The Good Daughters (8 page)

The World on a String

I
T DIDN’T EXCUSE
George’s absences and lack of attention that this was so, but I think he actually believed every one of his big ideas was going to make our family a killing. I never knew a person to possess so much optimism in the face of constant defeat. He just never gave up and he didn’t understand anyone who behaved differently, people like my brother, for instance.

For Ray, just getting through a day sometimes was hard. To look at my brother, you would have thought he’d have the world on a string. Handsome and funny, charming and athletic: girls loved him, and even teachers gave him second chances when he screwed up. When he was feeling good, he was Master of the Unicycle, sailing down Main Street in whatever town we lived that year as if he was the mayor or maybe the king.

But other days—and there were more of these as he grew older—he would stay in bed till noon, or I’d see him leaned against a tree somewhere, chewing on a piece of grass, or playing the same eight notes on his harmonica, over and over.

“Your brother’s sensitive,” Val said, though to me it was more than that. To me it sometimes seemed as if my brother was missing a crucial layer of skin other
people had that allowed them to get through the day when he could not. The time his junior high school girlfriend broke up with him. “You just don’t give me any room to breathe,” she said. Ray didn’t come out of his room all weekend, and I could hear him through the walls, not simply crying but moaning.

Then he was fine again—not simply fine, but fantastic, though there was also a bitter edge to him. “I’ll probably jump off a building one of these days,” he said to me once, up in his room. “Knowing me.” He was playing me an album he’d just bought, by The Doors.

“Jim Morrison,” he said. “There’s a guy who understands. Him and me, we’ll probably be dead before we’re thirty.”

“Stop it,” I said. “I hate it when you say things like that.”

“Let’s face it, sis,” he said to me another time. We were watching television, and they were showing scenes from Vietnam, images of Vietnamese people standing next to a burned-out village, naked children crying. “The world’s a pretty crappy place. Everybody’s out for themselves, when you get down to it.”

“How do you expect to get anyplace in life with that negative attitude of yours?” George said to Ray. “You must have inherited that from your mother.”

“And where exactly has this positive attitude gotten him?” Ray said, but not to George. Always to me. George would have left the room by that point. He was the type who delivered most of his big statements on the way out the door, before you had time to offer a rejoinder, not that I would have. That was my brother’s specialty.

More than once, George spent a bunch of money—three or four thousand dollars, probably, which would have been everything we had at the time—pursuing a patent for one of his inventions. Each time he was more hopeful than the last.

When the letter came from some lawyer he’d hired, to inform him, regretfully, that someone else had already thought up his idea for the electric cat food dispenser, or the all-in-one egg-breaker-and-scrambler that he’d just finished spending a year of his life developing, he’d read the letter out loud to Val with a
tone of pride in his voice. For him, the big news was not that his invention was dead, their money wasted, but that the existence of this previous patent served as validation of his good instincts and brilliance in thinking it up in the first place.

“I knew I was onto something with that one,” he said, concerning the egg scrambler. “One day, Dana, when you’re standing in your kitchen and your hubby says he wants scrambled eggs for breakfast, and you don’t feel like messing up a bowl and a fork at the same time, so you take out your scrambler, you can think of your old Pops.”

“We’ll think of George, as we watch the checks go to Mr. Got-There-First,” said Ray, from over at the card table that served as the place we did our homework and ate our meals, in between times George used it for his desk in whatever house we occupied that year. “What good does it do to have a great idea if nobody ever pays you for it?”

As for me, none of that mattered so much. I was still stuck on the part of the story in which I was portrayed as having a husband, a person who would expect me to make him scrambled eggs. Even then I knew I’d never marry. Not a man, anyway. But I kept quiet about this, as I did about most things.

“This is your problem in life, Ray,” George continued. “You keep measuring success with dollar signs. That’s only one way to look at things.”

