by Cheryl Peck
Which leads me to the subject of lawn mowers. My father the groundskeeper woke every summer morning to wander out into his yard and measure each blade of grass that grew there and the second one blade grew any taller than any of the others, he would say, “Cheryl—have you looked at the lawn?”
Being more a chattel really than a groundskeeper I could only remark that it seemed quite green to me.
“Needs to be mowed,” he would announce, and then he would go off to work.
I hated mowing the lawn as a child. I hated work as a child: but I hated mowing the lawn for two reasons. The mower. And frogs. The mower would never start for me. I could spend hours yanking the string, to have it cough, choke, splutter and die. I could kick it, swear at it, throw small stones at it, threaten it, yank the rope again … the mower would never start. If it did start, it would die two rows later and never start again. My father would come home. He would get out of his car. He would stretch. He would look around. He would purse his lips. He would say, “What happened to the lawn, Cheryl?”
I would answer, “The mower won’t start.”
He would say, “Did you put gas in it?”
I would always swear I had, although, in truth, that particular task would never occur to me because it was my father’s mower and my father never kept a tool without all of its required fluids in his life. I did not have any concept of how many fluids male tools need until some time after I left my father’s house when, one by one, all of my tools ran dry.
He would look annoyed, possibly because he had five children and two jobs and his oldest child was not even bright enough to run a lawn mower, and we would walk over to the offending mower, and he would look at it, check the gas, check some other fluid, walk all the way around it twice, and then reach out and pull the string and POOF!
The mower started.
I watched this ritual perhaps two hundred times before it finally dawned on me that lawn mowers are afraid of circles, much preferring straight lines, and they will do anything to keep you from walking around them that third time—even start, if need be.
So, having spent the entire day not mowing the lawn, I would now have my entire evening tied up in grass and I would trudge glumly along behind the mower, mowing frogs.
Frogs are curiously attracted to lawn mowers. They are apparently more hypnotic than car headlights are for deer. Perhaps it is the noise. Frogs will come from miles around to hop into the spinning blades of a lawn mower and be fileted, pureed and sprayed like fine pink mist all over the shins of slave labor. For the record, frog bones hurt.
As I drove this spring past the wetland where the frogs were singing mating calls to the frogs on the other side of the road, I was touched for a moment with nostalgia. What a delightful, primordial sound. It was almost like being home again, listening to the pop pop pop of those little frog bodies in the road.
mother/spirit
Sometimes
I can feel your will
lean in behind me,
your breath hot
on my cheek
as you whisper words
I can no longer hear.
The silence doesn’t matter.
Threatening/reassuring,
you always meant:
Remember me—
I’m right here.
batting a thousand
I WAS SITTING at the keyboard and Babycakes was sitting on my shoulder, half-asleep (both the cat and the shoulder) when an utterly silent shadow rippled across the room.
I thought, There’s a bird in this room.
Something was amiss, I could tell by the repetitive lashing of my left ear by the cat’s tail.
A large bird, I reflected, reviewing my memory, black and swooping—probably a rogue turkey vulture.
But I sat at my keyboard and the cat sat on my shoulder, and for the longest time nothing happened.
It’s all your imagination, I reproved myself. Perhaps it was merely a giant moth.
And at that exact moment, an utterly silent shadow swooped across the room.
The cat bolted off my shoulder, taking along small bits of my skin, and huddled down on the floor where he made himself into a small gold rug with big accusing gold eyes, which he trained on me, as if to say, What have you done now?
Circling my light like a drunken glider was a bat.
I know very little about bats now and I knew even less then. This bat was small and brown. (This observation is unusually precise. Experts in batology would have called it a small brown bat. I did not know this, at the time.)
When I stood up, the circle the bat was flying around my light became more elliptical, as if something large and horrifying had wandered into its radar. I looked around, but I never did see what it was.
I spoke to the bat. I said, “Go away.”
I walked over to the window, raised the screen, and posed, not altogether unlike Vanna White. “Here would be a good place to go,” I directed.
The bat switched the tilt of his ellipse from one side of the room to the other. Beyond that I could see no real change in his behavior. He swept past me once, dangerously close to my hair, which I interpreted as an act of aggression.
I may have shrieked.
(Once. It was one of those girl-instinct things that sometimes gets the better of me.)
I went back to the other side of the room, beside the keyboard, and waited.
The bat stopped circling. He had thrown up some subsonic invisibility ray to disguise his whereabouts.
I looked expectantly at the cat.
The cat looked disgusted and bathed a wild hair.
I thought to myself, leave the screen open, close the computer room door and go to bed—when you wake up in the morning, the bat will be gone.
Or, thirty thousand of his closest friends will be partying in the computer room. There will be stale beer and corn nuts all over the keyboard, small drunken aviators will be hanging upside down from the curtain rods …
Bats are good, my conscience lectured me, don’t do anything to hurt this innocent little bat.
So I closed the screen, closed the door and snuck myself and the cat out of the computer room and went to bed.
