A green pea shot past my head. The cafeteria had turned into a battleground and the floor was covered with flat green casualties. Green plastic soldiers didn’t die like green peas did; they just fell over and were ready to start over again. The pint cartons of milk were assaulted with straws until bubbles rose high out of them like bunches of white grapes. Chicken legs and thighs were twisted and cracked apart, a few bites taken, and left to the side. The dishes had divisions for each food group, much like a TV dinner. There was constant bartering, especially for a second helping of dessert. I don’t know what was most unbearable to me, the table manners or the screaming; I ought to have been grateful for the screaming; it covered up a more hateful noise, that of mass eating.
Needless to say, my mother wasn’t willing to pay hardworking money for “dat junk”. The first year we moved to Wachovi, she filled out a form for free lunches and free milk and was furious when her application was refused. To her, the title “unemployed widow” should have been enough to kindle charity in the heart of the nit-pickiest of American bureaucrats. When she filled the form out the following year, the zeros dropped like flies off her assets, property values, bank account balances; the number of her dependant offspring rose as radically. She claimed she had had three children before us in Lithuania. She said the school would never check up on that, and it was true, it didn’t. We were given hot lunch coupons, but went without eating half that year because the shame of being stigmatized with the red, white and blue coupons was too great. When my mother received a phone call from Mrs. Washington, the school principal at the time (Mrs. Washington was black, and had been transferred to our school during the bussing crisis) informing her that Cecilia and I spent our lunch time outside reading books instead of eating, and wondering if she, an active member of her church, Methodist or Baptist or one of those denominations, could personally be of any assistance to us, we were given lunch boxes from then on with my mother’s homemade concoctions. We never admitted to our mother that we were ashamed of the hot lunch coupons; we simply told her the food they gave us in school wasn’t good.
The war degenerated and someone made a flame thrower out of a pint of milk and a straw. I walked around a few green smears and did my best to fit in wearing my new dress, known in school as the Bell, a flowery thing that kept its all-weather puff thanks to a hula-hoop sewn into the bottom hem and had a square low-cut collar, front and back. You could wear it either way, it didn’t matter. You walked, it rang.
All I would have liked to do was sit down; you’d think sitting down was the easiest physical activity humans can do; sitting down doesn’t take ten years of daily practice, wasn’t some great feat only Houdini could do; but sitting down necessarily meant sitting down next to somebody, and that was not as easy as one might think in a middle school cafeteria. Every chair was supposedly taken, or being saved for someone else. If I insisted, those seated began to shift around and squeeze me out, a round of musical chairs. I felt like a gypsy with her hand out, in tattered rags, begging for money at a benefit ball. In physical education, whenever teams were being chosen for softball, I always ended up the last one, the one left over, the one whose name wasn’t called, but one team had to take, to the delight and laughter of the other. Every school has one of those. I was that one.
In class, I was the other one; the one whom peers fought tooth and claw to sit next to, the one they edged their desk towards. These friendships were short-lived; approximately one hour, the duration of the exam. If I tried to walk next to anyone after class, she or he usually stooped to untie a shoe.
I wandered outside into the courtyard, opened my new Bedknobs and Broomsticks lunch box (Ursula’s Christmas present to me; in exchange, she received the gingerbread Cecilia got in school), and took out my Bible I was recently in the habit of hiding in there. What was happening to me was not only normal, it happened since Adam and Eve. Fleshy desires were one of the Bible’s central preoccupations.
The Adam and Eve passages fascinated me the most. A few days earlier, changing classes, I happened to bump into my old teacher, Mrs. Wella. I pointed to the lump I felt in my throat and asked her if she knew what it was; it so happens she did: it was known as an Adam’s apple. I started noticing every Adam’s apple I walked by.
Stacks of chairs were lined up against the wall. The rolling belt continued its way to the kitchen like a segmented creature, without a dirty tray left on its back. It was time for me to go. I put my Bible safely back into my lunch box, and left my beef tongue sandwich for the birds and ants.