This was not true even at the time, and later, my brother turned out to be a person with about as little interest in dollar signs, or dollars either for that matter, as anyone I knew. There would come a day when he was basically living in a refrigerator box, as much as I can determine it. But at the time Ray actually wanted to go to college. He might have done what I did, and work three jobs to pay for it, but Ray was never one to push hard for things if they didn’t come easily. Maybe that’s what happens when a person’s as handsome and smart and funny and charming as he was. If good things don’t drop in their lap, they let it go or maybe even start blaming everyone else but their own self. Whereas a person like me learns early that she’s going to have to work for every single thing she gets.

Ray was good at everything, but one of his special talents was basketball. In
those days, a person who stood six foot two was considered tall, and unlike a lot of people his height, he also had grace and speed. Whatever town we moved to, he’d end up playing center on the team and being the star, not that our parents ever attended a game. Basketball wasn’t their thing, they told him.

Then partway through the season he’d stop going to practice. The coach would give him a warning, and when that didn’t get results, another.

“Don’t you think you’d better start going to practice?” I asked him one afternoon when he showed up back at home and I knew he was supposed to be working out with the team.

“They need me,” he said, laughing. “Those guys aren’t going to kick their best player off the team just because I don’t want to spend a beautiful afternoon practicing foul shots I could make in my sleep.”

That Friday night they had a big game against their number one rival team. Though it was winter, with the temperature below freezing, George and Val were never ones to provide rides, so my brother and I rode to the game on his bike, with me on the back, holding his gym bag against my chest. The truth was, I worshipped my brother. I would have jogged alongside him before I’d miss a game.

When we got to the high school, I went in the front, to the gym, while Ray went around back to the boys’ locker room. Alone in the bleachers, I found myself sitting next to a bunch of girls around my brother’s age.

“My brother plays center on the team,” I said. “You probably know him. Ray Dickerson.” Just saying his name, I felt proud.

He emerged from the locker room a few minutes later, wearing his regular clothes and carrying his gym bag.

“Come on, sis,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Too many missed practices, the coach had told him. He was out.

“Watch, they’re going to lose this game big-time,” he told me. Not that we stayed around to find out.

The Old Ways

W
E SAW VERY
little of the Dickersons through my high school years. The Christmas letters stopped, and with no address to send them to, my mother no longer mailed the Dickersons our annual card and gift of homemade pot holders to replace the previous year’s set.

But strangely, as uncomfortable as it had been all those years hearing my mother’s regular musings—“I wonder what Dana Dickerson’s doing right now?”—the fact that she had grown silent on this topic now struck me as worse. To have had in my life for as long as I could remember a person my mother spoke of as my birthday sister, and then to have her disappear from the landscape of our family’s life as swiftly and dramatically as if a tornado had touched down and carried her off, left me more than ever with an attitude of resentment and dread concerning who she had been in our lives.

And then there was the other part: that I still thought about her brother, and that day in the parking lot.

I had a couple of boyfriends in high school. The first—unlikely as it seems to me now—was Victor Patucci—who had been working for my father since he
was fourteen or so, for a wage that probably wouldn’t have done much more than keep him supplied with hair cream and flashy hubcaps.

He was a long way from the figures who populated my dreams—poets and singers, artists. Never one to display any particular interest in farming, or anything to do with rural life, Victor appeared to have only one clearly identifiable passion at the time: for his car—a 1962 Chevrolet Impala that announced his arrival at Plank Farm a good three minutes before he pulled up behind the farm stand, just by the sound coming out the back, and the music—the Tijuana Brass, Mitch Ryder. He seemed to have a particular fondness for “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” I knew this because every time it came on, he stopped what he was doing and recited the words along with Sergeant Barry Sadler.

But Victor had one thing going for him with me: he took me away from the farm—more important, away from my mother, and at the time, that was enough to justify the relationship, though where he took me was not anyplace I wanted to go.

Every weekend night, sophomore year, Victor drove the Impala to the parking lot over by the feed store—a place I associated with my father, which made me feel even more uncomfortable than I would have felt anyway. Sitting there in the car with this boy, receiving his attentions to my body as passively as a cow, it was as if my father might be watching me, seeing those rough, awkward hands of Victor Patucci, fumbling with the buttons on my blouse and squeezing my breasts as if he were not so much fondling them as milking me.

