Skip to main content

Mothballs and Twix


Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Ready or not, here I come! My friend's voice traveled down the hallway of her family's large, Los Angeles house. We were playing Hide and Seek: my friend, her older sister, and I. The girls went to my elementary school (we were in our last years), and they lived just down the canyon road from where I did. I remember being at their house fairly often, and also some kind of occasional car pool our moms had worked out. I remember that breakfast for them was often of the powdered sugar donut variety. Did I wish for the same, instead of my hard boiled egg and toast? Maybe, but not with conviction. Overall, I accepted (and now am very thankful for) my mother's firm belief in breakfast being the most important meal of the day and therefore her insistence that it be nutritious. I am now debating how to relate the next bit of info in a way that will not sound uncharitable. My intention is just to describe a fact, not a judgment, but, well, there aren't many delicate ways to say that my friends' mother had a significant weight problem. The girls were on the heavy side as well (as you might deduce from the donuts), but not yet what anyone could call fat. Not really. The father sticks in my mind as being the opposite: kind of wiry and full of nervous energy. On the afternoon in question, the afternoon of Hide and Seek, I'd gone into the master bedroom, then into a small walk-in closet to hide. I remember the space was boxy, square: I opened the door and faced a U-shaped configuration of clothes rods jammed with hangers, from which flowed colorful, voluminous fabrics. The racks were crowned with a single U-shaped shelf, and it was up on that shelf that I decided to hide. I don't know how I got up there, but I did it fairly quickly. Up on the shelf, it smelled faintly of mothballs. Not an overpowering smell, but it's an odor you simply can't miss, even if only in trace amounts. The other thing I discovered up there, besides the mothballs: a jumbo, "economy" package of Twix. The pack had been opened, and maybe two sets of Twix bars already consumed. At the time, I thought it was the weirdest thing in the world. Why would anyone—especially someone as generally "take me or leave me" in attitude as my friends' mother was—hide candy in the upper reaches of her closet? Of course now, although still disordered, I recognize the behavior as a natural part of the psychic landscape of the chronically overweight and unhappy. I imagined then that if she hid the candy there, maybe she also ate it there, too, chewing quickly and swallowing in silence, standing among the pleated, patterned garments or else crouching down among the shoes. (She certainly wouldn't be perched on the shelf as I was!) The thought made me feel strange, embarrassed that I'd discovered this secret; I felt almost ashamed, as if I were the one bingeing on chocolate-caramel-coated wafer cookies in the tiny room. And actually, I have to confess: I was. Ready or not, here I come . . . my friend's voice warned, I had only a moment to act. I told myself I was doing the woman a favor, saving her from herself. I scraped the thick layer of chocolate and caramel off the long shortbread cookie with my teeth. It was a hit of sugar, drug-like, and when the cookie was also eaten, I crumpled the empty, metallic-gold wrapper and jammed it into my pocket. I was ready to be found.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tap Root Manuscript

Here is an early music memory: I am very young. If not still a toddler, then not much older. I am running around the living room, squealing with unrestrained delight, while my dad chases me to the tune of "I Am the Lion" by Neil Diamond (Ba-pa-la ding-ga!). He's reached deep down and pulled out his big baritone voice—the one he also used for "Old Man River" on occasion; the one that always awed me. It's the early 1970s, and although hopelessly pop and showy, there is no shame in liking Neil Diamond. Not at this time. Later, I'd go through nearly two decades of keeping this (admittedly) often schmaltzy artist at more than arm's length. When I bothered to remember Neil Diamond, which generally I didn't, I thought of him more like a skeleton in my musical closet; a dirty little secret that, if exposed, would set me up for some heavy razzing from friends. I don't remember when it was that I recovered my dad's Tap Root Manuscript album. It wa...
7 comments
Read more

Black Kids Read, Too

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Touch Typing

Between seventh and eighth grades (or between eighth and ninth?) the deal was this: if I wanted to take an art class in summer school, I had to take typing. So said Mom. Although I didn't mind being in an art studio soldering bits of stained glass together, the thought of staying inside, seated in front of a typewriter when I could see the sun in its beautiful blue sky out the window, was torture. Still, I sat there. Such is the suffering one will endure for art! I typed the home keys in order, hundreds of times: a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;. I stretched my fingers up for T and Y and down for B. I did pages of the prototype sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Yes, it has every letter of the alphabet in it at least once. I learned to automatically put two spaces after each period. (I have had a hard time undoing this habit, but a copy editor's job these days is often to make sure there is only one space following a complete sentence!) It's fair to say...
3 comments
Read more