A country block from our Noble Street home, Ralph’s Deli had always been. The store was the epicenter of our side of the tracks. A low-income neighborhood not too far from the metropolitan houses that looked like a government subsidized, cookie-cutter suburb or the tracts of single family homes sometimes owned and sometimes rented.
At Ralph’s, the fried chicken and jojos fogged the hot food case before being slipped into aluminum lined bags by the pound or the piece. There were long blue Kisko Freezies in the waist highs next to the checkout. Coolers of drinks and frozen foods. All of this, what was needed or what was desired, was open for the asking. Just make sure your name was in the ledger and make a faithful effort to pay.
Grandpa A.C. and Grandma Louverta started a tab there when my dad was a boy. Used it to feed him and Uncle Bobby and Uncle Eugene and Aunt Gina and probably a wave of other relatives when the situation called for it. And when I came into the world, my parents started one, too. My dad tells me now, years after the store changed hands and eventually closed, that sometimes it saved us from hunger between their paychecks. A pound of lunch meat here. Some chicken legs there. Milk, bread, and cheese. I never knew this was the case. Never knew anything other than I never went hungry and that whatever my parents owed they must have paid because we were never turned away.
But I’ve known starving. I learned the hard edges and hollowness of it during college when my food plan ran out. When I was weeks away from my first campus job paycheck. When I had no minutes on my prepaid cell phone to call home and ask my parents to rescue me. No gas in my car. My starving was barely held at bay with packets of ramen noodles and cups filled with water from my dorm’s fountain. Sometimes I managed to scrape together enough change for a chocolate milk from the vending machines. Any other time I would have stayed far away from the thickness of it. I hate milk and it hates me, mostly. But I needed the heaviness of it and the sugar to stop the shaking in my hands and bring me back to focus at work and in class. And it was forty-five cents—an amount I could pull together with nickels and dimes found at the edges of my life.
Those weeks of hunger ended with a phone call from my mother and a few hours later she, my father, and my sister arrived on campus. It was only a forty-five minute drive, but that wait was like seeing an oasis on the horizon—your body making all sorts of plans to come back to whole once it had the proper sustenance. One item, probably the smallest in the bag of groceries they’d brought, still lingers on my tongue. A yellow apple—its mealy flesh yielding beneath my teeth and its juices sticking to my fingers. It took only a few moments to eat but I will never forget it. I cannot say what else was in the bag, but I know it snapped the coil of hunger in my belly and brought me back from the haze that hangs over everything when your stomach is empty.
Pride helped build my hunger those weeks. There were certainly ways I could have borrowed a phone or a few dollars, but I had a hard time owing anyone anything. There were no options for truly borrowing my way out of that starvation, though. Everyone I knew at the time, other students I loved and still love to this day, were just as on edge as me. What built community among the group of us was a collective holding up. Using a single meal plan to feed three people. Pooling money for late-night pizzas. Sharing snacks as much as we could to beat away the grumbling pits of our bellies. I rarely eat Instant Ramen now. Yellow apples, too. There are too many memories colored with hunger for them to be filling.
My groceries now come delivered from Instacart after I’ve sat on my sofa and filled a virtual basket and waited for the call that the food has arrived down in the lobby. I can avoid the lines and the annoyance and still get everything I need. There is no longer a cause to worry about whether when I get to the register I have miscalculated how much things will cost and wait for items to be voided while the line grows behind me. The ticking tally of this virtual cart lets me know in real-time if there is room for a little treat. It stops the disappointment before it can ever begin.
Disappointment now is knowing a particular brand is out of stock or there’s only the light version of some treat I wanted. This is nothing like starving. Instead, it is the privilege to be decisive about what comes into my home and into my body. I’ve been hungry in my adulthood, but I can say now that I have not been truly starving. There have been scant times I have nothing other than bad financial management or laziness to blame when my stomach grumbles.
I can still see Ralph’s brightly in my brain. From the mountain of chips near the door and Uncle Daniel behind the meat counter against the back wall. I never thought much about the blood smattered across his white tee and apron, just the slip of smile that always reached his eyes and reminded me of some alternate version of my father. Their faces are copies of a grandfather I can’t really remember. Uncle Daniel’s large hands worked quickly, measuring out the flesh with precision and piling it on the scale before wrapping it in bright white paper. He’d pass the bundles over the rise of the glass display case, his hands extending sustenance like some sort of benevolent god. The ruler of meat and blood and bone.
Ralph’s was the joy of a full belly and summer walks with my cousins past a chained-up dog along the shortcut between Pike Street and the store. We never really saw the animal, just knew its barks echoed off a makeshift shelter and the scrub of trees lining the potholed alley. I do not remember a house along the way, but I remember the dog ringing loudly in my ears. I used to be terrified of that alley, but it never stopped me from joining those walks when they happened. Over thirty years later I now worry about whether or not the dog was neglected or lonely or hurt and those barks were trying to get our attention. But we never even paused. Were never curious enough to stop moving toward the hot food and cold Pepsi. What I remember too was the penny candy at Miss Rachel’s up the block from the store. How we entered with hands full of change or crumpled dollar bills and left with sacks fat with sweet things.
Ralph’s was an oasis–-the only store, I believe, in the immediate area. One of working-class families covered in the soot of the steel mill or aching from standing on an assembly line. Families or couples or the all alone pulled into the parking lot to get what they needed. Shouting hellos at the familiar faces playing the numbers box or straight. There was even a notary to help certify what was really important. This was a community nestled within the lines of how the town kept the have and have nots apart. This was not the Giant Eagle on State Street with its bright fluorescent lights and name brand everything. A store situated in a completely different world far away from the ability to feed your family with only your word rather than currency.
I know now, far into adulthood, what could happen to those who didn’t settle the ledger at Ralph’s. The tab could close. The same as in a bar when someone has one too many drinks and not enough dollars in their pocket. But Ralph’s let the tabs build. Years after we moved out of the neighborhood, without paying the final tab by cause of forgetting, my father made a return trip and paid what he owed. $120 four years later. Many didn’t come back to make things right, he was told, and it meant more than he knew that he did. Ralph’s passed the idea of the tab down generations and I am sure had I remained home and had a family of my own I would have perhaps started one, too. Instead, I am unshackled from this type of hunger and the solutions it requires. Still, the weight of those borrowed meals kept me full enough to land where I am today.
The store is gone now. Two generations of the original family kept Ralph’s going, then an owner from outside the lines propped it up until it finally could no longer hold on. Now there is an empty building on that side of the tracks. Miss Rachel’s is gone, too. No tabs or penny candy remain. No grocery store easily accessible. Over the viaduct there is choice— Sav-a-Lot, Giant Eagle, and soon a Meijer. There is an abundance there. This side of town is still hungry in some ways. Scrambling to find food when the only option is gone. Bellies rumbling as the distance between sustenance and convenience grows further and further apart. This is a food desert just as much as it has become the wiping away of a community.
It took heart for Ralph’s to offer the tabs. It pushed away the hunger pains while people worked enough to cover the costs of living. The tabs let there be birthday parties and family reunions and regular old Wednesday night dinners, all on the strength of a promise and a name written down in ink.
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