The Good Daughters (10 page)

Escape to Canada

S
HORTLY AFTER MY
brother left home, the fall of 1969—destination, San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury—the first letter showed up at our house from the Selective Service. Ray had not registered for the draft, of course—as he had been required to do, years earlier—but they had finally found him, despite our many moves.

George never paid attention to the details of life—speeding tickets from his many road trips, pursuing one big idea or another, or the fines and threats that followed us from one address to another. He was in Hollywood when the notice came for my brother, but wouldn’t have paid any attention to it, anyway, and Val was little better equipped to deal with such things. Reading the letter from the draft board, she had looked momentarily anxious, but she was a woman who lived her life as if she had no power to affect the outcome of anything.

“I wouldn’t begin to know how to find him,” she said to no one in particular, tossing the letter in the trash, with so many other friendly or less than friendly reminders of unpaid bills. “Somewhere on the West Coast is all I know.”

The letters continued to arrive. Then came a phone call. With his December
30 birthday, Ray had come up number three in the draft lottery; his status was now 1-A. He was requested to report to the draft board within two weeks or he would be considered in defiance of the federal government.

“What can I say?” Val said into the receiver. “If I knew where to find my son, I’d be talking to him myself.”

It was the summer of 1970. For the fifth year in a row, I’d been working a waitress job (and a second job, nights, at a lab) saving money for college, living at home. By now—with the war escalating, the number of dead soldiers up around forty thousand—Ray was officially listed as having violated the law, and there was a warrant out for his arrest.

Sometime that August, we finally heard from him. Although we’d never passed on any news—not knowing how to do so—Ray must have figured out his status by now.

“I’m heading to Canada,” he said when he called. “You probably won’t see me for a long time.”

“How can we find you?” I asked him. Different as we had been all our lives, I adored my brother. I couldn’t imagine my life without him.

“I’ll be in British Columbia, probably,” he said. “A guy I know is headed there. Maybe I’ll become a fisherman.”

I tried to picture my brother on a boat. It wasn’t exactly the ship we’d all been told was coming in all those years. He didn’t seem like the fisherman type, though if you’d asked me what type he was, I’d have been hard-pressed to answer. He was the type who could make the most amazing hook shot anyone ever saw a player execute and then stop showing up for practice right before the playoffs. He was the type who would read out loud to me, one entire book of the Tolkien trilogy, every night for a solid three months, then never again. He was the type who could lean against a tree all day, making up the most beautiful songs on the harmonica but, when someone asked him to join their band, shrug and say he didn’t really know how to play.

“You need to call us when you get there,” I said to him. “I need to be able to find you.”

“The whole idea is to
not
be found,” he said. “The whole idea is disappearing.”

“If you go away, I won’t have anyone,” I said. I was twenty years old, but I’d learned a long time ago not to count on Val and George for anything but unreliability.

“You’ll have the same person that you always had, Dana,” he said. “Yourself. The only solid one of any of us.”

Then he was gone. Unlike George, who went away for long periods, Ray did not send postcards detailing his exploits, with hopeful progress reports, and lots of exclamation points, promising that success was a 99.9 percent sure thing. Once Ray went to Canada that was it.

“You’ll be able to look them in the eye when they come knocking at the door and say that you haven’t seen or heard from me,” he’d said, just before hanging up. “It’ll be the truth.”

He was right. A man in a military uniform did come looking for my brother. He handed Val a paper informing her that Ray was now officially listed as a felon, for failure to report to service in a time of war—and failure to report his whereabouts was also a felony. That paper she did not simply throw away. She burned it.

Nights back then, if I wasn’t working, and the television was on, and a report appeared about Vietnam, I’d watch Val shake her head, as if she found some odd comfort in the gaunt and haunted-looking faces of other women’s sons, in their helmets and flak jackets.

“At least he’s not there,” Val said, when footage appeared on the television screen, of villages in ruins and soldiers dropping out of planes into the jungle. I had never seen Val display so much concern for my brother as she did when he was no longer around to witness it.

As for me, I dreamed of disappearing to some other place too, though for me the dream was college, that I’d been saving up for since I was in junior high. In my mind I saw a woman in a long dress coming toward me with her arms open. I didn’t wear dresses myself, ever. But I liked girls who did. I saw her rub
bing my shoulders and stroking my face, in a way I’d never known my whole life. I saw myself running my hands through her hair. We were in the country someplace, with nobody around but the two of us. The clearest picture I could form of what it would look like: that spot of soil I’d lain in that day on Edwin Plank’s farm, with the sun on my chest and the taste of strawberries on my lips, breathing in the perfume of fresh-cut hay.

