The Good Daughters

by Joyce Maynard

  I’d show her my drawings, of course, that being what I did best. I loved art class, and hungered for access to oil pastels and paints, and things like glue and glitter, markers and construction paper and silver foil, that we never had around. At our house, the same box of Crayolas had remained on the shelf for as long as I could remember. Jumbo, but so old now that all the best colors—like purple and orange, pink, bright yellow, crimson—were used up or worn down to the nub.

  I asked my mother once if we could get a new box. “They wouldn’t get used up so quickly if you didn’t press down so hard,” she said. “And anyway, there’s plenty left.” Meaning brown, gray, beige. In my mother’s book, colors were interchangeable.

  And oddly, though I was always the one who loved to draw, my mother demonstrated a strong preference for the pictures my sisters brought to her. Winnie’s specialty was coloring books, where she, better than any of the rest of us, had mastered the ability to stay within the lines. Naomi had become particularly skillful at copying Peanuts characters.

  “We should send this in to the newspaper,” she said one time when Naomi brought her a likeness of Charlie Brown standing in front of the doghouse, with Snoopy on top.

  “It’s a copy,” I said, but only to myself. Why would the newspaper want to publish my sister’s drawing, when they already had the real cartoons?

  My own pictures were full of made-up images that I worked on out in our barn, in the hayloft—fantasy figures, beautiful girls in dresses fancier, even, than the outfits of Dana Dickerson’s Barbie. It was one of the many things I liked about drawing, the way—on paper—you could dream up anything you wanted, your only limitations those of your imagination, which in my case meant no limits at all.

  It was viewed as a problem in our family—this fantasy life of mine, and my capacity to think up stories and scenarios. To my mother, this kind of activity suggested a deceitful character, and a susceptibility to the temptations of impure thought. All the stories we needed were right there in the Bible. Why go further?

  But in my bed I did. I lay there sometimes, with my sister Esther asleep across from me and Winnie on the bunk above—and thought up characters and situations they’d find themselves in.

  Sometimes I acted them out, but only in my head. I imagined an orphan girl who works on a farm, weeding strawberries until one day a woman pulls up and sees her there. First she buys all the strawberries. Then, as the girl is carrying the flats of ripe berries out to her limousine, the woman asks, “Where do you live?”

  “Over there,” says the orphan girl, pointing to the barn, where she sleeps next to the cows on a hard pallet her cruel employer has given her, with only a scratchy horsehair blanket for cold nights.

  “I’m taking you away with me,” the woman says.

  “What about my clothes?” the girl asks, meaning a few rags and a pillow-case with holes for her head and arms that the cruel farmer’s wife has given her.

  “Never mind those,” the woman says, stroking the girl’s head and pressing her tight against the soft white fur of her cloak. “We’ll buy you everything you need when you come to live with me in Hollywood.”

  Of course the woman turns out to be a movie star. The two of them make a movie together, in which the orphan girl, whose name is Rose, plays the star’s beloved daughter. She’s famous now. Off-screen, Rose is adopted by the beautiful movie star.

  One day the cruel farmers go to the movies.

  “That pretty little girl up on the screen looks familiar,” the farmer’s wife says to the farmer.

  “Oh my God, it’s Rose,” he tells her. “If only we’d treated her better. Now it’s too late.”

  Later I’d tell myself a different kind of story. I did this at night still—or times at the farm, when I’d be driving the tractor or hoeing the tomatoes. Around age twelve—at about the age my mother sent the Dickersons that mortifying announcement of my recent entry into womanhood, with little in the way of additional explanation for me concerning this development besides the information that I’d better be careful now, and my sisters would answer my questions if I had any—I started including a new set of characters in my stories.

  These were boys around the age of the ones my father tended to hire to help out in the summer, but handsomer. Not Victor Patucci, though he was always around. Victor had acne—from all that hair cream I figured—and instead of calling our cows by their real names, he referred to them by the names of Playboy centerfolds, whose pictures I found when I was up in the loft one day, in a secret stash he’d evidently tucked behind some hay bales. The kind of boys I liked were more along the lines of Bob Dylan, whose album—with a soulful picture of him walking down a street in New York City with his beautiful long-haired girlfriend—I played on Sarah and Naomi’s record player as much as my sisters allowed me. I kept this to myself, but the harmonica parts always made me think of Ray Dickerson.

  Sometimes I dreamed of Bob Dylan. Sometimes Ray. Where my old stories featured shopping trips for dresses and rooms with four-poster beds, the pictures that filled my head now showed these boys taking my clothes off, though I never could picture how it would be if they’d taken off their own. In one, Bob Dylan was brushing my hair. Then he was kissing me. Then his hands were touching my breasts, and I was touching them, too, as I thought about this. Then lower. The place my mother did not ever talk about, except to say that babies came from there.

  Not just babies.

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE, MY father had brought home a book called Harold and the Purple Crayon. My mother never had much use for children’s stories, but my dad used to take me to the town library—rainy days, when there was no way to work in the fields and nothing much was going on in our greenhouse that couldn’t wait till tomorrow.

