The Good Daughters (3 page)

Just Fine

T
HERE WERE FIVE
girls in our family: Naomi, Sarah, Esther, Edwina, and me, the youngest, Ruth. Edwina was the only one who bypassed the biblical name, perhaps because by then my mother had begun to realize there might not be a son to carry on her husband’s name, and this would have to do. Once her fifth daughter came along, she had accepted daughters as her destiny and returned to the Old Testament for inspiration.

My mother did not actually come from New Hampshire, where we lived, but from the Midwest, Wisconsin. Cheese country, she said, and it was cheese that brought her to the farm. The Planks raised cows, and wanted to learn cheese making.

Her father had come east to deliver some kind of cheese-making equipment. He’d brought his daughter on the trip, to mark her high school graduation and show her the world. As it would turn out, this was as much of it as she would get to see beyond prayer groups in Maine, now and then, and those road trips to check in with the Dickersons.

She was eighteen when she met my father, nineteen when she married him,
though he was seven years older. There were hardly any men around in those days, with the war going on, but my father had been granted an exemption from military service, to stay back home and run the family farm. As the oldest of the three Plank brothers, the rest of whom had enlisted in the armed services to fight in Europe, my father was needed at home, and even the government agreed.

All his life, the fact that he had not fought in the war was a source of shame and guilt to my father, but the absence of competition in the form of other available suitors had no doubt also made it possible to persuade my mother to marry him, even if, as she told us regularly, the role of farmer’s wife had never been her ambition.

Once she was installed on Plank Farm, though, she did not question it, or him. For all the years of my growing up, and plenty after that, my mother put in fourteen-hour days, in the kitchen mostly—baking bread and tending the baked beans and feeding our laundry through the wringer washer, hanging my father’s overalls on the line every morning, canning vegetables in the pressure cooker to get us through the winters and, of course, running our farm stand.

Ours wasn’t the kind of family she’d grown up in—the cheese business having been more lucrative, evidently, than farming was for us—but she displayed not an ounce of nostalgia for the life she’d left back in Wisconsin, and anyway, that was over. Once she made her bed, she liked to say, she’d lie in it.

For my father, there was never a day in his life he didn’t know who he was or where he was headed: to the barn first, to milk our cows, then out to the fields, to start up the Massey Ferguson. Except for winters, that’s how his days went, and he waited out the winters with a controlled impatience, preparing to start the cycle all over again in the new year, beginning with the arrival, every January second, of the new catalog from Ernie’s A-1 Seeds.

My father’s family were lackluster Presbyterians, but my mother brought a stronger dose of God into the mix, coming as she did from midwestern Lutheran stock. And though, in most departments, my father’s word dictated how we lived our lives, when it came to religion, my mother steered our course.

Back then she was a rare midwestern transplant in New England. Her two
sisters and her parents remained out in Wisconsin. Money being in short supply, and with a family our size, we didn’t go there. That was the reason our mother gave us at the time, anyway, for why we never visited. I never questioned this, or wondered why, among the framed photographs of Plank ancestors that covered our mantel and every wall on our old farmhouse, no image of her own family was part of the display. I questioned little in those days.

I think now my mother must have led a lonely life on the farm—my father not much of a talker, the women of the church having all come from around those parts and, even after twenty years, after thirty, viewing my mother as something of an outsider. She attended women’s Bible study and Rainbow Girls gatherings during which recipes and household hints were exchanged, and remedies for childhood ailments, and where, once a year, the women got together to perform skits based on lessons from the New Testament.

When the annual holiday bazaar rolled round, she made her pot holders to raise money for starving children in Africa, but my parents didn’t socialize with anyone outside church. My father didn’t go out anyplace but the feed store and to meetings of the volunteer firemen. Evenings, our mother read Agatha Christie novels, or the Bible, though once we got our television, she developed a deep and surprising affection for Dinah Shore—a woman of the Jewish persuasion, she said. But with a voice like an angel.

“If that Dinah Shore lived here in town, I know we’d be friends,” she told me once. Later, when Dinah took up with a younger man, Burt Reynolds, I found a copy of the
National Enquirer
at the bottom of my mother’s sewing basket, with a photograph of Burt and Dinah on the front. Whatever my mother made of that one, she never said.

My mother’s only real-life friend (not counting Val Dickerson, and Val Dickerson could not be counted) was Nancy Edmunds, wife of our insurance agent, who lived down the road. The two of them got together for coffee—not often, because my mother was always busy with the chores, but every now and then. Nancy liked to do hair, and though my mother would never have paid money to visit a beauty parlor, she let Nancy give her a permanent wave once,
and another time (this was long after, when they both must have been nearing fifty) Nancy dyed my mother’s hair. It came out jet black, and if the objective had been to make her look younger—to cover the gray—the experiment failed.

