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A Novel
by Joyce Maynard
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“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 performing magic tricks wearing a cape he’d evidently
sewed himself. He had taught himself ventriloquism, so one time, at Plank’s, he
made this pair of summer squashes talk to each other without moving his lips.
Years before, when I was five or six, he pulled a silver dollar out of my ear, so
for the next few days I was forever checking to see what else might be in there,
but nothing ever was.
Excerpted from The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard. Copyright © 2010 by Joyce Maynard. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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