“No. No. No. No. No. Yes.”
Afternoons, we took Fletcher’s old dog, Katie, for a walk by the brook, looking for wildflowers if the season was right. Summers we swam in the pond down the road, no need for suits. In winter we snowshoed. Nights in our little kitchen, with a tape of Frank Sinatra playing, or Chet Baker, or Nina Simone—or sometimes Clarice’s choice of Emmylou Harris or Dolly Parton—we danced.
There was nothing we lacked in life. Or only one. I wanted us to raise a child together.
RUTH
Risk Assessment
I ENROLLED IN grad school to study art therapy. My plan was to work with troubled people, using the tools of drawing to explore their experiences. I had enough savings from my unexpected book royalties to pay for a little apartment in Cambridge not far from where I’d lived before. My year on Quadra Island with Ray had taught me many things; among them was the ability to live on almost nothing.
All that spring and through the summer I took classes during the day. At night I fixed myself rice and beans or soup, or sometimes nothing more than a bowl of popcorn, and read, or drew, and listened to music, until it was time for sleep. I did not think of Ray, or at least, when thoughts of him came to me, I pushed them away.
No men entered my life. Men seemed to recognize something about me now that kept them away, and this was good news. I had no interest in sex, no interest in love. I worked, ate, drew, slept. Apart from Josh and a couple of women I knew slightly from my classes, I kept to myself.
I was walking home from the library one night—fall now, leaves on the ground, the kind of night that reminds you winter’s on the way.
The spring will be frozen over now next to our cabin, I thought. Ray will have to take out the hatchet soon to break through the ice.
I wondered if he’d grown his hair back. I wondered what he’d done with the drawings I’d made of him, that we took down for my mother’s visit, and the poems he wrote for me. If she had never come that day, we’d have a three-month-old baby now. Daphne.
“Ruth.” I looked up to see a face I dimly knew but could not place. A pleasant face, though with the kind of regular, even features that were easy to forget.
“Jim Arnesen,” he said. “We went to the movies together a couple of years back.”
I remembered then. Last Tango in Paris. Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider and the butter. A picture of the two of them together came to me. Then it was not Brando and Schneider, but Ray and me. There was no such thing as sex that wasn’t with him.
“You have time for a drink?” he said.
I shrugged. There was no particular reason to do this, but no reason not to.
At the bar around the corner, Jim told me what he had been doing since we’d seen each other last—selling life insurance without charging the usual commissions. It wasn’t the most lucrative work, but he was proud to be a quiet outlier in a world of fast-talking salesmen.
“I never stopped thinking about you after that night,” he said. “I might as well tell you. I used to walk by your place, hoping to run into you. Then I finally got up the courage to ring your bell and someone else was living there. For a few days I kept trying to figure out a way of finding you, but I didn’t even know your last name.”
“Plank,” I said. “As in, piece of wood.”
We started going out. He took me to dinner mostly, but also to the Museum of Science and Fenway Park, a place he loved. He was a lifelong Sox fan, he told me. The day Jim Lonborg—pitching on just two days’ rest—lost the seventh game of the 1967 World Series had been one of the darkest in his life.
If that was what Jim called a dark day (my Jim—as I had begun to think of him), then he was lucky. There was some comfort being with a man for whom losing a ball game was the definition of trouble.
Sometime that winter—after a surprisingly long time in which all we ever did was kiss a little on my couch—we went to bed together. His lovemaking was, not surprisingly, similar to his kissing. Heartfelt and earnest, and utterly lacking imagination, inspiration, or danger. But I felt a tenderness for him that I named as love.
His professional specialty was risk assessment, and if there was one thing Jim Arnesen knew, it was how to play it safe. If there was another, it was devotion and constancy to me. He was steady as a metronome. Reliable as the postal service. I didn’t need to know him long to understand: I could more safely place my trust in this good man than trust in my own self.
Right around my twenty-seventh birthday—strawberry season, Fourth of July weekend—he took me to Maine for the weekend at a bed-and-breakfast on the coast. I knew, as we set out on the highway, that he would ask me to marry him on this trip. It was never too difficult to predict Jim’s behavior.
We had dinner at the B and B that night. Studying the menu, I’d noticed a familiar name. “All our greens are organic, and come to you from Dana Dickerson’s Smiling Hills Farm.” Apart from that one brief phone call to Dana the year before—my frantic attempts to locate her brother before the abortion—it had been years since I’d spoken with my birthday sister.
Maybe she knows where he is now, I thought.
If she does, stay away.
For dinner we had the prime rib. Afterward, Jim ordered champagne and made a gesture to the waitress that was probably meant to remain secret but wasn’t. A moment later the crème brûlée arrived. Mine had a diamond on top.
It was not the corny romantic gesture that moved me. No scenario dreamed up by Jim Arnesen could have approached the kinds of scenes I’d played out on that frozen bed on my island in British Columbia with Ray Dickerson. But Jim moved me in a different way. Looking at him then, across the table—his eyes damp, his smooth hand stretched out over the white cloth, reaching for mine—I felt no roughness, no trace of danger or trouble, only kindness. This was a good man.
