I DO NOT REMEMBER THE flight, or my father meeting us at the airport, though he must have done so, or the long drive back to our farm (past midnight now, an early dusting of snow covering the field where a few leftover pumpkins lay unclaimed).
For all that first week back, I kept trying to reach Ray, but there was no phone number to call. No response to my telegrams. I even called my birthday sister, Dana, to see if she knew where he was.
“I have no clue,” she said. “I haven’t laid eyes on my brother in years.”
He seemed to have vaporized.
And so when my mother came to me a few days later to say she’d arranged an appointment at a clinic, I simply nodded.
My sister Winnie came with us to Boston that day and sat with me in the waiting room while our mother remained outside. By this point I thought I must be losing my mind. I no longer fought any of it. Just watched, with horrified wonder, as if this were an episode of The Twilight Zone, but more terrifying than any I’d ever seen. Not just watching The Twilight Zone, but in it.
With my own hand, I signed the papers for what they called “the procedure,” though it was my mother who filled them out.
My mother, a woman who believed that birth began at conception, had brought me to an abortion clinic. I, a woman who just seven weeks before had greeted word of pregnancy as the happiest news of my life, now slipped her feet into the stirrups.
I could only believe I had lost my mind. Then, for a while anyway, I did.
Dana
Stranger Things
AFTER CLARICE AND I bought Fletcher’s place—now named Smiling Hills—I started dropping by Plank Farm more often. At first this was just because we lived reasonably close now. I’d be passing through on the way to pick up Clarice after her classes—nights she worked late, and I didn’t like her to have to drive home alone—or it was strawberry season, or later, when the corn was coming in.
During the period of my animal husbandry studies at the university, I’d become fascinated with goats, and now we had established a small herd—a dozen, of a variety known as Adamellans, whose milk produced a particularly fine cheese. We kept just enough chickens to provide fresh eggs for the two of us, and because it had been a lifelong dream for Clarice, we bought her a horse, Jester.
We decided early on that our farm would specialize in only a few of the higher-end crops, and ones that didn’t take up so much land—since, unlike the Planks, we only had a few arable acres. Partly because Clarice loved them, but also because they made sense for our locale, strawberries were my chief focus other than the cheese, and because I had never tasted better strawberries than those at Plank’s, I went to talk with Edwin about starting my own growing operation.
Many farmers wouldn’t want to share their expertise with a person who could be viewed as a competitor, but Edwin Plank had always been generous about sharing his knowledge with me. When I called him up to ask if I could stop by and discuss getting our beds started, he seemed not only willing to assist, but actually eager.
The basic concept of strawberry propagation was simple enough: as they grow, strawberry plants shoot out runners—little offshoots that live on after the original plant has petered out. These are called daughter plants. That’s where you got your new stock: from the daughters.
Any farmer can tell you it’s important to cut back the daughters. If you let them all develop, the bed will become too crowded, the plants will be stunted, and the berries will be sparse and small. To harvest a good crop of strawberries, Edwin Plank had told me, you must choose the five healthiest and best-looking daughter plants and let only those bloom and bear fruit the following season.
Most commercial growers rely on seed companies and nurseries to supply them with daughter plants every year, rather than going through the laborious process of selecting and propagating their own new generation of strawberry plants every year. But for our farm, I wanted to grow berries that were acclimated to our particular region—the New Hampshire and southern Maine coastal area, and to the soil conditions on the particular piece of land I was cultivating. It was for this reason—but also no doubt because I looked for any excuse to talk with Edwin Plank about our mutual passion for farming—that I’d set out to visit Plank’s Farm that day.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he said to me, when I showed up that afternoon. As he led me out to the greenhouse, there was a kind of excitement to his step. Or as much of that as a person like Edwin Plank ever revealed anyway.
“I want to show you something,” he said. “I’ve got a little project going that might interest you. With that university diploma of yours and all, you could be just the girl for the job of taking it over.”
Although, unlike me, Edwin had never gone to school to study horticulture, he was an amateur plant scientist. Ever since he was a boy growing up on the farm, he told me, he was interested in the process of plant propagation.
Edwin had a natural understanding of how plants worked—the kind of education that didn’t come from books or classroom lectures. “I don’t believe I ever got over the kick of grafting a branch of one fruit onto another fruit tree,” he told me. “When other boys were out playing ball, I was doing experiments with different kinds of soil conditions and fertilizers, to improve the quality and yield of the produce.”
I’d been that kind of kid myself. I remembered a time my mother and brother and I had stopped by for strawberries—early July, as usual—when Edwin Plank had taken me out to the field where the corn was growing and explained how the ears are formed.
“The beautiful thing about corn, Dana,” he had told me, “is how every stalk is both male and female, all in one plant. The tassels are the male part—the father, you might say—that forms the pollen. The way nature works it, the pollen from the male tassel lands on the silk, which is the female part of the corn.
