Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs Read online

  I have determined that I don’t particularly mind being the queen of my gym. There may indeed be women who wake up in the morning and sit on the edges of their beds and think to themselves, “There is that fat woman at my gym who goes almost every day, and if she can do it …” I am proud to be an inspirational goddess. It has taken me most of my life to understand that what we see, when we look at another person, may reflect absolutely nothing about how they see themselves. Always having been a woman of size, I have always believed that it must be just a wonderful experience to be thin. What I am learning is that the reverse of the old truism is equally true: inside every thin woman there is a fat woman just waiting to jump out.

  We give that woman entirely too much power over our lives.

  We all do.

  tales from the duck side

  MANY, MANY YEARS AGO when I was just a child, a neighbor girl’s parents came to my house and gave me a bag of ducks. I remember the bag, which was a big, brown paper grocery sack, and I remember the anticipatory expressions on the faces of the adults around me. I remember realizing the bag held some form of moving life. And I remember looking inside the bag to find myself the proud owner of six baby ducks.

  It would never have occurred to me to transport six baby ducks in a grocery bag. (I am not the least bit anal retentive, but I would have gone directly to the animal transport store and purchased the official Audubon-approved duck crate. I would have paid $50. And I would have panicked had I discovered, a week later, that I now needed to transport six baby rabbits.)

  As you can imagine (brown paper grocery sacks being about the same size they’ve always been), my six ducks were tiny. Ducklings, really. Ducklettes. I remember them as being somewhat fuzzy—sort of pre-feathered ducks—of a loose, barnyard-mongrel genus of duck. The day they became mine they were black and yellow and they made sweet little peeping noises in the bag.

  I immediately released them, thus learning very early in life that even very tiny, fuzzy ducks making sweet little peeps can cover an amazing amount of ground in a hurry. My father loped off across the back yard to examine his fine personal collection of chicken wire. We built a pen for my duck herd and my duck herd spent the rest of their lives escaping.

  Not entirely without provocation, I admit.

  The Peck family (or at least my immediate twig of it) at the time belonged to a small but fiercely protective cat named “Gussie” after the tennis player, Gussie Moran. (Both wore what appeared to be white lace panties.) Shortly after the duck pen was built and the duck herd was incarcerated, Gus strolled through the back yard and heard an unfamiliar chorus of sweet peeps.

  She stopped.

  One ear swiveled, not unlike a radar dish.

  Her whiskers twitched.

  She dropped her belly to the ground, and, peering through the blades of grass, she espied a small pen of hors d’oeuvres.

  I believe Gus may actually have contributed to the ducks’ arrival. Gus had a dark side to her personality—downright nocturnal, really—and she frequently came home with a swelling belly and began building little nests all over the house. She and my mother waged prolonged battles over where Gus would give birth to and raise her new family; my bed, my mother’s shoe collection and the clean laundry basket being on the top of Gus’s list and the bottom of my mother’s. Sharp words were spoken on both sides when Gus decided to consolidate their daycare problems and give birth in one of my younger siblings’ bassinet. I raised each and every one of Gus’s children as soon as I found them, and—tortured by the idle threats I heard from the adults around me—I was quite passionate about homing all of her kittens. It is entirely possible I gave the neighbor’s family a kitten—which, I vaguely recall, immediately walked the three miles back home, so I had to give it up again—which may have been what provoked them into be-ducking me.

  We did not count on Gus.

  Compressed all but flat, she seemed to flow like liquid toward the duck pen, and she coiled to pounce just as my father began wiring on his makeshift lid.

  She refused to speak to him for days.

  She gave up motherhood.

  She did not eat.

  She spent all of her time lying in the deep weeds, her eyes drawing a bead on my ducklings, her body utterly motionless except for the steady switch, switch, switch of her tail.

