Revenge of the Paste Eaters (15 page)

He did this with all nine trees, until in the end he had nine spindly, weakly little maple trees in paper buckets parked all over our lawn.

“Okay,” he said, and he wandered off.

“Well, that’s dumb-looking,” I said to my siblings.

“They’re going to be hard to mow around,” my siblings said to me.

“I don’t like it,” I agreed. “Something’s up.”

And indeed it was: it was my father with a shovel thrown over his shoulder. “You’re going to need to get a bucket of water,” he said to me.

This is the most misleading sentence my father has ever said to me, bar none. I believed, at the time I heard it, that for some unknown reason my father had determined he needed one bucket of water.

I found a bucket. I filled it with water. I hauled it four miles across the lawn to where he was.

He picked up my bucket and poured the water into a hole he had just dug. He handed the bucket back to me and looked expectant.

It took five buckets of water to plant each tree. His children were sprawled all over the lawn like spent slaves, but we had not yet heard the worst of it.

Those stupid little trees required five buckets—twenty-five
gallons
—of water apiece for the first twenty-five years of their life. It makes no difference whether you talk to me or the UnWee or the Wee One or our Little Brother or our Baby Brother, we will all tell you the same thing. Barely taller than five-gallon pails ourselves, we hauled those pails full of water five times a tree for nine trees every day, day in, day out, across mountains and deserts uphill both ways through droughts and dust storms and gale-force winds.

If you were to look at my father’s lawn today you would find a beautifully manicured park filled with lush, healthy sugar maples. One was killed by lightning, another rotted in the crotch and split, but most of them are full, mature trees. Beautiful trees. Sometimes we gather in my father’s lawn, and someone—a newcomer—will comment on how beautiful my father’s trees are.

It doesn’t matter which of us answers, it’s always the same. We look at the trees, and we nod, and we mutter, “Water hogs.” And one more time we tell the story of the never-ending bucket brigade.

how i came out

i was browsing through
my personal poetry the other day and I came across a particularly cranky one I wrote to a friend who was struggling with her sexuality. My friend had done everything she was supposed to do. She went to college, she got married, she had two children, she got divorced, she got a decent job, she fell in love with a woman. Wait. Women falling in love with other women is not on the “should” list her mother gave her. My friend was drawn to me because I was out, I was open about my life, and I would talk to her about the subject that had become the all-consuming passion of her life. I knew other gay women and I was willing to introduce her. On the other hand . . . I was out. I was open about my life. People
knew
about me. She reminded me of the need for discretion—at least in terms of betraying her “secret”—about seventeen times a day, and as a result I wrote a scathing poem to her (
“we expect more from sisters”
) which, as far as I know, she’s never read.

I felt very cool and righteous when I wrote that poem.

Being in the throes of creative genius, I probably had just momentarily forgotten the book I threw against the wall on Waterman Avenue, or the two hours I spent driving across the state to visit a bookstore so I could walk in the front door and right on out the back. Or the twenty-odd years where I lived a completely schizophrenic life with my gay friends on one stop on I-94 and my straight friends on the other. Coming out may be a process, but I had pulled my life together: she needed to shape up.

She was struggling because she had a grown child who had made vaguely homophobic remarks. Imagine letting a small thing like your offspring hold you back from being all that you can be.

This is how I came out. I have to remind myself of this from time to time because I am apt to rewrite for myself a much more courageous past than the one I lived.

I was fat, I was socially inept, I had zits, my mother told me I would never finish anything. I wanted more than anything else to be a writer and my mother told me I would starve on the street because no one wanted to read the dark and depressing melodramatic dreck I wrote. (She did not actually use the word “dreck.” What she said was, “Sherry, why does everything you write have to be so dark? You have a wonderful sense of humor, why don’t you show that once in a while?” She obviously had no understanding of drama.) The last thing I needed in my life was to wake up one morning a lesbian.

In fact, I was not a lesbian. I didn’t even like the word. (As a sort of lingering denial, I misspelled it for years.)

