Fulfillment
by Becca Human“When I was a little girl, an enormous desire rotted away inside of me. And I couldn’t express it, I didn’t know what it was for. My mother drove me all over the flat bread fields of Nebraska, and if I concentrated hard enough on the sky, this desire would pour out of me and fill the whole space, all the way up to the colossal clouds. I could feel it there, glowing like glass, shivering like a living force. But what was it that I wanted? For a long time, all I wanted was to help my mother with the groceries. We went to Walmart once a week. I couldn’t stay home alone, since my father worked evenings; in fact, I rarely saw my parents in the same room. My mother had to take me, it wasn’t her choice. I saw how tired she was, pushing the heavy cart from aisle to aisle, hoisting gallons of milk, straining to reach cans of beans. Her limbs moved slowly, like the air was too heavy for her. Her back was hunched from working at a computer, her eyes were red and bleary, and she never wanted to talk much, deluged as she was by meaningless language at the call center. Seeing her struggle, I often tried to help, but she’d snap at me, even slap me if I insisted on lifting so much as a cereal box. Never could my little hands touch a loaf of bread, never peel a plastic bag from the roll-around dolly at the cashier, never load or unload the bags from the back of the car. That’s not your job, she’d say, or, there’s plenty of time for that. I didn’t understand what she meant, and in time I grew to believe that she was keeping something from me. This was not, as it initially seemed, an act of self-sacrifice; she was gaining some pleasure from grocery shopping, a pleasure she was concealing from me. My mother’s hands cradled the smooth red soup cans; they squeezed the dimpled avocados; they stroked the fine fuzz of peaches. She gave no sign of enjoyment, but then again, she never did. My mother was a woman of few pleasures. The only indulgence I ever saw her allow herself was a bag of Dove chocolates—bite-sized candies wrapped in neon blue foil. She ate one chocolate per day, always in the evening, as we bathed in the plastic glow of the TV screen. She would place the square of chocolate reverently on her tongue, her face glowing with the rapture of a Catholic. This was a woman who had known the dangers of overindulgence. I, on the other hand, was a girl who had been denied all whims. I began to hate and covet everything she had; I wanted her jewelry, I wanted her dresses, I wanted the hair curlers she put in her hair at night in preparation for my father’s return, which I never witnessed. But more than anything I wanted the groceries—I wanted to feel the rattle and jerk of the shopping cart under my palms—I wanted to palm the firm skin of the apples—to feast my eyes on the speckled egg shells, checking for cracks. I longed to choose a plastic-wrapped pack of ground beef to my liking, to wrap my arms around the soft bag of rice at the bottom of the shelf. The grocery store was an agonizing denial, a Garden made entirely of poisonous fruits. Every week I trailed after my mother, my tiny body lit aflame with how much I wanted to take things away from her; and she greedily kept it all to herself, that witch! Then one day it all changed—in a single moment. I must have been ten or eleven, and my growing maturity was becoming obvious. Her adamant refusal of help grew more and more ridiculous. One week, as I stalked a few paces behind her, viciously fantasizing, I noticed that my mother was shooting me short, brutal glares, though I hadn’t asked for anything. As we reached the cashier, she stopped abruptly. “I forgot the milk,” she said. “Wait here with the cart while I go grab it.” And she placed the cart into my hands. I was flabbergasted. The overwhelming fulfillment of my strongest desire was too much for me to process, it didn’t even feel good, instead I felt my heart shudder and heard my breath in my skull; the entire world became overbright and trembled. My mother walked away and I was left to an agonizing freedom. Even now, I feel a sense of tension, as though I still don’t know what I’m going to do. I see myself standing there, a skinny body salivating. And right in front of me, in the seat where a baby would sit, is that precious bag of chocolates. Right away, without really choosing at all, I open the bag and start to eat. I’m unwrapping those little chocolates as fast as my fingers can move, shoving them in my mouth faster than I can chew, til they’ve melted into a sticky mass in my mouth, my jaw is hurting and my throat is hot and creamy, sticking shut until I gasp for breath and the gluttonous mass briefly parts for air. I’ve never felt that type of satisfaction, but what I learn in that moment is that it’s not enough; you pass some kind of blind point of enjoyment and the desire comes back with a vengeance, even in the middle of it; even before you’ve finished, you start needing more and more. It’s a disease. I’ve eaten half the bag when I start to cry because this pleasure is sickening, it’s sickening because I wanted it so much, because I couldn’t help myself, and I still can’t, having been denied things for so long, I can’t have acted any differently; and it’s the lack of choice that hurt the most—the feeling, standing there, that I really was an animal. Then my mother returned. When she saw me, smeared in chocolate and crying like a lunatic, a strange expression came over her face—an expression I’d only seen one other time in my life, on the day I had my first period—not ashamed or surprised, but simply grim, as though she had foreseen it. She patted my shoulder professionally. I nearly expected her to shake my hand. Gently, she gathered up the crumpled foils and walked to the trash can, where a sprinkle of blue and silver flashed above obliteration. Then she took the cart away from me and went to where she had to pay.”