Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs by Cheryl Peck Read Free Book Online

then we had the baby. We had the baby so fast that while the doctor was trying to clear
     her lungs he barely caught the rest of her as she tumbled into his hands.
    What I remember thinking at the time: whatever else we as people may be, we are mammals, and as stunning and as awesome an
     experience as childbirth may be, human babies are born much like kittens and calves (both of which I have seen). In some misguided
     sense of modesty or propriety, we have become, as a culture, curiously divorced from the sheer physical power of our being.
     After the cord was cut, while the doctor was still tending my sister, I held my niece. She can’t fool me, and there is no
     spun glass here—she is made of flesh and blood and bone, and no one who witnessed her birth could be awed by how fragile she
     is. Tiny, yes (8 pounds, 8 ounces, 21 inches long). Helpless, maybe. For now. What awed the aunt of D.B. Weeest, born 01/29/95,
     was her sheer determination to be born, shoved like a watermelon through a garden hose to emerge bloody, but unbowed, to look
     around this strange, unfocused new world and to say, “I exist. Feed me.”

changing
    I was twelve
    painfully
    self-consciously
    in bud
    You were
    a year or so older
    a year or so younger
    sprouting
    like saplings
    You will always be
    that age for me, frozen
    in that single glimpse of time
    when I understood
    that boys and girls
    were different
    when I would have
    changed out of my bathing suit
    in total darkness,
    if I could
    while the two of you
    shrieked and snapped towels
    and flashed each other,
    calling my attention
    to each other’s nakedness
    as if your bodies
    so new
    and changing
    were things
    of wonder.

threads
    M Y SISTER — THE W EE O NE —recently offered me a chance to baby-sit. The Wee One is into crafts, specifically quilting and appliqué. She comes by this
     quite naturally. Our Middle Sister— the UnWee—is an accomplished seamstress who can transform four pieces of lint and a spool
     of thread into an evening gown. Our mother made all of her own clothes. And the beginning of every school year of our lives
     arrived just as our grandmother appeared with patterns, various swatches of fabric and those cursed straight pins, measured
     our growing bodies from stem to stern. She would disappear for about a week and return bearing three to five dresses for each
     of us. As a child this struck me as absolutely normal, if just a little homespun for my particular tastes. As an adult I am
     still awed by the sheer industry of that project—as many as fifteen little girls’ dresses in seven days is a daunting project.
     Even I
know
how to sew. I own the tools, and I have an impressive fabric collection, just in case the bumper sticker is true (She Who
     Dies With the Most Fabric Wins), but somewhere my skills—and interest—die shortly after the purchase phase. I lack the UnWee’s
     fascination with precision and detail (in truth, we were unevenly stirred while in the womb, and I ABSOLUTELY lack it—she
     got it all) and I lack the Wee One’s manic passion for activity. She cooks, she cleans, she bears small children in a single
     bulge—and she attends craft shows to sell her wares.
    D.B. is now three and a half months old. She has lost that ball-sprouting-twigs look of newborns and now bears an uncanny
     resemblance to the fairy-tale baby drawn in one of my childhood books. She is a beautiful baby, a statement I can make with
     no prejudice whatsoever, and she is a beautiful, breast-fed baby, which means she prefers to visit her mother on a regular
     basis. So while she comes equipped with a fully functioning thirteen-year-old brother, she requires the supervision of someone
     with either (a) a driver’s license, or (b) a deeper commitment to the next generation than I have.
    Baby-sitting for D.B. was sheer hell.
    Her mother woke her up, fed her and gave her to me before she left. I tucked her into her stroller and lulled her back to
     sleep with the sound