My Stolen Food Story

Last month, I was lucky enough to attend a fantastic writers conference close to my home. One class, led by Deborah Madison, prolific cookbook author and promoter of the Slow Foods Movement, was about journaling life through the lens of food. We all shared how food shaped our childhoods, and how we associated food and our mothers and our fathers. Then Deborah asked us to write about the stolen food in our pasts. Stolen food? Puzzled looks crossed many faces as if to say, Moi? And then, delicious, mischievous expressions replaced the haughty ones as each writer put pen to page.

As it turned out, no one in the class had difficulty crafting an essay right away. One gentleman, about my dad’s age, wrote that he and his friends fed themselves during the Depression by stealing green apples off of trees, grapes from the vine, and watermelons from railcars. The lady who owned the grapevines always chased the boys from her field—while never picking any grapes herself. And since those long-ago days of his youth, the man won’t eat sweet apples—he longs for the tartness of the unripe fruit from his youth. They just never tasted as good as they did when were stolen.

Another writer shared her story of stealing a block of Vermont cheddar cheese from a Manhattan gourmet market—when she could well afford to buy it. She secreted the two-pound chunk within the folds of a voluminous coat and likewise kept her secret all these years, wrapped in layers of shame and need.

As for me, I had a hard time getting started—I couldn’t think of a time I had stolen food. I was the kid who NEVER stole penny candy because being raised Paranoid Roman Catholic, I knew beyond a doubt that stealing would ensure that, upon leaving the corner store with my precious stolen Boston Baked Beans or Devil Dogs, I would immediately be flattened by a passing delivery truck and go STRAIGHT TO HELL. I have never stolen any food, I thought. And then a thought bubble appeared over my head.

Ahhhh, yes. The cupcake.

This is my stolen food story.

Have you ever been inside a real Italian bakery? Have you witnessed the piles of chewy pignolis, flaky butter cookies, the gleaming tortes, the orgasmic cannoli? You know what I’m talkin’ about, eh? If not, fuggedaboudit, because readers reader, you have not lived. To taste authentic Italian pastries is to dance just outside the gates of heaven.

Unfortunately for me and my chubby thighs, I grew up right next to the Italian part of town, and my daily walk to elementary school took me past Rossi’s Bakery. (It also took me past a bowling alley, two bars, a pizza joint and a corner diner, but they were meaningless then and now.) The sweet smells wafting through the air set my mouth to watering as I peered through the plate glass window—my daily exercise in frustration and longing.

Once in a while my mom would let me accompany her while she picked up a loaf of Italian bread or some snowflake rolls. (Oooohhhhh, snowflake rolls! Your rich, buttery insides are exquisite beyond belief, outdone only by your soft, flour-dusted crusts!) On certain, perfect days when the birds were singing tra la la, the counter lady in her starched apron and white polyester uniform would grab a waxed paper square, pick out a chocolate chip cookie, and hand it over to me. “Say thank you,” my mom would say.

“But I’d rather have a cupcake,” I would think, gobbling the cookie anyway while I stared through the glass case. I had never seen cupcakes like these: each a perfect replica of the next. Each with exactly the same number of swirls in the frosting, the same pattern of multi colored sprinkles or even silver sparkles.

Oh, yes, I wanted one. And each time I asked my mom, the answer was the same: “NO.” Dammit, life was as unfair as it could possibly be.

But my luck was about to change. One day, mom called me to the kitchen. “Run to the store and get a loaf of bread, nothing else, and bring me my change. And hurry, dinner’s ready in twenty minutes.” Off to the corner market I went, bought the bread, wrapped one chubby hand around the tie wrap of the bread bag and the other around mom’s change, and walked back home.

Where the miracle occurred. Instead of putting out her own two hands—one for the bread, one for the change—mom only asked for the bread. I slyly slipped the change into my pocket—I think it was twenty-eight cents—and quickly left the room.

For days, I waited for her to ask me for the change. She never did. After a few weeks, I figured she had forgotten all about it. The coast was clear! My chance was upon me! Cupcakes filled every dream while I hatched my plan.

