Unsuitable Things by Carolyn Zaikowski
When I was a little smaller, I ate unsuitable things. That’s what Daddy always said: “Cut the shit, dummy! Dirt ain’t suitable for food.” Or: “How many times I gotta tell you newspaper ain’t suitable for food? Catch you eatin’ that again I’ll slap it right out your mouth.” And then he’d slap it right out my mouth, as promised. Daddy knew to keep promises.
In the cabinet over the sink, one drab summer day, I found a sugar stick. In pale pink paper. You know, those Pixy Stix tubes you get at the penny candy store for a nickel or dime or ten pennies or five plus a nickel or whatnot, bundled like tinder in their own special jar next to the teaberry gum and jelly beans and all manner of big and small chocolate. This particular Pixy Stix was probably from the summer before, when my older sister San snuck me and our little sister Meg – who whined and made us carry her the whole way – to the candy store when Daddy was sleeping on the porch. Daddy always slept on the porch with no pants on, especially in the summer, empty bottles all around him.
San and Meg, they loved Gerrit’s Refreshing Teaberry Gum and those no-brand jelly beans in the jar, even if the no-brand jelly beans were all nasty green apple and grape and who-knows-what. Me and jelly beans, we weren’t friends. Rather, my big love was those dang tubes of sugar. The sugar would be something like sugar-sugar except all tart pink or orange, glowing-like but pale, too, like if you stared hard and squished up your face in with attention, you’d see right through every grain.
And then you’d be all waterfalling the sugar into your mouth like the best of somewhere’s tiny sand. All from inside a paper tube thinner than a pencil, nearly flat except for the tiny swell of that sugarsand.
The sink under the cabinet, that night it had a drip on account of the faucet needing to be tightened. The dropping water spattered all out in a pattern so perfect it seemed like it’d come straight from nature. The old brown cabinet was fake wood. Had a chip in the bottom from the time Daddy swung his rusty wrench around from being mad as a hornet at San for spending her allowance on blush and had a half-broken hinge from when Daddy crashed it shut from being mad as a hatter at Meg for getting spit-logged Jolly Rancher chunks all up in her hair.
You should know it wasn’t exactly that sugar was unsuitable in itself. We all, Daddy too, ate sugar on occasion. Single-serving brandname cherry pies from the metal shelf at the package store. Singleserving packets of brown sugar maple oatmeal all boiled in water. Sugar causing too much pep doesn’t make sugar an unsuitable thing. The unsuitable thing was the little paper home in which my topcabinet Pixy Stix lived.
But even though I knew this all too well, on that sticky hot eve I went searching. I’d waited ’til I heard Daddy go way out in the yard with his big mower, so I knew he wouldn’t know and wouldn’t be able to swing his rusty wrench all mad again.
The sun had come suddenly shining out from the gray, right over Daddy and the too-tall grass, just like a big motorcycle headlight. I’d pressed my palms into the rounded edge of the counter to get my body up high. Like getting back on the dock from the lake. And from there I’d pressed my knees into the rounded edge of the counter, also like on a dock, and up I went further. And further still ’til I balanced. And I’d perfectly raised my fingers up to the sticky corner of the cabinet, sticky from never being cleaned I mean, and I’d swum them over the surface of the sticky contact paper on the cabinet floor. Wasn’t much of note in there except a can opener here and a can of peas there and some crusty old Gerrit’s gum sticks.
But then: The paper tube. And its tart pink sugar waiting there for me.
I bit it open. Tipped that paper tube right into my mouth, dumped the pale pink sugar sands into me. I knew I was supposed to spit the paper out. But it dissolved in my cheeks. And I let it.
The paper, I felt it all grainy in my teeth, felt it melt all over the parts of my taste buds where sugar was meant for. And I felt paper and sugar come all together to make some kind of odd little grain or fruit’s meat from a land I’d never been. And I closed my eyes, mouth all sandy. Like as if I was licking the beach of a place where fairies and the sweetest of monsters live.
Outside, the mower farted and went quiet, and Daddy yelled curses at it, then at the grass, then at San, who wept a little even though she was getting too old to weep like that, like how Meg wept when she puffed out her lower lip and refused to go to bed. The paper, I sucked at it, gnawed harder, blocking out Daddy’s big sounds, and the sweet slop went on and on down my throat. A sweetmeat mush dissolving into sugar ‘til none of its parts knew the difference between each other. My knees kept on digging into the edge of the counter as they held me up, and I knew my knees would have little marks – bruises, even – when I finally dismounted, but for now on the counter I hovered, chomping and swallowing the very best of paper.
Even though Daddy’s mower went quiet like that, and out of the corner of my eye I saw weepy San rush past the window, and from the feelers on my neck I felt little Meg peek through the kitchen doorway to make sure of something, I kept on, part resolute, part awash in notions of a land all my own where all I had to do was eat sugarpaper on a sandsugar beach and watch the water go out and come in again. And even though I heard Daddy heave his big legs and lungs closer to the house, toward the kitchen, where my knees knelt bruisehard on the counter while I ate unsuitable things, and even though my neck feelers told me Meg was still in the doorway so he might get a hold of her too – Meg was still too young to understand unsuitable things – I kept on. Didn’t even watch over my shoulder. And the paper, it dissolved inside me ’til it was gone, and the tart pink sugar too, and a little trip to somewhere lovely it was, a funny little unsuitable trip, all for me.
Carolyn Zaikowski is the author of the novels A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013) and In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016).