The Good Daughters (2 page)

The point of this, as always, was what my mother imagined to be my attachment to Dana Dickerson, but for me, the one significant attraction of the trip was knowing I’d get to see Ray Dickerson.

Young as I was, I understood he was handsome, and the knowledge of that made me shy, though I was drawn to him too. The odd thing was that even when I was very young—eight or nine, and he twelve or thirteen—he seemed to take an interest in me over my sisters. On one of our visits, he had spotted a drawing I’d made in the car, of a camel I’d copied off an empty cigarette pack I’d found—only I added a man dressed like Lawrence of Arabia riding on it, and a girl tied up, like a prisoner, on the camel’s other hump.

“Cool picture,” he said. “I’ll give you a Lifesaver for it.”

I would’ve given Ray Dickerson my picture for nothing, but I couldn’t speak.

After that, whenever we made trips to the Dickersons, I had lots of pictures ready. Things boys might like: spacemen and cowboys, and a portrait of my father’s favorite player on the Red Sox, Ted Williams.

“Just a few more hours, girls,” my mother would say when we complained about the length of the journey, the discomfort of all those hours in the car. But the most uncomfortable part was what happened when we arrived, and Mrs. Dickerson greeted us with that bemused and irritated expression (even as a child, I could see that), offering us lemonade, but never a meal.

The first year after they moved we drove to Pennsylvania to see them, and though that time we fit in a visit to the Liberty Bell, to round out the trip, most of the later trips we made—to Vermont, Connecticut, Vermont again—were
made for the sole purpose of catching up with the Dickersons. My mother told Mrs. Dickerson that we were passing through. (Passing through? To where?) The visit might last an hour. Never more than two.

Dana and I shared nothing (she was a tomboy; I was interested in art), but her mother would always suggest we go upstairs to play, at which point I would ask Dana to show me her Barbies—Barbie being a kind of doll my mother didn’t believe in, due to her physique and the provocative clothes the Mattel Company made for her, not that we would have spent the money anyway.

Dana never seemed interested in dolls herself, but Valerie kept giving her new ones, along with an incredible collection of official Barbie outfits, unlike the kind most girls I knew back home had—home sewn by their mothers and grandmothers, often crocheted and picked up at church fairs.

The real Barbie ensembles all had names that I knew from studying the Barbie catalog. My favorite was called “Solo in the Spotlight”—a strapless evening dress with sparkles on the hem that came with a tiny plastic microphone, for nights Barbie performed in nightclubs.

Once, when Dana was in the bathroom, I had stuffed the Barbie gown into my pocket. Dana had so little interest in this kind of thing she hadn’t noticed, but as we were leaving their house, Ray had put an arm around my shoulder and whispered, “You forgot something.” He handed me an odd-shaped package, wrapped in many layers of toilet paper and sealed with tape, and later, when we were on the highway, I opened it. The microphone.

I thought about him all that year. How had he known, for starters—though, of course, it was already proven he was magic. But more important: what did it mean, that Ray Dickerson, so much older than me, and so handsome, had chosen to present me with the treasured item?

The next spring, when we made our pilgrimage to see the Dickersons, I brought him a present of my own—a harmonica I’d bought with money I earned from weeding the strawberries, with mother-of-pearl on the case. But Ray—the main attraction of the trip—was off on his unicycle, so I never got to see him that time. Meanwhile, downstairs, my parents and Valerie Dickerson
chatted about people back home, barely known to Valerie, and my mother inquired after Dana’s religious education, such as it was. She’d brought a Junior Bible as a gift.

“That was so thoughtful, Connie,” Mrs. Dickerson told her. “I wish I could invite you to stay for dinner, but I’m taking an art class.”

“Art lessons, a woman her age,” my mother commented to my father as we made our way home along that same long stretch of road, after the lemonade—my father’s back straight at the wheel, his eyes on the road and no place else. “What is Valerie Dickerson thinking?”

