The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

irrigation pond was our spot and ours only.

Dana
    Windowsill Garden
    W ALKING HOME FROM school, sometimes, I’d study other kids with their dads and wonder what it would be like to have a father like that. Mine, when he was home, seemed more like a lodger than a member of our family. He’d turn up in between what he referred to as his business trips, wearing some fancy shirt and, if his latest project had taken him to some warmer climate, a tan. For my brother, George’s greeting was a slap on the back of the kind businessmen or fraternity brothers might give one another. Though even as a kid, Ray was never the backslapping type.
    For me there was a kiss on the cheek, or he’d pat my head as if I were a puppy. He brought me hotel soaps and shower caps, and once, a shirt with rhinestones on the front that said I LEFT IT IN LAS VEGAS . I often wondered, did he know me at all? How could he, and think I’d wear that shirt?
    With Val, George seemed to adopt a kind of sharp and bitter humor lacking anything that passed for affection. They’d disappear into the bedroom shortly after his return from one or another of those trips, but I never saw them kiss, and when he spoke of her, it was usually to make fun of something—herpoor housekeeping skills, her hopeless cooking, how much money she spent on paint.
    I was too young to understand, but there was always an edge in his voice that left me anxious. “Your mom find any new boyfriends while I was away?” he’d ask. Or once, to my brother, he said, “Take a piece of advice from me, buddy. You’re better off with an ugly woman. Those are the ones you can count on to stay out of trouble.”
    Val never said anything when he made these comments. None of us did. At times like this my brother could be counted on to head off on his unicycle, or pull his harmonica out of his pocket and start blowing on it. Val disappeared into whatever space she’d set up for herself to do her artwork. My father usually headed out for a beer. He no longer gave any indication of working on his novel.
    As for me, I went to the library and checked out a new biography of some inspirational figure—Nellie Bly, reporter; Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross; Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad. I tended my windowsill avocado plants and concocted interesting combinations of organic materials—coffee grounds, crumbled-up eggshells, and old vegetable peels put through our juicer—to use as fertilizer. I conducted experiments with bean sprouts and bread mold. I dreamed I was living in the country somewhere, raising chickens and living off the land, with no people around to mess things up.

RUTH
    Staying Within the Lines
    T HINGS WERE NEVER easy with my mother, but I adored my dad. My father alone, of all the people in our family, seemed to appreciate me, even if he didn’t always understand what was going on in my head. Where my mother remained distant and dismissive, my father offered nothing but love. Stern as he could be if I’d neglected my chores in the barn, or there was mold on the blueberry bushes I was supposed to be looking after, he seemed only delighted by all the ways in which I revealed myself as different from the others.
    “My beanpole,” he called me. “After all these years of tending corn, someone up there must’ve thought I should have a daughter with hair the color of corn silk.”
    “I didn’t get a son,” he said. “But I got an artist.”
    All those years growing up, I had felt my mother’s coolness toward me. She was never an easily affectionate person. But where her quiet, contained expressions of affection for the other girls came naturally—if not in abundance—with me, she always seemed to have been following directions, going through the motions of brushing my hair or kissing my cheek, in the same diligent manner with which she would go through the steps for canning tomatoes correctly in the pressure cooker or making pickles. There