The morning of my heist, I walked past the bakery on my way to school, just like every other day. I peered past my reflection through the plate glass window, just like every other day. I spied my perfect cupcake waiting there for me, taunting me, just like every other day. But I knew that this day was not just like every other—this was one I had been waiting for.

At school, the hours shuffled by until at last the bell rang and I was free to claim my sweet prize. I anticipated the sugary frosting and dark chocolate cake as I flew out of the building and through the gate, down the street and around the corner. For the first time, I boldly entered the bakery knowing that finally, I would have what I wanted.

I faced the white starch lady and asked for a cupcake. She looked at me incredulously, but bent over and slid the mirrored door open on the case anyway. “That’ll be twenty-five cents,” she said. Smiling, I handed over the money that I had secreted away from my mother all those many days.

My eyes glowed with expectation as I left the bakery with my treasure. For a few blocks, I carried it in both hands, admiring its curves and swirls. Then slowly I peeled away part of the paper wrapper and took a bite. Nothing could have made me any happier. Down the street I walked, savoring my sweet, sweet cupcake in surprisingly small bites. Frosting coated my upper lip. I licked the paper, trying to make it last as long as possible, but knew I must finish it before I arrived home and raised the suspicion of my entire family.

In my sugary stupor I lowered my guard, forgetting that I was Up to Something, when suddenly I heard a shout: “Hey! Where did you get THAT??”

Jolted out of my bliss, I looked around in dismay to see who had ruined another of the relatively few good days of my early adolescence. It was my brother. My brother, who knew that I didn’t have money of my own to be spending on cupcakes. My brother, who knew that if our mother had given me money for a cupcake, he damn sure was going to get one, too. I was busted. I managed a lame “none of your beeswax” or something, and gobbled up the rest of my suddenly oversweet cake. It went down in a big lump.

I dreaded the confrontation that awaited me. Sure enough, when I reached home, brother John (taller, thinner, swifter) had already told mom what he saw. I knew this the moment I met her in the kitchen, and I knew that she knew where the money had come from. “That was my change, wasn’t it, Claire?”

“Yes,” I answered, feeling ashamed and full of regret.

I don’t remember my punishment, but I’ve never forgotten how it felt to get away with something (quite an accomplishment in a family of my size, when twelve sets of eyes were usually upon me), to have something I really wanted (of course it was food-related; many lifelong issues around that subject), and to be caught in the end, ensuring that my joy was short-lived and ultimately guilt-inducing.

While the joy was fleeting, the feelings around the incident shaped much of my young life. Who was I to have such pleasure? I didn’t deserve it. Silly me, enjoying a treat out in the open like that—it’s far better to be sneaky with food. Then, no one can harass you about needing to lose weight. The guilt and shame piled up, over and over, like so many layers on a cake, until I pushed it back down with a squeaky clean plate at the dinner table, a trip to the cookie jar, or a big piece of mom’s home baked blueberry pie. With ice cream, of course.

My Second Job

When I turned sixteen, I qualified for the two rights of passage I yearned for: a driver’s permit and a real job. The desire to learn how to drive, I understand. But why I was in such a hurry to join the ranks of the working stiffs, I can only ponder. I suppose my main interest was getting out of the house and out of my dad’s way. I constantly rankled him, and he was pretty much pissed off at me for about seven years or so. So, a part-time job that occupied the hours of 6-10 pm sounded pretty choice (this was the late seventies, you know).

I applied for a job at only one place, in the grocery industry—the other traditional career route in my family (the first being the newspaper industry). My dad, you see, was a grocer for the first twenty-something years of his adult-type married life, and a butcher for the remainder of his working days. My older brothers and sisters helped out around his small neighborhood grocery store, the one a few miles from our house that Dad opened after his first store, a block from our house, burned to the ground one horrible night. It was the first time I ever saw Mom cry one of my older sisters remembers. I was a year old. By the time I was old enough to help bag apples (how do you think they got into the bags?) or sweep the warped oak floors, Dad decided that the larger chain stores were a real threat to the neighborhood stores—and he converted his into a Laundromat. Smart guy, my dad.

