by Cheryl Peck
My grandmother was a wealth of information about the community where I grew up. I had only to point to a house and she would frown and say, “I don’t know who lives there now,” and then she would tell me everything she knew about the five families who had lived there before, whose son had been killed in World War II, whose daughter married a Catholic and was never seen not pregnant again, whose second cousin had married that so-and-so boy and was living in the white house down on the corner of Behnke Road and Wherever Street … She told me about the little ten-year-old girl named Mary who was playing in the barn, swinging on the rope between the hay lofts and who fell and died; she told me about taking care of her father when he was old and infirm and not himself; she told me about driving the horse-and-buggy when she was a kid because her mother didn’t like to. She told me that before the war she drove a “big old Buick” that was so high off the road she once drove over a full-grown pig and both the Buick and the pig survived. She told me her mother owned a photography shop when my grandmother was a little girl in the 1890s. She told me about the cats she had had in her life, Buster and Teddy and Timmy. I don’t remember the stories she told. Fragments. Pieces here and there. What I remember, in retrospect, is a sense of connectedness and of history. A complex interweaving of people and lives and changes and luck and hard work and courage that winding in all around each other made up a family and beyond that, a community.
Always a woman concerned about keeping busy and being useful, she was more than anxious to be on her way when she died at the age of ninety-four. I find her memories in curious places. In the faces of poppies … The scent of a rose … But her stories are buried in my heart and every now and then as I go about my normal life a proud old cat who died before I was ever born will brush against my leg, or a big old Buick will run over an angry and ruffled pig and I will look up and find myself standing beside a coffee grinder, inhaling the strong, nostalgic smell of fresh-ground coffee—and once again I am five years old and doing my trading with my grandmother at the A&P.
litter string
THERE IS A GOLD PAW hanging out of the fan box. It is July, 110 degrees in the shade, his Mommy is sitting in the direct path of the floor fan in front of the computer where she is sipping iced tea by the half gallon and thinking wistfully of the lake and Babycakes is napping inside the fan box. He needs his shelter— the only rooms in the house that are even TOLERABLE with all of this stifling heat happen also to have those big, noisy boxes in the window that shove wind across his delicate whiskers and ruffle his coat …
He is uncommonly fond of boxes. When he was young he and Mommy played a game called “Seal the Box.” Mommy would remove the lid from a big plastic box and Babycakes would jump in and make himself at home, then Mommy would put the lid on top of the box. He would wait patiently because he trusted his Mommy and soon she would remove the frustration and he would jump out … stretch … and jump back into the box. He once played Seal the Box at a party Mommy gave for her friends. Mommy sealed him in the box and then went where the air changes. Babycakes waited patiently. When Mommy came back, a small circle of her close, personal friends had gathered in around the box and were saying things to themselves, like, “Do you really think she put him in there?” “Can he get any air?” “My wife would kill me if I did something like that.” Mommy removed the frustration and—with the slow, methodical grace of a born ham, Babycakes stood up, stretched, and stepped daintily out of the box … He spent the rest of the party helping the guest of honor unwrap birthday presents.
Babycakes loves wrapping paper. Last year when Mommy came home with boxes and began hiding them all with wrapping paper, Mommy gave Babycakes an entire roll of his own. She said, “Play with this before I kill you,” which is Mommy’s way of saying, “You’re the best cat I’ve ever had, Babycakes, and I love you more than life itself.”
Babycakes loves string, although string can turn on you. String just hangs there, taunting you, wriggling its very tip to entice you from time to time … A long piece of string Mommy hangs from her window attacked Babycakes once, wrapped around his hind end, and followed him under the coffee table, around the leg and back around another leg, all the while squeezing Babycakes tighter and tighter, making him very unhappy that he had ever played with that string at all. Before the string attack, there were strings hanging from every window in the house, but Mommy went around and tied them all up in knots that Babycakes can barely reach anymore. However, she was kind enough to hang some strings from her coat, which he understood were for his pleasure. She tied one to her nightgown once too, but something happened to it.
She hangs long, wide strings from the wall in the room where she keeps her litterbox as well, but once Babycakes tried to help her play with that string and she howled and told him he was the spawn of Satan. Mommy is touchy when she’s in her litterbox. Babycakes used to like paper bags. They were exactly the right size for his being. A young cat could curl up inside a paper bag and sleep to his heart’s content, while outside Mommy would wander the length and breadth of the house calling, “Babycakes … Baby-cakes …” When he had concluded his work he would step out of his bag, yawn and shatter Mommy’s nerves. This was great fun for a young cat, but one day he stepped out of his bag and it followed him. He stepped again: again the bag followed. This seemed wrong to him, so he decided to leave—but the bag filled up with air and began making horrid, terrifying flapping noises, and still IT WENT EVERYWHERE HE WENT. He ran right, he ran left, he did his best leaps and turns and turning leaps, and still the blasted bag followed him and at that moment, that nanosecond that contained the greatest terror of his life, his own MOMMY grabbed him by his perfect coat, forced him to lay down AGAINST his will and said, “You stuck your head through the handle, stupid.”