  Every once in a while when she just absolutely could not stand it anymore, she would release a howl of pure rage and charge the duck pen, sending the inmates into a panicked peeping clutch on the far side. Then Gus herself would spend some time extracting various body parts from the holes in the chicken wire and she would retreat to bathe herself from toe to tail as if to say, I didn’t really mean that.

  Meanwhile, the ducklings grew and in a very short time became real ducks. Each one would have required his or her own grocery sack.

  My father grew tired of retooling the duck pen and wandered off to construct prisons for woodchucks.

  By the time Gus managed to penetrate the duck pen, the ducks were roughly the same size she was and there were six of them. They had done hard time. A pact was swiftly drawn: the ducks would huddle together, quacking in mock terror as they raced in tiny circles around their water bowl, and Gus would hunker down and stalk them but never eat them.

  My mother amused herself most of the summer by waiting for people who drove into our yard to rush up and warn her that her cat was stalking her ducks. My father used to sit on the back steps with the garden hose in his hand, and when Gus would get the ducks going, he would blast her. I put my younger sisters in the duck pen to see if they would toddle in circles around the water bowl as well. I believe we all grew as human beings.

  The tale ends bitterly, of course. It turned out Gus was not alone when she thought of my ducks as food. My own parents murdered my ducks.

  My mother—who gave birth to me, and who devoted years of her life to keeping me from watching the miracle of feline childbirth—cooked one of my ducks and tried to make me eat it. I couldn’t eat a bite. And neither could anyone else in my family because months of being herded around the water bowl by the spirit of the Serengeti had turned my ducks into about the toughest birds to ever waddle down the pike. My father claimed he broke a tooth and shot a baleful look at Gus.

  Once again, she was visibly pregnant.

  eleanor

  I LIVE NEXT DOOR to Eleanor. Every morning that I don’t go to the gym I see Eleanor and her mother race out of their house, coats, scarves and book bags flying as they scrape off their car, jump in and speed off to wherever it is that Eleanor goes. Sometimes we speak. Sometimes we nod. Sometimes my coat, scarf and book bag are flying as well and we just duck our heads and get on with the going.

  Once, back in the fall when my leaves were all piled neatly in the street, waiting for the city to come get them, three little girls daintily rode their pink bikes into my leaf piles in what appeared to be an extremely feminine demolition derby. It was at that time that I realized that unless Eleanor is exactly where Eleanor should be, doing exactly what Eleanor should be doing, I really can’t tell which nine-year-old girl is Eleanor. I am a bad adult. While I still do vaguely remember how the world spun around me when I was nine, how none but only the most irrelevant adults could fail to recognize me and my significance to the universe on sight, all nine-year-old girls now pretty much look alike to me.

  Several weeks ago I stayed home for three days to nurse an ailing back, and sometime during that brief respite from work, there was a gentle tap on my door and when I went to look, there stood Eleanor. She had one of those color brochures of inedible candies in overpriced tins that seem to be the staple of education finance, and she inquired very politely, in a hurried and obviously memorized speech, which of these delightful tins I might personally wish to purchase. The simple answer would be “none,” but there was the noblesse oblige of neighborliness to consider. I gave solemn consideration to several possibilities until it occurred to me that none of the candy ever tastes quite li
ke it should and I should just pick out the tin I objected to the least. So I did so. I asked her if she needed the money now or later and she said it didn’t matter—my order should come in X number of days/weeks/months and she would bring it to me. She thanked me very politely and made her escape.

  Eleanor is unfailingly polite.

  Some time went by.

  I don’t remember exactly how much time. I had been taking muscle relaxers when Eleanor sold me the tin and at the time I was lucky to have been able to figure out how to open the door to let her in.

  However, as my life clipped along, every morning I would see Eleanor and her mother making their run for the car and it would occur to me that I had not yet received my tin. The tin itself was inconsequential: what mattered was that if I did not pay for the tin there was the chance that Eleanor herself might have to pay for it and I didn’t want that to happen. No one should have to finance her own education at the age of nine.

