Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (10 page)

I have not yet made my peace with church.

A hundred years

was Sleeping Beauty

sleeping

before Prince Charming

came

and what was the

consolation prize

for waiting

but what the chambermaid

was getting

while Sleeping Beauty

slept.

W
HEN
I
WAS VERY SMALL
I lived in the little bedroom next to my parents’ room. I approved heartily of the location, but I do not have particularly
fond memories of the room itself. For one, it harbored a huge dark green wardrobe I was forbidden to look inside, which therefore
hid lions and tigers and hostile elephants. I was prone to nightmares as a child and it was not uncommon for the bears and
the tigers to start crawling out of the top of the wardrobe and vault across the room onto my bed and try to maul me in my
sleep. I would wake up in hysterics and my mother would come running into the room to find out why I was crying and even when
I pointed out the lions she never once saw one.

Even better, the room was papered with a variety of scenes of hostile dwarves, something along the line of Rumplestiltskin,
and although it was not a large room, there were probably about a hundred mad dwarves surrounding me. My mother was fond of
reading to me and she read any number of stories involving dwarves. Until Snow White came along, I never heard about a friendly
dwarf. She would read to me about dwarves who stole babies, dwarves who hid money under the rug, dwarves who cast peculiar
spells on people, and then she would kiss me, tuck me in, murmur something encouraging about “bedbugs” and turn out the lights.

I suspect it was the years I lived in this room that explain my serious and residual dislike of
The Wizard of Oz
, which features not only witches, lost children, and lions and tiger and bears— but flying hairy dwarves and several thousand
singing chipmunks. I rarely get that far, but I’d rather watch all four versions of
Alien
back-to-back than stick around when those ugly monkeys start coming down out of the sky.

As our family grew it became more and more impractical to keep the babies in bassinets in the dining room, so my room was
seized for the common good and I was given a grown-up room upstairs. I had a full-sized bed and room of my own by the age
of five. I had arrived. From my bed I could lay and study the light in the hall room, which hung over the stairway back to
the rest of my family. At the head of the stairs was a window. Often when the hall light went off, the window at the head
of the stairs would be bright with starlight. About a month after I moved upstairs, I spent a weekend with my grandmother,
where I sat in rapt attention at her television—we didn’t have one—and watched a wonderful story about a man who murdered
his wife, skinned her corpse and fashioned her face into a mask which he wore to appear in the window of an older woman’s
house in order to scare her to death. In fact, he was a ghost story writer and he had previously rented her house. He’d written
his best stories there and he wanted her house back. I came home, went to bed, my parents flipped off the stairway light,
and I lay frozen in darkness waiting for this ghostly apparition to appear in the hall window between me and any possible
escape …

The upstairs of our house was a wonderful place to raise children. The stairway came up to a large room we called “the hall”
and all of the other rooms opened off from the hall: my room, the little storeroom which had no light and the storeroom beyond
that that was full of odd things that smelled funny and
weren’t ours
so we couldn’t go in there. The spare bedroom, which was closed, was forbidden and hung with dark blinds. Shortly after I
left my bedroom downstairs the big, dark green wardrobe that had stored the lions and tigers and bears came upstairs and lived
in the corner of the Forbidden Bedroom. My mother stored all of her not-appropriate-for-children books in the wardrobe, including
one with a picture of huge extraterrestrial eye that peered down over a city of terrified people who looked very much like
our parents.

It was an old house that lived nestled in among a number of big, environmentally friendly trees. A good night in an old, environmentally
friendly house is not a quiet night. Squirrels ran up and down the insides of the walls. Boards creaked. Walls groaned. Periodically
we were treated to the silent, fluttering sweep of a stray bat. During windstorms the trees would blow in the wind and slap
the house upside the head like a truculent child. We named the draft that closed doors when no one was anywhere near them
“Simon,” but he was nothing compared to the unknown man who lived behind my door and raced me to the light string in the middle
of the room each night.

