Groceries

Even at 7 years old I knew we didn’t eat well. I could tell the difference between the food that was in our house and the food that we had to scavenge.

First, breakfast was a catastrophe. Our choices were Fruit Loops or Cream of Wheat. I’d always choose the ‘Loops but somehow they’d show up again as a day-old bowl of soggy Fruit Loops. If I dared not finish the bowl I had poured myself, it would be put in the fridge by my mother for me to finish the next morning. Swollen Fruit Loops floating in pinkish-green milk in a plastic margarine-container-bowl; we did not have real dish wear. If I whined about not wanting to eat the cereal sludge my mom would holler “we don’t have the money to waste food”. It was true, we didn’t.  My dad had moved out and wasn’t paying child support; my mom was working two jobs and was never home; my brother was in charge of me and my sister, and he was only 11 years old. Sometimes my sister Cathy - as we called her then - would cook Cream of Wheat, though the rubbery clumps would make me want to gag. My mom would tell her to cook it with “butter” to smooth it out, but the “butter” was actually margarine and it made it taste like motor oil. Most mornings my brother, sister, and I would leave the house hungry and thoroughly under-nourished. It drove us to constantly be scavenging for food. 

Dinner at our house was no better than breakfast. Our mom cooked very infrequently. When she did, she’d make pork chops, or maybe a roast with Yorkshire pudding. Everything would be over-cooked, if not altogether burned. I learned to like burned food, but if she cooked a roast, I knew I’d not get to eat much of it. She saved the meat for herself; my portion was often the string that bound the roast - greasy and blackened with shards of meat attached.  I learned to love chewing on the bundle of string-meat, sucking out the flavor and spitting out the wad of cotton string when it lost flavor.

 Usually though, we kids were alone at dinnertime and had to fend for ourselves. We were poor, which made it difficult to “fend” at all. If my parents had decided to put their kids first, we would have been just lower-class poor.  But since they were both raging narcissists, and put us last, we were dirt-poor. Barclay, the oldest of us, was in charge of the household and ‘on point’ to care for me and my sister. He was full of schemes that, at that age, I thought were games - though I know he’d not think of them as having been “fun”. Barclay took caring for us seriously, always having our backs, always doing his best to keep us alive. He was the oldest, the boy-in-charge, and was the responsible one; my sister was the stereotype middle child to whom everything shitty happened and who took no responsibility for anything; I was the baby, somewhat oblivious to the trauma of our household but completely reliant on my siblings. We stuck together. Even when we fought and nearly killed one another, no one could break our bond.

To get food, Barclay devised schemes: #1 collect change. Barclay and Cathy had side-gigs to earn pocket change. They each figured they could buy candy at our corner store and sell it at a premium in school. I don't know the specifics, but they seemed to be able to pull change together on demand. I, on the other hand, took to stealing money from my mother. I’d sneak into her purse and dig around at the bottom where I knew there’d be change. I knew if she ever caught me I could get away with it because I had “most-favored-child” status. She’d laugh and let me off the hook for the same things that would result in a beating for Barclay and Cathy. Being the youngest had definite advantages in our home. Dimes were the best: they were small, I could hide them in my mouth if I had to and, in the 70’s a dime bought a lot. With one dime we could buy our favorite submarine sandwich at the corner store. I loved those submarine sandwiches. Like the scavenging hyenas we were, dime in hand, we’d walk to the corner store in a pack. The subs were in cellophane packaging in the fridge. One of us would retrieve the sandwich while another of us would give the clerk the dime. We’d anxiously watch the clerk unwrap the sandwich and place it into the toaster oven, anticipating the smell of the browning bread, melting cheese and sizzling salami. My mouth would water and I’d get so excited. I never got my own sandwich though; I always had to share with either my brother or my sister, or both. My brother would take a bite of the fresh-from-the-toaster sandwich under the auspices of checking that it was not too hot for us. He was a reasonable-size biter. He’d then hold it to my mouth and I would lurch forward taking a huge bite, laughing. The scalding cheese would stick to the roof of my mouth, usually giving me a huge blister, but I did not care. Barclay would then rotate the sandwich toward my sister’s mouth and just as she was going to take a bite, I’d pull back on his arm forcing her to crane her neck forward so she’d get only the tiniest of bite. I’d howl with glee and my sister would cry. Cheating my sister out of things happened all the time because she was the weak one of the three of us and an easy target on which to take out our unregistered anger. I hated sharing with both of them and I did not mind making it known. I’m sure they hated sharing with me too, but I did not think about them and their needs. I looked to them for my needs. 

My all-time favorite Barclay-game was “grocery shopping”. My mom would give him money to “get groceries”, which meant walking to Krogers and buying whatever food we could, for whatever pathetic sum of money she handed him. In order to maximize the money we had, Barclay would tell us, once in the store, that we had to eat as much as possible while “shopping”. It really did not matter how much money we had to spend because I heartily took up the challenge. I loved this game and I was really good at it. “Grocery shopping” honed my shoplifting skills at a very early age; skills I maintain to this day. We’d enter the store and would scatter, having agreed on our meet-up time back at the register. My internal engine would rev as I took off through the aisles. I knew exactly where my favorite foods were and I knew exactly the route to take to open, eat, and stash the packaging by the time I arrived at my next food item. I’d start at the packaged meat section, slyly squeezing one package into the waistband of my pants (for seconds, of course), simultaneously opening the top of another package as I turned into an aisle of totally unrelated products. I’d peel back the plastic strip and put the entire wad of sliced turkey or beef into my mouth as I stuffed the empty package between rolls of toilet paper, en route to the cheese section. Arranged like rows of cards in a game of solitaire, I’d select the ‘family-sized’ package of Swiss cheese, fold the stacked slices together lengthwise and shove the whole thing into my already bulging cheeks. The goal was to mix the flavors of meat and cheese. I’d swing by the milk aisle to get a school-sized carton of milk and wash everything down my gullet. Then I’d eat the second package of meat on my way to the candy aisle. After stashing the empty milk carton, the packaging from the cheese and the second pack of meat, I’d grab two 3 Musketeer bars, my candy bar of choice for grocery shopping trips. The whipped nougat would dissolve so fast I could consume two of them by the time I got back to the front of the store. I’d arrive at the cash register to meet Barclay and Cathy at the agreed-time, belly full, and quite proud of my achievement. Stealing, or “grocery shopping”, definitely contributed to building my self-esteem when there was little else in our life that did. If it wasn’t for the burden that Barclay had to bare, I would say I had fun.

We’d leave the store buying something ridiculous like a cake mix from the “sale” bin. Invariably it would be orange flavored or one equally disgusting. We’d get home and not even bother cooking the cake. We’d mix the batter and eat it, one spatula at a time.