No. I was a writer. I had a perpetual cast of imaginary people in my head, going about their own lives, which were always more dramatic, meaningful, and intense than mine. One day, for no obvious reason, my main imaginary character fell in love with his best friend.

Imagine that. I was so creative that I was having male-on-male sexual fantasies in my head. It had nothing to do with me, of course, because I am not male . . .

. . . But it did pique my curiosity, and I decided I needed to research the peculiar direction this character had (autonomously) taken. (Did I mention that these imaginary characters who live in my head have the bad habit of becoming just intensely, passionately fascinated by issues that six months later would become unexpected issues in my own life?) The first thing I discovered was that almost no one had ever written a book about gay men.

I went to my local bookstore, where I found two books:
Burn in Hell, Pervert
and
We All Live a Long, Long Way Away.

I determined that perhaps the bookstore where I was shopping was too small, so I went to Ann Arbor. I went to college in Ann Arbor, where I vaguely remembered something called “gay and lesbian dances.” I had always wanted to go (we have no idea why) but none of my roommates had ever agreed to go with me. Now, as it turned out, I should have gone, because I could have been doing research for my book. (For my main male character who, all of his own accord, had gone gay on me one day and started boffing his best friend. Try to keep up.)

I found a book that was a kind of travel guide for gay men. It was titled
The Gay Insider.
It was written under a pseudonym by this amazingly charming and enthusiastic young man who traveled all over the United States checking out the gay hot spots (both of them) at the time. He was funny. He was delightful. I sat right down to write him a letter. I wanted to tell him how much I enjoyed his book, how I had achieved a new understanding of the trials and tribulations of gay men, how I felt he and I had forged, through his book, a common bond, which was that he was a gay man and I was a straight woman with an imaginary male character in her head who had gone gay one day for no good reason. (Much the same way cider just turns into vinegar, I would imagine.)

That letter went to hell in a handbasket. That letter was twenty-three pages long and it was still explaining why I (of all people) read his book in the first place. The warm glow of kinship had flared up in my face and burned out, I was mad at the author, mad at myself. I was furious with my main character and his flexible sexuality that had gotten us all into this mess to begin with. I snapped, “I am NOT a lesbian,” and threw the book against the wall.

I could prove it.

And I sat right down, and I wrote a concentrated, distilled, intentionally
lesbian
story. I picked out every lesbian impulse I had ever had and I exaggerated it, intensified it, threw it on the floor, and jumped on it seven times while wearing boots. I wrote a story about a
dyke.

(I am a creative writer. I write fiction. I can write anything I want to write.)

I wrote a short story about a woman going to her best friend’s wedding.

I wrote the first honest, frankly biographical short story based on my own life experiences I had ever written. The main character was in love with her best friend. She didn’t
want
to be. She did everything she could to deny it, she would have died rather than admit it. But reading that story, it was remarkably clear what the conflict was. Unlike the other three times I had tried to write the same story, casting myself as a man, and the story made no sense at all.

It took me three weeks of conscious practice to use the word “lesbian” in a sentence that did not also include the word “not.”

It took me six months to make a deliberate effort to meet another lesbian.

It took me twenty years to get so cool with my sexuality that I could fault a sister for asking me to deny part of my identity to protect hers.

The process of self-acceptance is never-ending. A few days ago my editor sent me a review a bookseller wrote to publicize
Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs.
The bookseller had written, “Cheryl Peck is a fat, lazy lesbian from Michigan who doesn’t care who knows it . . .” I took immediate offense. I turned to Babycakes and I snapped, “How dare that man call me ‘lazy’?”

walking home

i was driving home
from work. I was tired. It was a cold, rainy day following too many cold, rainy days that have stood between me and a warm and welcoming spring; it was damp in the truck and slick on the highway, and as I rattled up to a busy intersection of two one-way streets, two two-way streets, and the railroad tracks, there—in the middle of this frantic man-made mess—was a dog. Probably not an old dog, but unmistakably a tired dog. A dog with sore feet and aching muscles and a slight limp. A wet, tired, lost dog who looked up at me in the middle of the road and ripped out my heart.