Even then I understood what prompted his ardor, or at least his selection of me as the person he’d chosen for his weekend makeout sessions: he wanted to take over the family business. At age nineteen he’d already set his sights on someday running Plank Farm and—as he liked to tell me—bring our operation into the twenty-first century. The old ways of farming were dying out, he said.

“Let’s face it,” he said. “Your old man’s a dinosaur. If you guys want to keep this place going, you need a guy like me to make it happen.”

In the summer of 1967, Victor approached my father with a proposal for increasing revenues at the farm stand. He’d make a weekly run with my father’s
pickup to the North End in Boston, the markets around Faneuil Hall, and bring back produce they sold there, cheap. That way we ourselves could sell our customers those items like mangoes and pineapples, and bouquets of hothouse roses from Chile, and those carnations they sold at the big flower market, dyed green or purple or blue—colors not found on the petals of any real carnation.

The day our dog Sadie died may have been the only time ever that I’d seen my father look sadder than he did the day he finally agreed to Victor Patucci’s plan. I stood with him in front of the house that morning, as he sipped his coffee in the first light of day, watching Victor head out with the truck to bring home the imported fruits and vegetables for the purpose of reselling them at Plank’s.

“No farmer should sell another man’s crops,” he said, kicking the dirt.

“It’s just till things get better,” I told him, though we both knew things were only likely to get worse.

“Arrogant little pip-squeak, that one,” my father said, watching Victor disappear down the road. He had an uncle in the produce business in the Italian part of Boston, he’d told my dad. You wouldn’t believe the prices we could buy tomatoes there.

Not Brandywine. Not Big Boy. Not Glamour or Zebra.

“These days it’s all about moving stock, Ed,” Victor had told him. All of the other workers called my father Mr. Plank, but to Victor, my father was Ed.

“I thought it was about putting good food on people’s tables,” my father said, walking back to the barn.

IT WAS A CURIOUS THING
, Victor’s obsession with taking over our farm, despite an almost total lack of interest in anything to do with farming. He laid out his vision for me one night at the A&W in Dover. It was time to have sex, for one thing. And to nail down plans for our future.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You could be Mrs. Victor Patucci.”

Disregarding all the other reasons I might not have wanted to spend my life in the company of a person whose idea of a fun night out was a few hours
at the dog racing park, I explained to him the way things worked in the legacy of the Plank family. Our land and farm were traditionally passed down to the oldest son. In the absence of a son, it seemed most likely that my oldest sister, Naomi, who was engaged now to her future husband, Albert, would take precedence, and if not, there were three more sisters and their future mates in line ahead of me.

Victor had thought of this, of course. As he had correctly observed, Albert had already announced his intention to become a gym teacher—having reluctantly given up his original and highly unrealistic aspiration to play for the NBA. Sarah, the only other sister to have hooked up with a clear candidate for a husband, had chosen a person equally unqualified and poorly suited to farming—a boy named Jeffrey who had one leg significantly shorter than the other, was currently at college pursuing a degree in accounting, and had made the disastrous mistake, on the occasion of his one and only visit to our home, of announcing that he liked to sleep late, preferably till noon.

“Your family’s going to need a man around to run things,” Victor pointed out. “I don’t even mind keeping the name the same as it always was, though once we have a son, to hand the farm down to when you and I reach retirement age, I’m thinking it would make sense to change the name to Patucci’s.”

Just nineteen years old, my boyfriend was already planning not only the takeover of my father’s land and the sex of our future children, but retirement.

I BROKE UP WITH VICTOR
just before the start of my senior year.

I had a few dates after that, but the only other boyfriend I had all through my teenage years—the one who took me to our prom—was one my mother found for me at church. Roger was deeply religious, planning to become a minister, and never touched my breasts or any other part of me besides my hand, which he would take in his now and then, when a particular part of the church services we attended together stirred him.

