Dana
The Half of It
THERE HAD BEEN no explosive moment in which Val and George announced they no longer loved each other. There was no big, traumatic day when George packed his bags and drove away. The truth was that George was always driving away. He went on trips so often it was hard to say where he lived anymore, or which were the destinations, and which the trips. For as long as I remembered it seemed George had been disappearing. So when he disappeared for good, it was a long time before I even noticed.
He had gone to Nashville with a bunch of song lyrics in his bag, and a few demo tapes he’d made on our reel-to-reel recorder. One was the love song he’d pictured George and Tammy singing together.
My mother got a few postcards from Nashville, then one from Austin, telling her that Nashville was no longer the place for country music, Austin was. Then a card from Nashville again, to say he had a meeting with a big star coming up, though he was not at liberty to say which one. Then he was calling from Portland, Maine, to say he’d caught a ride north with a musician buddy from Florida (Florida? Who made music in Florida?) and could I meet him for dinner there.
It was the first time in a year that I’d actually seen George, and possibly the first time ever that he’d sought me out. The moment we sat down in the restaurant, the reason became clear.
“The thing about music demos these days,” he said, “is that a person just can’t get away with anything less than professional-quality sound anymore. What I need to put my work over the top is to hire a class-A producer and a few good studio musicians to record my stuff, so I can get it in the hands of the right people. I’m thinking a thousand dollars would set me up. I know you’ve got some money saved up for school, but you won’t need it all till next year. I was hoping you might help me out in the meantime.”
I looked at him across the table in the restaurant—the Western-style shirt, his face brown from (I guessed) a tanning parlor. As recently as three days earlier, when I’d gotten his message, I’d allowed myself to feel a small, slim hope that maybe there was more to our relationship than I had known.
“My father actually wants to have dinner with me,” I’d told Clarice. “I know I shouldn’t even care, after all the times he let our family down, but I can’t help it. I’m happy.”
“That’s good,” she said, her arms around my neck. “Just watch yourself. I don’t want you to be hurt.”
Now George was reaching for his drink. “I’d pay it back in three weeks,” he said. “Four weeks, tops. First check I get, I’ll sign it over to my little girl.”
I set my fork down. I had ordered chicken but all appetite had left me now. George took a bite of steak.
“That’s not who I am,” I said. “Your little girl. I never was.”
“I know, I know. You’re all grown up,” he said. “Where did the time go, anyway? I can remember when you were just a baby.”
“Can you really?” I asked him. “Because I can barely remember you. You weren’t around that much.”
“I was working on deals, honey,” he said. “It’s not easy, supporting a family. Let me tell you.”
“Tell me what?” I said. “You never took care of anything. You left Val to do it, and she wasn’t much good at the job either.”
“That’s probably why we raised such great, independent-type kids,” he said. “You never had the world delivered on a silver platter. One thing I wanted my kids to take from me was self-reliance. And look at how you turned out. You know how to do your own thing, that’s for darn sure.”
I looked at him hard then. “Whoever was responsible for how I turned out as a person,” I said, “it wasn’t you. If I turned out OK, it wasn’t because of you. It was in spite of you.”
“Listen,” he said. “I’d say I did OK by you, under the circumstances.
“Your mother—” he began, but the sentence went no place. “Your mother was doing her own thing too,” he said, finally. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“Whatever Val did or did not do,” I told him, “at least she stuck around.” I got up from the table.
We never spoke again.
RUTH
An Anatomy Thing
MY MOTHER AND Nancy Edmunds came to stay with me for the weekend. They were part of a quilting group—my mother’s one non-church-related activity, besides our farm. There was an exhibition of quilts from Appalachia they had heard about that they wanted to see. It had been Nancy’s idea to make a weekend out of the trip—drive down, take in the quilt show and maybe Filene’s basement, or the Freedom Trail, have a seafood dinner down by the water, and stay over at my place. Nancy could sleep on the couch and my mother would bunk with me.
This was to be the first time in the nearly two years I’d lived in Boston that my mother visited my apartment there. She had not come down when I first enrolled, or for the show in which my drawing had won the prize. At the prospect of her visit, I felt a combination of irritation and excitement. After all this time I had never gotten over the longing to please her, and disappointment every time I fell short.
We were at the fish restaurant, eating dessert, when Nancy brought the subject up. “We heard you published a book. That’s quite an accomplishment.”
I studied my slice of pie, unable to speak. At no point during the past few hours I’d spent with my mother had her behavior toward me seemed any different than usual. Friendly, but remote.
“Not exactly,” I said, my tongue suddenly dry. “I was just helping a friend out. How did you hear about it?”
“A customer at the farm stand,” my mother said. “Some young woman buying a flat of pansies. She wanted to know if we were related to this artist that did some drawings for a book she had.”
“What kind of book is it anyway?” Nancy asked. “We haven’t seen a copy yet.”
“Sort of an anatomy thing,” I told her. “They thought I’d do a good job because of my work in drawing class.”
“All my girls showed talent in that department,” my mother said. “You should have seen the Snoopy pictures Naomi used to make. They published one in the paper.”