In the morning the bat did seem to have vacated the premises.
The following night I was sitting at the keyboard with a sleeping cat on my sleeping shoulder when an utterly silent shadow rippled across the room.
The cat lunged off my shoulder, taking most of my right arm with him, and hid under the desk.
“That’s it,” I said, “I’m done—get out of my house.”
And I went for the tennis racket.
(We will take a moment from our narrative to allow all of my personal friends to finish turning to one another and murmuring, “Cheryl Peck owns a tennis racket?” I do. I stole it from the Wee One because I could see no reason why my little sister should own a tennis racket when I didn’t. I don’t play tennis, but then again, I might. Besides, she quit playing right after that.)
My plan was simple, but well organized: I would swing the tennis racket, knocking the bat out of the air into a small trash can I held in the other hand. I would then slam the tennis racket over the top of the can, constructing a makeshift jail long enough to carry my prisoner downstairs and outside to freedom, where he would gratefully fly away.
The cat at my heels was just insurance. Somewhat wimpy insurance, judging from the cowering crouch, but I assured myself that once the bat had stopped, it would look to the cat like what it looked to me—a flying mouse. The cat has never been out of the house and mice have never been in the house, but I trusted fervently that instincts would burst into play at the appropriate moment.
I swung my tennis racket. I caught a solid draft of sheer air, nearly knocking myself off balance, while the bat circled around and swooped just over my head.
I waited, muscles tensed for action, instincts honed, my heart pounding with the lust to kill: I swung again, nearly decapitated the cat, drove my own knee for
cefully into the trash can as I stumbled forward, and I cursed myself for every tennis lesson I never took.
On the third swing I knocked the bat out of the air onto the ground, where it twitched twice, attached itself to the grid of my tennis racket and began crawling up the handle. Swiftly, possibly shrieking (for only the second time in my life), I scraped the offending creature into the trash can, where it hung upside down, still glued to the racket. All three of us thundered down the stairs to the front door where a passionate discussion ensued concerning who can go outside and who cannot. In the meantime, the bat was shaking his battered little head and beginning to stir. The cat would not give up: he would go outside and oversee the release of the bat, or no one would go outside. He glued his back to the door, his paws spread, nailed against the door like a tiny hairy Jesus figure.
I explained that if he had been a proper cat, he would have caught the bat, eaten it and I would never have had to deal with the situation at all.
He spoke to me about the lure of the wild life, the faint perfume of wanton females in the wind, the sheer testosterone of hunting and killing his own food.
I set the trash can on the floor, its inmate twitching erratically against its mesh caging.
“Okay, so perhaps not,” huffed the cat. He flicked his tail at me and stalked with great dignity into the kitchen.
I carried the bat outside and released him.
Or, at least I tried.
I waved him toward freedom.
The bat remained glued to the tennis racket.
I waited for the scent of freedom to call him.
He wrapped his wings around his head and pretended to be dead.
To the bat I said, “Give me back my tennis racket.” For, having used this racket to play one game of tennis in the thirteen years it had hung in my basement stairway, I was loath to leave it outside, unattended, in the wind and the weather to warp and perhaps be destroyed.
“Get off, get off,” I wailed, and began dancing the hopping, puppering whines of the terminally mature.
The cat poked his head through the curtains to see what I was up to, and then went away.
I scraped the bat off my tennis racket against the stone flower box on my front porch not unlike the way one would remove peanut butter from a knife blade.
“Die there, then,” I tossed as my parting shot.
The bat, batted and bewildered, cat-threatened and smashed and trashed—and, very likely, hungry—gathered his tiny bat wings up, shook them off, staggered a few steps down the flower box, then gathered himself together and flew unsteadily off into the sunset.
I suspect he warned his friends.
Fear the mighty dyke that lives in that house, he told them all. That woman has a shriek that will foul up your radar for days.
the chicken coupe
I DO LOVE PRESENTS and there is a special place in my heart for Christmas, but as a child my favorite—all-time, hands-down favorite—holiday was Easter. When we were very young all three of us girls were made brand-new Easter dresses, a tradition that dwindled down gradually as it became clear we never went anywhere to wear them, and even clearer that—except for that doll-loving sissy, the Wee One—none of us even liked dresses all that much. However, the new dresses took care of that perpetual gift-giving foolery, clothes. I was never deeply enamored of the idea of getting clothes as a gift. A “gift,” to me, was something wonderful and exciting and new and especially mine. It seemed a given, to me, even at an early age, that one way or another we would get clothes: to wrap them up in pretty paper and put a ribbon on them seemed to me to be cheating. But by Easter we had already gotten the clothes, so there was not much danger of rushing downstairs in the morning and finding our baskets full of underwear or more frilly little dresses to wear to school.
No, our baskets would be full of candy.
Chocolate.
I loved chocolate.
There may never have been a child born who loved chocolate more than I did.
Every Easter, in my basket—dead center in my basket—would be a big, molded something made of pure milk chocolate.
