An odd thing happened when I realized my mother was dying. I wanted to go home to the farm. Jim was traveling a lot for his insurance business, and I was working part-time, with Elizabeth in preschool. It came to me that we should return to the farm and care for my mother.
Until then, I’d never had any reason to contemplate my mother’s death; her sturdy demeanor and unflagging good health had made her seem indestructible. Now I felt that time was slipping away, and I had to grab every second I could, in an attempt to make things right or at least (more accurately) understand why they had gone so wrong. And where always before she had seemed like such a powerful and frightening force in my life, the tumor revealed—for the first time—her frailty. She was no longer strong enough to hurt me as she once had.
When I moved back home, I intended to stay only a couple of months, to help my father and sisters take care of my mother. Once spring came, I could take Elizabeth out around the farm and let her do all the things I used to, back in the days I’d followed my father out to the barn—feeding the chickens, riding on the tractor. I told myself I was making this choice in large part for my daughter’s sake—so she could know the farm, and her grandmother.
Now, though, I realized how much I’d missed my home. My father, the land, the farm stand. In an odd way I even missed my mother, as judgmental and cool as she’d always been toward me. As deeply as she’d hurt me.
She was sitting on the porch when I pulled up. Her hair, which had been dark brown when I’d last seen her, was all white. Her body seemed to have shrunk.
“Tall as ever,” she said, as I approached, holding Elizabeth. She did not reach to embrace me, though she patted my daughter’s head.
“Hi, Grandma,” Elizabeth said. She had heard enough of my remarks about my mother to sense ours was not an easy relationship, and so remained, herself, protective and a little wary.
“What are you here for?” she asked. “I thought you were so busy with your job.” Art therapy, working with emotionally disturbed children, mostly, and sometimes Vietnam vets and other PTSD survivors.
“All those years you took care of me,” I said. “I thought it was time I did the same for you.”
So I cooked for her and my father. I took her for walks. I gave her baths and I read to her. My sisters focused on the farm stand, and I stayed close by our mother.
My reasons, in the end, were selfish. I wanted the slate clean. I had to know, once she was dead, that I’d done my best. I didn’t want the burden of feeling that I should have done more or differently.
Her decline came with alarming swiftness. Her face changed—this was the steroids—and though I tried to fix her hair the way she had always liked it in the past, she pushed my hand away, leaving a fine halo of thin white hair that spread out in all directions as if she’d put her finger in an electric socket.
I would have expected she’d want us to get her to church somehow, and I had enlisted Jim—who came up from Boston on weekends—to help me do it, but when I offered, she just shrugged.
“I’ve had enough of that stuff,” she said, with a little wave of her hand. Sixty years of living by the Bible, as—her term—“a God-fearing woman.” Gone in a flash.
THE TUMOR WAS LODGED IN the portion of the brain that controlled language and speech, which meant that my mother’s words sometimes came out garbled, though never beyond recognition. But the harder part was this: the glioblastoma’s steadily growing presence was affecting my mother’s abilities to control her subconscious thoughts. This had the effect of removing virtually all inhibition.
Suddenly my mother, a woman who had lived her life with the strictest adherence to propriety, was making the most outrageous remarks. Only they weren’t outrageous, actually. She was now simply stating, out loud, the kinds of things she must have been thinking all the time, but keeping to herself until now. One central theme of which was sex.
Once she was sitting in the kitchen with me while I fixed dinner for my father and her.
“How often does he like to put his penis in you?” she asked, meaning my husband. “Do you actually enjoy it?”
I might have worried how to respond, except there was seldom a need to. My mother kept on talking.
“I never liked the act of intercourse myself, but maybe your father wasn’t doing it right,” she said. “I always wondered what the fuss was all about. I bet that Burt Reynolds did some things differently, when he did it with Dinah.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “Your father is a good husband. The only hard part was him wanting me to let him in all the time and pound away at me, like some old barn door slamming, when all I wanted was to be left alone.”
Another time I was making biscuits, rolling out the dough and cutting the circles out and setting them on the tray to bake. Elizabeth ran through the room, in search of a peanut butter sandwich.
“It’s good you never had to worry about her hanging on your breasts all the time,” my mother said. “I never could understand women wanting to do that kind of thing.”
Though I would have loved to be one of them, of course. If I had been able to give birth, I would never have missed nursing my baby.
“I never liked my breasts particularly,” she said. “They just made trouble. But your father was always after me to let him do things to them.
“He could never get enough, you know,” she said. “Your father. I suppose you know he was hung like a horse, as the saying goes.
“Then again,” she said, her face darkening, “maybe it was my own father that ruined everything.” This was my Wisconsin grandfather she was talking about, the one we never visited, news of whose death, when I was little, had been received with barely a response. I sat there holding my daughter, taking in my mother’s words, feeling sick.
“I wanted to be a good wife to your father,” she said. “In the beginning I even thought I might enjoy it with Edwin. But from the first time we did it, all I could think about every time we’d start was my father.”
