“Never put deodorant there,” she used to tell me, even though I worked long hours in the sun and came in sweaty, days on our farm. “I want your real smell on me.”
Now I drank in hers.
Only after honoring all those other places did I visit the one where we always ended up. The dark, hidden spot in her where treasure lay. I lingered there longest of all. Far away, I heard her voice—a low purring first, then a sound like newborn baby animals rooting for mother’s milk. Then moaning.
Hours had passed since that terrible moment in the doctor’s office, and still we had not yet wept over his news, but now the two of us could cry. The sound of our voices filled the house then. The voice that came out of me—out of us both—was one I’d never heard before and never want to hear again.
It was a pure, clear animal wail—two voices, raised in a single long cry that filled the night and went on a long time.
Then we slept.
RUTH
The Darnedest Thing
WE FOUND OUT Val Dickerson had died from a message left on our answering machine for my father. He was living on his own, more or less, but the forgetfulness he’d been experiencing for a number of years had now reached the point where a caretaker was needed to spell us in between the hours each of us put in babysitting him. If you left him by himself now, there was no telling what he would do. He might go out to the barn and start up the tractor, never mind if it was winter and the ground frozen. Or he’d head out to the greenhouse and decide this was the day to get a few dozen flats of Early Girl tomato seedlings started. One late November day, long past frost, I found him wandering in the cornfield.
“I don’t understand what happened,” he said. “The Silver Queen has disappeared. We should have had twenty rows here. Someone’s been robbing us blind.”
Of course he no longer farmed by this point. Though the title to our now heavily mortgaged farm still belonged to my father, a couple of years earlier we’d leased our land to Victor Patucci.
The afternoon the message came saying Val died, he had been watching television. It was the early days of Oprah, for whom he seemed to possess a surprising affection.
“That girl may be a Negro,” he said. “But she sure makes sense.”
I was unloading groceries when I pushed the blinking message button—surprised that anyone would have called. After my mother’s death, my father no longer attended church or got involved in community affairs the way he had for so many years. Most of his friends, if they weren’t dead, were old, like him. Those who could spent the winters in Florida.
The voice on the machine was unfamiliar. He introduced himself as David Jenkins, the husband of an old friend of ours, Valerie Dickerson. He was calling from Rhode Island.
“I thought you should know, Valerie passed away suddenly last weekend. She wasn’t sick. I found her in her art studio. She must’ve been painting when it happened.”
I set down the carton of eggs I’d been holding, shaken not so much from the news of Val as I was by the way just hearing her name had conjured a memory of Ray. I saw his long hair falling over me. I could almost taste strawberries on my tongue.
I was long married by this point, and unexpectedly pregnant with our son, Douglas—a full ten years after we’d adopted Elizabeth. But even then, a week and a half away from my due date, with my back sore and my ankles swollen and my cheeks splotchy, just thinking of Ray Dickerson caused my face to grow hot.
Jim and I had been married almost sixteen years. The night Doug was conceived had been the first time we’d made love in close to a year, and we’d never conceived a child even when we were trying hard, which was probably the reason I’d felt no need for birth control.
After all our efforts to have a baby when we were younger, I had assumed it would never happen. Punishment for the abortion, I secretly believed. And here I was, pregnant for the first time at age forty-two, I said. Pregnant for the second time, actually, but that was something I never spoke of.
Now came the news that Val Dickerson was dead. Thinking about her and about Ray made me forget about my father, who was sitting in his chair a few feet away from the answering machine, facing the television. What roused me was a faint, not quite human sound coming from his chair, like an animal in distress.
I looked over at my father then, hunched in his chair, the afghan my mother knitted long ago covering his thin knees. For the first time in my life—the death of my mother no exception to this—I saw my father crying.
As well as I could for a woman at my stage in pregnancy, I knelt in front of him and put my hand on his.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I told him. “I guess you heard the message. You remember Val, right?”
Watching his face, I saw that this was a ridiculous question, though there were plenty of people in our life—my sisters’ husbands, for example, and the grandchildren, including our eleven-year-old, Elizabeth—whose names he no longer knew. But the news of Val Dickerson’s death had evidently touched a place in him where memory remained, like a patch of soil the tractor has missed, where a few dry stalks of last summer’s crops still stand in their withered rows, the soil not turned over.
“She was some kind of woman,” he said, fingering the afghan. “Tall.”
“One time they drove all the way from Vermont to buy strawberries,” I said, still thinking about Ray. As much as the news appeared to have shaken my father, it had produced a strong effect in me, too. “And then there were those crazy trips we used to make to visit them. All those hours in the car playing I Spy and looking for license plates of unusual states, all for a few glasses of lemonade and a cup of instant coffee. George was hardly ever there and I never got the feeling Val was all that happy to see us.”
“Your mother never got along with Valerie Dickerson,” my father said. The words came out with surprising force.
“But she always wanted to stay in touch. It was the darnedest thing.”
He was silent. On the TV screen, Oprah had put her hand on the shoulder of a woman who had just announced she had an eating disorder. “Let it out,” Oprah said. “It feels good to talk about it.”