Even deprived of a television, we were able to entertain ourselves in the evening, particularly in the early fall when the
migration began. The UnWee and I were sitting on the floor in the living room when some motion whisked past us and our family
cat, Gus, charged through the room, froze in the middle of the floor, hunkered down, whiskers twitching, tail-tip flicking
right and left, and she c-r-e-p-t, toe-step by toe-step toward the couch … We were perhaps eight and five at the time and
ever-eager to help, so of course we scrambled on hands and knees across the floor to see what was under the couch. Gus was
thoroughly disgusted with us, but the mouse apparently felt outnumbered and made a mad dash for the overstuffed chair. So
the mouse dashed, Gus lunged, I vaulted into the seat of the chair to see over the back, my sister ducked under the chair,
realized she couldn’t see and jumped up for a better look, grazing the bottom of my bare foot with her hair and—I, toe-bitten
by a mouse the size of a German shepherd—released a scream that would have frightened the dead. We had a wonderful time explaining
what happened to our mother, who seemed to be under the strange impression someone had been maimed or dismembered.

Recently, I have been faulted by a small union of lesser siblings (not all mine) for having failed my role as the hard-core
big sister. I have allowed dissension and even outright insubordination from my underlings. It is to these dreamers I devote
my last tale of the House of Peck.

In high school the UnWee was the drum major for the Coldwater High School Band. She wore a white sequined bathing suit, white
gloves, a big white hat, and white marching boots, and she led the band around the field while threatening them with a baton.
They always seemed to go where she sent them. At the end of a particularly grueling day of marching the UnWee clomped onto
the back porch in her drum major boots and discovered not a mouse, but a full-grown, living rat. I have never seen a rat in
our home and as far as I know the UnWee only saw one, but he was big and he was cocky and he gazed at her with beady little
eyes and told her to take a hike. The UnWee did not care for mouse/rat/weasel-like things any more than she enjoys the company
of externally-skeletonized or overly-legged things and she quaked in terror at the sight of this rat. The rat, overestimating
her fear, thought to himself, “Hah—another dizzy blond,” and he rushed her—or dashed for the door, or moved swiftly and, as
it turned out, foolishly … The UnWee kicked his soul directly into hell: killed him dead with one blow.

Someone like myself who in her formative youth was terrorized by wallpaper dwarves, doesn’t just recklessly lord it over women
like the UnWee.

I
DON’T OWN
a cell phone. I have friends who do. They share this information with great pride and enthusiasm, as in (fingers snapping),
“You know, we have a cell phone—so we’ll turn it on and you can call us at the campgrounds/on the highway/somewhere around
the North Pole between 8:10 and 8:15 on the third Tuesday …”

I don’t know anything about cell phones. They have batteries which are, I gather from my friends’ behavior, either extremely
short-lived, or more precious than life itself. I had a doll who wore a white bridal dress and because her dress was white
I could never play with her because she would get “dirty.” That experience satisfied my need to own something that never does
anything. So I have no idea why anyone would want a cell phone. Certainly I don’t need one: I have a portable phone that hangs
up on me on whim so I have battery concerns enough of my own.

So I was phoneless (uncelled?) when I invited friends (2) to come spend an evening with us at my Beloved’s house, and I mentioned
casually that one of them had enjoyed, once, a year or so ago, the company of a friend we have in common. In slightly over
a week this became a ten-person steak picnic in the park with fresh strawberries ladled over homemade cheesecake, designated
grill tenders and a trail of lost dinner guests. I—who would probably not carry a peanut butter sandwich outside to eat in
a lawn chair because it’s too much work—watched this whole process with mild amazement. I had a good vantage point to watch
this because the grill, the eleven lawn chairs, the potato casserole, three coolers and a fishing pole crawled up in the back
of my truck and waited impatiently for transport.

