The Good Daughters (19 page)

A Deadly Ticking

I
N
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.

“Never put deodorant there,” she used to tell me, even though I worked long hours in the sun and came in sweaty, days on our farm. “I want your real smell on me.”

Now I drank in hers.

Only after honoring all those other places did I visit the one where we always ended up. The dark, hidden spot in her where treasure lay. I lingered there longest of all. Far away, I heard her voice—a low purring first, then a sound like newborn baby animals rooting for mother’s milk. Then moaning.

Hours had passed since that terrible moment in the doctor’s office, and still we had not yet wept over his news, but now the two of us could cry. The sound of our voices filled the house then. The voice that came out of me—out of us both—was one I’d never heard before and never want to hear again.

It was a pure, clear animal wail—two voices, raised in a single long cry that filled the night and went on a long time.

Then we slept.

The Darnedest Thing

W
E FOUND OUT
Val Dickerson had died from a message left on our answering machine for my father. He was living on his own, more or less, but the forgetfulness he’d been experiencing for a number of years had now reached the point where a caretaker was needed to spell us in between the hours each of us put in babysitting him. If you left him by himself now, there was no telling what he would do. He might go out to the barn and start up the tractor, never mind if it was winter and the ground frozen. Or he’d head out to the greenhouse and decide this was the day to get a few dozen flats of Early Girl tomato seedlings started. One late November day, long past frost, I found him wandering in the cornfield.

“I don’t understand what happened,” he said. “The Silver Queen has disappeared. We should have had twenty rows here. Someone’s been robbing us blind.”

Of course he no longer farmed by this point. Though the title to our now heavily mortgaged farm still belonged to my father, a couple of years earlier we’d leased our land to Victor Patucci.

The afternoon the message came saying Val died, he had been watching television. It was the early days of Oprah, for whom he seemed to possess a surprising affection.

“That girl may be a Negro,” he said. “But she sure makes sense.”

I was unloading groceries when I pushed the blinking message button—surprised that anyone would have called. After my mother’s death, my father no longer attended church or got involved in community affairs the way he had for so many years. Most of his friends, if they weren’t dead, were old, like him. Those who could spent the winters in Florida.

The voice on the machine was unfamiliar. He introduced himself as David Jenkins, the husband of an old friend of ours, Valerie Dickerson. He was calling from Rhode Island.

“I thought you should know, Valerie passed away suddenly last weekend. She wasn’t sick. I found her in her art studio. She must’ve been painting when it happened.”

I set down the carton of eggs I’d been holding, shaken not so much from the news of Val as I was by the way just hearing her name had conjured a memory of Ray. I saw his long hair falling over me. I could almost taste strawberries on my tongue.

I was long married by this point, and unexpectedly pregnant with our son, Douglas—a full ten years after we’d adopted Elizabeth. But even then, a week and a half away from my due date, with my back sore and my ankles swollen and my cheeks splotchy, just thinking of Ray Dickerson caused my face to grow hot.

Jim and I had been married almost sixteen years. The night Doug was conceived had been the first time we’d made love in close to a year, and we’d never conceived a child even when we were trying hard, which was probably the reason I’d felt no need for birth control.

After all our efforts to have a baby when we were younger, I had assumed it would never happen. Punishment for the abortion, I secretly believed. And here I was, pregnant for the first time at age forty-two, I said. Pregnant for the second time, actually, but that was something I never spoke of.

Now came the news that Val Dickerson was dead. Thinking about her and about Ray made me forget about my father, who was sitting in his chair a few feet away from the answering machine, facing the television. What roused me was a faint, not quite human sound coming from his chair, like an animal in distress.

I looked over at my father then, hunched in his chair, the afghan my mother knitted long ago covering his thin knees. For the first time in my life—the death of my mother no exception to this—I saw my father crying.

As well as I could for a woman at my stage in pregnancy, I knelt in front of him and put my hand on his.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I told him. “I guess you heard the message. You remember Val, right?”

Watching his face, I saw that this was a ridiculous question, though there were plenty of people in our life—my sisters’ husbands, for example, and the grandchildren, including our eleven-year-old, Elizabeth—whose names he no longer knew. But the news of Val Dickerson’s death had evidently touched a place in him where memory remained, like a patch of soil the tractor has missed, where a few dry stalks of last summer’s crops still stand in their withered rows, the soil not turned over.

“She was some kind of woman,” he said, fingering the afghan. “Tall.”

“One time they drove all the way from Vermont to buy strawberries,” I said, still thinking about Ray. As much as the news appeared to have shaken my father, it had produced a strong effect in me, too. “And then there were those crazy trips we used to make to visit them. All those hours in the car playing I Spy and looking for license plates of unusual states, all for a few glasses of lemonade and a cup of instant coffee. George was hardly ever there and I never got the feeling Val was all that happy to see us.”

“Your mother never got along with Valerie Dickerson,” my father said. The words came out with surprising force.

“But she always wanted to stay in touch. It was the darnedest thing.”

He was silent. On the TV screen, Oprah had put her hand on the shoulder
of a woman who had just announced she had an eating disorder. “Let it out,” Oprah said. “It feels good to talk about it.”

“I WONDER WHAT DANA DICKERSON
is doing now,” I said. Only after I said it did I realize that this was the very remark my mother had always made—one I’d always hated for the message it conveyed, that the life of a girl we barely knew merited so much more interest than my own. Now here I was doing the same thing.

“She liked making pictures,” my father was saying. He had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket. He blew his nose. “She had a nice smell about her.”

“Remember Ray?” I said to him. I had not spoken of him for years but here in this room, with a man for whom past and present had melded into one thick fog, it seemed I could safely speak the unutterable name. Some part of me wanted to say it out loud, just to feel the sound of it in my mouth. With my father as he was now I could have said anything.

He fed me strawberries with his tongue when I was thirteen.

We lived in a cabin in Canada once. I thought he was my destiny. We were going to have a baby.

“Yellow hair,” said my father. “Too bad you didn’t know her.”

LATER, I CALLED VAL’S HUSBAND
, David. At the point she died, he told me, she had been living in Rhode Island, where she had settled with this new husband, the businessman with the golden retriever portrait. At the time of her death she was teaching yoga and taking night classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. She must have been close to seventy by this point, I figured. Hard to imagine, of the woman who had always seemed to me so young and beautiful.

Given what I gathered from the last news I’d heard about Ray, years ago—that there was no news, actually, that even his sister didn’t know his whereabouts—it appeared unlikely he’d be at the funeral, and this was a relief. On
the one hand, I longed to see him again. Still, if I allowed myself to imagine he might actually show up at the service, I hated the thought of Ray seeing me as I was now. Some women look beautiful, pregnant, but I only looked fat.

In the end, I couldn’t attend the funeral as I’d planned. That morning, the contractions began. By afternoon, I was in labor. But my sisters made the trip.