Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs

by Cheryl Peck

Genres: LGBT Gay

Synopsis

Naughty cats, quirky family members, and experiences as a large gay woman in the heartland of America: Cheryl Peck has a potpourri of poignant -- and laugh-out-loud hilarious -- stories to tell about growing up, love, and loss. With self-deprecating humor and compassionate insight, she remembers the time she hit her baby sister in the head with a rock, how her father taught her to swim by throwing her into deep water, and the day when -- while weighing in at 300 pounds -- she became an inspirational goddess at her local gym. Filled with universal stories about a daughter's love for her parents and the eternal quest for finding meaning in it all, this book reveals many seemingly unremarkable moments that make up a life -- the weighty events that, like fat girls sitting on lawn chairs, just won't let go.

Release date: January 1, 2004

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 224

Sample

JEFF DA NIELS doesn’t know me. He could if he wanted to: we ate in the same restaurant at the same time once. He was busy talking to the
bartender and never once looked my way, but if he had he could have walked over and introduced himself and we could have become
friends. I feel I have a special interest in Jeff and his career because, like me, he lives in a small town in Michigan just
off interstate I-94. My truck, Hopalong, broke down in his hometown once. I used to work with a man whose kids went to school
with his. Our lives intersect and overlap on a regular basis.


When you live in the Midwest like I do, celebrities are a rarity. I used to know a woman who lived just down the road from
Ted Nugent, but I was always afraid that if I wandered too close to his property he would kill me and grill me. I’ve never
felt that sense of kindredness and likeness of character with Ted that I feel with Jeff. While I am a fair hand at the air
guitar, I’m afraid I would have to say that for a Midwesterner, Ted is a little out there. Jeff and I could find common ground.


I have always felt Jeff and I would get along well because, like me, he is a writer. At the age of thirteen I began writing
the great American novel on a $10 typewriter I bought from an office supply store. I set my sights midway between James Joyce
and T. S. Eliot (neither of whom I had read, I suspect, at thirteen) and I wrote passionately, dramatically and with great
meaning for the next thirty-odd years. I never finished anything except the occasional Oscar acceptance speech. (Imagination
is a vital ingredient to any writing career.)


During those thirty years my friends would listen to me rant on about my inability to produce great literature. They would
say, “Why don’t you just write down the stories you tell us?”


But those stories were about my cats, my family and the misadventures of a woman of size. They were not the stuff of great
literature. And I did not “write” those stories; they were just spontaneous verbal riffs.


Some of my friends, in the meantime, published a small newsletter for the lesbian community in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and they
were always begging for articles. Finally—after much persuasion—I tentatively wrote a short, humorous article about cat hair.
I followed that with an article about the birth of my (then) youngest niece. My reading audience swelled to five or six. Soon
I was encouraged to read my writings aloud at a talent show put on by the community church, where my audience burgeoned into
the teens. My cat, Babycakes, became a literary character.


None of my siblings remember our history the same way I do. Some claim I spent most of our childhood wandering around in the
gravel pit behind our property where I talked mostly to imaginary friends, as if the historical accuracy of a lunatic were
automatically suspect. They have pointed out small inaccuracies in every story. My response to all of this is as follows:
I write fiction.


I do have two younger sisters and two younger brothers. In the stories I have identified us in degrees of wee-ness: I am the
Least Wee, my next younger sister is the UnWee (my favorite title—it sounds like “ennui” and reflects her innately less excitable
nature), our baby sister is the Wee One (and when, at forty-one, she finally had her daughter, I dubbed the baby the Weeest).
We three girls were born within a five-year span; our Little Brother (1) is nine years younger than I am and our Baby Brother
(2) is twelve years younger than I am. He attended kindergarten the same year I graduated from high school. We don’t use such
formal titles among ourselves. We just call each other by name. My age, my father’s age, and the exact number of offspring
of the reproductive among us changes from one story to the next because over time these things do. I did hit the Wee One in
the head with a rock. She lived anyway. Her version of the story is different from mine, but hers is remarkably good-natured.


I grew up in rural Branch County, four miles north of Cold-water, Michigan. Our house is roughly twenty-five miles from the
Michigan-Indiana state line. We lived in an old farmhouse, but by the time we moved there most of the farm had been turned
into a gravel pit and our yard was cradled on two sides by a kidney-shaped 120-acre hole in the ground. Like much of southern
Michigan, the area where I grew up is farm country dotted with small wooded areas, wetlands and lakes. It is pretty country
without calling undue attention to itself. Legend has it that no one who lives in Michigan lives more than five miles from
a lake—we lived across the road and a cornfield from a chain of five of them. When I was growing up small farmers believed
their way of life was the safest, most reliable way to make a living and always would be. People were connected to the land.
People did not just recklessly move around from here to there, and change was greeted with a skeptical eye.


I have not lived an extraordinary life and I did not have an unusual childhood. (I have long felt crippled by this as a writer.)
I have tried to write honestly about the things I know about— what it’s like to sit in a fishing boat with your father for
an entire Sunday morning when you are four years old and the longest time you’ve ever spent doing one thing is seven minutes
… dealing with the dog your loving parents don’t realize hates you when you and he are about the same size … why fat girls
are wary of lawn chairs.


