The Good Daughters (23 page)

A Different Breed

W
E WERE MOVING
our father into a nursing home. “Care facility” was what they called the place, but we knew what it was, and as much fog as there was enveloping his brain at this point, my father understood. He was leaving our farm.

“No good will come of this,” he said, as my brother-in-law Chip pulled up in front of the building.

“It’s going to be fine, Dad,” Winnie said.

“What do you know, Ed?” Chip said, as we made our way up the walk to the door—Chip carrying the suitcase, Winnie following behind with a small portable TV. “Looks like they’ve got a little garden here. Bet you could give these guys a few pointers.”

Stooping as if for a low lintel, though none was there, my father said nothing. He was wearing brown corduroys, not his usual Dickies overalls, and the shoes he’d probably last worn for my mother’s funeral—or his one brave but abbreviated road trip, that same year, to visit Val Dickerson. Moving along the cinder-block hallway with him now, I observed that all the other residents wore slippers. We had left his work boots back at the house. No use for them here.

His room was the size of a horse stall—single bed, bedside table, chest of drawers. I had brought a few pictures to put up on the walls but when I began to set things out, he shook his head and waved them away. He sat upright and still in the straight chair by the bed—the place for visitors, no doubt—and studied the sliver of sky through the window.

“Looks like rain,” he said.

That night, alone at the house, I sat on the porch and looked out over the fields. The cornstalks were down, and the soil turned over for the winter. All evidence of this year’s crops gone except the winter squash and pumpkin vines in the far field awaiting the “Make Your Own Scarecrow” weekend that now marked the end of another season at Plank’s.

The sun was setting early now. Only the barest slice of light remained, though I could make out the kitchen lamp at my sister Naomi’s place down the hill, where she and her husband would probably be fixing dinner now—Lean Cuisine, eaten in front of the television most likely. They didn’t eat fresh vegetables even in season, and nobody canned anything anymore.

So here we were—a family scattered to the wind like milkweed once the pod has opened. I was halfway into my fifties, with more gray in my hair now than blond. My daughter was off in Seattle, in her second year of law school and unlikely to live here again. My thirteen-year-old son, though still living under the same roof with me, was counting the days till the Red Sox drafted him starting pitcher, and whether or not he attained that goal, he had his eye on distant horizons.

In the absence of a male heir, management of the farm had fallen to Victor Patucci, though I still oversaw the seasonal farm stand operation.

All of us—the other four girls and the husbands not yet lost to death or divorce—still lived on the property on the one-acre parcels our dad had subdivided for us back in the 1980s. It had only gotten harder to make a go of things on the farm. The only question still before us was which of two courses we’d choose for the dissolution of the property that had been in our family for three hundred and forty years: the Meadow Wood Corporation or good old Victor Patucci. If we went with Victor, we would receive a cash settlement much
smaller than that offered by the developers, but at least our family’s land would continue to be a farm.

A FEW OF THE GRANDCHILDREN—POSSESSING
sufficient sentiment about the property that they still cared to see the land farmed, if not by Planks, then by someone else—were lobbying for the Patucci option. (One, my nephew Ben, labored under the illusion that this was “the green choice.” I didn’t disabuse him of the notion.)

My sisters themselves seemed ready for the more lucrative buyout. Whichever scenario we chose, it seemed inevitable that the days in which Plank Farm rested in the hands of the Plank family were coming to an end. Everyone but me was long past ready to sell.

My being the lone holdout was odd, actually. If I had a passion in life, it had been art and drawing; but I respected history, too, and it seemed to me that there was a heritage to preserve with this farm of ours, this piece of land of which, like it or not, we had become the stewards.

There were several houses on the property now, of course—mine, and those of my sisters, all of which would be part of the package when the place was sold. Victor Patucci had announced that my house—totally upgraded, of course; his wife favored granite countertops over tile—would work best for his family. Our old farmhouse, where my parents had made their lives for more than fifty years, and my father since birth, was a teardown.

