If you had attended the fundraiser Tell It Slant for the Lincoln Square Friendship Center Food Pantry like you should have, you would have heard this story during the open mike:
I have lived my life on the edges of survival. My husband
and I were just barely able to scrape together enough money to buy a house in
the whitest neighborhood in Chicago. Every other house on the block had their
additions and dormers done months before we were able to take this step. The
weary front lawn shows signs of insouciance, the garage door opener has been
inoperable for years, and most days I don’t even know where my next minivan is
going to come from.
I have experienced hunger and starvation almost every day—in
the middle-class, western sense of the word, of course. I decided to keep a
hunger journal to share my struggle with the world.
March 2. I first notice my hunger at 7:24 a.m. I immediately
scan the bedroom for sustenance, but the Girl Scout cookie boxes are all empty.
The cellophane sleeves are lying around like empty condom wrappers the morning
after a fraternity party. They are the detritus of our own middle-aged version
of a wild bacchanal—a night of watching the Agent Peggy Carter finale, eating
overpriced, déclassé wafers with reckless abandon, and falling asleep by 9:30.
10:00 a.m. Eating my first satisfying meal in at least
twelve hours—not including the Trefoils.
It’s been hell. This peanut butter and bacon on toast with Diet Coke
might as well be prime rib and Chateau Margaux, that’s how good it tastes.
10:30 a.m. Medium Diet Coke, easy ice, from the Golden
Arches. I know I already had a Diet Coke earlier, but every addict knows that
McDonald’s has the good shit.
2:30 p.m. Store-bought tamales and leftover chateaubriand
under glass fuel my waning energy early in the afternoon. When you’re dealing
with this level of deprivation you don’t stop to think about food pairings.
7:30 p.m. Currently drinking domestic merlot from Trader
Joe’s. Essentially I’m having fruit salad for dinner, only without the coring
and chopping. The wine feels warm going down. I dig a Thin Mint and a dollar
fifty-seven in change out of the couch cushions and thank the little baby Jesus
for small blessings. Spending time with Simon Baker, Jason O’Mara, and my other
pretend TV boyfriends will distract me from my suffering and sustain me through
the night.
I hope. Sometimes I just want to give up.
March 3. I’ve noticed that I mostly feel hungry when I
haven’t eaten. I decide that the easiest solution is to eat all the time,
proactively, so that I can avoid the gnawing pangs of my body slowly consuming
itself. It’s a desperate ploy, I know, but I’m starting to be able to see my own
toes. I’m fading into a mere shadow of my formerly zaftig self.
March 4. Jury duty. This usually goes well for me. A couple hundred citizens sit through a
video explaining the court process—as though we haven’t all watched seven thousand
hours of Law and Order over the past twenty years.
The grandmotherly lady next to me wears her puffy coat
indoors while I am seconds away from spontaneous combustion. Must be nice to be
post-menopausal. She unzips her Spiderman vinyl lunchbox and pulls out two
granola bars. The crunchy kind. I eye them longingly. I sense hunger lurking
like a panther ready to pounce. Grandmom chews with an abundance of crunching
and slurping. She also mutters to
herself and hums. Even with my earphones in I can hear her lips smacking.
I
want to kill her.
…
This hunger journal reminds me of something my unofficial foster son
L. Peevie told me twenty-plus years ago. I’m about as white as a person can be. I
had never been a parent before, let alone a parent of a teenager, let alone the
temporary parent of a black teenager from the west side. It took some
adjustment on both sides.
I soon figured out that teenage boys eat a lot. I could not
keep food in the house. It disappeared within minutes after I got home from
Dominick’s. Sometimes it didn’t even make it into the ‘fridge or pantry. He’d
snatch it from my hands like a wildebeest on the plains and eat it without even
removing the packaging.
One time L. Peevie was rummaging around looking for a tiny
after-school snack of a few thousand calories. He rearranged margarine tubs
containing a bit of chili mac, a dollop of chicken tetrazzini, and a serving of
potato salad. The vegetable drawer held a few limp carrots and some sad-looking
celery.
“There’s nothing in the ‘fridge,” I told him, “I’ll go to
the store in a little bit.”
L.P. looked at me and shook his head. “That’s the
difference between black people and white people,” he said. “When white people
say ‘there’s nothing in the ‘fridge,’ there’s still a ton of food in there.” He
picked up the chili mac and shut the refrigerator door.
“When black people say there’s nothing in the fridge, the
only thing in the fridge is mustard.”
