Bread

I was my family’s first child, first daughter, first grandchild. Every day my mother put a spoonful of Karo Syrup in my bottles of milk to keep my system moving and filled them with sugar water in between. My grandfather topped them off with red Kool-Aid and took me for long rides in his pickup truck. They doted over my cute thigh rolls and baby jowls, tickled my bulging belly. As I grew, they called me big-boned and husky.   

My grandmother, thin and bitter, didn’t believe in eating sugar, being nice to grandpa, or serving bread that wasn’t brown. When my sister and brother were born long and lanky, she immediately approved of them, the closest she would ever come to coddling any of her grandchildren. Their presence provided excellent comparisons and shining examples to which we should all aspire.  

My parents were divorcing, so the four of us were temporarily staying in my grandparents’ big house made smaller by their separate bedrooms. For two years Mom worked nights, and I’d wake up in the hours before daylight so we could share roast beef sandwiches on gloriously white Kaiser rolls, still warm in the foil jackets she’d wrapped around them before leaving the diner. 

My uncles said having three babies in four years ruined my mother, her once svelte figure having given way to a roundness blamed not just on back to back babies, but also on drinking RC Cola and, of course, eating white bread. It was an open secret that Mom kept a loaf of Wonder bread hidden in her room. 

“It’s just sugar,” they said back in the 70’s when no one really knew it was in fact just sugar, so I choked down tuna on pumpernickel, peanut butter and jelly on rye, grilled cheese on whole wheat.  Grandma made French toast from crunchy, multi-grain loaves and ate it with salt and pepper. 

All these years later I sometimes wonder if grandma would be proud of me now, but I know better than that. I may be the thinnest of her five grandchildren, the only one eating vegetables and not drinking Pepsi or Dew, yet when I’m pulling the fluffy white flesh out of a still warm loaf of Italian bread until it’s hollow and empty, then shoving it in by the handfuls on the way home from the grocery store, I know I’m still that big-boned girl hiding under the dining room table eating sugar spread on stolen slices of white Wonder.