Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (19 page)

“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.

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.

I have never come out to my father. I am forty-eight and he is seventy. He has changed remarkably, since I was fifteen: he
has proven to be a man with a deliciously wry sense of humor, an almost Buddhist acceptance of the whims of fate and fortune,
and an occasional aggravation with complications in his life which have, since my mother’s death, become my province. As it
is his job, as my father, to lend me money and fix my tractors, it is my job, as his oldest daughter, to sort through his
life for evidence of unresolved problems, which he stores for me like butterflies in a glass jar. I rarely actually solve
them: more often than not I identify or define them, or tell him what agency deals with problems like that.

He knows. I know he knows.

We have a covenant of trust, my father and I. I do not present him with emotional, word-intensive problems he cannot solve.
He does not make anti-gay remarks in my presence and sometimes he has this—mischievous—almost expectant—little smile on his
face when someone else does.

She’ll get ’em—she’s good with words.

A
NUMBER OF YEARS AGO
I was having dinner at a friend’s house and we were discussing my interest in photography. I babbled on at length about how
my lifetime shot of a deer had been hampered solely by the deer’s reluctance to stand still—or even near my camera. My friend’s
husband smiled and he said, “All you have to do is find out where they sleep and where they feed and settle in somewhere between
the two.”

I remember smiling at him.

I glanced at my friend.

We both fell over laughing.

At the time I owned (or mortgaged) three-fifths of an acre about a quarter of a mile from the Jackson city limits. No deer
slept in my yard. No deer ate there. I’d never seen a deer passing through looking hungry or sleepy. I assumed, at the time,
that to follow my friend’s husband’s advice, I would have to first locate a deer, then figure out where this deer both ate
and fed. I might as easily have been fascinated by the hope of shooting wild African elephants.

I may have originally filed this insight under the heading Useless Information Acquired from Men.

He was right.

He seriously overestimated my grasp of the task at hand— but he was right.

A few years after that conversation I was driving down Dalton Road through an area known in that county as Behind the Prison
and I was testing out my new 50 X 10 field glasses when I espied several brown lumps on the hillside. I pulled off the road,
focused my field glasses and studied … eleven sleeping deer. They were deer. They were asleep. I flashed back on my conversation
with my friend’s husband and I thought:

I KNOW WHERE THEY SLEEP.

They were too far away to photograph and walking around on prison property has never been encouraged by anyone I know, so
I let sleeping deer lie.

Perhaps two years ago
Newsweek
magazine carried an article about deer (calling them, among other things, “rats with antlers”) and my sister the Wee One
read this article and (apparently) memorized it. She and I were driving somewhere one day and I said, “Look—a deer,” and she
recited everything I now know about this article. Of deer
Newsweek
said, “They’re edge-feeders.”

We all know that, of course. We are driving down I-94 in the early evening, we glance out the window and there, at the edge
of a field, quite near a small wood or at least a hedgerow, is a small herd of deer. They’re eating. We are not sufficiently
sighted to see deer in the middle of the woods and we almost never see them in the middle of the field—they are always on
the edge. Predators are always a factor, but this is also pretty much determined by what they eat—saplings, baby trees, fresh
weeds (and as every gardener knows, corn, broccoli, cauliflower, and especially tomatoes. My father has found a tiny rogue
herd of specialists who appear to dine solely on tulip blooms). An “edge-feeder” means an animal who feeds primarily on the
sort of new growth most easily found on the outside edges of woods. Allegedly—according to
Newsweek
—if you wander into the deep woods the only deer you will find will be either very hungry or very sleepy or perhaps both.

The focus of that article was that deer have adapted remarkably well to coexistence with humankind—in fact, we create exactly
the kind of environment where they thrive—and beyond the occasional highway collision, deer seem to be settling in for the
long haul with humans, their oddly shod brothers. It appears that of the two, humankind seems to find more objections to this
peace and tranquillity than deer do. On the overpopulated, suburbanized East Coast, where one is always on the edge of something,
Bambi has lost some of his charm. It must be something he ate.

The more I learned about deer, the more I understood about what my friend’s husband had been trying to tell me. They are animals.
To find one, you need to know (1) where they shelter and (2) where and what they eat. Once you have narrowed down the basic
characteristics of these places, they will be easier and easier to find and—surprise—so will the deer who sleep and feed there.

Unfortunately I was never able to tell him that because I never did know where he ate and my friend kicked him out, so I don’t
know where he sleeps.

O
UR PARENTS CREATED
three beautiful, sensitive, creative children and then, as an afterthought, they had two boys. We were not horribly impressed
with their efforts. First of all, the UnWee and I had barely finished raising the Wee One. Whatever else her faults may have
been, she never peed us square between the eyes while we were changing her dities. But above all else, no matter what we did
to her, the Wee One hardly ever cried. She passed out fairly often—she bled like a sieve at the drop of a hat, and she was
forever losing her balance while spinning, or bed-bouncing, or other expressly forbidden activities we had warned her against
(
Okay, but remember—if you get hurt doing this Mom is going to spank ALL our butts
). She would more likely purse her little lips and start spluttering in blind rage whenever she felt misused. Our little brother
(1) started crying hours after he came home from the hospital and he cried nonstop until he was fifteen. “What on earth have
you done to that child now?” our mother would demand, as if we were responsible for his every passing mood.

Nor was he made of particularly sturdy stuff for a child. We tried to teach him to play backlot softball; he wandered across
home plate at the wrong time, caught a hearty swing at a pitch, and had to wobble off into the weeds and take a nap. Years
later he jumped up to catch a fly ball and slammed nose-to-forehead into a slightly taller boy and broke nine bones in his
face. We know how many bones he broke because the doctor X-rayed his head and counted them, and then, conversationally, he
asked my mother, “How did he get that fracture to the back of his head?” As usual, our mother failed to appreciate the humor
of the situation.

He was a tiny child. For years he was the smallest child in his class and his only escape from terrorization from his classmates
was to come home and be terrorized by us. We are probably fortunate he did not join the Neo-Nazis or the NRA. He gradually
developed a wicked sense of humor with which he slices and dices all who wander into his sights, but what he did, apparently
in sheer self-defense, was grow. When I left for college he was nine years old, seven inches tall and barely cast a shadow:
the next time I paid much attention to him he was six feet one inch, built like a football player and there was that whole
neighborhood legend about beer parties in the gravel pit behind our house. It can be disconcerting, but it is best never to
flinch when you find yourself looking that far up at someone you have deliberately tortured most of his life.

By the time our baby brother (2) came along, we had given up. None of this encouraging old, repetitive skills like learning
to walk or talk. We had busy lives by then; we did not have time to stand around and wait for him to learn what the rest of
us all knew. We carried him around like a sack of potatoes for years and taught him to point at anything he wanted.