In the spring we rebuilt, in a fashion. To economize, and to get the new building up as fast as possible, my father chose a prefab metal barn structure Victor had located, with a laminate roof to replace the old wood barn that had stood on the property since my great-great-great-grandfather Gerald Plank first raised the beams with the help of his neighbors in 1857. It had been a day his wife had recorded in a letter to her mother.
“Once the last beam was in place,” she wrote, “the men descended the ladders for a meal of cornbread and beef stew I and the other wives prepared. All but my own fine husband, who, as tradition would have it, secured a young sapling to the highest peak. It will remain there a few seasons, I reckon, but the barn itself I expect to be standing long after Gerald and I are safely returned to the soil.”
We bought another tractor of course—a used Ford 8N, purchased at auction. “This one won’t have to last us so long anyway,” my father observed quietly to my mother when he brought it home—a sorry comedown from our shiny red Massey Ferguson. “It’s not like there’s another generation of Planks standing at the ready to take over this place.”
He replaced our tools, and bought a mower, but the fire marked the end of the days of fresh milk and cream on the table from the cows my father spoke of as “our girls.” My father didn’t have the heart for that part again, he said.
A week after the fire, my father received the first call from a developer—a conglomerate out of Nashua that had got wind of the disaster and evidently judged this as good a moment as any to make an offer on our place. The Meadow Wood Corporation was looking for land to construct communities of tasteful yet affordable homes in rural areas close enough to hospitals and shopping to provide an attractive climate for housing the coming generation, the man said—a two-tiered project that would begin with homes for growing families and eventually include assisted living and a twenty-four-hour care facility. They’d be more than happy to send a representative to come and talk with our family about a possible sale, terms highly attractive, he assured us.
“Some nerve that guy had,” my father said, after he set down the phone. “Barging into a family’s private business at a difficult time, flashing his wallet.”
Come January, he was making his order from Ernie’s A-1 Seeds, same as always. But we all knew if something didn’t change, there were only so many seasons left before they had us.
PART II
RUTH
A Universe of Three
AFTER MY GRADUATION from art school—a ceremony attended by both my parents, for once—I stayed on in Boston. I was working for a design firm but making my own paintings, too, on nights and weekends. Certain things I missed a lot about our farm—the smell of the barn, the taste of fresh peas eaten raw, right off the vine, the night sky as it can only look when no other light exists in any direction to diminish the brightness of the stars themselves.
Mostly, though, it was a relief to discover, after so many years, that the old sorrows I had known all my life—the chill wind of my mother’s disappointment, my sisters’ attachment to one another and distance from me—no longer stung as they once had. My father represented the one person in my family to whom I felt a deep connection—but even his tenderness and care seemed, sometimes, like a too-obvious attempt to make up to me what the others failed to provide.
“You have a special someone there in the big city?” he asked me once, when I was home for a weekend visit that May, helping to get the tomatoes planted. For my father—a man who generally confined his conversations with me to new varieties of corn, or the differences between the milk fat content of Guernseys versus Holsteins, or the progress of his attempts to create a new variety of super-sweet early strawberry—this was an unusually intimate question.
“I go on dates now and then,” I said, not so much opening the door to further discussion as closing it.
The truth was, the rare occasions in which I went out with men during those years were almost invariably uncomfortable experiences. Nearly every time a man suggested we go someplace together—to a movie usually, or dinner, or a beer in Harvard Square—I’d find myself counting the minutes until I could be back in my apartment again.
There was nothing so terrible about these men. There was just never anything that excited me, and in the absence of that I couldn’t see the point of the whole thing. When they kissed me, I registered the feel of their lips on mine, their hands moving down my back or possibly over my breast, but with the detachment of a person drawing the scene more than living it. Nothing stirred in me.
I was a twenty-four-year-old virgin. The one person with whom I discussed this, oddly enough, was Josh Cohen. We didn’t see each other regularly, but over the years since he had hired me to make the drawings for Sexual X-tasy we had developed a friendship.
Josh was wildly experimental. He told me about orgies he attended and weekends spent at hidden-away places in Vermont or Maine or upstate New York, where people walked around naked, moving freely from one partner to another—this being the days before anyone had to worry about the health implications of that kind of behavior.
As for me, the secrets of my own nature and yearnings were contained within the pages of my notebook. Even there, I had no interest in the kinds of activities Josh engaged in on weekends he drove his convertible to one of these spots, “to play,” as he called it. Josh liked hot tubs filled with beautiful women and fit young Boston businessmen on the move, energetically climbing over one another like a pile of kittens in the hayloft. From what I gathered, avoiding all emotional attachment was the main objective. It held no appeal for me.
“Nobody who saw your drawings would believe you live like a nun,” he said, one night when we were having dinner at a Cuban restaurant around the corner from my apartment. “You think up all these wild things people could do with each other. Then you never do them yourself.”
“I never meet anyone who makes me feel like I’d want to,” I said.
This was not completely true. There had remained, after all these years, a picture in my head—not even a picture so much as a feeling—of one man with whom I could imagine myself making love as easily as breathing. This was Ray Dickerson.
