Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

By this point, the FDA had extended its approval of The Nine to carbonated beverages and other liquids, something I couldn’t ignore because of my wife. Each night when I returned home from work, Betty would be waiting for me at the door, dressed in leg warmers and a striped leotard and drinking from a can of diet cola. “Now with Sweetness #9,” the commercials had started to say.

For a brief period of time before this, it had been possible for me to keep The Nine out of our lives by patrolling the pantry and policing the fridge. When Betty first came back from the store with a powdered pink lemonade and a gelatin dessert, I’d told her not to buy these products again. “I just don’t have a taste for them,” I’d said. But now that was impossible; now The Nine was everywhere, multiplying as quickly as the Tribbles in Star Trek.

I tried to convince her to go back to drinking an endless cup of sweet tea, but I might as well have asked her to quit the aerobics classes that helped her keep her weight down. She was sure the sweet tea had been responsible for her putting on all that extra weight when I was looking for work. The sugar in it had produced cravings for other sweets, she said. And so she left each night for aerobics drinking from her fifth or sixth can of diet cola. Do you think that’s too much?

At the same time that Sweetness #9 was approved for use in carbonated beverages, it was also allowed to enter the table-top marketplace, making it so that at every diner, restaurant, or truck stop in the nation you could find a packet of sweetener waiting for you in a little porcelain holder. If you’re old enough to remember, you’ll know that these packets glowed warmly from within, as their granulated contents were dyed bright pink — a visual testament to what the adverts urged consumers to do: “Pour a little cheer in your life.”*

When Betty wasn’t drinking from a can of diet cola, she was emptying a packet of sweetener into her coffee and wondering why I wouldn’t do the same. She remembered only the good times, those days when we were young and in love and sneaking the sweetener I’d brought home on the sly from Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark. “You should turn that frown upside down,” she’d say, “and pour a little cheer in your life.” I didn’t know what to tell her, or at least I didn’t know the best way to do it, so I’d simply say I preferred my coffee black. “That way you can taste the flavor of the bean.”

I knew this was wrong, and I wanted nothing more than to protect her — you must believe me when I say that. But before I could find the courage to act — and I know this sounds convenient, but it is the truth — Betty came home from what I had believed was a study session at the library (it was the summer of 1981, just before she was scheduled to begin the final year of her MBA program) and told me she’d been to the doctor.

“Are you sick?”

“I’m three months pregnant,” she said.

The news lifted me as high as I’d ever been, higher even than the first time I’d learned I was going to be a father, if only because this time it was so unexpected. But then, like Icarus when he felt that first rushing singe of hot wax, I fell from these heights into a depth of anxiety like none I’d ever known. I wished I had told her everything, because she and the baby were already sharing the same blood. But at the same time I feared what would happen if I told her anything at all. You have to remember our history. Carrying a baby to term would be like carrying an egg on a spoon for nine months. I didn’t want her to worry — to become uncertain in her steps. So I stood by her silently, convinced I could tell her about my experiences once I knew everything was okay. But then even that proved to be a lie, for once I was holding that pink bundle of joy in my arms and looking down into the eyes of our baby girl, Priscilla Reagan Leveraux — even then new fears came rushing in, one after the other after the other, my worries as relentless as the tide. The first few years of a baby’s life are filled with enough questions and doubts. Once you count fingers, thumbs, and toes, you ask one another if the baby’s walking and then talking on schedule, and then if she can handle blocks as well as the toddler down the road. I didn’t want to add to this list of concerns; and what’s more, I wasn’t sure I could say anything meaningful if I did. I hadn’t studied the prenatal risks of ingesting Sweetness #9; that had been outside the purview of my chronic toxicity test.

So we returned to the little house we’d bought in South Battle Station Township, a family of three now, and Betty felt so unexpectedly blessed that she turned her back on a job she’d been offered with the Chamber of Commerce and devoted herself entirely to the upbringing of our daughter. After that, things just kind of slipped away from me, at least where Sweetness #9 was concerned. You see, just months after Priscilla’s birth, the Japanese, those bloody Japanese, reached for the centrifugal separator and announced that Sweetness #9 was as well suited to commercial kitchens as high-fructose corn syrup. Almost as quickly the FDA awarded it a blanket approval for all uses, making the sweetener’s expansion into the marketplace complete. By the time we were celebrating Priscilla’s first birthday in January 1983, The Nine was so ubiquitous that the town of Cottonville, Alabama, was renaming itself Sugar Hill in a desperate effort to be selected as the site of the product’s new North American production facility.*

I suppose that by the time a second miracle was sending us back to the hospital (a boy this time, named in honor of the man who’d resurrected my career: Ernest Everest Leveraux), I could have sat my family down and told them to avoid several hundred food products. But by then too much momentum had built up behind my denials, and telling the truth made as much sense for me as it did for Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark. It’d be a confession of liability, exposing me to the threat of marital bankruptcy, a dissolution of all the familial bonds we’d been trying for so many years to forge. So again I kept my silence, telling myself that even if I did attempt to admit the truth, I couldn’t possibly substantiate my claims.

I don’t mean to sound like every scandal-plagued politician or athlete who’s ever tried to save face in public, but you have to see my point: it was now the mid-eighties, and I was removed from Animal Testing by more than a decade. I felt no more certain of what had happened than I did after waking from an especially troubling dream. There were transitions I could no longer explain, half-remembered details I remembered well enough only to know I didn’t remember them well enough at all. What could I possibly say? Especially when so many people were telling me that Sweetness #9 was a modern wonder of the world! A product whose significance lay somewhere between the splitting of the atom and the pest-free peace of DDT! Hadn’t you heard? Freezer-burn was a thing of the past because of it, baked goods kept their bronzed, just-from-the-oven appearance months after they’d been put on a shelf or plopped inside a vending machine, and production values — they were so improved that microwave dinners and boxed macaroni and cheeses could be sold in larger and larger portions at ever-decreasing prices. Everyone spoke of its benefits. Marxist scholars convened at a conference in Paris to discuss how the sweetener would help facilitate the transition to global Communism, while survivalists and Mormons eager to stock an underground shelter praised it no less than the nation’s dieting housewives. Even Time magazine got in on the act, naming Sweetness #9 its Man of the Year in 1985, an honor previously bestowed outside of humanity on only The Personal Computer. So great was the influence of The Nine that when I returned to my alma mater in 1988 to deliver a guest lecture in a graduate seminar on theoretical flavor chemistry, I ended with more than two minutes on “that godsend, Sweetness #9” and could be seen taking questions afterward while chewing on an energy bar and sipping from a can of diet soda.