  One morning I woke up and the whole world had turned white. I keep a male roommate for just that purpose and I listened a moment and heard the rewarding scrape of snow shovel against cement, but I hurried outside anyway to make it appear that I intended to help him, and while I was scraping off my car, Eleanor and her mother were scraping off theirs. I was feeling neighborly and expansive so I called across the yard, “Hi—has Eleanor’s tin order come in yet?”

  Eleanor’s mother seemed to stiffen for some reason and she said, “Eleanor will have to come talk to you about that tonight,” and she jumped into her car and drove away. It seemed a little abrupt to me, but I reasoned that she might be running a little late, with the snow and all.

  Of course I did go home that night, but not until very late, and Eleanor, I’m sure, was in bed.

  In fact, I rarely show up at home on any predictable pattern at an hour a nine-year-old should still be awake. And to complicate things, I had started going back to the gym, so I left about an hour and a half before Eleanor left in the morning.

  And so it happened that I was in the downtown bookstore the Friday after Thanksgiving. I had gone to pick up some reading material for my father, who has recently survived a double valve replacement and, having never been sick before, has become somewhat testy about the whole recovery process. It is apparently somewhat boring for a fixer/putterer/man-of-action to be restricted to lifting less than five pounds. I had heard rumors that his caretaker turned her back on him for five minutes and turned back to find him leaning over to pick up a bread machine, which, as everyone but my father knows, weighs more than five pounds, and my goal was to find less strenuous ways to amuse him.

  As I walked past the calendar rack, I espied a small child and I thought to myself, There is Eleanor. However, I only recognize Eleanor with confidence when she is exactly where Eleanor should be and the girl in the bookstore could have been any nine-year-old girl with long light brown hair and an aura of femininity about her that would make Barbie look butch. And the child seemed frozen. Not even her eyelids fluttered. She appeared to be staring at the calendar rack. I glanced there to determine what might be holding her attention so rapt and there wasn’t much there to entertain me, much less a nine-year-old. I thought about speaking, but then I thought, suppose her name is Phoebe and she’s never seen you before in your life?

  And so I passed her, like an oversized ship in the aisle.

  I found a magazine on lighthouses and the Great Lakes, I found a Penthouse (my sisters and I used to spend hours slung over our parents’ bed, reading our dad’s Playboy that he always stashed under his side of the bed. We weren’t even supposed to be in their room, but we reasoned that if they couldn’t see the magazine, artfully hidden by the edge of the bed, they might know we were up to something, but not exactly what. Like there were a broad variety of possibilities to choose from. There are my childrens’ butts all lined up along my bed, they’re obviously reading something. I wonder what they could be up to now?) I found a delightful book of trivia about the Great Lakes. My Beloved found him a puzzle that actually caught his attention and amused him later when we delivered all of this booty.

  I was standing at the checkout, making my purchases, when a small, light-brown-haired child materialized under my left elbow and said, “Um—hi.”

  Since she appeared to know me, I could only assume I knew her as well. “Eleanor,” I greeted her.

  “Um—we were going to just buy everyone little gifts.”

  “What?”

  She drew a deep breath—possibly her first since she’d seen me. “I took the book to my Grampa’s and I left it downstairs and neither one of us remembered it and it was the last day so we never got to send the order in so we were just going to buy everyone a little gift.”

  I laughed out loud, somewhat confusing her. “Oh, you don’t have to buy me a little gift, Eleanor,” I assured her. “It’s fine.”

  She looked doubtful.

  “Really,” I assured her. “I was just worried you might have to pay for something I ordered.” I refrained from telling her I’d never wanted it anyway.

  She heaved a heavy sigh, as only a nine-year-old can. “I thought you’d be mad,” she admitted.

  “I’m not mad,” I assured her. “You have a wonderful Thanksgiving.”

  “Thank you very much,” Eleanor said. She appeared thirty years younger, no longer plagued by the weight of the world, and she dashed away.

