Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (11 page)

So my Beloved lent Alice her car, and we took everything out of our friend’s trunk and put it in my Beloved’s trunk, just
as the wrecker man said, “You know, I should be able to get that.”

So we got everything back out of my Beloved’s trunk and put it back in Alice’s trunk, just as the wrecker man said, “No, I
guess not …”

So we got everything out of our friend’s trunk and we put it in my Beloved’s trunk.

Alice is going to have to leave Rhonda and my Beloved is going to have to leave me because their stuff is so commingled after
about the sixth trunk swap they will never be able to live independently again.

But we got everyone home, out of the park, and I don’t believe we even hit any geese.

I still don’t own a cell phone, but I may take the plumber’s wrench out of my truck for safety’s sake. You can never be sure
which one of your friends will be most willing to bang on your engine. However helpful that might be.

This morning your face

was in my mirror: the same

yellow/green eyes, the same

odd cindered flecks, the same

laughlines at the corners, the same

age.

You are frozen in time.

Preserved, like my plaster

kindergarten handprints, or

snap shot and printed as

a gap-toothed six-year-old

beaming proudly at the helm

of her brand-new bike.

My father, aging gracefully,

stands on the cusp of becoming

an older man, but you—who hated

aging—are forever forty-nine.

For twenty-two years you have

stayed the same, no after-images

to betray you, while I look in my mirror

and I see your face

your eyes.

In seven days

I will be older

than any image I have

of you.

I
T IS A BEAUTIFUL DAY,
nearly 70 degrees outside before the sun even awoke. Spring is stirring. The sap is running. Tiny, half-formed ideas of life
are beginning to poke up out of the ground. Three evenings ago I drove past a wetland and I heard a sound I have not heard
in years—the chorus of wide-awake and amorous frogs advertising their wares:
For a good time check out lily pad number 614. Distinguished gentleman in emerald greatcoat paging spotted lady with long
legs. No reasonable offer refused
. The chorus of frog ponds. I know a great deal about frogs.

I can remember when we believed perhaps a little less that the world should conform to our expectations, and it was the responsibility
of the driver to maneuver the road and not of the road to stay under the driver. The road that ran in front of our house—Battle
Creek Road then, Union City Road now, a country road that has changed its name to acknowledge a small (but very picturesque)
wide spot not even square in the middle of it—crossed a free-flowing wetland just north of my parents’ yard. The wetland on
the right of the highway was connected to the wetland on the left of the highway by a culvert that ran under the road, and,
based on my scientific observations as a child, all of the boy frogs were born on the right and all of the girl frogs were
born on the left. When spring came and the sap began to run, all of the frogs from both wetlands met in the middle of the
road to begin their courtship. It was not an exceptionally busy highway, but there is never much mystery about the outcome
of a collision between a frog and a car, and over a period of about six days and nights when frogs apparently act out all
of their sexual urges for the entire year, the highway would develop a distinct frog coating. There were dead frogs everywhere.
The dip between the highlands and the lowlands on that particular stretch of road was sudden and rather startling to the uninitiated—and
particularly so to the drunk—and the smooth patina of deceased frogs did nothing to improve traction or handling. And so it
came to pass that some unfortunate soul, weaving his way home from a bar, parked his car rather unexpectedly in the swamp.
I would not have parked my car there. The men who came to operate the three wreckers, the bulldozer and the crane that came
to pluck him out all agreed they would not have parked their cars there, but in those days one did not get much sympathy for
being the victim of a frog attack. Particularly when the frogs were dead.

The Road Commission came out shortly after that and built the road up until there was no appreciable dip. Perhaps they were
annoyed because the drunk lived. The highway became something of a climb for a sex-starved frog and over time there came to
be fewer and fewer frogs in the gravel pit. Some have blamed this on changes in the climate and acid rain, but I blame the
Road Commission and a little-known natural phenomena known as “recruitment.” I would think that by the time one has tried
to climb Mount Everest just for a hot date, fellow boy frogs—or sister girl frogs—who are distinctly more convenient, may
just look a whole lot better. It is possible the entire frog pond community just turned gay and died out.

There are other factors leading to the disappearance of the common frog that I feel have been underestimated by the scientific
community, not the least of which is basic intelligence. A friend of mine who is six feet two inches and certainly not a fragile
thing recently told me a tale about going to a Mexican restaurant with friends and feeling uneasy about speaking frankly about
his lifestyle (which does not even include eating flies with his tongue). When I failed to appreciate his dilemma, he reminded
me of the possibility of meeting a herd of young men waving two-by-fours. My friend has well-honed survival instincts. And
it curiously brought me back to remembering the last frog I saw. Was he soaking up the sun’s rays through two or three feet
of mud? Was he sitting on a lily pad in the middle of the lake? No, the last one I saw was hopping for his life down the bank,
a herd of small boys waving sticks and shrieking with the glee of the hunt behind him.

A year or so ago I was driving down the road, minding my own business, when a frog leaped into my headlights and disappeared
under the wheels of my truck. I believe I have already mentioned that given not one but two entire wetlands in which to conduct
their personal business, the vast majority of frogs were driven to display their every intimate moment on a slab of asphalt
twelve feet wide and perhaps an eighth of a mile long. I believe suicide is a seriously understudied social problem for frogs.
I believe the most that can be said for frogs is that they have a curious inability to see and identify an obvious natural
enemy.

Which leads me to the subject of lawn mowers. My father the groundskeeper woke every summer morning to wander out into his
yard and measure each blade of grass that grew there and the second one blade grew any taller than any of the others, he would
say, “Cheryl—have you looked at the lawn?”

Being more a chattel really than a groundskeeper I could only remark that it seemed quite green to me.

