God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (14 page)
Sizing Up Men and Women
One’s perception of one’s personal size, I have discovered, is heavily influenced by the style of one’s private equipment. That is to say, persons with the popular Guy Style apparatus will visualize themselves one way—tall—while for persons with the equally popular Girl Style of rigging, the desirable image can fluctuate from time to time. Guys never waver—they always want to be tall and indeed will claim to be, obvious facts to the contrary. I know this because I am six feet tall and I have never personally met a man who admitted being under five-nine. I can be standing right next to him, looking smack down at the entire top of his head, and if the subject of height comes up—which it so often does in my presence—he will invariably say that he is five-nine, which would make me at least seven-two. In our midst at the time of this conversation can be another woman who is five-four, and the tops of their heads will be exactly level. The guy will stand between the two of us girls and say with a completely straight face and utter conviction in his heart that he
is
five-nine. Me and the girl will exchange glances, wordlessly communicating to each other that this guy obviously thinks that we are either dumb as a box of hair or blind or possibly both, but he’s happy with his imagined stature, so we let him keep it.
I do understand this overwhelming desire to ignore the truth about one’s size. I have always harbored a desire to be five-two. While I was making up impossible stuff to wish for regarding my person, I also wanted to weigh a hundred and five pounds and have long red hair, green eyes, big tits, and little feet. Oh, and I wanted to be able to sing as well. Fate was not kind. The last time I was five-two I was in the third grade, but I probably didn’t weigh a hundred and five until I was much much older. I was a very tall, very skinny kid. I am still very tall. The red hair—well, I have it once a year, anyway, in the St. Paddy’s Parade, but for the most part my natural color is semi-gray; it is completely natural. I didn’t pay to have it dyed that way. I have not ever found it necessary to wear a minimizer bra. In fact, if I could figure out how to wear two Wonderbras, I would. And my feet. Oh, my feet. The feet I would have given myself are just the cutest little things! And my teeny little shoes would just make you cry, they’re so precious. People would wonder how I could even walk on these feet, they are so very teeny-tiny. The only thing tinier on my body, if I were designing it, would be my tee-tiny little ole butt; it would be like one of them little tiny baby lima beans. I can say one good thing about the actual size of my feet: It certainly is a mercy there’s that much of me folded under—otherwise, I
would
be seven-two.
A really nutty thing women do, indicating a severe distortion problem, is apparent in the clothes we buy when we have lost some weight. In our minds, before the weight loss, we were behemoths, which may or may not be founded in fact. However, once even a minimal weight loss has been achieved, we are positively elfin and we will race out and buy the clothes to prove it. We will buy clothes to put on our new bodies that, had we just recently risen to our present weight, we wouldn’t dream of putting on and going out in public. Since we are on our way down the scale, we think we are Tyra Banks, and our lust for tiny spandex dresses is boundless. I have a friend—you have one, too, I’m sure—who insists on wearing the very smallest-size clothes that she can actually squeeze herself into and zip up all the way. If that zipper closes, honey—it fits. Doesn’t matter that the pleats and pockets are all stretched out, she can’t move her arms, and there’s fat poking out between the buttons. If she can fasten a size-four around her girth, then she’s a by-God-size-four, and that’s all there is to it. She would look great in a size ten, but she just lo-o-o-o-oves that number four. Of course, to people who don’t know her, she looks like she has probably recently gained fifty pounds and can’t afford to buy clothes to keep up with her rapidly expanding behind. All she can see in her mind’s eye is that magic number four. Her mind’s eye apparently can’t see the woman in the mirror. We need to get her together with the guy who’s five-nine. I bet they could imagine a wonderful life together.
I Prefer Clorox
I hear a lot of complaints lately about women’s perfume. Actually, I have made a lot of complaints lately about women’s perfume. I would much rather they have perfume-free zones in restaurants than smoke-free ones, and I am no fan of cigarette smoke. But I would say that 99 percent of all the perfumes being manufactured today actually started out as chemical warfare weapons, and as soon as the formulas were declassified, all those Calvin Klein types snapped them up and put them in fancy bottles. I have been reduced to a sneezing, snotty-nosed, teary-eyed wretch in under five minutes, simply from being in the same building with some of these “fragrances.”
But let me hasten—I could fall and hurt myself, I am in such a hurry—to say that as vile as women’s perfume is, men’s is worse. And they have no sense whatsoever about how much to put on their persons at one dousing. They positively drench themselves in it. There is one guy who comes down from his shower at the gym, all buffed and shined, and smelling loud. He goes straight to the water fountain. I have made the mistake on more than one occasion of sticking my head in the water fountain right after he has been there. Big mistake. Huge. A big, ole stinky mistake. He is carrying around such a cloud of scent that a bunch of it hangs inside the water fountain and gloms onto the next poor fool who sticks his/her head in there. And there is no getting it off without a major hot shower, either. It does not wear off all day long. It sort of gets up your nose and sets up permanent residence, too. Heaven help you if one of these stinky people should go so far as to hug you. You are marred for life.
