Cheetos Stains

I was reading On Writing by Stephen King today while I was eating a $2 meal from Taco Bell. The $2 Meals come with Doritos, and it was the Doritos that inspired me to write. See, when I turned the page, Dorito dust turned the corner of it orange, and that instantly sent me back more than 20 years into the past. Some people connect smells with memories, some people hear sounds that bring them back to their childhoods (childrenhood?), for some people it's songs or certain times of year. For me, it is books. Name any important event in my life, and I can tell you what I was reading or what kind of books I liked. And with the orange-stained pages of On Writing came a very distinct set of memories, almost like I am watching a movie starring my child-self.

I was probably 9 or 10, maybe even 8. My parents had to go somewhere, I don't remember where. They tried to procure a babysitter for me with no luck. All the neighborhood girls had better things to do. And then, grabbing for a straw, they called one of my regular babysitters one last time. "Do you think any of your brothers or sisters might come over for a while? Could you ask?" And that's how Melanie's brother came to be my babysitter for the night.

Melanie's brother. Sigh. I don't even remember his name, but I sure do remember his face. I fancied myself in love with him. Which made me a nervous wreck. My mom dressed up a little, spent time in the bathroom curling her hair and smudging on makeup. Right alongside her, I dressed myself in my best pajamas and carefully pulled my hair into a ponytail, then messed it up a little so it wouldn't look like I had tried too hard. Then I cleaned up my room a little, grabbed the book I was currently reading, and hopped into bed. I carefully propped myself up on pillows and covered myself with the quilt on my neatly made bed. I imagined that I must look like the girls in movies always did when they got in bed to read at night. My hope was that Melanie's brother would notice how sophisticated I was and fall madly in love with me. It didn't really enter my mind that our age difference made that hugely unlikely; the only thought I gave to his age at all was that since he was older, maybe he could like me. See, my mom always told me that the boys at school who lived to belittle me would grow out of it someday, so logic told me that I had to look for an older man if I didn't want to be rejected.

All of this makes me sound rather bold and calculating. I was not. I was shy and hopeful. Once Melanie's brother arrived, my mom brought him into my room to have him say hi while she said bye, and I managed to utter out a strangled hello. And then he went out into the living room to watch TV and I curled up with my book and tried to forget that the love of my life was 50 feet away from me and I was too scared to so much as talk to him.

The book I was reading was called "Me and Cece," or something like that. (I just looked it up on Amazon to see if I could find it, but no dice. Damn.) I had gotten it at a garage sale my parents had stopped at on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and it had only cost me a nickel. It was a book about a girl who didn't get along with her mother but somehow ended up in a time warp and was able to make friends with her mother when her mother was her age. Of course, she found out all kinds of horrible things, like that her mother had smoked a cigarette once, and even climbed out her bedroom window to meet boys. It was filled with the prerequisite awkward moments that characterize fiction on that topic (Freaky Friday, anyone?), such as when the main character accidentally calls her new "friend" Cece "Mom," and when she catches herself just short of calling Cece's mother "Grandma."

Suddenly, something made me look up from my book. Most likely, it was the feeling of someone watching me, although I'm not sure how that got through while I was reading. My mother's car once slid off the road in a storm, spun around twice, and ended up in a ditch, and I looked up from the book I'd been reading and asked if we were home yet when I finally noticed that the car had stopped moving. Anyway, I looked up, and there was Melanie's brother, standing in my bedroom doorway.

"Want some Cheetos?" he asked me. I shyly nodded yes and he disappeared for a few minutes and then reappeared with a bowl of Cheetos and a glass of milk. He set them both on my dresser next to my bed. He sat on the edge of my bed. My heart stopped and accelerated at the same time and I clutched my book to my chest like a security blanket. "How's the book?" he asked me.

"Good," I managed to say, probably with a stupid grin on my red face. I wanted to something more, anything to keep him there, but I forgot how to talk.

"What's it about?"

I managed, somehow, to swallow my nerves and shakily begin to speak. I probably kept him quite entertained, too, because when I read a book back then, I became the book. There was no such thing as a brief synopsis in my world. I told him the story without leaving out a word. Pretty close to literally, probably--my memory for books was pretty unbelievable. I have no doubt that at some point in my childhood, I probably wrote a book report that was longer than the book it was about. He listened politely (I imagined back then that it was with interest, but it was probably just politely). Then he gave me a one-arm-around-the-shoulders kind of hug, wished me a good night, turned on my bedside lamp and off my overhead light, and returned to the living room. I was in heaven.

I'm sure it was a good 15 minutes or more before I snapped out of my reverie and picked up my book again. Drinking milk and munching on Cheetos, I stayed awake until I had finished the book.

And every time I read the book after that (I have a thing for re-reading my favorite books; I probably read the Little House and Anne of Green Gables series' a hundred times each), the Cheetos-stained pages brought me right back to that night when Melanie's brother half-hugged me. It's funny how memory works, how stained pages bring back to that night even now, even when the pages are of a different book and I am 20 years older than the hopeful little girl I was then.