by Cheryl Peck
I said, “So I have already ridden twenty-five miles, and they lied about the length.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said blithely.
I slammed that bike on the carrier on the back of her Jeep and jumped into the front seat.
“I guess she’s done,” Blithe Spirit observed.
I grew up on the water. The song of a red-winged blackbird calls home to me. I dislike canoes because they’re tipsy and with my compromised sense of balance they lack that feeling of security that the living room couch provides, but kayaks are lower in the water. You can actually touch the water, which has long been a bitter complaint I’ve held against other boats. Were you floating leisurely down a river in a kayak and were you attacked by a tree, you could reach up and push the offending foliage aside without guaranteeing you and your partner would be touching the water within the second. * And in kayaks there is no “partner.” No one behind you in the boat, shifting and bobbling about, shouting orders about the “other paddle” or “your other right.”
For a long time I allowed friends to convince me canoeing down the Pere Marquette River near Baldwin was fun. I became something of a legend for my skill and prowess in a canoe. My friend Bob admiringly admitted he has never heard anyone shriek so loudly or so long over so little. He has told many a fond tale of our adventures, and he has assured me with great affection that we will remain friends forever as long as I never crawl into his canoe again. Not that Bob is in any great danger of sneak attacks.
In the interest of togetherness, sharing and mutual water love this spring I bought my own kayak. My Beloved and I took it home. Stored it in my Beloved’s shed next to hers. From time to time we would go out and admire it. Never one to rest when there is more to be done, my Beloved insisted we actually take them out in the water.
So I launched my new boat.
I put my right foot in.
I took my right foot out.
I put my right foot in and I waffled all about …
While my Beloved kayaked up and down the shoreline offering encouragement and loving threats of death and dismemberment, I contemplated my body, which is large and awkward and stiff and slow-moving, and those various qualities of water I have long loved … it’s fast, it’s slippery, it’s wet …
In a mere thirty-five minutes I had tucked my ample behind into my kayak and was paddling in firm circles around the pond.
After a little more direction and encouragement from my Beloved I began pursuing straight lines across the pond—and we were off.
The Hoffman Pond, which we had chosen for our maiden voyage, is, in many places, about a foot deep. It is gently lined with lily pads and staunchly guarded by a small flock of killer swans and a hundred or so Canada geese. I was paddling peacefully through the lily pads, doing my best to avoid the swans, when the bottom of the pond exploded against my hull and nearly plunged me into the drink.
Ever alert to my most subtle mood, my Beloved called, “What are you screaming about now?”
“The pond is exploding,” I reported. “Part of it just came up and slapped my ass.”
“Carp,” she said.
A few paddles farther upstream it happened again. Carp—those exaggerated colorless goldfish that grow to be the size of small whales—were busy with the business of spring under the lily pads and whenever I floated over one (or two), it would lunge and flop and bang against the underside of the boat. I am not entirely certain how carp do manage the business of spring and I was hoping fervently that they were not trying to do to my boat what they were doing to each other under the lily pads. Nor, apparently, can one count on the common sense of a carp to avoid future collisions. I swear one struggled out from under my bow and slammed headfirst into the stern.
Still, it was a beautiful, calm evening on the pond. Swans eyed us beadily, but had not yet swept their wings out for a full attack. The water birds sang, a very faint breeze licked coolly against our skin, the sun was beginning to set …
I had found the perfect sport.
I loved kayaking.
I could kayak all day.
Ahead of me my Beloved shifted restlessly in her own boat. “So, Cheryl,” she called back, “were you thinking of starting to paddle anytime soon … ?”
clean sheets
You’re back, I see.
It’s been awhile.
I heard you’d been living
with some woman
further south—
not the one you dumped
for me, or the one you dumped
me for, or the one you left
both of us to have—
a new one.
One I never met.
You do love your
clean sheets.
a cover story
MY SISTER (the UnWee) and I slept upstairs. We were the only ones. Every night we kissed our mom and dad goodnight (giving up all hope of ever seeing them alive again) and climbed up those dark, creaking stairs into our dark, creaking rooms— hers in the hall, mine even deeper into the attic than that— leapt over the child-eating monsters that snaked out from under our beds, burrowed down into our covers and waited as our parents—the wardens—turned off the lights. We were imprisoned in darkness for the night.
I was terrified of the dark.
I was afraid of the shapeless, scurrying things that ran up and down the walls of our old farmhouse, and I was afraid of the huge, way-too-close things that banged against the walls outside, and I was afraid of the dark, silent swooshing things that flew through the air after the lights went out (“There’s a bat in here!”), but I reserved my deepest and screamless terror for two things: The Man Who Lived Behind My Bedroom Door, and The Book.
The UnWee remembers The Book. She slept even closer to it than I did.
The irony of all this is that we couldn’t just tell our mother we couldn’t sleep upstairs because of The Book because we weren’t supposed to know it was there.
We’d snooped.
We were bad once (okay, so we were bad twice, or maybe three times or four or five—RELATIVELY we were innocents) and our punishment was years of nights, night after night, of lying there, in the dark, waiting. We knew The Book was there.