“Each strand of corn silk is actually a hollow tube connected to the undeveloped mother cob. The pollen travels down the silk to the cob, where it forms a single kernel. Each kernel has its own silk attached to it. Someone up there thought of everything, because they even made it so the silk is covered with a sticky substance that catches the pollen. To make sure it doesn’t just blow away.”
What a person could do, if he wanted to have a little fun—“he or she,” Edwin clarified, seeming to recognize even then, in my nine-year-old self, the potential of a future farmer—would be to gather the pollen off one variety of corn plant and sprinkle it over the silk of a different variety.
“You never know,” he said. “You could come up with your own whole new strain of corn. Could be the best there ever was.
“Why, just last year I read about a plant breeder who came up with a seedless cucumber,” he went on. “Son of a gun, if that wasn’t a good idea I don’t know what is.”
Even as a child, I loved the idea of inventing a new vegetable or fruit. The funny thing was that all my life, George had been going on about his big ideas that were going to make us rich—new products that never existed before, or songs he’d write that would turn into hits, or amazing inventions. None of them ever felt real.
But as the two of us stood in the field that day—Edwin in his brown overalls, me in my shorts and Keds, munching on a bag of peas Edwin had picked for me along the way—I couldn’t imagine anything I’d rather spend my time doing than collecting and redistributing corn pollen to see if I could actually succeed in doing what he talked about, starting a new breed of plant.
I was halfway through my twenties—and Edwin closing in on sixty probably—when he took me into the controlled environment of the greenhouse to show me his strawberry breeding project—undertaken in the greenhouse, he explained, to provide a controlled environment where the blossoms would not be cross-pollinated by the bees, as they would be out in the open. When a plant breeder was working on something like this, he told me, it was important to eliminate any variables that might affect the purity of the experiment.
“I don’t show t
hese plants to many people,” he said. “You could say this is my secret laboratory.”
For more than a dozen years, he told me, he’d been trying to develop a new strain of strawberry—sweeter and more flavorful than all the rest. The way he did this was to identify the best berries of every given growing season. First he’d mark the plant that had produced the tastiest, juiciest berries of the season. Then he would carefully dig it up, along with its daughter plants, and transplant them into a marked bed in his unheated greenhouse. The next spring, when blossoms began to develop, he’d carefully snip the stamens—the pollen-producing parts of the flower—off the blossoms he wanted to hand-pollinate, and discard them.
Then he’d pick several blossoms from the plants he wanted to use as fathers—the plants that had displayed desirable traits like large, attractive fruit or resistance to disease, and twirl them over the pistils, or the sticky female parts of the mother plants. His goal was to combine the best traits of the mother plants with the best traits of the father plant to develop a new genetic cross, a whole new variety of berry.
When the new strawberries formed and ripened from this cross-breeding experiment, he would select the largest and sweetest ones, then mash them and strain them to remove the seeds. He’d plant these seeds in flats in his greenhouse, and when they were large enough, transplant them to his special beds outside, separate from his other strawberry beds.
He would mark those plants, watch the fruit, test for sweetness, and if they were unusually good—which by and large they were—he’d do the whole thing all over again the following year, improving on the quality of his plants with every generation.
You could dig up the daughters and transplant them into a nearby bed, or one a thousand miles away. But each daughter plant was an exact genetic duplicate of the parent plant.
“What I’ve ended up with here,” he said, indicating a patch of plants about the size of the bedroom Clarice and I shared, meaning not very big at all—“are probably the best berries you’ve ever tasted.”
He didn’t sell the berries from those plants. The plants and what they produced were strictly for propagation purposes. “But one day,” he said, “I’d like to think the variety will be perfected to the point we can take some samples down to the university and show them to the experts.”
I had spent four years with the university types who studied plant science, of course. They did their work in controlled conditions, handling the plants with gloves on, measuring things like sugar-to-acid ratios with highly technical equipment. But they weren’t farmers like Edwin, born with the instinct for growing things.
“You know what I hope?” he said. “I’d like to believe that one of these days, you’ll open up your Ernie’s A-1 seed catalog and there’ll be a full-page spread about this great new strain of strawberry plant they’re offering, bred on a small family farm in the state of New Hampshire.”
He was getting closer, he told me. But he wasn’t as young as he used to be, and this was a job that needed some youthful energy and spirit. It might turn out that perfecting this new variety of berry would take more growing seasons than Edwin had left in him, he told me. So he wanted to know—would I be willing to take over the job of propagating the plants?
“You never know what could happen,” Edwin said. “You could find yourself owning the patent on a brand-new variety of strawberry plant. Stranger things have happened.”
Hearing this, I might have been reminded of George, perpetually waiting for his ship to come in. Except Edwin was nothing like George.
I said I’d love to work on his project, of course—moved by Edwin’s willingness to trust me with his precious plants, the breed he’d spent so many years developing.
I thanked him for his faith in me.
“I’m not worried,” he said. “I can tell what kind of girl you are.”
