Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read online

  My parents rarely drank, and when they did they became giggly and oddly childlike and then they went to bed. Often—with a great deal of shushing—they hid this behavior from us, although I could not always tell what exactly they had been doing because they fell into the same elaborate shushing behavior whenever they misbehaved. They were devout midnight fans of a woman comedian named Rusty Warren and often when we were supposed to be asleep they would gather with their friends in the kitchen or other places where they believed we could not hear them and listen to this woman tell jokes. It never bothered me in the least that they did this and it had nothing to do with my being dissatisfied with my childhood—I only tell you that because my mother would be mortified that I told you she liked blue humor.

  My mother loved blue humor.

  I told our mother the second dirty joke I ever heard in my life. We were not supposed to know dirty jokes, and we were particularly not supposed to understand them. We were to avoid bad words (which prevented me from telling the first dirty joke I ever heard). But our mother loved jokes and she loved to tell jokes, and what point was there in living with five little parrots if they did not fly home once in a while with usable humor? She laughed, and then she told me whatever people said before they started saying, “It’s not appropriate,” and she told me I shouldn’t tell it a lot. I would lie awake at night huddled around the edge of my spy register and listen to her tell my joke to all of her friends.

  I could not huddle over my spy register, where I could see better and hear perhaps more clearly, because sooner or later someone would murmur something about the comparative size of the ears on my mother’s pitcher collection (as if her pitchers even had ears, big or little) and someone would yell at me to get back to bed. In bed I could hear the adults laughing and carrying on, but I could only rarely make out what they actually said—and I could see nothing.

  I think I can safely say that whenever anything interesting, fun, or good was about to happen in our house, we were all promptly sent to bed.

  When trying to force us to sleep through childhood didn’t work, our mother reached for the teakettle. Someone had apparently told her that boiling her children would prevent colds. In particular I was prone to chest congestion and respiratory infections, and she steamed the wallpaper loose from the wall of my room. When more than one of us were sick she would build elaborate sheet tents around us and we would drift in and out of consciousness to the steady bubble of the teakettle on its hotplate beside our beds. Moss grew on our sheets. The Wee One grew tiny slits in her neck, just behind her jaws, and as a teenager she could swim two or three miles underwater before needing to come up for air. What she could not steam our mother baked with a drawing salve about the consistency of peanut butter, which she spread, hot, over our naked chests like cake frosting and then covered in gauze. (I’ve never been sure whether she was trying to keep our sheets clean, or maximize the degree of burn.) And what she could not steam or bake, she boiled in hot Epsom salt water until it healed or fell off.

  While I am anything but stoic by nature, I learned not to flinch, limp, or otherwise show signs of physical injury or distress around my mother. She was apparently impervious to pain herself. I don’t know how many times I watched her pour boiling water into a pan, ram her hand into it, and say, “See—it’s NOT that hot,” and grab whatever gaping open wound I might have accidentally let her see and ram that into the boiling water. A half a mile up the road the neighbors would shake their heads at my screams and say, “Oh, it must be that Eloise Peck boiling one of her kids again—you know, she still has five . . .”

  Nor was she particularly understanding about my pain tolerance. I can remember sobbing hysterically at the very thought of blistering the hide off yet another innocent limb while my mother would roll her eyes up to the heavens and say, “Cheryl, I swear to God . . .”

  Once out in the gravel pit behind our house, probably half a city block from civilization, I rammed a rusty nail into my bare foot. I felt it go in. I looked down at my foot, and there was a rusty two-inch nail hanging out of it. I hobbled on one foot and two toes over the natural bridge, around the bottom of High Horse Hill, past the snake pit, down the walkway between the North Pond and the Big Pond, all the way across the back yard and halfway up the back steps. A small herd of sympathetic angels ran along ahead of and behind me shouting for help and offering encouragement while I sniffled and upsucked my way home to my loving mother. “Mom,” the herd of angels called, “Cheryl has a nail in her foot!”

  I probably have not mentioned that there was some stupid rule about (a) going into the gravel pit (do not, I believe it may have been), or (b) going into the gravel pit barefoot (especially do not, it may have been). Like every child in the world, I assumed that if there were varying degrees of do-nots, then none of them could have been all that important.

  My mother appeared out of the house where she had been either baking cookies for her loving children or perhaps reading one of the many novels she forbade us to touch. She picked up my foot.

  I suffered in anticipation.

  She aimed her talons for my nail.

  I shrieked in sheer self-defense.

  She slapped my leg and said, “Hold still.”

  She SLAPPED me, her own wounded child. I puffed up in righteous indignation, ready to point out that, had it not been for my noble courage and fortitude, hobbling as I had those many agonizing feet through the feral wilderness behind our yard, she herself might have been forced to venture out of the house to find me . . .

  She handed me the nail. She laid it, like a small trophy, in my hand. “Why didn’t you just pull it out?” she checked.

  “What?”

  “It barely broke the skin, Sherry—it’s a wonder you didn’t really hurt yourself, limping on that all the way back here . . .” She stood up and brushed off her hands as if they had recently been exposed to something unbelievably dirty, although all she had touched were my feet. “You’d better soak that,” she resolved. “God knows what you’ve been walking through with that . . .”

