Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (24 page)

Surrounded by birds gliding through the sky I turned to my dad. “Do you like it?” I checked.

And he grinned. Some things he doesn’t need words for.

Cranes have been staging in the fall in the Midwest far longer than my people have wandered down to watch them. Evidence suggests
they have always held some mystical fascination for us: prehistoric man carried crane bones around in his medicine bags. Something
about that apparently effortless flight, the aloof indifference to us—the steadfast determination to live as far away from
human beings as possible—intrigues us. Standing on a tower next to a field and looking up at a sky filled with incoming cranes
makes my heart swell. I feel I am touched by history.

As dark fell we walked back to the car and drove home. It was late by the time we got to my house: I checked with my father
to see if he was okay to drive the additional hour home, but he assured me he was. I hugged him. He left.

He never mentioned the double vision. Three days later he went to his optometrist, who told him it was not a vision-related
problem and he should consult his regular doctor. Within the next week and a half he would have as many as three more strokes,
which ultimately blew out the vision in the right side of both eyes and damaged his short-term memory, and he developed some
frustrating aphasia for a man who has never talked very much anyway.

As promised, the weather keeps getting colder.

M
Y FIRST CLEAR MEMORY
of my father is specific, as crisp and immediate as a photograph. I am standing on the burned-out foundation of the garage
where he parked his truck and I am looking eye-to-eye at his back tire. He is not there.

He drove a fuel oil delivery truck. Before that—during my lifetime—he tested milk, but apparently he managed this without
my supervision. I remember his red-and-white bulk oil truck. I remember hurrying out to the foundation with him each morning
and huffing along behind him as he completed his ritual inspection of his rig. His truck is the first solid object I remember
appreciating for its size, its density, its irrefutable properties of depth and dimension. I was shorter than the tires. I
banged my head walking under the corner of the back bumper. My father was six feet tall and he was in his early twenties when
I was a toddler and he walked fast. I went everywhere we went at a dead run. And at each corner of his truck I would find
myself scowling at his tire, which was taller than I was, alone, unprotected, utterly abandoned by the one person in the world
I wished to be with.

I was annoyed with him. He was not paying adequate attention to my needs. I was my father’s firstborn, but I was not his oldest
child. Before I came along to destroy the peaceful symmetry of their lives, my parents had lived quietly with their beloved
dog, Tinker. I remember Tinker remarkably well for my age at the time. He had long, silky black-and-white hair that stuck
to my fingers for no apparent reason. He had a row of tiny little teeth flanked on each side by great white fangs which spent
an inordinate amount of time pushed right up in my face. His chest was three feet wide and rumbled continuously. I never saw
my own fingers, when I was a child, because he was always nipping at them and I learned to walk by grabbing his coat and hanging
on for dear life while he towed me down the road and tried to sell me to every passing stranger he could find. There was no
love lost between Tinker and me. He hated me, and since my parents (apparently) wouldn’t let him eat me, he devoted his short
life to standing staunchly, resolutely, I’ll-die-before-I’ll-lose-to-the-likes-of-you determinedly between me and anywhere
I wanted to be. When my parents were watching, he guarded me as if I were crusted with the crown jewels.

My mother used to tell me Tinker rode around on the floor-board on the passenger side of our car and whenever she braked too
quickly, I would tumble off the seat and land on him. For her, this story demonstrated his devotion to me. Once when she was
downtown stopped at a traffic light, two men walked up to her car, one opened her door and one opened mine, and they started
to slide in and take us away. Tinker (cowering as he was on the floorboards, trying to duck small, flying children) had apparently
had a bad day and those men were the last straw and as he jumped up and expressed his aggravation with the whole situation,
both men slid right back out of the car and ran on down the street. “Tinker was very protective of you,” my mother would tell
me.

The thing he took the greatest delight in protecting me from was the company of my father.

I am standing at the corner of my father’s truck. I am looking straight into the back tire, which is taller than I am. I used
to be walking with my father, but my father has turned the corner and now I am alone.

