by Cheryl Peck
I felt very cool and righteous when I wrote that poem.
Being in the throes of creative genius, I probably had just momentarily forgotten the book I threw against the wall on Waterman Avenue, or the two hours I spent driving across the state to visit a bookstore so I could walk in the front door and right on out the back. Or the twenty-odd years where I lived a completely schizophrenic life with my gay friends on one stop on I-94 and my straight friends on the other. Coming out may be a process, but I had pulled my life together: she needed to shape up.
She was struggling because she had a grown child who had made vaguely homophobic remarks. Imagine letting a small thing like your offspring hold you back from being all that you can be.
This is how I came out. I have to remind myself of this from time to time because I am apt to rewrite for myself a much more courageous past than the one I lived.
I was fat, I was socially inept, I had zits, my mother told me I would never finish anything. I wanted more than anything else to be a writer and my mother told me I would starve on the street because no one wanted to read the dark and depressing melodramatic dreck I wrote. (She did not actually use the word “dreck.” What she said was, “Sherry, why does everything you write have to be so dark? You have a wonderful sense of humor, why don’t you show that once in a while?” She obviously had no understanding of drama.) The last thing I needed in my life was to wake up one morning a lesbian.
In fact, I was not a lesbian. I didn’t even like the word. (As a sort of lingering denial, I misspelled it for years.)
No. I was a writer. I had a perpetual cast of imaginary people in my head, going about their own lives, which were always more dramatic, meaningful, and intense than mine. One day, for no obvious reason, my main imaginary character fell in love with his best friend.
Imagine that. I was so creative that I was having male-on-male sexual fantasies in my head. It had nothing to do with me, of course, because I am not male . . .
. . . But it did pique my curiosity, and I decided I needed to research the peculiar direction this character had (autonomously) taken. (Did I mention that these imaginary characters who live in my head have the bad habit of becoming just intensely, passionately fascinated by issues that six months later would become unexpected issues in my own life?) The first thing I discovered was that almost no one had ever written a book about gay men.
I went to my local bookstore, where I found two books: Burn in Hell, Pervert and We All Live a Long, Long Way Away.
I determined that perhaps the bookstore where I was shopping was too small, so I went to Ann Arbor. I went to college in Ann Arbor, where I vaguely remembered something called “gay and lesbian dances.” I had always wanted to go (we have no idea why) but none of my roommates had ever agreed to go with me. Now, as it turned out, I should have gone, because I could have been doing research for my book. (For my main male character who, all of his own accord, had gone gay on me one day and started boffing his best friend. Try to keep up.)
I found a book that was a kind of travel guide for gay men. It was titled The Gay Insider. It was written under a pseudonym by this amazingly charming and enthusiastic young man who traveled all over the United States checking out the gay hot spots (both of them) at the time. He was funny. He was delightful. I sat right down to write him a letter. I wanted to tell him how much I enjoyed his book, how I had achieved a new understanding of the trials and tribulations of gay men, how I felt he and I had forged, through his book, a common bond, which was that he was a gay man and I was a straight woman with an imaginary male character in her head who had gone gay one day for no good reason. (Much the same way cider just turns into vinegar, I would imagine.)
That letter went to hell in a handbasket. That letter was twenty-three pages long and it was still explaining why I (of all people) read his book in the first place. The warm glow of kinship had flared up in my face and burned out, I was mad at the author, mad at myself. I was furious with my main character and his flexible sexuality that had gotten us all into this mess to begin with. I snapped, “I am NOT a lesbian,” and threw the book against the wall.
I could prove it.
And I sat right down, and I wrote a concentrated, distilled, intentionally lesbian story. I picked out every lesbian impulse I had ever had and I exaggerated it, intensified it, threw it on the floor, and jumped on it seven times while wearing boots. I wrote a story about a dyke.
(I am a creative writer. I write fiction. I can write anything I want to write.)
I wrote a short story about a woman going to her best friend’s wedding.
I wrote the first honest, frankly biographical short story based on my own life experiences I had ever written. The main character was in love with her best friend. She didn’t want to be. She did everything she could to deny it, she would have died rather than admit it. But reading that story, it was remarkably clear what the conflict was. Unlike the other three times I had tried to write the same story, casting myself as a man, and the story made no sense at all.
It took me three weeks of conscious practice to use the word “lesbian” in a sentence that did not also include the word “not.”
It took me six months to make a deliberate effort to meet another lesbian.
It took me twenty years to get so cool with my sexuality that I could fault a sister for asking me to deny part of my identity to protect hers.
The process of self-acceptance is never-ending. A few days ago my editor sent me a review a bookseller wrote to publicize Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs. The bookseller had written, “Cheryl Peck is a fat, lazy lesbian from Michigan who doesn’t care who knows it . . .” I took immediate offense. I turned to Babycakes and I snapped, “How dare that man call me ‘lazy’?”
walking home
i was driving home from work. I was tired. It was a cold, rainy day following too many cold, rainy days that have stood between me and a warm and welcoming spring; it was damp in the truck and slick on the highway, and as I rattled up to a busy intersection of two one-way streets, two two-way streets, and the railroad tracks, there—in the middle of this frantic man-made mess—was a dog. Probably not an old dog, but unmistakably a tired dog. A dog with sore feet and aching muscles and a slight limp. A wet, tired, lost dog who looked up at me in the middle of the road and ripped out my heart.