“I guess she’s got talent,” he said. Then, after a minute’s silence in the car, or even longer, he added, “Maybe Ruth should take art lessons. She’s got that gift too.”

Sitting in the backseat—the way-back, actually, this being the days before seat belt regulations—I felt a small, hopeful surge of promise, like a faint, thin shaft of light coming through the door, or the hint of breeze on a sweltering day. I loved to draw, a fact my mother hadn’t seemed to notice.

My mother said nothing. Why would she want to pursue any activity that linked me closer to Val Dickerson? Even as my mother sought the woman out, she seemed so filled with judgment and reproach.

“There’s a Howard Johnson’s up ahead, girls,” she said. “We’ll get you each a cone. Just not chocolate. It stains.”

Afterward, standing in the parking lot, licking my ice cream—the one person in our family who chose coffee, when everybody else favored strawberry or vanilla—I thought about a picture I’d seen on the wall at the Dickersons.

It was a print by an artist who was popular at the time, an image of a thin girl with straggly hair and big eyes that filled up half her face. She was holding a flower. The feeling it gave you, looking at this picture, was that the girl the artist had painted was the only person in the world (and very likely this was the only flower). Nobody could be more alone than that girl. And the funny thing was that though I lived in a big family—with my four sisters, crammed into three bedrooms—this was how I felt, too, growing up in that house.

Not that she ever did anything so different, but I had a sense that in some odd way I could not understand, but registered in my heart, my mother never took to me as she did to my sisters. I would feel it when I saw her with one of the others—Naomi, whose hair she liked to braid, or Esther, for whom she had found the nickname “Tootsie,” or Sarah, known as “Honeybun.”

“What’s my nickname?” I asked her one time. She had looked at me with a blank expression then, as if the thought of coming up with yet another endearment was beyond her capacity.

“Ruth,” she said. “That’s a fine name.”

This was when my father stepped in. “I think I’ll call you Beanpole,” he said.

I was different from my sisters. Different from my mother most of all. They didn’t know this about me, but I made up odd stories, and sometimes, as I did, I drew pictures of the things I dreamed up, and sometimes these pictures were so strange, and possibly even shocking, I hid them in my sock drawer. Though there was one person I showed them to, when I had a chance. Ray Dickerson.

The second time we visited them in Vermont, I brought Ray a picture of the two of us—Ray and me—on a spaceship, both of us in spacesuits but still clearly recognizable, with an image of Saturn out the window. At school we’d just done a unit on astronauts and they’d told us about Ham, the chimpanzee they sent into space—an idea that had haunted me, because my teacher never mentioned any plans for bringing the chimp home, only launching him—meaning he was destined to orbit the earth forever, I guessed, until the food ran out and all that was left was a chimp skeleton. In my picture, I was half girl, half chimpanzee. Ray looked like a chimpanzee too.

“Sometimes, I feel like that chimp they launched into space,” he said, when I showed him my picture.

“Only it wouldn’t be so lonely if you had company,” I said, thinking of how in the picture there had been two of us.

He just looked at me then. Maybe he was thinking,
What am I doing talking to a little kid?
He looked like he might say something—an expression he often
had, actually—but he didn’t speak. He just grabbed his unicycle and took off down the driveway, though not before stuffing my picture in his jeans pocket. This was another thing about Ray: he disappeared abruptly. One minute you were having the best conversation. Then he was gone.

Driving home that afternoon, we passed him on the road—his long, angular form cruising on his unicycle. He didn’t see me, but for that one flash of time, I had taken in his face. Long enough to decide I loved this boy.

Where Trouble Lay

T
O MY BROTHER
and me, our parents went by their first names, Valerie and George. In all the years we lived with them, I don’t think we ever called them Mom or Dad. It said a lot, our not using those names for them. I’m not sure I ever felt I had parents. Not parents as you normally think of them, anyway.

It’s an odd feeling, growing up in a family where it seems like the adults are the ones who need to grow up. Even when I was very young, I felt that way. They just seemed so unreliable to me. They were so wrapped up in themselves they sometimes seemed to forget they had children.