  I was probably my mother’s most obedient child—certainly the only one who accepted, for its sheer substantive logic, the argument because I said so—so I never fully understood why injuries were so problematic for me. I had to hide the fact that I could barely use my left hand for two weeks not because I was afraid my mother would make me soak it but because I had accidentally impaled myself on a stolen pocketknife. I knew it was stolen because it had belonged to my grandfather shortly before it became mine and he had not been present when the transfer of ownership occurred. I felt badly about that, but he had a small collection of them and I knew in my heart that my life would have more value and be far more entertaining if I owned just one pocketknife. I had been walking through the gravel pit, admiring my new pocketknife, when a stone leaped up and tripped me and I fell down and jabbed my own knife into my free hand.

  The fact that I wounded myself while under the spell of bad behavior would have so delighted her that none of us could have lived with her for months. Even worse, she would remember sooner or later that she had banned the ownership of small weapons in order to demilitarize our intersibling relationships and she would ask, “Where did you get it?”

  I was not a stupid child.

  I was not about to admit I stole something from her father.

  My little sister had stolen a candy bar from a local store once and our mother had forced her to walk into the store, admit to her thievery, give it back, and apologize. (She is still bitter.) I would have died of gangrene before I copped to any of that.

  Fortunately my grandfather did not keep his pocketknives particularly sharp and it was a shallow cut that healed quickly. It did leave a scar, which my mother had also never seen.

  Probably the most contentious issue between my mother and me was that of shoes. Shoes were the bane of my existence. In my prime I could walk across hot asphalt in August while the tar was bubbling and never feel a thing. I could wa
lk barefoot on gravel, small stones, crushed glass, beds of rusty nails—I didn’t care. Shoes, on the other hand, kept getting lost, or wet, or soaked in horse manure, all of which deeply offended my mother. I remember being sent out into the dark and nether regions of the back yard where the shadowmonsters lurked because I had lost my shoes and I would not be allowed home again until I found them. My mother lectured me about the cost of shoes, the value of shoes, the care and keeping of shoes, and provided me with a never-ending list of the horrible and maiming things that could happen to the feet of small children who failed to wear their shoes . . . As far as I was concerned the only good shoe was the shoe tucked safely under my bed where it couldn’t get me into any trouble and I could find it quickly if I had to.

  And so it came to pass, shortly after I impaled my left hand on a stolen pocketknife, that a pair of new shoes wore a blister on the top of my right little toe. This was somehow my fault—I had committed yet another shoe crime—and I was deeply reluctant to take this injury to my mother because it hurt. The idea of soaking it in hot salt upset my stomach. It was a fine blister, as far as blisters go, covering the entire top of my little toe and weeping some crusty yellow stuff with an unpleasant smell, but what bothered me the most was the pain. It pulsed. Throbbed. It felt as if an elephant were rocking back and forth on my toe, and I retired to the privacy of my bedroom where I could inspect this phenomenon in peace. The blister was angry and red and swollen, and there was a thin red line that appeared to be traveling up my foot.

  I loved my mother. I never believed she intended to harm me, but I did harbor a slight trust issue. I spent much of my early life feeling like the cat in the elephant house and I spent a lot of my time places where she wasn’t likely to be. And I was afraid of her temper, which for some odd reason seemed to go off whenever one of us got hurt, as if we just went out willy-nilly and wounded ourselves to make her life difficult. So I didn’t tell her I had blood poisoning in my little toe because she would have been mad at me. I decided to cut her right out of the loop of my medical care and I pulled out my dull and not terribly sanitary stolen pocketknife and cut off the top of my toe. Whittled that blister right off. It didn’t actually hurt any worse than the throbbing it had been doing anyway. And I never told her.

  Most farm kids my age were steamed as children. My Beloved’s family was rich—they owned a vaporizer. (The Goddess only knows how many siblings she should have had—the rest are gone without a trace.) When I finish telling my harrowing stories of being boiled alive in the interests of my health, most of my contemporaries join right in with stories of their own about mothers who numbed their hands washing dishes and doing laundry all day, versus children who still had feelings in their extremities. And when they have finished their own stories, they smile and look expectantly at me and they ask, “Why were you so miserable?”

  I don’t know why I was a miserable child. Perhaps for the same reason weeds thrive in the cracks in the sidewalk and wild orchids bloom in the damp crotches of trees—because it was my nature.

  Whatever my misery was, it lifted, gradually, like morning fog dissipating in the sunlight. Perhaps I learned how to get along with other people and myself. Perhaps misery is ultimately self-limiting. Perhaps my brain did its own internal chemical adjustment.

