Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs Read online

  of mites and men

  COCKATIELS CAN LIVE to be twenty-five years old,” I lectured, which my friend Annie agreed was a significant commitment. She and I both have reached an age when we must stop and consider whether or not we can afford our infant house pets on our Social Security during their old age. “However,” I reminded her, “that may not be a problem in my house.”

  “That’s right,” she remembered immediately. “And exactly how do you plan to manage a bird around … you-know-who?”

  I have never owned a bird. Never even considered one. When I was quite young my great-grandmother kept a parakeet named Joey. Joey had a working vocabulary that included “peetie peetie peetie Pete” (she imagined he was infatuated with a cardinal who lived in the hedge), “dirty bird,” and a charming repertoire of ear-splitting whistles. I remember two things about this bird: (1) whenever I dropped my guard, he strafed me and flew away with toesful of my hair, and (2) she trained him to hop around on her chest and kiss her on the lips on a regular basis. Joey never seemed to mind this, and, as far as I could tell, quite willingly obliged. Gram had a nasty habit of grabbing unwary great-grandchildren and demanding the same performance from them. I hated it. I didn’t have a great deal of respect for the bird. Also, I believe the little buzzard bit me.

  I was utterly bird-free until one evening not that long ago when I accidentally strayed into a pet store on my way home from a balanced, home-cooked feast at Burger King. The craze in my office of late had been for dwarf hamsters, and I thought I might visit one and compose a list of reasons why I didn’t need one. I was successful. On the way out of the store I passed something called a “playpen,” and playing on the playpen was a small parrot-like bird with a tiny crest, a long tail, clipped wings, and no patience whatsoever with human cuteness. He amused himself, therefore, by poising himself on the edge of the “playpen,” fluttering his wings madly and leaping to the ground—which caused him to sort of … drift … to the floor. Once there, he tucked his wings behind his back, leaned forward, and, looking for all the world like a tiny Charlie Chaplin, took off on his own walking tours of the store.

  I was enchanted.

  I wanted one.

  I alerted the store clerk to the fact that one of his $70 birds was walking to Indiana and the clerk smiled at me with the patience and endurance of a young man who might actually have paid $70 out of a store clerk’s salary for the privilege of stomping Mr. Chaplin into the carpet. He said, “Really?”

  I could see that not only did I wish to own Mr. Chaplin, he needed me.

  I visualized Mr. Chaplin moving into my house, escaping from his open cage onto the floor where he would tuck his wings behind his back, lean forward, and march resolutely toward whatever adventure might await him.

  In my visualization I then heard a scream of terror, a streak of orange (or black, or black and white) as Mr. Chaplin became a very expensive cat treat—raw squab, perhaps, or Cornish cockatiel—for the Intrepid Hunter.

  My macho housemate, Sir Babycakes, has never been outdoors and has single-handedly purged my house of killer flies, poisonous gnats and that bane of all feline existence, invisimites. He has stalked and furiously killed nail holes. Something that I can’t even see lives inside the living room lampshades, appearing to mere mortals as nothing but dust motes, but the mighty Baby-cakes is not fooled. He purges those shades of demons nightly, never shirking, never wincing, and only occasionally howling with rage and frustration when the invisimites burn his tender noseflesh, or toast a whisker in their own defense.

  When my sister closed her quilt store she gave me the stuffed bunny that had hung for years over the cash register. I had often admired it, and she had no further use for it. I brought it home and hung it in the corner of my living room where, if I had one, I might hang a bird cage. It looked like a bunny to me. True, one of my nephews pointed out that it was “silly” because it had wings and bunnies don’t fly, but I dismissed him as being too literal.

  Babycakes spied that winged bunnything, and he said to himself, “bunnymites.” To himself he said, “If I leave that thing alone, then next thing I know she’ll be bringing live birds in here.”

  And he slew that bunnymite.

  Repeatedly.

  I would have to say that bunnymite is as dead as anything made of cotton and quilt batting can get. Once I caught him dragging my again-dead bunnymite between his legs to his condo, like a lion hauling his kill back to his lair.

  “Can you do that to an innocent bird?” Annie asks me.

  The best image I can conjure is a feline afternoon amusement called “Leaping for Cockatiels,” which involves Sir Babycakes vaulting from the couchback to the cage and clinging like a huge, homicidal cover; to be quickly followed by “Bowling for Cockatiels,” in which Nicky and Babycakes take turns rolling the bird cage, torn by sheer cat-weight from the ceiling, along the floor from room to room while Mr. Chaplin exhausts himself just trying to stay upright and away from the edges.

  It’s hard to convince myself this would be more fun than walking behind the pet shop counter and beaking that store clerk on the ankle.

  the southwest michigan jaguars

  I NEVER WANTED to play football. I never wanted to fight in Vietnam. (I mention that because it was one of the other options not open to women when I was planning my life.) I never spent a minute of my life envying men for their football skills or their ability to get shot, and I ruled out both as possibilities for myself for about the same reasons. You could get hurt. The fans were fickle. There was way too much controversy involved for someone as ambivalent as I was to choose that path.

