Revenge of the Paste Eaters

by Cheryl Peck

  During the random dawnings of the light Babycakes was still small and oddly haired, and every now and then his back end overran his front end and dumped him in clumsy heaps on the linoleum. He was barely as tall as my ankle. At odd moments of the day or night he might turn into a faint pink streak that galloped from one end of the house to the other, making more noise in transit than the average dump truck.

  I was standing in the kitchen one night after exercise class. Perhaps I was trying to bring normal color back to my face. A faint pink streak roared through the kitchen, out onto the porch, vaulted onto the exercise bike, crawled like an inchworm up onto the bike seat, s-t-re-t-c-h-e-d his fine gold self between the seat and the handlebars, and began batting savagely at the light string. By the third swat, the light came on. The cat fell off the bike, shook himself off, and sauntered out of the kitchen as if to say, “So there.”

  Occasionally guests would come to my house, admire my decor, and laugh when they saw my exercise bike on the back porch. “So this is where you work out?” they might tease.

  “Actually,” I would answer, “we use it to turn on the light.”

  And they would stand there, looking at my bike. Occasionally the more curious might reach out and just experimentally touch the light string, as if expecting some sort of invisible challenge.

  The cat would walk over to his dish and sniff.

  victrola blues

  my grandmother molby was probably in her sixties when she began her life as a nomad. I believe she was driven off her farm (belatedly) by the Great Depression, or the fear of the next coming depression, or the election of a Democratic president—whatever compelled her, sometime in the mid-1950s my grandmother packed up my grandfather and all of their worldly goods, left the farm where they had lived for thirty or forty years, and went house-shopping.

  When my grandmother moved (and I presume it was my grandmother who moved—once she made up her mind something was going to happen she had a gift for “fussing” about it until all opposition got out of her way) she moved everything they owned. She moved the Victrola, which she stored in the new barn across the road. She moved the solid brass bed that she later sold to an antique dealer for five dollars, she moved the marble-top tables that she sold to the same man, she moved the artwork she had done as a child . . . she moved everything. My grandmother survived the Great Depression: she was not a woman to throw anything away.

  They could not have moved because the house was too big or the farm too hard to manage, because they moved to a bigger house on a bigger farm out on M-86, west of town. While I remember their house on Michigan Avenue (and there are photographs of me as a child taken all around it), it is the house on M-86 that I associate with my grandmother. It was a big old two-story house with weathered shake siding, a big, long stone porch, and some of the most beautiful woodwork I have ever seen. It had pillared, built-in bookshelves between the living room and the dining room. It had a glorious staircase. It had bay windows in the dining room. It had a see-through wooden china cabinet with cut-glass windows as the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. It had forced steam-heat baseboard heating that always sounded, when I slept upstairs alone, like Jack the Ripper was coming for me up the stairs. It had four bedrooms upstairs, but my grandparents immediately built a bedroom and bath for themselves on the main floor. In the upstairs bathroom there was a claw-foot tub I could climb into for my bath and I could barely see over the sides. I loved the house on M-86.

  Between two big cement gateposts there was the lane that went back to the back fields of the farm. This was a two-lane dirt road, perfect for exercising my imaginary horses. I fought many fierce battles of the Wild West on that road. When I went to my grandmother’s house I spent hours under the pignut tree probably half a mile from the house. I battled evil or was evil, depending on my mood at the time. I robbed banks and trains, held up saloons, fought with noble Indians, and hanged myself without mercy. I was a self-entertaining child: it was not the absence of other children my age that ever caused me problems when I was a kid.

  When I wasn’t racing up and down the lane, I was sequestered upstairs in the privacy of an old saloon hotel. The upstairs was uncommonly suited to that fantasy because the stairway came up the back wall and then circled around, and the hallway was open, the railing looking back down the stairway—just like an old Western hotel on television. My grandmother must have gone up there, because there was never so much as a dust mote anywhere, but she left me to my own amusements when I was staying with her.

  Very little of the time I spent with my grandparents was spent with either one of them. My grandmother routed my grandfather out of bed at 7:30 every morning (it was time to make the bed) and he would dress, shave, have breakfast, and then go take a nap in his rocker in the living room. If I happened to wander through before he had dozed off he would have me sit down and then he would regale me with tales of the railroad. He worked for the railroad all through the Depression. He was a professional train rider. He had started out in a different position, but as the Depression dragged on and more and more people were laid off he was bumped from one job to another until finally his job consisted of getting on the trains and riding from here to there to somewhere else (he knew all of these places by name) and then in a week or two coming home. This was apparently a nuisance, and he was glad when the Depression was over. He used words like “the Chesapeake and Ohio” or “the Nickelplate,” Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Gary, and Chicago. His voice reminded me of Clark Gable, so almost anything he said sounded significant, but his ramblings about the trains and working for the railroad were the most boring lectures I had heard in my short life. I would be a near adult before I would reason that if people paid to ride the trains, it was unlikely the railroad had hired my grandfather to do it.

