Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs

by Cheryl Peck

Our Grandmother Molby was a tireless seamstress and a strong believer in properly dressed children, so of course we were measured and stitched and hemmed into new Christmas dresses every year. We celebrated Christmas twice during the day, and so there were always two sets of Christmas pictures of us. Our morning celebratory One-Present-Only opening with just Mom and Dad, where, lined up side by side (often holding dolls), we were dressed in ragged hair and our bottom-back-flap PJs, was one picture. Later in the afternoon, after that interminable wait until the adults had FINALLY washed all of the dinner dishes and we could indulge in our frenzy of greed, once again we were lined up under the tree (often surrounded by massive piles of loot) where we were dressed in painfully exact curls and bows and all of our Christmas finery for photograph number two.

  One year the UnWee got a fort set. One year my mother announced that if our father gave her one more small electrical kitchen appliance she was going to find a way to use it on him. One year my Grandfather Molby gave me a desk he had built for me himself. We were neither rich nor poor, but we were wise enough to realize, gradually, that the hunger for things is never fully cured by mere things.

  The heart of the celebration was a huge celebratory meal, turkey with all of the trimmings, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, Mother’s favorite (a collection of various beans and onions she layered together and allowed to ferment for several days before serving), pickles, olives, candied watermelon rinds, fresh rolls, real butter, milk, candied sweet potatoes, and, as a nice chaser for the fudge, candy and cookies we had been pre-dining on, desserts. More than one dessert.

  Christmas was—and is—a time of magic, a time of gathering together in our family. As adults we have retained some traditions and modified others. We have sworn to cut back on the commercialism of the season, while still dashing out to buy this year’s trendy equivalent to the Tickle Me Elmo doll (“Christmas,” we tell each other solemnly, “is special”). Because our generation involves more groups of children and needs to be scheduled around custody arrangements, and because we gather now from farther away, we have switched around the gift-exchange portion of the day. While we still exchange gifts, we exchange fewer gifts at one time, and the ceremony takes up less time than it did when we were children. It is, perhaps, a less important part of the mass family gathering.

  The dresses are gone. We girls waffle now between dress slacks and jeans.

  A few of us have even gone to fake trees.

  None of us dress the bottom foot of the tree, and when someone shows up limping, we automatically know we are seeing the results of a cat-stolen-glass-ball-in-the-foot injury. You learn to take the good with the glass.

  the go-get girl

  THE YEAR I CAME OUT to myself—Hi, my name is Cheryl. I think I may be a (hic) lesbian—I went to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I was twenty-seven going on nineteen and one of my friends who had spent her summer listening to me said, “Go to Festival—you might meet some women you can talk to.” As luck would have it, that meant she might have a weekend during which she could talk about something else, which would also have been a good thing.

  The first year I went to Festival was about 1977. I met a woman who fell in love with me. I had trouble enough loving myself, so I got drunk and fell into a ditch and wallowed a while in the bracken. I remember porta-janes, hauling trash from the kitchen for my workshift, and being horribly, perpetually lost all weekend. I ate non-homogenized peanut butter and bananas (the only food I recognized) and swore I would die before I would strip naked and take a public (cold) shower (although I did watch a few). Alix Dobkin stood on stage and said it wouldn’t hurt little boys to learn there are places they can’t go either and I thought self-righteously, I will never become that bitter. I had a good time, I guess. As usual, I had no sense of history taking place or anything new or radical being forged around me; I was just worried about the nudity. And while I always had the best of plans, I did not go to Festival again for twenty-one years.

  My Beloved is a devout Festie-goer, so when I became involved in her life, I found myself packing my sleeping bags and tents and trailing off to into the woods behind her. The Land is different, the food is better, the porta-janes are cleaner and the bananas are just as good. Since I am not twenty-seven anymore and I gave up my job carrying fifty-pound bags up and down a ladder in the factory, I cleverly failed to volunteer for garbage detail as my mandatory workshift this time. Garbage collecting is hard work.

  I volunteered for kitchen detail.

  Almost everyone does.

  The choices are pretty much presented as kitchen detail in the morning, kitchen detail in the afternoon, kitchen detail in the evening or daycare for someone else’s kids. The first two years I was given plastic gloves, a sharp knife and a bus box and shown to a huge table laden with never-ending stacks of vegetables.

  This year I was promoted to go-get girl.

  It seems simple enough. A go-get girl goes and gets. It is a subset of the serving division.

  It is at about this point that the fog began to set in.

  Before I sign up for my civic duties, I should probably always tell the people around me that I never actually got that little T-shirt in kindergarten that says “Plays Well With Others.” I got the one that said “Throws Horrible Tantrums and Sometimes Bites.” This is not my fault. I have leadership abilities; everyone has always told me so. My particular skill, all of my life, has been to walk into a situation I know absolutely nothing about and begin organizing everyone around me. (For the record, I dislike this characteristic in nearly everyone else I know. I feel it causes unnecessary conflict. They could just do it my way.) I have no following abilities whatsoever and find them superfluous to my way of life. I should probably also note that I do not always understand the way New Free Lesbians (NFLs) communicate with each other. I have assiduously avoided “processing” for nearly thirty years now. Processing is the method by which six lesbians who fundamentally disagree with each other sit down together and explore in great depth every conceivable nuance of every imaginable interpretation of every feeling any of them have ever had until they come to a workable consensus. They keep telling me it works. It seems time-consuming to me.

