It was my mother’s illness that did him in. Though we knew from the beginning that her cancer was incurable, the bill just for palliative care had gone well over one hundred thousand dollars, and it turned out there was some problem with her insurance.
My husband—whose specialty was life insurance, not health—had been horrified by that one, but by the time he found out, the damage was done. My dad ended up on the hook for more than half of what was owed to the doctors and the hospital.
By 2001 Plank’s was in serious trouble. Property taxes were coming due in a few months and we had no idea how we were going to pay them. As usual, the developers were circling, and moving closer all the time.
“Over my dead body,” I heard my father say, the last time we’d raised the topic of the Meadow Wood Corporation.
Only the desire to avoid selling out to the developers had brought us around to considering a scenario that would once have seemed inconceivable: Victor Patucci had put together an offer to buy our place—take on the full debt my father owed, if we would offer partial financing ourselves. The farm wouldn’t be Plank’s anymore, but at least Victor would keep it as a farm. For now anyway.
All four of my sisters were anxious to accept the deal. I, alone, wanted to hold off on the deal while we worked on finding another way to hold on to our property.
“It’s the twenty-first century, get used to it,” Victor said when I told him how I felt about his plan to open a corn maze and offer a “Build Your Own Scarecrow” activity in the pumpkin field, with pumpkins trucked in at wholesale from other locations to increase our sales potential, and an inflatable bouncy house to lure in kids. “You don’t live in Little House on the Prairie with Ma and Pa anymore,” Victor pointed out. “Either you step boldly into the future, or you get left behind.”
IT WAS NOT ONLY LIFE on the farm that disturbed my sleep at this point, either. Something had changed in my marriage.
In the twenty-four years that Jim and I had been together, I had cared for him deeply—loved him, I thought—but I had never felt for him anything like the hunger or passion I’d known as a young woman, once and once only. I felt childish and immature that even as I passed my fiftieth birthday, I found myself still thinking about Ray Dickerson and still believing—corny as I knew it was—that he had been my one true soul mate, the partner with whom I was destined to spend my life and would have, if my mother had not intervened and convinced him to send me away.
All through my marriage to Jim—from our attempts to conceive a child, to our adoption of Elizabeth, and later the marvelous unexpected gift of Douglas—my husband had remained a loving and loyal mate.
“I still think you’re beautiful,” he always told me. Whenever we were alone together—our annual Florida trip, or weekends we’d drive to Boston for dinner and a show and a night in a hotel—he’d never ceased his hopeful, almost wistful brand of courtship. He was a man who never let my Fourth of July birthday pass without a glossy card containing a loving message, a man who always thought to have room service deliver champagne and a rose. Though recently he’d given up his old practice of writing me a poem, and simply drew a heart.
“I know you’re not in love with me the way I am with you,” he told me once. “But I never give up hope that one of these days you’ll wake up and you will be. You’ll look around at all the other women you know whose husbands don’t love them this way, and it’ll come to you what a good thing we’ve had all this time.”
“I already know we do,” I said.
I just didn’t want to sleep with him anymore. I didn’t fantasize about being with anyone else. By my fiftieth birthday I just wanted to be left alone to concentrate on my children and work.
I had a few friends—Josh Cohen, oddly enough, among the few with whom I’d stayed in occasional touch from my old Boston days, though he lived in California now. But for me, there was little I liked better than a rare day in which I could go off alone to a museum in the city and wander through the rooms of paintings until closing time.
An exhibition of Bernini sculptures came to the Museum of Fine Arts, from Italy. I’d seen them all, but only in books. So I made the trip down to Boston with my sketch pad, taking a day off work to avoid the weekend crowds.
I loved them all, but there was one, Apolloand Daphne, that I could not stop studying. I walked around the sculpture very slowly, taking it in from every angle: the lithe form of Apollo, reaching out toward the woman he loves, and she—her hair flying behind her, a look of desperation on her face—on the verge of capture.
But Daphne had chosen another way of making her escape. She turned herself into a tree. At the moment Bernini chose to freeze her image, she was partially transformed already—her face and arms still those of a beautiful woman, her feet twisting into the gnarled tree roots. Immovable for eternity.
I thought about that sculpture all the long drive home from the museum. It hadn’t even struck me until I was on the highway headed home that the name Daphne held another significance for me. The name Ray Dickerson had chosen for the daughter we never had.
It was dark by the time I got home from the museum. Earlier, Jim had fixed dinner for our son and now he was in the living room watching a baseball game.
“Good day?” he asked.
“Great.” I asked about Doug’s ball game. A meeting I remembered Jim had that day. He turned off the set and walked into the kitchen, where I was pouring a glass of water. He looked, at that moment, like a different person. A man I did not know.
“I have to tell you something, Ruth,” he said. “I’ve fallen in love with another woman. I want to be with her.”
Dana
Specks of Dust
JUST BEFORE LABOR Day, I made the drive to the university, to deliver samples of what I was calling the Plank Strawberry. This was the first step in the long process of pursuing a patent. I’d been told it would take a year or more, during which time my plants would undergo rigorous scrutiny over at least three generations before winning acceptance as an officially registered new breed of strawberry.
