by Cheryl Peck
Still, I held my ground. It was not fair. I was the only child in the family with an assigned task that lasted, as near as I could tell, until the end of time. Not only did I have to drop my own life to baby-sit whenever my parents chose to go off gallivanting— which, since my mother was a square-dance caller and therefore a critical member of several square-dance clubs, they did every Friday and Saturday night—but I had to wash dishes every day for seven people.
S-E-V-E-N.
My mother, who cleaned house, did the laundry and cooked for seven people, was peculiarly unsympathetic. My lesser siblings shot away from the dinner table like rockets, on the off chance the responsibility might shift without warning.
I have a vague but persistent memory of the Wee One wandering out to visit me in my exile in the kitchen, apparently driven by the need to make useless conversation, and remarking, “I like to wash dishes, don’t you, Sherry?” It’s a wonder the child lived.
I have never liked to wash dishes. I don’t like to cook because it creates dirty dishes that then just sit around, needing to be washed. I do it now, though. Sometimes I even feign a smile and good cheer. I can washes dishes in about the same amount of time it takes anyone else to wash them.
Or, I can also make the task last all day, it just depends on what kind of mood I’m in or where I think The Man Who Hid in the Shed might be hiding now.
mother learns to swim
WHEN I WAS four years old my father took me to a large body of water and threw me in, and when I came up shrieking and grabbing for air he said, “Good—she can swim.” We have no idea how many children there should have been in our family. He only kept the five that were waterproof. The only non-swimmer in our family was our mother, who spent most of the leisure hours of our youth either back on shore, or in the boat, her hand welding their own grips in the gunwales as we raced and swooped around the chain of lakes where we played.
Our mother was a confirmed non-swimmer. She didn’t like to get her face wet. She hated to be splashed. She was happiest about ankle deep with a fearless toddler to guard, conveniently preventing her from coming out into the depths where the rest of us were. By the time the youngest among us was born, I was a certified junior lifesaver and the UnWee and the Wee One were both better swimmers than I was; we took it upon ourselves to free our mother by teaching the baby to swim. He was a large, happy, round baby who never talked until he was three and never walked until he was four—both because he never had any reason. Since he was carried everywhere he went anyway, he never seemed to notice he was in water. We would play with him until we became bored and then just float him like a small air mattress. When he started to drift away, someone would reach out and grab a foot or his hair and pull him back to us. The baby loved it. It seemed perfectly natural to us. Citing his continued need to survive his siblings, however, our mother signed up, at the age of about thirty-four, for swimming lessons.
This seemed fairly foolish to us. We had all taken swimming lessons. Every summer for as long as we could remember we had been thrust into our suits, issued beach bags with our names on the outside and our clean underwear to change into and a towel on the inside, and ferried to the beach for swimming lessons. Although I was not a lesbian at the time and would not become one for another twenty years, I learned to get my face wet voluntarily to please my beauty queen/lifeguard teacher, Delores. I would have dog-paddled to China for Delores. At the time our mother learned to swim I could swim the required ten body lengths under water and both the UnWee and the Wee One could dive off one shore of the lake and come up on the other. We felt qualified to teach.
Mom’s first lesson was to get her face wet. This is a huge stepping-stone for non-swimmers, but for children who dove out of the car, raced down the beach and plunged headfirst into untested waters, it was a difficult trauma to take seriously. I offered to look up Delores because she was such a fine teacher, but Mom took offense. She was embarrassed because she could not swim. She had, after all, watched us do it fairly fearlessly for years. This did not help our cause in any way. We would take her to the beach to “practice,” offer to dunk her ourselves, dissolve into gales of laughter over our own cleverness and then run for our wicked little lives. One just did not make fun of our mother.
Her second lesson that I remember was to float. After years of observation and experimentation, I have surmised that stick-shaped people float like rocks. As I have gained stature and dimension throughout my life, I have gone from floating easily to bobbing like a cork, and while stick-shaped people have to struggle to stay on top of the water, I now struggle to get completely wet. However, my mother was never a stick. All she needed, I assured her, was faith. All I needed, she assured me, was to go to the far end of the lake and float until I was blue in the face. Like fine wine, she would float in her own time. I pointed out that she was old already, which was received nearly as graciously as my offer to find Delores.
When she did float, she would stiffen like a board and slap herself against the water and then come up spluttering and swearing that it could not be done, that there was some peculiar physical property to her body that would not allow it to float. “You’re too tense, Mom, you need to relax,” we would reassure her as we all floated supportively around her, and then we would dive under water, where we were relatively safe.
Eventually, after much swearing, a lot of frustration and an occasional bout of tears, Mother became proficient enough in water that she passed her beginning swimming class. She could swim. The morning after she passed her test she woke up an expert in all forms of water navigation. She had confidence. I had no idea, she told me, what it was like to overcome fear at her age. I was young. I had never been afraid of water. I had no idea what she had accomplished.
