Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs

  copyright

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Warner Books Edition

  Copyright © 2002, 2004 by Cheryl Peck

  All rights reserved.

  This book was previously self-published by the author.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First ebook Edition: January 2004

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-0985-6

  Dedicated to D. Eloise Molby Peck, 1927–1976

  acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Trudi and Elin who spent years musing aloud, “Why don’t you just write down the stories you tell?” until I finally did; Lavender Morning for allowing me to see my work in print; the Phoenix Community Church for sitting still for sometimes an hour at a time while I read to them; Annie for tirelessly reading everything I have handed her over the years; and my family for their sense of humor, which is nearly as twisted as mine.

  I would like to thank Ranee Bryce, Teresa Terrill, Mary Jaglowski, Janean Danca and Pam Wong-Peck for proofreading this manuscript and discovering all of those errors that fell below my radar. I would particularly like to thank Ranee for doing it all over again five months later.

  I would also like to thank Mary Appelhof, an internationally known author, for her publishing expertise and support. Historically she has been unfailingly supportive of aspiring authors and she is a strong voice in the publishing and environmental communities.

  I would like to thank our mayor, Tom Lowry, whose wonderful bookstore was the first home for Fat Girls, and whose support of our efforts helped lead us to a contract with the Warner Book Group.

  I would like to thank Amy Einhorn—my editor in New York—for her patience, her faith in me, and for allowing me to actually say to people I’ve known all of my life, “Amy—my editor in New York—says …”

  None of you would be reading this without the tireless patience, confidence, support—and skills—of my Beloved, Nancy Essex. She hates attention and she is driven to make worthwhile all of our time spent here on earth—the two traits every undisciplined writer needs in a partner. I wrote it: everything beyond that point is her work and determination, not mine, and I thank her.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Queen of the Gym

  Tales from the Duck Side

  Eleanor

  Chocolate Malt

  Obedience

  The Carpenter and the Fisherman

  Zen and the Art of Tomato Maintenance

  D.B. Weeest

  Changing

  Threads

  Of Mites and Men

  The Southwest Michigan Jaguars

  Eminent Domain

  What She Lost

  Wounded in Action

  The Designated Fetcher

  Staring at the Light

  Black Holes

  Whitebread

  Second Standard

  Our House

  How Many Lesbians Does It Take?

  My Mother’s Eyes

  Frogs

  Mother/Spirit

  Batting a Thousand

  The Chicken Coupe

  Maiden Voyage

  Clean Sheets

  A Cover Story

  Thinking of You

  Truer Confessions

  Mother Learns to Swim

  My Ten Most Beautiful Things

  Moomeries

  The Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company

  Litter String

  Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs

  Wreck the Balls on Boughs So Jolly

  The Go-Get Girl

  Coming Out to My Father

  Useless Information Acquired from Men

  A Short Treatise on Brothers

  A Meat-Lover’s Biased Look at Vegetarians

  Of Cats and Men

  The Sad and Tragic Death of Joey Beagle

  The Young Person’s Guide for Dealing with the Impossibly Old

  The Hand That Cradles the Rock

  Does a Bear … ?

  Watching Cranes

  Tinker

  Making Jam

  Star Bright

  Mother’s Day

  About the Author

  introduction

  JEFF DA NIELS doesn’t know me. He could if he wanted to: we ate in the same restaurant at the same time once. He was busy talking to the bartender and never once looked my way, but if he had he could have walked over and introduced himself and we could have become friends. I feel I have a special interest in Jeff and his career because, like me, he lives in a small town in Michigan just off interstate I-94. My truck, Hopalong, broke down in his hometown once. I used to work with a man whose kids went to school with his. Our lives intersect and overlap on a regular basis.

  When you live in the Midwest like I do, celebrities are a rarity. I used to know a woman who lived just down the road from Ted Nugent, but I was always afraid that if I wandered too close to his property he would kill me and grill me. I’ve never felt that sense of kindredness and likeness of character with Ted that I feel with Jeff. While I am a fair hand at the air guitar, I’m afraid I would have to say that for a Midwesterner, Ted is a little out there. Jeff and I could find common ground.

  I have always felt Jeff and I would get along well because, like me, he is a writer. At the age of thirteen I began writing the great American novel on a $10 typewriter I bought from an office supply store. I set my sights midway between James Joyce and T. S. Eliot (neither of whom I had read, I suspect, at thirteen) and I wrote passionately, dramatically and with great meaning for the next thirty-odd years. I never finished anything except the occasional Oscar acceptance speech. (Imagination is a vital ingredient to any writing career.)

  During those thirty years my friends would listen to me rant on about my inability to produce great literature. They would say, “Why don’t you just write down the stories you tell us?”

  But those stories were about my cats, my family and the misadventures of a woman of size. They were not the stuff of great literature. And I did not “write” those stories; they were just spontaneous verbal riffs.

