Revenge of the Paste Eaters (25 page)
“Well, it doesn’t now,” my Beloved replied cheerfully.
It’s not true that I have a hard time letting go of the past. From time to time I go to antique shows and I stop and price the rare Victrolas I find there. I just like to know what being the least stubborn of three generations of women cost me.
The crocus are back
braving the cold,
their single efficient stem
jabbing skyward, their single
efficient bloom curled gently
around their sex.
Crocus are tough plants.
Last year
the crocus were blooming
as I stood on the river’s edge
where Dan put his garden,
dead leaves and blooming crocus
under my feet, the river racing
with all of spring’s fury
below me. He lived
in such a wild and beautiful
place.
It was a hard winter
for AIDS patients.
These are not Dan’s crocus
and this is not Dan’s garden
and this spring
Dan will not be coming back.
when i was a
little girl—five, perhaps—one of my mother’s friends from high school stopped by our house on her way home from church. I had no idea my mother had any friends before me so I was fascinated, but I was quickly shunted outside to “play” with her daughter. I don’t remember anything about this child except she was wearing a white dress, and I only remember that because it got me into trouble. Our family did not go to church. I never wore white dresses on Sunday (or any other day of the week, if I could help it). To amuse the daughter of my mother’s friend as I had been directed, I invited her to climb down under the back porch and visit my new puppies. They were wonderful puppies as I recall. Six of them, all different variations of black-and-white mutt. Each one of them had a name because I was a responsible and dedicated puppy-keeper. My intentions were unsullied. My motives were pure. Unfortunately, the black dirt under our back porch was neither, and the resulting damage to that white dress was blamed not on the little girl wearing it but on me.
Who understands the logic that runs through a small child’s mind? By the time I was six something dark and hideously wrong had tangled itself around my soul. (Not necessarily as a direct result of the puppy incident.) I believed I was bad. Not just mildly bad, not just poorly behaved at times: I believed the very core of my being was rotten, that there was nothing that would fix it, nothing that could make it better. This belief in congenital, inextricable baseline evil followed me through my childhood and into my early adulthood. It automatically negated anything good or positive or supportive anyone might say about me and it dwelled obsessively on even the slightest hint of moral defect. I believed that no one loved me. I believed that no one loved me because I was inherently evil and did not deserve to be loved. If they did love me, it was only because they did not know me well enough.
If you really knew me . . .
Most of my childhood was spent wading through dark and endless interior monologues about not being loved, not being understood, not being worthy of love or understanding.
It was my fault the little girl’s dress got dirty. It was my fault I threw a rock and hit my kid sister in the head. It was my fault my parents argued or I got sick and they didn’t know how to pay for a doctor or I asked for something that was frivolous and foolish when there were other people in the family to think about. My parents reminded me almost daily of how irresponsible and selfish I could be, while I recall my childhood as one of just endless, unrelenting responsibility. And I was not worthy. I was not strong enough to hold my world together. A better child might have been, but I was not that better child. I was the bad child. A failure.
I was also a fat child. I was too tall for my age, clumsy and awkward. I remember sitting at the kitchen table trying to eat my lunch while my mother told me how miserable her life as a fat child had been, how miserable mine would be when I moved into junior and senior high. I had the power right now, she told me, to change my life as she had not been able to do: and if I failed, kids would tease me even more than they already had. Boys would never like me. The cool kids would ignore me. She wanted to spare me that humiliation, my mother would affirm as she burst into tears. All she ever wanted was for me to be happy. Somehow not only my size but also my failure to find happiness was added to my long list of personal defects.
Somewhere in the fantasy that passes for greater truth there is the Perfect Child in a white dress who never gets dirty, who never uses bad words, who sits with her knees together and her hands folded neatly in her lap. She is the child I never was and the child I should have aspired to be. She is the child so perfect that even when she does get dirty it is not her fault. I never wanted to be her. Hell, at her age I didn’t even want to be a
girl
, much less a well-behaved, well-mannered, excruciatingly clean girl. Still, she existed, the model against which I was judged and against which I have never measured up.
It is amazing what we find buried in old boxes in the attic. I had forgotten all about her. I had forgotten I ever even cared.
But I did.
Apparently I still do.
This spring a long-lost friend reappeared in my Beloved’s life. “You have to meet her,” my Beloved said cheerfully, eager to share with me her glow of reconciliation, and so the three of us met. Her friend—we can call her Susan—is about five feet four. She has blond hair. Blue eyes. She is a size six. She is bright and entertaining and a person for whom appearances are obviously important. This is my judgment, not hers.
Appearances are important to all of us: we have varying standards of how we need to appear and what we expect of others, no one standard superior or inferior to any other. And the problem that arises between Susan and me is not what Susan expects of me, but of what I
presume
Susan expects of me—I have a stuck throttle when it comes to what I call “little people.” The fact that Susan and my Beloved were childhood friends, the fact that their relationship has been through any number of transformations . . . none of that bothers me. What bothers me is that Susan is small and cute and blond and she is my enemy.
She is the little girl in the white dress who was so perfect that it was my fault her dress got dirty.
I expect that was not the lesson my mother wanted me to take away from that event. I expect she was just trying to teach me to stop and think. My instincts tell me she was embarrassed when her friend’s previously immaculate daughter came crawling out of the black dirt under our back porch. I would imagine at that moment comparisons between the two children present would have been inevitable.
And it is not that that particular event was remarkable to me at the time, or even later, so much as it seems to symbolize what was wrong with me and how I lost my rightful place in the world. It identified for me an enemy. Someone I could blame for what I felt I’d lost, however vague and ill-defined in my own mind that “loss” might be.
