Sprung At Last

Eventually, I made some friends, and played along with their games. One of these involved using my lunch box as a pillow – it was white and fairly soft, since it was only made of vinyl-covered cardboard. It broke down fairly quickly, and I was heartbroken when it finally disintegrated completely.

My mother bought me another one at the dime store, but since it wasn’t the beginning of the school year, there wasn’t much selection. I got a sturdy metal lunchbox with Inch-High Private Eye on it, and my mother got an extra discount because it didn’t have a thermos – but my Alice in Wonderland thermos fit inside it, and I didn’t really want another one.

She filled the lunchbox with a food that was different from everyone else’s. Sometimes the difference was small: The American cheese that went on my sandwiches came from a pre-sliced block of slices that all stuck together, instead of the individually wrapped slices that seemed somehow better. These are cheaper, she told me, and they’re exactly the same. But it might not have been the cheese that bothered me as much as the healthy bread she always bought, which wasn’t soft like the Wonder bread I always asked for, but was hard, and brown, and crumbled into sand against the metal walls of my lunchbox.

In Wisconsin, since my mother couldn’t drive, she relied on family to drive us everywhere; I sat in her lap in the front seat, held securely in her arms. Once, I opened the door of my aunt’s red Pinto while we were on the road, but we weren’t going very fast, and since I got yelled at by both my mother and my aunt, I never did that again.

In New York, my mother only needed a token to come and go as she pleased, since the subway would take you anywhere you might want to go, and so we rode the graffiti-covered cars, filled with strangers: People smoking cigarettes, teenagers with loud radios. Sometimes there were musicians playing violins or other instruments in the tunnels, and sometimes my mother would let me put a quarter into their violin case.

The parks in Wisconsin were different: I could walk a block to the playground near my grandparents’ house, and get the merry-go-round going really fast, and play with whatever neighbor kids happened to be there, or go find one of my friends, who all lived a door or two away. In New York, the playground behind my apartment building had a metal fence with sharp spikes on top, and the one at school that the first-graders used was on the roof of the five-story building. There both had black mats to cushion any rough landings, although they mostly served to smear knees and clothes with soot. After lunch, if it wasn’t raining, we played in the cement courtyard in the center of the school building, and if it was raining, we just stayed in the cafeteria.

Mostly, the kids were different. They made jokes I didn’t understand, like one boy who had the whole class laughing when he held up paste to his nose and announced he was sniffing glue, and played games I didn’t understand, like one called Catch Me Kiss Me where everyone laughed at me for actually kissing the boy I was assigned to chase, even though I had been told that I was supposed to.

When we returned from South Africa, my mother got a job at an ad agency in New York City, where she had worked before, and we left Wisconsin. We stayed for a few months with my mother’s college friend and her family in a house in New Jersey. I started first grade there, walking to school with her friend’s daughters, carrying my pretty new white Alice in Wonderland lunchbox. I made friends with a little Japanese girl, whose name I don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter because not too long after she celebrated my birthday with me, we moved to an apartment in Manhattan, and I started a new first grade.

The first night in our new apartment, it was just me and my mother and the few things we’d brought in our suitcase from Wisconsin to New Jersey to New York. It was late, and dark, we arrived, so there was nothing to do except go to sleep, sharing the large mattress she’d put in the center of the barren room.