There’s candy in the trash, make yourself at home

Have you ever rooted around in the garbage for something? What do you think is the smallest prize you’d stoop to going through the garbage for? Where does a 3 Musketeers candy bar fall on your scale?

Back in elementary school we had a program where we all had to experience being homeless for a day. That day, my favorite teacher, Mrs. Leonard, took us to a restaurant for lunch. We were pretty excited, until she passed the restaurant entrance, took us all the way around the back and stopped in front of a big green industrial-sized garbage bin. There were fresh grease stains on the ground, but if you looked hard enough, you could see older more permanent grease stains below them. The air reeked of rotten rice, which is a very easy to replicate but hard to stomach smell. Just leave the rice out on the counter for a few warm days, covered, so it doesn’t dry up, and bingo, you’re suddenly ready to make that move to New Hampshire on short notice. They have zero state income tax, no other reason.

This was fourth grade, and we were all a bunch of weaklings, even the feminists. The one exception was this kid Daniel Graff, who once did ten pull ups in gym class, ten more than the next butchest fourth grader, and now he couldn’t stop doing them at every opportunity. I could see the mental struggle in his eyes now. Do a pull up…into the garbage bin? I wasn’t sure he could resist the temptation.

We thought Mrs. Leonard would offer us a boost and gave her meaningful looks, but she insisted on “keeping things real.” “Homeless people don’t have chaperones at hand wherever they go,” she said. “You have to learn to fend for yourselves. Be thankful I found this restaurant for you.”

That sealed it and into the garbage bin Daniel went, on the tenth pull up of course. The rest of us went hungry until 3pm.

I have no idea where that story was going because it never happened. Mrs. Leonard was the best though, and Daniel Graff did win fourth grade that day in gym class.

But the 3 Musketeers bit is all true. Maybe I was willing to forgive the inferiority of the candy on account of how amazing the book is, but it’s a cold slimy fact that I delivered it from a ShopRite shopping bag reborn as a trash bag, deep into its third trimester.

I didn’t volunteer. You could even say I was coerced. Yuanyuan pranced into the kitchen some time after lunch, and started scouring the top shelf for the bag of 3 Musketeers that we’d bought for Halloween, in case trick or treaters braved Covid and showed up on our doorstep, or threw pebbles at our windows till our hearts melted, or the window’s heart broke. She probed blindly, being somewhat diminutive, but she’s excellent at finding things and if there were a bag of 3 Musketeers to be found, she would have found two of them.

Silly Haoser. I’d told her the day before that as soon as Halloween was over, that bag was going straight into the garbage. I refuse to be stuck with eating a whole bag of candy, something I’m fully capable of doing.

I repeated this story to her, in case she’d forgotten.

“You didn’t take a couple out before you threw out the whole bag?”

“Of course I did!”

“Well, where are the ones you took out?”

“I ate them already.”

“What!”

“We haven’t taken the trash out yet. Do you want me to get one out for you?” I offered.

“No,” she said, with resignation, and went back to the bedroom.

I tried to hear some ambivalence in her response and succeeded. I would sacrifice myself and get one for her. That’s what good husbands do, they throw themselves on the grenade. If I also got one for myself, it’d be purely incidental. I opened the bag, took a mental note to never eat eggs again, and roofied myself so I wouldn’t have to remember what happened next.

Triumphant, I brought the candy to the bedroom. Yuanyuan was sitting on the bed, pretending to work. “I told you I didn’t want it!” she shrieked, pulling away as the 3 Musketeers drew near.

“Don’t worry! I washed it in the toilet.”

And that’s how I ended up having to eat two 3 Musketeers bars instead of one.

That garbage bag has been in the apartment for three days now. I’m starting to think we should throw it out. I don’t know what’s stopping me.