  The house on M-86 was a beautiful house, but it was hard on my grandmother’s nerves. They lived there for twelve years, and survived eleven traffic accidents in their front yard. Headed west on M-86, approaching my grandmother’s house there was a sharp curve that was improperly graded and required a certain attention to detail to navigate. Late at night, coming home from the bars, drunks in particular piled into the cement post at the end of the lane, or climbed one of the two trees in the front yard with their car, or missed her yard but wound up across the street (also her property) in front of the barn. One missed all of the other obstacles and ran across her lawn and into her stone porch. Adventures like these were simply another attraction for us kids, but our grandmother became convinced that sooner or later someone was going to get killed, and she couldn’t bear it. (We all wanted to be there.) She was also acutely aware of how long it took the ambulance to reach her house, and she worried about my grandfather’s heart. I don’t know that there was anything wrong with my grandfather’s heart, but she was never one to stanch a worry when she could just as easily fuss. Eventually she decided to move him into town, where he would be closer to the hospital.

  To achieve this end, she began “sorting.” Out went the brass bedstead. Out went the marble-top tables. My grandmother owned a lot of beautiful old antique furniture, but she was not a strong admirer of antiques, and since they meant little to her, they were not, in her estimation, worth very much. I, on the other hand, was raised by people who fondled the grain of their wood, who looked for those little wooden blocks in the corners of drawers (they mean something), who admired dovetailing and quartersawn oak and bird’s-eye maple—I have never liked modern furniture.

  And I have always loved music. Hidden safely in the corner of an unused haymow was my Grandmother Molby’s old Victrola. It worked. It had 78s, it had extra needles. The sound was a little scratchy, but there must have been easily twenty records. To run it, I had to wind it up by hand, and when it began to wear down, it played slower. It was roughly four feet tall and perhaps two feet square. It was made out of polished walnut—the cabinet alone was beautiful.

  My grandmother decided it was “worthless” and needed t
o go to the dump.

  I begged. I cried. I pleaded. I wanted it, and I wanted it badly.

  My mother noted that I didn’t have anywhere to put it. I noted that I lived in a room that was 14-by-14 and hardly cramped.

  My grandmother said, “You don’t want that dirty old thing.”

  I established I did want it. I offered to clean it up, although I couldn’t see what was “dirty” about it. I gave it my best shot. And I was not a stupid child: I knew it was a collector’s item, I knew it stood a good chance of being worth good money someday.

  But my grandmother had decreed it “dirty” and dirt is the kiss of death.

  “You don’t need it,” my mother said, knowing full well who could fuss the hardest the longest and the most.

  And off the Victrola went to the dump.

  The house on M-86 is still there. The orchard is gone. Someone enclosed the stone porch with aluminum and sided the house with pale green aluminum siding. Every now and then my Beloved and I drive by it on our way to family reunions and she sticks her fingers in her ears as we go around the last curve. I don’t think it’s “godawful green,” she’s been known to say. Perhaps they own it and they can paint it any color they want. Browsing through old photographs recently I found a picture of the house on M-86 in all of its old glory, which I showed to her triumphantly. “This is what it used to look like,” I crowed.

  “Well, it doesn’t now,” my Beloved replied cheerfully.

  It’s not true that I have a hard time letting go of the past. From time to time I go to antique shows and I stop and price the rare Victrolas I find there. I just like to know what being the least stubborn of three generations of women cost me.

  winter kill

  The crocus are back

  braving the cold,

  their single efficient stem

  jabbing skyward, their single

  efficient bloom curled gently

  around their sex.

  Crocus are tough plants.

  Last year

  the crocus were blooming

  as I stood on the river’s edge

  where Dan put his garden,

  dead leaves and blooming crocus

  under my feet, the river racing

  with all of spring’s fury

  below me. He lived

  in such a wild and beautiful

  place.

  It was a hard winter

  for AIDS patients.

  These are not Dan’s crocus

  and this is not Dan’s garden

  and this spring

  Dan will not be coming back.

  boxes in the attic

  when i was a little girl—five, perhaps—one of my mother’s friends from high school stopped by our house on her way home from church. I had no idea my mother had any friends before me so I was fascinated, but I was quickly shunted outside to “play” with her daughter. I don’t remember anything about this child except she was wearing a white dress, and I only remember that because it got me into trouble. Our family did not go to church. I never wore white dresses on Sunday (or any other day of the week, if I could help it). To amuse the daughter of my mother’s friend as I had been directed, I invited her to climb down under the back porch and visit my new puppies. They were wonderful puppies as I recall. Six of them, all different variations of black-and-white mutt. Each one of them had a name because I was a responsible and dedicated puppy-keeper. My intentions were unsullied. My motives were pure. Unfortunately, the black dirt under our back porch was neither, and the resulting damage to that white dress was blamed not on the little girl wearing it but on me.

