Revenge of the Paste Eaters (10 page)

I keep thinking this whole situation should have just never come up—all I ever wanted from ANY of these people was my lunch.

I feel I’m paying too much for it.

gramma lucille

it is not reassuring
for small children to watch their grandmother stab huge animals in the ass with a pitchfork, it just sets a bad tone. My Grandmother Peck raised dairy cows. Big, sullen, occasionally bellicose animals she prodded here and there with the tines of her pitchfork. Occasionally she had them killed, and then we had to go down to the meat locker and drag them home again in hundreds of little white paper packages tied with string.
This is Bessie—you remember Bessie, don’t you?
Farm people just deal with that kind of stuff. I was not a farm kid. My mother bought my hamburgers from the local grocery store and she never made me remember their names.

Oddly enough, I have only vague memories of my father’s mother when I was a child. Not all of them are pleasant. She tended to be a little sharp with kids. With me, anyway. She made excellent oatmeal-raisin cookies, which she froze for emergencies such as visits from grandchildren. Frankly, it would have suited me better if she had thawed them before she gave them to me. She was a large woman, particularly when I lived closer to the floor, and being younger, she moved faster and less predictably than my other grandmother. I always felt a little like the cat around her.

My grandfather suffered a heart attack when I was still quite young and his life after that was one of slow, steady decline. Eventually they gave up farming and sold off the cows because he could no longer help and my grandmother could not run the farm and look after him at the same time. She told me that when I was very young, my grandfather used to play cards with me and we had splendid times together, that at least for a while I was the apple of his eye. I have no memory of that. I remember a man who almost never talked, and who, when he did talk, talked slowly, often incorporating agonizingly long periods of silence and reflection into his conversation that were almost impossible for a six- or eight-year-old to sit through. By the time I was ten I would have milked cows with my bare hands to get out of having to talk to my grandfather. And I was terrified of cows.

He died when I was fifteen. I remember his funeral because I kept waiting for some overpowering sense of grief to take hold of me (I was fifteen: emotions were pointless unless they were overpowering), yet none did. I remember his funeral because my father, the cornerstone of stoic Gary Cooper/John Wayne-ish Manhood upon which our family unit was built, burst into tears and was so overcome with grief that had my mother not been there to catch him, he would have fallen on the ground. I had never seen my father cry. I had never seen a tear roll down his cheek before, and there he was, disintegrating before my very eyes.

I was neither a particularly astute nor sensitive child at fifteen: in fact, almost everything that I remember happening when I was fifteen was about me. I suppose there were other people in the world—there are enough of them now—but like twelve, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen, it was a difficult year and I had my hands full of my own concerns. I must have found some way to quiz my mother about my father’s behavior at the funeral (my father and I found just living in the same house challenging enough, forget complex emotional interactions). She said that my father and his father had never talked to each other while they were both alive, and now they never would. I found that very poignant. I probably wandered off into the gravel pit and wrote a story in my head about it. I was not foolhardy enough to try to talk to my own father.

I went on about my life. I noted that my grandmother, who had suffered from a bad heart when I was a child and who frequently spent most of each winter in bed on the living room couch, appeared to recover shortly after my grandfather died of his. (She always suffered from depression in the winter: she learned to cope with it more effectively when it was identified as seasonal affective disorder.) I went on to college, got my degree, and eventually came home.

My adventures in college had not all been a roaring success. In high school I had teetered on the edge of the black pit of depression, but initially the excitement of going away to school, of confronting new and challenging ideas, pulled me away. I suspected my hometown of being excessively conservative and conformist and I was anxious to embrace the diverse and eclectic world of the university: it did not occur to me that I could put my fundamental definition of “normal” at risk. I began to lose my internal sense of balance. Three-quarters of the way through my college career, I fell into a black hole. There were days in my last year of school when I could not bring myself to leave my dorm room. When I should have been planning my bright new career as a college graduate, I was struggling to survive the day. I graduated and I came home again shaken and scared and depressed, with no idea what to do with my life. Something was wrong but I did not have the tools or the skills to identify or deal with it. And I was too tired. I got an apartment, got a cat, got a job in a local factory. For a long time I worked nights.

About the only person who was around, awake, and able to socialize when I got off work in the morning was my grandmother. I would go over to her house and we would have breakfast together and talk about houseplants, gardening, ceramics, and my desire to write the Great American Novel. She told me she also had written a book once, but I never saw it. I tried: I could never get her to show it to me. We went on gradually to talk of other things. My mother. Her mother. As I struggled with the thoughtseed that I too easily enjoyed women and had to work too hard to like men, my grandmother chatted on happily about her own theory that many women probably should have been lesbians. She had any number of women friends who would have been much better off if they had walked away from their marriages and pursued their affections for their friends. It was fine with her. It was also a secret she kept like a thousand other secrets because—while she would entertain any manner of idea while talking to a stray and possibly lost grandchild—she had very strict and unforgiving standards for her job as the grande dame of the family.

Long accustomed to storing “good” feelings here and “bad” feelings there, I found no real conflict with the notion that she led a double life. I can remember telling my sisters, “You don’t really know her—you have to sit down and talk to her when no one else is around because she’s a completely different person then,” but neither of my sisters appreciate complexity for complexity’s sake. She had offended the UnWee in ways that will not be resolved in this lifetime, and the Wee One and my grandmother together in one room put some very strong, outspoken opinions at odds with each other too often for comfort.

I loved her. She was there for me during a time in my life when I did not have a great deal left to extend to a hostile audience and I had a pathetic shortage of friends. She taught me to understand and cherish the bonds that older and younger women can share when they are willing.

She also played me.

