The Good Daughters

by Joyce Maynard

  Many times, surveying the artwork of my students in that little class of mine, I’d imagine how it would be if their pieces were hung in some downtown New York City gallery—how critics might rave about them, the big prices they’d summon. Occasionally I’d feel a stab of something like jealousy that here in this sad little room, with a bunch of people so heavily medicated they barely spoke, and shuffled when they walked, art was being made of a kind I myself no longer seemed able to produce. Sometimes, truthfully, I almost envied my students their madness and their capacity to lose themselves in the art they made, as I once had. Perhaps the turmoil that afflicted them actually made them better artists.

  Somewhere along the line—after I was brought back against my will from Canada—I had lost my passion for drawing and painting, or for anything else, with the exception of my child. But I was a good teacher, and there was a surprising amount of reward in that.

  In my life at home there was less art than craft, I thought. Jim and I were good parents—kind to each other, devoted to our daughter. He worked hard taking care of his insurance customers and on weekends when we weren’t occupied with Elizabeth, he played a lot of golf. We had settled into a life with each other in which virtually the only shared endeavor was our daughter, though he would have welcomed the opportunity to shower on me the kind of love we both gave to Elizabeth. I just didn’t want it from him.

  We lived less like husband and wife, it seemed, than affectionate brother and sister. I told myself there were worse things a person could say about her life than that.

  Dana

  How Things Happen

  IN 1977 PRESIDENT Carter had declared an amnesty for all Americans who had left the United States for Canada and elsewhere during the Vietnam draft. For a while after I heard the news I kept hoping I’d hear from my brother, but no call came. I called Val to ask if she’d heard anything, but it was unlikely that my brother would have found her even if he’d wanted to because she’d moved so many times by then. She was in Virginia at that point, doing occasional portraits for rich people—of their children, mostly—and augmenting her income with greeting card designs. When I mentioned the amnesty, she seemed not to have heard me.

  With the exception of that one odd period in which she’d protested the war, Val didn’t pay attention to the news of the world, or news of her own children for that matter. The rare times we’d talk, it was usually about her painting and pottery or her yoga or some new eating regimen she’d hit on—vegan, macrobiotic. I told her about Clarice, though she asked no questions about our life together. Once, though—out of character, for a person who seemed so unaware of any individual besides herself—she told me she’d heard Ruth Plank was living on the farm again. Someone—probably Edwin—had evidently told her Ruth had gone to art school, and that interested her.

  “Funny how these things turn out,” she said. “You ending up raising goats. And Ruth’s painting. Do you ever wonder how things happened that way?”

  I hadn’t, but now, thinking of my brother, I said, “I wonder if she’s heard from Ray.” I never knew the particulars but I’d been aware something had happened between them once.

  “Your brother’s off in his own world,” she said. “I don’t expect to see him again.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “Everything’s changed now. He’s free to come home.”

  “It’s not necessarily the government’s say-so that matters,” she said. “It’s what goes on in his own head. Your brother burned his bridges with us a long time ago.”

  “He could be married, for all we know,” I said. “You could be a grandmother. I could be an aunt. Don’t you want to know if he’s got a family?”

  “You know the funny thing?” she said. “He called me once from a pay phone somewhere in Canada. He said there was going to be a baby.”

  All these years, and this was the first I’d heard of that. “Then what?” I asked her.

  “Then one more call,” Val told me. “He said it didn’t work out. He was crying. That was the last time I ever heard from him.”

  RUTH

  Road Trip

  IT WAS HAYING season when my mother died, and maybe because of that, my father had little time to grieve for her, though he must have thought about her plenty, all those hours on the tractor moving in circles, mowing the fields.

  We were experiencing a low-rain summer again, so he was occupied all that July moving the irrigation pipe. He still did a lot of that heavy work himself, though often now my sisters’ children helped out, along with his longtime worker, Victor Patucci—whose title was foreman now.

  “Victor’s always after me to retire and let him run this place,” he said one night, coming in from the field after a particularly long day in which he’d stayed out, watering, until the last hours of sun were gone. “But there’s something about that fellow that rubs me the wrong way.”

  As rough as things had been for my father ever since the barn burned down, he wouldn’t have known what to do in the Florida retirement community whose brochure Victor showed him one time, or on the senior citizens’ cruise to Bermuda. My father needed Victor, but he had never cottoned to Victor’s ideas concerning how our place should run. Maybe it was true that we’d boost efficiency and increase profits if we cut back on all the little specialty items we grew and gave up on growing things like zinnias and peas—crops he loved, that weren’t particularly profitable—to focus on volume and what Victor called “the entertainment factor” of the farm that could turn it into a real moneymaker.

  But tending the land had never been just about making money for my father. Not even mostly about making money.

  “If all we had to do was cultivate plants and we never had to worry about selling anything,” he sometimes said, “life would be perfect.”