My next-door neighbors had a real mean maid when we were growing up. Mae, I think her name was. She used to yell at my friends, whose parents employed her but who were, of course, nowhere around to protect their hapless offspring. One of her favorite threats, on which she hung not even the hint of a veil, was, if they did not immediately and without any hesitation do whatever it was she wanted them to do, “I’m gone put sump’n on you Clorox won’t take off!” And she always really emphasized the first syllable of
Clorox
and gave it a really long “o” sound. Cloe-rox. It was a highly effective threat and generally had the desired effect of intimidating the kids into her required state of cowed obedience. So whenever I find myself plastered with somebody else’s raunchy eau de toilette (there’s a fitting name), I always think of Mae, the mean maid, and her threat. Has sump’n been put on me that Cloe-rox won’t take off?
It Was Only an Earthquake
Contrary to popular opinion, the chances of keeping cool in a crisis or running around screaming like a howler monkey are split pretty evenly along gender lines. There’s just no predicting who will go nuts on you. I was in a crowded elevator once, going from the basement level to the ground level. That’s as far as it went because it was a short building. There were mobs of people waiting for the elevator on both levels, which were only ten feet apart, max. Okay, the elevator gets stuck. I’m telling you, in less than eight seconds it was a madhouse in that elevator. One woman started yelling at another woman that it was her fault because she touched the buttons. One man started spinning in place, hyperventilating loudly. Another man literally crawled up the bodies and over the heads of everyone in front of him to get to the buttons so that he could push them himself. Being approximately three feet taller than everyone else in the elevator, I was just watching this little panorama unfold before me. Just before the shrieking started, I pointed out to them that (a) we were only maybe eight and a half feet off the ground and (b) everybody on both floors could hear that we were stuck, and help was bound to be here pronto, because those people waiting wanted to use the elevator their ownselves. Then the people with me started shrieking, and no sooner had the first blast died down than the elevator lurched up the last two feet and the doors opened, and they all walked out without even the decency to look sheepish for having behaved like pure loons in there. All that is to say, you just can’t tell about people in an emergency: The male/female thing is not a good predictor.
Here’s another example, told to me by our Spud Stud, Bob. Bob’s buddies Claudine and Homer took a trip to San Francisco. Remember that big earthquake they had a few years back? That’s when they went. Claudine is on the twenty-fifth floor of a high-rise hotel, in the shower, and here comes this giant earthquake. This, I can only imagine, is infinitely more offputting than having the doorbell ring midshower. She manages to get out of the shower and into the black hole that her hotel room has become and find a housecoat and a raincoat. Now, speaking just for myself here, I have never personally carried either a housecoat or a raincoat anywhere. But Claudine’s got them both and she puts them both on and finds her way out into the pitch-dark hall and feels her way along toward the sound of a woman having a screaming fit. She finds the woman, and they both indulge themselves for a moment or two in a little well-deserved hysteria. Now, as
Bob
tells it, the two women are just sniveling mounds of housecoats and raincoats until a man, undaunted and reserved, comes by and kindly and calmly herds the two of them down the twenty-five flights of dark stairs. I doubt the veracity of this account, but they did get out into the street, where they all proceeded to go completely nuts with everybody else out there.
Meanwhile, several miles away and out in the sun, our Homer is on the golf course. According to his account, the ground just sort of rippled. They all froze momentarily and then it stopped, so they assumed it was just your regular everyday earthquake that they have out there forty times a day. Everybody behind them was playing on and everybody in front of them was playing on, so naturally, Homer and his buddies played on, too. Several hours later, as they started making their way back into town, around closed roads and missing bridges and houses bucked up and split wide all around, it began to dawn on them to be perhaps just a little afraid.
Back at the hotel, Claudine had no idea where her darling Homer was, and she was frantic with worry. Eventually, Homer appeared, and they fell on each other with relief that neither had been harmed. The joyful reunion continued until Claudine learned that while she was shivering and quaking in the streets, Homer was playing golf!
“You were on the golf course?!” And yet again, “You were on the golf course!” After steadying herself, she proceeded, “You’re telling me that while I was here, not knowing if you were alive or dead, not knowing if I would live or die in this tacky housecoat with a bunch of shrieking strangers, you were playing golf.” Pause. “Homer? What on earth did you do?”
To which Homer had the reckless temerity to reply, “Bogey, par, par, bogey.” And somehow Homer is still alive, this very day.
