The Good Daughters (13 page)

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.

“I thought you’d left me,” he said. “I couldn’t bear that.”

He brought me presents: a kitten from a little girl he’d met in front of the food co-op who had a box of them to give away. A bottle of green drawing ink and a brush made from a lock of his own hair, tied to a piece of bone, a music box, and a pair of very delicate silk slippers that I suspected he may actually have stolen from the house of a rich woman he worked for briefly. He brought me a velvet purse, inside of which were shells he’d gathered on the beach for me, that he laid, one shell at a time, over the naked skin of my belly. One day he came back from town with fresh oysters, also gathered on the beach, with the plan of feeding them to me, but he couldn’t get them open, so finally, after an hour of trying, he drove back to the beach to set them free again.

“They shouldn’t die for nothing,” he said.

He said we should invent our own language that no one else would understand, not that there was anyone around to listen to our conversations anyway.

“The government probably has its eye on me right now,” he said. “On you too, just because you’re with me.”

KNOWING WHAT I KNOW NOW
, it is difficult to describe what it was like, loving Ray. Years ago a recovering crystal meth addict spoke at my son’s school.
She said that even after ten years clean, she still missed the way it felt to have that deadly substance in her veins. If she’d kept using it, she would have died. Still, life without the drug felt, sometimes, like a lesser thing. A sad though necessary comedown.

Listening to her speak in that auditorium filled with my fellow concerned parents, sitting next to my good husband with whom I’d lived at that point for close to twenty years, the image of Ray’s face was all I could see, and a wave of grief and longing overtook me, so strong I had to cover my eyes. Even after all that time.

Back in our British Columbia days, the way I felt when he was in me was like no sensation I have ever known, and I could have swooned from the rapture of it. After a while of being with him, the simple act of his touching my hand would cause my pulse to change, bring heat to my skin.

He had made a name for all the places on my body he loved to touch, which was all the places on my body. He made me promise I would never speak these names to anyone but him, and in spite of everything else that happened in the end, thirty years later I never have.

Our lovemaking went on for hours, leaving me exhausted. I was too weak afterward to try and make friends, or make art, or even clean the house. All around us things were falling apart, but there never seemed to be any time to put them back together.

He sang to me, songs he made up—every day another different strange lyric and tune. Because he never seemed to rest, and I did, he would sit on the edge of the bed sometimes and play me to sleep with his harmonica—Gypsy-sounding tunes that invaded my dreams.

Many times he told me he wanted to have a child with me.

“Where would the money come from?” I asked. “How would we live?” I might be able to sleep in a frozen bed, with nothing but rice in my stomach, but I knew if we had a baby, I would want more for her. School, friends, a house with running water, cookies in the oven, birthday parties, a Christmas tree.

As we were living now, we hardly ever saw anyone but each other, though
increasingly—on those rare occasions we’d drive to town to pick up supplies—I’d find myself looking for opportunities to strike up a conversation with someone. It didn’t matter who, a different voice was all. And then I’d feel guilty, as if I had betrayed Ray, knowing what he had said to me a thousand times: that he would never need any other human being but me. Me and our child. A universe of three.

Sometimes I imagined what my father would think if he could see me in this place. I would picture his gentle, worried face—the expression he had when too many days had passed without rain, or one of the cows had milk fever, or deer had gotten into the corn, and the homesickness would come over me. I wanted to be with Ray, but I was missing parts of the world too. I wanted to believe there was a way to have them both—the things I had loved, and the man I loved more than anything—but I didn’t know how to make this happen.

By the time fall came—close to a year now from when I had arrived on the island—Ray was talking daily about the two of us having a baby. He knew it would be a girl, he told me, and he even had a name for her: Daphne.

I had been using a diaphragm—a purchase I’d made right before flying to Vancouver, on my way to being with Ray. Now every time I took it out of the case, he shook his head. “What about Daphne?” he said. “Don’t you want her to come live with us?” He said it as if there were a real person just outside our door, alone and shivering, in need of nourishment and rest, and I was denying her. Sometimes, when we made love now, it was as if the face of our unborn, unconceived child was pressed against the fogged-up glass, pleading with us to let her come in.

“I want to throw that thing away,” he said. “I want to burn it.” But I put the diaphragm in anyway. I could not see us as parents, responsible for another person besides ourselves.

Then, one November night we were lying in bed together—moonlight streaming in the window, slashing across the naked body of the man I loved—and I found myself talking to Ray about something that hardly ever came up with him, consumed as our life was in the present.

“All my life, I’ve had this feeling that I didn’t really belong in my family,” I said. “I love my father, and maybe I love my mother and my sisters, but they feel like some other species of being from me. I don’t really know them. They don’t know me.”

“I am your family now,” Ray said.

I knew this. But one person didn’t seem like a family. You needed more than that.

“Let’s make our family,” he said. “We’ll be our own tribe. That comes from us and no place else but here.”

That night we made love without the diaphragm. “You are my family now,” he said, his eyes burning into me. “The only one I need. We’ll make our own good family.”