  But for Victor, the bottom line was profit. “He’s a bean counter, not a farmer,” my father said. “The only thing that fellow likes to see growing is his bank account.”

  If my mother had been alive, she would have sat with him all those nights after work, working on a quilt while she listened to his reports on how the corn was looking and what kind of a tomato crop they might expect. As it was, the evenings must have been lonely for him. Even with my sisters and me dropping by when we could, bringing dinners over, he came in from the fields so late that he ate most of his meals alone.

  Come fall, after the frost, he was restless. Once pumpkin season was done, there was little work remaining, and he’d take walks along the road, throwing sticks for his dog, Sam, or spend hours playing solitaire. My daughter, Elizabeth, used to stop by and play hearts with him, but she was busy with homework most nights now, and on weekends she visited her friends. The other grandchildren were no different.

  “I wish those darned seed catalogs would get here,” he said, but it was only November. He had another two months to wait before they arrived and he could get to work on next season’s orders.

  Sometime in early December my father announced he was planning a trip. “I thought I’d pay a visit to Valerie Dickerson,” he said. “Her being an old friend and all.”

  I hadn’t seen Val for years, and didn’t even know where she lived anymore, though it would have been easy enough to find out from Dana, and probably that’s how my dad had learned she’d moved to Virginia. She was making pottery, he said.

  “That’s a long drive,” I told him.

  “I always liked a road trip,” he said, though apart from those spring vacation pilgrimages to check up on the progress of Dana Dickerson’s childhood, I doubted he’d ever taken one.

  “When did you ever go on a road trip, Dad?” I asked him.

  “There’s my point. About time,” he said. “I can take in some historical sights. See the country.”

  The day before he set out, he visited the barbershop in town instead of asking my sister Sarah to trim what was left of his hair. When I stopped by that evening to check on him, I noticed a small package on the table, gift-wrapped, with a r
ibbon.

  “A person doesn’t want to show up for a visit empty-handed,” he said. He’d bought Val a pin depicting the New Hampshire state flower, the purple lilac.

  He set out before sunrise. For once in his life, he did not wear his overalls. He was wearing a new pair of jeans, with the creases pressed, and a collared shirt with a tie. He had his usual L.L. Bean jacket, naturally, on account of the cold. Standing on the front porch to see him off, I kissed him good-bye and smelled aftershave.

  He had made arrangements for us to take care of Sam for a full week, and my mother’s African violets, figuring he might want to stay down in Virginia for a while, checking things out, particularly considering this trip constituted the first vacation he had ever taken in his life.

  He was home seventy-two hours after he left. I heard his car pull up the road past midnight. He must have driven straight through back from Richmond, to save on a motel, but even so, given how long it would have taken him to get down there, he could not have spent any time at his destination.

  The next morning I stopped by to ask how things had gone with Val. He was sitting with his coffee at the kitchen table, but he didn’t want to talk about it much.

  “How did she like the pin?” I asked. If he heard the question, he ignored it. He was stirring the cream in his coffee, looking out the window to the fields below our house.

  “She got married,” he said. “One of those fellows that trades in stocks and what have you. Suit and tie, the whole bit. You know how she met him? He hired her to paint a picture of his dog after he died. Next thing you know, they were hitched.

  “They asked me in for lemonade,” he said, “but I said I was on a tight deadline. Busy man, that’s me.”

  My father was reaching into a drawer now for something, as he told me this. When in doubt, apply WD-40 oil to a hinge, one of his mottoes in life.

  “She’s still a beautiful woman, though,” he said. “That part didn’t change.”

  Dana

  A Deadly Ticking

  IN 1991, A food columnist for the New York Times picked up a wheel of our Tomme goat cheese at a farmers’ market in Portsmouth and wrote a column about artisan cheese makers, with a picture of me and our best milker, Andromeda, next to the little flower stand Clarice still kept stocked with bouquets of flowers for sale on the honor system. Within a week our mail-order business had doubled. I told Clarice that come November, when our goats stopped producing milk for the winter, we should take a vacation. We could finally afford to visit Italy and see the paintings she loved. Eat fresh pasta. Drink wine with our lunch.

  “You know what I’d really like best,” she said. “To take that trip out west we always talked about. See some buffalo. The Grand Tetons. Yellowstone. I bet it’s amazing in the winter.”

  But by fall she was having problems with her health. The numbness Clarice had noticed in her toes and fingers, off and on for a year now, was getting more pronounced, and so was the problem with her leg. I noticed it when we rode our bikes—the way she’d walk hers up the hills. She didn’t talk about it, but I could tell she was worried.

  We were making dinner one night when I handed her a bottle of wine vinegar for the salad dressing. She tried to open it and couldn’t. The bottle slipped from her hands.

  The doctor we went to this time practiced in Boston; his specialty was neurology. He ordered tests. When the results came back, he called Clarice.

  “You should come in,” he said. I would have accompanied her regardless, but he told her, “Bring your partner.”

