Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs Read online

  At any rate, her mother loaded us up into the car and we drove to town (something of an adventure for me, at the time— my mother did not just frivolously “go to town”) to the Dairy Queen, where I had my very first chocolate malt.

  I have a tendency to sigh while sucking down a chocolate malt, the kind of sigh I have discovered myself giving at other times in my life having absolutely nothing to do with food. I think chocolate malts are God’s most perfect food and I’ve believed that from the first taste of the first malt I ever had. I was nearly orgasmic over this malt.

  It occurred to Pam’s mother, sometime during this incredibly pleasurable experience of malt drinking, that I had never had one before. Which I had not. This seemed to tell Pam’s mother something, and while I was not entirely sure what it told her, I began to feel like a little backwoods ruffian in the company of society folk. Her attitude toward me seemed to shift, from a sort of reserve to a kind of she-can’t-help-it, she-doesn’t-know-any-better mien that I did not find at all comfortable. I felt as if I had somehow been disloyal to my mother. I should somehow have arranged to have had a chocolate malt before, so I could have been more prepared for my trip to the Dairy Queen.

  I mentioned this later, after I had been taken home, to my mother.

  It became clear to me, at the age of six, that Pam’s mother and my mother were not friends and never would be. Pam’s mother was a social climber, I was told. We were not “good enough” for her. I should not take anything she said or did all that seriously because she was a “snob” and my mother was sorry I had had to go through an experience like that. What I remembered of that experience was a chocolate malt, which I was not even remotely sorry for having gone through, so perhaps some of that conversation was lost on me.

  I was never invited to Pam’s house again. Later a classmate told me this was because I went through all of her mother’s drawers and her mother found me badly behaved. I felt guilty about this for years, although to this day I remember standing in Pam’s mother’s room while Pam, the eternal hostess, is asking, “Do you want to … ?”

  Pam and I may have become bored with each other. She was a wonderful girl—I am sure my mother would have been proud to have had a daughter like Pam—but she and I had very little in common. I always liked her, all the way through school, and I made a point of speaking to her at least two or three times a year as we passed in the halls. And she was always nice to me, although I always had the impression that whatever I had just said to her bounced off one of her internal walls. That may not tell you a great deal about Pam.

  I still find it interesting that I was accused of a crime—a misdemeanor, at best, but a social crime, nonetheless—and I have never been able to satisfactorily conclude whether or not I did it. Either I did it, or Pam lied, and why would Pam lie? She told me one of our other classmates went through all of her mother’s drawers. Perhaps she was not a perfect child, either: perhaps Pam, at six, went through an unfortunate stage when she told stories that weren’t true about other people. Perhaps she was covering up her own complicity. I was certainly not the better child, so I am not qualified to judge.

  But I can take the same memory, remember being just unreasonably happy, sitting in a car, holding a cold paper cup full of something, and I can taste that something on my tongue and I can identify that taste on sheer memory. Chocolate malt. Mrs. Sweet introduced me to heaven in a cup. Mrs. Sweet didn’t have to be my mother’s best friend.

  obedience

  I WAS A SIMPLE CHILD. I don’t believe it required any complex thought to understand anything I did. I liked my things where they belonged, I liked my space respected, I liked my little sisters on the other side of my door. I was a Big Sister. I expected to be obeyed.

  Recently during one of those intimate, sharing moments that sisters have, the Wee One admitted to me that when I was somewhere else, she would run into my empty room and stand there. Just stand there. From time to time she stole small items she thought were important to me, but for the most part, she just stood there. Apparently it gave her comfort to know she could orchestrate her own death.

  I walked through her room as well, easily twice a day, but that was because her room was the hall and both the UnWee and I had to walk through it to get to our own rooms. Neither the UnWee nor I ever stole small items of victory from the Wee One. We never saw any. The Wee One’s room looked like Anne Frank’s living quarters in 1941. Friends of mine, in transit to my room, used to look around, frown, and say, “I thought you said your little sister lived in this room …” The UnWee and I always thought the Wee One was neurotic, but it turns out she was just neat.