My mother thought Roger was perfect, and I suppose my willingness to go out with him spoke to the desire I continued to register, to please her—impossi
ble as this task remained. That stretch of months when I’d dated Roger probably came as close as any in which I succeeded in this, though the cost—namely, all those hours in the company of Roger Ferlie—had been high. I took comfort in the fact that my father himself expressed disdain for this boyfriend. It was always my father who understood me. Where my mother seemed to have me confused with some other person.

“The boy’s a wimp, Connie,” he told my mother. “I don’t want to see our daughter going off with a person that would put on a pair of loafers to pick tomatoes. I’d like to see him fix a hay baler or deliver a calf. After he got up, that is. Round about supper time.”

I had told Roger about my desire to attend art school in Boston and work as a medical illustrator or an art teacher. He said he thought it was important for a wife to be home with the children, and leave it to the man to work. When I broke up with him on prom night, after we spent the evening playing checkers because he didn’t believe in dancing, he said he would pray for me.

“Good riddance,” my father said, when I told him the news. My mother was heartbroken. This was the first time in years that I heard her reflect, again, on the whereabouts of Dana Dickerson.

“I wonder what your birthday sister’s doing right now,” she said, seemingly out of the blue. “I wonder if she’s thinking about settling down. You girls are almost eighteen now. For all we know, she could be engaged and thinking about starting a family of her own.”

Saying this, a look came over her face. We all knew that more than almost anything besides going to heaven, our mother looked forward to becoming a grandmother. With five daughters, it seemed like a good bet this would happen, but it hadn’t as of yet, and young as we were still, she was impatient for that, and particularly vocal on the subject of our future childbirth experiences.

I DID NOT THINK ABOUT
having babies, in those days. But I thought plenty about sex. To me, the definition of sex was Ray Dickerson.

Almost five years had passed since that day in the parking lot when Ray passed me the strawberry with his tongue, but I had reenacted the scene in my mind a hundred times. More probably. Then I created additional variations.

I imagined the two of us in a room somewhere, alone. He would be naked. I was drawing him.

There is a kind of artwork I liked to make in those days—a form I teach my students in my art therapy groups—called contour drawing. The idea is to keep your gaze solely on the object or person you are drawing, rather than on the paper. You move your hand holding the pencil along the contours of the form you intend to represent—a vase of flowers, a coffeepot, or in the case of my particular fantasy, the naked body of Ray Dickerson—without ever lifting the pencil off the paper.

This means that what you create is a single line that spools out over the page, like a tangle of string, only what it represents is, in its way, a rendering of the subject. The image you make is likely to be wildly distorted, but one that may possibly do a better job of suggesting the thing you’re drawing than if you had labored over your drawing pad, checking yourself at regular intervals, erasing lines and measuring the spaces between things for strictest accuracy.

In my dream, Ray Dickerson was posing naked for me, but he had explained the rules. I was forbidden to touch him, permitted only to look. At first I had no problem with these restrictions. I was standing at a table, fully clothed. I moved a number two pencil over the paper, though my gaze never left Ray. He had a beautiful body of course. And then there were those eyes of his.

The trick to making a good contour drawing is for the movement of your hand, and the speed or slowness with which it moves along the paper, to duplicate as closely as possible what your eyes do as they make their way over the form you are drawing. In my dream, when I got to the area below Ray’s waist, the place where his pubic hair began—and beneath that—I started to feel my body stir and my face flush.

At this point, my dream became a little vague. I’d never actually seen a
man’s naked body before, though in the front seat of Victor Patucci’s car, nights after our root beer float, I’d touched one.

Those times, I never wanted to. Now I did.

ALL MY LIFE I HAD
been a good daughter, or tried to be. My dream self was very bad. The person I was at this moment was nothing like the girl my mother imagined me to be. The girl I was, really, possessed dark longings of a kind my mother would have said only the devil creates. Now, in my dream, I held up my portrait of Ray Dickerson, and leaned in closer to study it. I pressed my lips against the paper.

“Good job, Ruth,” he said to me, reaching out his arms. “Now come on over here.”