The Good Daughters

by Joyce Maynard

her short, utilitarian body. Nothing about her resembles the women he sometimes

arranged himself on the tar of the

paying visits to the Dickersons whenever we were in town. She’d stop by with

on with her children, was my impression. Where my mother kept close tabs on

driveway, though not before stuffing my picture in his jeans pocket. This was another

gone. Driving home that afternoon, we

George’s book. Even when I was little, this fact shocked me. George’s goal was to become a world-renowned writer, which

fact shocked me. George’s goal was to become a world-renowned writer, which

Pittsburgh. Even then I remember thinking,

around the edges cutting into her full pink thighs, and her breasts were hanging

grabbing the towel. “I’m telling Miss Kavenaugh.” When I was older, looking back on this moment, the realization would come to me that if anyone in our school was likely to understand how I had felt at that moment, it might have been Miss Kavenaugh, our gym teacher. But at the time, all I knew was I had ruined everything.

enough to take in the name of the artist and

inside each card with a special calligraphy pen. Every one was a little off. “Just because your life isn’t going

Go WHEN MY FATHER was a boy growing up on the farm, he told me once,

to hold a swing or the boy who would be

work from a live model. Now the idea came

the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to

folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You

features, but now I saw myself as an artist

at the library would portray me on the

“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

thousand dollars, probably, which would

of his life developing, he’d read the letter

Naomi, who was engaged now to her future

home, of announcing that he liked to sleep late, preferably till noon. “Your family’s going to need

Eliot, Maine—just over the New Hampshire border—to check out an item I wanted to buy Clarice for her birthday. It was an antique brass bed advertised for sale in the Pennysaver. I knew Clarice

end of the days of fresh milk and cream

touches you in a certain way, or he doesn’t. This is not something you can teach anyone. I knew this that night on the doorstep with Jim when I told him good night, firmly expecting I’d never see him again.

together, or spend a few days hanging Sheetrock or planing lumber. But I learned early on that Ray’s projects usually didn’t get finished. We’d run into a problem

over.” Although, unlike me, Edwin had

would carefully dig it up, along with

watch the fruit, test for sweetness, and

bed, or one a thousand miles away. But each

came to me. Then it was not Brando and Schneider, but Ray and me. There was no

day came, I looked for another avenue for having children in our lives. This was

And though our sex life already had a certain tepid regularity to it—our lovemaking

as if she was checking us out, to see if we

Val Dickerson that way.” Dana

asked about her day, her answers came in

and sigh. “Who do they think I am, anyway? Their mother?” I again raised the topic of adoption, which she had dropped after the tenure episode. “You don’t need a raise for us to afford a child,” I said. “We’ll work it out.”

left alone.” Another time I was making biscuits, rolling out the dough and cutting

grandmother. I could be an aunt. Don’t you want to know if he’s got a family?” “You know the funny thing?” she said. “He called me once from a pay phone somewhere in Canada. He said there was going to be a baby.” All these years, and this was the first I’d heard of that. “Then what?”

when words are gone, I wanted her to know, I will hear your voice. When you can no

her breasts and nipples, but under them.

the scientist in me, again—how much

terrible moment in the doctor’s office, and still we had not yet wept over his

happened in my life, same as I believe she

take a year or more, during which time my plants would undergo rigorous scrutiny over at least three generations before

one.” IT WAS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT by the time

lintel, though none was there, my father said