The Good Daughters: A Novel by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard [Maynard, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Contemporary Women, Coming of Age, Neighbors, Farm life
ISBN: 9780061994319
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

KNOWING WHAT I KNOW NOW, it is difficult to describe what it was like, loving Ray. Years ago a recovering crystal meth addict spoke at my son’s school. She said that even after ten years clean, she still missed the way it felt to have that deadly substance in her veins. If she’d kept using it, she would have died. Still, life without the drug felt, sometimes, like a lesser thing. A sad though necessary comedown.

Listening to her speak in that auditorium filled with my fellow concerned parents, sitting next to my good husband with whom I’d lived at that point for close to twenty years, the image of Ray’s face was all I could see, and a wave of grief and longing overtook me, so strong I had to cover my eyes. Even after all that time.

Back in our British Columbia days, the way I felt when he was in me was like no sensation I have ever known, and I could have swooned from the rapture of it. After a while of being with him, the simple act of his touching my hand would cause my pulse to change, bring heat to my skin.

He had made a name for all the places on my body he loved to touch, which was all the places on my body. He made me promise I would never speak these names to anyone but him, and in spite of everything else that happened in the end, thirty years later I never have.

Our lovemaking went on for hours, leaving me exhausted. I was too weak afterward to try and make friends, or make art, or even clean the house. All around us things were falling apart, but there never seemed to be any time to put them back together.

He sang to me, songs he made up—every day another different strange lyric and tune. Because he never seemed to rest, and I did, he would sit on the edge of the bed sometimes and play me to sleep with his harmonica—Gypsy-sounding tunes that invaded my dreams.

Many times he told me he wanted to have a child with me.

“Where would the money come from?” I asked. “How would we live?” I might be able to sleep in a frozen bed, with nothing but rice in my stomach, but I knew if we had a baby, I would want more for her. School, friends, a house with running water, cookies in the oven, birthday parties, a Christmas tree.

As we were living now, we hardly ever saw anyone but each other, though increasingly—on those rare occasions we’d drive to town to pick up supplies—I’d find myself looking for opportunities to strike up a conversation with someone. It didn’t matter who, a different voice was all. And then I’d feel guilty, as if I had betrayed Ray, knowing what he had said to me a thousand times: that he would never need any other human being but me. Me and our child. A universe of three.

Sometimes I imagined what my father would think if he could see me in this place.

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