I am an oldest child. We oldest children like to keep everyone happy, smiling and in a good mood. We try not to hurt anyone’s
feelings. We have all of the characteristics of a good baby-sitter, which when you think about it, makes perfect sense. So
welcome to my book. Sit down, make yourself comfortable. Have a good time. I’m expecting Jeff to call me anytime now, but
until then, I’m all yours.


IT HAPPENED AGAIN this morning. I was sitting there half-naked on a bench when a fellow exerciser leaned over and said, “I just wanted to tell
you—I admire you for coming here every day. You give me inspiration to keep coming myself.”


“Here” is the gym.

I have become an inspirational goddess.

In a gym.

I grinned at the very image of it, myself: here is this woman who probably imagines herself to be overweight—or perhaps she
is overweight, she is just not in my weight division—sitting on the edge of her bed in the morning, thinking to herself, “There
is that woman at the gym who is twenty years older than I am and has three extra people tucked under her skin, and she manages
to drag herself to the gym every day …”


It is not my goal here to be unkind to myself or to others. Perhaps I am an inspiration to her because I am easily three times
her size and I take my clothes off in front of other women. Being fat and naked in front of other women is an act of courage.
Perhaps my admirer did not realize that it was exactly when she spoke to me that I was artfully arranging my hairbrush and
underwear and bodily potions to cut the buck-naked, ass-exposing mini-towel-hugging moments of my gym experience to the absolute
minimum. She wears a pretty little lace-edged towel-thing to the shower and back. I don’t, but I understand the desire.


It was not that long ago that she bent over to pick up something as Miss Tri Athlete walked into the locker room and whistled,
“Boy did I get a moon!” Junior high gym, revisited: I can’t swear that particular exchange was the reason, but I did not see
my admirer again for the next month. To Miss Tri Athlete she answered, “Just when I had forgotten for half a second that I
was totally naked …” I doubt that she forgets that often. Almost none of us do.


Nor do I: which is why, the first time someone in the locker room said to me, “I have to give you credit just for coming here,”
I smiled politely and thought ugly thoughts for some time afterwards. Up yours thrummed through my mind. Nobody asked you for credit zinged along on its tail, followed closely by Who died and left you queen of the gym?

“Like it takes any more for me to go the gym than it does any other woman there,” I seethed to my Beloved.

“Well it does,” my Beloved returned sedately, “and you know it. How many other women our size have you seen at our gym?”

The answer is—none.

There are women of all shapes and sizes—up to a point— from Miss Tri Athlete, who runs in the 20–25-year-old pack, wears Victoria’s
Secret underthings and is self-effacing about her own physical prowess to women who are probably in their sixties, perhaps
even seventies. There are chubby women and postpartum moms and stocky women and lumpy women … but there are very few truly
fat women.


Exercise, you might advise me solemnly, is hard for fat women.

Exercise is hard for everyone.

Exercise is as hard as you make it.

Miss Tri Athlete shared a conversation with me the other morning. She said, “It feels really good to get this out of the way
first thing in the morning, doesn’t it? I think when you plan to exercise in the evening it just hangs over you like a bad
cloud all day.” She can’t be more than twenty-five, she can’t be carrying more than six ounces of unnecessary body fat and
I’ve never seen her move like anything hurts. Her joints don’t creak. Her back doesn’t ache. She sweats and turns pink just
like everybody else. She trains like an iron woman, but she’s relieved when it’s over.


I don’t believe it’s exercise that keeps fat women out of the gym. I think it’s the distance from the bench in front of the
locker to the shower and back. I think it’s years and years of standing in grocery lines and idly staring at the anorexic
women on the cover of Cosmo, I think it’s four-year-olds in restaurants who stage-whisper, “Mommy—look at that FAT lady,” I think it’s years of watching
American films where famous actresses never have pimples on their butts or stretch marks where they had kids. It’s Baywatch. Barbie. It’s never really understanding, in our gut, that if we could ask her even Barbie could tell us exactly what is
wrong with her body. And we all know, intellectually, of course, that Barbie’s legs are too long, her waist is too short,
her boobs are too big and her feet are ridiculous, but she’s a doll. What we do not know, as women, is that my sports physiologist,
who is in her late twenties and runs marathons, also has tendonitis in her shoulder, a bad back, and passes out if she trains
too hard. My former coach for the Nautilus machines had MS. None of us have perfect bodies. If we did have perfect bodies,
we would still believe we are too short or too fat or too skinny or not tan enough.


None of us have ever been taught to admire the bodies we have.

And nothing reminds us of our personal imperfections like taking off our clothes. Imagining that—for whatever reason— other
people are looking at us.


My sports physiologist is more afraid of wounding me than I am of being wounded. The program she has set up for me to regain
my youthful vim and vigor is appropriately hard. Not too hard, not too easy. It’s just exercise. The most difficult part of
my routine, designed by my physiologist, is walking through the heavy-duty weight room to get the equipment I need for my
sit-ups. The weight room is full mostly of men. Lifting weights. Not one of them has ever been rude to me, not one of them
has even given me an unkind glance: still, the irony that I make the greatest emotional sacrifice to do the exercise I like
the least is born again each time I walk into the room.


