Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs Read Free

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
     was quite passionate about homing all of her kittens. It is entirely possible I gave the neighbor’s family a kitten—which,
     I vaguely recall, immediately walked the three miles back home, so I had to give it up again—which may have been what provoked
     them into be-ducking me.
    We did not count on Gus.
    Compressed all but flat, she seemed to flow like liquid toward the duck pen, and she coiled to pounce just as my father began
     wiring on his makeshift lid.
    She refused to speak to him for days.
    She gave up motherhood.
    She did not eat.
    She spent all of her time lying in the deep weeds, her eyes drawing a bead on my ducklings, her body utterly motionless except
     for the steady switch, switch, switch of her tail.
    Every once in a while when she just absolutely could not stand it anymore, she would release a howl of pure rage and charge
     the duck pen, sending the inmates into a panicked peeping clutch on the far side. Then Gus herself would spend some time extracting
     various body parts from the holes in the chicken wire and she would retreat to bathe herself from toe to tail as if to say,
I didn’t really mean that.
    Meanwhile, the ducklings grew and in a very short time became real ducks. Each one would have required his or her own grocery
     sack.
    My father grew tired of retooling the duck pen and wandered off to construct prisons for woodchucks.
    By the time Gus managed to penetrate the duck pen, the ducks were roughly the same size she was and there were six of them.
     They had done hard time. A pact was swiftly drawn: the ducks would huddle together, quacking in mock terror as they raced
     in tiny circles around their water bowl, and Gus would hunker down and stalk them but never eat them.
    My mother amused herself most of the summer by waiting for people who drove into our yard to rush up and warn her that her
     cat was stalking her ducks. My father used to sit on the back steps with the garden hose in his hand, and when Gus would get
     the ducks going, he would blast her. I put my younger sisters in