  Who understands the logic that runs through a small child’s mind? By the time I was six something dark and hideously wrong had tangled itself around my soul. (Not necessarily as a direct result of the puppy incident.) I believed I was bad. Not just mildly bad, not just poorly behaved at times: I believed the very core of my being was rotten, that there was nothing that would fix it, nothing that could make it better. This belief in congenital, inextricable baseline evil followed me through my childhood and into my early adulthood. It automatically negated anything good or positive or supportive anyone might say about me and it dwelled obsessively on even the slightest hint of moral defect. I believed that no one loved me. I believed that no one loved me because I was inherently evil and did not deserve to be loved. If they did love me, it was only because they did not know me well enough. If you really knew me . . . Most of my childhood was spent wading through dark and endless interior monologues about not being loved, not being understood, not being worthy of love or understanding.

  It was my fault the little girl’s dress got dirty. It was my fault I threw a rock and hit my kid sister in the head. It was my fault my parents argued or I got sick and they didn’t know how to pay for a doctor or I asked for something that was frivolous and foolish when there were other people in the family to think about. My parents reminded me almost daily of how irresponsible and selfish I could be, while I recall my childhood as one of just endless, unrelenting responsibility. And I was not worthy. I was not strong enough to hold my world together. A better child might have been, but I was not that better child. I was the bad child. A failure.

  I was also a fat child. I was too tall for my age, clumsy and awkward. I remember sitting at the kitchen table trying to eat my lunch while my mother told me how miserable her life as a fat child had been, how miserable mine would be when I moved into junior and senior high. I had the power right now, she told me, to change my life as she had not been able to do: and if I failed, kids would tease me even more than they already had. Boys would never like me. The cool kids would ignore me. She wanted to spare me that humiliation, my mother would affirm as she burst into tears. All she ever wanted was for me to be happy. Somehow not only my size but also my failure to find happiness was added to my long list of personal defects.

  Somewhere in the fantasy that passes for greater truth there is the Perfect Child in a white dress who never gets dirty, who never uses bad words, who sits with her knees together and her hands folded neatly in her lap. She is the child I never was and the child I should have aspired to be. She is the child so perfect that even when she does get dirty it is not her fault. I never wanted to be her. Hell, at her age I didn’t even want to be a girl, much less a well-behaved, well-mannered, excruciatingly clean girl. Still, she existed, the model against which I was judged and against which I have never measured up.

  It is amazing what we find buried in old boxes in the attic. I had forgotten all about her. I had forgotten I ever even cared.

  But I did.

  Apparently I still do.

  This spring a long-lost friend reappeared in my Beloved’s life. “You have to meet her,” my Beloved said cheerfully, eager to share with me her glow of reconciliation, and so the three of us met. Her friend—we can call her Susan—is about five feet four. She has blond hair. Blue eyes. She is a size six. She is bright and entertaining and a person for whom appearances are obviously important. This is my judgment, not hers.

  Appearances are important to all of us: we have varying standards of how we need to appear and what we expect of others, no one standard superior or inferior to any other. And the problem that arises between Susan and me is not what Susan expects of me, but of what I presume Susan expects of me—I have a stuck throttle when it comes to what I call “little people.” The fact that Susan and my Beloved were childhood friends, the fact that their relationship has been through any number of transformations . . . none of that bothers me. What bothers me is that Susan is small and cute and blond and she is my enemy.

  She is the little girl in the white dress who was so perfect that it was my fault her dress got dirty.

  I expect that was not the lesson my mother wanted me to take away from that event. I expect she was just trying to teach me to stop and think. My instincts tell me she was embarrassed when her friend’s previously immaculate daughter came crawling out of the black dirt under ou
r back porch. I would imagine at that moment comparisons between the two children present would have been inevitable.

  And it is not that that particular event was remarkable to me at the time, or even later, so much as it seems to symbolize what was wrong with me and how I lost my rightful place in the world. It identified for me an enemy. Someone I could blame for what I felt I’d lost, however vague and ill-defined in my own mind that “loss” might be.

  It is exactly the same thought process that results in racism or sexism or ageism. I am a sizist. I, who lobby endlessly (at least in my heart) for the equal rights of people of size, am predisposed to distrust “little people.” I expect they will judge me harshly. I expect they will reject me. I approach relationships with them with carefully guarded expectations and one foot perpetually aimed for the door. You can’t trick me into liking you—

  I know what you really think about me.

  In truth, Susan has never been anything but kind to me. In truth, if Susan weighed forty more pounds I would probably embrace her as an equal. This is not a characteristic I admire about myself. Nor is it one that follows any true line of logic. I have known women of size who are more critical of other women of size than any small, “perfectly” shaped woman would ever think to be. And I have known small, delicately shaped women who never think about size much, one way or the other.

  At some point in my life I looked at my reflection and I said to the person standing there, Suppose this is all there is? Suppose this “temporary” weight gain of ten or fifteen years never meets that long-anticipated burst of dieting self-discipline? Suppose you are going to spend the rest of your life fat? Do you want to spend your life fat and miserable? Or could you convince yourself you are a self-loving woman of size?

  And if all you ever changed in your life was your attitude about it, whose goddamned business is it anyway?