  As far as I know, any woman my age who actually played football did so because she had brothers who were either tolerant beyond their times or trying to kill her. We were allowed to use the gym on evenings six weeks out of the year to play intramural volleyball (if the boys weren’t using it). Period.

  Later Title IX came along and the quality of men’s sports was compromised forever by the odd assumption that girls were entitled to explore as many life options as boys. Apparently now in some schools there actually are women’s varsity football teams.

  I don’t often watch football. It’s a brutal sport. Beyond the obvious bumping and slamming on the field, there is me in the grandstand shouting, “Kill him!” or “If you can’t outplay him, hurt him.” Football does not showcase my best qualities. And the overall camaraderie of the fans has never been quite the same since they made us stop passing the cheerleaders over our heads.

  So earlier this spring my Beloved announced our area was developing a women’s football team, and we were required to go immediately to the nearest field and wait for them to play.

  I said, “Why?”

  This was wrong. I should have said, “Oh, great—let’s go show our support for women younger, stronger and more determined than we are. Perhaps if we’re quick enough, we can carry a wounded one off the field.”

  Last night my Beloved organized a small group of friends and we attended the first ever game played by the Southwest Michigan Jaguars. They played an orange-and-white team from Detroit. They got creamed 34 to 16. The score, however, is beside the point: they got out there, they played their hearts out, and in the second half they pulled their offense together and got two touchdowns AND a two-point conversion. They stood around and had their pictures taken. They came back to the showers and a crowd of devoted fans who had waited for them. They sold out the seating in the bleachers. It was a good game.

  I think if I had ever wanted to play football badly enough to pay $500 just to try out, if I had made the team, if I had practiced my heart out and if I had finally PLAYED FOOTBALL it would have been one of the most glorious nights of my life. It was fun to be a part of that. Yes. Women really can play full-contact the-same-shit-the-boys-play football. We just did it.

  And this is wrong and I know it and I should be slapped on the hand for even mentioning it, but … the number of men who came to watch surprised m
e. Are you surprised by the number of women who attend men’s football games? Actually yes, but then, I don’t like football. Do you just automatically assume that no one would be interested in women playing sports? No—I assume men wouldn’t be interested. So after twenty-five years of identifying yourself as a feminist, you still define your values by what you perceive men to value? No, I’m just surprised that many men came to see women play football on a Saturday night. And apparently so were the players because the newspaper article I read stressed, every other line, how many husbands and boyfriends were bringing them water and offering moral support. I expected to see thirty men on the sidelines wearing their MY WIFE IS NOT A LESBIAN badge; it was the two hundred men in the stands that surprised me.

  We all know, of course, that one of the players got sacked because she “ran like a girl.” (In fact, I don’t believe that criticism came from a man.)

  When the ball carrier for the Jaguars ran for the first touchdown a Detroit player came barreling in from the side and smacked dead-on into a well-set Jaguar guard, bounced off and landed on her butt in the grass and the man behind me went crazy. “Did you SEE that? My God, that was one hell of a block!” All around us amazed male voices decreed, “That was a good play!” Two plays later the man behind me turned to his companion and said, “Yeah—but did you see that block back there? I mean, she just WHOMPED her …” (I’m not really making fun of the boys. It really was a textbook block and I was pretty impressed myself.)

  Several things impressed me, even in spite of my abysmal ignorance of the game. In about the middle of the front line was a woman who appeared, from the stands, to be shorter and smaller than most of the other players. The quarterback would snap the ball, all of the players would begin running, they would all bunch up in the middle and fall on the pile, and then they would start unpiling until there was only the smaller woman left, and each time she would spring up like a Timex watch and get in line to do it all over again. She must be made of Teflon-covered rubber.

  Oh, yes—football is a team sport. Another reason I never wanted to play football was I never did well at team sports. To play team sports well you need years and years of practice of keeping track of not only what you are doing, but what everyone else on the field is doing and how what each of them is doing impacts on what you should do next. Volleyball is the most complex team sport I ever played and when I played you had your own sacred little patch of land and you played it come hell or high water. To play team sports well, you need a sense of camaraderie among your fellow players, a sense of higher purpose and willingness to trust that your fellow teammates will step in and cover you when you fail, back you up when you need it, even a willingness to sacrifice yourself for the good of the whole … all that T-word (trust) stuff. That’s what boys learn and have always learned on the playing field where girls were forbidden to go.

  Girls don’t learn the rules of engagement. Girls don’t learn the difference between personal victory and team victory or personal loss and team loss. Girls learned that if you don’t do it yourself, it doesn’t get done. Girls were never asked to fight the war in Vietnam or any other war. But if they had been, girls would have won. Girls would have felt guilty for not winning it sooner, and girls would have restored all of the roads, rebuilt all of the bombed homes, adopted all of the orphans, established daycare centers, domestic violence shelters and homeless shelters, and girls would have processed endlessly about what we could have done to have prevented the war and what we still can do to prevent it from ever happening again. Because girls believe, in the end, everything that happens is our own personal fault.

