Free The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard Page B

never leave Plank Farm. Whatever it was he felt about Val Dickerson—and seeing her, I thought, how could he not?—my father would never abandon us, or his crops and animals, or our farm.
    Still, I struggled to make sense of the afternoon. How was it, for instance, that Mrs. Dickerson—who must have just paid the four-dollar admission when we ran into her—would leave without seeing a single room in the museum? Why was she so dressed up? When did she start calling my father Eddie?
    “She had a long drive back to Maine,” my father said, as if this explained it, instead of just the opposite.
    The next week, a package arrived from Maine with my name on it. Inside was a note saying this was a late Christmas present, though in fact our family and the Dickersons had never exchanged presents in the past, beyond the occasional set of pot holders from my mother.
    Only I received a gift. I knew even before opening it what it must be, the shape of the box was so familiar to me, as it was to any girl in those days who felt the way I did about Barbie.
    Fashion Queen Barbie, in a strapless evening gown, with three wigs, each one a different color and hairstyle. My mother would disapprove of course, and did. “What is that woman thinking, sending a gift like that to a girl from a God-fearing family?” she said. Never mind that I was a little old for dolls.
    “I thought you should have one of these,” Val had written. “In my opinion, every girl needs at least one Barbie.”

Dana
    A Little Off
    W E WERE LIVING in Maine at this point. The clam shack period, although the clam shack had become a vegetable juice stand, and that hadn’t worked very well. And anyway, it was the off-season now, which was what had gotten George back into his songwriting again. In an attempt to bring in a little money, Val had put her mind to making one-of-a-kind greeting cards, and actually, the watercolors she was producing for these were beautiful. The problem came from the sayings she came up with, that she lettered inside each card with a special calligraphy pen. Every one was a little off.
    “Just because your life isn’t going too well doesn’t mean you can’t dance in the moonlight.”
    “When the water freezes , sharpen your ice skates.”
    “Love is like a robin’s egg. Blue. And it breaks.”
    We had no money. Evidently Val had a few shares left of Uncle Ted’s bubble-gum stock, which she’d been holding on to, but then she sold those. I remember because I came home from a job I had feeding our neighbors’ animals while they were away on Christmas vacation—and there were all these bagson the floor of our front hall, of things she’d bought after the check came in: a jacket for my brother made out of the softest leather, and a lamp that reflected little flecks of light on the ceiling like constellations, and for me, a field guide to the birds of New England with a long-playing record as part of the set, so you could learn to identify birdsongs. In all the years of my growing up it was the only time a present Val gave me showed any sign of having been chosen with me in mind—me as I really was and not her idea of the kind of daughter she might have liked better.
    Some people in our financial situation might have put the money in the bank, but after she’d taken care of a few basics like our electric bill, and stocked up on things like dried fruit and lentils, she’d bought all these presents. She had made a trip to Boston, in our old blue Rambler. “I thought I’d go visit a museum,” she said.
    She had evidently picked up some postcards in the gift shop though. The one I remember showed a woman sitting on a chair, wrapped from head to toe, almost like a mummy, with some kind of white fabric, sitting on a couch, propped on a bunch of pillows.
    This was a woman who had so much money she hired a famous artist to paint her portrait, Val said. After she died they turned her house into the museum Val had visited in Boston that