Sweet

On Sundays my step-father made his baked spaghetti. It was a bland, dry dish that he was very proud of. Had he seen my mother at the counter with her plate of food, with her sugar packet ripped open, with the sugar on top of his dish like a white hill, with her fork mixing the sugar into his carefully spiced tomato sauce, he would have been incensed.

I discovered her there at the counter, like a guilty girl, and until that moment, no one had known her secret, or if anyone knew, he or she didn't mention it. Her behavior with sugar was her private habit, and she wanted no one, not even me, to find her out. I did the right thing when I returned to the dining room table with the can of cheese and looked at my brother and step-father blankly, not uttering a word about what I had seen.

Within time, my reward became apparent; my mother grew comfortable around me, and sugared her food, her beef, her baked chicken, her salad dressings, easily and often, secure that I would not judge her, secure in knowing that I lived there too, that I understood the sweetness she needed was necessary.





One of Us

We opened up with each other in the afternoons as easily we did nightly with the boys who did not know us. On Mondays we sat in Angela's den, six of us, eating Frosted Flakes directly out of the box. We passed her father's magazines around, Playboy and Penthouse, running our fingers over the glossy photographs, the woman's round breasts and perfect triangle, and we knew that the boys themselves were down the block or across town, staring at the very same woman in the very same magazine, and even then I wondered aloud, Who is looking at them? We sent Angela into Safeway to buy Playgirl, so we could see them. And as we stared at the pretty boys with their generous portions, we pretended we were happy; we pretended we did not miss her. But here's the thing, we wanted to look at the woman, she was beautiful and stinging in a way the naked men were not, she held our secrets in her terrible, lovely body, and we believed, by the very fact she'd posed and opened, she was one of us.