Free Area Woman Blows Gasket by Patricia Pearson Page B

through her swimsuit? Or are you telling me that Geoffrey
     shouldn't be naked?"
    She drew her panting dachshund in closer to her chest, as if to protect him from my sudden hostility, and whipped out the
     proverbial feminine pistol: "It is the consensus here at the marina that your child should be clothed."
    Errrgh. I so deeply hate that. I'm being discussed! I'm the subject of an impromptu town hall meeting! Over the Skittles and Aero
     bars at the cashier's counter in the store!
    I must go, now, to Peshawar on a mule.
    "So you've been gossiping," I observed.
    At this, she absolutely bridled. "I do not gossip," she avowed, as if I'd accused her of having sex with a goat.
    Okay, so what was it then, her shared conversation, that came to its decisive consensus about the affront of Geoffrey's nudity?
     A matter of "what is to be done?" It had nothing in common with the savage dog that's been mauling children in the township,
     or the drug addict who has been stealing cash, or whether to intervene when a parent is seen cuffing her child with an appalling
     backhanded blow.
    The quandary here was a naked toddler occasionally arriving at the marina in a boat, and this woman, I sensed, had seized
     the opportunity to forward her agenda when she saw Geoffrey flaunting the implications of nudity by peeing in the lake.
    I gazed at her and shrugged helplessly. "You have your opinion," I said, "and I have mine."
    But it didn't end there because I was left to deal with the issue of community relations. I have been spending summers at
     this lake since I was a baby. I was married here. My aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins are scattered all around
     its shore.
    To ignore the marina store gossip would be to make an antisocial statement, the sort of broad hit of contempt that is notable
     in a small community, where the reverberations of every comment and shift of mood are observed.
    It isn't like the city, where anonymity presides and thus a kind of tolerance for everything but dog shit is assumed; that
     very weekend, gays from all over North America were getting married at Toronto City Hall and celebrating Gay Pride Day, and
     here I was in that general vicinity discovering that the phrase "it just isn't done" still has currency.
    Oh dear. I didn't want to give in to the communal consensus that nakedness in a boy of three isn't done.
    "I have an idea," Ambrose later ventured. "Why don't we come back to the marina with Geoffrey fully clothed, and me naked?"
    I loved that idea; I thrilled to it and laughed. But in the end he chickened out, didn't he? Because he was a man who had
     been a boy when it just wasn't done.
    "Here's the deal," I said to Geoffrey when I'd given it some thought. "I want you to wear underwear, because you're going
     to spill hot soup on that penis of yours or fall down and scrape it, and you need to protect yourself, okay?"
    From a mother lode of fear about male sexuality, and those pryin' affronted eyes.

My Lousy Job
    If, as a working parent, you wish to be stopped in your tracks for ten days, I highly recommend a lice infestation in your
     children's hair. There is simply nothing that even comes close to ruining your status as an efficient office worker like being
     unable to find the last one of eleven thousand seven hundred and twenty nits the size of dust molecules on a six-year-old's head.
    In my case, the whole fiasco of lice began with me, myself, walking around with an itchy scalp for about two weeks, thinking
     that I really ought to do a hot oil treatment in this very dry weather. Given that I shampoo every day and wear fashion mousse,
     it never occurred to me that I had insects nesting on my head.
    Instead, naturally, it was the schoolteacher who discovered the lice crawling through my daughter's ponytail because only
     schoolteachers can see lice. It's part of their training in teacher's college, to be able to spot minuscule species of insects
     from ten feet across the room and then cry