  It was ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degeneration of the motor neurons of the central nervous system otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  Though neither of us was the type to follow medical news, we had both heard of this one. First would come minor motor control issues, leading to gradual paralysis of the limbs, followed by swallowing problems, then breathing problems requiring a respirator. Somewhere along the line even speech would become impossible. Eventually, the entire nervous system shut down. This was when death occurred, usually within three to five years.

  “The brain does not lose capacity,” the doctor told us. “Only the body does.” Meaning Clarice would remain Clarice, trapped inside her body unable to move or speak, or scream.

  He ran through a number of treatment options, but he made clear that none of them was designed to do more than manage the disease. This was a condition for which the diagnosis remained terminal. Later, he said, he could go into more of the particulars with us, but we probably needed to be alone with the information for a while first.

  I drove home faster than usual, with a certain crazed thought that if we died now we could prove wrong the physician’s assurance that ALS would kill Clarice. If we died now, I could die with her.

  “Slow down,” she said. “There’s ice on the road.” Her voice was steady. She put a hand on my shoulder.

  The highway unspooled before us, all the long way home to Maine. I let myself pretend someone was chasing us. Lou Gehrig, rounding the bases, headed our way. If we could just get back to the farm—goats, dog, woodstove, brass bed—before he tagged us out (rules of the game jumbled here, like so much else), we’d be home free.

  “Let’s not talk about this until tomorrow,” she said as we pulled up in front of the house in the darkness. “Let’s go to bed.”

  FOR ALL THE TIMES WE’D made love in that bed, all the sweetness we’d known there, the two of us had never spent a night like that one.

  She sat on the bed and let me undress her—something I’d done many times before, though this particular night the motions of unbuttoning her blouse, slipping it from her shoulders, unhooking her fine, lacy brassiere, all took on a different kind of meaning. I know she was thinking what I was: that soon the day would come when I would undress her every night, not for lovemaking only, but by necessity.

  I got on my knees in front of her. I cupped my hands under her small, firm buttocks, pulling the zipper down, unzipped her skirt and slipped it around her hips and past them until it fell to the ground. Still at her feet, looking up, I rolled her tights down her thighs, her knees—she hated her bony knees, but I thought they were beautiful—and peeled them off her, as if she were some rare and exotic fruit over which layers of pod and leaf, skin and shell, must first be stripped away before a person could suck the juices out of her.

  But not yet. First I massaged her feet—the place the terrible numbness had begun. One by one, I took her toes in my mouth. I used to laugh at her for her love of nail polish—the dozens of bottles that lined her dresser, along with all the other things she loved that had never mattered to me: combs, clips, rings, pins, ribbons, feathers. I loved to give her jewelry, though all I wore was a watch. I heard it now, the deadly ticking.

  Suddenly every single thing about her was precious: her anklebone; the tiny scar from a childhood bike accident; the spot behind her knee where, when I moved my tongue a certain way, laughter came out of her, in the voice of the little girl she must have been once, and became again when I touched her there.

  Still in my dress pants and sweater—city clothes—I laid her on the bed as a person might lay a child who fell asleep in the backseat after a long car ride home. Her body had gone limp, as if she was trying out how it would be in the not-so-distant future. It was like she was practicing a new way of being, so unlike her old familiar self that used to climb all over me, caressing and kneading, wrestling and scratching, licking, kissing, biting, stroking, kissing more.

  “Come back to me,” I whispered to Clarice.

  “I never left,” she said. “I’m always here.”

  One inch at a time—one centimeter—I made my way over her body. At certain places, well known to us both from other nights and days, I lingered.

  “Remember this?”

  “Nova Scotia.”

  “Acadia National Park. Camping in the rain.”

  “The night we brought the rototiller home.”

  “New York
City. The Monet show. Our hotel after.”

  I had taken my clothes off too now, so I could feel her skin against every inch of me, and most of all, so she could feel mine. All the small gifts we took for granted were departing. We counted all the places we loved: fingers, elbows, ears, neck, belly. We counted them one by one, as a tourist might the great museums of Paris or the rock formations of Yosemite.

  We did not speak, or feel the need for words, and this too served as some kind of small comfort. Even when words are gone, I wanted her to know, I will hear your voice. When you can no longer speak, neither will I. (Though just the opposite happened, it turned out. More than ever, when we reached that point, she needed words from me. It rested with me, then, to speak not only for myself but for her, too.)

  I kissed her all the places that men, making love to women, are unlikely to think of or notice. Not simply her breasts and nipples, but under them. The little hollow spot above her collarbone, where, if she were lying down, and it was raining, the rain could actually collect. I had measured once—the scientist in me, again—how much liquid that place could hold. On Clarice, with her fine bone structure, it would hold a bottle-capful, almost. First pour it in. Then drink.

  I kissed her earlobes, forehead, the fold between thumb and forefinger, and all the other folds between all the other fingers too. The base of the spine, and each bone over it. Elbow, wrist, belly button, armpit.