That fall, a few weeks before the new academic year, Clarice resigned from the art history department. I had found her at her desk one afternoon, in tears over a slide carousel she’d been trying to load with images for a lecture on the Flemish masters.
“I can’t get the slides in the slots,” she said.
“I’ll do it,” I told her. But that was only part of it. She no longer had strength in her leg to work the gas pedal of her car, and steering was now close to impossible. Even if she could get herself to work, walking was getting harder every day, and though I still understood everything she said, her speech had begun to slur. That, for her, was the worst. The worst so far, anyway.
“The good news is, now we can take a trip,” I told her.
The next day I went to town in our old Subaru and came home in a brand-new van, outfitted with a gas cookstove and a sink, and a bed in back, a lavatory, a stereo system and air-conditioning. The deluxe model. What were we saving our money for?
“Come with me to Wyoming,” I said.
WHEN I HAD FIRST BROUGHT home the van, I’d thought we’d make our trip in the spring, when everything would be green, but in recent weeks the effects of the disease seemed to have accelerated with a terrifying speed. I wanted Clarice to make the trip when she could still get around a little and was no longer sure that would be so six months from now.
So I got the couple down the road to house-sit and cleaned up the strawberry patch in preparation for the winter, laying out the straw mulch to get them through the winter. I hired a helper to tend the goats, which wasn’t as big a job in the cold months when their milk dried up and the cheese-making operation ended until spring.
We set out on our great adventure. I drove, naturally, with Clarice perched in the custom-designed copilot’s seat beside me, looking out over the road. Our plan was to cover the first eighteen hundred miles as quickly as possible—the stretch from Maine to the Wyo
ming border—so we could conserve Clarice’s energy to spend the most time in the places she wanted most to see: the Bighorn Mountains, the Tetons, Yellowstone.
I had outfitted the van with a good sound system and made tapes of all the music she loved—classical, jazz, show tunes, folk, and though I hated it, country.
There was an album she loved, by an Irish folksinger, with a song that always made her cry, about a woman whose son leaves on a fishing boat and never comes home.
“Does this ever make you think of your brother?” she said. “I wish you two could reconnect.”
“He knows where I am,” I said, not adding that he wasn't my real brother after all. “Ray’s the one who chose to disappear. It would have been so easy to talk to me at Val’s service if he’d wanted, but he just left.”
“Someday,” she said, “maybe you’ll make your way back to each other. He may need you. You may need him, too, more than you think. Everyone should have family.”
We were on the Ohio turnpike, a long, flat stretch of highway that could have been anywhere, almost.
“You’re my family,” I said. “All I need.”
We found a great piece of pie at a truck stop in Indiana. Clarice was having trouble using a fork now, but I knew she didn’t like having me feed her in public.
“Just use your fingers,” I said. I did, too, so she wouldn’t be the only one.
“Who cares what people think, right?” she said. “That’s the least of our problems.”
After that we started eating practically all our food with our fingers. Pasta, chicken, salad. She drank soup with a straw now, so I did also.
Nights we’d pull over in some campground. I folded down the bed in the back of the van. First I helped her into the little toilet cubicle and brushed her teeth. Then, with the curtains drawn and a candle lit, I brushed her hair and undressed her.
For a few months after we’d got the diagnosis, we had continued to make love, but it had quickly become harder for Clarice. “Put my arms around you,” she said. “Lay me on your chest.”
But I knew the truth. She was long past lovemaking now. She was doing this for me. I was happy just holding her.
It was nearing the end of October when we reached the southern part of Wyoming. We had left the interstate now and were on a two-lane highway winding over the Bighorns. Great walls of rock rose up on either side of us, the layers of mineral as clearly delineated as a drawing in a geology textbook. Signs along the way named the particular era in which each rock formation had come into being. 250 billion years ago. 350 billion.
“It’s comforting, isn’t it?” she said. “Those numbers remind you how small a moment in time this one really is. What specks of dust we all are in the end.”
And the stars amazed us. I had thought I knew what the constellations looked like, from nights on our farm we’d lie on our backs in the yard looking up into the darkness, but that was nothing compared with the sky that blanketed us in Wyoming—how brightly stars shone in this place, how clear.
We passed waterfalls and strange, red rock outcroppings that rose alone, like totems, in the middle of a flat expanse of plains. We pulled into a junk shop where Clarice wanted to buy me a pair of spurs, and I bought her an angora skin rug to lie on.
“Do you think I only need invalid-type items now?” she asked, with a sudden sharpness. It was the one moment in ten days that her bitterness had shown itself.
So I bought her a mother-of-pearl penknife for removing the tops of strawberries. I bought her an ivory hair clip, and chaps.
Sitting in her copilot seat, with pillows and a strap under her chin to hold her neck up because she wasn’t strong enough to hold her head steady, she sported her chaps over the pajama bottoms that she wore all day now. It was just easier that way, she said. Her pajama bottoms were for comfort. The chaps were for style.