I believe I knew the instant it happened that we’d conceived a child, and by the next morning I could feel it in my body. A few weeks later, I made him take me to the clinic in town to confirm this. From the moment I told him the news, Ray couldn’t stop smiling. For me, there was the oddest mix of feelings: joy mixed with a clutch of panic whose origins I could not fully identify. Partly, I think, I was just so terrified that this might change everything between Ray and me. Nothing, not even a baby, was worth risking that.

But another worry plagued me too. I had loved the way Ray felt things so deeply, and how I could always make things right for him. Now we were introducing a child into our delicate, often precarious balance, and I couldn’t help comparing the probable future to my own past. As lonely and frustrating as it had felt, growing up with my two quietly stoic parents, there had been a sense of comfort in knowing how strong my father was. When our barn burned down, when the crops failed, when my sister and I ran away to Woodstock, my father had remained steady as a heartbeat. An hour had never gone by in which I didn’t know that whatever happened, he would take care of things. I tried to imagine how it would be for our baby, who would look to her father for strength and protection. And find a man less able to offer support than to require it from those he loved.

Thinking about my father as I was now, I registered a surprising impulse.

“I want to call my parents,” I said.

All that year, I had told them almost nothing of what I was doing. The handful of notes and cards I’d mailed home—no return address—had said, simply, that I was living on an island in British Columbia and was happy.

Now I wanted them to hear my news, and the wonderful fact that the father of my baby was a man they’d known most of his life, the older brother of my birthday sister, Dana Dickerson. Our families would be truly linked in the way my mother always seemed to want.

We placed the call from a pay phone outside the clinic. I could hear the ringing, imagined the two of them in the family room, having washed the dinner dishes and watching television probably. Or my father would be reading, my mother doing a jigsaw puzzle or working on a quilt.

“It’s Ruth, Daddy,” I said, when I heard my father’s voice come on the line. “I’m calling from Canada with news. Can you put Mom on?”

Then I told them. On the other end, after I’d said the words, only silence.

“Are you sure about this, Ruth?” my mother said. Not the excited tone I’d expected from a woman whose whole existence for the last ten years had seemed focused on the arrival of grandchildren.

“We got the test today,” I said. “I’m six weeks along.”

“That’s really something, sweetheart.” This from my father. From my mother, still, nothing.

“And Ray Dickerson. I guess this means you two have gotten reacquainted. You’ve been spending a lot of time together I imagine?”

“We live together, Dad. We’ve been together a year now.”

Suddenly it seemed bizarre I’d let all this time pass without telling them.

“I need to think about this,” my mother said, when she finally spoke. “It’s big news. Complicated news. I need time to think.”

I laughed. How much time did a person need to take in that eight months from now—right around when the corn came in, or started to—a baby would be born? How complicated was that?

We had no phone number to give them, but I told them our address. Next day came the text of a telegram, delivered to our rural delivery mailbox, announcing that my mother would be paying us a visit.

I might have expected this for the birth, but she was coming
now
. In three days. She had included her flight arrival information in the telegram.

We made the long trip to Vancouver to meet her plane, naturally. No way would I have expected my mother—a woman who had never traveled anywhere before, other than to Wisconsin, on a bus—to make the difficult journey alone to the island where we lived.

It was easy to spot her exiting the jetway—a small, stout figure with a determined look, like a soldier heading off to war. She was wearing her old gray coat, a scarf around her neck, a hat, her sensible shoes, and a pin in the shape of a flower on the collar. She was carrying her purse in one hand and a paper bag in the other that I knew contained a jar of her strawberry jam. Her arms, when she put them around me, had that old familiar stiffness, though after a year of Ray’s touch, it felt even stranger now to be held by a person whose embrace conveyed less love than wariness.

I worried about what she’d think when she saw our home—not so much the woodstove because we’d had one of those on the farm, too, but the outhouse, the bucket sitting by the door that we used to haul water, the tar paper on the roof and plastic on the single-pane windows of the place that, in her eyes at least, would seem like nothing more than a shack. In the few days since receiving the news of her arrival and meeting her plane, I had raced around cleaning up, hanging curtains, taking down the drawings of Ray, naked, that covered our walls, and the poems he’d written for me, tacked in odd places around the house.

My mother barely spoke on the drive home—the two ferries, and the two endless stretches of highway in between, though I pointed out scenery along the way, and she nodded.

“Very nice,” she said, her voice tight. “This is beautiful country. I’ll give you that.”

We had fixed up a bed for her in the corner of our living space I used for
my art studio, the only other room in the house besides ours. I had set a bowl of shells I’d collected next to her cot and laid an Indian print spread over the thin mattress, along with as many blankets as we could find.

It was dark by the time we got home. Because the pregnancy made me so tired, I went to bed almost as soon as we reached the house. You never knew how Ray would act around people—sometimes charming, other times silent and morose—so I was relieved and happy to see how friendly he was being to my mother. As I excused myself, I could hear him boiling water for tea over the woodstove.

“This’ll give our baby’s future grandmother and me a chance to get to know each other better,” he said, sounding like a person I barely knew.