  So I put on my apron, affixed my nametag and reported to my line. I was assigned to line one. I did not assign myself to line one, some NFL assigned me to line one. She said, as she did so, that she had been wondering where her line one go-get girl had gone, although—as far as I can tell—I had been there all along.

  My job, as I understood it, was to go get things my servers were running out of. So I positioned myself to be available for duty and waited for someone to run out of something.

  I was standing in my position in line one when another NFL informed me that line three had run out of tomatoes. This confused me because I was assigned to line one, but, ever-helpful, I said, “Okay,” and headed toward the food tent for tomatoes.

  I was about halfway there when she called me and she said, “You’re not from line three, are you?”

  I said, “No—I’m from line one.”

  She said, “I’m sorry—apparently I’m confused—you don’t have to go get the tomatoes for line three.”

  I said, “It’s okay—I’m halfway there.”

  She said, “Still, I’m sorry you had to go all that way for nothing.” She appeared to be appeasing me.

  I said, “Okay.” I went back to line one where my server informed me we were out of tomatoes; however, just as I headed back to the food tent, the go-get girl from line three darted across the lines and delivered a bus box of sliced tomatoes to my line.

  This annoyed me, because I could have been going and getting for my own line, if she had paid attention to her line. Instead, she seemed to be dashing all over the place, going and getting for everyone.

  I had now walked halfway to the food tent twice and I had gone and gotten exactly nothing. However, I had little time to worry about this because my line ran out of salad. Off I we
nt to the table where the salads are kept, and I acquired one bus box for my line, brought it back, dumped the last of the old salad on top of the new and now I had … an empty bus box.

  I missed the part of the informational message that would have told me where the empty bus boxes go. This lecture, I presume, occurred when I was right there but missing, just before I was assigned to line one.

  So I carried my empty bus box to the beginning of the salad production line and gave it to the lettuce chopper, who took it pleasantly enough, but then frowned and said, “But don’t you need a refill?” And she handed me a new bus box full of salad.

  I thought to myself, I will just carry this to line three. Just as I thought this, the go-get girl from line three zoomed past like the Roadrunner on speed and dashed off again with a bus box of salad.

  I estimated about nine people had gone through line one since I had refilled the salad box, so it seemed safe to assume my line was not out of salad yet. So I carried my refill to the table where I got the original salad, set it down, and strode purposefully away as if I were Head Go-Get Girl and no one should question my behavior.

  “What else do you need?” I greeted my servers as I returned to my line.

  “We couldn’t find you, so we sent the go-get girl from line three to go get it,” my server replied.

  “Lord knows what you’ll get,” I reflected as the line three goget girl screeched past, “that womyn has way too much energy for food delivery.”

  A camper materialized in front of us and set down a small, empty pail and said, “I need this full.”

  We were informed, as we stood in line getting our serving instructions, that there would be possibly as many as 12,000 womyn at the twenty-fifth Womyn’s Music Festival and that many of them—many of them—have issues about food. It was not our job, as servers, to deal with food issues, it was merely our job to issue food. We were, therefore, to serve each camper what we personally considered a “reasonable portion.” (Go to the line with fat servers.) If the camper requested more, we were to halve that portion and serve it. If they asked for more, we were to halve it again. If they had questions about the ingredients of the food, we were to direct them to the board in front of the tent that listed all of the ingredients in everything we served. If they had any more complex questions about the food, we were to direct them to the kitchen staff. Very cheerfully our kitchen staff womyn assured us, “We have as many as fifty people we can send them to where they will find out absolutely nothing.” We all laughed pleasantly. “However,” our kitchen staff womyn assured us, “we have enough food. At no time should you ever tell a womyn, ‘No, you can’t have more food.’”

  So our camper set down her pail, said, “I need this filled.”

  My server said, “I’m sorry, we’re not supposed to do that.”

  I gasped with shock and horror.

  “I’m getting food for several womyn,” the camper said. “I need this much food.” I could see food issues rising in her eyes: she was ready to fight to death over a small pail of salad right there in the mess tent. No mere server person was going to say “no” to her.

  “Well, okay,” my server said doubtfully, “but we’re not supposed to …”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said reassuringly.

  She glared at me and half-filled the pail. She waited.

  The camper waited.

  People began bumping into each other behind her, having expected the line to move ahead by now.

  “I have several womyn I’m getting food for,” the camper said.

