The Chocolate Drop
By Pamela Stutch
It’s 90 degrees out at the end of May. An unusual period, not typical of late spring. The sun is blazing, making waves off concrete, steel and glass. Bus fumes and the smell of rotting garbage from plastic bags piled outside apartment buildings and restaurants infiltrate the air. I am in black jeans and a black T-shirt. People are dripping in their tank tops, wilting in the humid sun, but I am comfortable and strong. I can handle the heat. I am power-walking up Broadway in Manhattan. For once, I am not cold.
I extend my arm ahead of me, curving it gently so I can see all of it while I walk. My fingers are long, delicate, and graceful, my nails manicured and red. They don’t break as easily with polish. My arms, defined and sculpted, glisten in the late afternoon sun.
I approach the mirrored front of a candy store my mother used to take me to when I was a child. Purple daisies imprinted on the glass, a smiling polar bear, a sun with dimples and rosy cheeks, just as it had been years ago. I look at my reflection. My deep-set eyes are larger than they’ve ever been. My face is oblong with prominent cheekbones. My jeans are skinny but not tight. They curve gently, showing off the space between my inner thighs. My hips are straight, my waist narrow. My belt is attached at the first loop.
I run my hand over my stomach. The rippled muscles show no excess, nothing that could be construed of as failure. It is a good day.
When I’m home, I turn my feet into a dancer’s fifth position and extend my left leg, arching my foot into a point. I watch my calf muscle flex, taut, hard, powerful reflected in the glass on the back of my closet door. My thighs curve out slightly, but it is all muscle.
Sometimes in the next room, I can hear the clink of bottle against glassware and liquid pouring and ice cracking with anticipation of five o’clock. Cigarette smoke emanates from the kitchen. My mother is on the phone as she consumes her second or third or sixth gin and tonic.
She never hassles me about dinner. She used to argue with me, urge me to fill my body with food—you need the nutrients! she would say. Now, she doesn’t care.
I turn onto Amsterdam Avenue and extend my legs to quicken my pace, to get the most out of the movements. On my left up ahead, a woman exits a bodega pushing a baby stroller. A large, full ice cream cone fills her right hand. She licks the edges while she pushes the stroller with her left. Her stomach extends out to the stroller’s bar handle, bulging over the top of her green gym shorts. Her blond hair sticks to her perspiring forehead, her red cheeks bulged and flushed. She walks slowly while she licks, careful not to let a drop fall. The oversized toddler in the stroller sucks on a powdered donut, sugar all over his face. I watch. I glare as I catch up. I pass them in an instant and they are gone. My nausea subsides.
I cross 85th Street. A clothing store is ahead on my left, with loud music and loud lights, the door open and inviting. Two girls peel out. They are my age, seventeen, maybe older, but not by much. They carry large shopping bags with the logo from the store printed on the side of each bag. They are tall, thin and laughing, with flowing hair and straight graceful shoulders. One pushes the other playfully and the other doubles over, clutching her sides. Her legs are long and tanned and glowing in her jean shorts. The frolic has lifted her up cut-off T-shirt, and I am able to see her stomach, which is also tanned and perfect. Far more perfect than I can ever be. As I walk by, they stare at me with undisguised contempt. They whisper and giggle. I try not to reveal that I notice.
My daily routine is salad. Lots of salad. Green leafy salad with cucumbers, celery, radishes, a few carrots, three grape tomatoes, a spoonful of plain tuna, and three hundred sit ups. I drink water too, lots of it. It’s filling and pure and cleansing, without consequences. I drink black coffee, for energy, not taste, and I eat two wholegrain rice cakes. Those equal fifty calories combined. I can use that up just breathing.
At night I do crunches, and then I put fifteen pound weighs on my ankles and lift. One hundred repetitions each side, holding myself perfectly tight, perfectly erect, not letting the momentum drop. With twenty-five pound weights in each hand, I raise my arms again and again and again. When I am finished, I roll over onto my back, panting, letting the air travel fully through my lungs and out again. In and out, in and out, feeling the goodness permeate my body, feeling how invincible I am, feeling how I can achieve anything.
When I’m asleep is the best time of all. The gnawing beast finally quiets. Rest puts it out of its misery.
I barely remember the girls and the clothing store as I press on. A new restaurant ahead on 88th Street announces its existence with big flashing neon signs and booming dance music piped out on to the street. People are gathered at the entranceway, the women in short, brightly colored skirts, white teeth and wedge sandals, the men in polo shirts and clean haircuts, waiting for an early dinner, late afternoon cocktails in their hands. I avert my eyes and step to the edge of the sidewalk. When I am parallel to the entrance, the odor of garlic and meat and grease-infused fries pours out of the vent above the door like toxic gas. I hold my breath to prevent it from entering my lungs, but at the last minute I breathe in. The contaminants fill me. I cough with revulsion, almost gagging. I move quickly away, breaking into a jog.