No one had EVER called Babycakes “stupid” before.
It was all the bag’s fault.
The only good bag is a dead bag.
The best ones to kill are the plastic ones Mommy fills with trash and then ties at the top—if you catch one just right and run and jump on it hard enough, sometimes it goes “Poof!” and makes a lot of bag noise. Then Mommy says bad words and comes and puts it all in another bag.
But best of all Babycakes likes boxes. He likes boxes with an open door. He likes boxes of all sizes, but he loves boxes that are just a little bigger than he is. He balls up inside his box with his head—or just one paw—poking out, guaranteeing free egress, and he does his most serious work of the day. And he needs his rest, because Mommy doesn’t understand life at all, and if it weren’t for him, she would never catnap and she would sleep ALL NIGHT LONG!
A good Mommy would let him play with her soft, white litter string.
She’s very lucky to have him.
She should probably stop threatening to throw him out with the trash.
fat girls and lawn chairs
DUE TO THE WEAR AND TEAR of aging, I have lost half an inch in height. I have mourned that half an inch because—in my mind—it was the half inch that kept me from being as wide as I am tall. Back when I still had this half an inch and thought of myself as tall and lithe, I happened into a mall bathroom where, as I emerged from the stall, a teenaged girl was scowling critically at her reflection in the mirror. Disgusted with herself, she grasped the roll of fat that was hanging disgracefully over the belt of her size four jeans and she wailed to her friends, “I am SUCH a cow …” And then she saw me. That a size four child is distressed because her babyfat won’t stay inside her jeans is probably not all that funny: but the stunned panic on her face when she saw me warned me that I was either going to have to laugh at her or kill her. I walked out of the restroom chuckling about a herd of tiny size four cows.
I have a friend who is smaller than I am. Several, actually: but I know this particular friend is smaller than I am because she gave me all of her “fat” clothes. Not all of them fit. She had been biking, hiking, golfing and starving herself into a thinner, more athletic image, and like many of us
who are zaftig, she was in a “thin” period. This was, admittedly, a few years ago. The passion that kept her moving and hungry apparently burned out, and like me, she has been eating her Wheaties. She still probably is smaller than I am. This might matter to me or to her, but it is probably splitting some very fine hairs as far as our thinner friends can tell. But after a weekend outing, I now have the reputation for being the thinner of the two of us by the grace of a lawn chair.
I was once small enough to fit comfortably in the lap of a lawn chair. I think smaller people probably take lawn chairs for granted, but that is because they have never been hugged in the butt by The Thing That Won’t Let Go. And they have never had the experience that scarred my friend.
We’ll call her Kristen. It’s a pretty name and it’s not hers. Kristen brought a lawn chair to a gathering of our friends. It was a weekend outing, a long holiday in which we conspired to gather at someone’s cottage, float around the lake on rafts, eat massive quantities of food and describe this adventure by some obscure athletic event that at least half of us participated in. We call it “The Canoe Trip.” This distinguishes it from “The Cross Country Ski Trip” where we gather at the lodge, float around in the Jacuzzi, eat massive quantities of food and some of us even go outside.
My friend Kristen was quite proud of her lawn chair. It was new. It was cute. It was a steal. Kristen is a woman who enjoys her toys, and it was a lawn chair to inspire the envy of all of her friends. She set up her lawn chair on the deck, arranged her towel, her drink, and the direction she was facing, and then she sat down. And the lawn chair, which was inexpensive and probably made by Chinese—none of whom are notably large people—began to spread out on the deck, spraddle-legged like a giraffe on ice, and slowly—excruciatingly slowly—it lowered her utterly without escape or grace until she was flat on her butt on the deck, the wounded chair parts welded around her and refusing to let go.
My friends prepare themselves for their athletic events by emptying a rather impressive number of beer cans, and they fortify their resolve, while performing these athletic feats, by emptying even more beer cans, and when they return to the deck to think back on the amazing athletic feats they have just performed, they empty more beer cans—so by the time Kristen’s butt connected with the deck, our friends had thrown themselves into the spirit of her adventure. They awarded her Olympic scores for the fall and its execution. One or two of the more nimble attempted to mimic the stages of her descent. There was a great outpouring of merriment and glee, not all of which was tempered with the sensitivity befitting the occasion.
If you took a poll of fat girls, you would knock on a lot of unfriendly doors before you would find the jolly, fun-loving sport who would answer, “Heck, yes, I love to sit down in a lawn chair that breaks, dumps me on my ass in front of all of my friends, and leaves me there to wonder, how am I ever going to get back up?” Kristen would not be one of those women.