16
Civil Rights, Body Hair, and Other Delicate Matters
I
continue to be shocked, appalled, and dismayed at the never-ending supply of inequities in the lives of male people and female people. I’ll never forget BoPeep coming home from school in the first grade on Martin Luther King Day. It was the first time she’d heard of the civil rights struggle, and she was horrified. I said, Well, do you realize that
we
could be treated just that same way in some situations? She was confused, since we happen to be white. Ah, yes, I said, but we are women, and black and white men got the vote before women did in this country. I told her that her very own grandmother was born before women in the United States of America could vote for dog catcher. She was astounded. I briefly explained that women are still considered property in many parts of the world, with no rights whatsoever. And it’s not just political power that’s been distributed unequally, I told her.
Consider this: I don’t know if society (men) silently decreed this a thousand years ago or what, but for the life of me I can’t understand how come a three-hundred-pound guy can cram himself into a Speedo and nobody blinks. The guy can also have black, curly hair growing thickly over his entire body so that he looks not unlike a gorilla in a bikini, and nobody seems to mind. Why is this so?
Women, on the other hand, must be completely hairless. Gleaming, bald bodies are required of us. Who started this bizarre tradition of shaving our bodies, anyway? Oh, stop gagging, I do it. I’m not over here growing armpit hair while I write; I just wonder how and why it got started and how come it was never dictated that guys do it. I am of the opinion that if women’s underarm hair is offensive (and I’m not totally convinced that it is), hair on a guy’s back is ten times worse. Yet who among them feels the slightest obligation to do anything about its removal? Is there a woman out there who, after suffering the agony of a bikini wax, can say this is fair? I think not.
Women must also not appear to have any spare pounds in a swimsuit. As a result, there are now eighteen thousand varieties of camouflage swimwear for us to try. They are basically gaily patterned girdles, and if you want to know how well they work, squeeze a tube of pork sausage in the middle real hard. It’s gotta go somewhere. It’s not like we’re hollow on the inside and you can just mash the fat inward and hide it.
I saw something in a catalog the other day that might just solve the world’s problem of pool attire, though. (This was in a legitimate catalog. If it was a joke, they kept a straight face about it.) Called “FrogWear,” it was sun-proof and covered you—totally—from neck to ankles in white fabric. I swear to you, they showed this entire family unit—Mom, Big Sister, Little Brother, Dad—frolicking merrily in the pool, wearing these ridiculous outfits just as if they had good sense. Not to mention mirrors. I mean, it looked like they were swimming in beekeeper suits. I’m sure it is the wave of the future, and not a moment too soon, either. They might consider some colors and patterns, though, in the interest of camouflage. You can still see all that back hair through the white, and if you had a spare tire, you’d look like a three-hundred-pound sack of flour floating in the pool.
And so you see, I told my precious angel who was listening raptly to my rant, we as women have special responsibilities to fight in every way we can for the rights of everyone to ensure that they are not denied to anyone, including us. She sat there blinking for a time, taking it all in. She’ll be prepared all right, I’ll see to that.
Men and women have vastly different habits regarding their toilettes, and their toilets as well. You won’t find a whole lot of men who like to take long baths, for example. Guys like to jump in the shower and be done with it. And while we can take a quick shower when the situation calls for it, whenever time permits, we do love to get up to our necks in hot water and sit there for days.
Most men have fairly easy-care hair, while we have to fool with ours a bit more. There are the obvious exceptions, given the current popularity of head-shaving for both sexes, but by and large, men don’t fuss with their hair much, and we think this is a good thing. As we discussed in
SPQBOL,
we are against men coloring, perming, or artificially replacing their hair. We are also against men having “hairdos.” One of our Wannabes was married (briefly) to a man who had a hairdo, and he would fiddle with it endlessly, and if it wouldn’t do right, he would pitch a fit and throw the brush at the mirror! All I can say is, if I’d witnessed that little spectacle, he’d have awakened the next morning to a bald head and a sack full of hair on the other—empty—side of the bed. There is nothing in those marriage vows about having to tolerate men having temper fits over bad-hair days. And don’t even talk to me about men in hair nets!
Now, regarding the actual bathroom habits—well, you got your men and you got your women. I can’t think of anything to compare this level of differentness to. Your women, for example, will use public rest rooms for number two, while your men would rather be set on fire. Men want to be on their home potty, and they want to spend the day in there. I have personally known grown men who would go through an entire workday in abject misery rather than make umps in a public rest room. They will somehow hang on until they get home to the potty where they feel free and comfy, and they will go in there with the entire Sunday
New York Times
and not come out until they have read it all, including the classifieds. There is nothing happening in that bathroom after, say, the first couple of pages of the
Times
. They are just hanging out in there—now, how weird is that?