In a town called Buffalo, we found the Hotel Occidental, a place that looked like something straight out of an old western movie.
We pretended she was a rodeo rider, injured in a fall from a horse, and that was why I had to carry her. “You’ve heard of Calamity Jane?” I stage-whispered to the woman at the registration desk. “This is her great-great-granddaughter. She took a bad fall over in Cody, riding a bull.”
They seemed to believe us. We ordered room service and ate medallions of buffalo on the floor by the fireplace and finished off a bottle of wine.
“It doesn’t matter if I get drunk now,” she said. “I talk like I’m drunk anyway.”
“This room looks like a bordello,” I said, setting her on a big spool bed with a red velvet spread and slipping her shoes off.
“Let’s pretend we’re on the run from the sheriff,” she said. “We robbed the stagecoach.”
My turn again. “We shot a lawman and now the posse’s on our tail. We know they’re catching up to us. It’s our last night of freedom.” It was unlike me to make up stories like this—I, the scientist, believer in data. But with Clarice, and only Clarice, I possessed an imagination.
“We can do anything we want,” I told her.
Not that we could, really. Our horizons, even in a place as wild and open as this one, were narrowing, and we both knew it.
“I want a whole pint of chocolate ice cream,” she said. “I don’t care if it’s fattening.”
For three days, we drove around Yellowstone, pulling over by the side of the road sometimes to watch a moose or a herd of buffalo. We had a picnic on the shores of Yellowstone Lake, huddled under a blanket, watching the pelicans. At the geyser walk was a row of wheelchairs, available for physically challenged visitors.
“I think one of those would be a good idea for me,” she said, surprising me. Until now she’d avoided using a wheelchair.
We talked some about the past, and about the wildlife, the rock formations, the way the light fell on the plains, and how much our old dog, Katie, would have loved to run on them back in the old days, or simply be there in the van with us, her head out the window taking it all in.
We did not talk about the future—not her death, or all the stages yet to come between now and then. But one night as we were lying next to each other in our bed at the campground, she turned to me. Her words came out more measured now, and so soft I had to lean close to hear her sometimes, but she was speaking right into my ear.
“I don’t think I’ll be very good at that eye-blinking system,” she said. “I don’t have the patience for spelling words out one letter at a time. Going through the whole alphabet to get each letter. By the time I spelled one word I’d probably forget what I wanted to tell you.”
There was no point in my saying something cheerful or encouraging, like it wouldn’t really happen, or it wouldn’t be so bad. It would happen, and when it did, it would be worse than anything we could imagine.
“I need to ask you,” she said. “To make sure I don’t get to that point. I’ll need to end things before I’m so bad I can’t tell you anymore. I don’t think I can do it by myself. I don’t think that I’ll be able to do it by myself.”
Our campsite was near a deep crevasse. Earlier that day, in the sunlight, we had stood at the edge watching the Yellowstone River raging through and jagged rock rising along the sides, red, rose, orange, yellow. The water smashed down over the rocks with such force that even high above it as we were, we felt the spray on our faces. Now, in the black night, I could hear the roiling current.
We could hold hands and jump, I thought. But I could never stand there watching her fall.
“Promise you’ll help when I ask you,” she said.
I told her yes.
RUTH
A Wild and Beautiful Country
I HAD NEVER imagined us getting a divorce, but it happened now with stunning speed. Jim was out of the house by Christmas; papers were signed before the snow melted the next spring. He married again—a small wedding but unlike ours, a real one, with music and guests and the bride in a white gown, I gathered, from our daughter—in lat
e summer.
I had no argument with his actions. Seeing him with his new wife (an insurance client, a widow with whom he had worked, following the death of her longtime husband) I felt no jealousy. I can’t go so far as to say I felt free of envy concerning the man with whom I’d spent the last two decades, but the envy I felt was unconnected to any desire to be with him.
I only envied the feeling of being in love. The memory of that was as distant now as what a war veteran amputee might feel remembering a pair of legs blown off in 1967.
By now I had lived half my life without Ray Dickerson, and it was not even Ray I missed. It was the young woman I had been when I loved him. She had disappeared. I missed the way the world had seemed to me then, the richness of the possibilities, the hunger I had felt, the capacity for longing. I had inhabited a wild and beautiful country once, one that I could never find my way back to. I had spoken a language no longer known to me. Somewhere on the planet, music was playing that my ears could not hear.
I thought about Apollo wandering the earth without Daphne, Jackie Kennedy watching the flag-draped coffin of her husband being carried up the steps of the Capitol as Camelot crumbled. I wondered if Neil Armstrong had ever felt this sense of exile: that he had once walked on the face of the moon, and could never return there.
Dana
The Promise
THE WORLD WAS closing in on Clarice now. The muscles of her body, one by one, were shutting down on her. One day we realized she could no longer walk. Next her right hand went. Then she was down to a couple of functioning fingers on her left, till those two locked. It was the opposite of a growing season, what we were living through now: a slow and relentless catalog of deaths.
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