I was five or six when George quit his job selling ad space at the newspaper in Concord, to write a novel about life on another galaxy where the people wore no clothes. This was the only thing I remember about George’s book. Even when I was little, this fact shocked me. George’s goal was to become a world-renowned writer, which was why we left New Hampshire, the place I was born.

Valerie’s father had just died, and her mother was dead already, and since there were no brothers or sisters, she inherited what he had. This wasn’t much,
considering her dad had been a steelworker all his life, but it was enough for George to decide to quit his job and sell the house and live off that money until his ship came in as an author. His goal was not to be simply a writer but “an author.” I never understood what the difference was.

Meanwhile, we’d live in Valerie’s father’s old place, just outside of Pittsburgh. Even then I remember thinking, what if this ship doesn’t come in? I had heard George telling the story for this novel of his—it was something he liked to do on long car rides when we were going somewhere, as was often the case, but every time he did, my mind would wander, which didn’t seem like a good sign. My brother, Ray, also a lover of fantasy, had read me a couple of J. R. R. Tolkien books by now, and C. S. Lewis, and though they were never really my style, either, I could tell a good fantasy from one that made no sense, meaning the kind George was writing.

As for me, as soon as I could read I gravitated to nonfiction, biographies mostly, of people like Annie Oakley and George Washington Carver. Also true stories about animals and nature. My all-time favorite was
Ring of Bright Water,
about a pair of otters. I loved it that the illustrations were photographs.

I worried that while we were waiting for that ship of his, George would spend all the money. If he didn’t sell his book, then where would we be? I was in the third grade at this point, but as it turned out I was right. Where we would be, and were, was in a trailer park in Pennsylvania, and after that, a house in Vermont without indoor plumbing. It’s unclear to me now how George and Valerie decided on these places for us to settle down, for a while anyway. We never stayed for long.

We were living in the Vermont house when George announced that he was going to become a country-and-western songwriter. He had an idea for a romantic ballad that would be perfect for Les Paul and Mary Ford—though by the time he got it together to record his demo, they were getting divorced. But even without the problem of the singers’ relationship, there seemed to be some pretty big obstacles to this plan.

“Don’t you have to know how to play the guitar or something if you want
to write songs for people?” I said. He thought this was a good idea, and bought one, along with a book on how to learn to play guitar in fourteen days. I did not find this reassuring.

Back in the days of reel-to-reel tapes, he created a recording studio to work on his demos, in what had been the garage of the house we rented, this time in Connecticut. I wasn’t sure the owner of the house would appreciate it that my father cut a hole in the garage door to let in more light, never mind what he was going to do in wintertime, when it would get pretty chilly in that uninsulated garage.

By winter the checks would have started rolling in, George told me. Then he could get himself a real place to work on his music, and things like an electric organ. We might even move to Nashville, he said. That’s where the action was in country music.

Even then, I knew this wasn’t happening, as did Val and my brother probably, though I was the one in the family with the firmest grasp on reality. Even as a kid, I always had the ability to see down the line to where trouble lay, or truth. George used to complain that I expected the worst out of life, but it wasn’t that. I simply recognized that just because the sun was shining one day didn’t mean it would the next. Frost would come, and so would snow. The fact of rain did not rule out the possibility of drought. You could call it pessimism. I based my attitudes on what I saw in the world around me. Not what I dreamed up.

“Dana has her feet firmly grounded on earth,” one of my teachers wrote about me on a report card. I remembered this because to me it seemed like the nicest kind of compliment, but I could see that for my mother, this was a disappointment.

“Don’t you ever want to use your imagination?” she said, but I was more the type who based her thinking on what was real—the things I could touch and see.

I was not one to believe, the way my father did, that things would always turn out the way you wanted them to, or—like my mother—that we should surround ourselves only with what was beautiful. Life wasn’t like that. Even as a child, I knew and accepted this.