Someone might laugh at me.

Someone might say, “What are you doing here?”

I have a perfectly acceptable answer.

I joined the gym because my girlfriend said, “I want to walk the Appalachian Trail.” I have no desire to backpack across the
wilderness: but I could barely keep up with her when she made this pronouncement, and I could see myself falling farther and
farther behind if I stayed home while she trained. I joined the gym because I used to work out and I used to feel better.
Moved better. Could tie my shoes. I joined the gym because I dropped a piece of paper on the floor of my friend’s car and
I could not reach down and pick it up. I joined the gym because I have a sedentary job and a number of aches and pains and
chronic miseries that are the result of being over fifty and having a sedentary job. I joined the gym because my sister, who
is younger than I am and more fit, seriously hurt her back picking up a case of pop. It could have been me. It probably should
have been me.


I keep going back to the gym because I love endorphins. I love feeling stronger. More agile. I can tie my shoes without holding
my breath. I can pick papers up off the car floor without having to wait until I get out of the car. I don’t breathe quite
as loudly. I have lost that doddering, uncertain old lady’s walk that made strange teenaged boys try to hold doors or carry
things for me.


I keep going back because I hate feeling helpless.

Years ago, a friend of mine convinced me to join Vic Tanney, a chain of gyms popular at the time. There was a brand-new gym
just around the corner from where we lived—just a matter of a few blocks. She had belonged to Vic Tanney before, so she guided
me through the guided tour, offering me bits of advice and expertise along the way … I plopped down money, she plopped down
money, and a few days later it was time for us to go to the gym.


She couldn’t go.

She was fat.

Losing weight had been her expressed goal when she joined: now she couldn’t go until she was “thinner.”

Everyone else at the gym, she said, was buff and golden.

“I’ll be there,” I pointed out (for I have never been a small woman).

She couldn’t go. She was too fat.

She was a size twelve.

I have determined that I don’t particularly mind being the queen of my gym. There may indeed be women who wake up in the morning
and sit on the edges of their beds and think to themselves, “There is that fat woman at my gym who goes almost every day,
and if she can do it …” I am proud to be an inspirational goddess. It has taken me most of my life to understand that what
we see, when we look at another person, may reflect absolutely nothing about how they see themselves. Always having been a
woman of size, I have always believed that it must be just a wonderful experience to be thin. What I am learning is that the
reverse of the old truism is equally true: inside every thin woman there is a fat woman just waiting to jump out.


We give that woman entirely too much power over our lives.

We all do.

MANY, MANY YEARS AGO when I was just a child, a neighbor girl’s parents came to my house and gave me a bag of ducks. I remember the bag, which
was a big, brown paper grocery sack, and I remember the anticipatory expressions on the faces of the adults around me. I remember
realizing the bag held some form of moving life. And I remember looking inside the bag to find myself the proud owner of six
baby ducks.


It would never have occurred to me to transport six baby ducks in a grocery bag. (I am not the least bit anal retentive, but
I would have gone directly to the animal transport store and purchased the official Audubon-approved duck crate. I would have
paid $50. And I would have panicked had I discovered, a week later, that I now needed to transport six baby rabbits.)


As you can imagine (brown paper grocery sacks being about the same size they’ve always been), my six ducks were tiny. Ducklings,
really. Ducklettes. I remember them as being somewhat fuzzy—sort of pre-feathered ducks—of a loose, barnyard-mongrel genus
of duck. The day they became mine they were black and yellow and they made sweet little peeping noises in the bag.


I immediately released them, thus learning very early in life that even very tiny, fuzzy ducks making sweet little peeps can
cover an amazing amount of ground in a hurry. My father loped off across the back yard to examine his fine personal collection
of chicken wire. We built a pen for my duck herd and my duck herd spent the rest of their lives escaping.


Not entirely without provocation, I admit.

The Peck family (or at least my immediate twig of it) at the time belonged to a small but fiercely protective cat named “Gussie”
after the tennis player, Gussie Moran. (Both wore what appeared to be white lace panties.) Shortly after the duck pen was
built and the duck herd was incarcerated, Gus strolled through the back yard and heard an unfamiliar chorus of sweet peeps.


She stopped.

One ear swiveled, not unlike a radar dish.

Her whiskers twitched.

She dropped her belly to the ground, and, peering through the blades of grass, she espied a small pen of hors d’oeuvres.

I believe Gus may actually have contributed to the ducks’ arrival. Gus had a dark side to her personality—downright nocturnal,
really—and she frequently came home with a swelling belly and began building little nests all over the house. She and my mother
waged prolonged battles over where Gus would give birth to and raise her new family; my bed, my mother’s shoe collection and
the clean laundry basket being on the top of Gus’s list and the bottom of my mother’s. Sharp words were spoken on both sides
when Gus decided to consolidate their daycare problems and give birth in one of my younger siblings’ bassinet. I raised each
and every one of Gus’s children as soon as I found them, and—tortured by the idle threats I heard from the adults around me—I
. . .