“Needs to be mowed,” he would announce, and then he would go off to work.

I hated mowing the lawn as a child. I hated work as a child: but I hated mowing the lawn for two reasons. The mower. And frogs.
The mower would never start for me. I could spend hours yanking the string, to have it cough, choke, splutter and die. I could
kick it, swear at it, throw small stones at it, threaten it, yank the rope again … the mower would never start. If it did
start, it would die two rows later and never start again. My father would come home. He would get out of his car. He would
stretch. He would look around. He would purse his lips. He would say, “What happened to the lawn, Cheryl?”

I would answer, “The mower won’t start.”

He would say, “Did you put gas in it?”

I would always swear I had, although, in truth, that particular task would never occur to me because it was my father’s mower
and my father never kept a tool without all of its required fluids in his life. I did not have any concept of how many fluids
male tools need until some time after I left my father’s house when, one by one, all of my tools ran dry.

He would look annoyed, possibly because he had five children and two jobs and his oldest child was not even bright enough
to run a lawn mower, and we would walk over to the offending mower, and he would look at it, check the gas, check some other
fluid, walk all the way around it twice, and then reach out and pull the string and POOF!

The mower started.

I watched this ritual perhaps two hundred times before it finally dawned on me that lawn mowers are afraid of circles, much
preferring straight lines, and they will do anything to keep you from walking around them that third time—even start, if need
be.

So, having spent the entire day not mowing the lawn, I would now have my entire evening tied up in grass and I would trudge
glumly along behind the mower, mowing frogs.

Frogs are curiously attracted to lawn mowers. They are apparently more hypnotic than car headlights are for deer. Perhaps
it is the noise. Frogs will come from miles around to hop into the spinning blades of a lawn mower and be fileted, pureed
and sprayed like fine pink mist all over the shins of slave labor. For the record, frog bones hurt.

As I drove this spring past the wetland where the frogs were singing mating calls to the frogs on the other side of the road,
I was touched for a moment with nostalgia. What a delightful, primordial sound. It was almost like being home again, listening
to the pop pop pop of those little frog bodies in the road.

Sometimes

I can feel your will

lean in behind me,

your breath hot

on my cheek

as you whisper words

I can no longer hear.

The silence doesn’t matter.

Threatening/reassuring,

you always meant:

Remember me—

I’m right here.

I
WAS SITTING
at the keyboard and Babycakes was sitting on my shoulder, half-asleep (both the cat and the shoulder) when an utterly silent
shadow rippled across the room.

I thought,
There’s a bird in this room
.

Something was amiss, I could tell by the repetitive lashing of my left ear by the cat’s tail.

A large bird
, I reflected, reviewing my memory,
black and swooping—probably a rogue turkey vulture.

But I sat at my keyboard and the cat sat on my shoulder, and for the longest time nothing happened.

It’s all your imagination
, I reproved myself.
Perhaps it was merely a giant moth
.

And at that exact moment, an utterly silent shadow swooped across the room.

The cat bolted off my shoulder, taking along small bits of my skin, and huddled down on the floor where he made himself into
a small gold rug with big accusing gold eyes, which he trained on me, as if to say,
What have you done now?

Circling my light like a drunken glider was a bat.

I know very little about bats now and I knew even less then. This bat was small and brown. (This observation is unusually
precise. Experts in batology would have called it a small brown bat. I did not know this, at the time.)

When I stood up, the circle the bat was flying around my light became more elliptical, as if something large and horrifying
had wandered into its radar. I looked around, but I never did see what it was.

I spoke to the bat. I said, “Go away.”

I walked over to the window, raised the screen, and posed, not altogether unlike Vanna White. “Here would be a good place
to go,” I directed.

The bat switched the tilt of his ellipse from one side of the room to the other. Beyond that I could see no real change in
his behavior. He swept past me once, dangerously close to my hair, which I interpreted as an act of aggression.

I may have shrieked.

(Once. It was one of those girl-instinct things that sometimes gets the better of me.)

I went back to the other side of the room, beside the keyboard, and waited.

The bat stopped circling. He had thrown up some subsonic invisibility ray to disguise his whereabouts.

I looked expectantly at the cat.

The cat looked disgusted and bathed a wild hair.

I thought to myself,
leave the screen open, close the computer room door and go to bed—when you wake up in the morning, the bat will be gone.

Or, thirty thousand of his closest friends will be partying in the computer room. There will be stale beer and corn nuts all
over the keyboard, small drunken aviators will be hanging upside down from the curtain rods …

Bats are good,
my conscience lectured me,
don’t do anything to hurt this innocent little bat
.

So I closed the screen, closed the door and snuck myself and the cat out of the computer room and went to bed.

In the morning the bat did seem to have vacated the premises.

The following night I was sitting at the keyboard with a sleeping cat on my sleeping shoulder when an utterly silent shadow
rippled across the room.

The cat lunged off my shoulder, taking most of my right arm with him, and hid under the desk.

“That’s it,” I said, “I’m done—get out of my house.”

And I went for the tennis racket.

(We will take a moment from our narrative to allow all of my personal friends to finish turning to one another and murmuring,
“Cheryl Peck owns a tennis racket?” I do. I stole it from the Wee One because I could see no reason why my little sister should
own a tennis racket when I didn’t. I don’t play tennis, but then again, I might. Besides, she quit playing right after that.)

My plan was simple, but well organized: I would swing the tennis racket, knocking the bat out of the air into a small trash
can I held in the other hand. I would then slam the tennis racket over the top of the can, constructing a makeshift jail long
enough to carry my prisoner downstairs and outside to freedom, where he would gratefully fly away.