The thing was, it had a dent in it. A scar ran across the face of the metal box. It was chipped and rusted in spots, pushed inward, and pressed together whatever unfortunate food item was placed inside.
There was nothing pretty about my lunchbox, nothing to see but the huge old head of Kwai Chang Caine, the crime-fighting monk from TV. And if you looked at it, that’s all you’d see—Caine’s bald head, cracked by the dent, looking like the shell of an overcooked egg.
The dent was there long before I ever got hold of it. It was a hand-me-down from my oldest brother, Will, who was as strange as the box.
And don’t think I didn’t try covering Kung Fu’s rocky head with a carefully placed hand or two. I tried. And tried. But his head ballooned and was way too wide for covering. I was convinced that the head was the first thing people noticed about me on the bus to Albion Primary School or at the Brownies. Having the head of Muhammad Ali or Evel Knievel—even the entire Walton family, including John-Boy and his squishy red mole—would have been far less painful.
I never told my mother how much I hated it, not wanting to seem weak. I preferred to be seen as greedy and begged regularly for a Josie and the Pussycats box. And when begging didn’t work, I banged my own head against Kung Fu’s on the school bus, the first time by accident, but after that, for the easy laughs it garnered, and the chance of damaging it beyond repair. And when knocking heads with Kwai Chang Caine failed to ruin the box, I simply left it at home and waited to eat my lunch till after school.
On those autumn nights when flocks of Brownies gathered in fidgety groups in the school gymnasium and opened their sewing boxes in search of thread and needle to fashion dolls from empty Palmolive bottles, I’d look shocked that my own box had gone missing and ask my cousin Dori for a needle and some thread.
“Where’s your sewing kit?” my mother asked when the troop leader reported that I’d forgotten it yet again and had to borrow from Dori, whose box was everything a sewing kit should have been—clear plastic with powder-yellow handles, stuffed to capacity with yarn and thread and a rainbow of fabric scraps.
I shrugged and kept to myself the fact that mine was not even a real sewing kit, that I would have preferred to pull needle and thread from a brown paper bag than carry around sewing supplies in Kung Fu’s big buttery head. I said nothing, and kept as a secondary source of shame the fact that I cared about such things.
I decided to be rid of it once and for all by convincing my mother that I hated Brownies. And either she was sick of coming up with money for dues or I was an excellent liar, because my mother somehow believed that I no longer wanted to sing and sew and dip peeled apples into brown sugar and cinnamon, push them onto the ends of broken branches, then turn them over an open fire.
I hated the songs and the parades, I said, and prayed she wouldn’t look into my eyes.
“Let me quit,” I pleaded.
And just like that, she did.
My mother had other things on her mind. A new baby to feed, a sitter to pay, a job to hold on to. And boxes to pack. We’d lived in Albion for three years—a tiny eternity given our record—but we were heading out again.
Our stay in the crumbling old house was over. Time at play in the strawberry patches out back, hours hiding in tall grass and cow corn, late-night walks along the outhouse path with my bravest sister in hand—all of this was coming to an end.