In the next block, a tall young man with long blond hair, in jean shorts and a T-shirt with a peace sign is walking toward me. He is thin and nonchalant, his narrow hips rolling from side to side with confidence in each step. I slow down to match his stride, lift my ribcage, and flip my long brown hair with my hand, grasping the brittle ends with my moist palm. I turn my face toward him, expectant and coy. Our eyes meet. I half smile. He stares, his expression becoming wide and disgusted. As he passes, I watch the cascading waves of his hair bounce and flow with his steps, the sunlight catching different hues of yellow. My insides buckle with self-accusation.
I used to admire my mother, the way she carried herself. The way men looked at her with her tall long-limbed frame, her bright smile with teeth that didn’t quite align, her cheekbones that looked like small apples when she applied rouge. She’d always tell me to lick my lips and then they’d be shiny just like hers and that was long before she let me wear lipstick.
When I was seven, she stayed with me in the hospital when I had my appendix out. She slept on a chair next to the bed, holding my hand. When I was nine, we played Sorry and Monopoly and used a step stool as a fake Ouija board. We chased it when we asked it questions and we would laugh like crazy, her laughter tinkling throughout the room. When I was twelve, we’d walk together in the neighborhood for errands. I’d pretend we were sisters as I followed in unison with her high heeled footsteps.
When I was fifteen, my father moved out. He’s a drummer in a touring rock band. Before he left, he gave me a tight hug and told me he would always love me. His jacket squeezed my face as I inhaled its earthy, leathery smell. I told him that I loved him too. He said that he and my mother didn’t have a relationship anymore, and I knew that was the truth. There were no screaming fights or smashed plates in our house. He was on the road much of the time and when he was home, there was just silence.
After he left, my mother began to drink. One post-work drink became two, two became four. I learned about low-calorie boxed dinners, iceberg lettuce, and diet popsicles. I sorted laundry, cleaned the bathroom, and vacuumed while she slept off the buzz. When she was awake, my mother would remind me that I looked like my father—the nose, the brown eyes, the oval shape of my face, all his—and she said I shouldn’t never forget what he did by leaving.
She’d talk to me about the possibility of us losing our health insurance, our apartment, the possibility of me not going to college because of money. The alimony and child support weren’t enough. I didn’t bother to tell her that Dad and I had already worked out a plan for college —he would pay for most and I would take out loans to cover the rest—and he would never let those other things happen. She complained that she might have to get a second job because we were so broke. And when she said this in conjunction with the cigarette smoke and the fumes from the alcohol on her breath, I would feel like the whole room was sucked of oxygen and I would need to go to my room and shut the door in order to breathe.
I am suddenly aware of the familiar pain in my stomach, that gnawing, unceasing pain, when I reach 95th street. Perhaps it is from the encounter with the girls or the young man or the stores or the walking or the heat or nothing at all. But its roaring ascends to a deafening pitch, and I am unable to contain it. It is engulfing me in a scream.
I turn around to head back. I approach a bus stop, an encased plastic shelter, with an advertisement for a local gym. There is a picture of a treadmill, an elliptical, and a woman’s smooth bare slender waist with a measuring tape encasing it. In the plastic reflection, my arms resemble heavy, plodding elephant trunks. I get right up to the pane. My legs are bulbous. My face has become round. My waist is the same dimension as the exterior points of my shoulders. I jerk away, panic rising in the lower part of my chest. I force myself to walk on, quickening my pace.
The restaurant and clothing store are still buzzing when I go by, but I barely notice this time. The vehicles on the avenue speed past in a haze of car horns and bus breaks and ambulance sirens. The neighborhood candy store gleams ahead with its purple daisies and grinning suns. No one is watching. I feel almost safe. I place my hand on the door handle, touching it lightly at first. The warm metal soothes my palm. I push my way in.
The store is a fairy castle of pink and yellow, with white clouds painted on the ceiling. The air conditioning’s coolness caresses my face, its hum steady and low from clean white vents above the storefront window. The woman behind the counter is small and slender, with a portion of straight pink hair dangling just above her eyes that matches her apron, the rest of her hair brown and tied back. She makes eye contact with me and smiles. I gaze at the rows of confections, some emulating multi-colored flowers, some posing as tiny fruit, some speckled, some plain. She waits. Her position shifts. She crosses her arms, her fingers encasing her elbows. She takes a deep bored breath. I can’t form my mouth to make words. A tray of mocha chocolate drops shines at me from the second shelf behind the glass. They used to be my favorite as a child. I find my voice. I point.