I had stopped for the light: I opened the truck door and tried to tempt him into my truck, but he looked at me warily and then ducked his head and padded determinedly into the path of three more lanes of traffic. And my light changed.
Frantic, I drove through the intersection and around the block, picked the wrong road back, drove in another wild circle, and ended up parked in front of the train station. Abandoning the truck, I set out on foot to find him, half expecting to find his freshly killed body on the highway. But he had made it across all three lanes and was sitting in the grass beside the road like a weary traveler who has gone as far as he can go.
I tried to walk up to him, but he dragged himself up, stared at me a minute, and then started walking again.
I called him, but he ducked his head and trudged along, keeping just about the same distance between us.
I felt awful. My imagination kept running off on riffs of what it must feel like to be lost and homeless in the middle of a world that makes no sense. I wanted to take him home (to my dog-hating cat) and give him shelter (in my cat-hair-coated home) and perhaps a decent meal (cat food?). I imagined how my life might be changed by the addition of one small (fifty-pound), bedraggled traveler. (I could give up my social life, re-home my personal dog-hating cat herd, all without ever addressing issues like housetraining, previous owner location, and where on three-fifths of an acre one keeps what looked like many parts of a golden retriever/Saint Bernard/Lab mix.)
I did give up. Although I was/am not convinced it was in his best interest, I allowed him to choose not to be adopted by me. Perhaps he went home.
Perhaps.
give me a head with h
air . . .
we were waiting for our port-a-pit chickens to roast when I first saw her. I didn’t pay much attention to her at first because I was hungry and I had begun to suspect that the port-a-pit chicken roasters were inexperienced in the art of port-a-pit chicken roasting and there were not enough hours left in the day for my port-a-pit chicken—for which I had already paid—to achieve anything close to the state of roastedness. I was hungry (never a good way to begin) and I was bored, because there is nothing quite like waiting for something you have already guessed you’re never going to get. What brought my attention back to the little girl was the girly-girl flip of her long, luxurious hair. She would tip her head back almost like a dog being butt-scratched, and I realized she was feeling her hair flow down her back. Because it was acquired hair. A fall. She was about eight years old and someone had pinned about a four-pound ponytail to the back of her head—she was in girly-girl heaven.
About the only thing that ever appealed to me about being a girl was long hair. Long, thick, glorious hair cascading down my back if I so chose. And I did so choose. My Grandmother Molby had never cut her hair—never—and every night she would sit down at her dressing table and unbraid her hair until it hung all around her like a gossamer curtain from the top of her head to just gently touching the floor. And she would comb it. I knew that if I could just convince my mother to stop chopping mine off, people would stop saying things like, “She’s . . . he’s . . . a cute little thing . . .” I didn’t mind being mistaken for a boy, but if I had to actually be a girl I wanted the perks that went with it. The only perk I could see was hair.
I was born bald and I stayed that way for at least two years. I had about seven strands of babyfur, which my mother painstakingly formed into two little curls on the top of my head for every photograph she had taken of me. The babyfur was blond, but when actual hair grew in to replace it, it was almost exactly the color of a well-stirred mud puddle. It was baby-fine. It grew quickly. It grew long. It almost—but never really—curled, which means it bent here and there, and about five strands of it, gathered together like a delinquent gang at the back of my part, stood straight up.
The other thing my baby-fine hairs that almost but not quite curled did, and did with a vengeance, was form tight, unforgiving wads around the base of my hairline. I didn’t care: I had hair. But my mother had no patience with my nascent dreadlocks. I came to turn pale and wobble off like a belle with the vapors whenever I saw my mother coming toward me with a hairbrush, and I suppose some people might have assumed she beat me with it, which wasn’t true. She brushed my hair with it. She would wind that brush through my hair, get a good, solid hold on the snarls along my neckline, and rip them out by the roots. I would shriek and scream and wail and the next thing I knew I had another bowl over my head and my mother was scissoring off all of my hair. “If you can’t stand still and be quiet and get your hair combed, then you can’t have long hair,” she would lecture me, as if there were an obvious choice somewhere in that.
I may not have had a long, flowing mane of hair during the daytime, but at night, in my bed, I knew exactly what to do. I would slip quietly out of bed, creep up beside the UnWee’s crib, and nab her baby blanket, ripping it out of her still clenching and unclenching little fingers. (I often thought she should have been a cat.) I would beat it back to my own bed, and there, in the privacy of my own fantasy, I would drape her baby blanket around my head, tie it with a scarf, and I had it: thick, thick, thick, long hair. It came to my waist and beyond. It weighted down my head, it flowed down my back, it was soft and . . . black, where I was (pale pink, to the untrained eye). I was a fair young maiden on a ship, flirting demurely with pirates, or an Indian princess . . . I probably would have worn my created hair to school, left to my own devices, but once again my mother stood in my way. Get that rag off your head, Cheryl . . .