I think I always had an understanding of the seasons and recognized that all of them—winter as much as summer, fall as much as spring—were necessary to sustain the cycle of life. I might be the youngest, but I kept track of the bills. Where the others whistled in the dark, I considered how we might get by in the event of a worst-case scenario. From what I’d seen of the world, those were far more likely to take place than the paydays George kept expecting.

I loved my brother, Ray. He was the only one in our family who showed me a certain interest, for a while there anyway. But I understood that I was the only truly reasonable person living under whatever roof happened to be sheltering us that season.

Except for one uncle, we saw no relatives. No cousins. There was one grandparent that I met one time and one time only. All I knew of my heritage was George’s story: that his father had performed in silent movies, where he met my grandmother—the woman, he told us, who had posed for that image we saw at the beginning of every movie made by Columbia Pictures to this day. He called her a legendary beauty of Hollywood. He said she could stop traffic with her amazing body, well into her sixties.

Traffic? What traffic? My grandparents had lived in Vermont. Due to some kind of falling-out that had something to do with my mother, though we never got the details, I met my grandma only once, when I was five or six, but in distant memory she was an ordinary-looking person who served us meat loaf and called my father Georgie.

George was a fair-weather type. He wanted every day to be sunny, and never believed, as long as it was, that the sky would ever darken again, as it always did over the broad green horizons he imagined for us all. He liked the idea of having children and being a father, but only long enough to cook up some project for us, which he’d forget about shortly after.

A picture from our Vermont days: One time at the feed store, where he was buying materials to build a pen for the baby chicks he’d gotten my brother and me for Easter—with no idea what we were going to do with them when they got big—George spotted a wildflower seed mix for sale. He came up with this
idea of digging up our lawn and planting the whole thing with wildflower seed instead.

Back at our rented house, he gave my brother and me paper cups filled with seeds and instructed us to toss them in the ground wherever we wanted, to make the flowers grow in a more natural-looking pattern. He had abandoned the idea of rototilling up the lawn at this point. George preferred to let the seed find its own way into the soil, he said, filling in the patches where the grass was thin.

I knew, even then, no seedlings would take root that way. Even as he was telling Val how we’d set up a flower stand in summer, selling bouquets, I knew we wouldn’t.

After his first round of the country-and-western phase, George had a fling with photography. He took up puppeteering. He had this idea he could make a living taking educational puppet shows to schools, teaching children about the importance of good nutrition.

They were ahead of their time, Val and George, as health food types, vegetarians. George’s plan to make a killing selling vegetable juicers, and juicer franchises, came sometime after that. Then there was the yogurt culture he bought from a guy he met at a truck stop in Virginia, that we would use to set up a yogurt-making business, with pure Vermont honey (we were back up north by this point) for sweetener. After that failed (and despite the fact that neither of them touched seafood) came the clam shack in Maine. In between these projects there were inventions and—this never changed—country songs.

The years we lived in New Hampshire—where I was born in July of 1950—represented the only time I can remember in which my father held down regular employment. I was eight when we moved, my brother, Ray, twelve. But for years after that, my mother reminisced about the house we lived in there—a place way out on a dirt road that we’d actually bought with a five-thousand-dollar down payment given to my parents by my mother’s uncle Ted, who had made some money from part ownership in a bubble-gum company, of all things.

Maybe it was the knowledge that a person could get rich from something like bubble gum (or if not rich, that he could end up with an extra five thousand
dollars in his pocket, anyway) that inspired George’s own dreams of overnight fame and fortune. Though, quick as he’d earned the bubble gum money, my mother’s uncle had lost the majority of the cash, reinvesting the proceeds, as my mother told me, in a scheme for edible crayons or something like that.

Perhaps it was a similarity to this uncle of ours that first attracted Val to George. Though what kept them together was harder to figure. And whatever it was, it didn’t keep them together much. The clearest picture I have of George is the sight of him with that briefcase of his, walking out the door headed to some greener pasture, or the twinkling lights of some city where someone had an amazing deal for him, or some grand harbor where, just over the horizon, our ship was coming in.