Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (16 page)

I lived in terror of being bitten by a cow for years. This amused my grandparents and my aunt to no end, which made me feel
abused and misunderstood, but the most reassurance I ever got was, “No cow bite is gonna hurt you.” Eventually I strayed too
close to a calf just before feeding time and while I was trying to pet him, he ate my hand. He clamped down good and hard
and set up a sucking motion that was impressive, and I was about to set up a shrieking action that would be just as impressive,
if not more so, when I realized IT DIDN’T HURT. Cows only have upper teeth: apparently it doesn’t take more than that to pluck
grass. So when my greatest cow fear came to pass, I did not lose my arm to the elbow, I was just slimed.

Still. Cows Get Out.

Whenever we were at our grandparents’, the UnWee, the Wee One and I lived in terror of the inevitable: someone would appear
out of nowhere and report breathlessly, “The Cows Are Out!” When we were very small, we would be ushered into the house and
ordered to stay there until someone came to get us— and we immediately presumed that might, in fact, be the cows, having killed
all of the adults. … I still have nightmares about the cows Getting Out, breaking into my grandparents’ house, stampeding
up the stairs after me and looking into the trunk where I am hiding. … When we were older, we were ordered OUTSIDE and told
to stand in front of the flower gardens and wave our arms. In a cattle stampede we were expected to risk our lives to protect
the begonias.

We had all seen
Rawhide.

All of this came back to me the day I gazed through Hopalong’s windshield and discovered inmate #43 and I were on the same
side of the fence. He was Out. He was big. He was bovine. He had the same flat, stupid eyes I remember from my childhood.
I drove away in a flash, thinking, “To hell with the begonias …”

Let some convict chase cows.

M
Y
G
RANDMOTHER
M
OLBY
did all of her trading at the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. I often went along to trade with her because it summoned
up notions of wearing hides and feathers and swapping tobacco for firewater (neither of which I had or even remotely needed)
and because we always came out with M&M’s. She knew all of the checkout people by name and they all knew her. One—Alice—had
grown up with my Aunt Janette and had become a career checkout clerk. It was an admirable career, not one anyone took lightly.
When I was in high school, checkout clerks were rumored to make almost as much per hour as employees at GM.

My grandmother was not that far removed from the generation when one really did walk into the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company,
slap down fifteen animal pelts, six dozen eggs and four billion tomatoes and use them as tender for those exotic things one
could not grow or catch on one’s own—tea, for instance. My grandmother could have traded hollyhocks, poppies, roses and gladiolas
for M&M’s, but I never actually saw her do it.

When I went to the A&P with my grandmother, I was always allowed to bask in the glory of my heritage. Old women who seemed
to know my grandmother would walk up to us and say, “Well—this must be Eloise’s daughter,” and I would smile and squirm self-consciously.
That I was that easily recognized by people I did not know but who knew my elders had not yet become problematic.

So we did our trading at the A&P and then we carried the M&M’s home and put them away, and then we cleaned house, and then
we made and ate supper and washed the dishes and carried out the trash and then we sat down to watch Groucho Marx abuse George
Fenneman. My grandmother hated Groucho Marx, and fussed about him for the entire half-hour he was on, every time he was on,
for as long as he was on. Then she went to the kitchen and came back with three bowls, one for me, one for her, and one for
my grandfather, and we had M&M’s. My grandmother and I would use the various colors to make floral arrangements in the bottoms
of our bowls, while my grandfather would just scoop them up by the handful and eat them. We felt morally superior to him.
We were more aesthetic. We would frequently discuss our moral and aesthetic superiority in his presence, but I don’t know
that he even heard us. Certainly our conversations never affected the way he ate M&M’s.

I often stayed over at my grandmother’s house. There was no plan or pattern to it. She would come to our house bearing old
copies of
The Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Family Circle
, and
Reader’s Digest
. Either she or my Aunt Janette brought us
National Geographic
. She brought us flowers all summer that she had grown in her yard. She brought us peas and beans and tomatoes and strawberries.
She brought us dress patterns and fabric and dresses pinned together to be measured and fitted. And then she would decide
to go home and one of my sisters or I would decide to go with her.