“You were just fine the way you were, Connie,” my father said, when he saw the results. The closest to a compliment I ever heard out of him, perhaps, though you might say it was just the opposite, and said less about how good she’d looked before the hair dye than how odd she had looked after.

A few years before this, around the time the oldest of the Edmunds kids and I were entering high school, it was discovered that Nancy’s husband, Ralph—our agent with Granite State for as long as my father had run the farm—had been embezzling money from the company. Next thing you knew, Ralph Edmunds disappeared.

A week later it turned out he’d taken a train to Las Vegas, in the hopes that he might win back everything he’d lost, but that wasn’t what happened. They found him at some motel next to a casino, hanging from the shower rod, with a note on the bed addressed to Nancy, apologizing for ruining her life.

Most people in our town stopped having much to do with Nancy and her kids after that, but my mother stuck by her friend, even after they lost their house and their car and Nancy Edmunds had to take a job at Perry’s Meat Market. My mother found some Bible verse that applied to the situation, she said, but really, I think, it was more the upbeat Dinah Shore philosophy than the scriptures that guided her. A person didn’t abandon her friend in hard times. That’s when they needed you most.

Roots

A
FTER THE NEW
Hampshire house was sold, we became renters, and we were always renters after that. This may explain why one of my earliest resolutions for my own life was that I would own a piece of land some day. What kind of structure might stand on it barely mattered, but soil did, and a deed of ownership. Roots.

Val and George never cared about those things that much—though Val wanted one thing, which was a place to do her art. All those years, there was always paint under her fingernails and some picture in the works, though more often than not, when we moved, she’d have to leave her canvases behind. When she died, there was almost nothing to show of all those years she’d spent making those strange, sad pictures. They were of faces, mostly, and people she dreamed up, places that didn’t exist.

As a young girl growing up in Pennsylvania, my mother had wanted to be an artist, but there was never any money for art school, and anyway, she told me once, her parents—her father worked at a steel mill; her mother kept house—didn’t think “artist” was a real job.

She was working as a waitress in Pittsburgh when a man had given her his card. “With that long, thin figure of yours, you could be a model,” he told her—an old story, but not one she’d ever heard. “Call me if you come to New York City and I’ll set you up.”

She didn’t care about modeling. But New York sounded good, and getting away from her parents sounded better. Uncle Ted fronted her a hundred dollars, and five days later she was on a bus to the big city.

It turned out the modeling job involved walking around a Times Square bar in four-inch heels carrying a tray of cigarettes and candy and wearing an outfit that was basically underwear decorated with bits of fluff and a few sparkles. “A Peachy Puff Girl,” she was called. Thursday nights she went to look at the art at the Metropolitan Museum and sometimes brought a sketch pad to copy some painting she liked.

But art school wasn’t happening. Simply coming up with rent money was enough of a challenge, particularly for a girl like Valerie, who was never good with finances, and who—every time she had a few extra dollars—did something crazy with it like buying a deluxe set of pastels or a gold leather purse she saw in the window of Macy’s, even though she had no place to take it.

It was on her rounds as a Peachy Puff girl that she met George, who was having a drink at the bar where she worked. He told her he was a writer. He had come to the city to meet with an editor who wanted to publish his novel. They were working out a few last details of the deal. (Later, it turned out the details included a five-hundred-dollar down payment,
from
George
to
his publisher, for getting
Vanquished Desire
into print. But that night, at least, George was one step away from becoming the next Erle Stanley Gardner.)

After all the traveling salesmen she’d met (though soon enough, she’d be married to one) the idea of knowing a writer struck Valerie as exciting. She told him she wanted to be an artist.

“Hey, we should go someplace like Vermont or New Hampshire and live off the land,” he said. “I’d write best-selling novels and you’d make beautiful paintings.”

In two weeks they were on their way north.

Years later, when Val and George were well into their forties and living in a funky apartment near Cocoa Beach, Florida—the last place they shared before George took off for good—George went to an art auction he read about in the paper. He came back having spent most of their savings—eight thousand dollars, if memory serves me—on a bunch of artwork he told my mother they could resell for three times what he paid, or more. A few days later he arranged for an appraiser to come over and take a look at his collection.

Among his purchases that day was a painting alleged to have been made by Salvador Dalí, and another that was by Fernand Léger, and a Frederic Remington statue of a cowboy, and a drawing the auctioneer attributed to a student of Leonardo da Vinci, with a letter taped on the back supposedly confirming this.

It took the appraiser less than five minutes to examine the collection. They were all fakes. George had fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.

The appraiser was just getting up to go when he spotted a portrait over our couch, of a woman in a red hat, smoking a cigarette. “Who did this one?” he said, with a tone of renewed interest. “You’ve actually got something here.”

The painting was Val’s. We had a storage room full of more of her work. There was no market for them, however—then or ever. Eventually, in her later years, after George was long gone, she made a little money doing greeting cards and pastel portraits of people’s children. Fifty dollars a portrait, seventy-five if there were two heads in the frame rather than one.

