Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read online

  You know that boy you like in school will never look at you twice if you eat that piece of cake . . .

  God, if you get any fatter I don’t know WHERE we’re going to buy you any clothes . . .

  What an inspired formula: affection versus body size. And to think my mother could never figure out why I thought she hated me. All I had to do was look in a mirror . . . I can walk into a gym full of sprightly size twos exercising their brains out and ignore them like they’re not even there: but when I walk into a three-mirrored dressing room in a women’s clothing store my mother swoops down on me like a vampire who needs fresh blood.

  And for all of the effort she devoted to keeping me from living the life of misery she herself had lived, I have done everything within my power to surpass her deepest fear. My mom dieted her entire life to stay just about middlin’ pudgy. Me, I am FAT.

  And I have learned to deal with that just about everywhere but in women’s clothing stores.

  Part of my Beloved’s job is boxing up and shipping worms. She also ships books and educational videos, but it is the worm shipping that sets the tone of her professional wardrobe. She wears shorts nine months out of the year. She wears tank tops. I would kill to be able to wear the wardrobe to work that my Beloved wears, but they won’t let you wear your own clothes in prison anymore and I look horrible in orange. It is part of the universal injustice of life that my Beloved has a very strong fashion sense that she is always inflicting on me. She, who could go to work in a burlap bag if she wanted to, is always picking on my favorite T-shirt because the “neck is stretched” or “what color was it when you bought it?”

  My very favorite part of our relationship is when she turns to me and says, “Can I wear this to (wherever we’re going)?” As if I would have a clue.

  “Sure,” I say bravely, and she smiles and affectionately tucks my bra strap out of sight.

  So I went to a women’s clothing store. I tried on several articles of clothing. I thanked the salesclerk profusely and I carried away a treasure. I took it right home and showed it to my Beloved. She blinked. She said, “What were you thinking of wearing that with?”

  “I’ll take it back,” I vowed.

  “Well, no,” she said, “I just don’t . . .”

  “I hate shopping for clothes,” I said. “The clerks hover over you like they think you’re going to steal all of their eggs out of the dressing rooms.”

  “You need clothes,” my Beloved said.

  A week later I went back to the store. I told the store clerk I had recently published a book and now I needed the clothes to wear to sign autographs and have long, intellectual dinners with other authors.

  She said, “We have a new line just designed by Bob Mackie—you know him, he designs gowns for women like Cher . . .”

  I flashed on some sequined number I had once seen Cher wear. Never mind that she was wearing thirty pounds of ostrich feathers on her head and the dress itself was slit open from her throat to her belly button; I tried to imagine eating dinner and chatting intellectually while various little rolls of belly fat peeked out curiously at my dinner companions . . .

  The trip was doomed before it began.

  “I can’t shop alone,” I wailed to my Beloved, “I don’t buy anything. All I need is one simple little black dress and some stuff to perk it up—last night I went to the dress store, sped right on past, and spent forty dollars in a craft store on rubber stamps for my journal. I’m going broke and I still don’t have anything to wear.”

  “Then,” said my Beloved, “we will go together.”

  And together we went. We loaded up my Beloved’s mother, my Beloved, our friend Rae, and me, and we drove to Battle Creek, where the same store that I had been to in Kalamazoo is purported to have better selections and a bigger sales floor. We were in a buying mood. We were loaded for polyester. The four of us strode purposefully into the store, the two clerks greeted us with pleasant smiles and said, “We’re not locking you in, we’re locking everyone else out.”

  It occurred to me to ask, “When do you close?”

  The clerk said, “Six.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was 5:55.

  “It’s okay,” I resigned. “I’ll just go read to people naked.”

  My Beloved extended her longest finger toward the back of the store in an order even dogs understand. “To the dressing room,” she ordered me.

  She explained to the clerks that I had recently sold a book and I was going on a book tour and I needed clothes. She sent Rae scurrying to the trunk of the car where she just happens to keep stray copies of the book, which she dispensed to the salesclerks. She mentioned we had driven a long way to come expressly to their store. My Beloved not only ships worms for a living, she often sells them. A woman who can sell worms is a force to be reckoned with.

  I went into the dressing room with one outfit. The next thing I knew four different women were knocking on my door, delivering outfits and extolling the virtues of their fabric, their design, and their price.

  Put it on.

  Take it off.

  There’s no sense wearing something that isn’t comfortable.

  Do you have slips/pantyhose/nightgowns/dress slacks/a top for that?

  The two women who worked in the store, Brenda and Susie, opened a charge card for me, tracked down my old unused charge account, recommended designers, reminded me of sales, complimented one decision, vetoed another . . . We probably kept them an hour and a half beyond the time the store should have closed and they were unfailingly polite and good-spirited about it. I walked away with a simple black dress, a simple black tank top and a simple black matching skirt, five blouses and jackets to wear with them, two bras, five pairs of panty hose, two dresses, two slips, a work blouse, some jewelry, and a hat—very close to doubling my existing wardrobe—and a charge card bill for the biggest single purchase of clothing I have ever made in my life.

  But I have clothes.

  I have clothes I haven’t even worn.

  If only I had shoes . . .

  the pagoda fund

  i have been driving around all summer with about five dollars’ worth of pop cans in the back of my pickup. In my old office, this method of recycling was considerably more efficient. I would wash my bottles, bag them up, throw them into the open end of the truck, drive them to work, park them in the employee lot, and by the time I was ready to go home they would be gone. Some enterprising thief would have acquired enough negotiable goods to buy cigarettes or a six-pack, I would have met my moral recycling obligations, and I didn’t have to spend my valuable time sticking tin cans into giant can vacuums. I have come to see the spare cans in the back as a sort of cheap alarm system. If I go to the truck and the back is empty, I will know that thieves are lurking nearby.

  I need this information because as he wobbles into his tenth year of service, my truck, Hoppy (or Hopalong, as I have affectionately named him), has become more and more eccentric. He needs a new muffler. His eyelashes only work periodically, making driving in rain something of a challenge. The driver’s side door has a broken hinge and a sullen, frequently difficult lock. And I would diligently repair all of these minor annoyances if I didn’t also know that Hoppy—bless his heart—is on his third transmission at 147,000 miles and the symptoms of misfortune are becoming all too familiar. It would cost more to restore Hoppy to his former health than Hoppy is worth now. But he continues to run, and I have never been known to give up on a vehicle while there was still tread on the tires or gas in the tank. However, because the door won’t lock (it will, actually—it’s the unlocking part that’s become problematic) Hoppy has become more vulnerable to thieves.

  I expect Hoppy himself is fairly safe. When he was young and strong and got washed once in a while he was a beautiful truck, a silver-and-purple 1994 Chevy S10. He was the very first of his model and when we first went on the road together, total strangers used to honk at us and give us the thumbs-up. And he has held up well. He sags just a bi
t in the rear, but I’m probably the only one who notices. He has tiny imperfections in his coat. Someone lightly keyed the driver’s side door. Someone else threw him into reverse just as a dead tree sprang into his path and dented his back bumper. Due to the bad exhaust system, he roars to a start like a true muscle machine. He might choke a time or two immediately after that, and he does have that whining, something’s-in-my-fan-belt sound that last time meant he needed a new timing chain, but he always runs. However, I have to be honest. If I were a thief, having just robbed a bank or an ATM, for example, and I needed immediate and reliable transportation, I would probably not steal Hoppy. I would probably pedal off on some poor kid’s bike before I would steal Hoppy.

  Still, I leave the pop cans in the back for the same reason people who don’t own alarm systems still slap a “This Property Protected By . . .” sticker in their windows.

  This morning I went racing out into the rain and jumped into Hoppy, noticing as I did that his driver’s side door had not been shut properly and the seat was slightly damp. This was odd because I have lived with a bad hinge for a long time and I know how to close the door so the catch grips. Also, my souvenir button from a trip to D.C. to see the AIDS quilt was lying on the front seat, when normally I keep it in the crock on the floor. I threw it on the seat and roared on down the road.

  I stopped at a drive-through to pick up my breakfast, reached down to the crock on the floor to get change . . . The crock was gone. The entire crock. Gone. It had not slid right, under my feet, it had not slid left, into the passenger side foot space. It was gone.

  I thought, “What the . . . ?”

  Someone had broken into my aging truck, parked in my own driveway, and stolen my pagoda fund. And they walked right past my pop can collection/alarm system to do it.

  I bought the crock at a yard sale. Originally I was going to pot a plant in it, but to get it home I set it on the truck floor in front of my drink slots and a brilliant idea occurred to me—I would keep change in it. The crock was about eight inches across and about four inches deep, made out of crockery, and it was heavy enough to stay where I put it. (This assumption turned out to be untrue. When I step on the brakes too hard, the crock slides down and clips me in the ankle. So far it hasn’t been a problem, but if I ever seriously tried to avoid a collision I would probably wind up in a walking cast. The possibility that the crock system of change containment may not be entirely healthy has occurred to me.)

  I acquire change easily. I don’t know why. I have probably $100 worth of pennies that have settled to the bottoms of my drawers and vehicle carpeting, and I routinely clean out my purse because it’s filling up again with pennies. I could see that this crock had value. I would never be able to accumulate enough change to fill that crock (she said whimsically).

  About the same time I bought the crock, I fell in love with a pagoda someone had in their garden. I had a pagodaless garden, myself. It seemed unfair. Some people call them Japanese lanterns, some people call them Japanese bird feeders, I call them pagodas. They are cement. They are a garden decoration. I wanted one. My Beloved said, “Save up your money and buy one.”

  My Beloved is always introducing foreign concepts into our relationship. I said, “What do you mean, ‘save’?”

  She said, “You put your credit card back in your wallet, and you set aside a small amount of money each week until you have enough money to buy your pagoda in cash.”

  I said, “But I have a credit card.”

  My Beloved smiled at me. “But you don’t like paying the bill,” she said. My Beloved can be mean.

  So every day I went through the drive-through and bought my breakfast and I threw my change into the crock and called it my pagoda fund.

  This morning some enterprising thief stole my pagoda fund, crock and all.

  We already know several things about this thief:

  1.He can’t close a simple truck door.

  2.He has some personal vendetta against the AIDS quilt. He stole my tire pressure gauge, he stole my open-ended wrench, he stole a string of Mardi Gras beads—all of these were also in the crock—but he threw back the AIDS quilt button.

  3.He is desperate and probably dangerous. He’s armed with a crock. The last time the crock slid off the rise and clipped me in the ankle I think it must have weighed a good ten pounds, so this individual—we will assume he is a man, a woman would have brought her own booty bag—is (a) not clever enough to realize the bulk of his booty was aged crockery (i.e., heavy), and (b) dedicated to the notion that he should get something for nothing. For instance, I have never toted the crock into the house and tallied up my pagoda fund because that crock is heavy. It was not heavy enough yet to have enough money to buy my pagoda.

  On the top of the junk in the crock there was a see-through container that held my quarter collection. There was $7.25 in the container. There were other small containers in the crock that were not see-through. I suppose just looking at it from the top, that crock might have looked like a windfall. I’d like to be there when he shakes out my other quarter-shaped containers and finds himself the proud new owner of 3,000 gloriosa daisy seeds. And—as is true of all of my change collections—the bulk of the collection is not quarters, it’s pennies, so I would guess all told this individual relieved me of just about $20.

  I wonder how far he had to tote that crock to find that out.

