Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (7 page)

Several things impressed me, even in spite of my abysmal ignorance of the game. In about the middle of the front line was
a woman who appeared, from the stands, to be shorter and smaller than most of the other players. The quarterback would snap
the ball, all of the players would begin running, they would all bunch up in the middle and fall on the pile, and then they
would start unpiling until there was only the smaller woman left, and each time she would spring up like a Timex watch and
get in line to do it all over again. She must be made of Teflon-covered rubber.

Oh, yes—football is a team sport. Another reason I never wanted to play football was I never did well at team sports. To play
team sports well you need years and years of practice of keeping track of not only what you are doing, but what everyone else
on the field is doing and how what each of them is doing impacts on what you should do next. Volleyball is the most complex
team sport I ever played and when I played you had your own sacred little patch of land and you played it come hell or high
water. To play team sports well, you need a sense of camaraderie among your fellow players, a sense of higher purpose and
willingness to trust that your fellow teammates will step in and cover you when you fail, back you up when you need it, even
a willingness to sacrifice yourself for the good of the whole … all that T-word (trust) stuff. That’s what boys learn and
have always learned on the playing field where girls were forbidden to go.

Girls don’t learn the rules of engagement. Girls don’t learn the difference between personal victory and team victory or personal
loss and team loss. Girls learned that if you don’t do it yourself, it doesn’t get done. Girls were never asked to fight the
war in Vietnam or any other war. But if they had been, girls would have won. Girls would have felt guilty for not winning
it sooner, and girls would have restored all of the roads, rebuilt all of the bombed homes, adopted all of the orphans, established
daycare centers, domestic violence shelters and homeless shelters, and girls would have processed endlessly about what we
could have done to have prevented the war and what we still can do to prevent it from ever happening again. Because girls
believe, in the end, everything that happens is our own personal fault.

To avoid having personal fault for a Jaguars loss, our gang drove immediately to the Meijers’ store—our team’s sponsor—to
buy team Ts and team paraphernalia. Sadly, there were none to be had. I presume we will be sewing our own. My Beloved is thinking
of giving the team mascot a gift certificate to a massage therapist to compensate for balancing that costume head all night.
We have preparations to make. First, we need to find a schedule because—although we are pretty sure we have four more home
games this season—we don’t know when any of them are. To build up our cheering voices, we have all vowed to practice shouting
“Go Deeper!” each morning in the shower. So if you hear any odd shouting before the next game, that’s what it is.

I
F YOU WALKED OUT
the back door of my parents’ house, drifted on past the old garage with its charred back wall and the cement foundation for
the larger building that burned away, and on past the converted henhouse where my father kept all of his tools (and himself
much of the time) you would come to the end of my yard. My yard ended more dramatically than most people’s—it dropped, almost
vertically, about twenty-five feet into a big, green pond. The view to the left of the back pond was more picturesque, but
no less startling: the little green pond was surrounded by a willow woods and when I was young, it hosted a small school of
rogue goldfish that would float up to the surface and speckle the dark water with splotches of white and gold.

A few years ago my nephew misnavigated and rode his grandfather’s four-wheeler headfirst over the bank into the little green
pond. His little brother rode right along behind him. The pond is nowhere near as deep as we presumed it was when I was a
kid. My father, the Groundskeeper, had spent a great deal of time eradicating “weeds” (anything not a maple) from the bank,
so it must have been a short, fast ride, just about long enough to let nine years of sin flash before the child’s eyes. Then
his grandfather burst over the bank, tore down the hill and—every instinct tells me—gave a remarkable demonstration of the
famous Peck temper. Both boys survived without a scratch, discounting injuries to the ego. The four-wheeler, remarkably enough,
lived as well, but it took my father most of the afternoon to haul it back up the bank and it was some time before my nephew
so much as acknowledged the cursed vehicle again.

Both ponds were part of the huge kidney-shaped hole surrounding our yard we called The Gravel Pit. We spoke of it quite definitively—The
Gravel Pit—as if it were the only one, as if no one else in south central Michigan had ever seen or heard of one. It was large
and fairly irregularly shaped and both my yard and my best friend’s, around the corner, were chipped out of it. From fence
post to fence post of the fields that contained it, it was about a quarter of a mile wide at its widest point, and it was
a little longer than it was wide. Ours was unconventional by most gravel pit standards: it hid the Great Plains, a section
of Death Valley, the North Woods and an extraordinary number of wicked and untamed Indians (for, I fear, it was a politically
incorrect gravel pit). I hunted both buffalo and Jesse James there in my youth.

On rare occasions huge dump trucks would roar down the drive and haul away parts of our universe, something I believe all
of us who hunted and foraged there considered to be both unnecessary and downright rude, but the intrusions were rare. Much
of the imaginary landscape was based on the topography—there were real trees and even a small woods (serendipitously to the
north) and most of the pit was carpeted with weeds and wild grass.

When the dump trucks came, we retaliated by laying our rocks in complex and mysterious patterns to frighten the intruders
away. (Imagine their surprise. “Sorry, Boss, but we can’t go down there anymore—those kids have been laying our rocks again
and—frankly, sir—we’re scared.”)

We were powerful.

Gravel pit rocks were particularly powerful.

The gravel pit was all the more fascinating because we weren’t supposed to go there. It was dangerous. Bad things could happen
to us down there—things our mothers might not discover for (my mother’s favorite measure of time)
God Only Knows How Long.
There was a magical shield that protected us from maternal mind-reading rays while we were down there. That prospect alone
was enough to drive me over the edge at the slightest excuse.

