1977, Chattanooga, Tennessee

By Katie Flannery

After school that day, my sister and brothers waited as I searched the kitchen for something for us to eat after school.

Our parents fed us Little Debbie snack cakes for breakfast every morning and a hamburger from Wendy’s every night, but we were hungry most of the rest of the time. In the refrigerator, I came across a sleeve of saltine crackers and some butter.

“I don’t want crackers,” Damien whined when I exulted over my find.

“I’ll make them good, Dame. I promise.”

I proceeded to butter the crackers very deliberately. I lay each cracker gently on a baking sheet as I finished spreading the butter on top. When the entire sleeve of crackers was adequately slathered, I placed the tray in the oven.

After waiting what seemed an interminable amount of time, we took the heated saltines from the oven and divided them equally. No one spoke. We ate those saltines as if they were manna from heaven. We moaned with delight, like other children might over a chocolate bunny at Easter or over a favorite licorice candy.

We were starving.

We had enough to live, but we were most assuredly malnourished. Our daily diet was nowhere near adequate, though school lunches purchased with the shame of a free lunch-colored ticket helped.

We were growing children. I was 13, Diane 11. Michael and Damien were so young, just 8 and 6. We each knew the pain of a growling belly, the torture of smelling the school lunch two hours before our bell would ring, and we could escape to the cafeteria, where all was well, and everybody, no matter how old or what grade they were in, ate the same food.

After finishing off the feast of saltines, Michael and Damien went outside to play. I was still hungry, and I was resentful. I thought about how my mother came home every single day from work and went directly to her room to get a package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and a Coca-Cola before she even went to the bathroom. She certainly wasn’t hungry.

“It’s not fair,” I fumed aloud. “Why can’t we have Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups too?”

“Who has Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?” Diane asked.

A lightbulb exploded in my brain. “Who has Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?” I parroted excitedly. “Who goes into her room every single day and gets Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? Who gets a Coca-Cola every time she walks in the door?” My voice was rising in both pitch and volume. “Who has Zero candy bars and cheese and crackers and cashews and PEANUT BUTTER!?!?”

Finally, Diane caught on. We barely dared to breathe as we walked, almost reverently, toward the back of the house to our parents’ bedroom door. The food was here-–had been here all along-–and we had just waited stupidly, starved while we waited on them to bring us our Wendy’s hamburger every night.

I took the doorknob in my hand and slowly turned it. The knob turned freely in my hands, but when I started to walk in, I realized that the door was not actually opening.

“Shit,” I said. For the first time, I realized the implication of the padlock on my parents’ bedroom door.

“I’m telling,” Diane said.

“Be quiet a minute,” I said. I had to find a way to get that lock opened. “We need to find the key,” I said. “Where do Mother and Daddy put the key?”

“Mama has it,” Diane said matter-of-factly. “She carries it in her cigarette case.”

As soon as Diane spoke the words, I could see our mother taking out that key every day of my life to open her bedroom door. And if Mother had the key, there was no way we were ever going to get our hands on it.

I started to cry. I could taste the peanut butter, feel the sting of the Coke as it slid down my throat. I was so, so hungry.

“Why don’t we just use a screwdriver?” Diane asked.

I started to protest, when it dawned on me what my sister was proposing. We didn’t need to pick the lock at all, not when we could simply take it off.

We raced about the house frantically, searching drawers and cabinets and closets for some sign of a screwdriver. We looked in the pantry and in the medicine cabinets on top of the refrigerator.

“How can there not be a screwdriver in this house?” I screamed. “Damien takes everything we own apart and puts it back together again every day. If he can find a screwdriver….”

Diane had reached the same very conclusion as I, and we raced to the front door. Michael was doing cartwheels in the yard, a skill Diane had taught him from her gym class, and Damien was sitting in the yard, digging with a fork.

“Damien!” I bellowed, even though he was only a few yards away. “I need a screwdriver. Do you have a screwdriver?”

“In the garage,” Damien mumbled.

Who would have ever considered looking for a screwdriver in the garage?

A few minutes later, screwdriver in hand, I stood with my sister again outside our parents’ bedroom.

“Wish me luck,” I whispered.

I took off the padlock, one screw at a time, making sure to place each screw in my pocket securely so we could find them when it came time to put the lock back on.

Once the door was opened, Diane nearly cheered. “I’ll go get the boys!”

I grabbed her arm. “We can’t bring them in,” I said. “They can’t keep the secret. They’ll get us in trouble.”

She knew I was right. “OK,” Diane said. “But we have to get them a snack somehow.”

“We’ll figure out something,” I assured her. But I was already in the room, searching. I hated the stink of my parents’ room, a cross between cigarettes and the smell of punishment and fear. There was another smell, familiar but unidentifiable, that made my stomach cramp.

I pushed the stench away for the time being. Right now, at least, only food was important. I was so incredibly hungry. Where on earth did a parent hide candy?

Evidently, parents hide their stash much the same as children do. Diane and I found four large, rectangular cardboard boxes filled with everything we could have ever wanted - Cracker Jacks, Payday candy bars, Cokes and Sprites and potato chips - under the bed.

We ate, blindly, shoving good, solid, nonsaltine foods down our throats at an alarming rate. We swallowed candy bars whole and licked salt from our palms as we consumed little packages of Planter’s nuts.

After just a short time, we were near to bursting, filled to the gills with junk food. It was pure heaven, and it was only as I was licking the chocolate of the melting Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup from my fingers that I noticed the gaps we had left in the boxes. My stomach sank.

“Diane, we have to put some of this stuff back so they can’t tell we’ve been in here,” I said, trying not to panic.

“They won’t know,” she said.

But they would know, and I knew they would know, and suddenly I felt very sick. I knew what would happen to me if I got caught.

Diane had little to fear. The most that would happen to her would be a belting, but I was a different matter altogether.

Unlike Diane, I had never learned to act contrite when I wasn’t. My mother saw this in me and worked to break me of it every chance she got. Being the oldest child and the bane of our mother’s existence didn’t help.

Knowing I would suffer extreme punishment if my mother ever discovered what I’d been up to this day, I started to hastily spread the foodstuffs around the boxes, evening out the bare spaces. I was still trying desperately to repair the damage we had done when Daddy walked into the room.

It might have been OK. Maybe he would have just laughed and chalked it up to regular childhood antics. Maybe it could’ve just gone by the wayside with a stern warning.

But my mother lived in the house too.

The following morning, I got up and ready for school with a big black eye. It hardly even hurt.

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, wondering what story I could tell this time. Maybe I could say I fell down the stairs. That one was old-hat, though. Hmmmm. I could say I was hit in the eye with a baseball. Yeah. I liked the sound of that. I could even imagine the punch of the ball as it hit the sunken area of my face that held my eye.

It was a good story. No one would question it.

Katie Flannery and her siblings keep well-stocked pantries these days. Katie writes for therapy, though she couldn’t do it without the support of her two amazing dogs and a really smart psychologist. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, December 10th, 2007 | Email This Post

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