The Happiness in an Egg Sandwich

1978.  I am 21 years old. 

 I shuffle, with my sleepy group, in a loose circle. This feels like the vivid scene in "Midnight Express" where the imprisoned men walk around and around the round pillar. This particular morning, the men and women around me look somewhat more alert than the prisoners in Turkish jail, but not much.  It's 6:45 a.m. and we're all inside a one-room food shack, built of concrete blocks painted white, and it's so quiet in the place that the buzz of the fluorescent fixtures seems loud.

Like the people in the movie, we move slowly but steadily, clockwise, following the person ahead. The line must not stop. We all have to be clocked in at work at 7 a.m., exactly.  Almost all my fellow shufflers have jobs at the RCA color television plant at the corner of Grimes Lane and South Rogers Street in Bloomington, Indiana.  I work up the road at the Campus Bus Service, on Grimes Lane, just past the railroad tracks.

Nobody else from my job is at the food shack with me. Back at the bus garage, the men were all standing around the gray metal time clock near the break room door, waiting to put their long yellow time cards into the top slot of the wall-mounted box.  I know that, as usual, all the guys I work with are well-fed, and sipping their second cups of coffee.  They’ve gotten up at six; their wives have gotten up an hour earlier to pack lunches, fry eggs, and perk coffee.

There is no one at my house to make anything for me. I am unwilling to get up at five o'clock to be my own wife.  So here I am, with all the factory workers, grabbing a quick cheap breakfast to wolf down as I walk up Grimes Lane to the garage.  Today, as on most weekdays, I'd left the house at 6:30 and I have just enough time to stop in at the nameless café where breakfast can be had for a dollar, lunch for two bucks.

"Café" is too grand a word for the place; it is a lunch stand, a shack really.  One large room with two soft-drink coolers and a formica counter along the east wall, a cash-register counter along the west wall, and a sizzling breakfast grill at the back. The rustic place is flat-roofed and resembles the outbuilding of a gasket manufacturer. Or maybe it's like the small-town home office of a farm insurance firm specializing in protection against corn must.  But it's not a repurposed property.  In fact the tiny cafe has been built in order to feed lots of people in a short amount of time. The place has, I swear, the exact square footage to the inch to allow three hundred people to come in between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m., get breakfast or lunch, and leave.

 The tightly-wound spring of the screened front door is exactly long enough for efficient closing without a single slam.  This is important, for each of us is only in the building for three or four minutes.  The screen door opens and closes constantly, as sleepy customers trickle in and out. I can't imagine what it would be like in this room if the door banged and banged and banged as we all enter and exit.

Inside the shack, a wide-bladed industrial fan whirls inside its custom-built opening in the cement blocks, high above the grill. Below the fan, a shiny grill top takes up the full length of the back wall.  The whirr of the fan blades pulling hot air and greasy sausage vapor out of the shack, plus the hum of the fluorescent light ballasts are practically the only sounds except for the scrape of the cooks’ metal flippers along the grill as they rake bacon crumbs and specks of hard-cooked egg into the deep narrow stainless-steel gutter along the front of the grill.

I'm a veteran now, having learned the breakfast drill from months ago by mimicking the actions of the people in front of me. I totally know where to go and what to do.  The morning ritual begins at long left wall was a long formica counter and behind this a young woman is busy, busy, busy. She is, I have learned, the daughter of the family who owns the cafe.  She's about my age, in her early 20s, and she manages the baked goods and beverages,  She also restocks the stack of thin, cheap brown lunch sacks which sit at the end of the chipped, white-speckled formica counter, ready for us to pick up as we pass.  Next to these are two large white pasteboard bakery boxes, lids laid open.  The first box holds iced doughnuts, and the second is filled with sweet rolls and cinnamon buns.

The first stop for each of us hungry folk is to decide about pastries. Those who are exhausted, hung over, or both grab a sheet of waxed paper from a flat industrial-size box next to the sweet rolls, and load up on carbohydrates and sugar. Those who don't want a sugar crash at 10:30 am wait to get real food from the grill.

Next, each of us chooses coffee or orange juice, each pre-poured into a squadron of styrofoam cups, lined up and ready for take-off at the end of the white-speckled counter.  Since each of us carries a brown lunch sack (empty or with doughnuts in it), we can choose coffee or we can pick orange juice but we can't carry both. We each make a choice and move on.

There isn’t long to decide about anything, either, because the shufflers before and behind me are about to move me into a soft right turn to face the grill at the back of the shack. Two more busy family members are hard at work.  The gray-haired father and the adult son, both wearing long white aprons over sleeveless v-neck tee shirts and jean shorts, have white paper hot dog vendor hats on their heads. The son never looks up from the left side of the grill. His father, on the right, turns his head about toward each of us as we approach.