  Some of my friends, in the meantime, published a small newsletter for the lesbian community in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and they were always begging for articles. Finally—after much persuasion—I tentatively wrote a short, humorous article about cat hair. I followed that with an article about the birth of my (then) youngest niece. My reading audience swelled to five or six. Soon I was encouraged to read my writings aloud at a talent show put on by the community church, where my audience burgeoned into the teens. My cat, Babycakes, became a literary character.

  None of my siblings remember our history the same way I do. Some claim I spent most of our childhood wandering around in the gravel pit behind our property where I talked mostly to imaginary friends, as if the historical accuracy of a lunatic were automatically suspect. They have pointed out small inaccuracies in every story. My response to all of this is as follows: I write fiction.

  I do have two younger sisters and two younger brothers. In the stories I have identified us in degrees of wee-ness: I am the Least Wee, my next younger sister is the UnWee (my favorite title—it sounds like “ennui” and reflects her innately less excitable nature), our baby sister is the Wee One (and when, at forty-one, she finally had her daughter, I dubbed the baby the Weeest). We t
hree girls were born within a five-year span; our Little Brother (1) is nine years younger than I am and our Baby Brother (2) is twelve years younger than I am. He attended kindergarten the same year I graduated from high school. We don’t use such formal titles among ourselves. We just call each other by name. My age, my father’s age, and the exact number of offspring of the reproductive among us changes from one story to the next because over time these things do. I did hit the Wee One in the head with a rock. She lived anyway. Her version of the story is different from mine, but hers is remarkably good-natured.

  I grew up in rural Branch County, four miles north of Cold-water, Michigan. Our house is roughly twenty-five miles from the Michigan-Indiana state line. We lived in an old farmhouse, but by the time we moved there most of the farm had been turned into a gravel pit and our yard was cradled on two sides by a kidney-shaped 120-acre hole in the ground. Like much of southern Michigan, the area where I grew up is farm country dotted with small wooded areas, wetlands and lakes. It is pretty country without calling undue attention to itself. Legend has it that no one who lives in Michigan lives more than five miles from a lake—we lived across the road and a cornfield from a chain of five of them. When I was growing up small farmers believed their way of life was the safest, most reliable way to make a living and always would be. People were connected to the land. People did not just recklessly move around from here to there, and change was greeted with a skeptical eye.

  I have not lived an extraordinary life and I did not have an unusual childhood. (I have long felt crippled by this as a writer.) I have tried to write honestly about the things I know about— what it’s like to sit in a fishing boat with your father for an entire Sunday morning when you are four years old and the longest time you’ve ever spent doing one thing is seven minutes … dealing with the dog your loving parents don’t realize hates you when you and he are about the same size … why fat girls are wary of lawn chairs.

  I am an oldest child. We oldest children like to keep everyone happy, smiling and in a good mood. We try not to hurt anyone’s feelings. We have all of the characteristics of a good baby-sitter, which when you think about it, makes perfect sense. So welcome to my book. Sit down, make yourself comfortable. Have a good time. I’m expecting Jeff to call me anytime now, but until then, I’m all yours.

  queen of the gym

  IT HAPPENED AGAIN this morning. I was sitting there half-naked on a bench when a fellow exerciser leaned over and said, “I just wanted to tell you—I admire you for coming here every day. You give me inspiration to keep coming myself.”

  “Here” is the gym.

  I have become an inspirational goddess.

  In a gym.

  I grinned at the very image of it, myself: here is this woman who probably imagines herself to be overweight—or perhaps she is overweight, she is just not in my weight division—sitting on the edge of her bed in the morning, thinking to herself, “There is that woman at the gym who is twenty years older than I am and has three extra people tucked under her skin, and she manages to drag herself to the gym every day …”

  It is not my goal here to be unkind to myself or to others. Perhaps I am an inspiration to her because I am easily three times her size and I take my clothes off in front of other women. Being fat and naked in front of other women is an act of courage. Perhaps my admirer did not realize that it was exactly when she spoke to me that I was artfully arranging my hairbrush and underwear and bodily potions to cut the buck-naked, ass-exposing mini-towel-hugging moments of my gym experience to the absolute minimum. She wears a pretty little lace-edged towel-thing to the shower and back. I don’t, but I understand the desire.

  It was not that long ago that she bent over to pick up something as Miss Tri Athlete walked into the locker room and whistled, “Boy did I get a moon!” Junior high gym, revisited: I can’t swear that particular exchange was the reason, but I did not see my admirer again for the next month. To Miss Tri Athlete she answered, “Just when I had forgotten for half a second that I was totally naked …” I doubt that she forgets that often. Almost none of us do.

  Nor do I: which is why, the first time someone in the locker room said to me, “I have to give you credit just for coming here,” I smiled politely and thought ugly thoughts for some time afterwards. Up yours thrummed through my mind. Nobody asked you for credit zinged along on its tail, followed closely by Who died and left you queen of the gym?

