Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read online

  I won, and I had a ten-dollar bill in my pocket to prove it.

  I had pretty much forgotten it all over again ten minutes later.

  Ten minutes later was when Louisa McFarland walked up to me and said, “Congratulations on winning the poster contest.”

  I nodded politely. Louisa McFarland did not talk to me all that often. Not many of my classmates did. I was a good student who got along well with teachers, but I had yet to strike that delicate balance of tact and discretion so necessary for playing well with kids my own age. I was a dark child, fatalistic by nature and sometimes distressingly blunt, and I had come to expect emotional and social disaster at almost any turn.

  “The prize really should have been mine,” Louisa went on. “My poster would have won, except I took it home to work on it and it got ruined in the rain.”

  Sometimes life is just like that, but I didn’t know that then. I believed her. Louisa was an artist: my most obvious skill in art class was eating paste. It made perfect sense to me that if I won something, someone would be along shortly to explain why I didn’t deserve the prize. I thought about just handing over my winnings to her, but I didn’t want to. I may have had the self-esteem of a rock, but I was in intimate touch with my own greed.

  To my silenceshe said, “I worked on it really hard.”

  Her best friend said to me, “You should give her the money.”

  I kept it. I agonized over it from time to time: but I kept it. I felt badly that everyone in my class would hear that I was the heartless bully who cheated Louisa McFarland out of her rightful reward: but I kept it.

  So what I learned from winning the poster contest was that I had no valuable skills as an artist. My skills leaned more toward plucking defeat from the jaws of victory, and barging through doors that were already open. I successfully avoided any opportunity to win by default in art contests for the next forty-odd years.

  Still, I have always dreamed of being able to draw. People whose drawing skills I have envied aloud have said to me, “Anybody can draw—maybe you should just take a class.” But my inner child cannot be so easily tricked. My inner child has always understood that the only art contest she ever entered she won because of rain damage. Ever vigilant against ego flares, my inner child can turn that advice right around to mean that anyone who does something well assumes everyone else can do it well because it comes so easily to them. In the years that I have shared my hopes and dreams with my Beloved, however, I may have mentioned my desire to draw a time or two too many because she began leaving around conspicuous little sticky notes with the whens and wheres of drawing classes. This fall I missed the registration deadline for all of the drawing classes, but I did sign up for and actually appear for a watercolor class put on by our local art museum.

  I showed up for class with an empty bag. I could have brought along my two sets of colored pencils, the watercolor paint set I got for Christmas when I was seven, my artist’s eraser, and my impressive paper and blank book collections because I own all of that. I love art supplies. I love art stores and always have. I am the only childless fifty-year-old lesbian on the block who owns three complete sets of the 64-color crayons (both the old colors and the new). My Beloved finally convinced me to take the class by saying, “Think of all of the new supplies you’ll need to buy!” I didn’t take my preexisting supplies to class with me, however, because for an additional fee . . . I could buy more.

  I haven’t drawn, painted, quilted, colored, or stained very much in my life because I am extremely vague on the concept of how colors interact. I have colored enough Easter eggs to know that blue and yellow make green. Beyond that, I am a photographer, not an artist—all of the colors I need in photography are already there. Our instructor murmured for a while about “swoozling” and drawing from the right side of the brain, and then she said to the class, “You need to be painting!” Someone handed me a child’s miniature plastic muffin pan, and they gave me—and I am serious here—three shades of blue, two shades of red, and one yellow and they said, “Paint.”

  I thought about all of the things that are blue, red, or yellow.

  Everyone else in the class began madly swoozling. Recklessly and completely without regard for the integrity of their paint they dipped their brushes in this color and then another, then into a glass of dirty water, and they made little piles of colors—pinks, oranges, magentas that they seemed to make up on the spot.

  “What would you like to paint?” the instructor prompted me, and I sat there, staring at three blues, two reds, and a yellow in the bottom of a minature plastic muffin tin. I thought to myself, What the hell am I doing here? I have no skills in art. I have to go home now. It was only a matter of time before Louisa McFarland would show up and explain why she should have custody of all of my unused art supplies.

  “You really thought you could walk into the class and just know everything they were going to teach?” my Beloved inquired when we discussed it later.

  “But I didn’t know anything,” I wailed. “They kept saying things like ‘blue is the coldest color’—what is so ‘cold’ about blue? I like blue.”

  “Have you ever taken an art class before?”

  “Of course not,” I dismissed. “I don’t have any artistic skills.”

  “Maybe that’s what art classes are for.”

  I scowled.

  “I never realized life was this hard for you,” she marveled.

  We were teetering now on the edge of dangerous terrain. I was the kid who ate paste in art class in the fifth grade. I have worked, scrubbed, and polished my public self for nearly a lifetime since then, until, to the untrained eye, I might appear confident, relaxed, and even comfortable in social settings. I have a droll but amusing sense of humor. I have learned how to make friends. But buried deep inside is still a ten-year-old paste eater with one ear always cocked for those subtle remarks that imply I somehow overlooked another rule, that there’s something about all that social interaction stuff that I still don’t get.

