Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (22 page)

When I was twenty it was painfully important that everyone around me like me and—if not like me—at least understand me. I
was a one-woman Peace Corps. Even the opinions of total strangers sitting at adjoining tables mattered. I don’t know when
that changed. I wasn’t paying attention. I am fifty now. I expect the strangers at adjoining tables to mind their own business
and I presume I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I no longer assume I am the most interesting person in the room and
as I have slowly turned gray I have discovered people don’t pay much attention to me anymore. I find that I like this.

An older friend once told my Beloved, “After fifty there is no more bullshit.” There will always be bullshit-lovers of any
age. But once I hit about fifty I realized that a lot of those dutifully learned rules I’ve been carrying around—and pretty
much ignoring, in my personal life—are just a lot of excess baggage and could probably be dropped along the wayside. It may
be a fine-sounding rule, but if I haven’t followed it in fifty years, chances of a sudden change now are slim.

My definition of “old” has changed in the past twenty years. When I was a child I decided to die at the age of thirty-six
because (1) it would be a long time before I was ever that old and (2) it was obvious there is no point in living any longer
than that. This somewhat pre-dated the “die young and leave a good-looking corpse” philosophy of those slightly younger than
I am, but it reflects, I believe, our culture’s attitudes toward age. (Or, I may have just confused myself with Marilyn Monroe.
I could make mistakes like that when I was very young.) Now I see people in their sixties and I ask myself, “Just exactly
when do people get old?” Because it’s a steadily moving cutoff.

I am happier, more at ease with myself and the world around me, than I have ever been. I am relaxed. I am having a good time—and
most of the people my own age that I know are.

Why then, I suppose younger people might ask, do the lot of you seem so cranky? What are the constant references to “young
people” like youth itself is some kind of social disease? What is this perpetual antagonism between the young and the older
anyway?

I was standing at the counter in a department store with my partner’s mother, who was then eighty-two, when I realized that
the clerk was talking to me. I wasn’t buying anything—my partner’s mother was. She knew what she wanted, she had her own money,
she was fully capable of making her own decisions—but she is a little hard of hearing. It can make her difficult to talk to.
And that simple infirmity, combined with the fact that she is older, has rendered her invisible. The minute the conversation
became taxing for the store clerk she turned to me because I was younger. More vibrant. More important. More powerful. Just
as we in our fifties begin to realize our parents are really not that much older than we are, we get to watch the world infantilize
the old. They become nonpersons. People talk around them or above them instead of to them. They become virtually invisible.

I asked my partner’s mother once what it feels like to be eighty-two and she looked blank for a minute and then said, “I don’t
feel any different than I ever did.”

I was hoping for something more profound, but the truth is, I don’t either. But I am hoping my mind goes into irretrievable
dementia before people start talking to me like I’m three years old again or it’s going to get ugly.

W
E HAD GATHERED
loosely around a table—siblings and their various entanglements—and we were idly discussing our childhood. Much to the Wee
One’s chagrin, these discussions almost always go back to the years when she could bleed at will. Often quite dramatically.
Her particular specialty was nose-bleeding, but she poured more blood out of her forehead than either the UnWee or I, as well.
And in the spirit of a sibling gathering, someone lovingly recalled the time when I hit my kid sister in the head with a rock.

It was an accident.

Actually, given my gift for aim, it was a phenomenal shot.

When we were kids, part of the property my father owned was an abandoned gas station and behind the gas station was a small
lot of pure trash. Broken glass, rusty cans, weedling trees and rocks. Lots and lots and lots of rocks. I have no idea why
so many rocks had chosen to congregate in one place, but in my father’s veins coursed quarts of diluted farmer’s blood, and
farmers

Hate Rocks
.

They hate them.

Leave an old rock in the middle of a road and a farmer will deliberately drive over it. Back up. Drive over it again. Farmers
are death on rocks.

