Jenise and I make faces when our dad opens a can of creamed corn to serve us for dinner. He doesn’t care that this is the one food my sister and I hate more than anything.
I can see leftovers in the refrigerator and other cans of food stacked in the cupboard we like, but it doesn’t matter. It feels like we could’ve been given garbage to eat if that was the nearest and easiest thing for him to grab.
As the opener tears at the metal of the can, grinding jaggedly and twisting it a circle, we sit and wait, and quietly understand: we’re going to bed hungry.
But we also know tomorrow our mom will reward us with presents for being good girls. It might be a new doll, or maybe she’ll treat us to a movie, or her favorite . . . bringing home a supply of sugary snacks.
I can already taste my favorite candy bar—milk chocolate covering caramel and a cookie. But if she brings me a quart of chocolate chip ice cream, that’s just as nice.
“Yuck,” I say to myself as I take a spoonful of the cold, canned corn, forcing it down so I can please dad and get out of the kitchen as fast as I can.
We swallowed everything that way—one spoonful at a time to survive.
Jenise isn’t eating. “Jenise,” I whisper. “Eat.”
Why won’t she eat? She will not give in. No, my sister isn’t that kind of peacemaker. She doesn’t seem to hear his feet pounding the kitchen floor, waiting, angry, as he counts down the minutes to send us to our baths and then to bed.
I watch in dread, afraid for what’s coming as her little body becomes rigid, bracing for what even she knows will be a storm.
She’s daring him! Oh no, don’t!
She plants her feet firmly on the black and white squares of linoleum and refuses every kernel.
“We don’t like creamed corn,” my sister says stubbornly.
This night, there’s no protection from the explosion lying just under his surface. It’s ready to boil, ready to burst, ready to—punish.
“Eat it now,” my father warns. His voice is detached and cold.
But my sister, my hero, she will not back down, and now my father’s face is a brilliant red, and his demons, the ones I’ve seen before, take him over.
Perhaps my father’s anger came from the disappointment of failing as a good parent. Maybe somewhere deep inside he was hiding, protecting his vulnerability, still the nine-year-old boy who couldn’t be soothed when his own father died.
Maybe it was the guilt that consumed him when he looked in the mirror and saw a young man who refused to stay home and take care of his mother as she sought relief from her addiction to prescription pills. Instead of facing that, he had joined the U.S. Army.
Did that tear his heart into pieces? She ended up such a delicate and frail woman. Did he feel guilty about leaving her? Or worse, did he feel by leaving, he made her that way?
Whatever the reason, tonight, his spark ignites. I watch in horror as his flushed face knots up in hatred because we stand between him and his liquid candy.
Keeping my screams pressed down, I hold my hand over my mouth and watch when he takes the back of Jenise’s head and shoves her face hard into the bowl of creamed corn.
MAR
About the Author: