Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read online

  It was about this time that nature decided to become two with me. I stepped out onto the front porch to get my mail and a bird flew away. It was clear the bird was displeased. It appeared, at least, that I could feed birds with impunity, but I was to stay off the porch when she was there.

  Except she was always there. Every time I went to the front porch to get my mail, she made a big fuss about flying away. Finally I looked up, and there, in the corner of my porch roof (no visible foliage nearby, dense or otherwise), was a bird’s nest.

  I could only hope Visa would understand.

  Now that I am on my second family (and second porch) I have spent some time wondering what Mr. Finch does for a living. He is almost always around. He sits in the maple tree by the sidewalk and sings long and fairly complex little songs to me if I happen to be in the yard. He—or his brother, or one of his 35,000 local cousins—spends at least part of his day on my sunflower seed feeder. I have never seen him on a nest, but then, I am not allowed to loiter in the area. In my Beloved’s back yard I saw Mr. Finch procure seeds from her mother’s feeder and take it to a teenager on the fence and feed him. Perhaps, like my own father, he deals with his children better when they are somewhat older. A week or so ago my sunflower feeder ran dry, and I took it in the house, intending to fill it and return it the next morning. In the morning I stepped out into the yard and I heard . . . I feel I can justly refer to these sounds as avian complaints . . . Mr. and Mrs. Finch flying from a bush to the hook where the feeder should have been, circling the hook twice, and then flying back to the bush. They were clearly displeased.

  It was becoming clear to me that feeding birds is not as simple as “If You Feed Them, They Will Come.”

  I have entered into a contract, of sorts, the rules for which are quite strict.

  The Rules

  If you provide food once, you shall provide it forever.

  A finch song is a gift of uncommon beauty, and all the repayment you should expect to receive.

  Begonias are good. More, please.

  Stay off the porch.

  The fuzzy thing in the window should go.

  one way to publish a book

  in the beginning there was nothing but a series of pressboard notebooks shoved into a bookshelf over my desk. Every now and then the writing bug would bite me and I would fire off an essay or a poem or a memory, print it out on my fine word-processing computer, and add it to the appropriate notebook. I loved to write and I loved to accumulate things, so there was nothing quite like accumulating a body of work a writer could touch and feel and measure the thickness of with a ruler when the sense of accomplishment was hard to nourish. Most started as articles I wrote for the newsletter Lavender Morning, a tiny publication friends put out for the lesbian community in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

  It so happened that my Beloved wandered one day into my computer room, examined my notebook collection, and said, “What are you going to do with your stories?” My Beloved is a woman driven to be all that she can be.

  I may have given a shrug and murmured, “Oh, I should probably do something . . .”

  “You know, if anything should happen to you, they’ll be lost,” said my Beloved. “You should publish them.”

  I could see it: I would die tragically one day, and the next day my siblings would hire front-loaders to knock down the walls of my writing sanctuary and haul my sacred scribblings to the dump.

  “I don’t know how to publish,” I admitted sadly.

  And she said, “But I do.” As luck would have it, my Beloved works for a small publishing company. The company—Flower Press—prints books on vermicomposting, the fine art of turning kitchen waste into fertilizer, but it is my Beloved who transforms eager young manuscripts into ambitious books. “Do it for your family,” she said.

  I held out my hand and she passed to me the red pen.

  We spent one entire summer editing, spell-checking, compiling stacks of manuscripts edited by friends and relatives. We argued about commas (in particular) and the vagaries of punctuation (in general). We dispatched friends with piles of lumber to the table saw set up in the garage (we were also laying my Beloved’s new kitchen floor that summer).

  The world’s most perfect sentence landed unceremoniously in the scrap bin beside badly cut kickboard. The sentence was beautiful. I could diagram it, I could argue for hours about what it said and the skill and language mastery with which it said it, while my Beloved held stubbornly to the notion that a “perfect sentence” would tell her something more than she knew from the sentence before. “I don’t know what it says,” she snapped, and four diagrams later it seemed clear to me I could maintain the sentence or the relationship, but not both. Still, I called total strangers and read it to them over the telephone, but it can be difficult to assess exactly how clear a sentence is by the way someone hangs up on you.

  Finally we had the kinks ironed out, the errors in tense and number and style all corrected—we found the bonus sentence with the missing verb—and we were ready to publish. My Beloved disappeared for hours at a time until, finally, she emerged triumphantly and said, “Here it is!” And she handed me a CD.

  “I’m published,” I exalted obediently.

  My Beloved looked annoyed. “Now we take it to a printer,” she said, and off we went.

  Weeks passed. I’m sure there were any number of adventures in printing that occurred during this time, but the printers called my Beloved, not me. She spoke to me from time to time in publisher-speak and I always tried to smile and look encouraging.

  The (last possible) Friday evening before we were to leave for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival we gathered excitedly in the front yard, each of us poised on the edge of our lawn chair, while the Girlchild raced to the printer. Rae pulled out her pocketknife in readiness while the Girlchild backed the truck into the yard and delivered unto us 250 copies of Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs by Cheryl Peck.

  I was/we were a published author.

  We sold copies of the book to all of our friends, all of our friends’ friends, and six or seven passing strangers in the street. We hauled the book to the Festival and hawked copies to the feminist bookstores that had booths there. We gave copies of the book to our family in the fine hope that they would treasure and perhaps even preserve them. When we began to run low on inventory, we ordered 250 more copies.

  Any number of very fine writers have struggled for years to have their books published by the conventional publishing houses, only to be turned down, sent away, and rejected. Many of these writers have believed so fervently in what they were doing that they paid the price to publish the books themselves, filled the trunks of their cars with books, and hauled them to every bookstore they could find. They convinced each bookstore owner individually to sell their book for them until their book began to build a reputation by word of mouth. Walt Whitman self-published. John Grisham self-published. To this day if you want a signed copy of a book by John Grisham, you have to go to one of the five stores that carried his book before anyone knew him, because he always makes a point to sign books for those booksellers. John Grisham may have been a legislator and an attorney, but he must also have had a lot of time to kill because bookstores are remarkably far apart and a starving writer could run out of gas between them. I did.

  My Beloved took the book downtown to Lowry’s Books, my favorite bookstore, and asked the town mayor and bookstore owner if he would be willing to sell our book. He agreed he would. I went down several days in a row to visit it purely for the pleasure of seeing something I had written with my name printed on the cover on display in an actual bookstore. Everyone in Lowry’s knows me. I am probably known affectionately as That Nut Who Keeps Fondling That Book.

  As sometimes happens in fairy tales and other unlikely adventures, at the time Tom Lowry agreed to carry my book he was in the process of opening a second bookstore in nearby Sturgis, Michigan. Many independent booksellers were struggling to keep one store viable, and Publishers Weekly
heard about Tom and contacted him to find out what he was doing right. One of the things he told them was that he had a “little book by a local author” that was selling very well for him, and it was called Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs.

  Five editors from New York publishing houses called me, leaving messages on my phone that they had heard about my book and wanted to see a copy for themselves. I took notes, copied down addresses, and brought them over for my Beloved to admire. She used them to ship copies of the book to them, a novel concept that had somehow escaped me in all of the excitement.

  One editor from a reputable publishing house we had even heard of before wrote me a wonderful, warm, funny letter telling me how much she enjoyed my book and while it was not the kind of book her house was publishing, she wished me well in my career as a writer. We were so excited we had a celebratory dinner. My Beloved framed the rejection letter for me and we hung it in a place of honor on my computer room wall. We had been rejected by the best.

  Editor Amy Einhorn from Warner Books called me and left a message saying she wanted to buy the book.

  I decided when I was thirteen that I would be a writer. I do not remember it as a difficult decision: I was walking through the back porch of my parents’ house and it occurred to me that I was thirteen and I had no idea what I was going to be when I grew up, and I thought to myself, “I’ll be a writer.” I bought an old typewriter from an office supply store for ten dollars, I bought a ream of paper (thinking, “I will never need this much paper”), and I started writing the Great American Novel. Hunkering down into my early fifties I had nurtured the dream that someday I would be a “real” writer, I would publish a book of great significance and import, and I would leave my day job for fame and fortune as a literary voice. I had, however, never actually tested this dream, nor, I discovered, was I all that open to the notion that someone else might test it.

  I was terrified. I knew probably fifteen people who love to write, but none have ever published what they have written. All of the old self-doubts and insecurities began singing in my ears like the sirens shrieking at Ulysses . . . Don’t do it . . . don’t risk it . . . don’t take a chance now, for God’s sake . . . What if you fail? What if it’s a trick? What if they realize they’ve made a mistake, that they only thought you could write, what if you tell everyone you know you’re going to publish a book and then the publisher backs out, what if/what if/what if????

  “What’s wrong with you?” demanded my Beloved. “You have to call this editor back! I thought this was what you wanted—I thought this was your dream.”

  I curled up into a little round ball on her couch and started crying. “I can’t,” I wailed. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “You’re a writer,” my Beloved returned. “Make something up.”

  This is a highly guarded secret, so don’t ever tell anyone, but the driving force behind my continued survival has not been my silver tongue but rather my ability to look pitiful and helpless in the presence of those who would serve my best interests. I applied this skill to my Beloved (for the very first time, I’m sure) and she called Amy Einhorn. In fact, the first five or six conversations I had with my new editor my Beloved had for me.

  My Beloved and I had several worst-case scenario practice sessions, but I did eventually get to the point where I could talk to my editor myself, and Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs was released upon the unsuspecting public in January of 2004.

  It’s real.

  I really did write and publish a book with my name on the cover.

  I went on a book tour.

  I’ve been invited to read my book and do signings in public libraries.

  I still have my day job.

  bonding

  when i was eighteen and first looking for gainful employment, I cheerfully informed all of my prospective employers that I was looking for something “dealing with people.” I was a “people person.”

  Where this peculiar notion came from remains a mystery. I had four friends in high school. I spent most of my childhood prowling around alone in the gravel pit behind my house. I am eminently self-entertaining and—as my friends occasionally point out—I don’t have a great deal of patience with the capricious natures of others. I have friends who know, for instance, the name of every waitress in every restaurant where they eat. I don’t bond with my waitresses. This is how much attention I pay to the people who wait on me: when I am sitting with friends in a restaurant and someone who feels they have not been properly serviced inquires, “Is that our waitress?” I freeze like Bambi on I-94. Why would I look at the waitress when I order food? I was looking at the menu.