So my father looked out the kitchen window one morning and he saw a herd of rocks gathering in his trash lot and my father
said, “We’re gonna go pick up those rocks, now.” The “we” of this project, of course, were my father and his small troop of
slave laborers, the Least Wee (me), the UnWee and the Wee One.

The Wee One was a poor slave. She was (and still is) five years younger than me and a year and a half younger than the UnWee
and she used this advantage mercilessly. She was small and cute and wherever she went, we heard the legend, “Why, she looks
just like a little Indian.” Her face, as a baby, was round, with big brown eyes and straight dark hair, and she tanned effortlessly.
In the racially unchallenged community where I grew up, this was enough to qualify someone for the exotic status of “little
Indian.”

So “we”—two slaves, a slave master and The World’s Most Perfect Child—parked our truck in the trash lot, and the slave master
got out to talk to my uncle, who had chosen that particular moment to drive by, looking for someone to talk to. The Wee One,
feather in hair, opted to stay in the cab. And the slaves—the UnWee and me—were sent to the rock pile. We were ordered to
toss the rock pile, one rock at a time, into the back of the truck.

The UnWee and I picked up rocks and threw them into the truckbed, picked up more rocks, threw them as well into the truckbed.
Picking up rocks and throwing them into the truck was work.

I was never a strong advocate of work.

I particularly was never a strong advocate of work I was forced to do while others stood idly by, talking, for instance, or
perhaps just gazing at their reflections in the cab mirror.

I was feeling righteously abused.

The Wee One sang back from the cab, “I’m gonna come help now.”

As if she would have been any help, had she come. She was— give or take—about five. Physically challenged. She couldn’t jump
three times on a bed without bleeding profusely through the nose, getting us all in trouble, and she couldn’t pick up most
rocks, much less throw one. She was, I felt at the time, about as close to useless as a kid sister could get.

I thought I told her to stay in the cab. I know I thought to tell her to stay in the cab. Whether or not I actually said it
aloud is a question for history.

I picked up a rock, I aimed for the back of the cab, I threw it, and I cold-cocked my baby sister.

Dropped her in her tracks.

I was aiming for the back of the truck, not my sister.

Had I been aiming for the Wee One, I probably would have taken out the back window of the cab, or perhaps the windshield of
one of the passing cars behind me. I know, in my heart, that I did not deliberately throw a rock at my sister because I have
never actually hit anything I aimed for.

She stumbled around in circles about three times, reached up to touch her little Indian head, wiped away a fistful of blood,
and my father swooped her up in his arms and whisked her off into the house.

This is the end of my memory tape. Nosing about for more, I find no traces of remorse and not a great deal of regret. I was
aware that my father was angry about the incident, but not aware that he was angry with me. I was shocked and astonished to
learn, some forty years later, that various members of my family either believed or at least entertained the belief that I
committed that heinous act on purpose. That I intended actual physical harm to my beloved baby sister.

I did not.

I would not have been profoundly disappointed if great bodily harm had come to her, but I certainly was not going to volunteer.
She bled most of the time and it almost always came to be my fault. She was small and delicate, it was explained to me, and
apparently had the common sense of a goose: I was older and stronger and smarter and more responsible. It was my job, therefore,
to keep her alive until her brain began to develop. I don’t recall, just offhand, what I ever did to deserve such a thankless
job.

Ironically, after I beaned her in the skull with a small rock, I was reprimanded—but it was still my job to keep her alive.
Eventually our mother took her to the doctor and had the inside of her nose cauterized so she didn’t leak so much, and no
longer suffering from blood loss, her brain did begin to work. Once utterly useless, she now cooks and sews—she sews and appliqués
and quilts beautiful, creative wall-hangings and other fiber arts—she mothers my nephews and my niece and she is even interesting
to talk to. In fact, as an adult, she is one of my favorite people. Today, I still can’t throw a rock and hit what I aim for.
But if anyone hit her in the head with a rock, I would be forced to drive over to their house, corner them in their back yard,
and beat them mercilessly with my own rock because she is my baby sister, and it is my job to protect her.