All in all, we were about as unlikely a family as you could imagine to have befriended people like the Planks. We didn’t exactly befriend them, of course. In fact, over the many years we kept receiving cards and letters from Plank Farm—forwarded from some previous address more often than not—Val often commented to us on the strangeness of Connie’s stubborn insistence that the two families remain in touch.

One night Val read a letter out loud to us over our dinner of lentils and celery and beet juice, imitating Connie’s voice as she might have spoken the words, and laughing in a way that struck me even then as unfair.

“Tell Dana for us that our Ruth has now entered the beautiful and special phase of womanhood,” Connie had written. “I know she’d enjoy hearing from Dana about her own experiences in that regard.”

My brother, Ray, had practically spit up his juice, hearing this. “The special phase of womanhood!” he said, gagging.

“Like I’d really write a letter to some girl I hardly know,” I said. About menstruation, of all things.

We made fun of the Plank family, if we thought of them at all, which wasn’t that often, though there was always the Christmas card, and oddly enough, Val always sent them a Christmas letter—which was a linoleum print she made, sometimes accompanied by the photograph George took of us each year, using a timer on the camera so he could be in it too. We even paid a visit to the farm stand most summers, usually around the time of Ruth’s and my birthday, which was strawberry season.

I think it actually mattered to Val more than she liked to admit, to know what this family was doing, and what they thought of us. Connie Plank was like that kind of hungry and determined cat that shows up at your door with such persistence—not all the time, but often enough—that you finally decide you might as well start feeding it.

“I feel sorry for Edwin,” Val said one time. “He goes along with that woman, but you know she drives him crazy. He should never have married someone like her.”

But here was the oddest thing: somewhere along the line, on one of those Christmases when the letter from the Planks arrived as it always did, with the same reports (how many calves were born that spring, the girls’ education, church events and the annual bazaar, followed by the yearly thanks to God for all his many blessings), it occurred to me that if the day ever came when Connie ceased to write, I would miss the presence of the Planks in our life. I had come to enjoy, in particular, our summer visits to the farm stand. I liked the dependability of the farm, for one thing—the fact that there was one place in my life—one place only, perhaps—that was always going to be there, where nothing much was ever going to change.

And I loved learning about the farm—those times on our strawberry season visits when (busy as he was, and he was always busy) Edwin Plank would drop what he was doing and show me some new development. He explained to me the reason he kept two kinds of cows—Guernseys for cream, Holsteins for milk. He was trying out a certain kind of Chinese bean with seeds brought to him by his one Chinese customer. (“Chinaman” was the term he used. This was the early sixties. That was what you said in those days.)

Another time he had reached into his pocket and pulled out for me a potato he said he’d noticed while digging up one of the hills.

“What do you make of this?” he said. “Darned thing’s the spitting image of Lyndon Johnson.”

Looking back, it was surprising how he seemed to recognize, early on, that I was a person who’d be interested in such things. I remember one year he was excited (as excited as a person like Edwin ever appears) over a new variety of butter-and-sugar corn that blended the best of both worlds: the flavor of yellow corn with the sweetness and crunchiness of white corn. Another time he told me the story of the Big Boy tomato, the first real commercial hybrid variety, developed by the son of a Ukrainian farmer, that was brought out by the Burpee company the year before my birth and Ruth’s—1949.

“Imagine thinking up a whole new vegetable,” he told me, as he handed me a sample.

“Now that would be a legacy to leave your grandchildren,” he said.

Though I was still young when we had these conversations—once a year at most, walking the rows, while back at the house Connie served Val coffee from the percolator, not instant—I liked our visits. I appreciated Edwin Plank’s sober reflection on the pride and comfort he found, early mornings in the barn, milking the cows, and most of all, running his old Massey Ferguson across his fields, knowing the furrows he was carving out were the very same ones his own father and grandfather before him had turned over in decades past.

“They’re long dead now, of course,” he said. “The only things that carry on for sure are the seasons and the crops.”

Young as I was, hearing him say this moved me. Some part of me admired
the Plank family’s steadiness and constancy, the order with which their lives unfolded, particularly measured against the untidiness of our own. I loved the idea that a handful of corn seeds, properly planted and tended, would lead to tall, straight stalks, and food. Girls weren’t supposed to care about these things—particularly in those days—but I was never a girl who cared about Barbie dolls or dresses. Even though Val, who loved those things, kept giving them to me.

I liked to put my hands in the dirt, felt drawn to it. I wished I could drive a tractor. Upstairs, alone in my room, I tried on my brother’s jeans and rolled up the cuffs. I used to say, when people asked me, that I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up. That or a mother, because that was what girls said in those days, even a girl like me, with a mother like mine.

I told no one this, but the truth was, I dreamed of being a farmer like Edwin Plank.