But this is about me. I’m sixteen, and I’m ready for my first interview at Tops Friendly Market. I meet the small, eyeglassed and balding manager in his tiny, dark little domain of power behind the cash office. I’m extremely nervous, and figure I have a snowball’s chance in hell of being hired to be a real grocery store cashier (low self-worth, anyone?). But the manager is impressed by my work history. He is even more impressed by my personal reference: Mr. B., our next-door-neighbor and all-around good citizen, who was a bank manager back in the day when they wore suits, topcoats, and hats to work every day, and were held in the highest esteem. (Side note: I was happy to visit Mr. B. just last November. He is eighty-nine.)

I was hired and started my career. I remember my first day of training, when the front-end manager introduced me to the expression, “I don’t get mad, I get even.” I spent days wondering what she really meant by that. But she was a toughie, no doubt about it. She scared me, and I stayed out of her way. With a little practice, I soon became a very good cashier. No scanning bar codes back then, oh no. We had to read the price and punch in the numbers, attributing each item to meat, produce, frozen foods, or miscellaneous as we went. I was a veritable machine, grabbing item after item from the cart, placing it on the conveyor belt with one hand, while accurately punching in numbers with the other. Fast as lighting. I was that good. My failure as a paper girl was soon a distant memory.

Tops Friendly Market was an odd little segment of society. Aside from the wide variety of personality types in our customers, the people who worked there were a little different than I had encountered in my sheltered world. They were a little more crass, a little more permed, teased, sprayed and Camaro driving than I was used to. I liked them. Once I felt comfortable, I wandered to the break room to chat with the other women, usually older than me and much more aware of the world. I started bumming a cigarette here and there, to fit in, to have something to do on break. I started making friends among the red polyester smocked and vested community; even took on a van-driving boyfriend, much to the horror of my parents. He was a real loser, but I thought he was pretty much the best I could do. The jocks weren’t lining up outside the door, you know?

I used to go out after work with a guy named Troy. He was cute and I had a real crush on him. We’d get some beer after work, and sit in his car, drinking and listening to Lynard Skynard. We’d flirt some and make out, even though he had a girlfriend. I was one of those girls, apparently. I was in his car one night, in front of my house as he was dropping me off, when the radio announcer told the world that John Lennon was dead. That’s why I remember Troy.

Back at Tops Friendly Market, I eventually ended up switching to the produce department. It was more solitary work, interacting with the iceberg and parsley instead of the drunks and yuppies. I had time to think, and hum, while I was making piles of oranges and weighing bags of broccoli crowns. I was usually the only one in the department in the evenings. All alone and isolated from the rest of the store.

All that stretching, reaching for the top of the apple display. Plenty of bending over, sweeping up the celery fronds. The quiet nights when very few customers would wander through the department. Ample opportunity for a predator, otherwise known as the store security guard, (you know, someone to be TRUSTED) to graze a bustline or a hip, and to say the inappropriate things that only confused a young woman into wondering if she should be flattered—or frightened. And so she said nothing at all.

That was my second job. And my first experience with sexual harassment. Little did I know how many more were to come.

Tops logo is a registered trademark of Tops Markets.

My First Job

This morning, as on every other morning of my life, I opened the old wooden screen door and stepped out onto my front porch. Lying neatly, right at my feet, was my local Sunday newspaper. As if it had been placed there with love. I peeked over the railing and spotted my Seattle Times at the bottom of the steps, safe and perfect in its plastic sleeve. I sent a silent “thank you” to my delivery people, the faceless ones who so kindly meet my needs and those of my neighbors by not requiring me to walk out to the yard or (egads!) to the front sidewalk to fetch my papers.

You see, every morning, my hair looks like this:

and I believe that nobody other than D. and the other animals who live in my house should be subjected to that crowning glory.

This morning, as I sometimes do when I see how nicely my papers have been delivered, I thought back to my pre-teen years when I had that job—and how much less care I took to meet my customers’ needs. I was a substandard newspaper carrier.

I inherited my paper route from my older brothers. Each of them had done it, mornings or afternoons, and on Sundays each of us sold three different newspapers—our local paper, the New York Daily News, and the New York Times—in front of our church. For years, every Sunday for four Masses, from 8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., year round, one of us kids was out there schlepping hundreds of papers over to the church so we could sell them to the people who walked by our paper stand on their way home.