  In this book, the boy named Harold gets a magic crayon and starts drawing things with it, and as he does, the lines he makes come to life, so when he draws an apple, he can actually eat it, and when he draws a rocket ship, he rides on it to space.

  The message was clear to me: a person who can draw can do anything, go anywhere. This was the kind of person I wanted to be, and the fact that my father recognized that well enough to pick out that book for me was what I loved about him. One of the things.

  I also believed my father—my father, alone—recognized and felt pride in my artistic talent. When we needed a sign for the farm stand (FIRST PEAS! SPRING ONIONS! PLEASE DON’T PEEL THE CORN! WE PROMISE THERE’S NO WORMS!), I was the one given the job of making it. When our dog, Sadie, died, he asked me to paint a picture to remember her by.

  My father hardly ever took a day off work, besides those car trips every February to wherever the Dickersons lived at the time, and every now and then down to where the state agricultural school was, if some pest was giving him trouble and he needed advice, or soil testing. These were rare times my father set aside his Dickies overalls and put on his brown pants and regular shoes. He’d make an appointment to visit the lab, and when we walked in, carrying our soil samples, or a Tupperware container with a pinch of leaf mold or a fungus that was worrying him, or a new strain of potato bug, one of the professors would analyze the situation.

  My sisters never came along on those trips, and I loved it that I got him all to myself then—sitting next to him on the bench seat of our old Dodge truck listening to the radio, or just the sound of him whistling, or talking about things in a way that never happened when my mother was around. Stories from the old days, when he was growing up on the farm. The time he spent a whole summer cultivating a pumpkin with the hope of winning first prize in a 4-H competition at the fall harvest fair, and then the night before the competition, a hailstorm had destroyed it. A trip he made to New York City—home of Greenwich Village, home of Dylan!—with his grandfather to the 1939 World’s Fair.

  The war, and my father’s obligation to run the family farm, had ended my father’s plans for a college education. He wanted that for me.

  Meanwhile, he loved visiting the agriculture profess
ors, and talking with them about issues on the farm. They had the book learning, he had the field experience. “If we could just get together on this stuff,” he said, “there’s no telling what us farmers could grow.”

  I loved those days, just my father and me, traipsing over the university campus, carrying our soil specimens and plant samples. After we were done talking with some professor there, my father took me over to the experimental barns where they bred the cattle. They had this one bull there, a new breed they’d been developing, though still in the experimental phase. I asked my father what he meant by that.

  “This is a prize bull,” my father told me. “Back home we breed cows the old-fashioned way, but here at the university the students extract the semen from him and inject it into cows they’ve selected for the purpose of improving the breed. Eventually, they hope they’ll come up with a whole new breed, created right here in the state of New Hampshire.”

  We were standing outside this bull’s pen at the time. The sign on the front of his stall said his name was Rocky. He was the biggest bull I’d ever seen, though the fact that he’d been confined within such a small space, and he looked so angry about that, no doubt contributed to the sense you got looking at him that this bull was enormous. I got the feeling he might at any moment break right through the bars and stomp on us, but I felt safe, because I was holding my father’s hand, and I always felt safe when he was there.

  I asked him how they got the semen. If I’d known better what it was, I might have felt embarrassed but I didn’t. He would never have talked about these things if my mother was around, but when it was just the two of us, as it often was, my father loosened up considerably.

  “One of the things I love about being a farmer,” he said, “is having the opportunity to put together totally different genetic strains and come up with a whole new breed of living thing. Could be a cow. Could be a watermelon. That’s how it is when a man and a woman get together too. You mix up the bloodlines and come up with the best of both, if you’re lucky. Like I did with you.”

  Later that night, the bull entered my dreams. He was stomping his huge hoof in the sawdust of his pen, and his eyes were red, and there was drool coming out his flaring nostrils. He was scary, but something about him was exciting too.

  When I came down to breakfast the next morning, my mother was at the stove, as usual, making the oatmeal. My sisters were already at their places.

  “Did you and your father have a nice time at the university?” she said.

  “Yup,” I said. “Very educational.”

  Dana

  The Idea of Love

  THE FIRST THING people noticed about Val was usually her height, which was closing in on six feet. She stood a little taller than George, in fact. But that wasn’t the only striking aspect to her appearance. She had this long blond hair, and blue eyes, and she moved like a dancer. Her fingers, though they were always covered with paint, were the kind you’d see in a magazine advertisement for hand lotion or diamond rings, not that she had one. She wasn’t beautiful in the way movie stars and fashion models might be, but she had this very long, thin face, with a surprisingly wide space between her nose and her upper lip, which gave her a faintly animal appearance. She was the type of person other people looked at when she came into a room, without her making any effort to produce that result.

  Unlike myself. I was short, with hair of a shade people tend to call dirty brown, and where my mother’s legs stretched long and thin, with elegant narrow ankles and high arches like a ballerina’s, I had thick calf muscles and wide, broad feet. Even in girlhood—long before menopause sealed the deal—I had a short, thick waist that inspired my mother to comment that I had the kind of body high-waisted dresses were invented for.

  But the truth was, I didn’t like any kind of dresses. I have always felt most comfortable in jeans or overalls or, if the situation calls for it, wide, cuffed men’s trousers with a tucked-in shirt, never mind if it makes me look boyish and thick. Why pretend? I am.