  Other than sheer geography there would have been no reason for me to walk into the Wee One’s room. Five years younger and obsessed with dolls, she had nothing that would have interested me. Even if she did, I would simply have taken it away from her, so this whole stand-in-your-room thing baffles me.

  Ha! She’s gone somewhere—I think I’ll go stand in her room …

  “I liked to touch your things,” she said.

  Touching my things is no great challenge; I keep them all out in the middle of the floor where I can find and touch them myself. As a concession to adulthood I bought a dining room table, but it’s never added any great challenge to finding my things.

  “You know, of course, that if I’d caught you I would have killed you,” I remind her.

  This just makes her laugh. “You never knew,” she says confidently. “You never missed anything I took, either.”

  This flashes me back to the single seminal episode of sharing that shaped my attitudes toward siblings in general.

  When I was very young—I was perhaps seven and a half—my Grandmother Molby decided to move. She had lived in the same house on Michigan Avenue for thirty or forty years and she was not a woman to recklessly waste things, so our entire extended family went through a period of time when we were each quizzed about our needs. Did my mother want or need the doll collection she had when she was five? Did my Aunt Janette have any use for the linen collection? (This may have been multiple sets of sheets, but, knowing my grandmother, it was her set of “good” sheets with the thin spots or holes in the middle. I can only assume that sometime in her life she was thoughtlessly deprived of a cleaning rag and it was never going to happen again. That, or she expected war to break out and injured soldiers to break into her home, looking for suitable bandages.) I chose that wonderful time in my life, when personal possessions were falling from the sky like leaves, to take up collecting keys.

  It was a particularly satisfying hobby because the people in my family were savers. My Grandfather Molby had keys to buildings that were no longer on the property. He had keys to buildings that had never been on his property. He had keys to cars that no longer ran, he had keys to locks he had changed. My Uncle Steve, who looked and talked like Paul Newman, was another wonderful source of keys. All I had to do was stand around looking sad and wistful until someone finally noticed and asked me what was wrong, and then say, “(sigh) I sure wish I could find some more keys …” (I was not supposed to “bother people” by “asking for things.”)

  By honing both my patience and my acting skills in a few short months I was able to acquire every key my Grandfather Molby had that would not start his car, open a padlock, or lock a building door. I had to get an auxiliary ring. I had a fine collection of thirty-two keys, which I carried around with me almost everywhere I went. I loved my keys. They represented the love of my uncle and grandfather and the stick-to-itiveness of my collecting desires. They were wonderful keys. Some children don’t understand the sheer pleasure of owning an object as mysterious, as powerful, and as satisfactorily physical as a key. I, fortunately, was not one of those children.

  And neither, apparently, was the UnWee. She would have been roughly four, still a mandatory nap-taker every afternoon. The naps of my younger siblings gave me this wonderful period of time in the afternoon when I was an only child, so I was adamant the nap
-rule be enforced even though I knew the UnWee never slept. And my mother should have known this too since years before, the UnWee while supposed to be napping, simply dismantled her crib, patiently removing every small screw in it.

  I had important things to do that afternoon, so I stored my key collection in its rightful place in the middle of the floor of my room where none of my lesser siblings were allowed to tread, and I went off to do my important things.

  When I came back my mom sent me to let the UnWee out of bed, so I went to her room and I found her—wide awake—playing with one key.

  My key.

  One of my keys.

  I found the rings.

  I found one or two of the miniature license plates my uncle had given me for my key rings.

  I found three keys.

  The other twenty-nine keys were not in her bed; they were not under her bed; they were not stuck in the ceiling or jammed in the cracks in the floorboards. I shook her blankets; I shook her pillows; I shook her until my mother made me stop—no more keys.

  I was outraged.