  Two or three years ago a little restaurant opened up within walking distance of where I work. The food is good. The desserts are to die for. The prices are comfortable. I eat there two or three times a week. I go there so often, as a matter of fact, that I learned the name of the waitress who worked there.

  She immediately quit.

  She was replaced by a woman who remembered that I always drink iced tea and who greeted me at the table with it each time I came in. I felt known. I felt powerful. Eventually I learned her name.

  I never saw her again.

  My friend Annie began joining me for lunch once a week. Normally we worked in the same building, met in the lobby, and picked restaurants at random, but then a long series of events began to unfold that put Annie to work for the summer in another building than mine. It just became easier for us to meet at the neighborhood restaurant.

  Annie bonds with the carryout boy at the grocery store.

  Annie bonds with the Amtrak passengers who fly past our windows each day.

  Annie was impressed that the (again new) waitress brought me iced tea before I even ordered it, and wanted to know all about my friend, the waitress.

  I knew beans about the woman. I did warn Annie, however, that it appeared to be bad luck to learn their names because they immediately quit. Annie listened to this, and then she began calling me “Eeyore.” Annie bonded with the waitress, whose name is Sandy. They had quite a chat. I learned actual biographical data about this woman. I knew it would come to a bad end.

  Sandy is an excellent waitress. She gives you just enough personal attention, she does her job, she keeps the floor hopping. She also told me the other waitperson was slow and inept, but I smiled because I too have worked around, over, and through the slow and inept.

  Sandy also told me about her dental problems, and her niece, and her medical problems, and somewhere along the line, in my craven little Eeyore heart, it occurred to me that I knew too much about my waitress. I was expected to actually remember her condition from one meal to the next.

  I mentioned this to Annie.

  She told me I had a dark soul.

  She scolded me.

  She said, “You’re just being strange.”

  The slow, inept waitress quit, and Sandy arranged to have her friend Luanne come to work there. Luanne was a good waitress, Sandy assured us—they had worked together for ten years in another restaurant.

  The restaurant is not much bigger than a postage stamp. It may have fifteen two-person tables. Waitresses stake out certain tables as “theirs,” and this is how, I presume, they keep from tearing each other’s hair out in the kitchen. Two times in a row I sat down in Luanne’s section. The second time Sandy walked by and said, “I don’t think you like me anymore.”

  I whined to Annie, “I just want to go there to EAT—I don’t want to do psychiatric counseling for my waitress before I get my lunch.”

  Annie called me a blackguard and told me to “just shut up.”

  So for three weeks I would walk into the restaurant and freeze in the doorway and wait until Sandy gave me a sign as to which tables were “hers” that day (because they alternate every other day and you’d need a chart not unlike those football coaches carry around just to know where the hell to sit down . . . )

  Last Wednesday Annie and I went to lunch at the restaurant. We froze obedi
ently in the doorway. Sandy gave us the sign. We sat down at the appropriate table. We ordered, got our soups, and with our sandwiches Sandy said, “Luanne just asked me if you guys don’t like her anymore because you always sit at my table.”

  I looked up silently at Annie.

  Annie said, “Hush.”

  Sandy said, “I just told her it was an accident, because I don’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings.” She looked at me. She seemed to be waiting for something.

  I ate my sandwich. I may have actually torn pieces off with my bare teeth. I thought of any number of quick, witty things I could have said, but none of them would have gotten me better service from Sandy. I’d be lucky if I could get her to pour hot coffee in my lap.

  Annie babbled something sympathetic, and Sandy went about her merry way.

  I looked at Annie.

  Annie said, “Just don’t say anything.”

  I gazed solemnly at Annie.

  She said, “Okay, so you’re right. Now—just don’t say anything . . .”

  Within the realm of human interactions, the fact that my waitress wants a friend and I want a grilled cheese sandwich is not of overwhelming import. The fact that I can be as quirky as the rest of my friends may have come as a horrid shock to me, but none of them seem surprised. And I doubt if Sandy realizes that she has effectively told me that every time I walk into her restaurant I now have to consciously choose whether to hurt her feelings or Luanne’s (or what the simplest, simplest solution to that problem would be).

  I keep thinking this whole situation should have just never come up—all I ever wanted from ANY of these people was my lunch.

  I feel I’m paying too much for it.

  gramma lucille

  it is not reassuring for small children to watch their grandmother stab huge animals in the ass with a pitchfork, it just sets a bad tone. My Grandmother Peck raised dairy cows. Big, sullen, occasionally bellicose animals she prodded here and there with the tines of her pitchfork. Occasionally she had them killed, and then we had to go down to the meat locker and drag them home again in hundreds of little white paper packages tied with string. This is Bessie—you remember Bessie, don’t you? Farm people just deal with that kind of stuff. I was not a farm kid. My mother bought my hamburgers from the local grocery store and she never made me remember their names.