Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (3 page)

One morning I woke up and the whole world had turned white. I keep a male roommate for just that purpose and I listened a
moment and heard the rewarding scrape of snow shovel against cement, but I hurried outside anyway to make it appear that I
intended to help him, and while I was scraping off my car, Eleanor and her mother were scraping off theirs. I was feeling
neighborly and expansive so I called across the yard, “Hi—has Eleanor’s tin order come in yet?”

Eleanor’s mother seemed to stiffen for some reason and she said, “Eleanor will have to come talk to you about that tonight,”
and she jumped into her car and drove away. It seemed a little abrupt to me, but I reasoned that she might be running a little
late, with the snow and all.

Of course I did go home that night, but not until very late, and Eleanor, I’m sure, was in bed.

In fact, I rarely show up at home on any predictable pattern at an hour a nine-year-old should still be awake. And to complicate
things, I had started going back to the gym, so I left about an hour and a half before Eleanor left in the morning.

And so it happened that I was in the downtown bookstore the Friday after Thanksgiving. I had gone to pick up some reading
material for my father, who has recently survived a double valve replacement and, having never been sick before, has become
somewhat testy about the whole recovery process. It is apparently somewhat boring for a fixer/putterer/man-of-action to be
restricted to lifting less than five pounds. I had heard rumors that his caretaker turned her back on him for five minutes
and turned back to find him leaning over to pick up a bread machine, which, as everyone but my father knows, weighs more than
five pounds, and my goal was to find less strenuous ways to amuse him.

As I walked past the calendar rack, I espied a small child and I thought to myself,
There is Eleanor
. However, I only recognize Eleanor with confidence when she is exactly where Eleanor should be and the girl in the bookstore
could have been any nine-year-old girl with long light brown hair and an aura of femininity about her that would make Barbie
look butch. And the child seemed frozen. Not even her eyelids fluttered. She appeared to be staring at the calendar rack.
I glanced there to determine what might be holding her attention so rapt and there wasn’t much there to entertain me, much
less a nine-year-old. I thought about speaking, but then I thought,
suppose her name is Phoebe and she’s never seen you before in your life?

And so I passed her, like an oversized ship in the aisle.

I found a magazine on lighthouses and the Great Lakes, I found a
Penthouse
(my sisters and I used to spend hours slung over our parents’ bed, reading our dad’s
Playboy
that he always stashed under his side of the bed. We weren’t even supposed to be in their room, but we reasoned that if they
couldn’t see the magazine, artfully hidden by the edge of the bed, they might know we were up to something, but not exactly
what. Like there were a broad variety of possibilities to choose from.
There are my childrens’ butts all lined up along my bed, they’re obviously reading something. I wonder what they could be
up to now?
) I found a delightful book of trivia about the Great Lakes. My Beloved found him a puzzle that actually caught his attention
and amused him later when we delivered all of this booty.

I was standing at the checkout, making my purchases, when a small, light-brown-haired child materialized under my left elbow
and said, “Um—hi.”

Since she appeared to know me, I could only assume I knew her as well. “Eleanor,” I greeted her.

“Um—we were going to just buy everyone little gifts.”

“What?”

She drew a deep breath—possibly her first since she’d seen me. “I took the book to my Grampa’s and I left it downstairs and
neither one of us remembered it and it was the last day so we never got to send the order in so we were just going to buy
everyone a little gift.”

I laughed out loud, somewhat confusing her. “Oh, you don’t have to buy me a little gift, Eleanor,” I assured her. “It’s fine.”

She looked doubtful.

“Really,” I assured her. “I was just worried you might have to pay for something I ordered.” I refrained from telling her
I’d never wanted it anyway.

She heaved a heavy sigh, as only a nine-year-old can. “I thought you’d be mad,” she admitted.

“I’m not mad,” I assured her. “You have a wonderful Thanksgiving.”

“Thank you very much,” Eleanor said. She appeared thirty years younger, no longer plagued by the weight of the world, and
she dashed away.

