Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (20 page)

My baby brother (2) was lucky to reach his first birthday, because every now and then he would be left in the care of our
father, a wonderful man, but not necessarily the world’s best baby-sitter. I particularly remember the afternoon my mother
went shopping and left my baby brother napping in his buggy in the dining room. This was the same afternoon my father decided
to knock out the wall between the living room and dining room with his trusty sledgehammer. Our baby brother never woke up
during all of this pounding, but when he did our mother had to dig him out from under a pile of lath and plaster. I remember
our mother said, “What were you thinking?” And our father said
“what … ?
” eloquently, I thought.

As a small child he learned to fearlessly toddle out in front of us with his arms up to indicate he wanted our attention.
As often as not, I would be riding my bike, and rather than running over him (which always put our mother in a bad mood) I
would hang him by the backs of his knees over the handlebars and cradle his body with my arms like the edges of a hammock,
and ride him this way around the “P” (shaped) drive for hours. As an adult several thoughts occur to me: the bike that I rode
had handbrakes, which I could not reach when he was in my arms; it can be hard to balance a bike with an unpredictable thirty-five-pound
weight on the handlebars; the “P” drive was new gravel and therefore hard to navigate and not particularly good landing; I
wonder exactly where our mother was. To the best of my recollection, I never did drop him or throw him over the handlebars.

Over time we have all grown into substantial adults. At five feet seven inches I—the oldest—am also the shortest and the widest.
The Wee One is five feet ten inches and the UnWee is five feet eleven inches. Our little brother (1) is six feet one inch.
Our baby brother (2) is six feet two inches. We are like a human strain of redwood: not only are we tall, we are burly and
thick of trunk. To wander slightly off track with the same analogy, a few who have tried to love us have come to admire the
thickness of our bark and the steadfastness of our stance, but that is another story. Not many people (besides us) go out
of their way to argue with our little brothers. Big Men carry a certain mantle of automatic respect. If nothing else, the
Wee One has observed, there is always the danger that one of them will fall on you.

T
HERE HAS BEEN
a rampant outbreak of vegetarianism in the past few years. They have always walked among us, of course, but their numbers
are growing and they are fast becoming the Militant Minority that nonsmokers were ten years ago. Years ago, when I was young
and occasionally slept on the ground, I was lured to the Michigan Womyn’s Festival where, as I wandered like Alice through
an amazing Wonderland of semi-naked, self-embracing women, I heard the first trill of vegetarianism:

Oh, YUUUK—the smell of burning flesh …

My response was not supportive.

The other day a woman called me out of the blue to tell me she had decided to expand her personal circle of friends and she
wanted to include me in it, and would it be possible for us to meet, perhaps for dinner? (I make note of this because it’s
never happened to me before in my life. Nor, actually, have I ever seized such initiative. I personally am a lay-back-in-the-weeds-and-bat-at-her-ankles
sort of flirt.) Where we might eat, precisely, became somewhat problematic, however, because she is a vegetarian relying on
a confirmed carnivore to pick her restaurant.

I have nothing against vegetarians except they are hard to eat with. I personally could find everything I have ever wanted
to eat at Baskin-Robbins, so of course all of my potential dinner companions except one are nutrition experts. First they
gave up fat (flavor) and now they have given up meat (food.) In another year or so I suspect we’ll give up going out to eat
at all and just wander from cabbage patch to beet bed. And, since I am, in my own way, as devoted to my diet as they are to
theirs, I will be forced to pre-eat. I am so well-known for my eating habits that I called in to work sick one day and my
desk partner suggested I must have accidentally ingested a lettuce leaf.

From a purely outsider’s point of view, vegetarians are a confusing lot. I have vegetarian friends who eat fish. I have vegetarian
friends who eschew beef bouillon but who eat chicken. I have vegetarian friends (not many) who become indignant when it becomes
clear I do not appreciate the purity of their diet: they do not drink milk, eat cheese, eggs or bird’s nests, and only wear
the hides of freshly slaughtered polyesters. Like all non-Catholics who are only too aware of the convenience of Catholicism
(eat, drink and be merry, for Friday we have only to confess) I tend to sniff at the hypocrisy of vegetarianism without needing
to seriously evaluate the philosophy. Being free of contradictory behavior myself, I feel quite comfortable judging my friends.