Almost.

I can hear the triumph in his little dog laugh. I can smell the gloat in his thick, hot dog breath as he flashes those little
teeth at my fingers like a disembodied set of clicking jaws, fluttering, snapping everywhere my fingers go to get away from
him as he backs me, one angry, frustrated step after another up against the garage wall where I am blocked, the wall behind
me, the dog pressed up against me, growling, reminding me that our souls will meet and spar forever on the far side of the
coals of Hell …

I have no recollection of ever being bitten.

He knocked me down. He stood on me. He dragged me out to the Suzy House and taught my father’s goat (Suzy) how to knock me
over and stand on my shoulder straps so I couldn’t get up, but that is, perhaps, a different story … I have no memory of how
my parents came to understand Tinker and I were not friends. I was terrified of dogs for years after my parents finally found
him another home and perhaps I was honestly terrified of him. What I remember is being pissed. He tormented me. He was bigger,
faster, meaner—a rogue shepherd. Some mutt combination of a border collie and the gatepost, he dedicated every herding instinct
he had to making my life miserable.

And my guess would be that I never did a single thing to make that dog resent me. My motives were pure. My conscience is clear.

To this day I can still feel my little fists just buried in all that soft and silky hair.

L
AST
S
EPTEMBER
my father became gravely ill. In October his girlfriend retired early to take him home and care for him, in November he had
two valves in his heart replaced, and in December she flew to Alabama to buy a house. My father lives in Michigan. My father
has always lived in Michigan. In seventy-six years my father has drifted exactly eleven miles from the farm where he was born.
I can only assume she decided that he wasn’t going to drift any farther and if she wanted to move back “home” it was time
to go. That, or taking care of my father can be overrated. The summer she left she had her right knee rebuilt, and her sisters—all
of whom live conveniently in Alabama—gathered together to make jam.

I know this because the following spring I went down to fetch my father who had drifted to Alabama, and she gave me two jars
of jam and told me the story of how they were made. Her two sisters told her to rest her healing knee on a footstool and there
she sat, doing what she could, while they fluttered around her and did everything else, and when they were all done, they
gave every third jar of jam to her. I can see this woman sitting quietly on a stool while other women worked around her—I’m
suspicious they piled the jars in her lap and made her hold her share, just to keep her down.

I remember my mother canning tomatoes. She once did something to several quarts of concord grapes and every hot summer after
that another jar would explode in the basement. We never ate them—they looked like jars of purple eyeballs to us. (We used
to add grapes to our mud pies for exactly that reason.) She made strawberry and raspberry jam. In the beginning I think she
put up corn and froze green beans and peas, but corn developed a reputation for killing people if it wasn’t done right and
she lost confidence. We were not really a green beans and peas sort of family and I think she lost interest in working that
hard to preserve food none of her children would eat. We lived on tomato products. We ate goulash and chili and tomato soup
and homemade pizza and Spanish rice and meatloaf. We ate so many tomatoes in my family that I developed a passionate craving
for white sauce that haunts me to this day. I remember being drafted as a tomato-picker or strawberry-huller or pea-shucker,
but if my mother’s sister ever came over to help us I don’t remember it. And it’s possible that my grandmother came over to
supervise us as well, but again, I don’t remember it. I remember my mother alone in the kitchen, where she directed little
puffs of air at the bangs that fell in her eyes while she scalded an endless supply of large glass jars. In our family putting
up food was a solitary sport.

Eventually I moved out of my mother’s house into an apartment of my own, where I immediately noticed a critical shortage of
food. Not only was there no store food—there was no “free” food, like homemade jam or canned meat or frozen peas. In my mother’s
house I could have survived that sort of deficit for months on end, relying on canned tomatoes alone for sustenance. My new
independent apartment was a dismal disappointment. A disappointment nearly as crushing as the day I took my spanking new paycheck
to a grocery store and compared it to the price of store-bought jam. It’s possible the first grocery item I ever bought was
a jelling substance to distinguish my homemade jam from ice cream sauce.

