by Cheryl Peck
In my mind I am still in my early thirties. When I say that, some women snort and mutter, “Yeah, right,” but they’re upstarts. Ambitious weeds in a field of old, established daisies. They still imagine that there is some time in their lives when they will feel like “adults,” when the occasional disfavor blessed on them by their parents will no longer faze them, when any situation that presents itself to them will have a clear and apparent solution. We won’t tell them the truth—it would be like telling them the ending of the book they are reading.
I grew older. More seasoned. Stable. I moved on into my forties a woman of calm disposition, a woman who had battled demons in her youth and if she had not won, she had at least broken even. And then one day my supervisor suggested I redo something I had already finished and I contemplated killing him. In fact, there was almost no contemplation to it: I exploded in a lava flow of fury and vitriol so intense the man literally dropped to the floor and belly-crawled to safety. I stood there, shaking with rage while this small, invisible child who is my conscience tugged gently at my symbolic skirt and murmured, It’s not all THAT, you know . . .
Beyond the occasional homicidal rage, I got out lucky. My Beloved, spurred on by the pathetic cries from her coworkers—more yam cream, more yam cream—tried hormone replacement therapy—which worked flawlessly for me—and developed such intense pain in her legs that she was virtually on crutches for a while. According to her doctor hormone therapy cannot produce the sort of symptomology she was displaying, although it began shortly after she began HRT and it ended shortly after she ended HRT. Her sister, who had a hysterectomy in her early twenties, endured years without estrogen in her system at all until her doctor put her on estrogen therapy: and then she developed breast cancer and he jerked her back off. In fact the whole question of HRT is a Sophie’s Choice of options: would you rather bet against cancer or heart disease? Is your physical comfort and sense of well-being worth genetically mutating all of the fish bred within your closed water system? Ten years ago HRT was judged “harmless.” Now that I’ve taken it for five years, doctors aren’t so sure. It “may” not be as effective as doctors once believed it to be. It “may” have more serious side effects than previously believed.
My father’s mother, who would not have acknowledged anything so earthy as her change of life, told me about bouts of near-suicidal depression in her mid-forties. She told me about being taken to the doctor who injected her with massive shots of vitamin B12 that left her wired and anxious and sobbing for no apparent reason. She was a woman who preferred to think of herself as a sort of ethereal spirit temporarily bound to a corporate form, the care of and needs of which were not the things that “ladies” discussed, so how much of her illness during this time was her life and how much of it was her change I have no way of knowing. Still, while she was always vulnerable to seasonal affective disorder, she appeared never to be as susceptible to paralyzing depressions in her later years as she was during her late forties and early fifties.
I’ve noticed lately that my sisters, who followed me fearlessly into puberty, are now showing signs of having tagged along too closely across the next great chasm. We would be the three women standing on the front porch in twenty-degree weather fanning ourselves. None of us currently own a decent winter coat—we’ve just never gotten round to buying one here lately. We amuse each other with stories about waking up at three o’clock in the morning and pitching all of the blankets off the bed, only to wake up later cold and curse the gremlins in the thermostat.
I lost my mind in the battle of the hormones. I joke that it probably fell out with all of the hair that was leaving my head at the time—or perhaps it was simply bleached colorless during the War Against the Gray. My bush acquired the same spindly legginess of an aging spirea. All of that missing hair and more sprouted immediately out of my chin, thicker, bolder, more resistent to styling and shaping than it had ever been before. But the thing I have come to miss most is the English language. I used to speak in full sentences. People used to enjoy listening to me as I told stories or recalled past events. I was funny. I was charming. I was not perpetually saying, “Oh, that . . . thing, you know—my friend what’s-her-name used to have one . . .”
Women older than I am assure me I will eventually recover my ability to use more than three words sequentially. I have doubted them in the past—sometimes it has seemed that I will never spontaneously remember a noun or a verb any more specific than “umm . . .” But there have been other predictions I brushed aside as being too improbable as well. For instance, I never thought I could ever feel this way again, I felt this experience was dead to me, washed away in the torrents of time, but yesterday a peculiar and persistent feeling came over me, seeping into my awareness, waking long-dead memories of younger, happier days. I had to think about it for some time, but eventually I identified this feeling: I was cold.
puppy love
when i was a freshman in high school I became the light in a young man’s eyes. I was oblivious to my own charms or their effects on others, and he was too shy to approach me. We were, I believe, attending a parade in downtown Coldwater when, utterly by accident, his family found themselves standing next to mine, and his mother told my mother that her son had a crush on me. I was dumbfounded, because I’d had no recollection of ever having seen the boy before.
Nonetheless, galvanized by his mother’s proclamation of his affections, he began seeking me out and involving me in awkward and self-conscious conversation. He made a point of being at my locker every morning about the time I got off the bus and he walked me to my first class.
