Sweet Tooth

Tilted back in her recliner, Rachel’s mother has the look of a petulant child. Feet up, arms crossed. Pouting.

Rachel closes her eyes, exhales long. She swallows her impatience, her anger, and reminds her mother what the doctor said. “If your blood sugar’s too high, you won’t heal.”

Her mother makes a face. “A couple pieces of candy aren’t going to kill me,” she spits.

But it’s never just a couple pieces. Ever since her mother came home from the hospital — minus three toes — it’s been a parade of friends bearing sweet treats: homemade chocolate-chip cookies, a caramel Frappuccino, a get-well teddy bear hugging a box of jelly beans. Each time, Rachel finds a moment to pull the visitor aside. No, no, it was so kind, she tells them, truly thoughtful, it’s just the doctor said, and I can’t help worrying, and, no, please don’t feel bad, you couldn’t have known, I’m so sorry to even bring it up, of course we are both so appreciative.

By the time the well-wishers say their goodbyes, everything’s been smoothed over, the smiles recomposed. But the sweets they’ve brought remain. Rachel has tried reasoning with her mother. She’s tried understanding. Offered to buy her sugar-free treats. She’s done everything but scream, do you want to lose your whole foot?

Every avenue she tries leads to the same destination. Just a little and it’s not that much, and you’re trying to control me. The same argument, over and over and over.

This time, it’s a two-pound box of assorted milk chocolates, brought by her mother’s Scrabble group. After the friends leave, while her mother is snoring in her chair, Rachel marches the chocolates out to the trash bin.

“You didn’t have to throw all of them away.” She looks near tears.

The doorbell rings. The wound-care nurse has arrived to change the bandages. Rachel is grateful for an exit ramp.

The nurse readies her tools, and Rachel brushes by her mother’s chair, laundry basket in hand. Her mother shoots her a mordant look. “Disappears as soon as the bandages come off,” she mutters to the nurse.

It’s true. Rachel hasn’t been able to look at her mother’s mutilated foot. The void left by the amputated toes. She pushes away the image that’s forming in her mind. Tries to focus on the neat stacks of clean laundry.

Rachel opens a drawer and pushes her mother’s soft nightgowns to one side. Something gleams up from the bottom of the drawer. She lifts it out, holds it by its ruffled top. Examines it like a detective who’s stumbled upon a piece of evidence. Strawberry bonbon. The same kind her mother used to set out in the candy dish when they had company.

She opens the next drawer and the next. Throws compression stockings and tired bras onto the floor. There are lemon drops, gumdrops, malt balls. Hard candies shaped like root beer barrels. Candy corn. Blocks of caramel wrapped in thin plastic. Pillow mints. Licorice vines. Spongy orange circus peanuts in a cellophane bag, rolled up and bound with a crumbling rubber band.

In the living room, her mother whines to the nurse about the discarded chocolates. Rachel unrolls the bag of circus peanuts. She pokes one, and her fingernail leaves a crescent. Circus peanuts. Her favorite when she was a girl. She’d never noticed how much they look like toes. She lifts the bag, inhales the scent. Marshmallow. Banana. A hint of something chemical.

This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy had none. And this little piggy went wee-wee-wee . . . .

The nursery rhyme loops in Rachel’s mind as she shoves the candies, one by one, into her mouth.

END