Drawing from Life

F
RESHMAN YEAR AT
art school, we did a lot of figure drawing. I had always been good at drawing from life, from all my days spent in the barn with my sketchbook.

Now we had a nude model every day—sometimes male, sometimes female. I found that I felt no desire for these naked male models. I approached the human body as clinically as a doctor might a patient on the operating table. Whether my task that day was to portray a hand or a vase of flowers or a man’s naked body didn’t make a difference. The important thing was to do it well.

Which I did. Two weeks after classes started, my life studies teacher pulled me aside. “You’ve got a real talent for the figure, Ruth,” she told me. “I’m putting you in my more advanced section.”

I took classes in color theory, too, and a survey course in art history, and a class in printmaking, but it was life studies I loved best. I drew all the time now, and on weekends I spent hours at the Museum of Fine Arts, sitting on benches copying the great drawings of the Italian renaissance, and the life studies of Michelangelo and Raphael and Botticelli. That spring, a drawing I made of my roommate—a
girl from Texas whose interest was in large, nonrepresentational abstractions—won the prize for the best student drawing in a school competition.

My mother, hearing this news, and always dubious about the cost of my education, wanted to know if this award came with any money. My father drove down to attend the exhibition, and afterward he took me out to dinner in the North End, to a restaurant recommended to him by the one Italian he knew in New Hampshire, his longtime employee, Victor Patucci. Married now, with a baby on the way, it appeared that Victor must have given up his old ambition to take over Plank Farm and was resigned to running the greenhouse operation instead.

“These people they get for you to make pictures of at school,” my father said. “They don’t mind taking off their clothes and letting all the students gather round and take a look?”

“It’s art, Dad,” I said. “They’re getting paid. Nobody sees it as a big deal.”

“Times sure have changed,” he said, cutting the spaghetti up into short pieces with his fork, the way we’d done on the farm. “Back in my day, they made such a big deal about all of that, it made you a little crazy. If people could have talked about it and not acted like the whole thing was so sinful, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble.”

“What trouble was that?” I might have asked, but I didn’t.

The drawing award I won did, in fact, come with some money, but only a hundred dollars. And my mother wasn’t totally off base expressing concern about finances, because even with my scholarship, keeping up with tuition payments—never mind art supplies—was starting to feel impossible.

I saw an ad in the
Phoenix
.
“Artist wanted. Must demonstrate strong ability with the nude. Minimum wage now
,
but strong prospects of future earnings for the right person.”

I called the number and made an appointment to go for an interview in Jamaica Plain, practically at the end of the subway line. My roommate, Tammy, was worried the guy I was going to see might be some kind of sex addict, running a prostitution ring or trafficking in female slavery, but I wasn’t concerned.
One of the good things about being six feet tall is that men tend not to mess with you.

As it turned out, the guy who’d run the ad wasn’t remotely seedy. Josh was small and skinny, not much older than I, though his hairline had already begun to recede. He wore thick glasses and, judging from the books on his shelf, appeared to favor Beat poetry and Oriental philosophy. Even before he opened his apartment door I could hear the music inside: Marvin Gaye. Where most of the people I went to school with were listening to Bob Dylan and Neil Young, or Joni Mitchell, or Linda Ronstadt, Josh Cohen was strictly an R & B guy.

A copy of
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
sat on the table, next to a bong.

“You know how many copies this book has sold,” Josh told me. “Millions. The guy who put it together is set for life
.

“The thing is,” Josh said, “this book just proves there’s a readership for more of this stuff.”

“But they already bought that book,” I said.

“Does your mom only own one cookbook?” he said. “Does she read only one story?”

Just thinking about my mother, in this particular setting, was jarring. And in fact, though she owned several cookbooks—most of them put together by women’s groups at Lutheran churches, for some fund-raising bazaar or other—she was a perfect example of a woman who did read only one story. The one she believed to have been written by God. But I saw his point.

“I’m looking for an artist to work with me on creating an alternative sex manual,” he said. “My budget’s limited on the front end, but if I like your work, I can give you a share in the back end of the profits.”

Josh came from New York. His father worked in the fabric trade. He knew how to sell like my father knew how to plant corn. Second nature.

I took the job. For the first time in my life since around age six, I did not spend the summer working in the fields and the stand at Plank Farm. Instead, seven days a week, I took the train out to Jamaica Plain to sketch pictures of
men and women, also hired by Josh through ads in the
Phoenix,
engaging in an amazing variety of sexual acts.