There were women standing on the riverbank sharing fly-fishing techniques. There were flocks of geese eyeing the coolers.
There were big, graceful willows snapping greedily at the lines of the fly-fishing women. There were mallards flying in, landing
on their breasts and making a sweet waterfall sound as they glided to a stop. In the background the peacocks in the little
zoo across the river were crying like lost children in the woods.

The food was plentiful and delicious, the company was happy and relaxed, the heat, which was oppressive, was more bearable
in the presence of friends, and the steaks were grilled to taste and perfection. It was a thoroughly delightful evening until,
seconds from the end, our Friend In Common, Alice, stuck her key in the ignition of her car and thought:

That’s not my key.

And she was absolutely right. It was not her key. It was the key of a friend. She had accepted the task of daycare provider
for a friend’s Ford and she had stuck her friend’s key in her own ignition. The car would not start. The correct key would
not go into the ignition, having been so recently dispossessed, and neither key would start the car. The key said to Alice—
foo to you, you ingrate, I resign
.

The car, barely a year old and not even yet scratched, would not start.

I drive a scratched, dented, fender-bent, four-year-old truck I’ve named “Hoppy,” which has enough keys to start a dealership.
(Hoppy, being a GM, takes two keys just to make him go—he came with four and the warranty will provide a spare each time I
lock myself out for the first 75,000 miles. By now there is a spare door key for Hoppy under every rock and bush between Jackson
and Three Rivers.) None of my keys, however, are “coded.” I have no little plastic box with buttons to push to make the car
start.

Being intelligent, car-savvy lesbians, we determined that the daycare key had fouled up the recognition mechanism in the ignition.
The key had been decoded. Alice had been foiled by her own anti-theft devices.

And because Alice is quirky about her vehicles and guards them with her life—possibly even with her partner’s life, should
it ever come to that—it looked very much as if Alice and her partner were going to have to set up camp among the geese in
the park.

Fortunately, my Beloved could provide virtually everything they might need for the night. They could feed themselves easily
into late Tuesday evening. They had chairs, a grill, a fly rod, several nice flies, a river … All the duck and goose anyone
could care to eat … I was ready to go home.

Someone said, “Hey—I have a cell phone.”

I don’t know who that person was. She was never seen nor heard from again. There in the middle of a parking lot at 10:30 at
night stood ten sweating lesbians, a dead Ford, thirty-seven still-hopeful geese and a cell phone no one knew how to operate.
It was as if the phone fairy had dropped the Rubik’s Cube of communications in our hands and then dusted away all of our memories
of her.

Thea, Eliza and Alice’s partner, Rhonda, all own cell phones, but this particular cell phone was alien to all of them. Eliza
was busy waving magnets at the ignition. Alice—who owned the car—was distracted because Lucylou was thinking about dismantling
something under the hood with a flashlight and an ice pick. I know nothing about cell phones but I can see: Thea knows a great
deal about cell phones, but is legally blind without stadium lights. Lucylou was digging through her tool box for a plumber’s
wrench, which was troublesome because Alice was the only one who knew the help number we were calling and we could not seem
to keep her attention away from Lucylou’s banging long enough to get it dialed. So while Lucylou was humming to herself and
banging blunt metal objects against the car engine, Thea would activate the phone, hand it to me, I would dial 800 and then
shout and scream until Alice looked up at me with a distracted, almost panicked look in her eye and murmured something about
closing the hood, the cell phone would die, and we would start the whole process all over again.

It began to occur to us that we had become a living joke— how many lesbians does it take to operate a cell phone?

The answer appears to be ten. One to turn it on, one to dial the number, one to recite the number to be dialed, one to bang
on the engine with a plumber’s wrench, one to fly fish, two to chase the geese away, one to hold the flashlight, one to unload
the trunk, and one to jimmy the key in the lock, repeating, “This really should work. …”

We did rescue Alice. Kind of. Sort of. We told the panic line, with great assurance, that the key had not broken off in the
lock, it was an ignition problem, so rather than a locksmith they sent a wrecker guy, who promptly noted the key had broken
off in the lock. He did not have the tools to fix it.