Sweets Eaten In Secret

Marc Twain observed that too much to drink is sometimes barely enough. Substitute chocolate, and you’ve got me covered. Midway in my eight-year adventure in the restaurant on the second floor of Levy’s, a venerable department store in Tucson’s first mall, their marketing department added a bakery just a few feet from our open entryway on the second floor. Insidious fans blew a luscious caramel aroma through the kitchen in the early morning hours, sweetly trumping the odor of roasting meats and sulfite veggie soak. Even more challenging to me, a glass and steel dessert case appeared one morning between my salad station and the wait-staff’s coffee counter.  Rows of tarts, éclairs and cookies reposed at eye level across the narrowest of counters. I resisted their sweet, sticky allure since I had recently lost my teen-aged chubby chipmunk cheeks and was not looking for their return. My resolve was tested daily as I was the one to re-stock the case. I would at times surreptitiously tilt the metal rack and watch the chocolate, or jellied treats slide slickly on their paper liners to my greedy lips, but I was generally iron-willed.

On a certain December Saturday something, a glistening dark chocolate glaze or gentle swell of custard, some promise of gastronomic ecstasy seduced me. I tucked three éclairs into their column, and ate the fourth, and the next, and the next—and the next. I fell, sticky and dizzy with sugar, into utter debauchery. Every time I heard a waitress slide the front case-door open, I’d nudge the back fellow closer to her side, and eat his comrade. Surrounded by tall stainless steel cabinetry, my stealthy decimation of the baked battalion proceeded unobserved. By day’s end, the éclairs MIA were in the double digits, and these were not dainty little finger-sized treats. I could not ride my bike home after work. I had to walk beside it, and was grateful in my glucose-drunken haze to have it as a rolling support.

When I finally got home, I rested my forehead on my crossed arms at the kitchen table for a while. My husband, Marc, was there waiting for our walk across Speedway to the neighborhood pizza joint for our weekly sausage and pepperoni, hold-absolutely-nothing fast food feast. Changing our pattern could provoke inquiry that might reveal my dissipation, so I weakly agreed, passing my lethargy off as just the result of an unusually hard day in the kitchen. I choked down enough pizza to avoid comment on an unusual lack of enthusiasm and again staggered home. I was so full I could not lie down and so hot that the winter night felt like an evening in hell. I paced around our tiny bungalow in equal parts of physical pain and anxiety that my gluttony would be discovered.  My shame was revealed when Marc awoke in the early hours to find me moaning softly and pressing my burning face against the cold glass of our bedroom window. The éclair affair passed into family folklore, and forever after, the offer of a cookie, brownie or any baked treat has been tagged with, “or would you like them all?”