And she was right: I had no fear of the water. I swam with the unquestioned belief that I could swim my way out of any situation. I had been dunked, I had fallen off skis and catapulted to the bottom of the lake, I had been dragged by a towrope once; and while each of these experiences had frightened me at the time, I still found myself baffled over exactly how anyone could drown. It did not compute. I took junior lifesaving, where our teacher patiently and repeatedly told us how dangerous drowning people can be, how even if we knew how to do rescues and we knew how to do them safely, we should always always ALWAYS stop and evaluate the risks before we dove in. What they taught me repeatedly in junior lifesaving is that the only thing more tragic than one person drowning is two people drowning.
To celebrate her new success and to practice her newfound skill, my mother took us to the beach. I wandered out to the diving dock and dove off, and was effortlessly floating in the water just beyond the dock, mulling over swimming out to the raft or just staying where I was. I was floating upright, like a cork, a position I could maintain for hours with just an occasional underwater sweep of my hand. I no doubt looked utterly relaxed. I may have looked like I was standing shoulder deep in water, although the water was about seven feet deep.
My mother called, “Look out, Sherry, here I come,” and ran and cannonballed into the water.
I had just enough time to think, “Why … ?”
Her head popped up out of the water right beside me, her eyes bugged, she went “Uhhhh …” inhaling half the lake, and she went under, and as she went, she grabbed me.
I grabbed the dock on the way down: had I been any farther away, I would have been in a fight for my life. Everything I had learned—and had practiced, repeatedly—about how to get out of the grip of a drowning person was erased with the initial shock. She grabbed me and shoved me underwater as she struggled to climb over me to reach the surface. The strength of her grip, the unreasoning, flailing force of her panic was superhuman.
I grabbed the dock, hauled her up to it, and managed to latch her onto it instead of me while she hung and coughed and spluttered and choked and eventually cleared her airway. When she recovered, she was furious with me. I had “tricked” her. I should have told her the water was o
ver her head. When I mentioned the incident a few years later as an example of how swiftly survival can become an issue in the water, she was angry again, claiming that I exaggerated, that she had never really panicked, that she would have been fine.
Mom became an adequate swimmer, but she never became the kind of fearless waterbabies that we were. She could tolerate it, but she never really liked to get her face wet. She reached a certain comfort level that assured her that if any of us got into trouble in the water, she could wade in and help us out.
And while I would never have taken that confidence away from her, it was she who taught me just how dangerous that assurance can be.
my ten most beautiful things
IN FOURTH GRADE I was an unfinished work. I loved school and, because I craved attention and approval, I did well there. I was a sponge soaking up praise and reassurance from any source that would offer it; while I was not a popular student among my peers, I was a chronic overachiever in the classroom. My specialties—and this had already been noticed— were those things that came most easily to me. The first time I ever genuinely broke a sweat over a textbook was in an economics class my junior year in college just after I transferred to U of M. The first fourteen years of school I majored in my Great Potential with a minor in Con Artistry. I had a way with words. It was—and remains—my sole survival skill, and it came to me perhaps too easily. It did not come, however, without a price.
I liked my fourth-grade teacher. She was that unfathomable age that all grade school teachers are, somewhere between parents and angels. She liked me. I had extraordinary luck with teachers all through grade school—I only had one who did not actively like me, and she tolerated me remarkably well. I was quite comfortable in fourth grade. I sat in the middle of the room, near the front, I raised my hand to answer every question, I loved going up to the board … I floundered somewhat in math, but I never expected to use it much anyway. I excelled in reading. I did well in a fairly useless class we had called “English.” I wasn’t even paying attention the afternoon our teacher told us we had to write a poem: the subject was to be My Ten Most Beautiful Things.
I did not pour my heart and soul into this poem. I diddled around in class, whispering to my best friend until we got caught, and five minutes before class ended I scribbled some stuff on my paper and handed it in. My poem was titled “My Ten Most Beautiful Things” because that was the assignment.
Our teacher was so impressed by my poem that she took me aside to tell me mine was the best in the class. She had me read it to the class. My class was impressed as much as any group of fourth graders are impressed by poetry. Our teacher told me she liked my poem so much she was going to have it PUBLISHED.
I went home and told my mom. One of my ten most beautiful things was “A cardinal overhead.” Another was “My mother in a new dress.” My mother liked my poem, too.
I particularly liked the fame and attention my poem gave me. It had been sheer accident and I knew it, but praise was praise and no one loved praise like I did. I reveled in it. I rolled in it like a dog in new grass. I would sit in class and think back on my poem and remind myself how incredibly—even if accidentally— good I was.
A few days after our teacher told me she was going to have my poem published, she called me aside and told me the school PRINCIPAL wanted to talk to me.
I was beginning to sense there might be no end to my fame.
The principal was substitute teaching in the sixth-grade class.
Sixth graders were gods.