The total count varied, depending on where the occasional cranes did their digging, but most often there were three ponds
(the third pond was not visible from our yard), each over sixty feet deep. (We never actually measured them, but there is
no point in having a pond less than sixty feet deep, since you will always lose the “my pond is deeper than your pond” debate.)
There was the big green pond, the little green pond and the hole. The hole was spring-fed and maintained a toe-tested temperature
of 32 degrees year-round. We swam in the hole once by accident. Five or six of us just slipped and fell in. Any of the ponds
were dangerous swimming because they were just holes full of water dredged out by the big metal buckets on the cranes and
the bottom could be anywhere at any time. The most accessible bank of the hole went from an inch to over six feet deep in
less than three feet and the bottom was gravel, so it was significantly easier to fall in than to fall back out again. While
we were in, however, we spent a great deal of our splash time challenging each other to touch bottom since the water only
two feet below the surface was all but unbearably cold, and when we did scramble out, we came out blue. Normally we were not
allowed to swim in the ponds because they were “stagnant,” a word my mother dismissed as meaning “dirty and full of diseases.”
We used to peer into the water and look for diseases, but the worst thing I ever saw was a crayfish, which looked like a miniature
bleached lobster. When one of my little brothers fell into a pond, we all cheerfully promised him he was going to turn stagnant
and die.

The gravel pit grew some of the healthiest, lushest, greenest poison ivy I have ever seen. It grew like a pampered English
ground cover. My best friend and I (and several annoying younger siblings) discovered a particularly satisfactory patch of
wild grass once and conducted an adventure I can no longer recreate, but it involved a great deal of rolling around in all
of this lovely grass. Grasshoppers may have been involved. I went home and had dinner; she went home and had herself admitted
to the hospital for a week with poison oak over 90 percent of her body. I never grew a bump. She got to miss a week of school:
I got quizzed about how I managed to lure all of my innocent younger siblings back into the deepest corner of the forbidden
Pit of Iniquity where I could deliberately expose them to life-threatening weeds.

I was not particularly fond of my innocent younger siblings—they followed me everywhere, even in the face of the vilest threats,
and they frequently resorted to the innocent sports of blackmail, extortion and coercion to include themselves in matters
that were none of their business—but the sad truth is, I still don’t know what poison oak looks like. And neither do my innocent
siblings because—of course—not a single bump arose on their thick little hides either. My best friend and her brother scratched
and dug and molted for weeks. (There were three of us girls, all perfectly healthy; two of them, in misery. Their mother never
looked at us girls quite the same way after that.) Fortunately, my baby brother was too young to have followed us on this
adventure. He has to take cortisone shots just to stand in our back yard without scratching and whenever they sense him coming,
you can still find the fine young tendrils of poison ivy snaking up on the lawn to find him, not unlike
The Day of the Triffids
.

Each spring the snow would melt and much of the floor of the pit would be flooded. As early summer approached, the water would
begin to evaporate and there would be massive pools of black commas left to writhe and die in the sun. I could not imagine
that mother nature would be that wasteful and for years I would drag my best friend down there and, armed with our trusty
mayonnaise jars, we would spend literally hours scooping up stranded tadpoles and carrying them to the safety of deeper water.
It is possible that a million frogs owe their lives to us.

I remember all of this as if it were what was important to me at the time. It wasn’t. When I was a kid, the gravel pit was
my domain. It was where I went to be alone, the world I could control. There were times when I barely tolerated the company
of my best friend, much less that of lesser beings. I spent hours walking back and forth, retracing the same steps along the
same path over and over again while I wrote spectacular adventures in my head about truly exciting people who lived extraordinary
lives. One of the small ironies of life, perhaps, is that those stories, which utterly consumed me at the time, were stories
invented by a child to entertain a child and would probably not make a great deal of sense to me now if I could remember them.
The minor things—the time that I spent with my friends and my family—those are the things that I now remember.

When her breasts

betrayed her

with cancer

she had them

removed

lopped off

returning,

at the age

of fifty-five

to those tit-free

scorching

days

when she ripped off

her shirt

and ran

bare-chested

through the heat

as careless as any boy

“So how does it feel

to be flat-chested?”

we ask

and she grins:

and for a minute

we all remember.

I
HAVE A SOFTBALL INJURY
. I expect it will be quite impressive in a day or so—it is barely three hours old now and it has made its presence known.
In the center is a white oval, surrounded by an angry red ring something like a bull’s-eye (can you catch Lyme disease by
playing softball?) which is, in turn, surrounded by a lavender bruise. But because even I have a little pride, allow me to
explain WHY this injury occurred before we get into exactly HOW.

I don’t play softball. In fact until this summer I could honestly say the last time I watched a softball game I was—give or
take— ten. However, my cubiclemate plays and this spring she had to switch teams and I went along—once—to offer a little moral
support. Until then I had assumed a softball game would last three to seven hours and would require an audience of several
thousand people. Having gone once, I was pleased to discover this gesture of moral support was a sacrifice of barely an hour
of my time and was actually kind of fun. I went again. I got to know a few of her teammates by name. I’ve gotten quite comfortable,
going to watch Cathy’s games. I root. I cheer. There are six or seven of us hard-core Robin’s Roost fans and we have our own
secret handshake by now.

I know when to shout, “Good eye.”

These things are important.

So I was innocently seated in my fan seat, waiting for my team to arrive, when Cathy snuck up behind me and accused me of
rooting for the men who just happened to be on the field at the time. I quickly explained that I was early. She and I then
observed that men seem to continue to play softball much longer than women do. And then we both admired the irony that Cathy,
who is thirty-eight, is the oldest player on her team.

Her team had not yet arrived.

As game time approached, they began counting themselves. I smiled and rooted, since I have never had any particular reason
to count how many players there are on a softball team. I was smiling and rooting for no one in particular when Melissa, the
team captain, turned to me and said, “Do you want to play?”