“I love you but I’m not in love with you,” I said. That old line people come up with over and over, as if they’ve arrived at some profound revelation, when all they’re really saying is they are feeling rational in a relationship, as opposed to crazy.
“That’s enough for me,” he said. “Just as long as you let me be in love with you.”
“I’m a difficult person,” I said. “I sometimes wish for what I can’t have. There are things about me you wouldn’t like so much.”
Pictures then of Ray and me. Fingernails on his back. The two of us covered in mud. A day spent on the mattress, dawn till dusk. No words but animal sounds.
“I don’t need you to be different from how you are right now,” Jim said. “Unless you say no. That’s the one thing I’d want to change. Say you’ll be with me, and I won’t need anything more.”
A thought came to me: I can make this man happy. For all my extravagant expressions of wild love, that was something I’d never been able to accomplish with Ray Dickerson.
WE GOT MARRIED THAT FALL—A city hall event. Jim’s parents were both dead and I did not invite mine, or anyone else. A few days later I did call my father—at an hour when I knew my mother would be at church—to let him know.
“I hope you’ll be happy,” he said. “I wish we could’ve been there on your big day.”
It wasn’t such a big day, actually, I wanted to tell him. I’d had a big day already. I needed no more of those. Only small ones from now on. Regular days for the rest of my life.
Dana
A Matter of Lifestyle
ABOUT THE ONLY source of tension between Clarice and me concerned Clarice’s reluctance—unwillingness, in fact—to make our relationship known to her colleagues at the university. Though I would sometimes pick her up after class, I stayed in the car while I waited for her. When there were faculty events, I did not attend. One year—1983, I think—the seniors chose Clarice, out of the entire faculty, as an honorary member of their class. There was a dinner held at which she had been asked to speak.
“I want to be there,” I said. “I think it’s time people know there’s someone who loves you so much
.” This, too, was an issue between us. In the absence of any sign of a partner, Clarice’s colleagues in the department were always trying to set her up with one or another newly divorced or widowed man. She brushed off their efforts, but enigmatically, never telling anyone the reason she chose not to meet their most recent candidate for her affection.
“You don’t understand how it works in my world,” she said, when I pushed to attend the dinner in her honor. “It wouldn’t be good for my standing at the university.”
“Don’t you work at an institution of higher learning?” I said. “Aren’t people at universities supposed to practice open-minded thinking not only in the classroom but out of it? What about some student who may have been sitting in your humanities lectures all year, who is struggling with the knowledge that who she really wants to be with is a woman, not a man? What kind of message are you teaching her with your silence? There might be something else you could be saying, a lot more relevant to her future than the influences of the Italian renaissance on British architecture.”
“I’m not at the university to make a political statement,” she said. “I’m there to teach art history. That is where I work, and nothing more. My real life is here.”
“Can’t you integrate the two? I do.” Even though the world I inhabited—of small-scale independent farmers, and bigger growing operations like Plank Farm—tended to be run by older people whose views on most things ran along conservative lines, I’d never encountered any problems at livestock shows or horticulture symposiums when I spoke of my partner and made it plain her name was Clarice.
The next year, 1984—just before my thirty-fourth birthday and Clarice’s fortieth—Clarice was up for tenure, after more than a dozen years of waiting. The faculty in her department and a committee of higher-ups from the dean’s office would vote on her appointment right around graduation time. With her popularity among the students and her recent publications in her field, it seemed clear to us both—even Clarice, though she tended to worry more than I—that she’d receive the promotion and the significant increase in salary and position that went with it. We had even begun planning the trip we’d make, a cross-country drive to Yellowstone Park.
“I know most people in my field would go someplace like Florence,” she said. “But you know what I want to see? Herds of buffalo. And the Annie Oakley museum.”
The previous fall I’d started volunteering at the school in our town, coming in once a week to work with the elementary-school kids on projects involving plants and animals. For me, this was partly about making connections and forming ties in the community where we lived and where—unlike my wandering family—I intended to sink permanent roots.
There was another aspect to my volunteering. I wanted children in our life. More and more, I longed to raise one with the woman I loved. I wished there could have been a way for Clarice and me to have one ourselves, and sometimes we even talked about it, but the idea did not seem feasible.
“If we got my brother to be a sperm donor for you,” I said, only half kidding, “that would be almost the same as if you and I had done it together.” Even as I said this I was aware of how totally different my brother was from me—not just physically but emotionally.
But even if we’d wanted to ask Ray to help us, there was another more concrete hurdle: I had no idea where my brother was. Some years before, Ruth Plank had called, looking for him, with the news that he had been living on an island in British Columbia. That was the last I’d heard of his whereabouts from anyone, including Val and George.
