The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard Page A

fell in love with me. I was born in a girl’s body, with a boy’s desires, and because this was 1964, and nobody talked about these things, I supposed I was the only person on earth who had this problem.

RUTH
    Letting Go
    W HEN MY FATHER was a boy growing up on the farm, he told me once, he and his brothers had longed for a rope swing over the deepest of their irrigation ponds—the same one where, years later, he and I would share our afternoon swims. But at the time, none of the existing trees around the pond was tall or sturdy enough to hold the rope. They needed a better tree.
    There was a young oak tree growing alongside one of the farm ponds, but that tree was never substantial enough during my father’s boyhood to hold a swing or the boy who would be clinging to it.
    Then, with his brothers grown and gone, my father started a family of his own, and finally the tree was sufficiently tall and strong to support a boy holding on to a rope. The only problem was that no boy had been born.
    After I came along, my father had given up on the dream of a male heir to the farm, but he had held on to the dream of the rope swing. The summer I turned eight he’d put one up.
    My sisters never tried it once. They were afraid of water. But all that summer and every summer after that I made my way down to the pond in the late afternoon or early evening, and with my farm chores finished, I’dwait by the barn for my father and head across the field with him and Sadie to swim.
    I’d have my suit on already. He’d unfasten his overalls and take off his T-shirt, so all he wore were his cotton boxers. Then he’d grab on to the rope and take a running leap over the water before splashing down.
    As much as I wanted to share the pond with him—I, and I alone, the one other swimmer among our family of Planks—I could never bring myself to jump off the swing, into the pond. I could hold the rope and swing out over the water. It was the letting-go part that scared me.
    Then one summer, right around the time I turned fifteen, we had a heat wave so brutal that even after the sun went down the temperature never dipped below ninety, and just getting dressed and brushing your teeth started feeling like more effort than it was worth. Even my mother gave up her daily routine of baking bread and putting beans on the stove, since all we cared about eating were Popsicles anyway.
    One day she went to the doctor in Concord—“a female problem,” was all she said about it. My sisters had gone along to do some back-to-school shopping, but at the last minute I decided not to accompany them. It was just too hot.
    So I was there on my own at the house. It was a Monday—the day we kept our farm stand closed.
    I had always wanted to draw the human figure, but never having had a real art class, I’d never gotten to work from a live model. Now the idea came to me—maybe it was the heat of the day that inspired me—to strip naked in front of the mirror and draw myself.
    I went up to my room—the room I shared with my sister Winnie—and peeled off my clothes. I sat on the floor in front of the full-length mirror with my drawing pad in front of me and started to sketch.
    Here’s something I’ve learned over my years of drawing the naked human figure, though this was the first time I did it. There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of all the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman’s folds of flesh take ona kind of beauty. You can look at a man’s shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.
    That day—my awkward, lanky fifteen-year-old body folded in front of the mirror in that impossible heat—I saw myself not as a girl who was too tall or too thin, a girl whose breasts were small, neck too long, hips boyishly narrow. I saw myself as a work of