Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs Page 6

  The gravel pit grew some of the healthiest, lushest, greenest poison ivy I have ever seen. It grew like a pampered English ground cover. My best friend and I (and several annoying younger siblings) discovered a particularly satisfactory patch of wild grass once and conducted an adventure I can no longer recreate, but it involved a great deal of rolling around in all of this lovely grass. Grasshoppers may have been involved. I went home and had dinner; she went home and had herself admitted to the hospital for a week with poison oak over 90 percent of her body. I never grew a bump. She got to miss a week of school: I got quizzed about how I managed to lure all of my innocent younger siblings back into the deepest corner of the forbidden Pit of Iniquity where I could deliberately expose them to life-threatening weeds.

  I was not particularly fond of my innocent younger siblings—they followed me everywhere, even in the face of the vilest threats, and they frequently resorted to the innocent sports of blackmail, extortion and coercion to include themselves in matters that were none of their business—but the sad truth is, I still don’t know what poison oak looks like. And neither do my innocent siblings because—of course—not a single bump arose on their thick little hides either. My best friend and her brother scratched and dug and molted for weeks. (There were three of us girls, all perfectly healthy; two of them, in misery. Their mother never looked at us girls quite the same way after that.) Fortunately, my baby brother was too young to have followed us on this adventure. He has to take cortisone shots just to stand in our back yard without scratching and whenever they sense him coming, you can still find the fine young tendrils of poison ivy snaking up on the lawn to find him, not unlike The Day of the Triffids.

  Each spring the snow would melt and much of the floor of the pit would be flooded. As early summer approached, the water would begin to evaporate and there would be massive pools of black commas left to writhe and die in the sun. I could not imagine that mother nature would be that wasteful and for years I would drag my best friend down there and, armed with our trusty mayonnaise jars, we would spend literally hours scooping up stranded tadpoles and carrying them to the safety of deeper water. It is possible that a million frogs owe their lives to us.

  I remember all of this as if it were what was important to me at the time. It wasn’t. When I was a kid, the gravel pit was my domain. It was where I went to be alone, the world I could control. There were times when I barely tolerated the company of my best friend, much less that of lesser beings. I spent hours walking back and forth, retracing the same steps along the same path over and over again while I wrote spectacular adventures in my head about truly exciting people who lived extraordinary lives. One of the small ironies of life, perhaps, is that those stories, which utterly consumed me at the time, were stories invented by a child to entertain a child and would probably not make a great deal of sense to me now if I could remember them. The minor things—the time that I spent with my friends and my family—those are the things that I now remember.

  what she lost

  When her breasts

  betrayed her

  with cancer

  she had them

  removed

  lopped off

  returning,

  at the age

  of fifty-five

  to those tit-free

  scorching

  days

  when she ripped off

  her shirt

  and ran

  bare-chested

  through the heat

  as careless as any boy

  “So how does it feel

  to be flat-chested?”

  we ask

  and she grins:

  and for a minute

  we all remember.

  wounded in action

  I HAVE A SOFTBALL INJURY. I expect it will be quite impressive in a day or so—it is barely three hours old now and it has made its presence known. In the center is a white oval, surrounded by an angry red ring something like a bull’s-eye (can you catch Lyme disease by playing softball?) which is, in turn, surrounded by a lavender bruise. But because even I have a little pride, allow me to explain WHY this injury occurred before we get into exactly HOW.

  I don’t play softball. In fact until this summer I could honestly say the last time I watched a softball game I was—give or take— ten. However, my cubiclemate plays and this spring she had to switch teams and I went along—once—to offer a little moral support. Until then I had assumed a softball game would last three to seven hours and would require an audience of several thousand people. Having gone once, I was pleased to discover this gesture of moral support was a sacrifice of barely an hour of my time and was actually kind of fun. I went again. I got to know a few of her teammates by name. I’ve gotten quite comfortable, going to watch Cathy’s games. I root. I cheer. There are six or seven of us hard-core Robin’s Roost fans and we have our own secret handshake by now.

  I know when to shout, “Good eye.”

  These things are important.

  So I was innocently seated in my fan seat, waiting for my team to arrive, when Cathy snuck up behind me and accused me of rooting for the men who just happened to be on the field at the time. I quickly explained that I was early. She and I then observed that men seem to continue to play softball much longer than women do. And then we both admired the irony that Cathy, who is thirty-eight, is the oldest player on her team.

  Her team had not yet arrived.

  As game time approached, they began counting themselves. I smiled and rooted, since I have never had any particular reason to count how many players there are on a softball team. I was smiling and rooting for no one in particular when Melissa, the team captain, turned to me and said, “Do you want to play?”

  In the movies this moment is always the climax of the plot— that Golden Moment when the Kid Who Always Wanted to Play has her chance to play with the big girls. In the movies she has her cleats on her feet, her glove in her hand, a spare ball in her hip pocket, and she jumps up and down and cries, “Oh, man, Coach—just give me a CHANCE!!!!” I said, “Yeah, right,” and rooted for someone in the distance.