He needs nouns from each customer.  He and his silent son each have a stack of plastic bakery trays, piled hip high, close at hand. Every tray is filled with hamburger buns.  I can see that someone (probably the daughter) has opened each bag of eight soft white buns.  The cooks find the bread by touch, reach into the open clear plastic bags without taking their eyes off the sizzling eggs and meat.  What is needed from each of us is a short clear description of what we want on our hamburger bun:  Egg.  Bacon.  Sausage.  Cheese.  Egg sausage.  Egg cheese.  Egg bacon cheese. The father turns his head so that his left ear is pointed our way. After I say "Egg sausage cheese," the father turns to the grill which means he heard me. Somehow he communicates with his son, though I can't see how that's done. The sandwiches always match the spoken requests.

Yesterday was a payday, so today most of us are splurging on two or three nouns per order. The egg sandwich is a dollar and then each add-on costs a quarter. I will owe a dollar fifty for my food and if I take a snack cake from the rack near the register too, the total will be two dollars and my coffee will be free. So of course, that's what I'm going to do. But first I need to collect my egg, sausage, and cheese sandwich.

The finished breakfast sandwiches are placed, one by one, on sheets of the same type of waxed paper squares we use to pick up our sweet rolls.  The finished orders are lined up in rows on brown plastic lunch trays, the kind used in school cafeterias. Each tray slightly glitters under the fluorescent ceiling lights, shimmered by the ever-turning ceiling fan;  a slightly holographic diamond pattern is pressed into the top surface of each plastic tray.

Several of these trays were laid, edge to edge, along the high narrow stainless-steel counter between us customers and the men working at the grill top. My responsibility, if I want to eat, is to recognize my own hot sandwich, grab it and put it into my thin brown paper sack.  I have have ordered Egg Sausage Cheese, so I must not grab someone else’s Egg Bacon by not paying attention. This will bring the production line to a halt, and the people who build color televisions at the RCA plant can told you what a disaster that can be.  It would be as bad as Billy Haves walking the wrong way around the pillar in the Turkish prison.

Since I have said my nouns, found the correct sandwich and put it in my sack, the no-talk rule is back on.  The shuffling line works its way toward the wife of the family, who stands behind the counter where an old-fashioned cash register sits.  This antique’s typewriter-style keys are marked with prices like .29 and .49. The total .79 has popped up on a plastic tab which shows in a glass viewing panel at the top.  The ancient cash register may actually have stopped working in 1959, for all I know.  The drawer stays open, and the cashier, always calm and unsmiling, takes our ones and fives and makes change from the open till. In the nearly-silent room, I can hear the sharp down-clacks of the U-shaped metal bars in the wooden compartments as the cashier lifts them and lets them drop to hold down on the two crinkled greenbacks I have just given her.

I drop my Honey Bun into the brown lunch sack on top of my sandwich, grab my coffee, and I am done with the café and it is done with me. Until tomorrow.

                                                             *****

When, fifteen years later, the last worker at the RCA television plant goes on unemployment, the tiny white food shack will sell its last egg sandwich and the screen door will be latched permanently. But for decades to come, when I have a leftover hamburger bun, I make myself an Egg Cheese, with cheddar instead of American.  I  think about the people in the one-room cement block building on Grimes Lane – not the people who owned it, but the men and women with whom I shuffled around in a circle, learning patience, the value of order and clarity, and the simple joy of shared experience.

Oh, and a nice hot egg sandwich.

Swinging a Red Plaid Lunch Box Down Main Street While Singing Loudly

1964.  I am 7 years old.

I am on my way to second grade, early in the fall when the weather is still summery and the sky is blue.  The sun lights up everything along Main Street in Beech Grove, Indiana:  the gas station with the wooden bay doors, the dime store with its wood plant floors visible through the big picture window, and the small building which is the public library.

 I have crossed two crosswalks to get from the road which leads to my street to Main Street, and I am now in what passes for downtown in Beech Grove. Once the intersection is behind me, I am safely away from the convent on the south side of Main, which scares me as I don’t know the schedule on which the torrent of silent nuns in penguin-style  “Sound of Music” habits come marching out single file.  It makes me nervous when the wooden door opens and they come out in complete silence, walking in a perfect column.

I am not yet at Beech Grove Elementary, with all its rules and the gang of bully boys who chase us girls on the walk home. I still have a couple of blocks of morning freedom.  The sun is shining on me and on all the world, and I have matching red plastic barettes (shaped like ribbon bows)  holding my hair back over my ears. I swing my red plaid metal lunchbox (slightly rusty inside, smelling of peanut butter and celery), and I sing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” at the top of my lungs.

Night Gazing

1972.  I am 15 years old.

I wear cheap thin flannel pajamas and a light blue chenille robe, and I slump half-asleep in a curved burnt-orange chair.  This swivel chair is off-balance (too much twirling in it by us kids) and it’s upholstered in worn plush.  Over my head, a heavy gilt plaster frame holds a knock-off reproduction of a Dutch Masters painting.  The picture is of an urn full of flowers with round tops like marigolds, but fancier.  I look out the window at the driveway, where a rotating beacon turns slowly in the darkness. throwing bright light (red, white, red, white) from the roof of an ambulance.