It is exactly the same thought process that results in racism or sexism or ageism. I am a sizist. I, who lobby endlessly (at least in my heart) for the equal rights of people of size, am predisposed to distrust “little people.” I expect they will judge me harshly. I expect they will reject me. I approach relationships with them with carefully guarded expectations and one foot perpetually aimed for the door.
You can’t trick me into liking you—
I know what you really think about me.
In truth, Susan has never been anything but kind to me. In truth, if Susan weighed forty more pounds I would probably embrace her as an equal. This is not a characteristic I admire about myself. Nor is it one that follows any true line of logic. I have known women of size who are more critical of other women of size than any small, “perfectly” shaped woman would ever think to be. And I have known small, delicately shaped women who never think about size much, one way or the other.
At some point in my life I looked at my reflection and I said to the person standing there,
Suppose this is all there is? Suppose this “temporary” weight gain of ten or fifteen years never meets that long-anticipated burst of dieting self-discipline? Suppose you are going to spend the rest of your life fat? Do you want to spend your life fat and miserable? Or could you convince yourself you are a self-loving woman of size?
And if all you ever changed in your life was your attitude about it, whose goddamned business is it anyway?
I am not advocating obesity as a lifestyle. I am advocating the serenity prayer as a path to inner peace.
Still, I have the moral obligation to change what I can change. There is a box in my personal attic that I do not need, some old, malformed chunk of personal history that has turned musty with age and has become ugly and counterproductive and hurtful just by being. I need to go up there and do some serious cleaning. Dust off all of the old boxes so I can see what lies inside, throw out what I don’t need, take better care of what I do . . . It’s a lifelong habit, maintaining an attic, and one I tend from time to time to let go.
I need to find that little girl in the white dress and forgive her. As she is a part of all of us, she is a long-
neglected part of me. It was not her fault. She didn’t do anything wrong. I suppose I could continue to punish her for the rest of my life, but if I can find it within myself to seek forgiveness, the first step surely must be to forgive.
my beloved and i
have friends who are in transition. All relationships are in transition, I suppose, but our friends are struggling to consolidate two lives and two different towns and all of the accoutrements of middle age into one joint partnership. There are several stumbling blocks to this process, but the one my Beloved and I can relate to immediately is the cat. There is an unwritten rule in the universe that those of us who truly love our cats will fall in love with a potential life partner with an incurable, unbearable allergy to cat dander. Our friends, one allergic, one catted, have decided to create a cat-free space within their home.
To the best of my knowledge—and I have done some extensive research—there is no way to separate a cat from its dander without irreparably harming the cat. One of the true beauties of the cat is the shape of the cat, and as anyone who has ever accidentally gotten their cat wet immediately realizes, the shape of the cat is the shape of the coat of the cat. Remove or damage the coat of a cat and the pathetic misshapen being left will be so ashamed it will dash into the kitchen and immediately impale itself on a carving knife. Cats know what makes them beautiful and mysterious and correctly shaped. This is why any self-respecting cat is almost always grooming himself.
I grew up in the country surrounded by farms. Farms are where the combination of grain storage and grain-consuming rodents brought about the relationship between cats and humans. I was raised by a cat—Gus—who was born and bred on a farm. A farmer gave her to my father when she was just a kitten. She rode all day with him in his fuel oil delivery truck, delicately sharing his lunch with him at noon, and he brought her into the house and introduced her to my mother. Gus accepted my mother as hairless but possibly useful, said, “Excuse me,” and went out to the kitchen to kill a mouse. She ruled our home for eleven years, and because spending money on free pets was a conundrum for my parents, Gus was free to roam and free to tend to her reproductive instincts. I clearly remember evenings when Gus would be on our back porch, telling my mother quite emphatically that she needed to GO OUTSIDE while my mother would be imitating cat calls for the six or seven frustrated males already out there. As a result of her wanton ways, Gus was almost always either pregnant or raising kittens, and I grew up with a never-ending supply of cats.
I have almost always lived with a cat.
It is the basis of this life experience that has led me to smile, nod, and maintain a discreet silence while our friends explain their plans to create a cat-free space for the more allergic of the two of them. This plan involves a French door, a louvered door, and a fireplace screen.
I have to be honest: there is no evidence to suggest so far that their plan will not work. The fireplace screen is set in place at the base of the stairway. Apparently the first time the cat (Simon) saw this screen he said to himself, “This can’t possibly have anything to do with me,” and he jumped over it. As he jumped his hind feet hit the screen, which teetered and wobbled and crashed to the floor with a clatter that so thoroughly destroyed his nerves that he has never gone near it again. He has erased the entire upstairs of the house from his mind. When his people go up there he never so much as wonders where they’ve gone, he just yawns and wanders out to the kitchen to check to make sure they filled his food bowl.
I have heard comments to suggest that the French doors are not as frightening to him. Still—so far—the plans seems to work. There are catted areas of the house, and there are cat-free areas of the house, and the cat seems to respect these barriers being established in this, his ninth year of rule in this house.
My Beloved is violently allergic to cats. Her throat swells and grows hives. The whites of her eyes turn pink and begin to swell out of their sockets. She sniffles, her eyes leak sticky fluids. Her asthma kicks in and you can hear her trying to breathe several rooms away. She has spent a great deal of our together time at my house on the front steps, or in a tent out behind the house.
I live with one cat. Babycakes. Babycakes is a long-haired red tabby. There are hairs on this cat that measure as much as three inches. He appears to grow these hairs in about 7.2 minutes, and when one falls out he grows two to replace it. In a week and a half he can completely carpet a hardwood floor. He grows fine red/gold fuzz that looks more like angel hair or angora yarn than cat hair. He was twelve years old in March. He is in perfect health. He is twelve pounds of walking, breathing, shedding cat dander, and proud of it.