  “I can do this class,” I said sullenly.

  “It’s a class,” my Beloved said. “It’s supposed to be fun.” And I can hear my mother’s voice echoing from the past: You just never seem to have any fun, Sherry . . .

  I paid ninety bucks to take this watercolor class. First I’m going to order fifty dollars’ worth of books about colors and all of the mischievous things they’ve been doing with each other while I wasn’t looking. And then I’m going to go back to that class and I’m going to have FUN.

  If it kills me.

  scenes from a road trip

  my friends and i are Midwestern women. The three of them—my partner, Nancy (my Beloved), her sister Mary, and their prodigal friend Susan—grew up in the same small town: I grew up in a small town an hour away and a couple of back streets wider, but it’s all the same, German/English/Scottish Protestant farmers with the odd Italian Catholic thrown in for color. We are a practical people, not big risk-takers. (The big risk-takers, as other authors have pointed out, migrated on west.) We are suspicious of people who show off too much or appear to be having too much fun. Dead Calvinists are salted down around our roots. We are people who tend our roots. We plant trees in our yard that take thirty to fifty years to mature. We expect to still be there. We expect nothing to have changed all that much between now and then.

  We are also women who, for one reason or another, have had reason to look at that heritage not only for its strengths but also for its weaknesses. There are relatives not all that long buried in Nancy’s family and mine who would not embrace our relationship. There are relatives still alive who would prefer we just not talk about it. Susan left the Midwest years ago and moved to the South, having always found the fit here in conformityland a touch too binding: she has come home for the summer to heal after an emotional battering, but none of us expect her to stay. She hates the cold—both literally and figuratively—too much. Mary, whose life on the surface is the most conventional, has struggled
with Western medicine’s curious indifference to anything that cannot be cut out or drugged. She is still married to her childhood sweetheart, a man she seems truly to love and a man who has doubtless made her loyalty a challenge. (“But it’s always been interesting,” she will comment later.)

  We have driven a hundred and fifty miles to stay overnight in a basement, drink bad coffee for breakfast, and have our fortunes told.

  Before I met my Beloved I had never heard of Camp Chesterfield and, except for a brief dalliance with the occult years ago, I had rarely consulted a psychic. During that brief dalliance I took “psychic lessons” with a group of friends, all of whom either possessed skills and insights greater than I could imagine or they were all crazier than loons, but I am not necessarily qualified to make that determination. Many of my friends in this class had spent their lives half in/half out of the psychic world; I had once answered a phone before it rang. I loved the idea of a psychic class, but my mind has never been flexible enough to bend around corners. I wanted to believe them. Ultimately I came to believe that agreeing to spend time in a room where people are doing things I have never done before does not automatically make me “open” to the possibilities. Sometimes it just makes me scowl.

  My Beloved’s friend Susan returned this summer—for the summer—after having wandered the far edges of the country, and while the two of them were exchanging stories and memories, they determined we should all make a trip to the tiny community of psychics known as Camp Chesterfield in Anderson, Indiana, to have our futures told. A variety of our friends were included in the planning phases of this trip, but when we left it was the four of us.

  I am the youngest of the group, for whatever that’s worth. I’m fifty-four. And I am an eldest child, a distinction that seems fairly benign to Mary and me, but which Nancy and Susan claim had not gone unnoticed. Susan has spent most of this summer with her sister/mother, who is seventeen years her senior, and she has already told me the caretaker/charge relationship she had hoped might mellow into sisterhood has remained as rigid and role-defined as it was when she was four. Susan has spots chafed raw by too much exposure to big sisters. Big sisters, Susan maintains, have no concept of what it means to be the baby.

  Nor am I younger than any of them by very much. In order of seniority we are Mary and Susan, who are within months of each, then Nancy, then me. Age is not the issue and birth order hardly matters to women our age: like old hens in the yard, we just like to keep the pecking order straight. We are four women packed into Mary’s SUV and headed for a psychic camp for a short weekend.

  Nancy loves the SUV. It’s big. It’s white. It commands authority on the road. Drivers who might challenge her little green Toyota hesitate and give way to the SUV. It looks like a man’s vehicle. There is no man in it or anywhere near it, but it muscles us down the road like a bodyguard. Step aside, step aside. We feel little and important and protected inside, although it is a proud member of the most dangerous class of vehicles on the road.

  I had written an article about fat girls shopping for dress-up clothes that Nancy has me read to the group. She and I are women of size: Mary and Susan are not. Nancy has heard it at least three times by now (she also lived it) and she laughs at my best lines. She and I are in the front and I can’t tell how the women in the back are reacting.

