Now we were all called upon—even my reluctant sisters, even our mother—to assist with the irrigation pipe. I could remember times in summers past when it felt fun, squishing through the mud in bare feet. But that summer, all joy left us, as we spent day after day shifting pipes to their different locations to keep the crops alive, holding the muddy aluminum pipe as high off the ground as we could, especially in the cornfields, so as not to break the stalks, coming in past dark with the muscles in our arms so sore they throbbed.
Even with all our work, the crops were a disaster that season. Not just the strawberries, but the tomatoes and broccoli and beans, the cucumbers. Our yield was down 50 percent, which left no money for all the repairs my father needed on the barn and the tractor and, more significantly to me, for back-to-school shopping and the giant set of oil pastels I’d been longing for. The seed company that always gave us credit in the past sent out a letter that October to say that in light of the unpaid bills, they could no longer sell us seed stock for the coming year without cash up front or on delivery.
Then came November 22. My mother was cooking fudge for the annual church bazaar. My father was off in the back field, clearing away the last of the cornstalks. My sisters were at school but I had stayed home that day with a cold. My mother must have had the radio on. I heard a cry from the kitchen, of a kind I never heard out of her before.
“I have to go get your father,” she said, setting the fudge on the counter. Just at the hard-ball stage, where as even I knew, a person had to keep stirring.
After, they came in the house together and told me the news. “God must have a plan for him,” my mother said, but that didn’t make any sense.
That night we said a prayer for the Kennedys. The pot of half-finished fudge sat on the counter—the only time I ever remember my mother leaving a dish out that way.
We all watched the funeral on television. I remember my mother, sitting on her chair in front of the round screen of our black-and-white Zenith, shaking her head as the cortège made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue, the camera cutting in with shots of Jackie and the children in their funeral clothes. Even though Jackie Kennedy was a Democrat, not to mention a Catholic, my mother loved her, almost as much as she loved Dinah Shore. Possibly the one topic she and Val Dickerson would have agreed on—Jackie Kennedy.
“That poor woman,” she said. “What’s she going to do now?”
“They’re millionaires, Connie,” my father said. “They’ve got a mansion on the Cape and servants and the whole shebang. No danger those children won’t have clothes on their backs.”
UNLIKE US, WAS WHAT I was thinking. What with the drought that summer before, and the interest payments on the loan my father had to take out to buy seed stock, and a sick cow that ran up a bill with the vet, my father sold his prize Model T that we’d kept in the barn to take out on special occasions for Sunday drives. For Christmas, our parents had told us, we could each choose one item of clothing from the Montgomery Ward catalog: a sweater or a skirt.
What was the person with the sweater supposed to do for the bottom of her outfit? my sister Sarah wanted to know.
“Mix and match,” our mother said. “You girls are close enough in size you can trade off.” As was so often the case, her remark excluded me. There was no way any item of clothing purchased for my sisters—even the oldest—would fit my own long-limbed body.
The next year was better, but other difficulties presented themselves now. It used to be that the kinds of produce we sold at our farm stand were not available at places like Grand Union and the A&P, but now all the big chains had started selling more unusual items of the sort a person used to have to visit Plank’s to locate—varieties of lettuce besides iceberg, interesting melons and fresh peas, and because they bought in bulk, they sold them cheaper. A person who shopped at the supermarket could also find items we didn’t carry, like pineapples from Hawaii and blueberries before the local season.
No flavor in those, my father said. But people didn’t seem to notice that. What had happened to people’s taste buds, he wanted to know. Too many frozen dinners and artificial flavors. No one appreciated the real thing anymore.
Dana
Vicarious Living
IT WOULD HAVE been hard to say who Val loved more, Jackie Kennedy or Jack. She loved Jackie’s style and her ball gowns, how she redecorated the White House, her interest in art. But to my mother, JFK was the perfect man—strong, handsome, charming, and rich.
Valerie spent her life making up imaginary romantic scenarios. To her, I think, those seemed to her more important, in the end, than real love—and the fact that the prince of Camelot had probably not managed to remain faithful to his wife longer than a day did not seem to bother my mother. It was image that interested Val, more than substance—and for image, nobody could top JFK. I’m not sure she ever fully recovered after the shock of his death.
All the rest of that November, and beyond, she barely got out of bed. It was the only time in her life that I can remember when she didn’t pick up a paintbrush.
“She’ll snap out of it,” George said. My brother and I just looked at him. Val was not the kind of person who snapped out of things, any more than she snapped into them. Once an idea or a feeling took hold of her, it stayed.
George was gone most of that winter. He had this idea for a game show and thought if he could just get a meeting with those people in Hollywood whose names he’d picked up watching the credits of What’s My Line?—Goodson and Todman—they’d eat it up.
He’d driven out to Los Angeles early in December. We’d get postcards every week or so, about movie stars he’d spotted and great restaurants on Sunset Boulevard, but no mention of a meeting yet.
“I’m getting my ducks in a row,” he wrote. “In this business it’s all about who you know.”
Who that might be in his case, he did not say.