I had stopped for the light: I opened the truck door and tried to tempt him into my truck, but he looked at me warily and then ducked his head and padded determinedly into the path of three more lanes of traffic. And my light changed.

Frantic, I drove through the intersection and around the block, picked the wrong road back, drove in another wild circle, and ended up parked in front of the train station. Abandoning the truck, I set out on foot to find him, half expecting to find his freshly killed body on the highway. But he had made it across all three lanes and was sitting in the grass beside the road like a weary traveler who has gone as far as he can go.

I tried to walk up to him, but he dragged himself up, stared at me a minute, and then started walking again.

I called him, but he ducked his head and trudged along, keeping just about the same distance between us.

I felt awful. My imagination kept running off on riffs of what it must feel like to be lost and homeless in the middle of a world that makes no sense. I wanted to take him home (to my dog-hating cat) and give him shelter (in my cat-hair-coated home) and perhaps a decent meal (cat food?). I imagined how my life might be changed by the addition of one small (fifty-pound), bedraggled traveler. (I could give up my social life, re-home my personal dog-hating cat herd, all without ever addressing issues like housetraining, previous owner location, and where on three-fifths of an acre one keeps what looked like many parts of a golden retriever/Saint Bernard/Lab mix.)

I did give up. Although I was/am not convinced it was in his best interest, I allowed him to choose not to be adopted by me. Perhaps he went home.

Perhaps.

give me a head with hair . . .

we were waiting for
our port-a-pit chickens to roast when I first saw her. I didn’t pay much attention to her at first because I was hungry and I had begun to suspect that the port-a-pit chicken roasters were inexperienced in the art of port-a-pit chicken roasting and there were not enough hours left in the day for my port-a-pit chicken—for which I had already paid—to achieve anything close to the state of roastedness. I was hungry (never a good way to begin) and I was bored, because there is nothing quite like waiting for something you have already guessed you’re never going to get. What brought my attention back to the little girl was the girly-girl flip of her long, luxurious hair. She would tip her head back almost like a dog being butt-scratched, and I realized she was feeling her hair flow down her back. Because it was acquired hair. A fall. She was about eight years old and someone had pinned about a four-pound ponytail to the back of her head—she was in girly-girl heaven.

About the only thing that ever appealed to me about being a girl was long hair. Long, thick, glorious hair cascading down my back if I so chose. And I did so choose. My Grandmother Molby had never cut her hair—never—and every night she would sit down at her dressing table and unbraid her hair until it hung all around her like a gossamer curtain from the top of her head to just gently touching the floor. And she would comb it. I knew that if I could just convince my mother to stop chopping mine off, people would stop saying things like, “She’s . . . he’s . . . a cute little thing . . .” I didn’t mind being mistaken for a boy, but if I had to actually be a girl I wanted the perks that went with it. The only perk I could see was hair.

I was born bald and I stayed that way for at least two years. I had about seven strands of babyfur, which my mother painstakingly formed into two little curls on the top of my head for every photograph she had taken of me. The babyfur was blond, but when actual hair grew in to replace it, it was almost exactly the color of a well-stirred mud puddle. It was baby-fine. It grew quickly. It grew long. It almost—but never really—curled, which means it bent here and there, and about five strands of it, gathered together like a delinquent gang at the back of my part, stood straight up.

The other thing my baby-fine hairs that almost but not quite curled did, and did with a vengeance, was form tight, unforgiving wads around the base of my hairline. I didn’t care: I had hair. But my mother had no patience with my nascent dreadlocks. I came to turn pale and wobble off like a belle with the vapors whenever I saw my mother coming toward me with a hairbrush, and I suppose some people might have assumed she beat me with it, which wasn’t true. She brushed my hair with it. She would wind that brush through my hair, get a good, solid hold on the snarls along my neckline, and rip them out by the roots. I would shriek and scream and wail and the next thing I knew I had another bowl over my head and my mother was scissoring off all of my hair. “If you can’t stand still and be quiet and get your hair combed, then you can’t have long hair,” she would lecture me, as if there were an obvious choice somewhere in that.