Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs Read Free Page B

theirs. I was feeling
     neighborly and expansive so I called across the yard, “Hi—has Eleanor’s tin order come in yet?”
    Eleanor’s mother seemed to stiffen for some reason and she said, “Eleanor will have to come talk to you about that tonight,”
     and she jumped into her car and drove away. It seemed a little abrupt to me, but I reasoned that she might be running a little
     late, with the snow and all.
    Of course I did go home that night, but not until very late, and Eleanor, I’m sure, was in bed.
    In fact, I rarely show up at home on any predictable pattern at an hour a nine-year-old should still be awake. And to complicate
     things, I had started going back to the gym, so I left about an hour and a half before Eleanor left in the morning.
    And so it happened that I was in the downtown bookstore the Friday after Thanksgiving. I had gone to pick up some reading
     material for my father, who has recently survived a double valve replacement and, having never been sick before, has become
     somewhat testy about the whole recovery process. It is apparently somewhat boring for a fixer/putterer/man-of-action to be
     restricted to lifting less than five pounds. I had heard rumors that his caretaker turned her back on him for five minutes
     and turned back to find him leaning over to pick up a bread machine, which, as everyone but my father knows, weighs more than
     five pounds, and my goal was to find less strenuous ways to amuse him.
    As I walked past the calendar rack, I espied a small child and I thought to myself,
There is Eleanor
. However, I only recognize Eleanor with confidence when she is exactly where Eleanor should be and the girl in the bookstore
     could have been any nine-year-old girl with long light brown hair and an aura of femininity about her that would make Barbie
     look butch. And the child seemed frozen. Not even her eyelids fluttered. She appeared to be staring at the calendar rack.
     I glanced there to determine what might be holding her attention so rapt and there wasn’t much there to entertain me, much
     less a nine-year-old. I thought about speaking, but then I thought,
suppose her name is Phoebe and she’s never seen you before in your life?
    And so I passed her, like an oversized ship in the aisle.
    I found a magazine on lighthouses and the Great Lakes, I found a
Penthouse
(my sisters and I used to spend hours slung over our parents’ bed, reading our dad’s
Playboy
that he always stashed under his side of the bed. We weren’t even supposed to be in their room, but we reasoned that if they
     couldn’t see the magazine, artfully hidden by the edge of the bed, they might know we were up to something, but not exactly
     what. Like there were a broad variety of possibilities to choose from.
There are my childrens’ butts all lined up along my bed, they’re obviously reading something. I wonder what they could be
     up to now?
) I found a delightful book of trivia about the Great Lakes. My Beloved found him a puzzle that actually caught his attention
     and amused him later when we delivered all of this booty.
    I was standing at the checkout, making my purchases, when a small, light-brown-haired child materialized under my left elbow
     and said, “Um—hi.”
    Since she appeared to know me, I could only assume I knew her as well. “Eleanor,” I greeted her.
    “Um—we were going to just buy everyone little gifts.”
    “What?”
    She drew a deep breath—possibly her first since she’d seen me. “I took the book to my Grampa’s and I left it downstairs and
     neither one of us remembered it and it was the last day so we never got to send the order in so we were just going to buy
     everyone a little gift.”
    I laughed out loud, somewhat confusing her. “Oh, you don’t have to buy me a little gift, Eleanor,” I assured her. “It’s fine.”
    She looked doubtful.
    “Really,” I assured her. “I was just worried you might have to pay for something I ordered.” I refrained from