What made making jam particularly appealing to me, that first year—that is, after I recovered from sticker shock after pricing
a pint (not a quart, a pint) of black raspberries in the produce section—was the realization that I knew where to get them
for free. I went immediately to my father’s garden, only to discover he had vanquished his mortal enemy, the black-shelled
pesky berry beetle, by tearing every berrylike bush, shrub and plant out of his garden. He doused them with gasoline. And
then he shot at the escaping beetles with his twelve-gauge as they tried to fly away. He is not a violent man, but he takes
his gardening very seriously. This was not a horrible setback to my independence: black raspberries grew wild in the gravel
pit, and they were mine for the picking. They could have benefited from my father’s benevolent pruning. It was a pain to dress
like I was going to a mosque on the hottest day of the year, just to keep my flesh intact. I resented the chiggers for weeks
after that. But within perhaps two hours I had enough black raspberries to keep myself in jam all year.

I had never actually made black raspberry jam before, nor had I ever watched anyone else do it. I was not terribly clear on
the difference between jam and jelly. Fresh out of college, perpetually strapped for cash, I could have used a little dental
work that I could ill afford. I made a substantial batch of jam to see me through the cold, hard winter, but it lasted considerably
longer than that because raspberry seeds are plentiful (one might almost suspect they are the point) and they are small only
until they get wet. Nothing will locate a cavity in a back molar quite like a swelling raspberry seed. The following year
I did a little more research on how to avoid being chigger-bit, and I learned how to make seedless raspberry jam. And then
I moved farther from home and therefore farther from easy access to free raspberries, and I never made it again.

Many, many years went by.

I met my Beloved.

I said, “I don’t cook.”

My Beloved cooks for relaxation. My Beloved cooks for emotional gratification. My Beloved cooks because she’s good at it and
people admire her for her cooking skills. All of this positive reinforcement incites her to invite great herds of people to
her house or public parks or even more exotic arenas where she can display her cooking skills. When my Beloved is bored or
irritated with her day job, she turns to our friend Rae and says, “Let’s open a restaurant.” Watch my Beloved’s partner jump
for joy at the idea of waiting on people for a living. Keep watching.

The year before last my Beloved, our friend Rae and I jumped into a car and toured southwestern Michigan, looking for inexpensive
black raspberries. We learned that there is no such thing. First of all, not all that many people grow black raspberries.
(I suspect the cost of all those twelve-gauge shells is prohibitive.) Those who do are apparently former diamond-miners trying
to recoup their losses. I believe we may have paid about a dollar a berry that year—seeds and all—and once we’d removed the
seeds we had this minuscule little supply that made my Beloved’s habit of giving away small jars of jam to people who just
happened to wander into her house something of a heart-stopper. Black raspberry is my personal all-time favorite jam.

Last year I said, “Raspberries grow wild over half of southern Michigan—let’s forage.” And forage we did. Up and down roadsides,
out behind the cemetery, we spotted every unguarded, unwanted, untended raspberry patch in three counties and we picked and
we bled and we waded and stumbled and met more wildlife on a cooking expedition than I’ve met on most wilderness hikes. We
brought our booty home, washed them, crushed them, de-seeded them, jammed them … We had black raspberry jam right up through
mid-December. It takes a heap of pickin’ to make a batch of jam.

In fact, we spent most of last summer preserving things. We made strawberry jam, peach jam, raspberry jam and plum jam. We
made pickled beets and three kinds of pickled pickles (one dill and two sweet). We stuffed peppers, we canned tomatoes, and
made two kinds of salsa (mild and hot). We made sweet pepper rings. (This is, of course, the use of the royal “We.” I personally
washed things and cut up things and shouted encouragement from my stool. I’m in training to have my knees redone.)

This year I thought, “I’m lobbying for more black raspberry jam.” But since I am the weakest link, I could lobby quietly without
drawing undue attention to myself simply by picking more berries. I thought I was prepared.