  They were all still looking at me. There were not enough of them. If I refused to play they would have to forfeit the game. I looked left. I looked right. I offered to try to bribe a player from the other team to defect. I looked down at my own self to determine if something movie-like and magical had happened when I wasn’t looking.

  I am forty-six years old. I am five feet seven inches tall, I weigh three hundred pounds (plus change). I do not run. I do not catch. I do not throw. I gave up playing with balls when I was ten. I have never actually stood on a softball field before. I said, “Get real.”

  They said, “If you don’t play, we can’t play either.”

  I said, “I can’t catch, I can’t throw, I can’t hit, and I can’t run. Other than that, I’m damned good.”

  They said, “You can play right field.”

  I believed, in the confusion of the discussion, that I was agreeing to play until my replacement arrived, which—I believed— meant I would walk out onto the field, my replacement would drive up, I would be shooed off the field and thanked profusely for my space-taking abilities.

  So I was given a glove, someone suggested I try putting it on my LEFT hand, someone threw a ball at me twice (which I assume someone fielded) and I was herded out to right field. It seemed safe enough. I waited for my replacement to arrive.

  My replacement arrived.

  They put her in center field.

  They continued to play.

  I was still on the field.

  My cubiclemate—who plays catcher—began calling my name and insinuating something about left-handed batters, everyone on the team became immensely interested in my personal space-taking skills, and the batter, who was standing backwards on the plate, connected with the ball and arched the specious little orb

  over the first basewoman’s head

  and right at me.

  The fir
st basewoman called, “Cheryl, you got it?”

  And I answered, “Hell, Noooooo …” And I raised my big, clumsy mitt in the air, and I ran toward that vicious, nasty little ball as it snubbed my mitt altogether and smote me in the middle of my outstretched arm—nearly breaking it, I might add— and then bounced … off into the boondocks, somewhere …

  My one claim to fame as an outfielder, and I have a big purple stain on my arm that says, “Next time: BIG barn, b-r-o-a-d side. …”

  I thought I was safe the other half of the inning. I thought, they know I can’t hit, so they’ll run a sub for me. Obviously I didn’t think this through: if they’d HAD a sub for me, they would have put her in right field. So I found myself at home plate with a bat in my hand and a woman not far enough away throwing balls at me. I was thinking one thought as I held my bat. I was thinking, If you hit this, you have to run.

  Run.

  I haven’t run since 1962.

  I thought a comforting thought: I thought, What are the chances … ?

  I swung my bat.

  The stand went wild. My team went wild. Everyone in south central Michigan was yelling, “Cheryl, R-U-N …”

  So I gathered every fiber of my being—and there are many, many fibers in my being—and I pointed them all toward first base, and I leaned in that direction, hoping to add speed at a later date, and—although in my heart and soul, I was running— I … drifted … with the grace and delicacy of perhaps a hippopotamus … toward first base.

  For reasons unclear to me, I was safe.

  They had several years to throw that ball across that plate, but apparently they threw it somewhere else.

  I was given instructions: if the ball went into the air I could wait, but if the batter hit it at the ground I had to run immediately. The batter hit it at the ground and once again I gathered, motivated and lumbered on down the road. I reached severe oxygen deficit at second base. I was breathing like a freight train. The field, which had looked small from the stands, had grown several miles in its overall proportions. It was 94 degrees and humid. It occurred to me that I could get to third faster in an ambulance than on foot.

  The next batter hit the ball. Once again I ran. The stands were going wild. I sensed my entire team running each step with me, as if willing me on. I was waiting to be tagged or crippled or tripped … but I arrived on third (AGAIN) safe.

  I knew this time I was the one they would kill. I knew they’d be lucky to kill me before I ran completely out of air and just expired six feet short of the plate. The batter swung, the batter hit, I lumbered slowly and loudly over home plate … to discover the opposing team had tagged their third out on someone else on another base and my run didn’t count.

  Furthermore, I had to go back to right field and wait for more ball attacks.

  I did make it up to bat again, and I actually hit the ball— sadly, right at the pitcher, who scooped it up and sent it to wait for me at first. As I was shambling back to my team, someone on the opposing team remarked, “Well, you made it across home plate last time. …” I wasn’t sure how to take that, so I smiled and shambled on.

  In retrospect, I’ve decided to take it as a compliment. My team, inspired by my spirit and mastery of the game, may have set a new league record with our score of 25–2 before the mercy rule kicked into effect and they let us go home and—while it had nothing to do with anything I did—I was one of the few runners on my team to come anywhere near home plate.

  But I think I’ll hang up my glove. Or whoever’s glove it was. There has never been a single moment in my life when I found myself thinking, “Gee, I wish I were playing softball right now,” and I expect even fewer in the future.

  And—just for the record—that ball isn’t soft.

  the designated fetcher

  WHEN I WAS VERY SMALL, my dad was the coolest person on earth. He may still be—when I was a child, he lived right there in my house and all I had to do to be near greatness was go outside and listen for the sound of work being done.