For once she did not mention Dana Dickerson. It did not escape my mind, of course, that for once my mother’s lack of interest had served me well. She never again asked about the book, though Nancy brought it up a time or two.
“Don’t forget to bring a copy home one of these days,” she said.
When I didn’t, no one pursued it.
Dana
Good Fencing
FOR THE FIRST time in my life, I was happy. I had graduated from UNH with a bachelor’s degree from the College of Agriculture. I was living in Newmarket with Clarice, who was teaching full-time at the university. I felt guilty not to be doing my share of paying the bills, but she said not to worry, things balanced out. I had a big vegetable garden in the back that fed us all summer, and when fall came, I filled jars with dill beans and pickles and beets, and my homemade tomato sauce. Every night when Clarice came home from work, I had dinner waiting and candles lit. Nights on our bed, I massaged her beautiful shoulders, her fine, narrow back, tense from all those hours grading papers. I never got tired of looking at her lovely, intelligent, kind face.
“You’re so beautiful,” I told her. I couldn’t help myself. I told her every day. “I love your body,” I said.
“I feel the same way about you,” she whispered, though we both knew how far I was from beautiful—my body was like a tree stump, my face square and forgettable. I imagined the potato Edwin Plank would have pulled out of his pocket to represent me: pale, round, and plain. Where Clarice’s hair tumbled down her back in a lush golden mass of curls, mine was thin and spiky, chopped close to my neck as a boy’s.
“To me, you are beautiful,” she said, stroking my cheek.
I had a plan. I wanted to find a plot of land in the seacoast region, close enough to the university that Clarice could make the commute easily. Not a lot of land like Plank Farm, just a few acres on which I
’d grow specialty vegetables like the unusual greens that were starting to come into fashion now as an alternative to iceberg and romaine lettuce. And I’d started thinking about raising goats.
I had some money saved up. It wasn’t a lot, just a few thousand dollars. Mostly, when I looked at property, which I had begun to do, everything was way out of my range. “Why don’t we wait to go see this property until your husband can join us,” real estate agents said, when I asked them to show me a listing. When I said I wasn’t married, they’d close the book.
One weekend I drove to Eliot, Maine—just over the New Hampshire border—to check out an item I wanted to buy Clarice for her birthday. It was an antique brass bed advertised for sale in the Pennysaver. I knew Clarice had always wanted one.
The man selling the bed must have been in his late eighties. His wife had recently died, and after sharing that bed with her for sixty-three years, he couldn’t bear to sleep in it anymore.
Fletcher Simpson had lived in the house all his life. It was a tiny place, just two bedrooms (one for him and his wife, the other her sewing room, since they’d never had children). There was a screen porch and a perennial garden and out back—beds with rhubarb and asparagus and every kind of herb, and three kinds of berries. He’d planted a plum tree to mark their fiftieth anniversary.
I told him this was just the kind of place I dreamed of having someday. I had the feeling it would be all right to talk plainly, so I said I was looking for a spot like this to live with my girlfriend and raise goats and start a cheese-making operation. We’d have a farm stand maybe—just a small one. The kind where you leave out bouquets of zinnias with a jar next to them for people to put in their money on the honor system, and they do.
“How much you want to pay?” he said.
I told him I had saved up thirteen thousand dollars. Even back then, 1974, this wasn’t much.
“I’ll tell you what,” Fletcher said. “You pay me that, to be my stake for the move to Florida. Take good care of my dog, and on the first of every month send me a check for a hundred dollars. Keep this between you and me, and leave the government out of it.”
Six weeks later he’d signed over the deed and Clarice and I moved in. We helped Fletcher pack up first, then drove him to Boston to put him on the plane for Fort Lauderdale. We promised to send him regular reports about his beagle, Katie, which we did.
We never had to move the brass bed, of course. It stayed in the same spot, where we slept in each other’s arms every night, with Katie snoring at our feet. Summers I ran the fruit and vegetable operation—with the zinnia bouquets, as planned. That was Clarice’s department.
All year round I tended the animals, and I set to work studying the art of making goat cheese, which was not yet a fashionable item, though it became one. All my university courses in animal husbandry had not prepared me for the realities of raising goats—milking a new mother goat, or the smell of a male goat in rutting season, or getting the curd just right on a wheel of Tomme—but I learned quickly. Within a couple of years, we’d been written up in Yankee magazine. People started buying our cheese by mail order, and restaurants as far as Burlington and Portland featured it on their menus.
Goats are wonderful animals: intelligent, affectionate—funny even—though if you don’t keep good fencing up, you can forget about your raspberry crop. I learned that lesson the hard way.
At the university, Clarice was on what they called “the tenure track.” She kept her private life to herself, so I did not attend faculty cocktail parties, which was fine with me. We had few close friends. All we really needed was each other.
We were the happiest couple I knew.
RUTH
Bones and Teeth
AFTER MY MOTHER had given birth to her fifth daughter, it became clear that for the first time in ten generations there would be no male heir to inherit Plank Farm. One of my father’s brothers was childless. Another, like him, had only girls. The last brother fathered a son—a boy they had started talking about as the possible inheritor of the farm, though Jake Plank had never seemed remotely interested in the idea.