So I lived partnerless in Cambridge. My sexual experiences took place when I painted and drew. I didn’t always create erotic scenes in my artwork, but when I did, it was as if I were not simply depicting but living them. I stayed up all night sometimes, painting, and when I finally lay down to sleep my body would be damp with sweat. Nobody saw these paintings but me. They were too raw for other eyes.
It was the fall, 1974. The first frost had come, and the leaves were turning. I remember this because I’d had one of my rare dates that evening, with a nice man who had taken me to see a movie.
This man, Jim, was an exceedingly decent man who seemed to like me a lot, for reasons that never failed to mystify me, considering how little enthusiasm I displayed toward him. I felt no desire for him and could never pretend.
Jim had walked me back to my apartment. I remember the dry leaves on the sidewalk, and thinking with a certain wistfulness of the maple tree in front of our house back home—where my father used to make us a giant leaf pile for my sisters and me to jump in. As we walked home, Jim was telling me something about the insurance industry—his chosen field—and how few people understood it properly. I tried to listen but felt my mind drifting.
We reached the door to my building. “I’d like to see you again,” he said, moving toward me in a way I knew meant he was planning to kiss me.
“Could I come upstairs with you?” he said. “Maybe we could listen to music.”
“I’m working tomorrow,” I said. “I have to get up early.”
I did kiss him, or at least, our mouths touched, though I felt nothing when they did.
It is one of the mysterious things I have spent years considering—how it can be that one person may have a way of touching you that can make your skin practically burn, and another (a much better man, p
erhaps, or at least a very good one who loves you as well and truly as any person ever has) may simply not possess a talent for that touch. And if he doesn’t, none of the other things matter in the end. If a person doesn’t move your heart, there’s not a thing your head can do about that.
I could draw all these couples making love in a wide variety of positions, and Josh could end up selling enough copies to get him well on the way to where he eventually landed—a very rich man with his own publishing company, at the wheel of a 1987 Porsche heading to Esalen (he had moved to L.A. by this point) with a couple of former Playboy bunnies in the jump seat. Somewhere out there were a hundred thousand people who had evidently studied those pictures, or at least bought the book.
But in the end, the book does not exist that can tell a person how to make love, and, saddest of all maybe, no amount of love in a person’s heart will necessarily instill in him the ability to make another person feel desire if it’s not there. Either he touches you in a certain way, or he doesn’t. This is not something you can teach anyone. I knew this that night on the doorstep with Jim when I told him good night, firmly expecting I’d never see him again.
Hours later, I heard the phone ringing. But I was in the middle of a dream. I let it go. Only the ringing resumed. Stopped for a moment. Then started again.
When a telephone rings in the middle of the night—and rings and rings and rings—you can only suppose something terrible has happened to someone in your life. So I threw off the covers finally and picked up the receiver.
“Ruth.” That’s all I had to hear to know whose voice it was. Ray. I had not laid eyes on him since the day he climbed into that van leaving Woodstock and rode away without even looking back out the window.
“Where are you calling from?” I said. I had seen Dana once or twice over those years, when she’d stopped by our farm. I had taken pains not to reveal the intensity of my interest in her brother but I had asked, as casually as possible, what he was doing, so I’d heard about Canada. The draft. Also the silence. Now here he was.
“I’m living on an island in British Columbia,” he said. “I work as a carpenter. There’s a few of us up here, who left when the army came after us. I keep to myself mostly though.”
I can still remember how I felt, standing in my little apartment that night holding the phone. A current running through my body, a dam unstopped, water tumbling over rocks.
“I always hoped you’d call,” I said.
“I was thinking you might come out here,” he said. “It would be good to see you.”
I knew enough by then to be cautious, but I felt only longing and desire. This was the only man who’d been able to reach me, touch me deep below the surface of my skin. He’d been able to walk away from me so easily. But he’d also come back.
That day I quit my job and my apartment, threw away most of the paintings I’d been working on except for a few I put into storage. I told my parents very little. I was going to see a friend in Canada, was all. Four days later I was on a plane heading west.
He was waiting for me at the airport in Vancouver. We didn’t even say that much on the long drive north—an hour to the ferry at Nanaimo, an hour on the ferry, another three up north to Campbell River, and another ferry ride over to the island where he lived, Quadra.
He had his hand on my leg the whole time. I could feel his palm against the flesh of my inner thigh, warm beneath my skirt.
I did not ask him to fill me in on the particulars of what he’d been doing, how things worked for him in this place—certainly not his plans for the future or how I might fit into them. Sometimes he looked at me without saying anything. Mostly, driving along the highway, he’d stare straight ahead at the road toward the outline of the mountains against the horizon. Though I had never been to this place I had no doubt where we were headed.
That last ferry crossing was short. Ten minutes after we’d driven onto it, the boat pulled into the landing, and Ray started the engine on his truck. Slowly we rolled off onto the dock and past the town, which wasn’t more than a few buildings—a post office, a grocery store.
It was another twenty-minute drive on a dirt road where we hardly passed a single car, to the point where he told me, “We’re home.”
No other houses within sight. No power lines or, as I later learned, running water.