  My father was always working. About ten years ago he retired, which has given him more time to concentrate on the home repairs, yard work and carpentry of his extended family. He carries a small notebook where he stores the exact dimensions of my Uncle Don’s cottage bathroom, how many board-feet of lumber he needs to finish his friend Toby’s back steps and the exact style of ceiling tiles we need to redo my kitchen. This work ethic courses through my family and it coursed right past me.

  When I first became an adult, I used to invite my dad over to my house. We would sit around, struggling to make small talk. Sooner or later I would ask him how to fix something and seconds later we would be gathered around that thing, eyeing it, measuring it, evaluating it, taking notes about dimensions and required tools and materials in his notebook. Over the years I have eliminated a few steps. Now I call him up and say, “Dad, my toilet doesn’t flush right—what time would you like dinner?”

  I have no real gift for work, myself. I am tool-impaired. I have yet to hit the same nail twice with a hammer. I can drill holes in the wall with a screwdriver and I once peeled the skin off my knuckles with an electric drill. I like tools—particularly power tools—but I rarely have the opportunity to actually own any. I mentioned once to my dad that I was enchanted by a small chain-saw and the next day I heard a familiar roar and found him in my front yard, buzzing every tree I owned into kindling. I am not allowed to own a circular saw, either; something about cutting off my own leg. “Those things will kill you,” my father decrees and locks his shed in case I might wander in in my sleep.

  I am better than I used to be.

  As a child I was my dad’s designated fetcher. I would be innocently basking in the glow of his greatness when he would say, “Run out to the barn and get that 3/8ths wrench on the middle bench next to the drill press.” It broke my heart. I wanted to be with him and I spent most of the time I was with him being sent away. These missions I was sent away on rarely enhanced my standing in my father’s eyes.

  Shamefully I must admit how easily the worm can turn: I just woke up one day in the middle of performing some task for which I did not have the right tool—although I knew exactly where the right tool was—and I looked up and there, lingering aimlessly right near me, was a small, mobile being, and it just seemed so natural to me to say, “Hey kid—run down in the basement on the bench by the dryer and get my vise grips and the blowtorch. …”

  I was a lazy child, but my greatest objection to being the designated fetcher was that I could never find what I had been sent to fetch. I could find the shed. I could find the middle bench. The middle bench—like the right bench and the left bench— was home for many of my father’s tools. There were grinders and polishers and twisters and benders. There were screwdrivers with flat noses and screwdrivers with star-shaped noses and nutdrivers that only looked like screwdrivers. There were hammers and mallets and sledges. There was the thing he used to beat his tires with and the thing he used to make the tires get off the wheels with and the thing he used to tighten the spokes on my bike. There were jars of bolts and washers and screws and nails and nuts and brads and staples, and there were drawers of hinges and fasteners and drawer pulls and latches and locks. There were machines with blades and machines with drill bits in them and machines with sandpaper and one of these machines—and only one—was called a “drill press.”

  I had never pressed a drill.

  I had no idea why anyone would need that done, much less what the machine that did it would look like.

  The problem, of course, was that if I couldn’t find the drill press, I couldn’t find the 3/8ths wrench next to it.

  I would eventually admit defeat, but I rarely went immediately back to my dad for further instructions because it always seemed to make him mad. So I would linger in his shed, studying his girlie posters, or perusing his tool chests, just taking notes in case I might later be sent to find something in one of them (he had four). Eventually I would wander back to my d
ad and I would say, “(sigh) I can’t find it.”

  “Did you look on the bench?”

  “Unhunh.”

  “Did you look next to the drill press?”

  Could be. Maybe. How would I know? “Unhunh.”

  “And it wasn’t there?”

  And maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I couldn’t find it because it wasn’t there to find. I could wriggle right off the hook, here. “Nope.”

  He would think. He would frown. “Are you sure?”

  I would be, by then, very very sure the wrench was nowhere near that drill press. He had lost his wrench and was sending me on a wild goose chase, and he could not possibly blame me for that. “I’m sure,” I would say.

  He would use bad words. He would stand up and stalk out to the shed as I tagged along like a kite tail, and he would walk into the shed, up to the middle bench, next to the machine with the drill bit hanging out of it, and he would pick up his 3/8ths wrench and show it to me. He would say, “It’s right here.”

  “It wasn’t there when I looked for it.”

  “So why would it be there now?”

  I would have no idea how that could happen, but personally I always blamed it on the red squirrels. My father hated red squirrels, anyway.

  “So what were you doing out here all that time?”

  I was not a stupid child. I knew, even at a tender age, that the answer to that question is not I thought you would yell at me so I hung out for a while. I’ve never been entirely sure why that is a wrong answer, but it is.

  So I would answer, “I was looking.”

  “But it was right there,” he would say, and walk off, shaking his head.

  Over time he came not to believe me the first time I came back empty-handed. He would repeat his instructions and send me back. My dad has a very soft voice and very little patience with repeating himself, so I learned, as a child, to memorize vocal patterns and just repeat them, over and over again in my head, until I could translate them into standard English. I don’t hear any better than anyone else, but I am of invaluable aid to people watching home movies with mushy soundtracks.