I shifted my daughter on my lap. I was holding her tightly, less because she needed that than for the measure of comfort it offered me. I wanted to ask my mother to explain, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she might say if I pursued the question either.
“They wondered why I never wanted to go back to Wisconsin until after he died,” she said, sounding angry now. “Who would? If I never saw that fucker again, that would be too soon.”
All those years of reading out loud to us from her Bible, never missing church, washing our mouths out with soap if we said “darn” or “hell.” My new mother—the one I got when she was dying—had a mouth like a drunken sailor.
“Then he was dead, and I thought I could finally talk to my sisters about it,” she said. “Rode the bus all the way to Milwaukee with my girls. Get to the depot, my sister says, ‘Just one thing I want to make clear. We’re not opening up any old Pandora-type boxes, Connie. Pop’s dead and gone. We’re leaving well enough alone.’
“I just wanted to ask my mother why she let it happen,” my mother said. “A girl’s mother is supposed to protect her.”
I could have said plenty here. Did she think it was protecting me, going all the way to British Columbia to confront the one man I ever really loved and take me away from him?
How she had accomplished this I had never understood—how she convinced a man who said I was the love of his life, too, to say good-bye to me. How a woman who believed that life began with conception could have taken her daughter to an abortion clinic. This she had managed. God only knew how. Here was my last chance to ask her, but I couldn’t.
Even now sometimes, as I was laying her naked body on the sheet and running the warm sponge over her skin to bathe her, memories would assault me, and I would have to fight the small, mean impulse to scrub a little too hard, or force the brush through her hair without slowing down to untangle the knots. The urge to inflict pain—registered, though resisted—came to me when I remembered my mother beside me
in the waiting room, filling out the forms because I was crying too hard to do it myself. The nurse handing me the gown. Feet in the stirrups and my mother saying, “I know what’s best for you.”
I saw the taxi to the airport. The long flight home. Letters to British Columbia, returned unanswered, no forwarding address. Even when she was on her deathbed, I blamed my mother for this and burned to ask her, How could you have done it?
GIVEN ALL THE OTHER THINGS my mother said those last few months, it’s surprising that she said as little as she did about Val Dickerson. For thirty years it seemed as if one of her main focuses in life had been this other family with the daughter born the same day as I, but at the end of her life, my mother seemed barely to think about the Dickersons, though one day and one only she spoke of Val.
“I do wonder what it would be like to have been pretty, like her,” she said. “Men always nipping at her heels, no doubt. You can’t really blame a fellow, if he wants to lift the skirts of a woman like that and give her a whirl. Those long legs and all that blond hair. Down below, too, no doubt. I suppose you’re the same.”
This was how it went with my mother now. An endless monologue whose contents made me get the queasiness you might feel turning over a rotting log and discovering a mass of slithering insects and worms—so long hidden from the light—scrambling out from under. For hours I sat beside her, grateful for those times my daughter came to settle in my lap, where she fell asleep sometimes. After all my mother’s dark commentary on the human condition, it comforted me to hear the sound of Elizabeth quietly snoring in my arms.
“When all’s said and done,” she said, “what does it really matter, anyway? How long does the whole sex thing last? Five minutes? Ten maybe. The part that matters isn’t getting the baby, it’s raising her. That’s what I did. More than anything in the world I wanted to be a good mother.”
“You did the best you could, Mother,” I told her. Even at such a moment, there was a limit to how much I could reassure her or pretend she’d done a good job. I could feel a tight, hard place in me that, even in the company of a dying woman, withheld the thing she wanted most to hear.
It was winter when her symptoms sent her to the doctor for tests and early spring when she was diagnosed—crocuses pushing through the last of the snow. By the time the lilacs bloomed her walking had become unsteady. “I hope I’m still around for strawberries,” she said.
One of the things she asked me during those last weeks was if my birthday sister knew that she was sick. After so many years it still irritated me to hear her asking about Dana.
“We could call her if you wanted, Connie,” my father said. He was sitting at her bedside for a change, drinking coffee, putting in a rare daytime appearance. It was hard for my father to see my mother this way. I would stand at the window sometimes now and watch him in the field, staying out even later than usual, circling the rows until the last rays of sunlight were gone. I knew he didn’t want to return to the house. It was the only summer I never heard him whistling.
Nobody ever did call Dana Dickerson, but as it turned out, she came by anyway, just around our Fourth of July birthdays. My mother had hung on until then, though just barely. By the last couple of weeks she was sleeping most of the time, barely speaking anymore—which was a relief, given the kinds of observations she’d been making lately.
Dana was living not far away then, on a farm of her own, raising organic greens and goats. She maintained the ritual of paying a visit to the farm stand during strawberry season, even though she now grew strawberries herself, just to discuss issues of farming with my father, evidently. Speaking with one of my nieces out at the farm stand, she’d learned about my mother, and asked if she could come up to the house and pay her respects.
Dana arrived in the company of a very attractive woman. She herself dressed more like a man than a woman now. It was clear, seeing the two of them, that they were a couple.