“Just one,” I say.
She stares. “We don’t sell them individually,” she says. Her tone verges on sarcasm.
My brain is unraveling. I feel the pieces shatter. “I just want one,” I say.
“It’s by the pound. A half-pound, quarter-pound.” She suddenly realizes her power. “It’s really good.” Her smile is playful now.
The room is beginning to spin. The panic is at my throat, but then I realize she has inadvertently saved me. If I get one or two or five or twenty, it doesn’t matter. I can throw them all in the trash outside. When my words come out, however, they contradict reason. “I just want one.”
She gives me a hard look and then her face softens. “Hey, if it’s a sample you’re after, I can give you a taste.” She points to a bunch of chocolate blocks, the size of bricks.
I can’t move. I am paralyzed.
“Here.” She is already hauling out one of the bricks and putting it on the cutting board. She takes a butcher’s knife and slices off a chunk. It drops to the board and she spears it with the end of her knife. She extends it over the counter with a false smile.
I should have left while I had the chance, but now there is a knife pointed at me with a slice of brown at the end. I feel my insides dissolve.
With icy, tingling fingers, I reach forward. The tips of my fingers make contact with the brown. She withdraws the knife and continues her smile. I am holding the brown with my hand extended over the counter. My elbow is shaking.
She is watching me. I am taking too long. “It’s really good,” she says, the pitch in her voice descending for the word good.
There is no way out of this alleged kindness. I raise my fingers to my mouth and my mouth opens like a dark cave. The pressure between my fingers is melting the brown, making my fingers sticky and sickly. If I wait long enough, the contents might melt and contact might be avoided. But the powerful saccharine odor beneath my nostrils consumes me. My fingers open involuntarily. The brown lands on my tongue. I press it deep into the roof of my mouth and swallow.
“Amazing, huh?” she says.
I back away from the counter.
She frowns. “Don’t you like it?”
I back away further. I can’t speak. My hand is on the door, pulling. I am running. When I reach my mother’s apartment, I disappear into my room. She doesn’t know I have returned. She is talking on her phone again. The clink of ice echoes from the other room with liquid entering the glass, and the flicker of her lighter as a fresh puff of soot seeps under my door. The acrid smell sears the tiny hairs in my nose.
The pain in my stomach is devouring me now, worsened by my misdeed, threatening to consume me alive. On my hands and knees, I crawl to the mirror on the back of my closet but avert my eyes because I know what I’ll see: a hideous, bloated, sweaty figure with puffy cheeks, a thick neck, dimpled elbows and bulging swollen thighs, hateful and disgusting, a blight not deserving of taking up valuable space among the living, ashamed to breathe the same air as they do.
I force myself up. My feet slip back into running shoes. My mother is sitting on a stool in the kitchen, slurring words into her device, her laughter raucous and hyena-like. My fingers grasp the front door and I turn it without making a sound. She doesn’t look up. I am in the hallway of my building and hurrying towards the stairs.
Out on the street once again, I head to Riverside Park. The air has cooled slightly. The headlights of the cars speeding down the avenue gleam in the early twilight. The streetlights are lit. Dusk has settled into the city. The water tanks at the tops of the older buildings stand stark against the graying sky.
People are walking their dogs, large dogs, small dogs, in-between dogs. They ignore me. I am invisible as I run past them, blending in with the night. A section above the river is paved for pedestrians and bicyclists next to a fenced-in area with a garden that blooms in the summer. The blooms are already out, the red and pink and yellow flowers among the dearth of green foliage. They stand like jewels ebbing in the light.
My pace slows to a brisk walk. I am by the river now, near another path for bikers and joggers, away from the traffic. Across the water, the lights of New Jersey buildings flicker and in the distance the George Washington Bridge glimmers like a gold and diamond necklace. A lone, large tree stands by itself on the grassy surface near the path. I sit beneath it and run my fingers over its gray, brittle trunk. Its branches cover me like a protective sibling. Its damp roots cool my legs. I think that when I die, this is where I want my ashes scattered, at the bottom of a tree overlooking the river with lights in the distance and a flower bed nearby. A place where I can just be and forget everything else. I breathe in the sour river air as the breeze turns cooler.
I get up and head back home. Tomorrow will be better, I am determined. I can’t imagine myself there yet. I am too far removed, but I will triumph in the end. I will get through this even if there is nothing left.
THE END