Read Online The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joyce Maynard
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then, when we lay down side by side, and lowering her gorgeous breasts over my face, guiding her perfect pink nipples into my mouth.
The way I put my arm around her then was strictly for comfort, the way my brother put his arm around me sometimes, when I was feeling bad about something that happened at school.
For that moment, anyway, I was more like a sister, a friend. “They shouldn’t make you feel that way,” I said. “They’re idiots.”
“I wish I was flat like you,” she said. “No offense.”
“I think you’re beautiful,” I whispered. I couldn’t help myself then. “I love them.” Her breasts, I meant. I couldn’t say the word, and the word boobs, that all the other girls used, seemed ridiculous and inadequate. Like what they had on top was some kind of a joke, instead of something wonderful and beautiful.
I kissed her. On the mouth.
She let out a noise, not like a scream exactly. More like my mother when she opened one of the yogurt containers and found a bunch of mold on top.
“You’re a freak,” she said, 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.
By three o’clock our whole school would know, Dana Dickerson was a lesbo. This part was true. The only saving grace was that our family moved a few months later. For once I was glad we had never stayed anyplace that long.
RUTH
Outside the Rules
B ESIDES OUR VISITS to the laboratories and barns of the University of New Hampshire College of Agriculture, I can remember only one other occasion, ever, when I went someplace besides the feed store or the dump with my father.
It happened over Christmas vacation the year I was in seventh grade, right after my mother left for Wisconsin to attend the funeral of her father—an event that had not seemed to fill her with much grief, I noted. She took my sisters, but when I told her I’d just as soon stay home, she didn’t argue.
The five of them planned to take a Greyhound bus over that stretch of days between Christmas and New Year’s, when nothing much was happening at the farm. Every year, as dependable as sunrise, my father would receive his new Burpee’s catalog and the one from Ernie’s A-1 Seeds, on January 2, and get to work with the ordering, but until then even he had time on his hands.
Two days after Christmas—a year in which my father had given my mother a new hay rake for the tractor as her gift, the same thing she’d given him—we drove my mother and sisters to the bus station in Boston, my sisters in theirchurch clothes for the trip, my mother in a suit. I figured we’d head home right after, or maybe, if I was lucky, stop at Schrafft’s for an ice cream. I knew about that place from the one other time I’d been to Boston, when our mother took us there to hear Bishop Fulton J. Sheen preach. Not a Lutheran, but she’d made an exception in his case.
As we pulled onto the road leading out toward the Charles River, my father handed me a Coke from the cooler in the back. “What do you say we take in an art museum, since we’re in the neighborhood?” he said.
He might as well have said, “What do you say we go to a bar and get drunk?” or “Let’s go bet on horses.” The suggestion was that bizarre. But wonderful.
The place he had chosen to visit, oddly enough, was not the Museum of Fine Arts. That one I’d discover on my own years later, when I went to school not far from there. But that day we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. You had to wonder how he’d heard about it.
“When I was a boy, my father took me once to Fenway Park, to watch Lefty Grove pitch,” he said. “Seems like the kind of thing a dad should do at least once in his child’s life, take her someplace
The way I put my arm around her then was strictly for comfort, the way my brother put his arm around me sometimes, when I was feeling bad about something that happened at school.
For that moment, anyway, I was more like a sister, a friend. “They shouldn’t make you feel that way,” I said. “They’re idiots.”
“I wish I was flat like you,” she said. “No offense.”
“I think you’re beautiful,” I whispered. I couldn’t help myself then. “I love them.” Her breasts, I meant. I couldn’t say the word, and the word boobs, that all the other girls used, seemed ridiculous and inadequate. Like what they had on top was some kind of a joke, instead of something wonderful and beautiful.
I kissed her. On the mouth.
She let out a noise, not like a scream exactly. More like my mother when she opened one of the yogurt containers and found a bunch of mold on top.
“You’re a freak,” she said, 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.
By three o’clock our whole school would know, Dana Dickerson was a lesbo. This part was true. The only saving grace was that our family moved a few months later. For once I was glad we had never stayed anyplace that long.
RUTH
Outside the Rules
B ESIDES OUR VISITS to the laboratories and barns of the University of New Hampshire College of Agriculture, I can remember only one other occasion, ever, when I went someplace besides the feed store or the dump with my father.
It happened over Christmas vacation the year I was in seventh grade, right after my mother left for Wisconsin to attend the funeral of her father—an event that had not seemed to fill her with much grief, I noted. She took my sisters, but when I told her I’d just as soon stay home, she didn’t argue.
The five of them planned to take a Greyhound bus over that stretch of days between Christmas and New Year’s, when nothing much was happening at the farm. Every year, as dependable as sunrise, my father would receive his new Burpee’s catalog and the one from Ernie’s A-1 Seeds, on January 2, and get to work with the ordering, but until then even he had time on his hands.
Two days after Christmas—a year in which my father had given my mother a new hay rake for the tractor as her gift, the same thing she’d given him—we drove my mother and sisters to the bus station in Boston, my sisters in theirchurch clothes for the trip, my mother in a suit. I figured we’d head home right after, or maybe, if I was lucky, stop at Schrafft’s for an ice cream. I knew about that place from the one other time I’d been to Boston, when our mother took us there to hear Bishop Fulton J. Sheen preach. Not a Lutheran, but she’d made an exception in his case.
As we pulled onto the road leading out toward the Charles River, my father handed me a Coke from the cooler in the back. “What do you say we take in an art museum, since we’re in the neighborhood?” he said.
He might as well have said, “What do you say we go to a bar and get drunk?” or “Let’s go bet on horses.” The suggestion was that bizarre. But wonderful.
The place he had chosen to visit, oddly enough, was not the Museum of Fine Arts. That one I’d discover on my own years later, when I went to school not far from there. But that day we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. You had to wonder how he’d heard about it.
“When I was a boy, my father took me once to Fenway Park, to watch Lefty Grove pitch,” he said. “Seems like the kind of thing a dad should do at least once in his child’s life, take her someplace
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