Birthday Club

I’m in a birthday club that meets monthly for lunch.  We’ve been doing this for over ten years, long enough to get to know each other pretty well, to be completely free and comfortable around one another.  Which is a beautiful thing.  And much cheaper than therapy.  When we first started getting together our children were younger and we were always harried, barely able to spend an hour without having to jump up to go collect a child or hurry back to work.   Now our lunches can drag on for close to three hours, long enough for our waitress to go off shift and the restaurant to empty and the busboy to stand yawning in a corner.

          We are beautiful, self-assured, completely natural women, meaning there’s not a size two among us.  We’ve lived long enough to be comfortable in our own skins, to accept the sags and wrinkles and wobbly thighs that come with being mature, natural women.  So far, we’ve resisted the siren call of plastic surgery. 

          I tell you all of this because my husband always asks with astonishment, “What do you find to talk about for three hours?”  

          Here’s a sample:

          “I ran into Lucy Dillard.” Eye roll.  “She and Jack are getting ready to go to the Bahamas and she was bragging about having her bikini area waxed so she can wear her new thong.”  (We hate Lucy.)

   “I tried some of that Nair stuff once.  It was so painful, y’all.”

   “Is that the stuff that smells like rotten eggs?”

   “See, if you wear a swim skirt you don’t have to worry about hair.”

   “Not unless it hangs down below the edge of your skirt.”

   Laughter.

   “When Scott and I were going to Mexico on that business trip last year, I went to Target and bought one of those cute little elastic waist skirts that go over your suit.   It was in a zebra print, which for some reason I thought was stylish.  Apparently I was wrong.  Anyway, by the third day the elastic had stretched out so bad one side hung down lower than the other, which made me look kind of like a wounded zebra dragging a leg. Trust me, it was not a good look.  So I just pulled on a pair of shorts and told Scott he better not say a word.”

   “Did y’all hear they’re coming out with a line of Spanx swimsuits?”

   Much excitement here.

   “I tried one on but the problem is it squishes the fat from your waist down over your hips which is not really a good look either.”

   “Kind of like a reverse muffin top?”

   “Exactly.”

   If laughter truly is the best medicine, we should all live to be ninety. 

Indian Princess

As children, my father always told us we had Cherokee ancestry. This wasn’t too hard to believe as my brothers and I had round Charlie Brown heads and, what the neighborhood kids liked to call, “Chinese” eyes. My brother’s nickname was Kato and mine was Suzie Wong.

We weren’t just Indian; we were Indian nobility. We were descended from a Cherokee princess, according to my father. He was a large somber man with a Gaelic temperament, meaning that one moment he would be weeping over a particularly beautiful verse of Yeats, and the next roaring in rage over a bicycle left in the driveway. He was a college professor struggling to earn his Ph. D with a wife and three children in tow, and often seemed to be walking a tightrope between hope and utter despair.

My mother, a sweet Southern girl, ruled him with an iron fist although he was unaware of this, of course, as the fist was clothed in a soft downy glove. Direct confrontation was never my mother’s style. She could soothe and cajole my father out of his moods with a skill I’ve only seen matched by The Horse Whisperer.

In those days my father was on a ten-month teaching assignment, meaning he spent a month teaching at a summer camp for forestry students and the remaining two months of the summer traveling with his family. Our travels, regardless of the mileage involved, were always done in an automobile where my brothers and I, endlessly bored, would devise a series of rough games to keep us occupied. The backseat was divided like Gaul into three parts; as the eldest, I took the section directly behind my father where I could mock him with impunity (and where the belt, should he loosen it and begin to flail over the seat back, could not reach); my middle brother took the middle section with two borders to defend; and my youngest brother, who was prone to car sickness, hugged the far door.

The summer of my twelfth year we took a trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota. My father had brought along Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for his light summer reading, a horrific account of the massacre of three hundred Sioux men, women, and children by the U.S. 7th Cavalry, and as the vacation wore on he sank deeper and deeper into one of his black moods. We watched anxiously as my mother tried, and failed, to bring him out of it.

“Oh look,” she said, clapping her hands gaily. “A trading post. And they have real arrowheads! Let’s stop, shall we?”

“Three hundred men, women and children,” my father said, eyeing us gloomily in the rearview mirror. “Promised a reservation and then hunted down like dogs. They were our people.”

“I thought we were Cherokee,” I said.

“Three hundred people murdered in cold blood.”

“They have ice cream!” my mother said brightly. “Who wants ice cream?”

Later that night, in the adjoining room, we heard my parents arguing, one of the few times I’ve ever heard my mother raise her voice. As we were leaving the next morning, my father said, “Where’s my book?” He had left it on the nightstand, where sometime during the night, it had mysteriously disappeared.

“Where’s my book?” he repeated, eyeing my mother suspiciously.

She returned his gaze evenly. “Today I thought we’d have a picnic,” she said, smiling. “Won’t that be nice?”

I have no idea if my father ever finished the book. He never spoke of it again and not long after this vacation he stopped telling stories of our Cherokee grandmother, the Indian princess. Even now when I’m at my parents’ house I search for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee on the bookshelves, but I never find it. It seems to have disappeared into my family’s past as mysteriously as our Cherokee grandmother.