“I WONDER WHAT DANA DICKERSON is doing now,” I said. Only after I said it did I realize that this was the very remark my mother had always made—one I’d always hated for the message it conveyed, that the life of a girl we barely knew merited so much more interest than my own. Now here I was doing the same thing.
“She liked making pictures,” my father was saying. He had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket. He blew his nose. “She had a nice smell about her.”
“Remember Ray?” I said to him. I had not spoken of him for years but here in this room, with a man for whom past and present had melded into one thick fog, it seemed I could safely speak the unutterable name. Some part of me wanted to say it out loud, just to feel the sound of it in my mouth. With my father as he was now I could have said anything.
He fed me strawberries with his tongue when I was thirteen.
We lived in a cabin in Canada once. I thought he was my destiny. We were going to have a baby.
“Yellow hair,” said my father. “Too bad you didn’t know her.”
LATER, I CALLED VAL’S HUSBAND, David. At the point she died, he told me, she had been living in Rhode Island, where she had settled with this new husband, the businessman with the golden retriever portrait. At the time of her death she was teaching yoga and taking night classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. She must have been close to seventy by this point, I figured. Hard to imagine, of the woman who had always seemed to me so young and beautiful.
Given what I gathered from the last news I’d heard about Ray, years ago—that there was no news, actually, that even his sister didn’t know his whereabouts—it appeared unlikely he’d be at the funeral, and this was a relief. On the one hand, I longed to see him again. Still, if I allowed myself to imagine he might actually show up at the service, I hated the thought of Ray seeing me as I was now. Some women look beautiful, pregnant
, but I only looked fat.
In the end, I couldn’t attend the funeral as I’d planned. That morning, the contractions began. By afternoon, I was in labor. But my sisters made the trip.
Dana
Bound to Leave
AFTER WE GOT the news about Clarice, nothing else seemed to matter. I milked the goats and filled the cheese molds with fresh curds and kept the strawberries weeded and picked and the farm stand stocked, though I gave up on those bouquets of zinnias we used to sell by the side of the road. It was too much effort, and what was the point?
As for Clarice, she pretended for a while that nothing had happened, and since she wanted to inhabit the state of denial for a while, I let her. Soon enough it would not be possible.
I marched along then, keeping up a show of normal life. When the call came from Val’s husband in Rhode Island—a man I barely knew—to say Val had died, I had been typing Clarice’s notes for a humanities lecture. Her fingers no longer worked well enough to do this herself.
I would not have expected the news of Val’s death to hit me hard. By the time she died, Val had been so nearly absent from my life for so long that her complete departure from earth was not likely to make much of a difference, or so I believed. I’d go to her service, of course—relieved that there was someone else now to take care of the arrangements—but Val was less like a parent to me than a distant and frequently maddening acquaintance. Though we were never close, I had made a point of calling her once a week, but I hardly ever visited.
The last time I’d seen her she’d seemed the same as ever. She was a little vague and dreamy, preoccupied with her artwork as usual. When I’d mentioned our goats, she responded by telling me about a class she was taking at RISD extension in raku pottery and a trip she and David were going to take to Quebec.
Then she was dead, and once I got the news, a surprising thing happened. I was hit by a strange and terrible wave of grief, for all the things we’d never got around to talking about. My relationship with Clarice, for starters.
I never pictured her having a hard time with that. Val was not the type of person who would have been shocked by the idea of two women loving each other. If anything, I might have risen in her estimation for the originality of my choice in a partner. One of the things that always bothered Val about me was, I suspect, what she took to be my conventionality, my complete lack of an artistic spirit.
My not being an artist was true enough. But keeping to convention was never my problem, as Clarice could have attested. If you wanted conventional, you didn’t have to look any further than the five Plank sisters—the oldest four, anyway, who, to my great surprise, showed up at Val’s service, held at the yoga studio.
I had told Clarice about that old “birthday sister” routine Connie Plank had insisted on promoting all those years and the uncomfortable and pointless visits their family used to make to see us. And now here came the Planks again, marching into our life as if to reassert a connection I’d never understood in the first place.
These were women who believed in following the rules all right. They filled the better part of a whole row at the yoga center in nearly identical navy blue suits, each with a strand of pearls around her neck. All of them wore their hair in roughly the same short, neatly blow-dried style. Their bodies were the same shape, more or less—short and thick around the waist, with surprisingly large and well-developed calves, for women who did not appear to spend time in a gym.
All those other times, occasions I stopped by the farm stand, the only Planks I’d seen on those visits had been Connie and Edwin, and occasionally Ruth, so this was the first time I’d seen them since we were children. Now when I did, what I registered first was how out of place they seemed in a roomful of Val’s yoga students and artist friends—how unlikely it was that they’d be here at all, with Tibetan prayer flags fluttering over their heads and a tape playing Native American flute.