There were no mortal beings on earth as important, as powerful, as awesome as sixth graders. After sixth grade they just fell off the edge of earth, into something called “Junior High” and there was no way of knowing what happened to them after that—but in my school, sixth graders ruled. To even be seen with a sixth grader could make you automatically more important: to actually know one was to touch the hem of God.
To report to the principal, I had to walk in on a class of thirty-five studying sixth graders, up to her oversized teacher’s desk, and still be able to talk.
She was expecting me. She told me she had read my poem.
I felt more confident; I was going to get more praise.
She told me my poem was very good.
I thanked her demurely.
She asked me if there were anything about my poem I would like to tell her.
I had scribbled that poem off in the last five minutes of class without giving it two thoughts; I would have been lucky to have been able to tell her what was in it, much less to share any in-depth thoughts about it.
She said, “This poem is awfully good for a fourth grader, don’t you think?”
I said, “What?”
She said, “Are you sure you didn’t just read this somewhere, Cheryl?”
I had not yet made the connection between poetry and Mother Goose rhymes—I had never intentionally read a poem in my life. On the other hand, I had just scribbled that work of art off in the last five minutes of class—in my fourth-grade heart, I had no way of knowing where the inspiration had come from and I did not, at the time, fully understand her question. I answered, “No,” but without the same self-assurance I had had when the conversation started.
She said, “Because I think you might have read this poem somewhere before, and then turned it in in class, not realizing that is stealing.”
I stood there, in front of thirty-five allegedly studying sixth graders, and I could not think of a word to say.
It had never occurred to me that there might be a penalty for being too good at something.
It had never occurred to me to steal a poem.
She told me that if I promised her I had written that poem by myself, she would take my word for it.
I promised her. I knew it was a trick, one of those adult things, and I knew she didn’t believe me, but hell would have frozen over before I would have let her know what I knew.
I went back to my fourth-grade class utterly crushed. I was convinced I had done something terribly wrong, but I could not isolate exactly what. All I truly understood from my conversation with the principal was that she did not believe that I was good enough. Single-handedly in a ten-minute conversation she had erased all of the confidence and self-assurance my teacher had spent the school year trying to help me build.
I went home and told my mother that the principal thought I had read my poem somewhere.
I understand all hell broke loose shortly after that.
My mother had no tolerance for thieves and even less for people who abused their authority, but God save the authority figure who unjustly accused one of HER children of stealing.
I understand an in-person discussion was held.
I was not invited.
It must have been an interesting discussion, however, because after it took place the principal was a stickler for discipline for every student in her school but one. Had I been just a little bit sharper or a little less bent on winning every adult’s approval, I might have made that woman’s life miserable for a good two years. She went out of her way to make mine uneventful.
My teacher had had no idea why our principal had wanted to see me and she told me personally that she would never have sent me if she had known. She took great pains to explain to me that the principal had been wrong and had behaved badly.
I was groomed for most of my educational life to become a teacher. It was, for the women who taught me, a safe, respectable way for a woman to make a living. As we boomer women were told over and over again, before the statistics finally made themselves felt, we could always count on nursing or teaching to support ourselves. I assumed I would be a teacher myself for a long time, but when it came down to taking those niggling education classes that were supposed to earn my bread and butter, I sat down and I had a long private chat with myself. I isolated a few facts I had been ignoring: (1) I didn’t like children when I was one. I’m not ready to sell them into slavery to pay off my taxes, and I do like the occa
sional bright child, but as a group—they are not my favorites. (2) I don’t really like teaching. I like having knowledge; I like showing off my knowledge; I even like sharing my knowledge; I do not have that selfless desire to see small minds grow. (3) Not a single soul who knows me has ever admired me for my patience.
I am forty-eight years old. Whenever I have written something I am particularly proud of, and I have shared it with a few friends who have admired it, and I have milked everyone around me for as much praise as they can possibly give, and someone less familiar reads it and that person says—as if surprised—You know—this is really good … I can still see those thirty-five sixth graders pretending to read.
I only had one teacher who truly did not understand children and I only had her for less than fifteen minutes. I know what a difference a good teacher can make.
moomeries
ABOUT A YEAR AGO my good truck Hopalong and I were cruising slowly along the gravel road that runs behind Southern Michigan Prison, hunting for deer, when I espied, in the road ahead of me, an escaped inmate. The inmate looked at me and slowly chewed whatever it is inmates chew. I looked at the inmate. He was way too big to be anyone I wanted to deal with, so I drove away immediately to the nearest State Police post (located conveniently right next to the prison) and reported that steer #43 had jumped the fence. He was now standing on the edge of the road ruminating about his newfound freedom. At the rate he was fleeing, I reported, they would have three or four hours to run out and catch him before he crossed the road. The officer thanked me for being a good citizen, showed me a map so I could pinpoint the scene of the crime, and said they would send someone out. I avoided the area for several days just to be on the safe side—I’ve met hostile Angus before.