  I thought back on that visual image of the child frozen in front of the calendar rack, thinking desperately Did she see me? Does she know me? Does she look mad? Do I have to talk to her now or can I just pretend I don’t see her?

  It must have taken considerable courage for her to come up to me and admit to me she’d lost my tin order. I would have slunk away and tortured myself with guilt and enemy sightings for weeks, but then, I barely recognize the child when I see her, so I guess we don’t need to worry about her role-modeling after me.

  chocolate malt

  MEMORY IS A TRICKY THING. It is the definition of fiction: it starts with an event or a feeling or a perception, and then it wanders off down the corridors of its author’s mind until what eventually emerges is “true” only for the person doing the telling.

  I had my very first chocolate malt the afternoon I rode the bus home with Pam Sweet and stayed to play at her house.

  We were in kindergarten. Pam’s mother invited me. Perhaps Pam invited me, although it seems unlikely because while Pam was a nice enough kid I don’t remember that we palled around all that often in school. There were six kids in our class, but I had lived my pre-school life in the company of adults and while most adults loved me, I lacked the requisite social skills to have any friends my own age. I was the social leper of my kindergarten class.

  I was an intensely competitive child about everything. I had to be the first on the school bus, I had to be the first in line, I had to be the first child called on, I had to do it—whatever it was—first, fastest, loudest and best. I was driven. I was probably the largest child in my class physically, in part because I was also the oldest, and I was strong, and when my charm fell flat on my peers—and it so often did—I resorted to force. I remember plowing through the line to the bus, just shoving aside anyone who dared to stand in front of me, and having no concept of why that might be wrong, or why anyone else might find it offensive. I was goal-oriented. It seemed a silly complication to allow obstacles to voice opinions.

  As a result nobody liked me. Everybody hated me. For lunch I sat by myself on the front steps of the school and ate worms.

  It is unlikely Pam Sweet said to her mother, “Mom, there’s this gargantuan girl in my class who kicks and bites and shoves and is just obnoxious all day long—and I’m the smallest kid in the class so she’s made my life a living hell—can I have her over to our house some afternoon?” On the other hand, I have, in my possession, a photograph of Pam Sweet and, indeed, every other girl member of my kindergarten class, grinning over my sixth birthday cake. Pam has both front teeth m
issing, although I’m sure I had nothing to do with that. Perhaps I was invited to her house as social reciprocity.

  Pam Sweet had a playhouse of her very own.

  She had a little brother, so her life could not have been perfect, but she had this beautiful, immaculate, physically independent playhouse in the back yard where she could go and be anyone she wanted to be. I asked her what sort of games she played in her playhouse, but I don’t recall her answer was particularly satisfactory. I believe Pam was a textbook girlchild of the fifties. She played with dolls and she played house and she had a tea set. I suspect she did not have imaginary friends. She appeared to be confused when I told her what an excellent jail her playhouse would make. None of this may be true, of course, but I do remember having some difficulty finding a suitable game we could play together because hers were silly and she just did not understand mine.

  This may be why she took me upstairs in her parents’ room and asked me if I wanted to look in their dresser drawers. This seemed odd to me. I had the most territorial mother in the five nearest states, and What Is Mine Is Mine and You Stay Out was the number one rule in my household. I remember her offering the opportunity about the same way she might later ask her guests if they wanted a cup of coffee, as if it were something all of her friends did and she was extending the invitation to me as a good hostess. I may have done it, but my instincts are that I would have declined. I had been told to be good and rifling through someone’s mother’s things was most definitely Not Good.

  I am not sure how well the rest of my visit to Pam’s house went. I have no recollection of doing much of anything except discussing her mother’s dresser drawers and looking at her playhouse.

  That afternoon I spent at Pam’s house was probably in the spring. I have a very pungent memory of dampness in the air, that faint green scent about everything, the insistent feeling of buds popping out and things rustling underneath the ground. It may have been the day the Dairy Queen opened.