The Wachovi News Press came to our gym class that day to take pictures of the kids who had won Presidential Physical Fitness Awards, a big deal in our community, because the winners received certificates with photocopied signatures of Richard M. Nixon. The repressed giggles were like crumbs left here and there in a dark evergreen forest, nudging me on in the right direction. I found my dress lining the netless basketball ring, upside down, and filled with our gym’s reserve of basketballs. The hula-hoop sewn in the bottom hem kept it from falling through, though the weight of ten or so basketballs bent it sharply in two like the hinge and dual arc mechanism of a pair of jaws. It was quite a sight: my gown so altered, multitudes of bumps and domes molding the fabric into someone else; it was the incarnation of my subconscious; a surrealist sculpture of surplus breasts and buttocks. I hurried to find a chair I could reach it with.
Cecilia and I had the habit of meeting at the flag after school so we could get a seat on the bus together; we weren’t unduly patriotic or anything; we pledged allegiance to the flag every morning in school like everyone else, and that was the extent of it. My mother, like most naturalized Americans that were once Eastern Europeans, had been accustomed to outbursts of nationalism; I deduced this from the way she waved a flag around during the fourth of July parades in this country: feverishly enough to make people around her wonder if we had just won a war. And not just any flag, no, no, no; the last page of the Wachovi News Press where the American flag was printed on one side only, for children! On the other side, were the answers to the crossword puzzle of the day before, the horoscope forecast, and the comic strips. She waved that around on a yard stick, yelling “God Bless Amer’ca!” and “Long Live Yuncle Sam!” until Cecilia and I acted like we didn’t know her.
Cecilia was nowhere in sight; considering how late I was, I guess that was predictable. I made haste, cut across the grass, nearly tripped over a low, draped chain, and had just gotten on the school bus when Barry Ramsey pushed me off.
“Go back in there right now, metal mouth, and put those basketballs right back where you found them.”
“I found them in my dress.”
“I don’t give a crap where you found them; it’s where you left them that concerns me. I’m responsible for the equipment.”
“Then take care of it and leave me alone.”
“I will as soon as you go back in there and pick them up off the floor. I’m not your fuckin’ maid!”
“Nor am I yours.”
“You better do what I say, railroad tracks.”
“Stainless steel sex appeal.”
The reply was Ursula’s; it didn’t sound like me; nor did it correspond to my looks.
“Don’t make me puke.”
“You had better let go of me this instant or I am going to tell.”
“Be my guest. You’re the one who’s gonna get in trouble.”
There was a small crowd forming around us. A boy I’d seen playing Frisbee in the morning instead of going to class looked at me. The stubble on his face was as long (or short) as his crew cut. I’d seen his name, Winston Bee, carved into the washroom walls. Without warning, he ducked into the tent-like space between my waist and hoop, before rushing out and fanning the air before his nose. He thought Cecilia and I wore the same dress all week and not a different version of the same dress every other day. The crowd encouraged him to more dramatic interpretations. He staggered before fainting and underwent an epileptic seizure.
The buses had started. I made a pathetic run for it, the two yard dash in seven seconds. Barry had caught me by my hair, his eyes squinting down to hateful slits. I felt something almost gratifying, I know this will sound absolutely preposterous, as if I were a fish about to be eaten.
“Your ass is going back in there now.”
His Adam’s apple went up, and down. The more he squinted, the more I found myself looking up at him with strange sleepy eyes. An apple core was stuck in his throat; a bite of knowledgeable fruit surrounded by weak flesh, like a sweet baked apple in the snout of a roasted pig.
My back struck the earth’s crust. At one point, I saw Cecilia kicking Barry in the head. Really, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, for she was wearing my old, soft leather sandals which were only kiddy size thirty four; still I was moved; it’s the thought that counts.
Mr. Liverpool rushed towards us, led by our octogenarian bus driver, Mr. Ginger. Everyone turned around to watch him run. Mr. Ginger had been the talk of the town for the past two years. Some said he shouldn’t be allowed to drive a bus at his age, that he could have a stroke at any minute. Others said his medical exams showed he was as fit as any forty year old man. The letters to the editor that the Wachovi News Press was only too happy to print were getting more and more below the belt, until Mr. Ginger made the front page by swimming four miles across the bay, towing a row boat by his real teeth. After that, no one dared say a word any more. Personally, I would have given him a psychological exam.
Barry was holding his Adam’s apple. There was nothing of an apple at all in there, only cartilage and meat! The apple’s skin was clearly human skin, and the apple’s juice was recognizably warm and red. Segments of thin lip skin dangled in my mouth like that fine outer skin of a peeled onion. My new braces had grated my inner cheeks like a Parmesan shredder. When my mother heard on the radio that overbites could cause migraines later on in life, she had finally given in. Before Mr. Liverpool had quite reached us, Barry tackled me again.
