mechanical quality. Her words of encouragement, a script.
She’d compliment Esther or Naomi on a paper they brought home from school, or tape up a drawing they’d made—then, as if following a checklist, add, “What about you, Ruth? Show me what you did today.” Worst of all was when she hugged me. Her lips on my cheek felt dry and frozen. I imagined that she must be counting the seconds before dropping her arms from that stiff embrace. One one thousand, two one thousand. Then, abruptly, release. A relief to us both.
The Good Daughters Page 4