And every afternoon after school, I folded somewhere around a hundred papers and arranged them in my paper bag, which featured a hideous, attention-grabbing, neon orange strap, ensuring that I could not hide from the boys in my class who were playing hoops or baseball along my route. Then I either took off on foot or on my badass Sears Free Spirit 3-speed wonderbike and headed up the street to bring the news to the people.

My paper-tossing skills were not great. In fact, I really sucked at it. The shrubs, the porch roof, halfway up the stairs—yeah, those were my targets. But landing one on the porch at the actual front door? A rarity. Sometimes I’d get lucky and hit a screen door with a smack! But most times I just grabbed a paper out of the heavy canvas sack and lobbed it in the general direction of the porch. And kept right on going.

It wasn’t that my parents had not instilled the “if you’re going to do something, do it right” mantra in me. Apparently it didn’t take, at least not back then. Had my father witnessed my performance, he would have made me pick up every single misfired paper and walk it to the customer’s door, placing it between the screen door and front door. Then, he would have had me ring the doorbell, greet the customer when they answered, and apologize for the poor quality of my work.

I took great pride in the occasional toss that actually landed on the porch. As time went on, I became better at it. But for the most part? Toss and go. Walk up the block. Toss and go.

Now, my favorite customers received world-class service. I used to collect once a month from each subscriber, and some of the little old ladies on my route greeted me with homemade sweets each time. Their papers went behind their screen doors—every day. And the two older women who were confined to their wheelchairs? I walked into their living room and handed the paper to them. But the strong ones had to work a little harder to get theirs. Even if it meant grabbing a broom to retrieve it from the roof.

Today I understand how they must have felt. I understand how much they probably despised their papergirl. And why my tips were never that great.

But as a sixth grader who hated being outside in the cold and felt scared in the dark, I had one mission: get home to supper. Get rid of the papers and get back home to supper. Complete my route, hopefully unscathed by bad dogs, mean boys, vampires (these were my Stephen King days) or frostbite, and get back home to the warm kitchen where supper was on the table.

When I think back to that time in my life, I wonder if we were crazy, naive, or stupid. Who would allow a young girl to walk the streets after school, even in winter when it was very dark, to go to strangers’ homes to collect money once a month and then to carry this money around with her? Were things so vastly different then? Was this routine act that is now unthinkable really safe then? Or was I just very lucky?

What I thought then was that it was cool (apart from the hideous orange strap on my bag). I was our small city's first female paper carrier. I was so proud of that. I was earning my own money and learning how to fulfill an obligation every day. There were no sick days. There were no “Mom please drive me today” days. Oh, no. Mom had a bunch of kids to take care of and the aforementioned supper to get on the table. And Dad wasn't home from work yet.

I had nobody to rely on except me. Whether I wanted to do it or not, I had to. On days when I would have given anything to just hang out at my best friend’s house listening to music and talking about boys, I was still out there. Throwing papers. Into the bushes.

Perhaps that’s the real reason my aim was so poor.

My Favorite Childhood Book: We Help Mommy

I'm child number eight, out of eleven kids. Born smack in the middle of six boys. By the time I was nine, the oldest kids, including all of my sisters, were out of the house, on their own, hundreds of miles away.

It was me, mom, and the boys (including dad). We all had to Help Mommy, or she would have collapsed under the volume of laundry she faced daily. Smelly boy laundry.

This was one of my very favorite books. How wildly traditional, repressed, and stereotypically un-feminist of me. But the book helped bring me along the road to equality, too. I remember thinking "Hmm, where are the boys when I need someone to hold the dustpan?" Gosh, I loved this book! I think I loved it because I loved my mommy. And because it inspired me to help my mommy (hey, now that I think about it, I smell a rat!). And because of the beautiful illustrations. I looked at that pudgy little blond girl and saw myself. And she was good.

I'm going online now. Must. Have. Warmandfuzzypieceofchildhood.

Thanks to Jean Cushman (author), Eloise Wilkin (Illustrator) and Cynthia Smoot (photo credit).