My grandmother was a stately woman, about five feet six inches, a stout woman, a large and powerful and safe woman. Unless
she was going to town she always wore an apron and she always smelled faintly of soap. Dirt and disorder in any form lived
in mortal fear of my grandmother. Dust mites in other people’s houses went scurrying off under the furniture to get away from
her. She did not tolerate disorder in her own life and she did not tolerate disorder in the lives of those she loved. She
did not tolerate it particularly well in the neighbor’s dogs.

When I was eleven I was standing in the dining room of her house on M-86 and I was flipping through either
Look
or
Life
magazine while she and my mother talked and I discovered an article about an eleven-year-old girl in India who had just had
a baby. Worried this might be contagious, I read on that this girl had said the father was a twenty-one-year-old soldier currently
off fighting a war. I read this information to my mother and I asked, “How does she know who the father is?” My mother got
one of those I-should-have-been-childless expressions on her face, but my grandmother never hesitated: she looked up at me
and she said, “Just never you mind.”

Her hair always fascinated me. She did not cut it until she was well into her eighties and the strain of keeping it up just
became too wearing. When I was a child I used to sit and watch her comb it each morning when she got up and each evening before
she went to bed. It fell down over her shoulders, down her back, past the stool where she sat and nearly touched the floor.
She was in her early sixties when I was born and the strain of her life had taken its toll, so her hair was quite thin, but
the length, nonetheless, made me envious. During the day she always wore it up in a bun on the back of her head, and while
I knew her, the hair around her face faded from dark gray into silver, but the bun on the back of her head stayed brown.

We went to the A&P on Tuesdays. I don’t know why she selected that particular day as opposed to any other, but I do know that
she lived and shopped as if she lived fifty miles by oxcart from the nearest store. During the time I knew her, the farthest
she ever lived from the A&P was four miles. She just did not go to town often. Going to town was an event. It required preparation.
One had to look one’s best. She always combed her hair. She always touched up her makeup, pancake makeup which she wore to
cover blemishes in her complexion, the only makeup she ever wore. She always wore a clean, freshly pressed dress. It came
out of the closet pressed and she pressed it again.

In fact, she always wore a dress. According to my mother, when she baled hay, which is a hot, dusty, scratchy, thankless job,
she pulled on my grandfather’s coveralls over her dress; but she gardened in a dress; she mucked out stalls in a dress; she
tended her chickens in a dress—she even killed them in a dress. She had one dress pattern from which she made every dress
I ever saw her wear, so the question when we saw her drive in was not what she was wearing, but whether it was navy-and-white-dotted
Swiss, brown-and-white-dotted Swiss, navy small-print cotton gingham, brown small-print cotton gingham, or navy-and-white
gingham plaid, or brown-and-white … And once she had made a dress, she wore it until the spots fell out. My grandmother got
the last possible drop of use out of everything she ever owned.

She wore a “good” dress to go to town. She carried her purse, which opened with a clasp at the top and swung by the straps
from her forearm and which had a snap/latch on the inside to hold her car keys. If she ever bought a new purse it must have
looked just exactly like the old purse because I only remember one.

The clothes she made for us—and she made nearly all of them—reflected her values, if not necessarily her private tastes. She
built dresses for active children who lived in their clothes, dresses with triple stitching between the blouse and the skirt
and reinforced stitching to hold on the sleeves. As soon as I discovered style and popular fashion these dresses became the
bane of my existence. They were homemade. They were indestructible. The first store-bought dress I ever owned I wore during
a rousing game of trucks and, scooting around on my hands and knees on the floor, I ripped the skirt right off the blouse,
an accident unimaginable in one of my grandmother’s dresses. Much to my mortification she bought a new sewing machine that
boasted a raft of decorative stitches and I was compelled to appear before my peers in dresses with rows and rows and rows
of machine-sewn ducks and snowflakes and whirly-gigs. No one else wore dresses like that. I would walk into my class and my
schoolmates would smile and say, “Oh, your grandmother made you a new dress.” Older now, I think perhaps I heard the criticism
in my own head and missed a more subtle, kinder message.

