She yearned for something sweet. She toasted Pop Tarts, the hot sugar cooled like Elmer’s Glue to her finger tips and tongue. She spooned gold honey into Earl Grey, threads of nectar stringing between jar and cup where it pooled in the dregs and she tipped her head back to receive the thick liquid on her tongue. She boiled Honey Crisp apples and brown sugar and cinnamon into a hot mash, dropped a scoop of Breyers, flecked with vanilla bean, into the center of the lava, dredging her finger along the smooth contour of the bowl so as not to miss a drop.

She became harder to please. She bought crinkly cellophane cookie trays from Nabisco and popped buttery circles into her mouth, one after another, her teeth crushing grains of granulated sugar, her tongue peeping out into the corners of her lips to catch spare crumbs. She thawed whole Sara Lee cakes layered with oily buttercream and dry sponge, carved her fork through the lacquered frosting, pressed the tines against the exposed cardboard disc below the cake to scrape up the tacky remains. She counted the number of licks it took to get to the center of Tootsie Pops; she cut thin seams into her tongue as she dragged it along the rough edges of a Blow Pop just before driving her molars through the candied shell and into the soft center that she dragged off the stick with her front teeth; she chewed handfuls of multi-hewed Jelly Belly beans, the jumble of peculiar flavors mixed with her saliva into a sweet, indistinct morass.

Soon she was never satisfied. She filled her pockets with brown packets of raw sugar, shooting the crystals down at stoplights. She stirred Jello, the pink-tinted powder into boiled water and drank it down like water, a sticky film filling her mouth and throat. She emptied boxes of Captain Crunch and Lucky Charms and Cookie Crisp into a red and white bowl labeled “Popcorn” and ladled handfuls into her mouth until her cheeks bulged as she struggle to chew, a mouthful of stones, and her tastebuds stung, enraged. She ordered flats of Dunkin Donuts, a dozen of each kind, telling the bakery to bill the local high school PTA (“for the chess club fundraiser”), and crawled into the back cargo area of her SUV with the carton, and eventually succeeded in folding a greasy-doughed Boston Cream into her mouth, whole.

With each jolt of glucose, her fingers and toes twitched and tingled, her center thrummed with artificial electricity, but she also remembered, in the ripples and echoes of sensation, that time when she had been loved. She remembered when he had tenderly taken her head in his hands, the flat of his palms supporting the weight of her skull, taking the burden of all her heaving thoughts onto the thick bones of his fingers, and her body had been flooded with an elemental relief, like fire and water both, nothing simulated, just sweet.

My family was the kind that tried hard, but our efforts never hit the mark. When my mother made cookies for a family get-together, my fussy aunt found a cat hair and acted as though my mother had planted a razor blade among the chocolate chips. When my father bought a used snowmobile from our affluent piano teacher, he never got it running, and it sat for years in our garage, amid the many other non-working implements until hauled to the dump. That dump was a big hole dug behind a barn. The intention was the barn, once a chicken coop, would be bulldozed into the hole, and covered like a grave. Instead, the hole remained a canker sore filled with garbage, aluminum cans, and debris. My brother was encouraged to strive as hard as his intellect hinted he could, but he spent his energies in less fruitful ways, and my mother burned his heavy metal albums in a garbage can in the driveway. I was the kind of child, already subservient to my own physical discrepancies, who bore their failures on my sleeve, where my heart might have been had I been less embarrassed to show it.

(2007 – Noah is 2 years old)

Two boys ride face to face,
Feet sunk into the well of the
new Radio Flyer wagon that has waited
in the garage since Christmas
until this first warm day of May.
One boy (not mine) sits, head on a
swivel, repeats: “Two boys.”
Then, “Twooo Boooyys.” Proud
of his naming himself and my son.
His mama tells him, at a crosswalk,
about the busy street, stop lights, walk
sign. She tells him, “When the light
is red, stop, and look both ways. Wait
until you see the little man
appear, and we can cross.” He looks
both ways. “Two boys.” He chatters
about the park, the stairway down
to the beach, something about shells.

My son says nothing, faces forward, back
bow-shaped. His hands grasp tightly
the sides of the wagon. I do not bother
to tell Noah to look both ways. He will not
remember, he will not describe where we go,
or maybe not even know. He may not know
that the boy who sits across from him
is Harry. Though Harry looks at me
and says, “Noah’s Mommy,” though
they play together each week, or Harry
plays and Noah wanders room to room.

On the beach, Harry builds sand castles
with molds, covers his mother’s feet
with sand and giggles with delight
as she unearths her toes, a game.
My son feeds sand into his own
mouth, hand over hand. Flushed with heat,
Noah’s cheeks are red, and he is heavy
in my hands as I move him back
To the blanket. He cries and I use my finger
to crook out some sand before he bites, before
they see what he has done. His lank body
is soon exhausted by the exertion of sitting
upright in tumble-over sand. He will not
stay still, and enough is enough. I want
a spaceship make us dapple and disappear, whoosh
back up the steep and lengthy stairs,
over the blocks of fine houses,
the wagon a magic carpet. Instead, we struggle
as they ascend before us, knowing
to offer help is no help at all.

Sweat drips into my eyes but my hands
are full, holding both Noah
and the railing tightly. When Noah
seizes, he gets hot hot hot
just like this, and we layer cool
washcloths on his chest both to
soothe and to stimulate. Perhaps
I should have headed the other way
toward the water, to the cool waters
of Lake Michigan, to the edge
of the lake, dip him in, a christening.