As things worked out, it never came to that. Three days after landing in Vietnam, at the age of twenty, Jake was killed by friendly fire near an army base in Da Nang. All that remained of the next generation then were daughters, and not a one of us in possession of sufficient enthusiasm for the farming life to fight as hard as would have been necessary to overcome the gender problem.
Of the five of us, I was the only one with any interest in the farm, but for me, that had less to do with farming than with spending time with my father. I wanted to make art, not grow corn.
When my sisters and I were little, everyone was too busy to think much about the family legacy. Just getting through the days, and then the seasons, was all my father could manage. But as he got older, you could see the problem weighing on him. And Victor Patucci, out in the equipment shed, oiling the tractor, or going over the orders for fertilizer and seed, like a fox prowling the henhouse, licking his chops.
This became particularly evident as our financial problems grew more severe. Although my father had always maintained the Yankee tradition of paying cash and avoiding debt, by the time I left home he and my mother were taking out a loan every winter just to make it through another season. By 1973, the year I turned twenty-three, we had a mortgage on our property of more than fifty thousand dollars.
I was living in Boston at the time, working for a graphic design firm (and still, amazingly, collecting the occasional check from Sexual X-tasy), but I came home one fall weekend to help sell pumpkins a few days before Halloween.
Once again we’d been experiencing a drought, and though it was past the season for worrying about crops, my father was still keeping his eye on the rain gauge and not liking what he saw. In among the dots of orange where the pumpkins lay, our fields had seldom looked so dry.
It was around sunset, and you could tell the weather was changing. Black clouds had gathered over the horizon. The cows, back in the barn, were making restless sounds. Right after his old friend Don Kent, the weatherman for WBZ, my father looked to the cattle next to tell him what was going on meteorologically.
My mother was just clearing away the dinner dishes. Winnie was over, to work with our mother on a crib quilt for the daughter of a woman from church who’d just had a baby. Our father had settled in with the paper, expressing displeasure with the news. He’d voted for Richard Nixon, but after Watergate he observed that he’d never trusted the man.
At first I thought someone had fired a gun in the yard. Then came the sound, like an explosion. When the second crash came, we knew it was thunder. I stepped out on the porch just in time to see a lightning bolt strike the barn. A minute later, there was a burning smell, and smoke curled from the roof.
“Edwin, get the hose,” my mother screamed. She was dialing the emergency dispatcher.
I’d never seen a building burn before. This one was engulfed in flames within minutes, the lines of the roof no longer visible beneath the tongues of fire. My father had pulled his boots on—no time to lace them—racing to the barn. After thirty years of fighting fires on other people’s property, nobody had to tell him what a barnful of hay looked like when a spark got to it.
The hoses were coiled next to the baler. Even if we could have connected them up in time, there was no way of getting to them; the heat was too intense. And beside the hoses sat our precious Massey Ferguson, its tank filled with gasoline, and a second gas can beside it.
By the time we got to the barn, the flames had reached the stalls, and they were lapping up the walls toward the roof. All my life I’d lived around cows, but I’d never heard them moan as they did now, with the flames devouring them. The air was filled with the cries of burning cows and the sound of our own voices, screaming and shouting, and the smell of burning flesh. In the blazing darkness I saw the swing in the loft outlined in flames, spinning like a lasso from a rafter as it crashed to the gro
und, and with it, our weather vane.
My sisters’ husbands came running—first Andy, then Chip and Steve and Gary. We were hauling anything we could find in the kitchen that would hold water—our canning kettle and mop buckets, the coffee percolator, but it was an effort as pointless as spitting on the flames. They had reached the sky now, where a full harvest moon hung like a medal. Even the leaves of the maple next to the barn were burning. The line of scarecrows my father had built to attract pumpkin customers blazed like a parade of Vietnamese villagers fleeing a fire-bomb attack. In the bizarre way fires traveled, the sign I’d painted that afternoon—BEST PUMPKINS AROUND! PICK YOUR OWN!—remained untouched, but beside it, a row of diapers belonging to my sister Winnie’s baby flapped, burning, in the deadly breeze. Beside our old Dodge truck, my father stood like a man witnessing the end of the world. Which in a way he was.
Finally the fire trucks were there, and the hoses shooting a wide, powerful spray, but by the time they arrived it was too late to save our barn, or anything that had once resided there. Cows, tools, equipment, cats. Gone.
The whole thing was over by midnight, though the embers continued to smolder for two days after that. My mother, the one who did best at functioning in the face of crisis, suggested that we harvest the pumpkins ourselves and take them down the road to a neighbor’s place to sell. Nobody would want to come to Plank Farm now for a fun outing with children. Only to deliver casseroles and sympathy.
We had insurance, though not close to enough as it turned out. One of the cows had actually escaped the blaze—an old milker named Marilyn, whose stall was closest to the one open door. Ignoring the firefighters’ words, my father had run in the barn to free her moments before the main beam crashed down. Of the rest, all that remained were a few bones and teeth. My mother dealt with those. My father, though he didn’t weep, could not have handled the sight.
The Good Daughters Page 12