I took this news in with a certain mean-spirited pleasure. Now that it was revealed that Dana Dickerson was a lesbian she had finally done something even my mother, for whom Dana represented everything that was desirable in a daughter, would surely find unacceptable. My birthday sister would no longer be the daughter my mother would have wanted. I wondered if my mother would be aware enough to understand.
They didn’t sit down—Dana and this woman she had come with. They made no particular effort to conceal the fact that they were a pair. They were holding hands, as I recall. Dana was studying my mother’s face. Her skin was stretched tight and her eyes were closed.
“You always raised the best strawberries here, Connie,” she said. “I had to make sure Clarice got to taste them. My partner.”
My mother opened her eyes and looked at the two of them—Dana first, then the other woman.
“You turned out homosexual?” she said. “Knock me over with a feather.”
Here it comes, I thought: the moment I’d waited for all my life, when my mother would finally see Dana Dickerson as a flawed woman and appreciate, at last, the daughter she’d been given, me.
“I can’t say I understand what you girls do, or how you go about it,” she said. “But if you ask me, it makes a lot of sense. Who needs a man and all that complicated apparatus they’re always showing off? I’m guessing you two have yourselves a nice, sweet time together. Softer skin.”
Dana, though we had not prepared her for my mother’s behavior, seemed to take her words with a matter-of-fact interest. Her partner, Clarice, stroked my mother’s hand.
“We’re very happy together,” Clarice said.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” my mother said. “I’ll take that to my grave.”
One other group of people with whom we had only the briefest dealings over those last months were my mother’s Wisconsin relatives. Her parents were long dead, but there were two sisters still living near their old cheese operation.
“We thought you’d want to know,” my sister Naomi began, when she finally placed the call.
I did not hear the voice on the other end of the line, but the conversation was brief. When my sister put down the phone, she had looked shaken.
“Her sister said that was a shame,” Naomi told me. “She said it was too bad but they were never close, and to send the obituary when it came out, for their scrapbook.”
THE LAST TIME I SPOKE with my mother was the day she died. She spent almost all day sleeping by that point, but as I was sitting there—I was drawing her—she had opened her eyes. My sisters were making arrangements at the funeral home and my father was resting, so I was alone in the room when it happened.
“You were a good daughter, in the end,” she said. “Not the one I was expecting. But things didn’t turn out so bad.”
She was buried in the family plot, which was set in a grove of birches behind the house next to one of our irrigation ponds. She had rows of Planks to keep her company—Plank men, and their wives, the children who hadn’t made it through infancy or childhood, and the ones, like my father, who had grown up to tend the farm after their father’s passing, and then passed it on to the next generation. Standing around the hole in the earth—it was a rainy day, early fall, hurricane season but thankfully there were no big storms this year—I watched my father sink his shovel in the earth and raise a spadeful of dirt to scatter over her coffin. One more planting, out of season. My sisters wept and I wished I could, but no tears came.
AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH, I told Jim I wanted to move back to the farm and build a house there, on that piece of land my father had been saving for me all this time. As usual, my husband went along with my wishes.
The place we built was nothing fancy—a couple of bedrooms and a little art studio for me, with a sunny kitchen that looked out over the irrigation pond where my father and I used to swim. I wanted to help look after him now, I told Jim, but there was more to it. My roots in that place had reached deeper than I’d known.
I got a part-time job running a kids’ art class, an
d a second job as an art therapist in Concord, the capital, working with emotionally disturbed adults and men suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Vietnam veterans, mostly. Jim would keep his insurance business outside of Boston. Though this would mean an hour-long commute for him, he didn’t argue.
We had a comfortable life, then. Our daughter loved being on the farm, and though my father had once commented how odd it was that first Americans went to Korea to fight, and the next thing you knew they were adopting babies there, he adored Elizabeth. She spent many hours doing chores with her grandfather, riding next to him on his tractor when he plowed, tending the hills of pumpkins and snipping the heads off zinnias. As he had done with me, so many years before, he taught my daughter how to renovate the strawberry beds after the season was over, selecting the five strongest daughter plants, spacing them evenly around the mother plant, like the rays of the sun, and letting them take root for the next season.
“Daughters,” he told her as they dug. “Nothing better than a good daughter.”
I worked long hours but I liked how I spent my days. Mornings I taught the elementary-school kids in town, making collages and clay animals and potato prints, which made it easier to locate patience for the men and women I worked with at the state hospital. It was a long way from my days as a young artist, working as I did now in a basement room in Concord, moving among the tables of people so profoundly depressed or damaged that in some cases I had never heard them speak.
But—maybe in part because they were unrestrained by the conventions of what was considered regular society—my clients at the mental hospital made beautiful things, painted with a kind of freedom and expressiveness you wouldn’t find in a class of so-called normal people. A portrait of a woman made by one of my students at the hospital would not simply fill the paper but spill over its edges—eyes boring into you, colors applied with bold, slashing strokes that practically vibrated with feeling. One man in my group liked to paint portraits of baseball players from the 1960s, with all their statistics forming a border around the edges of the canvas. One woman only made paintings of babies; another made a self-portrait using matchsticks.
The Good Daughters Page 18