In the afternoon, after dismissal, I watch an eighth-grader “skitch” behind a departing bus, grabbing hold of the back bumper with his bare hands and skiing behind it for a hundred yards in his tennis shoes. The big kids go hatless and mittenless in the dead of winter. They wear socks and gym shoes in the snow. As I board my bus in bread-bagged feet, mortified by their misbehavior, I have my own secret sin on my conscience.
I don’t care for my circle-and-square sandwiches but tell Mom that I do. I don’t bring them home uneaten for fear of hurting her feelings. Nor do I throw them in the wastebasket in our classroom—we eat at our desks, like harried middle managers at Mickey Mining—for we are told, at home and at school, that starving children in Africa would love to have our bologna sandwiches.
So I put my uneaten sandwiches in the pencil box in my desk and watch them turn green after many, many weeks sealed inside their plastic Baggies. The Wonder Bread, American cheese, and bologna are so pregnant with preservatives that it takes ages for them to turn. But after two months, the sandwiches piling up in the pencil box like corpses under the patio begin to stink. Mrs. Streit doesn’t yet notice. In a classroom full of six-year-olds, it’s just one more strange smell among many. Still, the sandwiches haunt me. The guilt overwhelms me. Even seated at my desk, I am a fugitive on the lam. I want to confess but can’t, knowing it’s only a matter of days before I’ll be led out of the classroom in handcuffs, my classmates pointing and howling at me on the way out, the pencil box zipped into a plastic evidence bag carried by a man in a hazmat suit.
That pencil box, not incidentally, is the size of a cigar box and every bit as redolent. Before I began stashing my sandwiches in it, the box smelled of pencil shavings, crayons, Elmer’s paste, eraser crumbs, and possibilities. The lid of this canary-yellow cardboard coffin is illustrated with fresh-scrubbed boys and girls frolicking beside a puppy in a meadow. Above the tableau are the words MY SCHOOL BOX. There are spaces on the lid for my name, my school, my grade, and my teacher’s name. Mom filled it all in, the blank spaces now embroidered with her impeccable Palmer Method cursive.
MY SCHOOL BOX holds the fruit of my first back-to-school shopping spree, which I undertook before first grade, making the pilgrimage that Jim and Tom made before me to Snyder Brothers Drug Store in the Cloverleaf strip mall. There, in a magical aisle, are spiral-bound Mead notebooks in a motley of colors, number-two pencils racked up like bats in the Twins dugout, and bevel-edged erasers the color of bubble gum with “Pink Pearl” stamped on them in an elegant script. They look like a human tongue, or the pink rectangle of bubble gum inside Topps baseball cards.
As for crayons, we are not allowed the sixty-four-pack of Crayolas with the sharpener built into the box but rather the primary colors of the eight-pack. The sixty-four-pack induces crayon envy among the eight-packers in the classroom. The eight-pack deprives us of Peach, the crayon formerly known as Flesh, so crucial to drawing our Caucasian flesh-toned self-portraits. The sixty-four-pack has Peach and even Indian Red, evidently manufactured exclusively for drawing Indians. Since that first visit to the Dells, a good portion of my thoughts have been devoted to Indians—the rubber-tomahawked Indians of my imagination.
I am beckoned to sit “Indian-style” during story time, and when Kenny Mellenbruch repossesses one of the marbles he has given me—a polished “steelie” that’s hard to come by—I call him an Indian giver. The school year itself begins with the false promise of Indian summer. And yet all the Indians I know—the Atlanta Braves mascot, Chief Noc-a-Homa; the Cleveland Indians mascot, Chief Wahoo; Iron Eyes Cody himself—are noble and righteous figures. The Indian headdress on the Tootsie Pop wrapper is a symbol of joy, Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.
The Washington Redskins consist entirely of Indians, as far as I can tell. The Redskins are the 1972 NFC champions and have a linebacker whose name is Chris Hanburger but whom I always think of as Chris Hamburger.
Back-to-school shopping concludes with a fitting for uniforms at Korner Plaza. For boys, Nativity requires navy-blue pants and a light blue shirt, a seemingly rigid code that in fact leaves almost endless leeway. For instance, the uniform code allows children, through a celestial loophole, to wear navy-blue Levi’s corduroys, provided they can somehow persuade their mothers to buy them. These are the gold standard. At the opposite end, a few boys wear tweed trousers with flecks of white and gray, like a pointillist sign that says KICK ME. The Rushins wear something in between, flat-fronted gas-station Dickies paired with short-sleeved dress shirts.
But it’s the shoes that matter most. We beg for Adidas, to whose three stripes we have assigned an imagined hierarchy. At the entry level are the Roms, followed by the Viennas, topped by the Italias. The names ring out with European sophistication, and any child leaving Nativity in Levi’s cords and Adidas Italias on a Schwinn Sting-Ray is the luckiest child on earth. Levi Strauss has been dead seventy years, Ignaz Schwinn died a quarter century ago, and Adi Dassler is an old man in his eighth decade. And yet, in Bloomington, these three dominate fashion and adolescent longing unlike any other men of the modern age.
“Shall I box them up,” says the shoe salesman, holding my nylon Thom McAns, “or will you wear them out of the store?”
Mom is talking to the clerk but looking at me when she says, “Box them.” My shoulders slump.
“We don’t wear shoes out of the store,” she whispers. “We’re not hillbillies.”
All around us, hillbillies are walking out of the store in new gym shoes, their old gym shoes in a box beneath their arm.
Our new clothes have to hang in the closet or sit folded in a dresser drawer for several days before we’re allowed to wear them. As with America’s handgun laws to come, my purple paisley dress shirt with the pterodactyl-wing collar requires a five-day waiting period before I can get my hands on it. I ask Mom why I can’t wear it right now, a day after we walked out of Target with it, and she says (as I knew she would), “That’s what hillbillies do.”
I can’t possibly know where she gets her irrational fear of hillbillies. God knows, I have plenty of irrational fears of my own, including a fear of being hypnotized by a pocket watch swinging back and forth on its chain while a soothing voice says “You are getting verrry sleepy.” It happens in half the shows I watch on TV. As for Mom, she grew up in Cincinnati, evidently fearful that hordes of hillbillies would wade—straw-hatted, barefooted, bib-overalled—across the Ohio River and into her backyard. This might explain Mom’s endless cleaning, the neatening of drawers, the discarding of anything that isn’t nailed down. If she finds a hole in the toe of my sock, she darns it with a needle and thread. In every cartoon and comic strip, a bare big toe poking out of a hole in the sock is a hillbilly indicator. I might as well walk around with a stalk of hay in my mouth.