I am alone in the living room.  In the back bedroom, my parents and the medics are murmuring.  My youngest sister’s illness has taken another bad turn, in the middle of the night, again.

My mother, a woman of many fears, needs me to sit up in the front room while she and my father, in their car, follow the ambulance to Children’s Hospital.  I don’t know if my middle sister, a heavy sleeper, is aware that there is a medical emergency going on in the bedroom she shares with Joanne.

Mom is worried that while her two healthy daughters sleep, the furnace or the kitchen stove will leak gas fumes and smother us, or that a bad man will know that two innocents are unguarded and he will break in and get us.  Or perhaps, Mom’s anxious mind tells her, the people who once stole her purse from the bowling alley in the Twin-Aire shopping center will try to use Mom’s own house keys to get in.  The locks have been changed for years, true, but you never know with people.  So Mom has roused me from my rumpled bed and told me to sit up in the living room and keep an eye on the house and my middle sister.

 When I am shaken awake, I don’t whine or resist outwardly, but I am slow to come to consciousness and even slower to get up and put on my robe and move out of my bedroom toward the orange chair. I don’t want to sit up at 3 a.m. and gaze out the picture window into the darkness.  I hardly feel up to the responsibility of tenth grade, with its P.E. requirements and Algebra II, and now I am supposed to do things that would be hard for an adult?

Now, slumped and mildly sullen, I turn in the swivel chair a bit because my mother is coming down the hall.  She is in the same slightly-creased clothing as yesterday because she sat up all night at my sister’s bedside.  My mother pushes her unbrushed hair away from her forehead, pulls out a bobby pin, and re-inserts it. Then she gives me her serious look, full eye contact and everything.  “All right now, I need you to be the big girl."

She doesn’t say to be "a big girl,” as in the Four Seasons’ “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” but instead to be “the big girl,” which is an Appalachian concept.  “Big girl” means eldest daughter, deputized to act as surrogate parent for younger siblings.

I nod, murmur “Okay,” and sit up a little more in the orange plush chair.

My mother looks at the long television console with the black-mesh speakers covering each of the record player and radio components.  “Whyn’t you turn this radio on?  That’ll help you stay awake.  You could go in the kitchen and get you a Pepsi.”

“Maybe,” I say, though we both know that I don’t like cola.  I do get up and go to the wood-grain console, which has the gray-green blank television screen in the center, the record player on the left, and the AM/FM radio on the right side.  I lift the heavy wooden lid over the radio control panel, and click the knob into the "On" position. There are sounds of  static and murmuring announcer voices and blips of music as I tune in the Top 40 station. WIBC has had “Don’t Pull Your Love Out On Me, Baby” by Hamilton, Joe Frank, & Reynolds in heavy rotation, and in fact that very song is playing now:  “…then I think that maybe I’ll just lay me down, cry for a hundred years…”

The ambulance gurney with my twelve-year-old sister on it comes rattling down the hallway, and then the medics ease it out past the storm door and then down to the driveway where the ambulance beacon flashes red, white, red, white.  My father silently follows the gurney, without glancing my way.  My mother, now with her worn leather purse over her arm, takes up the rear.  She stops at the door and fishes the car keys out of her purse.

On the radio, Hamilton, Joe Frank, & Reynolds sing “you know you’ll break my heart when I watch you close that door, ‘cause I know I won’t see you anymore…”

Mom gives me another serious look.  “Be careful with the stove,” she says, as she always does when she leaves me in charge.

“All right,” I say.

The radio changes the mood in the room as “Don’t Pull Your Love Out On Me Baby” fades out and is replaced by Anne Murray’s “Snowbird”:  “Beneath its snowy mantle cold and clean, the unborn grass lies waiting for its coat to turn to green…”

“I’m going to lock this door good,” says my mother.

“Okay,” I say, and Mom stands at the door, looking at me, sitting in the chair under the painting of the flowers.  Anne Murray's voice fills the silence:  “. . .when I was young my heart was young then, too. Anything that it would tell me, that’s the thing that I would do.”

“You’re a help to me,” says Mom.

I nod,

Outside, the ambulance pulls out of the gravel driveway onto the blacktop road. without the blare of the siren but with the sweeping roof light flashing red, white, red, white.  Then my mother goes out the front door and down to the driveway and gets into the old Chevy.  The car door slams, and the Impala engine starts with a grinding bent-flywheel sound, and the engine roars and rattles. I hear the tires crunch backward along the pea gravel and the night is quiet again as the old car disappears down the road.

I am alone listening to Anne Murray.sing “So, little snowbird, take me with you when you go, to that land of gentle breezes where the peaceful waters flow,” as my eyes adjust to the dark shadows of the treeline across the quiet road.