The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard Page B

art, imagined a picture of me, as I was that day, hanging on a wall in a museum, and the idea was not shameful but exciting.
    I studied myself more closely then, one inch at a time—the lines of my collarbone and my ribs, the curve of my calf muscle, and the muscles in my arms hard from a summer of hoeing potatoes and stacking hay bales. I traced the bridge of my nose and the way my nostrils flared at its base over my surprisingly wide mouth. In the past, I had often stood in front of the mirror looking critically at my features, but now I saw myself as an artist would, imagining how the painters whose work I’d studied in books at the library would portray me on the canvas—Picasso and Matisse, also Vermeer or van Gogh or El Greco and Rembrandt—and when I did that, I became something I’d never been before, an object of beauty.
    I imagined then how it would be to look at my whole self—not just my face—with the eye of an artist. I considered my toes and my fingers, and my belly, and my thighs. Shame left me then, replaced by fascination and excitement. I became a student of my own body, and to the artist in me, my body became beautiful.
    I don’t know how long I sat there this way, but I filled up many pages of my pad. Hours may have passed, though it was still light out, and I knew my sisters and my mother would not be home for another few hours at least, and that my father would be out on the tractor until sunset, cutting hay. Flushed not only with the extreme heat of the day, but from my afternoon of drawing myself, I headed to the farm pond for a swim.
    Normally I wore my swimsuit at the pond, but that afternoon I let my uncovered skin feel the water. When I came up for air, I could hear the slow grinding sound of my father’s tractor over the other side of the hill and the lowing of the grazing cows. Just above the surface of the pond, a little cloud of bugs hovered,the wings of one catching the sunlight in a particular angle that made it beautiful as a jewel, and I could smell the fresh-cut hay.
    Remember this moment, I told myself, though only in my head. Young as I was, I knew that I was witnessing a kind of perfection that a person might experience only a handful of times in her life.
    I climbed out onto the shore and scooped a handful of mud from the edge of the pond, slathering it over my body until I was nearly covered. Then I climbed back on the rope swing and let myself fly out again over the water, higher than I’d ever gone. Then I let go of the rope.

Dana
    The World on a String
    I T DIDN’T EXCUSE George’s absences and lack of attention that this was so, but I think he actually believed every one of his big ideas was going to make our family a killing. I never knew a person to possess so much optimism in the face of constant defeat. He just never gave up and he didn’t understand anyone who behaved differently, people like my brother, for instance.
    For Ray, just getting through a day sometimes was hard. To look at my brother, you would have thought he’d have the world on a string. Handsome and funny, charming and athletic: girls loved him, and even teachers gave him second chances when he screwed up. When he was feeling good, he was Master of the Unicycle, sailing down Main Street in whatever town we lived that year as if he was the mayor or maybe the king.
    But other days—and there were more of these as he grew older—he would stay in bed till noon, or I’d see him leaned against a tree somewhere, chewing on a piece of grass, or playing the same eight notes on his harmonica, over and over.
    “Your brother’s sensitive,” Val said, though to me it was more than that. To me it sometimes seemed as if my brother was missing a crucial layer of skin otherpeople had that allowed them to get through the day when he could not. The time his junior high school girlfriend broke up with him. “You just don’t give me any room to breathe,” she said. Ray didn’t come out of his room all