  First of all, I could not imagine what a four-year-old could do with twenty-nine keys that a sister of my advanced age could not undo. They were physical objects subject to the laws of the universe—they had to be somewhere.

  Second, I could not believe my mother. I demanded the immediate and unquestioning return of all thirty-two of my keys.

  My mother said—and this is a direct quote: “Perhaps you should have taken better care of your keys, Sherry.”

  Like it was my job to watch my little sister. I argued that the UnWee had no right to play with my keys, that they were my keys and not hers and she could not just go in my room and take anything she wanted.

  I got some vague lecture on the unfinished brains and the fuzzy thought-processes of four-year-olds.

  I demanded my keys back.

  I was told to go stand in a corner until I could control myself.

  At that point I was just too through with the UnWee AND my mother, and I stomped out of the house for good. As it happens I did eventually go home again, but things were never quite the same.

  My twenty-nine keys were never found. One four-year-old had my key collection—without authorization—for about an hour in a room eight feet wide and twelve feet long, and twenty-nine of the thirty-two keys she stole were never seen again.

  I wanted to have her X-rayed, but my mother refused.

  Having lost my key collection and much of my faith in humankind, I drew my lesser siblings together at a time when our mother happened to be elsewhere, and I described to them in rich and colorful detail the multiple forms of death they would suffer if either one of them ever stepped foot in my room again.

  I must have made quite an impression because even today, while some of us are drifting into our fifties, I will sometimes catch one of them just touching something of mine and then glancing guiltily at me as if to see what I’m going to do about it.

  the carpenter and the fisherman

  WHEN I WAS A KID, my father and I built a boat. He told me what we were doing, and then for a long time he messed around with a big sheet of paper with diagrams and mathematical formulas on it, and then he spent some time dragging me to lumber yards where we bought a lot of boards, and then he spent even more time measuring and sawing, and then he dragged me AND my mother out to the barn and they spent time laughing and arguing and bending boards and bolting them in place until eventually he had what looked to me like the skeleton of a boat, and then—FINALLY—the important part came. He filled a little oil can with hot oil, and it was my job to squirt hot oil into all of the holes in the boards. He followed along behind me with a bunch of screws and a screwdriver and filled all of my well-oiled holes with screws so my oil couldn’t drip back out. Then we varnished the whole thing—I supervised this project—we painted the bottom red and we had a boat. I have a picture of my father, looking like he is about twenty-six years old sitting in our boat. (There appears to be no trace of the oiler.) I was quite bitter to discover later that my father intended to use our boat to go fishing.

  I believe I spent most of my youth fishing with my dad. He loves to fish. As is true of most people, if you want to spend time with my dad you often find yourself doing what he loves to do … and when I was very young, I wanted to spend all of my time with my dad. But when I was three or four years old, three hours in a boat holding a fishing pole seemed like most of my life.

  I was not allowed to sing in the boat. I was not allowed to stand up in, or lean over the edge of, or “fidget” in the boat. I was not allowed to catch weeds as we motored past, or say, “Daddy, look at the big bird!” or throw food to the fish or lay down on the floor and pretend I was dead in the boat. I was to sit on the bench in the middle of the boat, utterly still, with my pole in my hands, my bobber in the water and my hook out of my dad’s hair. He was particularly testy about that hook. In one expedition, I artfully hooked six bank weeds, a telephone line and his hat. He was peculiarly unexcited about teaching me how to fly fish.

  In the lakes around my home, the most frequent prey for fisherpersons were bluegills, pronounced “bluegill” by the locals. It never mattered whether you had one or twenty, they were “bluegill,” as in the sentence, “I’m gonna go out an’ get me some bluegill.” I don’t know what color the other gill is. Grammar police are never invited on fishing trips. Bluegill are flat, fish-shaped creatures that wriggle around on the bottoms of lakes. During certain times of the year you can walk down to the lakeshore, gaze into the murky green waters, and in sandy or smallish-rocky places you can see rounded-out hollows about the size of frying pans, which are bluegill beds. If you pick EXACTLY the right time, you will find Mrs. Bluegill building her bed, or Mr. Bluegill protecting her. Recently a friend told me that this is the best time to fish for bluegill because Mr. Bluegill is hyped to protect his expected family from all comers and will snap at anything that hits the water—not because he is hungry, but because he is plagued by an overdose of testosterone. So when our boat set out to sea, my father’s thoughts turned to Catching the Big One, while my thoughts turned immediately to Fig Newtons and Necco Wafers.

