WALDORF SALAD, PART TWO

So I wanted to mow the lawn, to have the freedom of a “boy” chore. This did not mean, of course, that I would get out of my “girl” chores. I still had to wash the dishes every night, even though I often succeeded in diminishing this task by escaping right after dinner to the bathroom, where I would dawdle and daydream and explore my reflection in the mirror. I thought the “call of nature” was a foolproof delay tactic, until one evening my older sister — dish towel in hand, scowl on face — bitterly accosted me with the truth: “You’re not pooping; you’re just being lazy.”

Mortified, I flew into a fit of denial: “I AM TOO POOPING!”

It was an argument too absurd — and too gross — for my mom to intervene in. So my sister was left to feel the injustice of my chore-shirking, and I was left to sit in the bathroom and feel the injustice of having to do dishes every night while my brother, visible through the kitchen window, played kickball or occasionally mowed the lawn with his bare chest gleaming in the sun.

I was fascinated by his tanned, lean torso, the beginnings of a well-muscled, athletic physique, and by his ability to take off his shirt anywhere. His shirtlessness and the freedom it represented to me — and thus the unfairness — was really the dawning of my feminist consciousness: a sense that male and female bodies were different and that males had way more freedom with theirs. This sense would be heightened for me when my mom told me I had to start wearing a bra (when I really didn’t need to); when I felt peer-pressured to shave the peach fuzz off my legs and armpits; when I noticed my brother could belch and spit and pass gas and otherwise make his body more comfortable — when the same behavior in me or my sister would be chastised as “unladylike”; when I learned that boys’ sexual explorations were winked at and girls’ were kept in check by the ever-present fear of being deemed “slutty." (My brother started sleeping with girls when he was 13. I know this because he confessed in the blank pages of a Bible he kept in his closet: “Angie and me have done it.” My parents’ reaction was what are you going to do? He’s a boy. By contrast, when they caught my 17-year-old sister rolling around the green shag carpet of our rec room with her boyfriend, she was punished and cautioned to be more mindful of her reputation.)

It’s not that I wanted to take off my shirt. I just wanted the freedom it represented. My parents’ concession to my “tomboy” leanings was that I could mow the lawn. I still had to do the dishes, and my brother now had one less chore, making the sexual division of labor in our household even more unfair — but it seemed like a victory nonetheless.

After a tedious lecture on lawn-mower safety — complete with a few horror stories about “surefire ways” to lose your hand or get your toes mangled or even get killed — my stepdad started the engine and showed me how to push the mower in straight lines. He took great pride in the appearance of his yard and home — and, for that matter, his wife, who unfailingly made up her face right before he walked in the door each night ("I don't want Dad to catch me looking like a wildwoman," my mom would say). The object in cutting the grass wasn’t just to keep it manageable; it was to make it pretty. The front lawn was mowed on the diagonal for maximum attractiveness, and the back lawn was simply mowed in straight lines (presumably because no one really saw it but us). A few times we won our small town's “best yard” award, which was a homemade sign that said “best yard” in stenciled letters. It would stand in the middle of the lawn until some yard judge took it away to some homeowner who had outdone us.

I could only mow the back lawn. If I did a good job with that, I could move up to the front lawn.

Alas, that was not to be. After mowing the yard for the better part of a summer, I realized that it was not a victory; it was a chore like any other. Boy chore or girl chore, it was still a chore — and not one you could get out of by pretending to use the bathroom. Worse, I would see my brother playing catch with his friends and grow bitter as I trudged up and down in straight lines. He should be mowing the damn lawn, not me! This is cutting into my before-the-sun-goes-down playtime! When my friend Susie interrupted my mowing to ask me to come play, I grew impatient. I told her I’d meet her at her house, then began running with the lawn mower to make quick work of my once-coveted task. Probably my stepdad thought a warning against running with a mower was a safety measure too obvious to mention. In any case, at some point he looked out the kitchen window and saw me sprinting, sometimes backward, up and down the lawn with this deadly, whirring blade. I know he had visions of me tripping and being shredded as he rushed out of the house screaming “TURN IT OFF!”

I didn’t get to play with Susie that night. I had to go straight to bed instead — while the sun was still up and I could hear my brother and the neighborhood boys chattering on the patio and bouncing a basketball. It was definitely a defeat for me, but it was also a victory: Next week at this time he would be back behind the mower — shirtless, sure, but I could live with that.