Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

I’d been out in the heat for less than a minute, but already beads of perspiration were making my arms feel swampy and the base of my shirt wet.

“I thought I was just imagining things,” she said. “You understand how it is. With so many kids, I can’t always give each one the full attention he deserves. But this morning I made a point to shadow them around, and if this isn’t the truth, my name isn’t Madeline Jones. He doesn’t say verbs, not ever.”

The sun hung in the sky over my shoulder; she squinted and smiled and held a hand up over her eyes as she talked. “I was just wondering if it was because he’d been diagnosed with something. I’m not prejudiced or anything — Jeremiah has ADD, no different than all my kids — I just thought I should know”—somehow her smile grew bigger—“you know, in case you wanted me to remind him to take his pills. Jeremiah’s always forgetting,” she said, “so when he’s over at your house, by all means remind him.” She slapped her mouth then, her eyes growing large and round. “Oh my Lord! I’m not telling you something you didn’t know, am I?”

I’d imagined her question a moment before she’d asked it. Would it make me a bad parent? “We really should be running,” I said. “We’ve got reservations for dinner.”

While Ernest was still inside collecting his things, I hurried back to the car and told the others what I’d learned.

“No verbs?” Betty said.

“Had you noticed?”

She turned in her seat to question Priscilla. “Does this sound right to you?”

“Considering the junk he eats? It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s got Sweetness #9 poisoning.”

Betty rolled her eyes. “Priscilla!”

“What?” She reached into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and flipped to a page in her notebook. “‘Aphasias and impotence,’” she said, “‘rage disorders, dyspepsia, a forgetfulness that verges on panic.’”

I spoke to her through the rear-view mirror. “You never would have said that until this morning.”

“Whether I knew about Sweetness #9 poisoning before today is irrelevant. You don’t have to believe in cancer to get it.”

I shushed my daughter and motioned discreetly to the stairs. “He’s coming.”

“Do we tell him that we know?”

“What do we know?” I said. “That a woman who probably didn’t graduate from high school has suspicions?”

These were the last hurried words we could share. Then Ernest placed a corn dog in between his teeth, opened the door, and in one fluid motion fell down into his seat while tossing his backpack in back. After he pulled his corn dog free, I dropped my head down to one side, noticing the curl of green ketchup that ran the length of his early-evening snack.

“What?” he said.

It wasn’t just me; we were all staring.

“Nothing.”

“Green ketchup?” Priscilla asked.

Her brother looked at her no less suspiciously than she looked at him; then he parroted the line I’d heard on television: “Same great flavor, new bold color.”

Betty and I shared a look: six words, not a single verb.

I threw my arms across her seat and backed out, then turned the car north, in the direction we’d come from. As I sped toward McDonald’s, I remembered the dreams I’d had as a young man, before my stint at Greystone Park had put an end to such thinking. Back then, when not imagining a future in flavor, I’d often considered working for the CIA. I’d thought I could be the type of agent who can get the truth out of someone after only a few minutes in a closed room, and so here I put those dreams into action.

“Some weather we’re having,” I said, “isn’t it?”

I looked for Ernest in the rear-view mirror, but he only bit into his corn dog and shrugged.

“Priscilla keeps telling me it’s global warming.”

“Because it is.”

I sent my daughter a stern look over my shoulder. She had an oversized personality, more like that of a president than a political adviser—​the exact opposite of her brother, who played Atwater to Priscilla’s Reagan, content never to take center stage. Understanding my purpose now, Priscilla nodded and sank back into her seat.

“It’s certainly unusually warm,” I continued. “It’s not even August yet, and already we’ve had seven days this summer over ninety. What do you think, E?”

He turned his corn dog round on its stick. He was eating the dough off first. “Heat wave,” he said.

Betty sighed. I gave her a reassuring nod.

“Yes, a heat wave. What have we had — two days in a row at or above ninety-four? And tomorrow it’s only going to get hotter, they say.”

“Ninety-nine.”

“No! That high? What makes you say that?”

“The computer.”

“When I looked this morning, my homepage said to expect a high of ninety-five.”

Ernest looked for me in the mirror. “The temperature reading: ninety-five.” He gestured with his corn dog. “But the ‘feels like’? Ninety-seven.”

I smiled at my wife. “Feels like!” But she was quicker with grammar than I was and had already determined the phrase had been used as an adjective to modify the reading of which he spoke. As she turned to look out her window, I pushed my foot down on the gas. “How do they even know what it feels like?”

Ernest was biting into the meat of his corn dog now. “Computers. Inputs. Variables. All very complex.”

“But how does a computer determine a feeling? Can you tell me that?”

“Logarithms. Statistics.” His voice betrayed his loss of interest. He looked around for a place to dispose of his now meatless stick. “Et cetera, et cetera.”

“Well”—I let out a long breath—“all these years I thought I was leaving you a better world, but now it seems I may have been wrong. Computers that feel. You want my advice? Don’t go west, go back. I’m not sure where we went wrong, but it has to be back there somewhere. Do you hear me?”

That evening at McDonald’s, Ernest popped the lid off his drink and dropped a long burst of red food coloring inside. He was like a Texan who couldn’t be separated from his Tabasco; he carried a little bottle of Red Dye No. 40 around with him wherever he went. Betty and I had disapproved at first, of course we had, but our son’s attraction to the coloring ran deep, past frosted cakes and Shirley Temples to streaked glasses of milk and eggs he ordered “bloody-side up” from waitresses who didn’t know how to react. What could be the harm? we had thought, because it was either this or struggle to get him to eat anything all. And really, we had said, if you don’t give it to them at home, they’ll only find it somewhere else.

After the dye had fallen into his soda, Priscilla said something to her brother in Spanish, causing him to answer her in kind. I had always been grateful to our housekeeper for teaching them the language. It gave you an edge in college and the business world. But as they rattled on in their Mayan-inflected tongue, with Priscilla saying ten words for each of her brother’s flat, laconic replies, I began to have second thoughts. They were like peasants plotting a revolt.

“What were you two arguing about?” I asked, after Ernest had ended things by standing up from the table and going off for some more ketchup.

“I was telling him he shouldn’t be using that stuff. It’s gotta be dangerous,” she said.

“The red dye?” Betty had been cutting into her Quarter Pounder with a plastic knife and fork (she’d read that you ate less if you cut your food into tiny pieces), but here she pulled her utensils away from her meal and gave me a concerned look. “Is it, David?”

“It’s perfectly safe,” I told her.