Revenge of the Paste Eaters (7 page)

I don’t know why I was a miserable child. Perhaps for the same reason weeds thrive in the cracks in the sidewalk and wild orchids bloom in the damp crotches of trees—because it was my nature.

Whatever my misery was, it lifted, gradually, like morning fog dissipating in the sunlight. Perhaps I learned how to get along with other people and myself. Perhaps misery is ultimately self-limiting. Perhaps my brain did its own internal chemical adjustment.

My mother died when she was forty-nine. Since she left us I have never soaked anything attached to my body (or anyone else’s body but my friend Bob’s) in hot Epsom salt water. (Bob has a thing for bath salts.) I do not apply drawing salves to my chest, and I have difficulty enough breathing in greenhouses, much less under sheet tents of steaming kettle water. I have discovered that a well-honed fingernail is good for just about anything—spare screwdriver, thorn-remover, guilt-assigner . . . I never had any children so none of them will grow up to write about me. From time to time my nephew has talked to me about writing, but I always assure him it’s more bother than it’s worth. Nip that little tell-all in the bud.

I still don’t like shoes.

self-confidence

I am fascinated by the arrogant,

not that it’s a trait I admire—

I just try to imagine life without

self-doubt tugging at my skirt

like a dirty barefoot baby sister.

Dress it up all you want
, she seems

to whisper,
You know it’s just no good.

I wonder sometimes what they
feel
,

the arrogant, while my stomach

churns and my faith fades and every

good thought I’ve ever memorized

vanishes in the blinding light.

How do they do that, believe in them-

selves? What stories did they read

as children, what astonishing success

did they achieve at a formative age?

Whatever could I have done so badly

that I have dragged the memory of it

clinging to my ankle through five decades

kicking at it every inch, every year,

and still managing to feed it better

than I feed myself?

shopping

i have never really
been a trendsetter in the competitive world of fashion. I have a dress T-shirt and a casual T-shirt. I went all of the way through college in a World War II army field jacket (which, given all of the pockets, was cheaper and more efficient than a backpack). In the years before athletic shoes really came into their own, I wore hiking boots everywhere I went. All through college I maintained just enough clothes to do the laundry every two weeks and have something left to wear to the SudsyClean. For years my entire wardrobe—including my towels—fit neatly in a WWII canvas parachute bag. I am fifty-four years old, and other than the occasional panicked dash to womenswear just before a wedding, I have managed to stay safely out of the cruel grasp of fashion.

For about seven years I worked in factories where whatever you wore was wrecked by the end of the first day, so “cheap” and “durable” were the desired fashion criteria. Even when I moved into the professional world of office worker, there were still vague strains left of the egalitarian sixties and seventies, and for a long time I dispensed food stamps and welfare while wearing jeans and basketball shoes. High-tops, because I have weak ankles.

About ten years into my career as a nonprofessional “professional” person my employer determined I was in fact a professional after all and inflicted upon me a dress code. I can no longer wear jeans or athletic shoes to work. I can wear toeless shoes without stockings only between Memorial Day and Labor Day. I can be sent home without pay and ordered to change my clothes and come back if my pants are too short, if I appear to be wearing culottes or T-shirts with logos on them (although T-shirts without logos are equally illegal, it is a distinction that is repeatedly made), or if my toenails are unseasonably naked. I cannot recite the dress code in any greater detail than that—I believe it is a violation to wear bobby socks with skirts, I believe that has been an issue—I just dress as close to the bottom of the fashion chain as I can without getting busted and I’ve never risked humiliation and banishment over my God-given American right to wear denim in the workplace.

I wear stretch knit pants I acquire from Target for about twelve dollars a pair. I throw them out when the crotch falls out. I have several different colors but I could not fault someone for saying I wear the same pair of pants to work day after day after day. They fit. They’re comfortable. They do not seem to set off alarms when the fashion police wander by.

About six years ago I happened upon a plus-size women’s clothing store just as it was wheezing its last breath of business. It was a wall-to-wall sale. Clothes were 30 to 70 percent off. I spent almost $200 in that store, and walked away with a boatload of polyester work blouses that I have come to loathe. They wear like iron. Nothing seems to faze them. I left one wet in the washing machine for three days once—it bounced right back. About the only weapon that seems to do any destruction to them at all is fire, and while I can’t justify ruining my own wardrobe, I have been known to cuddle right up against smokers, gaze softly into their eyes, and beg them to flick their Bic just one more time for me. The one thing these shirts seemed unable to do was to retain a button, but I was young and naive then and I introduced them to my ersatz mother-in-law. When these shirts are nothing but gossamer webbing fluttering in the breeze, those buttons will all still be attached.

Last year my Beloved wandered into my study and began collecting up the Great Unread. “Give me this,” she said, and wrested unfinished novels,
Lavender Morning
articles, and scraps of poetry out of my hands. “I’m going to publish your book,” she said, and—being my Beloved—she did.

It seemed fairly benign at the time.

Shortly after she published our book we sat there, looking at the boxes of unsold books we had published, and a publisher from New York called us and offered to take the book off our hands. She would publish it. She would tote it all over the country, she would sing its praises, she would
distribute
and
market
and other threatening verbs that sounded like . . . work . . . to me. I sold that book in a heartbeat.

That seemed even more benign.

Then my Beloved said to me, “Cheryl,” she said, “you have to help sell this book. You have to go out there. You have to meet people. You have to autograph copies and have dinners with booksellers—you need clothes.”

I am fifty-four years old and square. My bust, my waist, my hips, and my height are all within spitting distance of each other and as soon as I step into a three-sided mirrored dressing room they commence.

You’ll never be happy while you look like that.

Honey, I just don’t want you to grow up to be miserable and alone.

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.