  My mother died when she was forty-nine. Since she left us I have never soaked anything attached to my body (or anyone else’s body but my friend Bob’s) in hot Epsom salt water. (Bob has a thing for bath salts.) I do not apply drawing salves to my chest, and I have difficulty enough breathing in greenhouses, much less under sheet tents of steaming kettle water. I have discovered that a well-honed fingernail is good for just about anything—spare screwdriver, thorn-remover, guilt-assigner . . . I never had any children so none of them will grow up to write about me. From time to time my nephew has talked to me about writing, but I always assure him it’s more bother than it’s worth. Nip that little tell-all in the bud.

  I still don’t like shoes.

  self-confidence

  I am fascinated by the arrogant,

  not that it’s a trait I admire—

  I just try to imagine life without

  self-doubt tugging at my skirt

  like a dirty barefoot baby sister.

  Dress it up all you want, she seems

  to whisper, You know it’s just no good.

  I wonder sometimes what they feel,

  the arrogant, while my stomach

  churns and my faith fades and every

  good thought I’ve ever memorized

  vanishes in the blinding light.

  How do they do that, believe in them-

  selves? What stories did they read

  as children, what astonishing success

  did they achieve at a formative age?

  Whatever could I have done so badly

  that I have dragged the memory of it

  clinging to my ankle through five decades

  kicking at it every inch, every year,

  and still managing to feed it better

  than I feed myself?

  shopping

  i have never really been a trendsetter in the competitive world of fashion. I have a dress T-shirt and a casual T-shirt. I went all of the way through college in a World War II army field jacket (which, given all of the pockets, was cheaper and more efficient than a backpack). In the years before athletic shoes really came into their own, I wore hiking boots everywhere I went. All through college I maintained just enough clothes to do the laundry every two weeks and have something left to wear to the SudsyClean. For years my entire wardrobe—including my towels—fit neatly in a WWII canvas parachute bag. I am fifty-four years old, and other than the occasional panicked dash to womenswear just before a wedding, I have managed to stay safely out of the cruel grasp of fashion.

  For about seven years I worked in factories where whatever you wore was wrecked by the end of the first day, so “cheap” and “durable” were the desired fashion criteria. Even when I moved into the professional world of office worker, there were still vague strains left of the egalitarian sixties and seventies, and for a long time I dispensed food stamps and welfare while wearing jeans and basketball shoes. High-tops, because I have weak ankles.

  About ten years into my career as a nonprofessional “professional” person my employer determined I was in fact a professional after all and inflicted upon me a dress code. I can no longer wear jeans or athletic shoes to work. I can wear toeless shoes without stockings only between Memorial Day and Labor Day. I can be sent home without pay and ordered to change my clothes and come back if my pants are too short, if I appear to be wearing culottes or T-shirts with logos on them (although T-shirts without logos are equally illegal, it is a distinction that is repeatedly made), or if my toenails are unseasonably naked. I cannot recite the dress code in any greater detail than that—I believe it is a violation to wear bobby socks with skirts, I believe that has been an issue—I just dress as close to the bottom of the fashion chain as I can without getting busted and I’ve never risked humiliation and banishment over my God-given American right to wear denim in the workplace.

  I wear stretch knit pants I acquire from Target for about twelve dollars a pair. I throw them out when the crotch falls out. I have several different colors but I could not fault someone for saying I wear the same pair of pants to work day after day after day. They fit. They’re comfortable. They do not seem to set off alarms when the fashion police wander by.

  About six years ago I happened upon a plus-size women’s clothing store just as it was wheezing its last breath of business. It was a wall-to-wall sale. Clothes were 30 to 70 percent off. I spent almost $200 in that store, and walked away with a boatload of polyester work blouses that I have come to loathe. They wear like iron. Nothing seems to faze them. I left one wet in the washing machine for three days once—it bounced right back. About the only weapon that seems to do any destruction to them at all is fire, and while I can’t justify
ruining my own wardrobe, I have been known to cuddle right up against smokers, gaze softly into their eyes, and beg them to flick their Bic just one more time for me. The one thing these shirts seemed unable to do was to retain a button, but I was young and naive then and I introduced them to my ersatz mother-in-law. When these shirts are nothing but gossamer webbing fluttering in the breeze, those buttons will all still be attached.

  Last year my Beloved wandered into my study and began collecting up the Great Unread. “Give me this,” she said, and wrested unfinished novels, Lavender Morning articles, and scraps of poetry out of my hands. “I’m going to publish your book,” she said, and—being my Beloved—she did.

  It seemed fairly benign at the time.

  Shortly after she published our book we sat there, looking at the boxes of unsold books we had published, and a publisher from New York called us and offered to take the book off our hands. She would publish it. She would tote it all over the country, she would sing its praises, she would distribute and market and other threatening verbs that sounded like . . . work . . . to me. I sold that book in a heartbeat.

  That seemed even more benign.

  Then my Beloved said to me, “Cheryl,” she said, “you have to help sell this book. You have to go out there. You have to meet people. You have to autograph copies and have dinners with booksellers—you need clothes.”

  I am fifty-four years old and square. My bust, my waist, my hips, and my height are all within spitting distance of each other and as soon as I step into a three-sided mirrored dressing room they commence.

  You’ll never be happy while you look like that.

  Honey, I just don’t want you to grow up to be miserable and alone.