Guilt, Sudafed, and the Low-Hanging Fruit
It’s hard to say exactly when it started: the paralyzing fear, the gut-wrenching guilt, the crippling self-loathing, the post-nasal drip. Actually, that last one started on Tuesday. But no matter how much Sudafed I ingest, none of it seems to go away.
I read somewhere that the traumas that have the greatest impact on our psyches are the ones we remember from childhood. I never really bought into that notion. After all, I’m not troubled by memories of shitting myself back when I was in Pampers, but I’m still too embarrassed to go back to that Indian restaurant where I had that ‘accident’ last year. Still, these symptoms are making me reconsider.
It started like any other day at Temple Rodeph Sholom Preschool: a few sessions in the blocks corner, a glass of grape juice, a futile attempt to draw an accurate picture of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Nothing memorable. The one thing I do remember was that it was October. I remember this because it was Sukkot.
Of all the ridiculous Jewish holidays, Sukkot, the harvest festival, always seemed strangest to me. Jews, or at least the ones I know, are not farmers. They’re podiatrists. They listen to NPR. They call pot roast brisket. Farming is never high on the list.
Nevertheless, there I was, somewhere amidst the seven-day festival of Sukkot, halfway through a day of preschool, and in the playground. I must have skipped snack time that day, because I was starving. I had two choices: scrounge for food, or wait till I got home. Home was four blocks away and preschool let out in an hour and a half. Hunger couldn’t wait.
The playground was on the roof of the building. Being that it was the only open-air space the school owned, it was also the site of the synagogue’s sukkah. I had been eyeing that sukkah since they put it up, hung with bunches of grapes and huge pineapples. Now it was more enticing than ever. I don’t want to get into Genesis comparisons, but there is no other analogy to the seductive quality of fruit that I can make. I scanned the sukkah, looking for my Apple of Temptation, which turned out to be a pear. I’ve always been a huge fan of the pear; it’s a delicious fruit, works well in tarts, and makes an underrated juice. But I’ve never had such an amazing pear as the one I stole that day from the sukkah. I looked back and forth–all the other kids were preoccupied with whatever version of let’s-chase-each-other-while-screaming was popular at the moment–and stealthily grabbed the pear from its place. The sweetness of its white flesh sent me into a Shark Week-esque feeding frenzy. By the time I regained consciousness, the pear was nothing but a core and stem.
I’m not a religious person, nor have I ever been. At an early age, I would stand at one end of my room and hurl a basketball at my Fisher Price mini-hoop, saying, “If there is a God, I will make this.” And almost every time, I would miss. My faith never recovered. But for some reason, when I looked at the pear carcass I had just ravaged, I felt the omnipotent eyes of a wrathful Jehovah and imagined all the plagues of Egypt raining upon my five-year-old body. I knew I had to get rid of the evidence. After an earlier experience involving an apricot pit and my windpipe, I knew eating the core was out of the question. So I did the only sensible thing I could: I threw it off the roof.
I didn’t think of it much then, but I have no idea what became of that core. For all I know, it could’ve picked up momentum on its downward plummet, striking a hapless passerby who was unlucky enough to walk near Rodeph Sholom that day. If that did happen, it couldn’t have been that bad. They probably would have canceled a day of preschool if a falling pear core killed someone during school hours. But then again….
Sometimes I think about the pear and I feel sick. Sick because I stole it. Sick because I hid as I ate it. Sick because I threw it over the roof. Sick because I never told anyone. But I think I feel sickest when I remember the next day on the playground. Because the next day, I stole a plum.
