She could still speak, though every syllable was labored. With what remained of her ability to communicate, she returned to the subject she had first raised that night in Yellowstone. As much as Clarice loved being alive, once she could not communicate, she would have no more taste for living.
“Not the blinking,” she said, again, in her new clipped way of speaking. “Can’t do that thing. With the alphabet.”
I said there were computer programs that could help her. I was looking into one that picked up the movements of a person’s irises to identify commonly used words and phrases on a board. She shook her head when I started to describe it.
“You made a promise,” she said.
MANY YEARS EARLIER, WHEN I worked at the experimental cattle barns at the university, I learned how to use animal tranquilizers, and in recent years I’d applied my knowledge on occasion, mostly when a need arose to dehorn one of our male goats. There was a chart in my old textbook, identifying the quantities of each tranquilizer necessary to achieve the desired level of inactivity in warm-blooded mammals. There appeared to be no discernible variation in recommended dosages among differing species; the crucial determinants seemed to be simply the weight of the animal undergoing injection and the degree of tranquilization necessary to immobilize an animal without killing him.
An appendix to this text, printed in red, outlined the risks of incorrect dosage, from extended paralysis to coma to death. I learned from my textbook that this was painless.
Because I was a licensed animal breeder, I was able to buy these drugs. Still, I battled with Clarice over her choice, and with myself over my ability to do what she asked of me. For me, it would have been enough to know she was there in the room with me, there on the bed, breathing. But what would have been sufficient for me was for her unbearable.
And even if I wasn’t ready yet to act on her request—for what the literature referred to as “a terminal event”—I knew that if the day came when I did, it would be prudent to have an established pattern of making tranquilizer purchases.
So I began buying the drugs and injecting tiny doses of tranquilizer into Clarice’s bloodstream at night before she went to sleep.
IT WAS WINTER. FOR WEEKS, I’d barely left the house. Taking Clarice out in the van was too difficult now—not so much because I couldn’t carry her as because she could no longer sit up on her own and needed to be strapped in place in her old copilot seat with a breathing tube to do the work her own lungs could no longer manage. She now spent her days on a hospital bed we had set up in the living room after it got too difficult caring for her in our old brass bed upstairs.
I’d put a television and VCR by the bed, with a stack of movies for her. Once a day, I massaged her body with scented oils—a small remaining pleasure. I brought Clarice a kitten that I laid on her chest so she could feel the purring and the soft fur, and the kitten’s small pink tongue licking her skin.
Nights after we finished our third or fourth movie of the day, I’d read out loud to her. She loved Jane Austen novels and the poetry of Yeats, in particular, though one day when I’d made a rare foray to town, I brought home a copy of Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, and started reading it to her, acting out the dialogue with exaggerated drama. In the old days this would have been the kind of thing Clarice did—never me—but now that she could no longer be that kind of person, I became one, or tried to. Nothing but my love for her could have inspired this.
I was on the chapter where the world-famous fashion model and pill addict breaks off with her millionaire boyfriend because she’s really in love with a dashing lawyer who, though he doesn’t know it, is the father of her unborn child.
Once this would have made Clarice laugh. Now she just lay there and sighed.
It was getting harder to find anything that provided any form of diversion for Clarice. She was weary of everything now—even the music she’d loved, even the writers, even the pages of her favorite art books. Bonnard’s women in their bathtubs, the erotic drawings of Egon Schiele. If it wasn’t for Clarice, I never would have known the names of these artists, but because she loved them, so did I.
It was while I held one such book open for her that I had seen her crying. No sounds came out of her, but tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Enough,” she said.
“OK,” I told her, shutting the book.
“Not what I mean,” she told me. “Enough of life. I’ve had. Enough. Of life.”
THAT NIGHT I BATHED HER. I washed her hair with the good shampoo, the stuff she used to ration for herself, it was so expensive. Now I slathered handfuls on her scalp until the suds were piled on her head like a hairdo.
Then conditioner. Then body oil. Bath salts and pumice stone. A loofah on her back.
When every inch of her was scrubbed and patted dry, I carried her to the bed. I rubbed lotion on her. Then I did her nails. I held out six bottles of polish to choose from.
“Curls,” she said, after her toes were done.
“I’ll do my best,” I told her.
I propped her up on the bed. I dug out her round wooden brush and the blow-dryer she’d used to curl her hair with every morning, until she couldn’t hold it anymore, and a jar of clips and Velcro rollers.
“This had better be a good hair day,” she said with a crooked little smile. It was a long sentence for her now. I knew what that one cost her.
As little as I knew of hair, I knew less of makeup, but I dug out the small velvet bag in which she kept her favored beauty items. Clarice believed in expensive products: swore that a twenty-dollar lipstick possessed properties the drugstore variety did not. Whether or not this was true, the containers her stuff came in were all beautiful little buffed metal compacts with gold-flecked powders, eye-liner wands with long, elegantly tapered brushes, tubes of creamy lipstick that fit in a person’s hand like art pastels.
“The trick with makeup,” she had once told me, “is to make it look like nothing’s there, when plenty really is.”
I loved her face best as it was in its most natural state, but because I knew she wanted me to do this, and because I was in no rush—just the opposite; I did not want this night to end, ever—I applied color, then took it off, then put it on again, until it was perfect.
I dabbed perfume on her neck and wrists. Then came jewelry: moonstone earrings and the bracelet I’d given her with charms from all the places we’d visited, the last two depicting a buffalo head and the Old Faithful geyser.
I dressed her in her favorite outfit, an antique lace gown she had found at a vintage clothing store in Portsmouth one time. I put ballet slippers on her feet.
She wanted Joni Mitchell, the Blue album.
“I know it’s not. An original choice,” she said. “But there’s a reason. Why everybody. Loves that one.”
IT WAS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT by the time we were finished. I had lit the candles.
“Get it,” she said.
The syringe. I thought about my old days at the Ag school barn with the goats. Janis Joplin in the Chelsea Hotel.
“Always remember,” she told me. “You made me happy.”
“I was the luckiest person on earth,” I told her. Only later did I remember who else had said that. Lou Gehrig.
After, I climbed onto the bed and lay down next to her. I put my arms around her, and my face against hers, so I could listen to her breath. Slower, slower, then gone.
I lay there a long time, almost until morning. Then I went outside and buried the syringe. If there was an autopsy, and suspiciously high traces of tranquilizers were found in her blood, I wasn’t sure I’d care. As it was, nobody demanded those tests. If whoever it was who examined her body had any questions, they never asked.
RUTH
A Different Breed
WE 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 lea
ving 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 wh
ich 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.
The Good Daughters Page 23