I thought back on that visual image of the child frozen in front of the calendar rack, thinking desperately
Did she see me? Does she know me? Does she look mad? Do I have to talk to her now or can I just pretend I don’t see her?

It must have taken considerable courage for her to come up to me and admit to me she’d lost my tin order. I would have slunk
away and tortured myself with guilt and enemy sightings for weeks, but then, I barely recognize the child when I see her,
so I guess we don’t need to worry about her role-modeling after me.

M
EMORY IS A TRICKY THING
. It is the definition of fiction: it starts with an event or a feeling or a perception, and then it wanders off down the
corridors of its author’s mind until what eventually emerges is “true” only for the person doing the telling.

I had my very first chocolate malt the afternoon I rode the bus home with Pam Sweet and stayed to play at her house.

We were in kindergarten. Pam’s mother invited me. Perhaps Pam invited me, although it seems unlikely because while Pam was
a nice enough kid I don’t remember that we palled around all that often in school. There were six kids in our class, but I
had lived my pre-school life in the company of adults and while most adults loved me, I lacked the requisite social skills
to have any friends my own age. I was the social leper of my kindergarten class.

I was an intensely competitive child about everything. I had to be the first on the school bus, I had to be the first in line,
I had to be the first child called on, I had to do it—whatever it was—first, fastest, loudest and best. I was driven. I was
probably the largest child in my class physically, in part because I was also the oldest, and I was strong, and when my charm
fell flat on my peers—and it so often did—I resorted to force. I remember plowing through the line to the bus, just shoving
aside anyone who dared to stand in front of me, and having no concept of why that might be wrong, or why anyone else might
find it offensive. I was goal-oriented. It seemed a silly complication to allow obstacles to voice opinions.

As a result nobody liked me. Everybody hated me. For lunch I sat by myself on the front steps of the school and ate worms.

It is unlikely Pam Sweet said to her mother, “Mom, there’s this gargantuan girl in my class who kicks and bites and shoves
and is just obnoxious all day long—and I’m the smallest kid in the class so she’s made my life a living hell—can I have her
over to our house some afternoon?” On the other hand, I have, in my possession, a photograph of Pam Sweet and, indeed, every
other girl member of my kindergarten class, grinning over my sixth birthday cake. Pam has both front teeth missing, although
I’m sure I had nothing to do with that. Perhaps I was invited to her house as social reciprocity.

Pam Sweet had a playhouse of her very own.

She had a little brother, so her life could not have been perfect, but she had this beautiful, immaculate, physically independent
playhouse in the back yard where she could go and be anyone she wanted to be. I asked her what sort of games she played in
her playhouse, but I don’t recall her answer was particularly satisfactory. I believe Pam was a textbook girlchild of the
fifties. She played with dolls and she played house and she had a tea set. I suspect she did not have imaginary friends. She
appeared to be confused when I told her what an excellent jail her playhouse would make. None of this may be true, of course,
but I do remember having some difficulty finding a suitable game we could play together because hers were silly and she just
did not understand mine.

This may be why she took me upstairs in her parents’ room and asked me if I wanted to look in their dresser drawers. This
seemed odd to me. I had the most territorial mother in the five nearest states, and What Is Mine Is Mine and You Stay Out
was the number one rule in my household. I remember her offering the opportunity about the same way she might later ask her
guests if they wanted a cup of coffee, as if it were something all of her friends did and she was extending the invitation
to me as a good hostess. I may have done it, but my instincts are that I would have declined. I had been told to be good and
rifling through someone’s mother’s things was most definitely Not Good.

I am not sure how well the rest of my visit to Pam’s house went. I have no recollection of doing much of anything except discussing
her mother’s dresser drawers and looking at her playhouse.

That afternoon I spent at Pam’s house was probably in the spring. I have a very pungent memory of dampness in the air, that
faint green scent about everything, the insistent feeling of buds popping out and things rustling underneath the ground. It
may have been the day the Dairy Queen opened.