That night, by the light of an oil lamp, he undressed me. What happened then bore no resemblance to any of the drawings I’d made for the book. For the first time, the eye that always seemed to be looking down at my life, observing it—drawing it, even—had closed, and I was simply Ruth, a woman inside her own body, exploring his.
I have no idea how long we stayed on that bed. Until morning, and long past. Now and then we’d fall asleep for a while. When we woke up, one of us would reach for the other, and it would begin again. I kept no track of time, or anything else.
IT WAS LATE FALL WHEN I arrived on the island with Ray. A few weeks later the first snow fell. A layer of ice formed on the spring where we got our water and Ray broke through it with an axe. Even with the fire going all day, the two-room house—uninsulated, with single-pane glass in the windows—was so cold there would be mornings I’d wake up and see my breath in the air, or frost on the blankets.
I cared about none of this. Or that we hauled our water from a spring a few hundred feet from the house. Or that money was so low we lived on rice and beans and peanut butter. In summertime, Ray had worked on construction, but there were no jobs for an unskilled carpenter on the island, once winter came.
I posted a notice at the general store, advertising art lessons. No takers. It seemed we weren’t the only ones on the island with limited disposable income.
But we were rich in other ways. Outside the window we saw eagles sometimes, and always deer. We took long walks. He washed my hair and brushed it dry. Ray hauled water from the spring, heated it on the woodstove, filled an old iron tub, lit the candles, and bathed me.
Sometimes Ray would start a building project at our place—a wood-fired sauna with a stove made from an old oil drum, an art studio for me. He’d make a sketch, and sometimes we’d get materials together, or spend a few days hanging Sheetrock or planing lumber. But I learned early on that Ray’s projects usually didn’t get finished. We’d run into a problem and he’d get frustrated.
“I don’t really need a studio anyway,” I told him. “I like lying here drawing you.” This was true. Something about the sight of him splayed out naked in bed reminded me of Christ on the cross. Those long outstretched arms, sinewy legs, and a certain expression that combined both pain and rapture. It was hard to say which one more than the other.
We spent a lot of hours on that bed. Ray had a low, drowsy voice, and he loved to read out loud to me. We went through all the Lord of the Rings books, and The Chronicles of Narnia, and Dune. He read me poetry—Yeats and Browning, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Blake. Sometimes, reciting certain lines, he would be so moved by the words he’d start to cry.
Even then, he was a fragile man. But at the time, this only made him more wonderful to me. Where my own father seemed so stoic it was often hard to know what he was feeling, every emotion that passed over Ray showed on his face. If he was happy, he might break into wild, crazy dervish dancing. When he was sad—and this was surprisingly often—he wept openly. Many years later I learned a name for this behavior, but at the time I called it honest and real.
We had this fight one time. I’d remarked to Ray about how he’d failed to get back to a man down the road who’d asked him to come and help put up his roof. Not great money, but something at least. Only Ray had waited so long to stop by that the guy found someone else.
“I let you down,” he wept. “I’m an idiot.”
“You never let me down in the important way,” I said. “How much you love me.” In this area, it was true, I never doubted him. As I spoke my hands moved through his long tousled yellow hair, the color of mine—but where my own
hung straight, his was a mass of curls I liked to bury my face in.
“I love your hair,” I said. Then no more talk, only kissing.
We smoked a lot of marijuana. He wouldn’t have had the money to buy any, but he’d planted a big crop the summer before, and unlike the rest of the plants he’d started, he had a successful harvest from those. Except for a handful of times—including Woodstock—I had never smoked before, and even now I didn’t like the feeling of starting every day with a joint the way Ray did. But I liked how it felt getting stoned before we made love. And we made love all the time.
I asked if it seemed odd to him that I’d never been with any other man. He meditated a long time on my question.
“It’s like you to be that way,” he said. “You’re the kind of person who can’t do anything that isn’t true to herself, and you had to wait until you were sure you had found your one true love on earth.”
My one true love was him, of course. Same as I knew I was his—though in Ray’s case, there had been no shortage of partners before me. Just not the right one, he said.
After all these years, it’s still difficult to say this, but I believed at the time, as clearly as I knew my name, that Ray Dickerson was my destiny. I held nothing back, believing as I did then that we would be together always.
What he wanted, he said, was to create a relationship in which the two of us were like one person. When I hear those words now, the idea has an ominous ring, but at the time it seemed like the most idealistic and wonderful goal two people in love could have for themselves. No boundaries. Nothing unspoken. No inch of each other’s bodies we did not know.
When spring finally came and the weather got warm enough, we spent our days naked, mostly—something you could do, living where we did, with no neighbors in any direction closer than a mile away. We swam a lot, in a lake down the road from our cabin, where nobody ever went. I had known for a long time—never not known, maybe—that Ray possessed a tendency toward melancholy and such acute sensitivity that it sometimes seemed to me that he was not meant for life in the world as we knew it. One day when we passed a deer hit by a car, lying by the side of the road, he had been so overcome he turned around and went back so we could put the body in the back of his truck and bury it. Another time, when I went into town without him and took longer than usual, I’d found him sitting on the cabin step when I returned, his hands raking his beautiful long hair.
The Good Daughters Page 13