Hearing this, I had considered, briefly, taking the door that bore the marks my father had made through the years chronicling the growth of the Plank sisters. Each pencil mark bore a date:

November, 1954, Esther.

June, 1955, Naomi.

October, 1959, Sarah.

January, 1960, Edwina.

April, 1960, Ruth. Our Beanpole!

Especially in the later years of childhood, the space between the marks for my sisters and the ones registering my growth stretched wide, whole inches of wood separating us.

I was a different breed from the rest of them. I had always known it. All I was missing was the confirmation.

And then a letter showed up in my mailbox. I didn’t at first recognize the name on the return address—Frank Edmunds—but when I opened the envelope I realized who it was who had sent the letter. I had barely known Frank when we were high school classmates long ago, but of course I remembered his mother because she was my mother’s friend—her only friend, perhaps, unless you counted Dinah Shore. Nancy Edmunds.

Frank was writing to me now, he said, to tell me that his mother had died recently—in a nursing home in Connecticut where she’d moved some years before, so her son—who worked just outside of Hartford—would be close enough to visit easily.

“Mom didn’t say much, those last months,” Frank wrote. “But she kept talking about this letter she’d written a long time ago that she’d been holding on to. She made me promise I’d send it to you once she wasn’t around anymore. So here it is. I don’t even know what it says, but I hope nothing in here stirs up any trouble.”

IT HAD BEEN YEARS SINCE
I’d seen Frank’s mother, Nancy. Back when my mother got sick, people from church had dropped casseroles or cookies by, but it was Nancy, traveling by bus from Windsor Locks, Connecticut, who sat with her and did her hair even, until there wasn’t any. She was at the farm the night my mother took her last breath.

Now here came a letter, with my name on the envelope, written in a shaky hand.
For Ruth Plank.

I didn’t open it right away. I sat there for a minute with the pale mauve envelope in my lap, thinking about the woman who had written this, and what
might have inspired her to do such a thing. Although I thought of her as having been old forever, I realized now that Nancy Edmunds must have been younger than I was now, when her husband killed himself, younger than I now, on that day my mother and my sisters and I helped out at the yard sale where all the Edmunds family’s furniture and most of their personal belongings had been set out on the lawn of the house they had to sell to pay off her creditors—my mother in an apron beside her friend, helping to collect the dollar bills. They had lived through that together, these two women. That and so much else I didn’t even know about probably.

I must have known, studying my name on the front of the envelope, that whatever the words were contained inside, they might change my life. Why else would a woman I barely knew have written them, and instructed her son, on her deathbed, to mail this letter to me once its author was in her grave?

And so I registered a measure of dread—mixed with a certain unmistakable excitement—at the prospect of hearing what my mother’s friend might have to say to me after all these years. Particularly at this moment. With the full knowledge that of all the relationships of my life, perhaps the least resolved (and least resolvable, now that she was dead) was mine with my mother.

Nancy Edmunds’s letter reached me in early summer. For whatever reason—no doubt some would attribute this to some kind of hormonal change but I myself knew it was more than that—a strange melancholy had begun to envelop me sometime earlier that year, for which I could locate no explanation.

My health was fine. My job as an art therapist gave me a certain satisfaction, and—combined with Jim’s contributions to our children’s support—provided enough money for us to live in relative comfort.

Despite the divorce, our children seemed like happy, well-adjusted people, though I wished Elizabeth called and visited more often than she did. In this respect and few others, I was like my mother—a woman for whom nothing had mattered more than family.

I regretted that my sisters and I weren’t closer, though we lived near one another and spent holidays together. Despite our physical proximity, the bond
the four of them shared had never seemed to extend to me, for reasons I still tried to comprehend.

We saw the world differently was all I knew. It was nobody’s fault, but in a hundred different ways—their quiet, dogged style of living that seemed to leave no room for joyfulness or play; their belief in our parents’ brand of self-sacrifice and faith that reward lay in the next life, not this one; even the foods they cooked for family get-togethers—my sisters and I had little in common other than the land we all lived on, those five one-acre tracts along the southern border of our dying family farm. And soon we wouldn’t even share that.

