My mother often stored a half-empty can in the fridge to drink over the course of an evening. She would stuff a rubber stopper that looked like a lime wedge in the mouth.
This was 1981, and we were always dreaming up new ways to keep our carbonated beverages from going flat. My mother’s older sister informed us if you crunched the big plastic soda bottle before you tightened the cap, you could preserve the carbonation. Our soda bottles looked like they’d taken a flight on an airplane: sunken bellies, cratered at each side. The rubber stoppers were part of this scheme to prolong shelf life, though they never worked. The fizz leaked out anyway. You would come back to your can the next day and find it flat and syrupy. Eventually those lime wedges ended up in a kitchen drawer alongside twisties and dead batteries, another failed experiment in fighting the way of the world.
But when I began stealing sips of my mother’s beer, we still had faith in the lime wedges. I would pop that sucker out and take a few glugs—not enough to be obvious but enough to get melty inside—and I would put the can back exactly where I found it. On the door side, next to the raspberry jam. On the top shelf, beside the cantaloupe, logo facing the back.
I didn’t do this every day. I didn’t even do this every month. It was a special-occasion indulgence. A splurge. But I did it for many years, as the 12-pack grew into the economy 18-pack from Sam’s Wholesale and cotton nightgowns turned into striped pajama bottoms and Duran Duran T-shirts.
Sometimes I went too far, because the beer was like a wave I wanted to keep crashing into. I would misjudge a few swigs and realize the can was nearly empty. I couldn’t put my mother’s Pearl Light back in the fridge with nothing but backwash in it.
So I had to drain that can and pop open a new one, drinking it down to the original level, which made me woozy with rainbows. I would take the empty back to my bedroom and shove it behind the foldout chair in the corner until I could slip out to the alley and dump it in someone else’s trash.
It’s odd I was never caught. Sometimes my mother noticed her beer lower than when she left it, but she wrote it off to a fluke of memory. And my father kept his eyes on my brother—who was, literally, a Boy Scout. Any con man depends on people looking in the wrong direction, but perhaps nothing worked more to my advantage than gender bias. Nobody thought a little girl would steal beer.
I WAS IN fourth grade when I began to realize my family might be out of our league in the neighborhood. One afternoon, a friend’s father was driving me home when he asked, “Does your dad rent that house?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Innnnteresting,” he said, in a way that told me it was not interesting but shameful.
There are moments you can taste your difference, like copper on your tongue. I began lying after that. Little lies, lies no one could catch. Yes, I’ve been to Aspen. No, that’s not our car. Absolutely I’ve been accepted to the School of Performing Arts in New York. When people asked where my father worked, I named the building but not the profession. “He’s a banker?” And I said, “I guess so.” Banking was a power career. Banking meant money.
Our home was on a major artery through the neighborhood, where cars zipped past all day long, forcing us to keep the blinds drawn at all times. I started using the back door to come and go. I didn’t want strangers to see me and know the dinky rental house was ours.
My mother had become embarrassing to me as well. She listened exclusively to classical music and hummed conspicuously in public. She had a therapeutic chattiness that felt like a doctor’s probe. “How do you feel about that, Sarah? Tell me more.” God forbid we pass a mother with a baby in the grocery store. She had to download the entire backstory. How cute, and how special, and blah to the blah. And my mother didn’t assemble herself like those kicky mothers of the PTA, with their frosted hair and ropy gold necklaces. She wasn’t bad-looking. But didn’t she realize how much prettier she’d look with some eye shadow?
Even my brother was a frustration. “You’re Josh’s sister?” the teachers would say on the first day of class, eyebrows arched with delight. But no matter what high score I made, his had been higher. Don’t even try, kid. Someone already won this race.