T
HOSE OF US
with crippling disabilities lie always cautiously on the edge of polite society, waiting for the next challenge. For instance,
last weekend in the middle of a Solstice Celebration, our hostess—a kind and supportive friend—asked us, her guests, to help
her defend her faltering garden from marauding deer by peeing its perimeter. Sadly, there are those of us who would, unfortunately,
burst like fine, overheated melons before our cast-off fluids will dampen the greens. This is the painful disability I have
lived with all of my life—if there is no porcelain bowl involved, the need may not diminish but the deed will go undone. I
cannot pee in the woods.

Or on the lawn, or in the garden, or in the back forty of somebody’s field.

I can bare my butt with the best of them, I can crouch—sort of—and neatly remove my pants from the line of fire—or water—
but there’s really no point.

In fact, I can be squirming uneasily across the lawn to certain porta-janes, walk inside, and the whole sense of urgency can
vanish in a flash.
Nope
, my body says firmly,
we will be making no contributions here.

My friend and hostess had only recently completed a several-week trek down the Appalachian Trail and so I presume peeing in
the woods now comes quite naturally to her. It made sense to her that her friends, with all of their needs and all of their
inherently human smells, might wander over to the garden and cop a squat rather than walk all the way to the house and contribute
to the disposal problems of the city. The garden-eating deer would be offended and go elsewhere for their salads, our friends
would be returning their essence to nature, and the passing train engineers might get a glimpse of something to brighten a
dull day. Under the circumstances, it would seem almost bad guest-manship to decline. Still, however willing my spirit may
be, my bladder won’t budge.

I have no idea why I am pee-impaired. Perhaps it is a reflection of my birth order, that having been the oldest child of a
family of five children, I absorbed the rules of social discourse not once, but five times, and am, therefore, excessively
socialized. My two-year-old nephew, patterning diligently after his father, often stood on the edge of his parents’ property
and stared intently off across the cornfield with one hand coiled—empty— in front of his fly. He had determined that this
is something that men do, even if the purpose of the ritual eluded him. I, on the other hand, patterned after my mother, who
seemed obsessed with the notion that all cast-off fluids be disposed of in the white bowl in the bathroom. In fact, she was
known for her fairly dramatic efforts to drag offenders to the proper shrine even as they leaked and dribbled along the way.

All of my life I have made an honest man of Freud. I admit it—I have envied the penis. Its sexual skills never impressed me
much, but I have always appreciated the efficiency of the hose. My own goddess of bodily emissions is rather unhandily buried
and not particularly receptive to direction. On those rare occasions when I have successfully squatted in the woods and persuaded
a healthy flow, the flow flowed either down my leg or directly into my wadded-up pants. I once filled my left shoe. These
experiences have probably led me to a psychological fear of failure. All those years of envy have brought on my own unique
brand of impotence. And now—way too late in the game for it to matter—a male friend of mine has admitted that his hose is
no more predictable than mine and he too squats to pee.

And there is always the dubious okay-ness of wilderness peeing. Several years ago some friends and I were canoeing down a
northern river and we stopped somewhere in the woods to relieve the copious supplies of beer my friends had been consuming.
“Oh, it’s easy,” my friend assured me, “just grab the edge of your suit and shove it to one side.” I wanted to go along and
watch this feat of agility and engineering, but it seemed somehow unacceptable. It is fortunate I didn’t go with her, because
minutes later she came vaulting through the weeds like a deer shouting, “Go … go … get Going …” It seems she had squatted,
pulled her suit to one side, and begun relieving herself of used beer when she glanced up and discovered, not more wilderness,
but the back porch of a riverside cottage and an irate cottage-owner stalking over to demand what she was doing. We all leapt
into our canoes and beat a hasty retreat downstream while the enraged cottage-owner stood on the bank and shouted, “How would
YOU feel if people came to pee in YOUR back yard?!!!”