Because there was danger that my life might have passed without trauma, the haircare industry invented home perms. “Perm” is short for “permanent,” and the first home perms rivaled pestilence and disease in the damage they could inflict on a child’s head. First I had to wash my hair, and then I had to rinse my hair in some chemical solution that removed its will to live. Then I was tied to uncomfortable wooden chairs in the kitchen, covered with a drop cloth, given one small handkerchief to save my eyes, and told to sit still. My mother would soak little sheets of paper in some ammonia solution, pick out four strands of my hair, wrap it in the paper, and then twirl it around little plastic bones that she secured to my head by driving them into my scalp with her thumbs. The ammonia solution would leak down my forehead toward my eyes, and my job was to mop without moving. Once all of my individual hairs were wrapped in bones, she would douse my head with yet more ammonia solution, wrap cotton around my forehead and in front of my ears to keep my face from scalding, and then she would set the stove timer.
I was not allowed to move while the solution perked on my head. I could probably have talked to my mother, had she not wandered off to do laundry or something equally boring.
When the timer went off she would come back and rinse my entire head, and then she would pour a neutralizing solution over it, which—with any luck—would stop the burning. Then she tore all of the plastic bones out of my head, sorted out the papers, and rinsed my hair some more. Even at that, as I remember I could not comb my hair or do much of anything but sit around with a towel wrapped around it for another hour or so while it “set.”
In exchange, my friend could tell I’d just gotten a new perm for five days based on the smell in my hair alone.
My hair responded to a perm by not so much curling as becoming . . . crinkled . . . in texture. What it did was frenetic and intense, but it bore only a passing resemblance to a “curl.” Other girls I went to school with had mothers less skilled in the art of torturing their daughters, and their hair fried. Their overpermed hair turned brittle and lifeless in color, and often all they could do was wait until it grew out.
I fought with my hair most of my life. I grew it long as an adult, only to discover I didn’t enjoy combing out the snarls around my neck any more than I’d enjoyed having my mother do it. And while each time I grew it out I imagined that this time it would be thick and sleek and my inner beauty would begin to break out . . . It never happened. I have a great many strands of quite fine hair, but the difference between a lot of nothing and not much of nothing is not all that obvious. My life became much calmer when I understood that my hair almost always does about the same thing, and the easiest solution was just to let it do it. I’m almost never mistaken for a little boy anymore anyway.
I never did get my port-a-pit chicken. It was a fund-raiser, put on by good-hearted people trying to do something nice to support a friend. We had somewhere else we had to be long before that overcommitted chicken would have been done, so we let our cooks know we were leaving, left our money as a contribution to the cause, and went on. But I still think back fondly of that little girl with her fine, thick, borrowed hair. It makes me wonder wistfully whatever happened to that wonderful blanket . . .
after the stroke
We sold my father’s truck
(automatic transmission,
independence,
personal freedom
all standard options,
no extra cost)
because he could no longer
see well enough to drive,
and because none of us
wanted his battered reason
making decisions on the road.
Still, somewhere in my mind
there is his big black truck
with four blankets neatly folded
in the back (for padding
and hauling) and six two-by-fours
all cut exactly the right length
to stabilize the rototiller;
his little wooden box collection;
the rubber band that held his maps
the extra pair of sunglasses
perpetua
lly thrown on the dash;
and the John Deere baseball cap
that hung in the back of the cab.
This was my father.
This was my father: since then
we have taken him apart,
dismantled him one piece
at a time. Discarding
the trappings of his life
to save it.
crackers
i have learned any number of things about my friends long after the fact—or, not necessarily about them, more about what they really think of me. I will be cruising along in a relationship, quite comfortably ensconced, and we will be reminiscing about the first time we met and my new, comfortable friend will laugh and say, “You know, the first time I met you, you were really being a bitch.”
Imagine watching my jaw drop.
Yet, it’s happened again.
I have no recollection of such bitchery. We were all to meet for dinner at my house and one contingency of the crew was (because it’s tradition for lesbians) late. I am one of the few card-carrying lesbians I know who can actually sit down and calculate what I need to do before I arrive at a selected location and how long these combined tasks will take, so that my truck and I arrive at the chosen location on or just slightly before the precise clock stroke originally agreed upon. If my friends tell me to be at their house by 6 p.m., I will be there by 5:55. Ready. With gas in the tank, money in my pocket, and (and this is the bone of contention) every firm belief that my friends will be equally present and prepared to begin our adventure.
I was once identified as the weak link on a camping/ biking/stargazing trip because I lived so far away, and I was reminded several times that I needed to arrive at the departure location precisely at 6 p.m.—earlier if I could—because we had miles to go and promises to keep. I arrived at my friends’ house at 5:47. One had driven away to perform some emergency recycling, and the other was pondering their as yet unpacked suitcase. I’m sure those thirteen minutes made all the difference. I spent an hour and a half sitting on the curb, whimsically thinking about all of the wonderful last-minute emergencies I could have tended to in my own life, those mere sixty-five miles away, had I only realized that “By six at least—earlier if you can” meant, “Oh, give or take, about eight.”