I wore pants to the service. (Dress pants, topped by a nice blouse and a suit jacket.) The Plank women looked like they stepped out of the pages of a Talbots catalog. But if you stripped away the surface things—makeup, clothes, jewelry, wedding rings—it became clear: the four sisters bore a startling resemblance to me.
I was not the only one who noticed. Clarice, spotting them coming in, had assumed these must be relatives of mine I’d mysteriously failed to mention in our many years together.
“They’re Planks,” I said. The only one missing was the only one to whom I bore absolutely no resemblance whatsoever, Ruth.
OVER THE YEARS, VAL HAD compiled a list of songs she wanted to have played at her funeral. She had the unexpected foresight to entrust the list to her husband, and now the number was so great the musical selections alone took over an hour.
After the flute music came Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” (though my mother’s eyes were blue, I knew she felt the words applied to her) and Paul McCartney and Cat Stevens and Jackson Browne. Mostly these were very romantic or sentimental songs celebrating some woman or other who possessed traits my mother must have seen as similar to her own, but there were other surprising musical selections too—Etta James singing “I’d Rather Go Blind” and James Brown, singing “I Feel Good,” followed, strangely, by a selection from Enya.
The musical prelude went on for nearly an hour—long enough for the four Plank sisters and me to study each other, which we did.
Because of how we were seated, the sisters’ primary view of me was of the back of my head, and I could practically feel the combined gaze of four pairs of eyes. I turned around when I could, pretending to scan the room for some relative or another, but each time I found myself staring at a Plank sister who was staring back at me.
There were two shockers for them to absorb, only one of which was my being seated next to Clarice, who had an arm around my shoulders. More troubling no doubt was the sight of my short, solid, and utterly familiar build, my square and startlingly recognizable face.
Back when we were younger, we might all have seemed like a bunch of interchangeable girls—Esther, Sarah, Naomi, Edwina—even Ruth, who had not yet started shooting up to that dramatic height that earned her the nickname of Beanpole. Back then our similarities in appearance might almost have been chalked up to age, dress, and the sweatiness of a summer day that made everybody’s face red and their hair stick to their faces. It would take another few decades for the resemblance to become what it was now.
Given how long the music went on, I had ample time to consider what this meant. I found myself scrolling back over the years, pulling out odd images of those intermittent but invariably disturbing times our two families’ lives intersected.
I thought about Edwin Plank, who always stood in the background, as if his role on these occasions was nothing more than that of family chauffeur. Still, I had always been drawn to him. A thin, tall man, he would get down low to the ground when he spoke to me—which he did in an authentic, grown-up voice, not the baby talk so many adults use when talking to a child.
Edwin Plank may have been the first person to notice my interest in plants. One time he inquired about the sweet potato vine I’d been growing on our windowsill. He studied the leaves on a rosebush my mother had been struggling with, commenting that it needed more nitrogen, and we should pinch the suckers while we were at it. It was he, I now remembered, who had shown me what I might do to increase the height and sturdiness of some sunflower seedlings I’d started, taught me how to renovate a strawberry bed, and, later, trusted me with his precious daughter plants—the result of his years of meticulous crossbreeding of strawberry varieties.
As I sat there at Val’s funeral, more pictures from the past came back to me. What I saw in every remembered scene—whether it was playing Barbies with Ruth, buying strawberries at Plank Farm, or talking about corn with Edwin—was a shadowy figure, always somewhere in the background, unable to take her eyes off me. The only other person in my life, possibly, besides Clarice, who
had looked at me with so much love and longing. Connie.
IT WAS ON THE DAY we buried Val that I realized the truth: Val Dickerson had not been my mother. Connie Plank was.
Connie, who—whenever she saw me—went for me like a bird dog. Went at me, a person might have said, her embrace was so fierce and smothering. Connie, who practically demanded to see my report cards, and inquired about my religious education, who sent my mother so many letters imploring her to get me baptized that finally Val had written back with the lie that the rite had been performed. Connie, who brought gifts to me (always me, not my brother): the Junior Bible, and a small paperback book called Way to Inner Peace by Bishop Sheen, and—the year I turned twelve—a locket in which there was room for two photographs. One of the oval frames remained empty. In the other she had inserted a tiny photograph of herself.
Considering how long the musical buildup took, the actual content of Val’s service, as laid out in the xeroxed program, appeared blessedly brief—a reflection and meditation from her husband and one of her yoga students, followed by remarks from anyone who wished to speak.
I was feeling shaken, not so much by the fact of Val’s death than by the sight of the women I suddenly realized must be my sisters. I took out the piece of paper with the statement I’d prepared about Val’s love of beauty, her dedication to her painting.
“My mother loved art,” I said. (For this occasion, at least, I would refer to Val as my mother.) What I did not add was that whatever love might have been left over for me had been largely overshadowed by a feeling I got from her all my life, that I had disappointed her. I always felt that I was not the daughter she had wanted.
And I wasn’t, of course. For the first time, I understood why I’d always felt that way. It finally made sense. The person who should have been sitting here in the front row was not myself at all but Ruth.
The Good Daughters Page 20