I worked on the book—
Sexual X-tasy
—right through Labor Day, when I delivered the last drawings. Most of the drawings focused only on the bodies of the lovers, but the final image I created—my pièce de résistance—featured a man and a woman in a hippie-style kitchen (a good-looking loaf of bread on the table, herbs hanging in bunches from the rough-hewn beams). They were having a good time on the kitchen counter.

The sum total of my earnings, from the hundred and twenty-seven erotic/ instructional drawings I created for the Josh Cohen project, came to one thousand two hundred and seventy dollars. To explain my absence from home, I had told my mother I’d gotten a job that summer at Filene’s without thinking that this would lead my sisters to inquire about whether I got an employee discount and if so, could they come down and do some shopping with me? I had never seen them more interested in anything I’d ever done up until then.

Ironically, I spent my summer with people who wore no clothes at all. From midmorning to well past dark, I sat on a hard wooden chair, sketching sex acts, but back at my little studio apartment near Central Square, I was alone, though now and then some man would try to get me to go out with him.

I always said no. I could not get Ray Dickerson out of my brain.

Gone

I
ENROLLED IN
college. Of all the places my family had lived, the one I felt most connected to was New Hampshire—the state of my birth, the only place we’d ever actually owned a home—so I chose the state university there. The University of New Hampshire was also known for its agriculture department, and that was my interest from the start. The college was less than an hour’s drive from Plank Farm.

I studied biology and soil chemistry, plant science, animal husbandry. For the previous two years I’d worked weekends and summers as a waitress, which gave me enough money for the first tuition payment. For the rest, I was counting on working my way through.

For my scholarship job, I got to work in the experimental barns. Among my responsibilities was labeling and cataloging various sperm samples of the seed bulls—a task for which my years of attempting to maintain order among the yogurt cultures in the chaos of my mother’s kitchen had prepared me unusually well. I was swiftly promoted to the more responsible position of specimen collector—an art not without a certain element of danger. And I got to work in the
Small Livestock barn, the place where I discovered my particular love of goats.

I was happy working in the barn. I loved the lowing of the cattle in the evenings, nights I worked late, and the soft, rhythmic sound of their chewing at the trough as I cleaned their stalls. When I was done with my work for the day—having locked up the pens, labeled my vials and set them in the appropriate racks in the cooler, changed out of my overalls and back into my khaki trousers to head back to the campus, I was aware of a heightened appreciation for everything around me.

Riding my bicycle over to the dining hall, or the dorm, I often found myself whistling the way I remembered Edwin Plank used to do.

“I love the world,” I said out loud one evening, riding home from the cattle barn.

I had not thought anyone was listening, but a woman pulled up alongside me on a bicycle of her own.

“Me too,” she said. “It’s a surprisingly rare trait.”

She looked to be about my age, though later I learned she was several years older. Clarice took exceptionally good care of herself. Anyone who imagines that just because a person is a lesbian means she’s unattractive never met Clarice. She had long curly hair tied back with a flowered headband, and though she was biking, she wore dangly earrings that swung as she pedaled and set off her long, elegant neck. Her nails were polished in some pearly shade—something you didn’t often see on a person at the Ag school.

She was an assistant professor of art history at the university. I remember thinking that this was good. I had no interest in taking art history courses. She would not be my teacher, at least not in art history, anyway.

“I love riding at this time of day,” she said. “There’s something about the quality of light on the fields. Did you ever see the work of a painter named Turner?”

I could have told her my father once bought a painting that was supposed to be a Turner—one of his many ill-advised lunges at the elusive brass ring. I held my tongue.

“English painter,” she said. “Nineteenth century. He was all about light on landscape.”

“I’m in the Ag school,” I told her.

“A woman farmer,” she said. “We don’t have enough of those. Did you grow up on a farm?”

“Not really.” I hesitated. I’d never been able to explain, really, where or who I came from. “My mother is an artist, I guess,” I said, and her eyes lit up at that. “And my father is…

“Gone,” I told her. The most accurate word to describe George, probably.

Hers too, she told me. Or at least, not speaking to her. “My parents didn’t approve of certain choices I made for my life,” she said.

She had jumped off her bicycle now so she was walking next to me as we spoke. She told me her name then. I had already studied her rear end on the bike seat. Now I could see her strong and elegant calves.

“Do you have plans for dinner?” she said.

It was not a difficult decision, forgoing the dining hall.

We talked most of the night. Until we stopped talking, and when we did, that was good too.