to be a movie star. The two of them makea movie together, in which the orphan girl, whose name is Rose, plays the star’s beloved daughter. She’s famous now. Off-screen, Rose is adopted by the beautiful movie star.
One day the cruel farmers go to the movies.
“That pretty little girl up on the screen looks familiar,” the farmer’s wife says to the farmer.
“Oh my God, it’s Rose,” he tells her. “If only we’d treated her better. Now it’s too late.”
Later I’d tell myself a different kind of story. I did this at night still—or times at the farm, when I’d be driving the tractor or hoeing the tomatoes. Around age twelve—at about the age my mother sent the Dickersons that mortifying announcement of my recent entry into womanhood, with little in the way of additional explanation for me concerning this development besides the information that I’d better be careful now, and my sisters would answer my questions if I had any—I started including a new set of characters in my stories.
These were boys around the age of the ones my father tended to hire to help out in the summer, but handsomer. Not Victor Patucci, though he was always around. Victor had acne—from all that hair cream I figured—and instead of calling our cows by their real names, he referred to them by the names of Playboy centerfolds, whose pictures I found when I was up in the loft one day, in a secret stash he’d evidently tucked behind some hay bales. The kind of boys I liked were more along the lines of Bob Dylan, whose album—with a soulful picture of him walking down a street in New York City with his beautiful long-haired girlfriend—I played on Sarah and Naomi’s record player as much as my sisters allowed me. I kept this to myself, but the harmonica parts always made me think of Ray Dickerson.
Sometimes I dreamed of Bob Dylan. Sometimes Ray. Where my old stories featured shopping trips for dresses and rooms with four-poster beds, the pictures that filled my head now showed these boys taking my clothes off, though I never could picture how it would be if they’d taken off their own. In one, Bob Dylan was brushing my hair. Then he was kissing me. Then his hands weretouching my breasts, and I was touching them, too, as I thought about this. Then lower. The place my mother did not ever talk about, except to say that babies came from there.
Not just babies.
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, MY father had brought home a book called Harold and the Purple Crayon . My mother never had much use for children’s stories, but my dad used to take me to the town library—rainy days, when there was no way to work in the fields and nothing much was going on in our greenhouse that couldn’t wait till tomorrow.
In this book, the boy named Harold gets a magic crayon and starts drawing things with it, and as he does, the lines he makes come to life, so when he draws an apple, he can actually eat it, and when he draws a rocket ship, he rides on it to space.
The message was clear to me: a person who can draw can do anything, go anywhere. This was the kind of person I wanted to be, and the fact that my father recognized that well enough to pick out that book for me was what I loved about him. One of the things.
I also believed my father—my father, alone—recognized and felt pride in my artistic talent. When we needed a sign for the farm stand ( FIRST PEAS! SPRING ONIONS! PLEASE DON’T PEEL THE CORN! WE PROMISE THERE’S NO WORMS! ), I was the one given the job of making it. When our dog, Sadie, died, he asked me to paint a picture to remember her by.
My father hardly ever took a day off work, besides those car trips every February to wherever the Dickersons lived at the time, and every now and then down to where the state agricultural school was, if some pest was giving him trouble and he needed advice, or soil testing. These were rare times my father set aside his Dickies overalls and put on his brown pants and regular shoes. He’d make an
One day the cruel farmers go to the movies.
“That pretty little girl up on the screen looks familiar,” the farmer’s wife says to the farmer.
“Oh my God, it’s Rose,” he tells her. “If only we’d treated her better. Now it’s too late.”
Later I’d tell myself a different kind of story. I did this at night still—or times at the farm, when I’d be driving the tractor or hoeing the tomatoes. Around age twelve—at about the age my mother sent the Dickersons that mortifying announcement of my recent entry into womanhood, with little in the way of additional explanation for me concerning this development besides the information that I’d better be careful now, and my sisters would answer my questions if I had any—I started including a new set of characters in my stories.
These were boys around the age of the ones my father tended to hire to help out in the summer, but handsomer. Not Victor Patucci, though he was always around. Victor had acne—from all that hair cream I figured—and instead of calling our cows by their real names, he referred to them by the names of Playboy centerfolds, whose pictures I found when I was up in the loft one day, in a secret stash he’d evidently tucked behind some hay bales. The kind of boys I liked were more along the lines of Bob Dylan, whose album—with a soulful picture of him walking down a street in New York City with his beautiful long-haired girlfriend—I played on Sarah and Naomi’s record player as much as my sisters allowed me. I kept this to myself, but the harmonica parts always made me think of Ray Dickerson.
Sometimes I dreamed of Bob Dylan. Sometimes Ray. Where my old stories featured shopping trips for dresses and rooms with four-poster beds, the pictures that filled my head now showed these boys taking my clothes off, though I never could picture how it would be if they’d taken off their own. In one, Bob Dylan was brushing my hair. Then he was kissing me. Then his hands weretouching my breasts, and I was touching them, too, as I thought about this. Then lower. The place my mother did not ever talk about, except to say that babies came from there.
Not just babies.
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, MY father had brought home a book called Harold and the Purple Crayon . My mother never had much use for children’s stories, but my dad used to take me to the town library—rainy days, when there was no way to work in the fields and nothing much was going on in our greenhouse that couldn’t wait till tomorrow.
In this book, the boy named Harold gets a magic crayon and starts drawing things with it, and as he does, the lines he makes come to life, so when he draws an apple, he can actually eat it, and when he draws a rocket ship, he rides on it to space.
The message was clear to me: a person who can draw can do anything, go anywhere. This was the kind of person I wanted to be, and the fact that my father recognized that well enough to pick out that book for me was what I loved about him. One of the things.
I also believed my father—my father, alone—recognized and felt pride in my artistic talent. When we needed a sign for the farm stand ( FIRST PEAS! SPRING ONIONS! PLEASE DON’T PEEL THE CORN! WE PROMISE THERE’S NO WORMS! ), I was the one given the job of making it. When our dog, Sadie, died, he asked me to paint a picture to remember her by.
My father hardly ever took a day off work, besides those car trips every February to wherever the Dickersons lived at the time, and every now and then down to where the state agricultural school was, if some pest was giving him trouble and he needed advice, or soil testing. These were rare times my father set aside his Dickies overalls and put on his brown pants and regular shoes. He’d make an
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