The Good Daughters Read Free

birthdays, they’d stopped by the farm stand. Dana and I must have been nine or ten, and Ray was probably thirteen, and tall as my father. I was bringing in a load of peas I’d spent the morning picking when he spotted me. It was always an odd thing—how, even when I was young, and the difference between our ages seemed so vast, he always paid attention to me.
    “You still making pictures?” he said. His voice had turned deep but his eyes were the way I remembered, and looking at me hard, like I was a real person and not just a little girl.
    “I was reading this in the car,” he said, handing me a rolled-up magazine. “I thought you’d like it.” Mad magazine. Forbidden in our family, but my favorite.
    It was on this visit—the first of what became a nearly annual tradition of strawberry runs—where the word had come out that Valerie was now a vegetarian. This was back in the days when it was almost unheard of for a person not to eat meat. This fact shocked my mother, as so much about the Dickersons did.
    “Some say the American consumer eats too much beef,” my father said—a surprising view for a farmer to set forward, even if his main crop was vegetables. My father liked his steak, but he possessed an open mind, whereas anything different from how we did things appeared suspect to my mother.
    “Dana seems like a particularly intelligent girl, didn’t you think, Edwin?” she said, after they pulled away, in that amazing car of Valerie’s, a Chevrolet Bel Air with fins that seemed to me like something you’d expect to be driven by a movie star, or her chauffeur. Then, to me, she mentioned that my birthday sister had won their school spelling bee that year, and was also enrolled in the 4-H Club, working on a project involving chickens.
    “Maybe it’s about time you thought about 4-H,” she said to me.
    This kind of remark—and there were many such—no doubt formed the basis for my early resentment of Dana Dickerson. As the two of us moved through childhood and then adolescence, the girl seemed to provide the standard against which my own development and achievements should be measured. And when this happened, I could pretty much rely on falling short, in anything but the height category.
    Most of the time, of course—given the irregularity of the reports—we didn’t know where things stood with Dana Dickerson. Then my mother made do with speculating. When I learned to ride a bike, my mother had commented, “I wonder if Dana can do that yet,” and when I got my period—early, just after turning twelve—she considered what might be going on for Dana now. One time, on my birthday—mine and Dana Dickerson’s—my mother gave me a box of stationery with lilacs going up the side. “You can use this to write letters to Dana Dickerson,” she said. “You two should be pen pals.”
    I didn’t write. If there was one girl in the world I didn’t want to correspond with, that girl would be Dana Dickerson. Our families had nothing in common and neither did we.
    The one Dickerson who interested me was Dana’s older brother, Ray, four years older than us. He was a tall, impossibly long-limbed person, like his mother, Valerie, and though he wasn’t handsome in the regular way of high school boys you saw on TV (Wally Cleaver and the older brothers on My Three Sons, or Ricky Nelson), there was something about his face that made my skin hot if I looked at him. He had blue eyes that always gave you the sense he was about to burst out laughing, or cry—by which I mean, I suppose, that there was always so much feeling evident—and eyelashes so long they shaded his face.
    Ray had this way of coming into a room that took your breath away. Partly it was the look of him, but more so it was his crazy energy, and all the funny and amazing ideas he thought up. He did things other boys didn’t, like building a raft out of old kerosene drums and taking it down Beard’s Creek, where it got stuck in the mud, and