She was embarrassed. She was humiliated. She was furious. She managed to roll back onto her feet and then she grabbed the offending corpse and pointed to the faulty welds that had betrayed her. She declared the chair “defective.” She planned to go directly to the store where she bought it on the way home and demand her money back. She stood there shaking mutilated sticks of aluminum and plastic weave as if expecting them to reassemble themselves and mumble an apology. For every faltering giggle she heard the rest of the weekend, be it chair-related or not, she asserted that it was not her fault the chair broke, that it was a bad chair, a weak chair, a poorly made and overpriced, cheap chair, and that she would, come hell or high water, exact her revenge on the seller.
Of course this only antagonized the situation. Sometimes good sportsmanship makes you look good and sometimes it just keeps you from looking worse. The urge to imagine this conversation between Kristen and the chair seller inspired friends who had never engaged in imaginary conversations before. The moment she walked out of a room someone would turn to someone else, mug a look of stunned outrage and mutter, “I just sat down in it ONCE and the darned thing BROKE …”And everyone would burst out laughing all over again. And because she would not give, not even break a single rueful little grin, the incident has never truly died.
When she bought her house, for her housewarming one of our friends bought her a matched set of oversized lawn chairs. They are very nice chairs. I believe I’ve even had occasion to sit in one of them.
I did track down the chair-giver and make him sit in it first. Kind of a trial sit. No self-respecting fat girl ever really trusts a lawn chair.
wreck the balls on boughs so jolly
MY MOTHER, MUCH to her own consternation, had five children in twelve years. She found, therefore, great comfort in blanket threats broadcast over a large audience.
It makes little difference what the boys heard or thought of these proclamations because they’re boys, and because we girls interpreted everything for them anyway. The UnWee was impervious to threats, unless, of course, they made her angry, which was an immediate call to war. And the Wee One was the blithe spirit of the group, believing that blanket threats either did not apply to her or were just too general to be enforced. I, however, the Least Wee—the oldest child, the rule-keeper of the lot—was a living human sponge, absorbing every rule, every threat, every implied code of conduct as if it were written on stone and handed down to Moses on the Mount. I exhausted much of my childhood trying to live up to these firm, and (I discovered all too late) not always straight-faced edicts.
I never walk on other people’s lawns.
I never step on cracks in the sidewalk.
Every Christmas our mother told us that if we were bad, instead of presents we would get a bundle of sticks or a single lump of coal hanging on the back-porch doorknob for Christmas. The UnWee harrumphed it was “not fair,” while the Wee One strained to imagine any situation in which she could be considered “bad.” I reverted back to midnight of January first of the appointed year and diligently tallied every bad deed I had ever imagined (keeping a separate column for accusations leveled unfairly or not yet proven) and worried. I worried all through November. I worried for twenty-four hours a day for twenty-four days of December. My father, who reveled in torture, would grin at me at odd moments and mutter, “coal, Cheryl,” or he would grip the back-porch door-knob, look down at it, and then cock one eye significantly at me. By Christmas Eve I was a basket case of worry and dread, remembering sins of mine too horrid and unforgivable to even be named. Every Christmas morning I ran directly to the back porch and checked for stick bundles before sighing with relief, promising to be better next year, and then dashing to see what Santa had left for me under the tree.
My mother loved Christmas.
She spent hours making fudge and candy and decorated cookies, much of which was immediately packed up in fancy tins and delivered to baby-sitters, neighbors and the people who ran the store down the road. The rest was packed up and hidden in the upper reaches of the cupboards where we were threatened with death itself, should we feel obliged to conduct any more samples. I remember Christmas as weeks and weeks of waiting until we could actually eat the delicacies she made.
She shopped and shopped for the perfect gifts for everyone. She put a great deal of thought into every gift. I remember one year she bought heavy metal Scotch tape dispensers for my father’s mother, and my father’s mother’s mother. They were red, and on the side was a little saying, which was a popular and humorous song at the time—sung on a German accent—Ve grow too soon old und too late schmart. My great-grandmother (who had to be in her seventies) was offended because she thought my mother was calling her “old.”
It seemed like every night our mother would come sneaking into the house with huge paper bags full of stuff and would tell us not to look. Holding the bags behind her back, she would sneak off into her bedroom. The last week before Christmas there was hardly a door in the house we could open without her swooping down over us like a hyperactive hawk, screeching,
DON’T GO IN THERE …
We bought a tree and put it up and buried it with decorations, and she bristled at the notion of ever using a fake tree when you could fill your house with the scent of pine and the perpetual threat of fire. Year after year my parents got into a fight while testing and retesting and re-retesting the tree lights, and year after year they would end up hugging and smooching in front of the tree when it was finally decorated.
Once the tree was decorated, it was our job, as children, to keep the cats from climbing the tree or batting off the decorations. Virtually every Christmas photograph of our trees, from when we were small, features a cat of varying size, coat or age, either in front of it, behind it, under it or in it. And virtually every Christmas photograph shows a tree with the bottom six inches of branches bare and cat-stripped.