It was late summer and everything was the deep jungle green that consumed anything that stood still. The air was humid and thick, "close" as my Mima used to say and by now we all tuned out the sounds of the locusts and the mourning doves that went on all day. All four of us had overalls that summer because my mother wanted to have pictures of us holding pitchforks and such paraphernalia as we now lived in a rural area and needed to symbolize it by having the appropriate wardrobe.
During the day in question we were to drive the forty minutes or so to Coleman's Nursery, one of our favorite places on earth and just a little way down the road from where I was born. It went out of business, by choice, a couple of years ago but before that it was a comparative playground on days meant for running errands. The plants were bountiful, but we loved it because of the Christmas store that was open all year and the candy store that had unique offerings such as chocolate bottles filled with liquor that we knew was somehow immoral, but how can immorality be stored in chocolate? What kind of fantastic person would think of that? Or buy it? At Christmastime Coleman's ran a little Christmas wonderland full of electric moving manequines that I still don't know the real name for but that we affectionately called "The Q's" as dubbed by my sister for an unknown reason. They were little elves making shoes and toys, they were victorian children riding in sleighs, they were terrifying, terrible clowns that popped up and down smiling with glittering insanity. The staff sold hot chocolate for a quarter at the door, and every year I burned my tongue so badly on it that it felt like sandpaper for a week afterward, generally meaning that I couldn't really taste anything at Christmas at any point that I can remember. But I digress.
That day in summer I, and by some magic only I, was allowed to pick out some kind of candy and my mother entrusted me with two dollars to go purchase it so she could continue to pick out shrubbery without candy store diversion, although telling me to bring her change. We were candy freaks and the opportunity to get new candy lit the fuses of our greed faster than anything else. I was a hoarder in this regard - I always had Halloween candy left, carefully rationed, until Easter, and Easter candy until Halloween. After Halloween we would all separate our candy into groups of worth and barter with each other for days afterward, always getting the best of Daniel who believed anything we said, even if it was that dum-dums were way better than Butterfingers.
That day I picked something that was meant to look and taste like little candy watermelons in a little green box. They were supposed to be two for seventy-five cents, which I reported to the lady at the checkout. Out of a rare sense of frugal self-righteousness I didn't buy two, but went for just the one box. Maybe I was trying to show that I was capable of responsibility when I was given favor, or at least it was something like that. My mother would do that sometimes - I think her motivation was to squelch jealousy between us and it worked pretty well. We understood that if one of us got something and the rest of us didn't, that meant our turn would come later as most of the time she couldn't afford to get something for everyone at once. Or at least that was the rationale, and we bought it.
The problem came in because I was too shy to correct the checkout lady when she charged me $1.50 plus tax instead of 33 cents plus tax. I guess somehow she heard that I had two things for $.75 each, instead of the price being two for $.75. I handed her the dollars and left.
The full impact of this loss didn't fully hit me until we were in the station wagon, stuffed in the back seat surrounded by prickly bushes with all the windows down in a useless attempt to squealch the heat. I had practiced self-discipline with the best of intentions and instead had thrown away a rare opportunity. I could have bought, I thought, and mentally went through the combinations I could have purchased for the same amount of money. This began to bother me more and more and I couldn't eat the candy I had because I was so upset. I wanted to eat it when I was happy to get the full experience out of it. I couldn't even eat it. I could have gotten a lot more. I was self-disciplined and no one would even know about it. It played like a tape in my head, cruelly rewinding itself and playing again and again and then I was crying in the back seat and my mother wanted to know why. Hoping for relief I told her about the mistake, and said I was sorry I wasted the money. It was only two dollars, she said to me, it really doesn't matter. Just forget it and eat your candy.
But somehow this didn't help. I knew all the other kids were looking at me, and I knew they were sending me hate vibes for being bratty on a day that I got candy. This made me feel even worse and I was struck by the idea that the worse things got the worse they continued to get, an exponential growth that echoed back over itself exhaustingly inside my head.
They all, my mother included, started looking at me with confusion instead of hate and that was even worse. They thought there was something wrong with me. They didn't understand what was happening. We got home and I went outside by myself to spare their judgment. Why was this such a big deal to me? I didn't know why but I cried and cried and cried until even I started to question myself. I sat in the grass by the tall green rows of corn and sobbed like my heart had been broken. I couldn't even look at the candy anymore, because I knew I had taken something happy and nice and completely ruined it, made it something depressing and terrible. First by the payment mistake and then by making too big a deal out of it and then by feeling like the whole world was crashing down. I cried like a crazy person. I had absolutely no control over my grief and thought it might never end. I felt like I was carrying the sadness of everyone I had ever met and the feeling continued even after I stopped thinking about the events leading up to it. It was as if I had tapped into something else, some huge well that no one knew existed and that only I now had access to but couldn't shut off. It felt hopeless and bottomless and filled up with intolerable emotions.
But eventually I did stop, and I looked at the little green box in my overalls pocket. I pulled it out, opened it, and ate all the candy inside as fast as I could. It tasted just like I expected - like little candy watermelons. It was even pink inside. I crunch crunched through it and then I stood up and went inside and tried to convince my mother that I was ok now, I liked it, thank you. I wanted it to be nothing again, a little nice thing that didn't really matter. But she looked at me with confusion and a little disappointment and almost a little bit of fear and I knew that whatever it was that had happened was something that was real. That other people could recognize but also not understand.
We didn't talk about it anymore but I knew that everything was a little bit worse now. It was something I had created in my own mind but didn't have control over and it had come out and affected everyone and how they saw me. It was completely terrifying and it changed how I interacted with people.
Why am I telling this story? Because I just remembered it and the memory was so distinct that I wanted to write it down.
The end.