Barry, Cecilia and I were suspended from the school bus for the remainder of the year, such was Mr. Liverpool’s verdict after weighing each of our tearful versions and wounds. He saw that my front tooth was chipped. (It had been chipped against the driveway years earlier, but if Barry’s pulling of my hair didn’t show, I was forced to substitute it with something else.) Barry had a bite mark around his apple. The gap at the base of the throat between the clavicles swelled outwards like a blood-filled blister.
Mrs. Ramsey picked up her son with the silence and rapidity of one accustomed to his behavioural problems. Once again, Mr. Liverpool dialled our number. I never should have told him where my mother was.
When they arrived, I think my mother wasn’t aware that she was still holding onto her bowling bag, nor that one of those one third fractions of a pencil you get in bowling alleys and Yahtzee boxes was still behind her ear, squishing a soft, blonde curl. Ursula nodded to each of us apologetically, as if she had just barged in on a sacramental service because she’d opened the wrong door. They listened to my side of the story, which was the filtered truth, but my mother’s face flushed so excessively that I found myself continuing my descriptions more mildly.
My mother confronted Mr. Liverpool, “So! You! Why you punishin’ my daughters?!” Her index finger was like a dagger ready to stab him in the face.
Mr. Liverpool explained how we were to serve as examples that you do not take authority into your own hands.
“You hear her! De boy, he was both’ring her! An’ she, she defen’ her sis’er!”
Mr. Liverpool was the frail, pallid Protestant type, with white hair and a three piece suit, who had never yelled or been yelled at in his life, even as a child. His strong principles made him insist that I should have gone to a superintendent for assistance.
“Someone, dey attack you, you wait ’til you are murder-ed dead to go to de super tendant??”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“You do? You wait ’til you are murder-ed dead?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Mr. Liverpool returned his face to his paperwork on his desk so my mother would get the hint it was time to leave. He pulled a ballpoint pen out of a tight bouquet of pens and pencils; paper-clips thrown in here and there were stuck between the wooden and plastic stems like petals.
I don’t know if my mother was trying to prove her point or to simply vent steam, but she rammed her bowling bag into Mr. Liverpool’s back, repeating mercilessly with each consecutive blow, “Now wha’ you do! Now wha’ you do?! Eh? Eh? You call a super tendant?”
Mr. Liverpool, understandably outraged, for enclosed in that red, white and blue segmented leather bag, was a fourteen pound bowling ball, stood to demand, “Leave this office immediately!” He trembled uncontrollably, which made him look a decade older in the span of a minute.
“Olga, please, calm down you, calm down you,” pleaded Ursula, thinking that maybe if she resorted to my mother’s syntax, her words might sink in more.
Cecilia acted as if nothing were going on. How one ought to behave was to her nonsensically abstract. She took people for the way they were and never expected variations of thought or temper from them. Cecilia, I thought, would make a good wife.
“I pay for dis office, it belong to me as much as it belon’ to you! Who you tink you are?!”
My mother did everything she could to get out of paying taxes, yet everything public, I noticed, belonged to her. She crossed her hands over her abdomen and concentrated.
“Mom!” I exclaimed, fearing the worst was to come and it did.
“Mótina!” gasped Cecilia, even she blushed this time. I guess as my mother’s own flesh and blood, she felt somewhat organically responsible for what had just occurred.
“You wan’ I do again?”
My mother now defied all of us in the office and I think she did try indeed, aiming her posterior towards Mr. Liverpool who had taken refuge behind a waste basket filled with reams of yellow legal paper.
Mr. Liverpool quietly mentioned that if I were too indisposed to seek help from a school authority, that Cecilia easily could have, and it was not proper conduct for a schoolgirl to have kicked a fallen boy in the head. With that, he gently asked if he could be of further assistance to us.
My mother said, “Yes. You keep you big words to youse’f.”
Outside, our mother gave us a choice. Feeling that she had already paid for our public transportation in her income taxes, the ones that she deducted to nearly zero the last few years, and thus unwilling to repay a supplement for car fuel, either we had to ask Barry Ramsey’s mother if she would give us a ride to school with him, or get up at five in the morning and walk.
Cecilia and I chose to walk.