Solid chocolate.
Rabbits made of chocolate, most often.
The Easter I was six, the molded milk chocolate in my basket was a chicken.
I was ecstatic. It was a very large chicken, by small child standards, and therefore it was a great deal of chocolate. It looked so good I began drooling the moment I saw it. I was overwhelmed by chocolate lust.
Even as an adult I do not have a great deal of restraint when it comes to chocolate. Delayed gratification has never been a strong goal for me. As a child I had almost no restraint. Every year my mother gave me a huge basket full of Easter candy, and every year my mother took it away from me again at least by noon because I saw no reason to have a huge basket full of Easter candy unless I could sit right down on the floor and eat the whole thing. I do not have a “full” button that lights up and tells me to quit eating. I do not have an “enough” button that ever lights up for anything. As a child or an adult, I can literally eat until whatever I am eating is gone. I may be uncomfortable later, but at the time there is nothing to warn me of the coming consequences.
As a child I could not bring myself to believe there could be any bad consequences from eating anything so good as chocolate.
I was, however, extraordinarily proud of my chocolate chicken, and I said to my mother, “I’m going to take this over and show it to my Gramma Peck.”
I had a mission.
It was a mission with a flaw, but a mission nonetheless.
So I did not eat my chicken while we were all piling into the car, because I was taking it to my Gramma Peck to show it to her.
I did not eat my chicken during the six miles around Randall Lake, around Swan’s Curve, or through the farmlands before and after Hodunk. We turned on Stancer Road and I did not eat my chicken as we passed the millpond and drove by the Electric City Mill.
But somewhere between the Electric City Mill and the corner of Stancer and Adolf Roads someone bit the head off my chicken.
I was horrified.
All that work, all that restraint, all that suffering and self-control … all for nothing.
I had nothing to show my grandmother but a headless chicken.
A chicken decapitated by my own greed.
I began sobbing hysterically.
“What on earth is wrong with you?” my mother checked from the front seat.
Holding up the evidence of my moral failure, I sobbed, “I bit the head off my chicken.”
There are those cherished moments in life when parents are reminded of the simple truths of childhood. This was apparently not one of those moments. “Oh, for Chrissake,” my mother said supportively and turned back to face the front.
So sobbing, huge tears running off my cheeks, I clamored into my grandmother’s house, held up my headless chicken, and confessed, “IwantedtoshowyoumychickenbutIatetheheadoff (hic) …”
My grandmother said, “Was it good?”
And indeed it was.
maiden voyage
THE SUMMER I MET my Beloved, she took a month off from life and went to Alaska, where she and two friends paddled kayaks around Prince William Sound.
The summer I met my Beloved, I took a day off work alleging I was ill and sat on the couch eating junk food and watching ’70s cop-show reruns on TV.
We have never been a perfect match.
The following summer my Beloved bought a kayak and a 20-speed mountain bike. Every day I would talk to her on the phone and every day she would tell me where she rode that morning before work. Every day I would share with her that I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower, threw on some clothes and once again made it to work without actually, technically being late. It occurred to me, sometime during that second summer, that my Beloved wakes up, ready to move and talk and function—nearly ready to sing—in the wee wee hours of the morn. Before the worms have had their chance to turn. Befo
re the early birds have begun thinking about their breakfast. And she would then don her biking gear and take off for adventure and discovery and … pleasure.
This led, of course, to our first fight, which had something to do with distance. She told me one morning that she had ridden about five miles that day to a particular dam and back. Now, according to the odometer on my truck, when I reached that dam I was twelve miles from her house. One way. This lent new and dark meanings to such enticements as, “Oh, come on—we’ll just go for a short ride.” In my biking prime, practicing faithfully, going to the gym religiously, I had worked myself into such a state of fitness that I could ride my bike twenty-five miles in one day before turning scarlet, wilting like old lettuce and needing three to six hours of sleep. This meant, of course, that a “short” ride with my Beloved was a mere 35–50 miles round-trip. A mere teasing of the biking muscles. A “warmup,” as my sports physiologist/sadist/torturist might say.
I recalled for my Beloved my favorite bike ride—it may have been the last—which took place in mid-September, during the blooming of some unseen and undiagnosed allergen, which sucks the oxygen from my asthma and leaves me huffing and puffing in the dust. They SAID the ride was 25 miles. I carry an odometer on my bike for just such misrepresentations. I rode along with a friend for 25 miles, stopping to gasp and wheeze and apologize every mile or so, until at one point we abandoned our bikes on the edge of a particularly scenic hay field and planned my funeral. We rode 25.5 miles. We rode 25.75 miles. One of our beginning-of-the-ride companions drove past to encourage us and tell us breezily that the ride had bored her so she had taken the 40-mile route. I mentioned that—according to my bike—I had already gone 25 miles—which was all I had signed up for—and the finish line was not visible to my naked eyes.
“Oh, no, it’s about five miles up,” our friend said cheerfully, “and that last two miles is a killer—wind, you know …”