  To avoid having personal fault for a Jaguars loss, our gang drove immediately to the Meijers’ store—our team’s sponsor—to buy team Ts and team paraphernalia. Sadly, there were none to be had. I presume we will be sewing our own. My Beloved is thinking of giving the team mascot a gift certificate to a massage therapist to compensate for balancing that costume head all night. We have preparations to make. First, we need to find a schedule because—although we are pretty sure we have four more home games this season—we don’t know when any of them are. To build up our cheering voices, we have all vowed to practice shouting “Go Deeper!” each morning in the shower. So if you hear any odd shouting before the next game, that’s what it is.

  eminent domain

  IF YOU WALKED OUT the back door of my parents’ house, drifted on past the old garage with its charred back wall and the cement foundation for the larger building that burned away, and on past the converted henhouse where my father kept all of his tools (and himself much of the time) you would come to the end of my yard. My yard ended more dramatically than most people’s—it dropped, almost vertically, about twenty-five feet into a big, green pond. The view to the left of the back pond was more picturesque, but no less startling: the little green pond was surrounded by a willow woods and when I was young, it hosted a small school of rogue goldfish that would float up to the surface and speckle the dark water with splotches of white and gold.

  A few years ago my nephew misnavigated and rode his grandfather’s four-wheeler headfirst over the bank into the little green pond. His little brother rode right along behind him. The pond is nowhere near as deep as we presumed it was when I was a kid. My father, the Groundskeeper, had spent a great deal of time eradicating “weeds” (anything not a maple) from the bank, so it must have been a short, fast ride, just about long enough to let nine years of sin flash before the child’s eyes. Then his grandfather burst over the bank, tore down the hill and—every instinct tells me—gave a remarkable demonstration of the famous Peck temper. Both boys survived without a scratch, discounting injuries to the ego. The four-wheeler, remarkably enough, lived as well, but it took my father most of the afternoon to haul it back up the bank and it was some time before my nephew so much as acknowledged the cursed vehicle again.

  Both ponds were part of the huge kidney-shaped hole surrounding our yard we called The Gravel Pit. We spoke of it quite definitively—The Gravel Pit—as if it were the only one, as if no one else in south central Michigan had ever seen or heard of one. It was large and fairly irregularly shaped and both my yard and my best friend’s, around the corner, were chipped out of it. From fence post to fence post of the fields that contained it, it was about a quarter of a mile wide at its widest point, and it was a little longer than it was wide. Ours was unconventional by most gravel pit standards: it hid the Great Plains, a section of Death Valley, the North Woods and an extraordinary number of wicked and untamed Indians (for, I fear, it was a politically incorrect gravel pit). I hunted both buffalo and Jesse James there in my youth.

  On rare occasions huge dump trucks would roar down the drive and haul away parts of our universe, something I believe all of us who hunted and foraged there considered to be both unnecessary and downright rude, but the intrusions were rare. Much of the imaginary landscape was based on the topography—there were real trees and even a small woods (serendipitously to the north) and most of the pit was carpeted with weeds and wild grass.

  When the dump trucks came, we retaliated by laying our rocks in complex and mysterious patterns to frighten the intruders away. (Imagine their surprise. “Sorry, Boss, but we can’t go down there anymore—those kids have been laying our rocks again and—frankly, sir—we’re scared.”)

  We were powerful.

  Gravel pit rocks were particularly powerful.

  The gravel pit was all the more fascinating because we weren’t supposed to go there. It was dangerous. Bad things could happen to us down there—things our mothers might not discover for (my mother’s favorite measure of time) God Only Knows How Long. There was a magical shield that protected us from maternal mind-reading rays while we were down there. That prospect alone was enough to drive me over the edge at the slightest excuse.

  The total count varied, depending on where the occasional cranes did their digging, but most often there were three ponds (the third pond was not visible from our yard), each ov
er sixty feet deep. (We never actually measured them, but there is no point in having a pond less than sixty feet deep, since you will always lose the “my pond is deeper than your pond” debate.) There was the big green pond, the little green pond and the hole. The hole was spring-fed and maintained a toe-tested temperature of 32 degrees year-round. We swam in the hole once by accident. Five or six of us just slipped and fell in. Any of the ponds were dangerous swimming because they were just holes full of water dredged out by the big metal buckets on the cranes and the bottom could be anywhere at any time. The most accessible bank of the hole went from an inch to over six feet deep in less than three feet and the bottom was gravel, so it was significantly easier to fall in than to fall back out again. While we were in, however, we spent a great deal of our splash time challenging each other to touch bottom since the water only two feet below the surface was all but unbearably cold, and when we did scramble out, we came out blue. Normally we were not allowed to swim in the ponds because they were “stagnant,” a word my mother dismissed as meaning “dirty and full of diseases.” We used to peer into the water and look for diseases, but the worst thing I ever saw was a crayfish, which looked like a miniature bleached lobster. When one of my little brothers fell into a pond, we all cheerfully promised him he was going to turn stagnant and die.