We were seen.
One of the more popular girls in school, who had never had much reason to acknowledge me before, walked up to me and said, “I saw you walking in the hall today with your boyfriend while I was walking with mine.” Obviously I had taken the first step toward social acceptance.
I was never the belle of the ninth grade. While many of the boys were still growing, I had achieved my full height three years before they would. Nor was I ever slender. I had common mouse-brown hair that was baby-fine and prone to oiliness and that was never, never intended for the huge, poofy dos of the mid-sixties. I worked much harder at it then—albeit intermittently—but I wore it pretty much the way I wear it today, the difference being that now it just does what it wants to do, and when I was in ninth grade, it did what it wanted to do in spite of my best efforts to make it do something else. I had acne. I had a precocious vocabulary for a child my age and I had a reputation for reading everything and anything. Most of my peers assumed I was much smarter and academically more accomplished than I felt. My mother had told me I would never get a boy on looks so I had best work on my personality, but she had any number of complaints about my personality as well, so I had decided my only possible avenue of success was to wow the world with my intellect.
One gauge of this intellect might be that I believed, far past the ninth grade, that the way to impress a boy was to outsmart him.
I hardly ever dated.
My boyfriend—as almost everyone but me had come to think of him—was a six-foot redhead with acne and a dismal grade point average. He was a very nice boy. He was altogether taken with me.
I had power over him.
I could get him to do things for me.
If nothing else, his presence reminded everyone who saw us that someone wanted me.
I just didn’t want it to be him.
He embarrassed me. He was big and ungainly and seriously besotted.
And boring.
I kept telling myself that eventually I would learn to enjoy conversations with him, but I rapidly reached the point where I felt a little ripple of oh, shit pass through me every time I saw him coming. I spent what seemed like hours gazing with frozen fascination into his face, but all I ever saw was a very sweet boy I was going to have to hurt to ditch.
I felt horrible the whole time I walked the halls with him. I felt dishonest. I felt like I was us
ing him to gain something for myself, and I resented him because I wasn’t gaining anything worthwhile. And I was angry because I kept hoping he would discover I was significantly less wonderful than he thought I was and he never seemed to notice, which meant I was going to have to either die of boredom or break his heart.
I broke his heart.
I can still remember the expression on his face when I told him I didn’t want to walk the halls with him anymore.
I felt like I had just stomped a puppy.
To this day I remember two things from this experience: (1) how incredibly awful I felt because I could not like him back the way he liked me, and (2) that he was going steady with another girl three weeks after I dumped him. They used to walk the halls together. If she saw me, she would reach out and gently take his hand.
the tyranny of trees
despite my parents’ best efforts, I still tend to look at work much the way I look at a novel: it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end of work has always been of keen interest to me. How long will this take? When will we be done? When does this end? When I think about my father I think about those cold, crisp days of early spring when mud puddles are mushy and sharp, filled with melting crystals of ice, and there is the faint smell of leaves burning somewhere in the air. In my memory I am too small to keep up with him, so I am standing abandoned somewhere in the yard while he patrols his lawn, picking up fallen tree limbs, checking for mole damage and dead spots and winter ruts. We will be outside working all day until our noses run and our cheeks are red and when we finally come inside we will suddenly get cold and shiver for a long time before we warm up again.
When my parents bought the house where I grew up there were as many as six elm trees in the yard—big trees, in my memory at least, and old. And dead. Dutch elm disease had either just come through or came through just after we moved there. Whatever the timing, we spent the first few years we lived there cutting down elm trees, cutting up elm trees, hauling away elm trees, digging out the stumps of elm trees. There was also a fencerow around the garden that was filled with seedling trees, and there was a rough sort of junkyard behind the foundation of the old gas station where weedling trees like ash and poplar and self-seeding maple had grown up. We tore those all out. We hauled away all of the rocks and the trash and the broken glass from the junkyard. When we finished these projects my father’s lawn spread from the driveway to the gravel pit on the left side of the house to the fenceline just short of the pond on the right side and all of it was smooth and level and kept in neatly trimmed grass. We lived in a park.
For the first ten years we lived there my parents fought about trees. My mother questioned why they had even bought the property if my father intended to cut down “every tree in the yard.” My father classified trees according to their habits. There were “goddamned trees” like the walnuts that dropped bumper crops of hard green balls all over the lawn, choking the mower and eventually turning brown and staining everything they touched a dark mahogany that never comes out. We had a metal roof on the garage and every time the wind blew in the fall we could hear the walnuts drop like distant artillery. There were “those dirty trees” like the willows that dropped a sixth of their growth on his freshly manicured lawn every time the wind blew. There were the fruit trees—two pear trees, three apple trees—that lobbed rotting fruit all over the property. There was actually only one pear tree, but it had been grafted to grow two distinctly different kinds of pears. There were the big mushy yellow pears that fell on the ground and attracted bumblebees so that small children, banished to the yard to pick up pears, were always in mortal peril of being stung to death and carried away. There were the small, hard green pears, which only rotted on the bottom and thus made our hands sticky and yucky. We all hate pears. I hated picking up rotten apples, too, but we used the apples in our own baking and canning. We made particularly appealing jars of mud, peeled concord grapes (they looked like eyeballs), and little green apples that we presented to our mother every fall.
