CHAPTER 13

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.