  I am not feeling as kindly toward this thief as I do toward those who recycled my pop cans for me. They were at least willing to contribute a little work toward their goal. Not to mention I’ve been saving for three years and now I’m $20 farther away from having my pagoda. And it’s not what this thief stole that chafes—it’s that he entered my space. He took my stuff. He defiled that tiny, safe part of the world that is mine—not to mention what he may have done to my Mardi Gras beads. The world is an uglier, dirtier place because of him, and I hope he sets that crock on his own floorboard, guns his engine, and makes a hard right turn.

  nesting in dense foliage

  according to my bird book, the house finch builds her nest in “dense foliage,” which must be why there is now a little twig nest holding five little green eggs in my hanging begonia. There is a nondescript little grayish brown bird in the nest, and she has made it remarkably clear that I should stop using my side porch from now on. She has important work to do. It annoys her to have to fly away just because I keep using the door.

  Last month I was not allowed to get my mail (different porch) for much the same reason.

  Before I bought my new house, I had never seen a house finch.

  In truth, a day or so after I moved in, I discovered a rare, second species of American goldfinch. (According to my Beloved, it was the female.) I spied several cedar waxwings before she identified them as female cardinals, and I was hot on the trail of a pine siskin when she said, “That’s a house finch.”

  I had never heard of a house finch.

  “Perhaps it’s a crossbill,” I said wistfully, consulting my book: but my Beloved began chatting irrelevantly about habitat and native vegetation and other boring stuff, and then she proposed the theory that exotic birds hardly ever come to city feeders. She said, “ergo . . . ‘exotic.’” I suspect she does not have the imagination to be a really good birder.

  I saw a Kirtland’s warbler the other day, but she just rolled her eyes and walked away.

  According to my book, a house finch is “a sparrow dipped in raspberry sauce.” (This describes the male, of course: the female keeps a much lower profile. She looks like a wooden sparrow with all of the paint weathered off.)

  (There are purple finches, as well. They look very much like a house finch, except they have white rumps. Birding, I’m finding, can be a rude sport. Excuse me, please, but could I—ahem—see your . . . )

  According to my book, a dealer in exotic birds in Long Island avoided paying the exotic birds taxes in the 1940s by releasing his supply of house finches. Sixty years later, they are producing multi
ple families on both porches of my house in Michigan. Fairly adaptive for a bird that identifies a tuberous begonia as a native plant species.

  I bought my new house in the winter.

  I bought a bird feeder on a lark. It was a cute little wire cage that held something called a “seed cake.” I hung up my seed cake, and it sat there untouched for three months: and then one day it disappeared. In the meantime, of course, I had read several books on bird luring, and all had warned me that my birds might take their own sweet time finding my feeder, so I was surprised and delighted when my seed cake disappeared over a period of three days. What wondrous birds must be living in my back yard!

  And indeed, as birds go, it was nearly miraculous. It had four feet, and a thick, bushy tail, and when I mentioned I was suspicious it was not a bird at all, it scurried down the pole and sat in the snow and chattered furiously at me. So far, my Just Say No program for seed-addicted squirrels has been a screaming failure. I bought them two bags of corn, thinking that if I fed them something appropriate, they would leave the bird feeders alone. I tossed an ear of corn out in the back yard, and twenty minutes later it was gone. Corn, cob, and all. The squirrel, on the other hand, was hanging upside down on the bird feeder. (I found the corn several months later—he planted it, kernel by kernel, in my garden. I still find his work sprouting in the lawn.)

  I was discouraged, I admit, but I reasoned I had not put out enough feeders. If one feeder is good, perhaps six is half a dozen. I bought a thistle seed feeder. I bought a sunflower seed feeder. I bought a mixed-seed feeder. I bought a ceramic feeder that fell to its death, fortunately, before the ceramic birds took over my yard. I bought a hummingbird feeder. I considered a flamingo feeder, but by now my Beloved had started to get ugly. She used words like “obsession” and “compulsive spending” and “instant gratification.”

  On Saturday mornings I found pleasure getting up, making myself a cup of coffee, sitting on my sunporch with Babycakes, and watching the goldfinches at the closest feeder. The cat and I were becoming one with nature.