She did use more than one pattern for our dresses, however, and she certainly used more than two colors. Our clothes were
color-coded for us to reflect our personalities and tastes. Nearly everything she made for the UnWee was blue, while the Wee
One was decked in bright yellows and I was ensconced—until I finally objected—in a sea of pink. But she made us beautiful
clothes. I remember a shirtwaist dress of polished cotton she made for me that was a coppery brown with pink piping and a
row of pink set in down the sides of the front placket; and an ivory polished cotton dress with a drop-waist and pastel flowers
in the print … One of my favorite dresses of all time featured the much-hated rows of fancy machine-stitching down the front.
I believe we compromised on the number of rows of ducks. Our dresses were beautiful. Not necessarily the cutting edge of fashion
at the time, but each and every one of them was a work of love.

On the way into town to the A&P we would pass the abandoned buildings around the cement factory where, once upon a time, the
Dagos had lived. They had all come over here—many from Italy—to work and live in the cement plant, and then it closed. So
they all moved downtown and bought ice cream parlors. As I remember that story, there was a point to it, some sort of life
lesson about struggle and hard work, but it’s gone now. My grandfather spent hours smoking his cigar and telling me stories
about the railroad, the job he had before the Depression, the kinds of jobs on the railroad he had during the Depression,
the railroad lines and where they went and who owned them and who bought them and the freight that was shipped and Chicago,
Toledo, Baltimore, Philadelphia … and what I remember of these long, historically rich ramblings is one word—
Nickleplate
. It sounded funny. I was sitting at a train crossing years later watching the cars fly past and there, written on the side
of one, was the word—
Nickleplate
. I was so excited I nearly drove into the side of it.

My grandmother was a wealth of information about the community where I grew up. I had only to point to a house and she would
frown and say, “I don’t know who lives there now,” and then she would tell me everything she knew about the five families
who had lived there before, whose son had been killed in World War II, whose daughter married a Catholic and was never seen
not pregnant again, whose second cousin had married that so-and-so boy and was living in the white house down on the corner
of Behnke Road and Wherever Street … She told me about the little ten-year-old girl named Mary who was playing in the barn,
swinging on the rope between the hay lofts and who fell and died; she told me about taking care of her father when he was
old and infirm and not himself; she told me about driving the horse-and-buggy when she was a kid because her mother didn’t
like to. She told me that before the war she drove a “big old Buick” that was so high off the road she once drove over a full-grown
pig and both the Buick and the pig survived. She told me her mother owned a photography shop when my grandmother was a little
girl in the 1890s. She told me about the cats she had had in her life, Buster and Teddy and Timmy. I don’t remember the stories
she told. Fragments. Pieces here and there. What I remember, in retrospect, is a sense of connectedness and of history. A
complex interweaving of people and lives and changes and luck and hard work and courage that winding in all around each other
made up a family and beyond that, a community.

Always a woman concerned about keeping busy and being useful, she was more than anxious to be on her way when she died at
the age of ninety-four. I find her memories in curious places. In the faces of poppies … The scent of a rose … But her stories
are buried in my heart and every now and then as I go about my normal life a proud old cat who died before I was ever born
will brush against my leg, or a big old Buick will run over an angry and ruffled pig and I will look up and find myself standing
beside a coffee grinder, inhaling the strong, nostalgic smell of fresh-ground coffee—and once again I am five years old and
doing my trading with my grandmother at the A&P.

T
HERE IS A GOLD PAW
hanging out of the fan box. It is July, 110 degrees in the shade, his Mommy is sitting in the direct path of the floor fan
in front of the computer where she is sipping iced tea by the half gallon and thinking wistfully of the lake and Babycakes
is napping inside the fan box. He needs his shelter— the only rooms in the house that are even TOLERABLE with all of this
stifling heat happen also to have those big, noisy boxes in the window that shove wind across his delicate whiskers and ruffle
his coat …