  It’s clear to me that appearances are important to Susan. She is a small blond, a configuration of color and appearance I have in the past jokingly referred to as “the enemy.” Susan is not my enemy. My “enemy” is some small, arrogant blond who may or may not have existed back in junior high school or perhaps even further back than that. A stereotype gleaned from after-school soap operas or romance novels. My enemy is a lifetime of total strangers walking up to me to recommend diets their great aunt Sarah tried with amazing results, and she was “almost as big as you are” when she started. My distrust of Susan has nothing to do with Susan, the woman who is my partner’s childhood friend, and it is not Susan’s fault she reminds me of the daughter my mother wished she had or the popular high school cheerleading career I once so desperately wished I had. I have grown confident enough in my writing and angry enough about what presumptions about size and character do to all of us that I can read out loud about being as wide as I am tall to small and exquisitely proportioned women without gritting my teeth or flinching. I always know where they are.

  We stop for dinner at a restaurant in downtown Auburn that turns out to be a cafeteria. They advertise “over 50 selections” on the way in. We settle in, order our drinks, drift along the salad bar adding bits of this and that to our composite. By the time I sit down at the table Susan is already talking to Mary, who answers, “I wore them for Bob because he was so curious about them.”

  Bob is a friend of ours, a gay man studying the ministry. It is a tribute to my affection for him and his tolerance for different points of view that he and I are even friends. (I have issues with conventional religion as well.) Bob was supposed to come with us on this trip but had to cancel at the last minute.

  I study Mary thoughtfully, trying to imagine what she might have worn that my friend Bob would be curious about. I check her clothes, her earrings, I am about to duck discreetly under the table to check her shoes when I realize she has breasts. This gives me an interesting insight into my friend Bob, and I laugh. “You’re wearing boobs,” I note. “I like them—they look very nice.”

  Mary had a radical mastectomy four years before. When she was first diagnosed with breast cancer she studied all of the available information about breast cancer, implants, and their accompanying potential problems. She opted not to replace one problem with another. Now, however, she is considering a career change into an industry where conventional physical appearance is more important—she’s decided to become a professional dealer for one of the local casinos, and flat-chested women don’t get as many tips.

  “I hate them,” Mary says. They get in her way and make her feel claustrophobic. She is allergic to virtually all adhesives, and the breasts are glued in some fashion to her chest. “I can’t wait to get where we’re going and see what this adhesive has done.”

  Right now she works for a heating and cooling company where she is one of perhaps two women—the rest are all plumbers and metal fabricators, all men. She has never made any secret about her breast cancer or the mastectomy required to save her life. For all I know the men she has worked with know all about the $6,000 replacement breasts she bought—they’ve had all day to notice them.

  The women in Nancy and Mary’s family are heavy-breasted women, even while the rest of their bodies are, like Mary’s, fairly standard. Her breasts have always embarrassed her and she has told us more than once she is perfectly happy flat-chested.

  I don’t know what to say to a woman who has faced down cancer—who is still facing down cancer—but I know that facts are more comfortable for her than emotions, so we talk about size. She tells about walking into a lingerie store and trying on bras, stuffing wads of toilet paper in them to try to decide what size she felt would suit her. She told us the salesclerks were all women our age who looked at her with silent panic in their eyes. They told her they had no idea how to fit her and called their manager, a pert little “twenty-year-old” whose friends were all alive and who therefore saw the whole adventure as a lark.

  We are flying through the dark between Fort Wayne and Anderson. Nancy is still driving. She has me tell the group about my desk partner, a redheaded woman of size who was driving off some bottled-up hostility the night she was pulled over by a state trooper for talking on her cell phone while driving.

  She saw his flasher in her rearview mirror, but she determined she had done nothing wrong and kept driving.

  He pulled up beside her and waved at her with his index finger.

  She ignored him.

  He started “getting obnoxious,” she told me, which I took to mean he pulled up beside her and edged her toward the side of the road, so she pulled off.
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br />   He walked up to her car. He said, through the two-inch crack she made for him, “You were driving down the road and talking on the cell phone at the same time—that’s a very dangerous practice . . .”

  “But,” said my cubiclemate, “one that is completely legal in the state of Michigan.”

  “Still,” said the trooper, “it’s dangerous.”

  “Did I use the proper turn signals when I passed you?” she challenged.

  “You did.”

  “Was I speeding when I passed you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you stop me?”

  “I stopped you to warn you . . .”

  “You didn’t have any reason to stop me,” she said.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “get out of the car.”

  She said, “No.”

  He said, “Get out of the car.”

  She said, “You go call your supervisor and bring him down here—otherwise I’m not getting out.”

  He said, his voice very determined now, “Ma’am—get out of the car.”

  She said, “You don’t have a leg to stand on and I’m not getting out of this car.”

  He stood there. He turned around, walked back to his car, got in, and drove away.

  We all agreed we would have been peeing our pants in terror when he told her to get out of the car, and we elected her our honorary queen.

  About half of the year, travel in Indiana involves the perpetual question, “Is that their time or ours?” Hoosiers claim the confusion is the fault of Michiganders who go on daylight savings time while Hoosiers stay the same. This is not entirely true, because “their time” depends on what part of Indiana you happen to be in: the northwestern counties match their time to nearby Chicago, which is daylight savings time in the next time zone.