My brother resented that George had gotten himself to California before he, Ray, managed that. In Ray’s way of looking at things, he’d come up with the idea of California first—northern, not southern, in his case. But west was west. It seemed unfair that George would have driven there without him when he was clearly much more of a California type.
Ray was seventeen at this point, washing dishes at a restaurant near our apartment, saving up for his getaway. Rare as it was for Val to think about our futures, she worried that if he didn’t go to college, he’d be sent to Vietnam, but Ray said no way was that happening. He’d intended to take the SATs but missed the deadline when he forgot to put a stamp on the envelope with the check. After that he decided he didn’t need college anyway. Ray probably believed he could charm his way through any situation, and so far this had proved true.
FEBRUARY BROUGHT THE ARRIVAL OF the Beatles in America, which perked Val up a little. All around me, at school, girls were going crazy over them. The only difference of opinion about them focused on which of the four was cutest. Paul was the clear favorite, but a lot of the girls in our class loved John, too. The rebels tended to go for George or, if you were a little weird, Ringo.
“Who do you love best, Dana?” my home ec partner Angie O’Neil asked me, shortly after their first appearance on Ed Sullivan. “Let me guess: George? Or Ringo.”
I could have said none of them interested me. I could have shocked her totally and confessed that my secret crush at the time was Honor Blackman, who played the beautiful crime-fighting anthropologist, Mrs. Cathy Gale, on The Avengers and wore skintight catsuits that I sometimes pictured myself unzipping and peeling off her, as if she was a banana.
“George,” I said, playing it safe.
“That’s good,” she said. “Because I love Paul.” She said this as if we were actually in the running for snagging one of them to be our boyfriend. This way we weren’t in competition.
“I love their English accents,” she said. This held true for Honor Blackman too, so I nodded in agreement.
If Val had taken more of an interest, she might
have spent more time over my high school years exploring the question of why I never had a boyfriend. Boys called me up sometimes to get the math assignment, and sometimes for advice concerning girls they liked. I had good relationships with boys, actually. I think they understood, whether they articulated it to themselves or not, that in many ways I was like one of them.
“Do you think Lorena likes me?” a boy I was friends with, Mike, asked me one time, while we were doing a biology assignment together. Cutting planaria in half and watching them regenerate.
“Possibly,” I said. I liked Lorena, too, was the truth; and I imagined it might be mildly exciting, discussing her together, though I was not about to reveal to Mike or anyone else the nature of my interest in Lorena.
“She has the most incredible body,” he said. The fact that he would say this to me—a girl who had the least incredible body—seemed almost like an accomplishment to me at the time. I had done that good a job of freeing myself from any kind of female identity that would have left a person like Mike to suppose this observation might have hurt my feelings. Which it did not.
“Well, Cassie Averill is pretty hot, too,” I said.
“Cassie’s not as pretty as Lorena,” Mike said.
“But she’s got the best tits,” I said. I had listened to my brother with his friends. This was how I learned how boys talked. If Mike thought it was odd, hearing this kind of remark from a girl, he didn’t let on.
“You think they’re bigger than Lorena’s?” he said.
“No contest. I’ve seen her in the locker room.”
He was setting a planarium on a slide now, but that wasn’t why he sighed. “If only you could sneak a camera in there for me,” he said.
“Yeah, right.”
“You think Cassie likes me?” he asked me. This was a boy for you, ready to change his allegiance on a dime. One mention of a pair of 38 Ds and he’d forgotten all about the girl with the 36s he was obsessed with one minute earlier.
“Didn’t you see her looking at you in history?” I said.
“Now that you mention it, I’m asking her out.”
“Just promise to give me the details,” I said. “I’m counting on you.”
I lived vicariously in those days, listening to the stories of boys I was friends with, talking about things they got to do with the girls I had crushes on, and then listening to girls I had crushes on talking about things they did with boys I was friends with.
I was always falling in love, was the truth, but nobody ever fell in love with me. I was born in a girl’s body, with a boy’s desires, and because this was 1964, and nobody talked about these things, I supposed I was the only person on earth who had this problem.
RUTH
Letting Go
WHEN MY FATHER was a boy growing up on the farm, he told me once, he and his brothers had longed for a rope swing over the deepest of their irrigation ponds—the same one where, years later, he and I would share our afternoon swims. But at the time, none of the existing trees around the pond was tall or sturdy enough to hold the rope. They needed a better tree.
There was a young oak tree growing alongside one of the farm ponds, but that tree was never substantial enough during my father’s boyhood to hold a swing or the boy who would be clinging to it.
Then, with his brothers grown and gone, my father started a family of his own, and finally the tree was sufficiently tall and strong to support a boy holding on to a rope. The only problem was that no boy had been born.
After I came along, my father had given up on the dream of a male heir to the farm, but he had held on to the dream of the rope swing. The summer I turned eight he’d put one up.
My sisters never tried it once. They were afraid of water. But all that summer and every summer after that I made my way down to the pond in the late afternoon or early evening, and with my farm chores finished, I’d wait by the barn for my father and head across the field with him and Sadie to swim.