FOR SOME TIME NOW I
had understood that there was no one in my life—not my sisters, not my father, not my ex-husband or my children, dear though they were to me, not my old friend Josh or the women I worked with now, though I valued their friendship—who fully knew me, not in the way I had briefly believed I had been known only one time in my life. For fifty years I had felt like an outsider in my own family. It was a feeling that began, I knew, with what had taken place between my mother and me. Or what had not taken place, that I had missed so sorely.

A memory came to me then, of Nancy Edmunds and my mother, sewing mother-daughter dresses for Nancy’s daughter Cassie and me—dresses with rickrack on the pockets and big wide sashes that tied in back. I had seen a Butterick pattern featuring the dresses at the fabric store and begged my mother to take on the project of making them. Surprisingly, for her, she relented, even going so far as to let me choose the fabric: a girlish print featuring kittens chasing balls of yarn across the yardage. Mint green and pink.

We brought home the fabric shortly before Easter 1960, at the height of the cold war. I was a fourth grader, and the teacher had taught us how to hide under our desks if the Communists came to bomb us. For years afterward, every time I heard a plane overhead I wondered if they were finally on their way to get us.

The picture came to me now of coming home from school on the afternoon of a particularly terrifying air-raid drill and finding my mother and Nancy waiting there, wearing those ridiculous dresses, with their puffed sleeves and sashes tied around the waist, that jaunty row of rickrack trimming the pockets and hem.

Maybe over the course of the years, I reshaped events to come up with the image, but I believe that even my nine-year-old self had registered poignancy in the image of my mother standing in the doorway to greet me that day, wearing the newly finished dress. Young as I was, I recognized this as one of those moments when the dream of how you hope and imagine things will turn out—the picture from the pattern of those two smiling figures in their matching dresses—turns out to bear so little resemblance to how things really go.

I had come racing up the driveway from the bus, carrying my fallout shelter instructions. As always, I longed for my mother’s arms around me, at the same time that I understood what I was looking for was not available to me. Only that day, there she was, just outside the house, in the kitten-print dress.

Never anything close to slim, my mother—in her usual clothes—came across as a strong, sturdy, no-nonsense person: not beautiful, not homely, not skinny or fat. Just totally herself.

That day, though—with those puffed sleeves squeezing down on her large arms, and the mint green and pink skirt twirling mercilessly over her thick sausage legs, her feet in their sensible brown oxfords, I remember feeling embarrassed. Not only for myself, but for my mother even more so.

“Let’s see you put yours on, Ruth,” Mrs. Edmunds called out from her station at the sewing machine in our front room, where she was putting the finishing touches on a dress just like the others, for Cassie’s Ginny doll. Mrs. Edmunds’s own dress, though not exactly fashionable, hung more successfully on her leaner frame. Cassie—several years younger than I, home from kindergarten hours before—was already dancing around the room in her dress. It was a style, I realized now, best suited to a five-year-old.

My mother was a competent seamstress, but she had cut certain corners, in the interest of saving fabric probably. Instead of a wide sash, and a full, twirly
skirt like the ones on the Edmundses’ dresses, the sash on mine was narrow, and too short to make a full bow, and because I was not only tall, but long-waisted, it tied somewhere in the midrange between my chest and my belly button.

I had gone upstairs to put on the dress—knowing before I even did so that the whole mother-daughter dress idea had been a terrible mistake. As I came down the stairs, it was clear from the look on my mother’s face that she knew this too. But Mrs. Edmunds soldiered on with forced cheer.

“Just look at her, Connie,” Mrs. Edmunds said. “She’s the spitting image of you. With those dresses on you’re two peas in a pod.”

MORE THAN FORTY YEARS LATER
, I opened her letter to me.

“Dear Ruth,” it began. “There is something I need to get off my chest. It seemed about time I told you.