My daddy grew up, as you may know, in Attala County, Mississippi, out from Ethel, Mississippi, to be exact, which is a suburb of Kosciusko. They didn’t have any indoor plumbing back then; they also didn’t have any outdoor plumbing. (Other people had plumbing of one sort or another, I am sure, but my people didn’t.) In the house at night or in bad weather, they used a “slop jar” (the prissy folks called it a chamber pot), which they took outside to empty at a more convenient time. Or they just went in the woods, which were nearby and plentiful. Daddy, always the outdoorsman, made a sort of hobby, as only a guy would, out of thinking up new and interesting places outside in which to answer nature’s call. His favorite was to climb a tree, select a sturdy limb with a big fork in it, drop trou’, perch in the fork, and let fly. He found this highly invigorating in one of those bizarre boy ways. I personally cannot imagine any circumstances under which I could or would do this in, or rather
from,
a tree. I have not, in my informal but exhaustive survey, found any woman who can imagine such a thing, but tell this story to a guy and his little face just lights right up. Anyway, Daddy had gone to his favorite tree one hot summer day, and his dog, Rags, followed him, waiting, wagging, looking up expectantly into the leafy canopy, awaiting the descent of his boy. Daddy tried mightily to shoo him away, to no avail. Finally, nature could wait no longer, plummeting earthward and coming to rest smack on top of the dog’s head. Now, Rags had no idea what was on his head, only that something had fallen out of the sky, landed on his head, and stuck there. He was completely undone by the whole thing, as any dog would be, and he took off running and hollering across the field.
Meanwhile, my granddaddy, the ineffable Harvey, was plowing behind a big ole red mule. Harvey was deaf as a post and did not know that Rags was hollering; he saw only the dog’s rapidly approaching shadow coming up behind him. An affable, dog-loving kind of guy, Harvey never looked away from the row he was plowing but just reached down to pat Rags on the head as he came up alongside him and drew back a hand full of, well, freshly minted umps.
Nonplussed
I don’t think would quite cover Harvey’s reaction. I am at a loss to express the multiplicity of feelings that must have enveloped him. He just looped the reins over the plow handle and slowly ambled on up to the house, occasionally looking at his soiled hand and shaking his head. He drew some water from the well. As he stood scrubbing on the back porch of the old farmhouse, his wife, my grandmother Carrie, headed out to see why he had stopped plowing in the middle of the day in the middle of a row, to come wash his hands. When he saw her coming, he turned to her with soulful, searching eyes, and posed one of those haunting parental questions that will linger throughout the ages: “Maw,” he asked, “what in this world could I have done to that boy to make him shit on his own dog’s head and sic him on me?”
As we all know, a woman will happily use the potty at work, but if her boyfriend or new husband is in their house when the urge strikes, she will go to just about any lengths to avoid making a home deposit until she can get rid of him. In testimony of this strange truth, we offer the story of a woman we have known for many years. She is older than we are and over the years has offered us wise counsel on many subjects. I was soon to be married for the very first time, and she thought it was time to have that little talk with me—you know, the one about how will I ever have any privacy again in this life? As I said, she is older and wiser—well, she’s six years older; you be the judge of “wiser.” Once upon a time a newlywed herself, she had no one older and wiser to give her advice on such sensitive matters to a young girl’s heart as keeping one’s private matters a closely guarded secret.
She and her shiny new hubby lived in a tiny little apartment—very tiny—way too tiny for anything like sneaking into the bathroom undetected for substantial potty time. So she figured out that she could loll about in bed of a morning, waiting for him to get in the shower, during which time she would run five blocks down the street to the gas station, grab the key to the ladies’ room, dash in, do the deed, return the key, and be back home before he got out of the shower. This program worked great until it rained. It was raining like a mad bastard, and though she didn’t mind getting drenched anywhere nearly as much as she minded using the bathroom with him in the house, she knew there was no way to keep her little secret if she was dripping like a drowned rat when he emerged from his shower. What? Roof leak? No plausible story for even one good use, much less for the future, since she was pretty sure it would rain again one day.
As the moments ticked by, her plight became desperate. As the second hand jerked by the big numbers on her bedside clock, she was coming closer and closer to zero hour. Of course, I offered stupidly, she could have knocked on the door and told him she needed to use the bathroom for a minute, could he speed it up a little? She looked at me with flat, dead eyes that told me just how stupid that suggestion sounded to her, even now, twenty years later. He would
know,
she said, writhing, and I understood: They Must Be Kept From Knowing at any cost.
And so, she told me in hushed, hysterical tones, she did the only thing that made sense to her at the time. She scurried out of the bedroom, softly closing the door behind her, fled into the kitchen, and frantically snatched a plastic bag from the kitchen counter. The sound of the shower running told her she would be alone in the rear hallway. And yes, she did just what you are suspecting she might—and she did it in blessed privacy. As she considered her next step, however, the hall door suddenly sprang open and there she was—holding the bag—face-to-face with her still-dripping husband. Without so much as the blink of an eye, she snarled, “Are
you
responsible for
this?
”