  “Just give her the bus box,” I suggested, “there’s at least one more in the food tent …”

  “We’re not supposed to give them this much food,” my server hissed at me and furiously filled the pail. “And besides,” she said, looking around, “I’m sure we’re out of something …”

  Of course, in no time we were out of salad. My server pointed this out to me as if it were personally my fault. As if I had dashed down the line when she wasn’t looking and told each and every one of the craft womyn coming through line one to tell her they could have more salad than she thought necessary and as a result, once again we were out of salad. I suspect this womyn had been taught to eat what was on her plate and to believe if all 12,000 womyn at Festival had filed through our line, they should have all eaten out of the same salad bus box. I suspected her of having food issues.

  I collected the empty bus box and carried it back to the lettuce table for a refill.

  The head of the lettuce table looked down at me, frowned— obviously I had gotten something in the wrong order again—but just as she started to speak, the go-get girl from line three roared past with three bus boxes stacked in her arms.

  “When you stack them like that, I can only use the top one,” the lettuce head said, obviously annoyed.

  Apparently not even line three server could do anything right: she was one surly head of lettuce.

  “I’msorryIdidn’tknowthat,” line three server spit out and flew away with three trays of lettuce.

  I knew that there would be no point in my walking back to line one with a tray of lettuce—line three server had restocked my salads and was probably halfway to the orchards in California to pick my next box of peaches by now.

  I thought bitterly that the line three servers could probably keep all five lunch lines going well into the supper line.

  I then thought—utterly without bitterness—that the line three servers could probably keep all five lunch lines going well into the supper line.

  I thought, I have been going and getting for a good hour and a half now and I think I will now go and get my own lunch.

  The lettuce head looked at me and glared, and I said, “We don’t need any more, but the server from line three is coming right back,” and I laid down my empty bus box and scurried away.

  coming out to my father

  I FELL IN LOVE with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the late fall of 1965. I was fifteen and restless to begin my destiny as the Great American Writer; he was a San Francisco Beat poet and my knowledge of him begins and ends with one small volume of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind.

  I discovered him in English class. Our assignment had been to find our “favorite” poem and read it dramatically for the class. Being dramatic only by hormonal accident and poetic by much the same route, I trudged along with most of my classmates to the library where we looked under “poetry” until we found something we could read aloud and keep our faces straight and our reputations intact. I may or may not have dug up “Invictus” (“my head is bloody/but unbowed …”). In the midst of this heartless adventure in literature, a theater major stood up and read, very dramatically, “I Am Waiting.” The class was dumb-struck. This was dangerous stuff. There were ominous thoughts involved in that poem that we were sure we were not supposed to think. I knew I had to own that book.

  It was not for sale in Coldwater, Michigan. The nearest bookstore that carried it was The Bookstall in Battle Creek, thirty-five miles away. I advised my mother I needed to make the journey and my mother advised me my father had business there and I should talk to him. When I was fifteen I hated my father and I thought he hated me. (In truth, he hated unbridled emotions, particularly when they were unbridled anywhere near him, but when I was fifteen the difference seemed negligible.) I may have told him I needed the book for class but it seems unlikely because (1) I didn’t NEED the book for anything, and (2) I had not yet learned—nor would I for some time—that he would have driven thirty-five miles one way to help me buy a book simply because I said I needed it.

  We went in his truck. His truck was pink. It was probably originally red, because I don’t remember many pink trucks in vogue in the late fifties, when the Chevy was built, but it had worked hard for a long time and it had faded. The gears were worn so smooth you could shift from first to second without using the clutch, and the body was so rusted that my father carried a riveter under the front seat so that when parts of the
body threatened to break loose and fall off, he could rivet them back into place. This seemed to amuse him. He kept his riveter in a cigar box and the rivets themselves were neatly stored in a container just the right size to hold them and to fit into the cigar box, which fit very precisely under the front seat. I could have eaten off the floor of his truck, but he had his little pile of things-he-is-never-without (maps, tools, sunglasses and his portable rock collection) stacked tidily on the seat, so when we reached The Bookstall he had to walk around the truck and open my door for me because the inside latch didn’t work. I remember thinking the people inside the bookstore would have been impressed for the wrong reason. I endured a moment of panic that the migrating literati from Coldwater might have beaten me to all the available copies of the book, but soon I had it for my very own, and, drunk with the knowledge that there really was a world out there different—deliciously, exotically DIFFERENT—from Coldwater, and that this very bookstore was not unlike a portal to that great unknown, I turned to find my father scowling at a display case. I assumed he was studying the display and I remarked on the contents (jewelry, I think), but he said, “Why would you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Why that’s just barn-siding.”

  I explained to him that barn-siding—the gray, grooved, weather-beaten, falling-down siding off gray, grooved, weather-beaten falling-down barns—was all the vogue, that people I knew were actually paneling the insides of their houses with it. He looked at me with baffled disgust and he said, “I could do something like that” (the fact that people would pay money for others to build something that would look homemade was incomprehensible to a man who aspired to make his projects look as professional as possible), and we left the bookstore. He never asked me what the book was about. I never told him because I suspected he would neither understand nor appreciate some Beat poet perpetually waiting for a Rebirth of Freedom and I had some vague sense that I was protecting him from something—that he followed me into the bookstore rather than the other way around, that I was an interpreter for a world where people built new things out of old wood and where words were taken quite seriously.