Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (14 page)

More than once my father would be standing in the kitchen, wondering idly how many children he really had and whatever happened
to the one who used to wash dishes, when the back door would fly open and his oldest child—carrying one plate— would fly through
it as if she had been chased the last forty feet by a pack of rabid wolves. Her eyes would be wide and frightened, her breathing
would be labored, her cheeks would be a deep scarlet, as if she had been outside in the cold for perhaps hours, for some unknown
reason she would be carrying one dinner plate and a spatula.

This man and this child hardly ever spoke to each other and they never spoke of these things. The man never spoke because
she was over the age of six and under the age of twenty-five and therefore a total enigma to him. The child never spoke because
she had been told he knew everything, saw everything, had a firm opinion about everything and all of these impressions and
opinions just happened to coincide exactly with impressions and opinions of her mother. They were a united front, her parents,
of one opinion, one mind: and since he was not all that talkative, she had no real conflicting information. She would not
know for another fifteen years that when he shook his head and walked back into the living room to watch television it was
not disapproval as much as blind confusion, nor would she understand for those same fifteen years that he was no more like
her mother than she was.

Still, I held my ground. It was not fair. I was the only child in the family with an assigned task that lasted, as near as
I could tell, until the end of time. Not only did I have to drop my own life to baby-sit whenever my parents chose to go off
gallivanting— which, since my mother was a square-dance caller and therefore a critical member of several square-dance clubs,
they did every Friday and Saturday night—but I had to wash dishes every day for seven people.

S-E-V-E-N.

My mother, who cleaned house, did the laundry and cooked for seven people, was peculiarly unsympathetic. My lesser siblings
shot away from the dinner table like rockets, on the off chance the responsibility might shift without warning.

I have a vague but persistent memory of the Wee One wandering out to visit me in my exile in the kitchen, apparently driven
by the need to make useless conversation, and remarking, “I like to wash dishes, don’t you, Sherry?” It’s a wonder the child
lived.

I have never liked to wash dishes. I don’t like to cook because it creates dirty dishes that then just sit around, needing
to be washed. I do it now, though. Sometimes I even feign a smile and good cheer. I can washes dishes in about the same amount
of time it takes anyone else to wash them.

Or, I can also make the task last all day, it just depends on what kind of mood I’m in or where I think The Man Who Hid in
the Shed might be hiding now.

W
HEN
I
WAS
four years old my father took me to a large body of water and threw me in, and when I came up shrieking and grabbing for
air he said, “Good—she can swim.” We have no idea how many children there should have been in our family. He only kept the
five that were waterproof. The only non-swimmer in our family was our mother, who spent most of the leisure hours of our youth
either back on shore, or in the boat, her hand welding their own grips in the gunwales as we raced and swooped around the
chain of lakes where we played.

Our mother was a confirmed non-swimmer. She didn’t like to get her face wet. She hated to be splashed. She was happiest about
ankle deep with a fearless toddler to guard, conveniently preventing her from coming out into the depths where the rest of
us were. By the time the youngest among us was born, I was a certified junior lifesaver and the UnWee and the Wee One were
both better swimmers than I was; we took it upon ourselves to free our mother by teaching the baby to swim. He was a large,
happy, round baby who never talked until he was three and never walked until he was four—both because he never had any reason.
Since he was carried everywhere he went anyway, he never seemed to notice he was in water. We would play with him until we
became bored and then just float him like a small air mattress. When he started to drift away, someone would reach out and
grab a foot or his hair and pull him back to us. The baby loved it. It seemed perfectly natural to us. Citing his continued
need to survive his siblings, however, our mother signed up, at the age of about thirty-four, for swimming lessons.

This seemed fairly foolish to us. We had all taken swimming lessons. Every summer for as long as we could remember we had
been thrust into our suits, issued beach bags with our names on the outside and our clean underwear to change into and a towel
on the inside, and ferried to the beach for swimming lessons. Although I was not a lesbian at the time and would not become
one for another twenty years, I learned to get my face wet voluntarily to please my beauty queen/lifeguard teacher, Delores.
I would have dog-paddled to China for Delores. At the time our mother learned to swim I could swim the required ten body lengths
under water and both the UnWee and the Wee One could dive off one shore of the lake and come up on the other. We felt qualified
to teach.

Mom’s first lesson was to get her face wet. This is a huge stepping-stone for non-swimmers, but for children who dove out
of the car, raced down the beach and plunged headfirst into untested waters, it was a difficult trauma to take seriously.
I offered to look up Delores because she was such a fine teacher, but Mom took offense. She was embarrassed because she could
not swim. She had, after all, watched us do it fairly fearlessly for years. This did not help our cause in any way. We would
take her to the beach to “practice,” offer to dunk her ourselves, dissolve into gales of laughter over our own cleverness
and then run for our wicked little lives. One just did not make fun of our mother.

Her second lesson that I remember was to float. After years of observation and experimentation, I have surmised that stick-shaped
people float like rocks. As I have gained stature and dimension throughout my life, I have gone from floating easily to bobbing
like a cork, and while stick-shaped people have to struggle to stay on top of the water, I now struggle to get completely
wet. However, my mother was never a stick. All she needed, I assured her, was faith. All I needed, she assured me, was to
go to the far end of the lake and float until I was blue in the face. Like fine wine, she would float in her own time. I pointed
out that she was old already, which was received nearly as graciously as my offer to find Delores.

When she did float, she would stiffen like a board and slap herself against the water and then come up spluttering and swearing
that it could not be done, that there was some peculiar physical property to her body that would not allow it to float. “You’re
too tense, Mom, you need to relax,” we would reassure her as we all floated supportively around her, and then we would dive
under water, where we were relatively safe.