I’d have my suit on already. He’d unfasten his overalls and take off his T-shirt, so all he wore were his cotton boxers. Then he’d grab on to the rope and take a running leap over the water before splashing down.
As much as I wanted to share the pond with him—I, and I alone, the one other swimmer among our family of Planks—I could never bring myself to jump off the swing, into the pond. I could hold the rope and swing out over the water. It was the letting-go part that scared me.
Then one summer, right around the time I turned fifteen, we had a heat wave so brutal that even after the sun went down the temperature never dipped below ninety, and just getting dressed and brushing your teeth started feeling like more effort than it was worth. Even my mother gave up her daily routine of baking bread and putting beans on the stove, since all we cared about eating were Popsicles anyway.
One day she went to the doctor in Concord—“a female problem,” was all she said about it. My sisters had gone along to do some back-to-school shopping, but at the last minute I decided not to accompany them. It was just too hot.
So I was there on my own at the house. It was a Monday—the day we kept our farm stand closed.
I had always wanted to draw the human figure, but never having had a real art class, I’d never gotten to work from a live model. Now the idea came to me—maybe it was the heat of the day that inspired me—to strip naked in front of the mirror and draw myself.
I went up to my room—the room I shared with my sister Winnie—and peeled off my clothes. I sat on the floor in front of the full-length mirror with my drawing pad in front of me and started to sketch.
Here’s something I’ve learned over my years of drawing the naked human figure, though this was the first time I did it. There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of all the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman’s folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man’s shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.
That day—my awkward, lanky fifteen-year-old body folded in front of the mirror in that impossible heat—I saw myself not as a girl who was too tall or too thin, a girl whose breasts were small, neck too long, hips boyishly narrow. I saw myself as a work of art, imagined a picture of me, as I was that day, hanging on a wall in a museum, and the idea was not shameful but exciting.
I studied myself more closely then, one inch at a time—the lines of my collarbone and my ribs, the curve of my calf muscle, and the muscles in my arms hard from a summer of hoeing potatoes and stacking hay bales. I traced the bridge of my nose and the way my nostrils flared at its base over my surprisingly wide mouth. In the past, I had often stood in front of the mirror looking critically at my features, but now I saw myself as an artist would, imagining how the painters whose work I’d studied in books at the library would portray me on the canvas—Picasso and Matisse, also Vermeer or van Gogh or El Greco and Rembrandt—and when I did that, I became something I’d never been before, an object of beauty.
I imagined then how it would be to look at my whole self—not just my face—with the eye of an artist. I considered my toes and my fingers, and my belly, and my thighs. Shame left me then, replaced by fascination and excitement. I became a student of my own body, and to the artist in me, my body became beautiful.
I don’t know how long I sat there this way, but I filled up many pages of my pad. Hours may have passed, though it was still light out, and I knew my sisters and my mother would not be home for another few hours at least, and that my father would be out on the tractor until sunset, cutting hay. Flushed not only with the extreme heat of the day, but from my afternoon of drawing myself, I headed to the farm pond for a swim.
Normally I wore my swimsuit at the pond, but that afternoon I let my uncovered skin feel the water. When I came up for air, I could hear the slow grinding sound of my father’s tractor over the other side of the h
ill and the lowing of the grazing cows. Just above the surface of the pond, a little cloud of bugs hovered, the wings of one catching the sunlight in a particular angle that made it beautiful as a jewel, and I could smell the fresh-cut hay.
Remember this moment, I told myself, though only in my head. Young as I was, I knew that I was witnessing a kind of perfection that a person might experience only a handful of times in her life.
I climbed out onto the shore and scooped a handful of mud from the edge of the pond, slathering it over my body until I was nearly covered. Then I climbed back on the rope swing and let myself fly out again over the water, higher than I’d ever gone. Then I let go of the rope.
Dana
The World on a String
IT DIDN’T EXCUSE George’s absences and lack of attention that this was so, but I think he actually believed every one of his big ideas was going to make our family a killing. I never knew a person to possess so much optimism in the face of constant defeat. He just never gave up and he didn’t understand anyone who behaved differently, people like my brother, for instance.
For Ray, just getting through a day sometimes was hard. To look at my brother, you would have thought he’d have the world on a string. Handsome and funny, charming and athletic: girls loved him, and even teachers gave him second chances when he screwed up. When he was feeling good, he was Master of the Unicycle, sailing down Main Street in whatever town we lived that year as if he was the mayor or maybe the king.
But other days—and there were more of these as he grew older—he would stay in bed till noon, or I’d see him leaned against a tree somewhere, chewing on a piece of grass, or playing the same eight notes on his harmonica, over and over.
“Your brother’s sensitive,” Val said, though to me it was more than that. To me it sometimes seemed as if my brother was missing a crucial layer of skin other people had that allowed them to get through the day when he could not. The time his junior high school girlfriend broke up with him. “You just don’t give me any room to breathe,” she said. Ray didn’t come out of his room all weekend, and I could hear him through the walls, not simply crying but moaning.
The Good Daughters Page 8