  I imagine there was all kinds of fishing lore my father patiently explained to me possibly a hundred times, but the information appears to have fallen into the same miscellaneous, irretrievable file as how the brakes on my car work. The information I have stored about bluegill is that they are not a big game fish: a small, inattentive child, for instance, could hook a bluegill and sit there on a wooden boat seat for ten or fifteen minutes, speculating how any grown adult could so passionately love such a boring sport, to have that grown adult turn around and mutter, “Check your line.” There is also a law of nature which dictates that when small children fish, they can only catch small bluegill; thus, after spending hours of grueling work landing their prey, their fathers will turn around, unhook their trophy catch, and THROW IT BACK INTO THE LAKE. For a while my dad carried a ruler in his bait box and automatically measured every fish I caught, just to shorten my sulking periods.

  As I recall, in the summer we got up every Sunday morning before the sun, peed prodigiously, my dad delivered his lecture about no talking, no squirming, no crying, no wanting to go home again while in the boat, we hooked the boat to the back of our car and drove away, leaving Mom home with the babies. This felt exactly right to me. I had never asked for any babies anyway. Mom was never much of a water person, so how she married us has always remained unclear to me. My dad and I spent most of my childhood on the water, and when the babies grew and became more meddlesome, we dragged them along, too. By this time I got to deliver the lecture about no talking, no squirming, no crying and no wanting to go home again while in the boat. I was all grown up and probably all of six by then.

  However, since the family had grown, we had to build a bigger boat. I had generously offered to leave my younger sisters at home and bear the burden of taking my father fishing alone, but once again I found myse
lf manning the oil can. Our second boat was bigger. In my mind they were otherwise identical, but this is perhaps because I performed only specialized labor: I leaned against boards that had to be bent and held to make them boat-shaped, and I oiled screw holes. In fact, by this time several of the babies had toddled out to Dad’s shop and—in the interests of peace—he spent a great deal of time filling little oil cans with hot oil and dispensing them to eager, competitive carpenters. When we finished the second boat, my dad covered it with a thick white cloth called “fiberglass” and then smeared that with a thick, pinkish gunk that was apparently some kind of epoxy. Then he itched for several days.

  We bought a bigger motor for our bigger boat and then my dad built a surfboard, and we took up surfboarding. Our surfboard was a big, flat plank of plywood painted red with both ends of a rope drilled and knotted through the front to form a rope handle to hang on to and a second rope that tied it to the back of the boat. Our surfboard was almost but not quite aerodynamically correct—it worked, but when we fell off, it automatically dove to the bottom of the lake. Once, two neighbor boys and I were all surfboarding together, I was kneeling in front of them and when they fell, the rope caught me behind the knees and tried to take me to the bottom with the board.

  I once tried surfboarding on dry land, was attacked by an imaginary wave and fell, pulling the board up over my toe and driving a sliver about an eighth of an inch wide and three-quarters of an inch long into my big toe, just under the nail. My dad tried to pull it out with a pair of pliers, I screamed, my dad turned green, and we all went to the emergency room where initially the doctors tried to treat my dad.

  When he retired, my dad bought a fishing boat. It’s a Starcraft twenty-two-footer, with a Porta Potti and an inside deck that sleeps at least two. This thing is HUGE. Six people can ride around and fish comfortably on this boat. He uses it to stalk perch on Lake Michigan. He swears to me there really are perch in Lake Michigan.