At any rate, her mother loaded us up into the car and we drove to town (something of an adventure for me, at the time— my
mother did not just frivolously “go to town”) to the Dairy Queen, where I had my very first chocolate malt.

I have a tendency to sigh while sucking down a chocolate malt, the kind of sigh I have discovered myself giving at other times
in my life having absolutely nothing to do with food. I think chocolate malts are God’s most perfect food and I’ve believed
that from the first taste of the first malt I ever had. I was nearly orgasmic over this malt.

It occurred to Pam’s mother, sometime during this incredibly pleasurable experience of malt drinking, that I had never had
one before. Which I had not. This seemed to tell Pam’s mother something, and while I was not entirely sure what it told her,
I began to feel like a little backwoods ruffian in the company of society folk. Her attitude toward me seemed to shift, from
a sort of reserve to a kind of she-can’t-help-it, she-doesn’t-know-any-better mien that I did not find at all comfortable.
I felt as if I had somehow been disloyal to my mother. I should somehow have arranged to have had a chocolate malt before,
so I could have been more prepared for my trip to the Dairy Queen.

I mentioned this later, after I had been taken home, to my mother.

It became clear to me, at the age of six, that Pam’s mother and my mother were not friends and never would be. Pam’s mother
was a social climber, I was told. We were not “good enough” for her. I should not take anything she said or did all that seriously
because she was a “snob” and my mother was sorry I had had to go through an experience like that. What I remembered of that
experience was a chocolate malt, which I was not even remotely sorry for having gone through, so perhaps some of that conversation
was lost on me.

I was never invited to Pam’s house again. Later a classmate told me this was because I went through all of her mother’s drawers
and her mother found me badly behaved. I felt guilty about this for years, although to this day I remember standing in Pam’s
mother’s room while Pam, the eternal hostess, is asking, “Do you want to … ?”

Pam and I may have become bored with each other. She was a wonderful girl—I am sure my mother would have been proud to have
had a daughter like Pam—but she and I had very little in common. I always liked her, all the way through school, and I made
a point of speaking to her at least two or three times a year as we passed in the halls. And she was always nice to me, although
I always had the impression that whatever I had just said to her bounced off one of her internal walls. That may not tell
you a great deal about Pam.

I still find it interesting that I was accused of a crime—a misdemeanor, at best, but a social crime, nonetheless—and I have
never been able to satisfactorily conclude whether or not I did it. Either I did it, or Pam lied, and why would Pam lie? She
told me one of our other classmates went through all of her mother’s drawers. Perhaps she was not a perfect child, either:
perhaps Pam, at six, went through an unfortunate stage when she told stories that weren’t true about other people. Perhaps
she was covering up her own complicity. I was certainly not the better child, so I am not qualified to judge.

But I can take the same memory, remember being just unreasonably happy, sitting in a car, holding a cold paper cup full of
something, and I can taste that something on my tongue and I can identify that taste on sheer memory. Chocolate malt. Mrs.
Sweet introduced me to heaven in a cup. Mrs. Sweet didn’t have to be my mother’s best friend.

I
WAS A SIMPLE CHILD
. I don’t believe it required any complex thought to understand anything I did. I liked my things where they belonged, I liked
my space respected, I liked my little sisters on the other side of my door. I was a Big Sister. I expected to be obeyed.

Recently during one of those intimate, sharing moments that sisters have, the Wee One admitted to me that when I was somewhere
else, she would run into my empty room and stand there. Just stand there. From time to time she stole small items she thought
were important to me, but for the most part, she just stood there. Apparently it gave her comfort to know she could orchestrate
her own death.

I walked through her room as well, easily twice a day, but that was because her room was the hall and both the UnWee and I
had to walk through it to get to our own rooms. Neither the UnWee nor I ever stole small items of victory from the Wee One.
We never saw any. The Wee One’s room looked like Anne Frank’s living quarters in 1941. Friends of mine, in transit to my room,
used to look around, frown, and say, “I thought you said your little sister lived in this room …” The UnWee and I always thought
the Wee One was neurotic, but it turns out she was just neat.