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

was always, in her behavior toward me, a sense that she was having to remind herself “Don’t leave Ruth out.” Her touch had a mechanical quality. Her words of encouragement, a script.
    She’d compliment Esther or Naomi on a paper they brought home from school, or tape up a drawing they’d made—then, as if following a checklist, add, “What about you, Ruth? Show me what you did today.” Worst of all was when she hugged me. Her lips on my cheek felt dry and frozen. I imagined that she must be counting the seconds before dropping her arms from that stiff embrace. One one thousand, two one thousand. Then, abruptly, release. A relief to us both.
    I’d show her my drawings, of course, that being what I did best. I loved art class, and hungered for access to oil pastels and paints, and things like glue and glitter, markers and construction paper and silver foil, that we never had around. At our house, the same box of Crayolas had remained on the shelf for as long as I could remember. Jumbo, but so old now that all the best colors—like purple and orange, pink, bright yellow, crimson—were used up or worn down to the nub.
    I asked my mother once if we could get a new box. “They wouldn’t get used up so quickly if you didn’t press down so hard,” she said. “And anyway, there’s plenty left.” Meaning brown, gray, beige. In my mother’s book, colors were interchangeable.
    And oddly, though I was always the one who loved to draw, my mother demonstrated a strong preference for the pictures my sisters brought to her. Winnie’s specialty was coloring books, where she, better than any of the rest of us, had mastered the ability to stay within the lines. Naomi had become particularly skillful at copying Peanuts characters.
    “We should send this in to the newspaper,” she said one time when Naomi brought her a likeness of Charlie Brown standing in front of the doghouse, with Snoopy on top.
    “It’s a copy,” I said, but only to myself. Why would the newspaper want to publish my sister’s drawing, when they already had the real cartoons?
    My own pictures were full of made-up images that I worked on out in our barn, in the hayloft—fantasy figures, beautiful girls in dresses fancier, even, than the outfits of Dana Dickerson’s Barbie. It was one of the many things I liked about drawing, the way—on paper—you could dream up anything you wanted, your only limitations those of your imagination, which in my case meant no limits at all.
    It was viewed as a problem in our family—this fantasy life of mine, and my capacity to think up stories and scenarios. To my mother, this kind of activity suggested a deceitful character, and a susceptibility to the temptations of impure thought. All the stories we needed were right there in the Bible. Why go further?
    But in my bed I did. I lay there sometimes, with my sister Esther asleep across from me and Winnie on the bunk above—and thought up characters and situations they’d find themselves in.
    Sometimes I acted them out, but only in my head. I imagined an orphan girl who works on a farm, weeding strawberries until one day a woman pulls up and sees her there. First she buys all the strawberries. Then, as the girl is carrying the flats of ripe berries out to her limousine, the woman asks, “Where do you live?”
    “Over there,” says the orphan girl, pointing to the barn, where she sleeps next to the cows on a hard pallet her cruel employer has given her, with only a scratchy horsehair blanket for cold nights.
    “I’m taking you away with me,” the woman says.
    “What about my clothes?” the girl asks, meaning a few rags and a pillow-case with holes for her head and arms that the cruel farmer’s wife has given her.
    “Never mind those,” the woman says, stroking the girl’s head and pressing her tight against the soft white fur of her cloak. “We’ll buy you everything you need when you come to live with me in Hollywood.”
    Of course the woman turns out