Eventually, after much swearing, a lot of frustration and an occasional bout of tears, Mother became proficient enough in
water that she passed her beginning swimming class. She could swim. The morning after she passed her test she woke up an expert
in all forms of water navigation. She had confidence. I had no idea, she told me, what it was like to overcome fear at her
age. I was young. I had never been afraid of water. I had no idea what she had accomplished.

And she was right: I had no fear of the water. I swam with the unquestioned belief that I could swim my way out of any situation.
I had been dunked, I had fallen off skis and catapulted to the bottom of the lake, I had been dragged by a towrope once; and
while each of these experiences had frightened me at the time, I still found myself baffled over exactly how anyone could
drown. It did not compute. I took junior lifesaving, where our teacher patiently and repeatedly told us how dangerous drowning
people can be, how even if we knew how to do rescues and we knew how to do them safely, we should always always ALWAYS stop
and evaluate the risks before we dove in. What they taught me repeatedly in junior lifesaving is that the only thing more
tragic than one person drowning is two people drowning.

To celebrate her new success and to practice her newfound skill, my mother took us to the beach. I wandered out to the diving
dock and dove off, and was effortlessly floating in the water just beyond the dock, mulling over swimming out to the raft
or just staying where I was. I was floating upright, like a cork, a position I could maintain for hours with just an occasional
underwater sweep of my hand. I no doubt looked utterly relaxed. I may have looked like I was standing shoulder deep in water,
although the water was about seven feet deep.

My mother called, “Look out, Sherry, here I come,” and ran and cannonballed into the water.

I had just enough time to think, “Why … ?”

Her head popped up out of the water right beside me, her eyes bugged, she went “Uhhhh …” inhaling half the lake, and she went
under, and as she went, she grabbed me.

I grabbed the dock on the way down: had I been any farther away, I would have been in a fight for my life. Everything I had
learned—and had practiced, repeatedly—about how to get out of the grip of a drowning person was erased with the initial shock.
She grabbed me and shoved me underwater as she struggled to climb over me to reach the surface. The strength of her grip,
the unreasoning, flailing force of her panic was superhuman.

I grabbed the dock, hauled her up to it, and managed to latch her onto it instead of me while she hung and coughed and spluttered
and choked and eventually cleared her airway. When she recovered, she was furious with me. I had “tricked” her. I should have
told her the water was over her head. When I mentioned the incident a few years later as an example of how swiftly survival
can become an issue in the water, she was angry again, claiming that I exaggerated, that she had never really panicked, that
she would have been fine.

Mom became an adequate swimmer, but she never became the kind of fearless waterbabies that we were. She could tolerate it,
but she never really liked to get her face wet. She reached a certain comfort level that assured her that if any of us got
into trouble in the water, she could wade in and help us out.

And while I would never have taken that confidence away from her, it was she who taught me just how dangerous that assurance
can be.

I
N FOURTH GRADE
I was an unfinished work. I loved school and, because I craved attention and approval, I did well there. I was a sponge soaking
up praise and reassurance from any source that would offer it; while I was not a popular student among my peers, I was a chronic
overachiever in the classroom. My specialties—and this had already been noticed— were those things that came most easily to
me. The first time I ever genuinely broke a sweat over a textbook was in an economics class my junior year in college just
after I transferred to U of M. The first fourteen years of school I majored in my Great Potential with a minor in Con Artistry.
I had a way with words. It was—and remains—my sole survival skill, and it came to me perhaps too easily. It did not come,
however, without a price.

I liked my fourth-grade teacher. She was that unfathomable age that all grade school teachers are, somewhere between parents
and angels. She liked me. I had extraordinary luck with teachers all through grade school—I only had one who did not actively
like me, and she tolerated me remarkably well. I was quite comfortable in fourth grade. I sat in the middle of the room, near
the front, I raised my hand to answer every question, I loved going up to the board … I floundered somewhat in math, but I
never expected to use it much anyway. I excelled in reading. I did well in a fairly useless class we had called “English.”
I wasn’t even paying attention the afternoon our teacher told us we had to write a poem: the subject was to be My Ten Most
Beautiful Things.

I did not pour my heart and soul into this poem. I diddled around in class, whispering to my best friend until we got caught,
and five minutes before class ended I scribbled some stuff on my paper and handed it in. My poem was titled “My Ten Most Beautiful
Things” because that was the assignment.

Our teacher was so impressed by my poem that she took me aside to tell me mine was the best in the class. She had me read
it to the class. My class was impressed as much as any group of fourth graders are impressed by poetry. Our teacher told me
she liked my poem so much she was going to have it PUBLISHED.

I went home and told my mom. One of my ten most beautiful things was “A cardinal overhead.” Another was “My mother in a new
dress.” My mother liked my poem, too.

I particularly liked the fame and attention my poem gave me. It had been sheer accident and I knew it, but praise was praise
and no one loved praise like I did. I reveled in it. I rolled in it like a dog in new grass. I would sit in class and think
back on my poem and remind myself how incredibly—even if accidentally— good I was.

A few days after our teacher told me she was going to have my poem published, she called me aside and told me the school PRINCIPAL
wanted to talk to me.

I was beginning to sense there might be no end to my fame.

The principal was substitute teaching in the sixth-grade class.

Sixth graders were gods.

There were no mortal beings on earth as important, as powerful, as awesome as sixth graders. After sixth grade they just fell
off the edge of earth, into something called “Junior High” and there was no way of knowing what happened to them after that—but
in my school, sixth graders ruled. To even be seen with a sixth grader could make you automatically more important: to actually
know one was to touch the hem of God.