I have actually gotten into the habit of perusing the menus of new restaurants for vegetarian dishes so I won’t be caught
breathless in the quest for places to take my friends. I can adapt.

And I understand that accepting a particular discipline that is outside the norm—whatever that discipline may be— requires
a certain determined immunity to the many obstacles nonbelievers feel compelled to observe and embrace. It takes guts to buck
the system. And I appreciate the camaraderie of kindred spirits.

I also appreciate meat. I was born and raised in the middle of a herd of cows, my horizons broadened by the silhouettes of
chicken coops, my senses heightened by the gentle eau de pig. I can appreciate more enlightened attitudes about the right
to life of animals, the ecological inefficiencies of a cattle-dependent diet … But I like meat. I want it. I crave it. It
would take just a bunch of Portobello mushrooms to get me through a meat-free meal with a smile.

It is entirely possible, I suppose, that meat-eaters will eventually go the way of smokers. We will be allowed to eat meat
only in special sections of the restaurant. We will have to leave all public buildings and sneak our hot dogs and hamburgers
twenty-five feet or more from the front doors. We will no longer be allowed to bolt down Whoppers while riding in someone
else’s car. Massive lawsuits will be filed against the American Beef Growers Association for primary and secondhand coronary
damage done by the deliberate repression of the known side effects of cholesterol.

Anything is possible.

Twenty years ago no one could have convinced me the tide of public opinion could have swung from the occasional malcontent
and hyperallergic whiner to a nationwide movement to clean up the air we breathe and the toxins we/those near us stuff into
our lungs. I have read, in more than one article, that eventually the human race will learn to eat grains or starve.

I quit smoking. More because I had come to the point (for the third time) when I could either smoke or breathe—but not both—than
because it was politically incorrect, but I did quit. I fear, however, you can have my steak when you can pry it from my cold,
dead hands.

And, just for the record, regarding all of those cutesy we’re-going-to-live-forever-while-being-good-to-the-planet/you’re-going-to-keel-over-and-die-horribly-before-your-time
remarks that seem to flower among the lovers of vegetables: I’m still not supportive. Eat whatever you feel you need to and
feel good about it, certainly. But if you don’t like what is on my plate, fork it.

I
’VE HAD A BACKACHE,
of late. I move much more slowly than I once did. I think about things, like angles and degrees of slant and how to pull
on my left sock. My goal in life, for about the last two weeks, has been to avoid unnecessary pain. Everything else goes somewhere
behind that.

I inched my way downstairs a few mornings ago to find my housemate and Babycakes having breakfast together at the dining room
table. I acquired this housemate because he was in transition between his old house and his new house. He and Babycakes are
still becoming friends. Bob was peering through the half-lens of reading glasses at the paper while he steadily spooned cereal
out of his bowl. Babycakes, who was spread out across the table top like a fine gold rug, was watching every spoonful go slowly
up, sink slowly down, go slowly up, sink slowly down, go slowly up …

Being something of a curmudgeon—it’s probably the pain— I observed that only one of them was truly supposed to be using the
table at a time.

“We’ve worked this out,” my housemate said, and flipped a page of his paper.

And—being racked with pain and attacked by assorted random muscular spasms and contractions—I temporarily forgot exactly what
was wrong with that alleged treaty.

In Skinnerian psychology, the flaw is called “successive approximation.” (You may quietly applaud. Four years of college and
this is pretty much what I remember.) Successive approximation is a term describing the methods by which someone who wishes
someone else to do something arranges for that person to actually do that very deed. As an example let us choose as the expectant
do-ee, oh, say … the cat. The cat—we can call him Babycakes— would like something to be done. To continue our example, we
need a doer. Let us just randomly choose, oh, say … Bob, my housemate. Babycakes would like Bob to do something for him. We
could just recklessly assume this “something” Babycakes would like to have done involves, oh, say … food.