We decided that once Clarice was granted tenure at the university, we’d look into adoption. Back in those days most foreign countries would never consider two women, living together, as acceptable parents, but somewhere, we believed, we’d find a child who needed a home—an older one, maybe; that was fine with us. Till that day came, I looked for another avenue for having children in our lives. This was what prompted my decision to create what I called the Farmer-in-the-Schools program in our town.
I loved working with the children. One week we planted beans in paper cups; another time, thanks to a rare suggestion from Val, I taught them about yogurt cultures. We stuck celery ribs in food coloring and watched the color creep up the threads of the stalk, following the same path nutrients traveled. Just as I had done, long ago, I got every child to grow an avocado plant from a pit. In spring, I brought a baby goat to school and let the second graders hold him, then taste the milk his mother made, and the cheese made from the milk.
I often found myself thinking about the person who had inspired me when I was young, Edwin Plank. I liked imagining that one of the children in this school might one day elect to tend a piece of land and grow something on it. And that someday others might, because of our experiences together, keep a cherry tomato plant in a pot on their deck, or cultivate a little patch of parsley and basil. It was a small good thing for the world, I believed, that these traditions would endure.
Near the end of the school year, I invited the third graders to come to Smiling Hills for an end-of-the-year picnic. It was too early yet for strawberries, but Clarice made lemonade and gingersnaps, and we had an early crop of snow peas for them to munch on, and feed bags for a sack race. She wound daffodils around Jester’s bridle for the occasion and let the children sit on his back and walked him around the field with them.
As always, I wore my blue jeans for the children’s visit, though with a nicer-than-average shirt—fashion never being my interest. But Clarice, who had made a point of being home that day to share the party with me, had put on an old-fashioned-style dress with lace around the neck and a full skirt of a kind she understood that little girls would appreciate. All that morning she’d worked on putting together a scavenger hunt for the children, with clues to take them all around our property.
The children had been brought to our place by a group of parents who’d volunteered to chaperone the excursion. They were just getting out of the cars—racing toward the pen holding our baby goats—when I saw a funny look come over Clarice’s face.
“I know that woman,” she said, dipping her head in the direction of one of the mothers. The one she indicated was dressed in a pantsuit, with one of those pageboy haircuts, turned under with the help of a blow-dryer. It was the kind of hairstyle that always reminded me of a sorority sister, though she was in her thirties. Next to her was a little girl I recognized, Jennifer, who’d once asked me if she could have a couple of extra scarlet runner bean seeds to take home and plant.
“She’s married to a man in my department,” Clarice said. “Our impressionism guy.”
“I guess you want to make a good impression then,” I said, but she was clearly not in a mood for joking.
“I shouldn’t have been here,” she said. “It was a stupid risk.”
“You’re being paranoid,” I told her. “Nobody’s going to care.”
We focused on the children then: a garden inspection; the scavenger hunt; three-legged races, followed by a snack. When the last car was pulling away, as we were standing in front of the house waving good-bye, Clarice reached for my hand.
“A very good day,” she said, kissing me.
Two weeks later came the vote on Clarice’s tenure. That evening she got a call from the department chair.
I was standing next to her as she took in the words, watching her face. I knew right away they’d denied her application.
“I’d like to know the reasons given for the opposition,” Clarice said. Her voice was steady as she spoke, though knowing her as well as I did, I could hear what lay beneath the surface of her cool, even tone.
It had been, the department chairman explained, an issue of morality that concerned some members of the department, though not him, personally. One individual in particular had raised a question of sexually inappropriate behavior.
“With a student?” I heard Clarice say. “Was there any suggestion that anything ever happened with a student?” I had heard Clarice’s stories
concerning “fraternization” between male professors (married, more often than not) and undergraduates. These were rife, and tolerated.
There were no accusations involving students, the department chair assured her. The problem was more a “matter of lifestyle,” he said. Though they would be more than happy to see Clarice continuing to teach her two humanities sections and her freshman art history survey, the consensus was that at this point in time, tenure was not an option.
After she put down the phone, we lay on our bed and held each other. She did not cry.
“It was my fault,” I said. “You knew it all the time. I was wrong to think you should let people see our real life.”
It was too precious, our life. Nobody should have been invited to witness it but us.
“At least they won’t try setting me up with eligible bachelors anymore,” she said.
She went back to work. We stayed home that summer, instead of making the Yellowstone trip. It would be too difficult to leave Jester and Katie and the goats, anyway, Clarice said. And the strawberries.
RUTH
A Family of One’s Own
AFTER MY MARRIAGE to Jim, my love of making art seemed to disappear. The sorrow was gone but I missed the excitement I used to feel, walking into whatever odd little space I’d set up for myself to paint in. The urge to make pictures had left me.
I wanted to be a mother. If the dream of a certain form of passion was over for me, this was what remained—the hunger to create a family I felt truly part of as I never completely had with my own.
I told Jim that I wanted babies. He said that was fine, so did he, though most of all what he wanted was to make me happy, and if having babies would do it, he was ready.
The Good Daughters Page 16