Sooner or later, it would get us.
Our mother loved to read and our house was full of books. Not rows of matching leather-bound tomes filed in stately wooden shelves—our mother read paperbacks and she kept her library in grocery sacks. She apparently knew other people who read as well, because every now and then women would come to our house and there would be this mad, exciting exchange— not of individual volumes—but of BAGS of volumes. Agatha Christie, Mickey Spillane, Victoria Holt (she must be 110 by now), Henry Miller and … I can’t think of his name—he wrote at least twenty books about rich people who dabbled in politics and (ate carrots) like bunnies (ah, yes—Harold Robbins) … romance novels, spy novels, detective novels … They all had one theme in common—sex—which I discovered quite early in my reading career (being naturally curious about such things) and I spent any number of secret hours during my teen years looking for the books my mother had determined were not fit for me to read. She read voraciously and she acquired so many bags of books that she had to find places to put them until the next group of book-starved women came along.
There is a peculiar inherited gene in our family that (apparently) lies dormant until the women conceive and then vaults like Tipper Gore out of a Morally Upright birthday cake and drives them to Make the World Safe for Children. My mother read Tropic of Capricorn while the local women’s club was drawing up a petition to have Henry Miller drawn and quartered in the adult reading room of the public library—but let MY virgin little fingers touch that book and you would have sworn seven HIV-positive transvestites had just tried to shake hands with Jesse Helms. It was this gene that caused my mother to sort her books into two piles: those suitable for small children to peruse and those that would corrupt our mortal souls.
(Did I mention that my young
er sister and I were the only two people in the family to sleep upstairs?)
This same gene caused my mother—normally a sane woman—to pack up all of these corrupt, unclean, filthy, sexually explicit X-rated seducers of the Innocent Youth of America and store them
upstairs
in the storeroom
and say, “Don’t come in here.”
This mysterious, unknown storeroom full of … things … that we had never seen before, belonging to—who knew?—and barred from our curious explorations by … a doorknob. And an order. “STAY OUT.”
And it was effective. Our mother would get into the car to drive a mile down the road to the store and the UnWee and I would race up the stairway and burst into the storeroom to explore.
The storeroom was dark, sealed into eternal gloom by the heavy dark green shades that were drawn over the windows all of the time. It had a kind of musty, abandoned smell. I remember there was a dresser and in one of the drawers of the dresser was a tube of scarlet lipstick that somehow escaped, smeared all over our clothes and got us into a peck of trouble. In the corner, all but hiding behind the door like The Man Behind the Door in my own room, was this H-U-G-E dark green two-doored wooden storage-thing that held (among other things) my grandfather’s Knights Templar uniform, which was mysterious enough for a seven-year-old. And in this darkened room, behind the door, in this huge green closet-thing, in a grocery bag—on top of the grocery bag—was The Book.
They don’t make books like The Book anymore. It was a ’50s thing. A crowd of terrified men and women (all in suits and ties/dresses and heels) ran in all directions from this huge EYE that peered down at them from the sky.
We took one look at that horrid thing and we knew we were doomed.
We weren’t supposed to be in the green thing.
We weren’t supposed to be in the storeroom.
We didn’t even know what that eye-thing was, but it saw us, and it knew where we had been, and we knew in our hearts that the next time it got dark that eye-thing was going to crawl out of that bag, out of the green thing, out of the storeroom altogether and come after us and it was going to do … whatever inexplicable thing it was already doing to all of those terrified, overdressed adults.
If memory serves me correctly—and it doesn’t, always—I believe I actually summoned the courage to read The Book when I was older. It may have been titled The Day the World Ended and it may have been a fairly insipid sci-fi tale about how the earth narrowly avoided being eliminated by some extraterrestrial terrorist organization when Our Scientist sneezed and then sprayed them with salt water … or maybe not. I think I remember that it was an incredibly bland story for such a horror-inspiring cover, that I had spent years cowering from some inner fear I could not begin to articulate and after I read the book, I just felt silly.
When the Wee One moved upstairs she was lodged in the hall and the storeroom was cleaned out and it became the Un-Wee’s room. I never saw The Book again. I can’t prove this, but I think she said to herself, “I’m not living in this room with The Book.” And she killed it.
thinking of you
He will jump up
and settle into my lap,
a low purr in his throat,
the occasional nail-stretch
gripping me
as he gazes, eyes half-closed,
across the room.
His whole body will arch
under my hand, absorbing
contact while he hums,
muscle and throat,
and for each stroke
he presses harder
until we are nearly
one.
Touch me, you said,
the way you touch
your cat.
truer confessions
I HAVE ALWAYS PRESENTED my childhood as if it were nearly idyllic, five happy siblings gamboling hand-in-hand across waving fields of grain with nothing on their minds more serious than a herd of homicidal cows. The truth is much darker and more difficult to face. I was horribly abused as a child. I was forced to wash dishes.
Every day.
Whether I wanted to or not.
