On certain weekday evenings and every other weekend, there descends upon our house a plague of near Biblical proportion: a voracious hunger that cannot be sated, but merely pacified for a time.
I’m speaking of my two teenage daughters.
For the majority of their lives, they reside with their mom in a small house in the next town over. Apparently they never eat or drink while they’re there, but merely lie dormant until it is time to swoop down and wreak their devastation.
If I do not provide at least a full gallon and a half of milk by their arrival on Friday, I will be running to the store to get more on Saturday evening.
Bread, ice cream, soup, cereal, waffles, Spaghetti-O’s, cheese, crackers, leftovers, dry macaroni, house plants, small animals, furniture; anything that could be in whole or in part consumed and used by the body as fuel: these things are in imminent danger of being ravenously eaten as the girls sweep through the kitchen.
Every time I get a glimpse of them, they’ve got some kind of food in their hands: a sandwich, a bowl of cereal, hunks of cheese, handfuls of Lucky Charms, etc.
I bought a half gallon of lemonade on Sunday morning, and by Sunday evening, there were about two tablespoons left. Neither my wife nor I had had any, and Michael had had about six ounces. L said “it’s not my fault,” a great non-committal answer if there ever was one. This meant those two had consumed 60 ounces of lemonade over the course of the day without impinging upon their intake of milk, soda and whatever else they’d had.
One night, I kid you not: my older daughter was holding something wrapped up in a paper towel and was sucking on the outside. Apparently she had momentarily mutated into some kind of grotesque human-spider hybrid, had liquefied her prey and was sucking the digested material back through her proboscis. I was more than just slightly creeped out.
I have to keep five or six cans of Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin Burger with Country Vegetables on hand at any given time, because this same daughter will go through at least a can of that every day she’s with us.
Sunday night, after packing up to go, they can be seen in the kitchen cramming whatever morsels they can find into Ziploc baggies for the trip back to their mom’s. My wife calls this the “Final Pillaging.”
After making the cross-town trip, I return to a home that looks reminiscent of a small town after a Roman siege, plundered and ransacked. I swear, it looks as though the cupboard doors are hanging from their hinges, and torn wrappers are rustling about the floor in the dry breeze. My wife stands in the midst of it, shaking her head: “They come, they eat, they leave,” she says.
Sometimes I’m tempted to check to see whether Michael is free from bite marks; I never know just how hungry they might have been.
I’m scared to think what’s going to happen when Michael hits his teen years. Might be a good idea to stock up now, put a meat freezer in the garage and a few head of cattle in the back yard.