So I drove off that day with precious cargo in the back of my truck: three flats of Edwin Plank’s lovingly tended daughter plants—“my good daughters,” he called them—headed for Smiling Hills Farm.
RUTH
No Love Lost
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS after I returned to my parents’ farm from British Columbia—I cannot say home, because it didn’t feel like home anymore—I stayed in bed. Only this time I was alone. It was not just Ray I’d lost—and the child we would have had—but my own self.
Ray had told me we were one person now. Then he sent me away. Who did that leave me to be? And there were all those other things he’d told me about our life together and the future we had—our destiny. I no longer knew what was real. If anything was.
A thousand times I replayed Ray’s behavior that last morning, the day he cut off his hair and told me to leave. It never made sense, but part of me also knew that the man I had loved, and still did, was a fragile person haunted by demons I’d often glimpsed but never truly seen. Because of that—because of his unfathomable vulnerability and fragility, I forgave him.
But my mother had no such excuse. Whatever it was she told Ray that night—whatever the words had been that transformed my world in a matter of hours—I knew her to be a strong person, and one fully in control of her actions. What had happened was precisely what she’d intended.
I pleaded with her to explain. I began with rage and when that didn’t work, I shifted to pitiful supplication.
“Tell me what you did to make him go away,” I said. “I need to understand.”
“Some things are better left alone,” she told me. “He was not a well person. There are times when a parent knows best for her child. I would rather have you hate me than see you making a mistake that would ruin your life.”
When I begged my father to explain, he turned away. “I know right now it feels like the end of the world,” he said. “But there will be other times.” Ever the farmer, that’s how he saw life. You planted your crops, they flourished until frost hit, then winter came and they died. Then, came spring. There was no such thing as endings, only the endless cycle of the seasons. Every year a new chance.
Him, I forgave. My mother never. I could no longer speak to her.
In an odd way, this new hatred of my mother provided the impetus for me to finally get out of bed just so I could get away from her. When I could not bear another day of seeing her walk through my bedroom door with her tray of soup and saltine crackers, I pulled myself up and started gathering my things. I called my friend Josh, who still lived in Boston, and asked if I could stay with him until I found another place. He came to pick me up in his sports car the next day. He knew how to talk to people’s mothers in a way that endeared them to him.
“Now there’s the kind of young man you should be keeping company with,” my mother might have said, in times past. “Even if he is of the Jewish persuasion.”
She said nothing about Josh this time, however. Even my mother appeared shaken by what had happened in Canada. She had ruined my life all right, and gotten me home on the strength of her scarily powerful resolve and determination. But now that she’d done this, she too appeared depleted and exhausted.
She said nothing as I carried the box of my possessions down to Josh’s car. I was taking almost nothing with me to Boston. I wanted nothing to remind me of this place.
“No love lost between you two, I guess,” Josh said to me, as I set my suitcase in the backseat and climbed the stairs for one last look in my room.
“If I never see her again, that’s OK with me,” I told him.
I did one last thing before I left the farm that day. From under my bed, I had taken out my old junior high sketchbook with all the dirty pictures in it that I’d made back then, my thirteen-year-old’s attempts at portraying the mechanics of all the other wild and forbidden combinations of male and female bodies that I’d thought up and put on paper when I was young. My thrilling early attempts at pornography.
All these years, the notebook had remained under my bed, buried in the stack of 4-H Club magazines and old issues of National Geographic. Now I carr
ied it downstairs. I set the notebook on the kitchen table, next to the Bible my mother read every morning with her coffee.
No need to leave a note. She’d recognize the artist.
Dana
The Closest Thing to Heaven
THE TIMES CLARICE and I spent in each other’s company on our little goat farm in southern Maine were the closest thing to heaven I had ever known. She wasn’t much of a gardener. Nobody could be who cared that much about her fingernails. But she loved picking bouquets of flowers for our selfserve flower stand out by the road, and gathering eggs, and taking her horse Jester out on the trails behind our house.
We set up a chaise lounge for her in the shade, where she would stretch out, reading papers or preparing a lecture, while I worked in the strawberry beds or hauled goat milk in to the separator. Sometimes she’d come out to where I was working, with a glass of lemonade for me, or I’d take her something to look at—a bug I’d found, a piece of old china my hoeing had turned over in an area that must have long ago served as the dump for Fletcher Simpson’s ancestors.
As a scientist, I kept meticulous notes on the strawberry propagation project—rainfall; number of blossoms per plant, and sweetness and color of berry measured on a scale from one to ten. For this, I enlisted the help of Clarice, to whom I presented my plates of test berries—each one labeled with a code number—for the purpose of determining which were the best plants to focus on for propagation of our new strain. I liked to sit at Clarice’s feet while she placed each berry in her mouth, one at a time. I’d study her face as she sucked in the juice—the exaggerated expressions she’d make if a particular berry seemed to her worthy of particular merit.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” she would pant, or moan, as if the experience of taking this morsel of fruit were capable of inspiring nothing less than orgasm.
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