  “Like it takes any more for me to go the gym than it does any other woman there,” I seethed to my Beloved.

  “Well it does,” my Beloved returned sedately, “and you know it. How many other women our size have you seen at our gym?”

  The answer is—none.

  There are women of all shapes and sizes—up to a point— from Miss Tri Athlete, who runs in the 20–25-year-old pack, wears Victoria’s Secret underthings and is self-effacing about her own physical prowess to women who are probably in their sixties, perhaps even seventies. There are chubby women and postpartum moms and stocky women and lumpy women … but there are very few truly fat women.

  Exercise, you might advise me solemnly, is hard for fat women.

  Exercise is hard for everyone.

  Exercise is as hard as you make it.

  Miss Tri Athlete shared a conversation with me the other morning. She said, “It feels really good to get this out of the way first thing in the morning, doesn’t it? I think when you plan to exercise in the evening it just hangs over you like a bad cloud all day.” She can’t be more than twenty-five, she can’t be carrying more than six ounces of unnecessary body fat and I’ve never seen her move like anything hurts. Her joints don’t creak. Her back doesn’t ache. She sweats and turns pink just like everybody else. She trains like an iron woman, but she’s relieved when it’s over.

  I don’t believe it’s exercise that keeps fat women out of the gym. I think it’s the distance from the bench in front of the locker to the shower and back. I think it’s years and years of standing in grocery lines and idly staring at the anorexic women on the cover of Cosmo, I think it’s four-year-olds in restaurants who stage-whisper, “Mommy—look at that FAT lady,” I think it’s years of watching American films where famous actresses never have pimples on their butts or stretch marks where they had kids. It’s Baywatch. Barbie. It’s never really understanding, in our gut, that if we could ask her even Barbie could tell us exactly what is wrong with her body. And we all know, intellectually, of course, that Barbie’s legs are too long, her waist is too short, her boobs are too big and her feet are ridiculous, but she’s a doll. What we do not know, as women, is that my sports physiologist, who is in her late twenties and runs marathons, also has tendonitis in her shoulder, a bad back, and passes out if she trains too hard. My former coach for the Nautilus machines had MS. None of us have perfect bodies. If we did have perfect bodies, we would still believe we are too short or too fat or too skinny or not tan enough.

  None of us have ever been taught to admire the bodies we have.

  And nothing reminds us of our personal imperfections like taking off our clothes. Imagining that—for whatever reason— other people are looking at us.

  My sports physiologist is more afraid of wounding me than I am of being wounded. The program she has set up for me to regain my youthful vim and vigor is appropriately hard. Not too hard, not too easy. It’s just exercise. The most difficult part of my routine, designed by my physiologist, is walking through the heavy-duty weight room to get the equipment I need for my sit-ups. The weight room is full mostly of men. Lifting weights. Not one of them has ever been rude to me, not one of them has even given me an unkind glance: still, the irony that I make the greatest emotional sacrifice to do the exercise I like the least is born again each time I walk into the room.

  Someone might laugh at me.

  Someone might say, “What are you doing here?”

  I have a perfectly acceptable answer.

  I joined the gym because my girlfriend said, “I want to wal
k the Appalachian Trail.” I have no desire to backpack across the wilderness: but I could barely keep up with her when she made this pronouncement, and I could see myself falling farther and farther behind if I stayed home while she trained. I joined the gym because I used to work out and I used to feel better. Moved better. Could tie my shoes. I joined the gym because I dropped a piece of paper on the floor of my friend’s car and I could not reach down and pick it up. I joined the gym because I have a sedentary job and a number of aches and pains and chronic miseries that are the result of being over fifty and having a sedentary job. I joined the gym because my sister, who is younger than I am and more fit, seriously hurt her back picking up a case of pop. It could have been me. It probably should have been me.

  I keep going back to the gym because I love endorphins. I love feeling stronger. More agile. I can tie my shoes without holding my breath. I can pick papers up off the car floor without having to wait until I get out of the car. I don’t breathe quite as loudly. I have lost that doddering, uncertain old lady’s walk that made strange teenaged boys try to hold doors or carry things for me.

  I keep going back because I hate feeling helpless.

  Years ago, a friend of mine convinced me to join Vic Tanney, a chain of gyms popular at the time. There was a brand-new gym just around the corner from where we lived—just a matter of a few blocks. She had belonged to Vic Tanney before, so she guided me through the guided tour, offering me bits of advice and expertise along the way … I plopped down money, she plopped down money, and a few days later it was time for us to go to the gym.

  She couldn’t go.

  She was fat.

  Losing weight had been her expressed goal when she joined: now she couldn’t go until she was “thinner.”

  Everyone else at the gym, she said, was buff and golden.

  “I’ll be there,” I pointed out (for I have never been a small woman).

  She couldn’t go. She was too fat.

  She was a size twelve.