WORK
BY SHELLEY ETTINGER

ROWDY GODDESS

        Everyone knows me as Randy but my given name is Mary, for my paternal grandmother's sister who died in the influenza epidemic after World War I. Her death, I was told, was the great sadness of my grandmother's life. And so when I, the first girl grandchild, was born, Bubbie insisted that I be named for her sister.
        My mother, as she told me when I was a teenager, balked—in a big way. Mary? As in Jesus Christ's mother? Aside from being an old-fashioned and terribly conventional name in this all-new era of transistor radios and electric can openers, it was irretrievably goyishe to my mother's way of thinking. Her mother-in-law argued, however, that it was a perfectly good old Jewish name. Her mother-in-law won.
        Me, I now feel fond toward the name on my birth certificate—even if I haven't gone by Mary for some 40 years. There's something so retro about it, so soft-focus, that it has an almost other-worldly feel to me now. Of course I know Mary is also the name with which one popular religious cult camouflages the great goddess who has been worshipped in her various guises in thousands of cultures over thousands of years. And I know full well that this female deity, whatever her name, is as imaginary as any other divinity humans have concocted to soothe and succor them on the transit toward death. Still, goddess worship—hey, okay. I can live with carrying the name of the goddess. The whole world longs for mommy? Fine, that's me, mother earth containing the whole world. All-knowing, all-powerful, my monthly menses transmuted from the messy, useless, inconvenient cramp-o-rama they really are to some ultimate mystery containing life and death and whatever other mythic uses anyone thinks up for the sloughed-off uterine lining. Mary. That's my name, don't wear it out.
        But if I really think about it, if I surrender to the purest ancient image of the great goddess, acknowledge the tasty appeal of the huge squatting mother-of-us-all whose likeness appears in every civilization until the tragic triumph of patriarchy—if I take a good look at her I see that she doesn't resemble me at all. Even if I am the con artist formerly known as Mary. I mean, come on. The goddess is not some bony jittery myopic nerd. The goddess is—good god, look at her! The goddess is the spitting image of my mother, Ruby. She's Mom all over! The vast pendulous breasts, massive padded hips, the lush rolls of fat that undulate down her abdomen until they meet the sweet, salty source of all life at the Venusian mound where, omnipotence aside, modesty prevails and the adipose waves dip down to bashfully obscure the hairy entryway to eternity.
        Jesus. (So to speak.) Why did it take me until now to realize this? I wish I could tell her. "Mom," I'd say, "You're beautiful." I'd show her the pictures, the Celtic figurines, or those unearthed in China, or Iraq or Congo, every one of those ancient goddesses a perfect body double for my mom, Ruby Schumacher Steiner, my mom who would never let me take a picture of her because she hated her overflowing physical self. "Look," I'd say if I could. "Look, Mom. You don't have to be ashamed of being fat anymore."
        Look. Mom. You are to be worshiped.
        Well. Be that as it may. Mom isn't here anymore. And I'm not Mary.
        Whatever flights of fancy it inspires in me now, when I was little Mary seemed like an unbelievably square name. I couldn't stand it. Felt embarassed—humiliated, even—each time I was introduced to someone. Kids automatically thought I was some kind of goody-goody just because of my name. I even got into a couple scrapes over it, fisticuffs with boys on the block who knew they could get my goat by calling me Maryhadalittlelamb, singsonging my short, sensible moniker into an elongated, babyish epithet that drove me bonkers.
        By 1962, when I was 9, I'd had enough. Decided it was time for a change. Figured I should do something. Take a stand. President Kennedy, after all, wanted us all to have vim and vigor. I resolved to show mine (well, my vigor, anyway; I still have no idea what vim is) by taking my life into my own hands. I would change my name.
        There was no great mystery over what my new name would be. My absolute favorite person in the whole wide world was Rowdy Yates, the young Clint Eastwood's character on the TV series "Rawhide." Rowdy was rugged, laconic, had a wry sense of humor and a terrific understated way of dressing. Rowdy. That would be me.
        What do names signify? Who we are? Who we want to be? Pretend to be? Might have been? Could never hope to be in our wildest dreams? I wanted to be Rowdy but I certainly wasn't very rugged. I was actually kind of a klutz—had, and still have, a tendency to bump into things and shriek. I did play outside a lot, but I hated bugs and tried to avoid getting dirt under my fingernails. Plus I had hay fever and always ended up sniffling and sneezing. Was never into smelly animals either. Can you picture me on a cattle drive? I'd never even been hiking or camping. We weren't exactly that kind of family. And laconic? Ha! I'm the kid whose elementary-school report cards always said things like "Mary's advanced verbal skills tend to dissolve into silliness; talks too much."
        I did have a robust sense of humor, although to call my 9-year-old wit wry would be stretching things. And I did dress well, I thought. Pretty much how Rowdy Yates would have dressed if he were a suburban tomboy with too much time on his hands after school and on weekends. I tended toward man-tailored shirts, pedal pushers and gym shoes.
        All in all, it made perfect sense. I would be Rowdy.
        So I told Mom. Which is why you know me as Randy.
        She didn't hit the roof, exactly. But she did lay down the law. The "you're a girl" law, to be precise. Which she had invoked before.
        "Mary," she sighed, "you are a girl." I shifted, set my jaw, tapped my foot. Stood my ground. Waited. Mom looked at me for a moment, as if she were calculating some difficult sum, sighed once more. "You're a girl and you have to have a girl's name. I don't know what your father's going to say if we announce that you're not Mary anymore." I stopped tapping. She sounded like she was part of this. Like she and I were changing my name together. "I don't know how he's going to react. And I don't even want to think of how we'll tell your grandmother. But we can figure that out. We'll deal with her later, okay?"
        "Okay." What was going on here?
        "Alright, so we'll work out together how to tell everyone, but first things first. If you want to change your name I am not going to stand in your way. I have loved you from the moment you were conceived and I will love you until my last breath and that won't ever change even if your name is Tuchas McGee. Your name isn't Tuchas McGee, is it?" I couldn't help it—I started laughing. Mom grabbed me and hugged me, then she spun me around and lightly slapped my bottom as she slipped into some sort of deranged hotel bellhop persona and yodeled, "Calling Tuchas McGee, is there is a Miss McGee in the house?"
        She shook with laughter—then suddenly she stood straight, passed her hand in front of my face like a hypnotist and stared at me with an expression I couldn't read.
        "You shall be called Randy," Mom intoned.
        And Randy I was. She was right, I knew it right away. A piece of me—my lower left intestine, which clenched—wanted to hold onto Rowdy. That was the name I'd chosen. I'd thought I could be Rowdy. I closed my eyes for an instant. In my mind I saw Mr. Yates himself shrug, tip his hat, turn his back and walk away, his image fading to black as I heard a background chorus of rueful cowboys humming his tradmark tune. Rolling, rolling, rolling, keep those doggies rolling ... I swallowed and looked up at Mom. She was biting her lip. Waiting.
        I blinked. Murmured, "Randy's okay with you? You'll tell Dad for me?"
"Ah shorely will now, Miz Randy, Ah shorely will." She winked, pivoted into a John Wayne turn and John-Wayne-walked out of the kitchen. For a fat woman, it was amazing how my mother could imitate all sorts of famous people really well, even their body language, even thin ones, even men.