Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

One morning Betty confessed her innermost fears to me in the kitchen as we sat eating our cereal.

“You’re going to leave me for another woman,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I love you.”

“You love the woman I was. I love the woman I was. Look at this.” She grabbed her side, pinching at a bulge of fat beneath her flower-print muumuu. “I’ve become the fatter older sister I always wanted. Do you see?”

“Stop. If anything, you’re the one who’s going to leave me. All those men in your classes, strung out on hormones.”

“Please. They see my wedding ring.”

“Yes, and it tells them you could teach them a thing or two. That you’re a woman of the world.”

“You should eat more,” she said. “It’s only fair. If I’m going to get fat, we both should.”

“Betty.”

“Have some ice cream.”

I was eating a bowl of Cheerios. “It’s eight o’clock in the morning.”

“Don’t you love me?”

“Of course I do.”

“We’ve got Rocky Road.”

I pushed my bowl away, then kissed her and left for an interview that didn’t exist. It was too difficult to stay at home, and not only because I’d found myself getting hooked on the same soap operas as my wife. Betty’s face sometimes unnerved me. Once or twice a day she’d turn from the sink while doing the dishes, or look over to me from the sofa, and for a moment, just a blink of the eye, I’d see a monkey staring back at me.

Had The Nine, or perhaps her withdrawal from it, triggered in her a primitive desire to eat? Or was my own short history of using the sweetener to blame? Had it perhaps made me as anxious and depressed as one of my former test subjects, causing me to see a rat where once I had known only the face of my beloved?

I drove each morning as if to race away from these questions, drove for more than an hour or two some days just to receive an informational interview or learn firsthand about an unpaid internship I wouldn’t have considered in the spring. Things got so bad that by late October I had started driving by the offices of Tanko-Shinju, even though they were notorious xenophobes who ran a closed shop. Today I can see this as evidence of my impending collapse, but back then, as I sat in my parked car each morning watching the Hondas and Datsuns and Toyotas pulling into Tanko-Shinju’s gated lot, I actually believed I was exhibiting the persistence and optimism of an achiever.

The last morning I idled there, I laid on my horn like a latter-day Commodore Perry, refusing to be ignored any longer. After maybe five or ten minutes of this, a polite man in a white lab coat walked out smiling and bowed before my opened window, low enough to show me the part in his hair.

“Please leave,” he said. “Thank you, good-bye, thank you.”

IF BETTY THOUGHT I WAS going to run off with a prettier woman, I was sure she’d leave me for a richer man, because in the end the only work I could find was at a gas station, a Mobil franchise six exits south of Jupiter Park. Taking this position was only slightly less humiliating than staying home to clip coupons and watch daytime TV, or so I thought before coming to appreciate the full impact of the OPEC oil crisis.

Each day, I sat on a stool inside a booth near the pumps, making change or asking the customers if they’d like the carbon with that. Because I had the least seniority, I was also the one who had to drag the sign out of the garage (NO GAS TODAY!) and set it down in front of the long line of waiting cars whenever there was another shortage. For this I received curses that rarely were so sophisticated as to be directed at the oil-producing nations of the world and a variety of obscene gestures informed by America’s great ethnic and cultural diversity.

Prices soared. They quadrupled from the same time the previous year, sending gas to a previously unimaginable high of one dollar per gallon. By the time a barrel of oil cost eleven bucks, some angry customers were leaning down to the little silver trough where I left their change and screaming a few choice words at me.

“If it’s OPEC’s fault, why are gas company profits on the rise? Tell me that, Fucko!”

I wasn’t the only one who believed we should be given hazard pay. After learning my master’s degree had earned me fifteen cents above the minimum wage, a young black co-worker tore off his grease-stained coverall and walked away, saying fuck it, fuck this, and fuck you— never had I heard such a torrent of profanity. I’m told he didn’t even come back to pick up his last check. They say he caught a bus that same afternoon to the nearest military recruiter, believing he’d be no worse off fighting in the malarial swamps of Vietnam.

It was shortly after he left that I suffered my own breakdown, one brought on by a customer whose accent I couldn’t place. “How much are the small ones worth?” he said, while puzzling over the coins in his hand, and the foreignness of his voice caught me so unaware — was he from Switzerland or Germany? — that my mind, as if looking for a connection, fell back to 1966 and the equally far-off land of Texas.

We had traveled there so my father could visit an old army buddy who lived in San Antonio, but it didn’t make for much of a family vacation. While he got to stay up late in the breezeway, drinking bourbon and swapping war stories, my mother and I had to settle for a tour of the Alamo and a side trip to the original Dr Pepper bottling plant in Waco. In between, we slapped mosquitoes and marveled at “Uncle Charlie’s” ability to live in this heat and humidity with only the benefit of a thundering swamp cooler. My father took pity on us the morning of our fourth day. Though we weren’t scheduled to fly out of Houston for another seventy-two hours yet, he rented a car and said we’d spend the time between now and then taking a tour of all the most modern, air-conditioned hotels in Texas’s Hill Country.

On the second morning of this ramble, a Waffle House waitress in Austin suggested we take in the view from the university’s clock tower. I can only imagine what would have happened to me had I not begged out of this excursion by saying I’d like to inspect the library. I had started sifting through college brochures earlier that summer, you see, and though I had no intention of leaving the Northeast — or even attending a college outside of New Jersey — as we stepped onto the sprawling campus, I struck a pose as a potential applicant to the flagship institution of the University of Texas system.

Near eleven thirty that morning, while I was hidden away in the stacks reading passages from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Charles Whitman pushed his footlocker on a dolly into the lobby of the clock tower building. He wore a flattop and coveralls and gave the appearance of a maintenance man as he rode the elevator some 300 feet to the top.

My parents took the stairs. My father had jogged before it was fashionable. “It’ll save your life,” he used to say. “Just a mile or more a day. Isn’t your life worth that?”

Whitman came prepared. He packed food (two tins of condensed milk, honey, Spam, sweet rolls, Planters Peanuts, sandwiches, and a box of raisins) and gear: binoculars, a plastic compass, two 3.5-gallon jugs (one filled with water, the other gas), several lengths of rope (both cotton and nylon), ear-plugs, an extension cord, kitchen matches, a flashlight, and (for reasons I still dare not dwell on) a deer bag.

After getting off on the twenty-eighth floor, from which you took a short flight of steps up to the viewing deck, Whitman hit a secretary on the back of the head, presumably with the butt of his rifle; then he shoved that woman’s desk against the stairwell door — just moments before my father pushed into it with his shoulder.