Sugar Crimes/A Memoir

On the day of my sin I am starved for candy. Deprived and feeling sorry for myself, I listlessly wander the perimeter of my yard when my friend Cheryl calls from across the street,

“Want to play?”

What I answer is morally wrong. I know it before the words are even formed.

To this day I shrink with shame that I, an earnest, good girl, could have lowered myself to extortion.

Back then, in the 50’s , a neighbor out walking their dog and passing by our sweet little house would never have guessed that inside, children were sometimes punished for gagging on foods that no kid in her right mind would choose to eat.

I was one of those hapless children, and it seemed like my mother Pearl believed that if she just ate enough liver and wheat germ her depression would go away and she would be happy. So it was that she projected her misery onto us, and so for breakfast, set before us Wheat Hearts with lumps and a skin that formed on top when cooling.

At dinnertime, while other kids were eating barbecued steaks we were eating liver. And inevitably would come the lecture about starving kids in China.

Lots of kids in the 50’s heard this lecture, but I don’t know one whoever took it to heart while eating Liver.

There was no white sugar in our house, and no white bread. Instead, we had brown raw sugar and whole wheat bread.

From this particular deprivation I grew into a young adult who routinely treated myself to open-face sandwiches made of Wonderbread, slathered with butter and heaped with white sugar.

But, back in the childhood years, Cheryl from across the street lived in what I regarded as food paradise.

Her house had chocolate chip cookies in the pantry, strawberry ice cream in the freezer, candy sitting around for the taking, in cut glass dishes, sometimes chocolate and sometimes those strawberry hard candies with soft centers that came wrapped in pretty cellophane.

So, picture me, a seven-year-old girl, deprived of what my friend Cheryl took for granted in her house of food heaven.

Cheryl calls out,“Want to play?” and I, feeling the full weight of the devil sitting on my left shoulder, say the words I will long regret,

“I’ll play with you if you give me some candy.”

And there it is.

The sin of extortion for the price of a piece of candy. Mother, I later discovered, hid her candy. Her secret was hidden in the linen chest, nestled amongst the towels What? Mother? Really? Years later, trying to trace the alcoholic gene in our family so I could lay the blame for that addiction on someone, my finger pointed briefly at my dad who practiced his ritual of three bourbon highballs every night, without fail.

Mother, in her pretty homemaker outfit, fetched those cocktails for my father who lounged in his red fake leather chair, sipping bourbon in a haze of Camel cigarettes, oblivious to the bitter snippiness of the woman dutifully serving him.

I came to know intuitively that my restless, aggrieved mother, the beleaguered 50’s depressed housewife who struggled with repeated breakdowns and yo yo diets and, apparently a craving for sugar, was the one who carried the tendency for addiction.

Candy in the linen closet was the clue.

Fast forward 45 years to the mature me.

One afternoon my step daughter comes to visit, bringing with her a geriatric blind Cocker Spaniel named Sadie who navigates her way around solely through her keen sense of smell.

From my bedroom Sarah calls out, “Elisa, you are busted!” I hurry to my bedroom to find blind Sadie sniffing and scratching at my linen chest.