We all worked very hard to trim back the encroaching wilderness and make our yard our home. We owned seven-eighths of an acre and we push-mowed an acre and a half. We mowed the property behind our yard that leads up to the big pond. We mowed the little woods to the right of our yard and both sides of the driveway into the gravel pit behind our house. We mowed the grass in the ditch a quarter of a mile down the road in either direction. If it was green and it grew we mowed it. When my father fired up his mowing machine, neighbors all up and down the road jumped up to countermow their perimeters. My father was the gold standard in lawncare.
There was a time when I could have told you exactly how many trips with a 22-inch mower every section of that lawn required. And every year an adjoining blade of grass fell over onto our lawn and that too had to be cut and became a part of the weekly mow. My father eventually bought a riding mower, and some lesser sibling inherited lawn duty just when it could have been fun because I apparently took up too much space making turns. This defect has not handicapped me in my adult life.
We had cut down all of the trees my mother had not lashed herself to like some kind of demented Californian. “The spirit of the trees has chained herself to the walnut grove again,” I would advise my father, and he would just nod, surrounded as he was by crazywomen. I was bitter, therefore, when he began showing up with puny, spindly little maple trees all jammed into paper buckets.
I believe—I can’t swear to this—that there were nine of them, originally.
He loaded them all in the trailer behind our tractor and took them for a ride through our park. At odd intervals he would stop, pull one off the trailer, plop it down on the ground, and step back to study it critically. He would cock his head to one side and then the other. He would walk away four feet, stop, and whirl back around as if the tree had been thinking about sneaking out of some ill-defined task. He would set the paper bucket four inches to the right of where it had been, and then eight inches to the left. Sometimes he would just rock the bucket back and forth as if he were trying to screw it into the ground.
He did this with all nine trees, until in the end he had nine spindly, weakly little maple trees in paper buckets parked all over our lawn.
“Okay,” he said, and he wandered off.
“Well, that’s dumb-looking,” I said to my siblings.
“They’re going to be hard to mow around,” my siblings said to me.
“I don’t like it,” I agreed. “Something’s up.”
And indeed it was: it was my father with a shovel thrown over his shoulder. “You’re going to need to get a bucket of water,” he said to me.
This is the most misleading sentence my father has ever said to me, bar none. I believed, at the time I heard it, that for some unknown reason my father had determined he needed one bucket of water.
I found a bucket. I filled it with water. I hauled it four miles across the lawn to where he was.
He picked up my bucket and poured the water into a hole he had just dug. He handed the bucket back to me and looked expectant.
It took five buckets of water to plant each tree. His children were sprawled all over the lawn like spent slaves, but we had not yet heard the worst of it.
Those stupid little trees required five buckets—twenty-five gallons—of water apiece for the first twenty-five years of their life. It makes no difference whether you talk to me or the UnWee or the Wee One or our Little Brother or our Baby Brother, we will all tell you the same thing. Barely taller than five-gallon pails ourselves, we hauled those pails full of water five times a tree for nine trees every day, day in, day out, across mountains and deserts uphill both ways through droughts and dust storms and gale-force winds.
If you were to look at my father’s lawn today you would find a beautifully manicured park filled with lush, healthy sugar maples. One was killed by lightning, another rotted in the crotch and split, but most of them are full, mature trees. Beautiful trees. Sometimes we gather in my f
ather’s lawn, and someone—a newcomer—will comment on how beautiful my father’s trees are.
It doesn’t matter which of us answers, it’s always the same. We look at the trees, and we nod, and we mutter, “Water hogs.” And one more time we tell the story of the never-ending bucket brigade.
how i came out
i was browsing through my personal poetry the other day and I came across a particularly cranky one I wrote to a friend who was struggling with her sexuality. My friend had done everything she was supposed to do. She went to college, she got married, she had two children, she got divorced, she got a decent job, she fell in love with a woman. Wait. Women falling in love with other women is not on the “should” list her mother gave her. My friend was drawn to me because I was out, I was open about my life, and I would talk to her about the subject that had become the all-consuming passion of her life. I knew other gay women and I was willing to introduce her. On the other hand . . . I was out. I was open about my life. People knew about me. She reminded me of the need for discretion—at least in terms of betraying her “secret”—about seventeen times a day, and as a result I wrote a scathing poem to her (“we expect more from sisters”) which, as far as I know, she’s never read.