I have friends who have been irrevocably scarred by experiences like mine, friends with their original character broken, their brains washed and filled with foolish adult mantras such as task assigned/task completed. I alone stood up solidly against this kind of brutal conditioning. My hands are soapy, but unbowed.
I held fast to the belief that my mom could tell me what to do, but there was always the chance that I could drive her to that final moment of surrender when she would swear under her breath and mutter, it’s just easier to do it myself.
We all develop our own survival skills. Mine was dragging out a task into slow, torturous frame-by-frame motion that seemed to take forever. It could take me as long as four and a half hours to wash supper dishes for seven people. My father used to wander out into the kitchen and just stand in the doorway, scowling at me, as if he were utterly baffled. A task assigned/task completed veteran, it was inconceivable to him that anyone could drag out a simple task that long—or would even want to.
My mother would say cold, manipulative things like, “You know, Sherry, if you would just buckle down and GET IT DONE, you’d have time to do the things you want to do.”
By most accounts—certainly by any you might hear from my siblings—I was an odd child. I spent most of my childhood wandering around in the gravel pit behind our house where I made up stories in my head about my imaginary friends. I certainly preferred this to reality, a perception which seemed to pester my mother to no end. I spent so much time in the company of those who were not there—and so much of it walking—that I wore regular paths all through the gravel pit where I walked and retraced my steps, back and forth and back and forth again. My only living companion was a black cat, Bugles, who perfected the art of weaving back and forth between my feet so that we walked in perfect synchronization, sometimes for hours.
By my account, the only form of amusement that ever seemed to present itself to my lesser siblings was to sneak down into the gravel pit and hide behind rocks and giggle when I walked by. Sometimes they would push a young one out of hiding and the child would look at me goggle-eyed, then scowl suspiciously and demand, “Who are you talking to?”
I did not simply walk. Particularly dramatic moments might make me leap forward or break into a short run. I waved and gesticulated. I was a gunfighter, a swordswoman, or the fearless captain of some rocking, storm-tossed galleon. My imagination was a cross between mental movie making and a one-person theater, so that I spoke aloud—or at least whispered—my particularly moving lines. I suppose it is remotely possible that someone merely looking on, without any real appreciation for the creative process, might, in a nonsupportive moment, have labeled such a performance “crazy.”
Not that any of my siblings did so to my face. For one, I was bigger than they were. Our parents occasionally left us alone and then they were at my mercy. I rarely beat them up and I sometimes even remembered to feed them, but I have no recollection of being a particularly warm or friendly big sister and it was probably clear to them that I liked them best when they were somewhere else. From time to time the Wee One would materialize through the mist that I preferred to have surrounding me and she would frown solemnly, in her much-younger way, and say, “Cheryl … you know when you’re walking around down in the gravel pit … who are you talking to?” As if there were a simple, logical answer to that question.
As it happened, my tradition of taking long walks with invisible friends worked in quite well with my dishwashing routine. All water in our house drained into a somewhat temperamental septic system, so we were barely allowed to dump the dirty dishwater down the drain, much less scraps of food or peelings or skins. So each evening I would fill my dish tub with hot, soapy water, soak the glasses and carry a plate to the back of our yard where we threw our garbage over the bank. I scraped the plates one plate at a time. If a pa
rticularly dramatic storyline unfolded itself mid-scrape, I might walk the same plate back and forth several times while I played with the threads of my plots, or unknotted a particularly tangled characterization.
I did this less often in the winter than the summer for two reasons: (1) my father, the groundskeeper, responded poorly to finding paths worn into his lawn and they showed more when they were worn into snow, and (2) it got dark sooner.
As soon as it got dark, The Man Who Hid in the Shed got his powers. He could leap out at any time and snag an unsuspecting dishwasher and God only knew what happened after that. The possibilities lurking in the gravel pit after dark, for a child with an imagination as vivid as mine, were overwhelming in their sheer number, much less their scope. Sometimes they would just loom up out of the darkness and overtake me like a particularly virulent genie.
More than once my father would be standing in the kitchen, wondering idly how many children he really had and whatever happened to the one who used to wash dishes, when the back door would fly open and his oldest child—carrying one plate— would fly through it as if she had been chased the last forty feet by a pack of rabid wolves. Her eyes would be wide and frightened, her breathing would be labored, her cheeks would be a deep scarlet, as if she had been outside in the cold for perhaps hours, for some unknown reason she would be carrying one dinner plate and a spatula.
This man and this child hardly ever spoke to each other and they never spoke of these things. The man never spoke because she was over the age of six and under the age of twenty-five and therefore a total enigma to him. The child never spoke because she had been told he knew everything, saw everything, had a firm opinion about everything and all of these impressions and opinions just happened to coincide exactly with impressions and opinions of her mother. They were a united front, her parents, of one opinion, one mind: and since he was not all that talkative, she had no real conflicting information. She would not know for another fifteen years that when he shook his head and walked back into the living room to watch television it was not disapproval as much as blind confusion, nor would she understand for those same fifteen years that he was no more like her mother than she was.