Skinnerian psychology is a behavioral philosophy that assumes that for every behavior there is a reward and for every reward
there is a behavior. An example springs to mind. A man is eating food. A cat jumps on the table. The cat wants the food. The
man has the food. The cat wants the man to give the food to the cat. The man wants to keep his food. The cat must think to
himself, “What does this man want, and how would this help me get his food?” The man wants peace. The man wants the cat to
sit quietly on the table. The cat says, “Ahhh … step one. I have gained the table. I shall reward this man.”

The man turns smugly to his housemate and he says, with just a trace of superiority, “We’ve worked this out.” The man has
been morally justified. The man has his reward.

The cat smiles. Normally he is not allowed on the table. It is time for step two.

Successive approximation is a slow process by which the doer is rewarded each time his behavior comes closer to being what
the doee had in mind than the behavior before it. In this particular example, it will be the cat who will wiggle and twitch
his way across the table toward the proposed doer, but the result is the same: the goal behavior is closer with each subtle
ripple of fine gold hairs. Thus the treaty—which, in the beginning, was that the cat would sit (on the table, but) on the
far side of the table, while the man ate their cereal—has successively approximated its way across the table until the man,
the cat, the cereal (and the treaty) are all cozily tucked into one small corner. So closely, in fact, that the cat’s nose
all but falls into the bowl.

The man is not stupid. He perceives a threat to the peace and tranquillity of his morning breakfast. Gently, firmly, he reprimands
the cat. “Your place is on that side of the table,” he says, pointing with a milk-laden spoon.

This is the beauty of successive approximation (not to mention cats). The cat does not argue. The cat does not engage in negative
social behavior. The cat does not attempt to punish or threaten the man. The cat withdraws. Halfway across the table. He is
now not as close as he once was to the goal. He is also not as far away as he started out. He may sing a brief song to convince
the man of his sincerity and affection. The cat feels neither, but there is nothing in Skinnerian behavioral psychology that
requires absolute or even approximate honesty.

In a previous life I am fairly sure Skinner was a cat.

I studied Skinnerian psychology in the late sixties, just about the time my generation discovered peace, love and the Vietnam
War. Good drugs were cheap and all around us. We all wanted to believe that good vibrations and gentle thoughts would change
the world, cure greed and patch the hole in the ozone. So we all trooped into 101A psych course, ready to learn how to cure
the planet and we immediately learned that (1) Skinner was primarily interested in electrocuting mice and (2) as far as Skinner
was concerned, love had nothing to do with it. My, the high moral arguments that erupted from that class. It seems just basic
human nature now, the notion that if you reward a child for a behavior the child will probably repeat the behavior, but at
the time we had much higher principles. We did not conduct our behavior based on short-term temporal rewards (like fashion,
social acceptance, peer pressure or the mores of the time). We were Right. We were Good. We were riding with the angels.

I fought with the amorality of Skinnerian psychology for a long time.

And every day I took that class, the cat I lived with at the time would jump up on my bed, kiss me, sing to me, rub her face
against my cheek, then jump off the bed and go sit in the doorway. I would get up, walk down the hall and go into the bathroom,
and the cat would come in, wind around my ankles, sit briefly in my lap, sing to me, rub her cheeks against mine, then go
sit at the top of the stairs. I would throw on a robe, wander on downstairs, and the cat would run into the kitchen and then
back to get me, and then into the kitchen and then back to get me. I would walk into the kitchen and the cat would run up
to the cupboard where her food was kept and then to her dish and then up to the cupboard where her food was kept and then
to her dish.

Somewhere about mid-term it dawned on me that my cat rewarded me for every behavior that more successively approximated her
goal. It was nice that I felt my cat loved me. It was nice that I responded so well to small, furry bodies rubbing against
my shins. It was also very nice that I fed her for this. It worked out well for everyone involved.