ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

The School
by Kristen Iskandrian

LUNCH

The cord of the burgundy change purse left a faint reddish stain on the back of my neck; inside, the leather was soft, crumby, and upside down, each letter was a stick figure, leaning and waving awkwardly. So much depended on its dingy brass button, so much more trustworthy than a zipper. Some kept bills in their shoes, slipped them into the tubes of their socks; some kept quarters deep in pockets, unfazed by the whiten and scrape of their knuckles. Carrying a change purse was like carrying around a good-night kiss or a finger from a mother’s floured hand, like leading a pack mule with some rope. There was no room for it, not on the crowded body, not in the crowded line.

“It would seem to be one of the duties of the school to teach boys and girls in connection with their hygiene or general science work both to understand some of the more elementary principals of food selection and to appreciate more than they would otherwise do the care and solicitude which their mothers must exert daily in the planning and preparing of their food.” Lawrence Augustus Averill, Educational Hygiene (Boston, 1926), p. 269.

The meatsmell started in line. Everything, even the pudding and the bowl of sad apples, bore the meatsmell, grimly but without complaining. The hamburgers, gray, sat in rows in their opened buns. Pearls in oysters. To me. But to most, they were for throwing, for mashing up with milk and mayonnaise so that days later, a hard, tell-tale speck would remain in the rounded corner of the tray’s main chamber. Or the boy with the fleshy lips would take the hamburger from its canopy bed and put it on the seat of the girl with the pink sneakers, the ones that jangled from all of the bead-strung safety-pins. Called friendship pins. When she got up to get a straw.
     (I didn’t know some food was for laughing at. I rehearsed in the coat room with a banana because bananas always struck me as ridiculous. Also, pineapples, but they weren’t served whole. When I was behind someone in line who chose a banana from the bowl, I sniggered my best snigger. Turned out I was wrong. Bananas were simply for eating, their ridiculous peels simply for throwing away. I picked up my purse from the floor, where it had been thrown. I once more resolved not to participate until I learned the rules. )
     I wanted to teach myself how to hate what I loved, and love what I hated, but each bite of my hamburger overwhelmed me with its goodtastingness. I tried to put it down, but I couldn’t. The flat pickle discs that had long ago, in some faraway jar given up, were returned to their zenith. The earth with its grains and its sunshine and its animals and its ketchup. I ate hot-faced with two hands, head bowed.

“Indeed, the greatest of all aids to digestion is an atmosphere of good cheer, for the nerves that govern digestion are powerfully affected for good or bad by the state of mind. A scientific diet is powerless to secure a good digestion if children are not happy at their meals.” Frances Williston Burks & Jesse D. Burks, Health and the School (New York, 1913), p. 228.

There was just enough in the soft purse for the week. On hamburger day, I always bartered with my appetite, which howled like a wolf protecting a forestful of cubs. From the chagrin of the line. I would defend my cubs by eating them.

BEATING (click for next section)