  The way Val kept presenting me with frilly clothes and things to put in my hair, even after I’d cut most of it off, always seemed bizarre to me. Every year on my birthday I got a new Barbie doll that I might never have taken out of the box if it hadn’t been for those times Ruth Plank and her sisters came to visit. I would have given them the whole lot, but I knew my mother wouldn’t want me to. She was the one who really loved those dolls.

  Who she wanted for a daughter was someone she could have done things with, like try on clothes, or play with hairstyles, or do craft projects and make dollhouses. Val loved making things with fabric and bright colors and glued-on sequins—beaded necklaces, hand-painted shawls, ruffled outfits. Dirty as her fingernails were most of the time from painting, she would probably have loved going to one of those nail salons to get a manicure.

  I never got the impression that there was love between Val and George, but Val had a big-time romantic streak. She used to do things like turn out all the lights and put candles all over the house, if George had been away for a while on one of his trips, and she’d have music going, like maybe Peggy Lee or Dean Martin, and then she’d meet him at the door in some amazing outfit she’d cooked up, with scarves and lace and possibly not that much else, which freaked out my brother in particular. He learned to make himself scarce on those nights.

  I got the feeling she always ended up disappointed though. Val was a woman who loved the idea of love—more, possibly, than the reality of loving someone. She liked the trappings and the drama.

  Her real love—more than George, and more than my brother and me when you got down to it, though I believe she loved us in her way—was going into whatever odd, cramped little space she’d made for herself in whatever place we’d touched down, and making artwork.

  She painted faces mostly, generally women. Sometimes she cut pictures out of magazines to use for inspiration. She painted herself often, though always in made-up circumstances—riding a horse, on a trapeze, dressed in an evening gown at some imaginary ball. I used to wish she’d make a painting of me, but if she had, she would have had to study my face for a long time, and I had the oddest feeling that she didn’t like to look at me. Not that she didn’t love me. She just preferred not to consider my face too closely, having surely recognized long before that it contained not even the faintest sign of what she loved best, which was beauty.

  I KNEW, VERY YOUNG, THAT I liked a certain kind of woman, a strong one. A woman nothing like my mother, though I could be drawn to beauty too.

  The first woman I remember having a crush on was the actress who played Perry Mason’s secretary on TV, Della Street. Perry might win the cases, and his big tall buddy, Paul Drake, stepped in when a little muscle was needed, but Della had this cool, calm, organized manner, like nothing ever flustered her, and underneath her gentle exterior there was a firmness and command I liked. Unlike the woman I lived with—my mother—this one had a handle on things.

  I imagined how it would be if Della came to our house. How she’d get rid of all those variously dated and mostly out-of-date yogurt cultures on the windowsill, the frozen orange juice cans with paintbrushes lying around, my father’s tapes spooling off the reels, my brother’s Mad magazines, my mother’s sequins and hair ornaments littering the floor, and all those unopened bills from the phone company and some recording studio where George made a demo one time, forwarded from whatever town we’d lived in before.

  I watched The Patty Duke Show, about two identical cousins—one of whom grew up in London, the other in a place near New York City called Brooklyn. The proper, refined London girl, Cathy, comes to live with the family of the Brooklyn girl, Patty, who is a fun, wild, American teenager type. But I always liked Cathy best. She was sensible and cautious, where Patty was boy-crazy and immature. Patty got on my nerves.

  In fact, I watched television a lot in those days, searching for women to model myself on. I liked Julia Child’s big, confident voice and how she handled a roasting chicken, an
d the runner, Wilma Rudolph, who won three medals at the 1960 Olympics even though she’d been born with polio. I liked Donna Reed, not only because she was beautiful, but because she seemed kind, and steady, in a way I longed for my own parents to be. I loved The Beverly Hillbillies, but not because the ridiculous antics of the Clampett family amused me. The one I related to was the no-nonsense secretary Miss Jane Hathaway, the one sane character in the bunch. Something about her long thin frame and her plainness, even homeliness—particularly set off by the frilly excesses of Elly May—stirred my heart.

  I was thirteen when I realized that how I felt about these women differed from how my brother viewed certain male celebrities and hero types.

  For me, the women whose images covered the walls in my room were not simply people I admired, or ones whose music or performances appealed to me. I didn’t just like these women. I thought about kissing them, and for the first time that I remember—having been all my life a person seemingly lacking in imagination—I imagined what I’d like to do with them.

  I pictured the women wrapping their arms around me, and their legs, and pressing their hands into my flesh, running their fingers through my hair and down my neck.

  I didn’t know the word for who I was or how I felt, when I first started getting these feelings. I only knew I wasn’t like other girls, who screamed when they saw the Beatles on television, or hung pictures of Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson on their bedroom walls.

  I didn’t want a boy, I wanted girls—real girls, girls at my school—to feel about me as they did about some boy. To show that kind of interest, but in me this time. How could it be, I wondered, that they could fall all over themselves for some pimply loser with a bulging Adam’s apple who snapped their bra strap, when I would kiss them tenderly and love them?