It is a virtue that has fallen out of favor within my lifetime: at one time women prided themselves on their ability to manipulate the people around them. They “ruled from behind,” and their skills at getting the men in their lives—anyone in their lives—to do the things they wanted done without their having to ask . . . these skills had value. They were skills to be practiced, like a geisha practices the sweeps of her fan.

I was leaving my grandmother’s house one day and she followed me out onto the back porch and said wistfully, “I wish your father would do something about these steps.”

I had not yet met the man. He had always been around, but he only liked children under the age of two and over the age of twenty-two and I had been his flesh and blood, too old to cherish and too young to talk to for far too long. I remember thinking,
Well darn that man.
“What is it you want him to do?” I asked, resolved that I could negotiate a peaceful settlement.

She wanted a railing on the steps. She had lost her balance and almost fallen, and with her bad knee the steps had become a treacherous obstacle for her.

I hunted up my father and I said, “Why won’t you put a railing on Gramma’s back steps for her?”

He looked at me as if I had slapped him in the face, and he said—as he always says when he’s confused—“What?”

I capitulated. “Gramma needs a railing on her back steps,” I said, “she needs something to hang on to because her knee isn’t very stable anymore.”

And my father scowled and he said, “I wish she would just
ask
me,” and he stalked off. To find tubing to build his railing out of, as it turned out, because all she had to do was express the slightest desire for something and it was custom built for her by the end of the day . . .

“You never asked him,” I accused her. “You used me to get him to do something and you made me look like an idiot because you never asked him to do it in the first place.”

“He does so much for me,” she suffered. “I hate to be a bother to him.”

“Oh, bullshit,” I dismissed—because I knew by then that she found some odd vicarious pleasure in my bad language. “You’d be less of a ‘bother’ to him if you just asked him for what you want instead of using me or anybody who walks past your web to ask him for you.”

She studied me for a long silence, measuring her options. Eventually she smiled. “But,” she said, pleased with herself, “you did it.”

When I was a kid she always tried to get me to call her “Gramma Lucille.” I never did, because for some reason I could never remember “Lucille” (I couldn’t remember the right word for “pickle” at the same age, and every time I asked for one someone would give me an olive). She told me that when she died she wasn’t going to go to heaven, she was going to go sit on her headstone and watch the rest of us. I would hope that heaven offers more challenging options than that, but whenever I drive past her headstone, I always wave and murmur, “Gramma Lucille.”

fatso

my friend annie and i
were having lunch and we fell into a discussion of people of size. She told me she had gone to the fair with a friend of hers who is a young man of substance, and while he was standing in the midway, thinking about his elephant ear, someone walked past him, said, “You don’t need to eat that,” and kept on walking away. Gone before he could register what had been said, much less formulate a stunning retort.

And that person was probably right: he did not need to eat that elephant ear. Given what they are made of, the question then becomes: Who
does
need to eat an elephant ear? And to what benefit? Are elephant ears inherently better for thin people than for fat ones? Do we suppose that that one particular elephant ear will somehow alter the course of this man’s life in some way that all of the elephant ears before it, or all of the elephant ears to follow, might not? And last but not least, what qualifies any of us for the mission of telling other people what they should or should not eat?

I have probably spent most of my life listening to other people tell me that as a middle-class white person, I have no idea what it is like to be discriminated against. I have never experienced the look that tells me I am not welcome, I have never been treated rudely on a bus, I have never been reminded to keep my place, I have never been laughed at, ridiculed, threatened, snubbed, not waited on, or received well-meaning service I would just as soon have done without. I have never had to choose which streets I will walk down and which streets I will avoid. I have never been told that my needs cannot be met in this store. I have never experienced that lack of social status that can debilitate the soul.

My feelings were not hurt when I was twelve years old and the shoe salesman measured my feet and said he had no women’s shoes large enough for me, but perhaps I could wear the boxes.

I have never been called crude names, like “fatso” or “lardbucket” or “fatass.” My nickname on the school bus was never “Bismarck,” as in the famous battleship. No one ever assumed I was totally inept in all sports except those that involved hitting things because—and everyone knows—the more weight you can put behind it, the farther you can kick or bat or just bully the ball.

I have never picked up a magazine with the photograph of a naked woman of substance on the cover, to read, in the following issue, thirty letters to the editor addressing sizism, including the one that said, “She should be ashamed of herself. She should go on a diet immediately and demonstrate some self-control. She is going to develop diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, and stroke, she will die an ugly death at an early age and she will take down the entire American health system with her.” And that would, of course, be the only letter I remember. I would not need some other calm voice to say, “You don’t know that—and you don’t know that the same fate would not befall a thin woman.”

No one has ever assumed I am lazy, undisciplined, prone to self-pity, and emotionally unstable purely based on my size. No one has ever told me all I need is a little self-discipline and I too could be thin, pretty—a knockout, probably, because I have a “pretty face”—probably very popular because I have a “good personality.” My mother never told me boys would never pay any attention to me because I’m fat.

I have never assumed an admirer would never pay any attention to me because I’m fat. I have never mishandled a sexual situation because I have been trained to think of myself as asexual. Unattractive. Repugnant.

Total strangers have never walked up to me in the street and started to tell me about weight loss programs their second cousin in Tulsa tried with incredible results, nor would they ever do so with the manner and demeanor of someone doing me a nearly unparalleled favor. I have never walked across a parking lot to have a herd of young men break into song about loving women with big butts. When I walk down the street or ride my bicycle, no one has ever hung out the car window to yell crude insults. When I walk into the houses of friends I have never been directed to the “safe” chairs as if I just woke up this morning this size and am incapable of gauging for myself what will or will not hold me.