Imperiled By Sudden Darkness

1983.  I am 26 years old.

In this completely silent, totally dark room I literally can’t see my hand in front of my face. I am standing still and trying to figure out what to do.  I have tried yelling for help but now I've stopped doing that becausae my short, barky shouts of “Hey! Hey! Hey!” are absorbed instantly by the silent darkness. It's as though I am inside a huge box of Kleenex.  

In space no one can hear you scream, a movie poster once told me. This is also true for the eighth floor of the Undergraduate Library at Indiana University, when it's after hours and the building is closed for the night, and then the lights go out.

There’s no source of light anywhere, not the faintest glimmer.  The giant library where I work as a janitor is eleven stories tall but has absulutely no windows except on the first three floors.  This library does have excellent soundproofing. It also has great fire barriers because, rumor has it, the previous location was burned to the ground by an insane librarian.  

This explanation for the old library's destruction had sounded far-fetched to me when I first heard it, but then I literally saw the person purported to be the firebug. I'd been standing outside the loading dock entrance with another night custodian and smoking a coffee-break cigarette when my workmate said, "There's Smokey." 

For a moment, I thought "Smokey"meant the bear in the forest ranger hat and my co-worker was making a joke about us preventing forest fires or something. Then I realized he meant that weird guy that people said burned down the old library.

We watched the alleged arsonist walk briskly up Tenth Street and turn onto Jordan Avenue. He turned again at the entrance to the back parking lot, and strode purposefully toward the door used by employees. The madman looked a lot like Dennis the Menace’s father, including the hornrims and pipe.


                                                    

                                       

“He still works here?” I'd asked under my breath, as the librarian pulled open the door to enter the building.  "And he can take a lighted pipe in with him?"

“Nothing was proved,” the other custodian had answered.

“Well, at least he can’t torch this library,” I'd said, philosophically.  “It’s all made of stone.”


                                                                

“And there’s extra walls in here,” said my co-worker.  “Plus sprinklers all over the place. They weren't having that happen twice." 

We'd followed the cold-case suspect into the building, and from a distance, we 'd watched the fire-starter take the pipe from his mouth and tap the ashes into a sand-filled ashtray before getting into an Up elevator.  

"They put a lot of soundproofing in this building too, when they did the fire protection,” said my buddy. He was using his normal voice now since the pipe-smoking librarian had gone up to the administrative offices.  “You ever drop one of those big metal dustpans in here?  I have, and I thought for sure somebody would  come running because it was so loud. But I've done that twice, maybe three times, and nobody ever noticed."

And now that I'm trapped and alone, the memory of seeing the crazy man who burned down the old library has of course come back to my mind  I'm a little scared to move around in case the mad librarian walks the stacks at night. And more immediately, the soundproofing really has made it impossible for me to call for help. I am alone, in pitch blackness at the very back of the eighth floor or the library. I am as far away from either a light or a stairwell as it is possible to be.  It's obvious that I will have to save myself from this predicament. No one knows I am in trouble and I can't let anyone know.


                                               

It's hard for me to plan because the sudden darkness has taken me by surprise. Just before everything went dark, I'd been angling a swivel dust mop to catch dust and tiny bits of paper and cookie crumbs, humming to myself and feeling like the cartoon cleaning lady from The Carol Burnett Show. Being a truly dedicated Custodial II employee, I don't just sweep the main highways and byways. I actually sweep the furthest rows of the book stacks. I'd  just been turning a corner into the Dewey Decimal 817s when the banks of overhead lights began to go out, row by row.

Only an employee could be turning off the lights. There are no regular light switches, Instead there are rows of slots in a metal plate. The only way to shut off a bank of fluorescent fixtures is to insert a special key made of thin metal and split like a meat-holding fork in a miniature carving set.  There's a slot in the wall for each set of lights, and we employees put in the tiny two-pronged key and toggle the interior switch up or down. 

If normal switches were available, any joker from among the student population could do a quick palm-sweep, plunging half of any floor into instant and total darkness, There are no windows in this part of the building. It's like an underground bunker, except eight stories in the air. We have electric light or we have nothing.

 When the new library was designed in1969, Indiana University generated its own electricity at little cost. Tons of cheap coal was burned at the university’s Physical Plant. Each of the top eight levels of the eleven-floor building each had dozens and dozens of buzzy metal fixtures set into the ceiling, and each fixture had two long glowing fluorescent tubes set into it. Not only did the electric lights have to offset the windowless design of the building, but they had to illuminate every corner of each floor, as the study carrels for students were set along the walls.  

So I know that whoever is shutting off the lights works at the library. The tiny forked keys which go into the slots are issued to library staff and they are also given to the janitors. The librarians, library assistants, student workers and even the daytime light-duty janitors (Custodial I's) have all gone home, and at one in the morning, the only people around are other Custodial II's.


We night custodians used the keys a lot. In the old days when the coal-fired plant provided cheap power, all the lights on all the floors stayed on around the clock. But now, those of us on the cleaning crew had been instructed to shut off the lights on each floor as we finished working there.  In the last fourteen years, the cost of using artificial light had become untenable (I’d heard the Public Service Indiana bill was ten thousand smackers a month) but of course there was no way to knock windows into eight floors of stone walls.  The university needed drastic cost savings, and all of us on the overnight shift had heard loud and clear that the lights should only be on in the areas where we were actively sweeping, mopping, or dumping trash.  If we came upon a fully-lit floor, devoid of other custodians, we were to use the special key to shut down the banks of fluorescent bulbs.  

Turning off the lights was a noisy business. The key slid into a slot, and then the ussr rolled the inner switch down, and there was a decisive, resonant bang  as four long rows of lights went dark. Apparently some big metal lever crashed into a new position when the key switch did its thing. This was one noise the fancy soundproofing couldn't absorb.

 The double row of switch slots was about a foot long. Each floor of the library was enormous, literally the size of a football field. At the time, the I.U. Library was the largest campus library in the world. So there were lots of fluorescent lights and therefore lots of light switches. Even with experience, it took a minute or two to darken an entire floor of the Undergraduate Library.

On the night in question, I heard the first bang from way way way down the other side of the huge room filled with bookshelves and study carrels, I knew that Roy, the Custodial II worker who did the floors just below mine, was diligently shutting down the lights on the eighth floor because he thought I was all done sweeping and had gone down to the seventh floor without switching off my lights.  Dude was just helping me out.

“Roy!"  I yelled.  

Bang bang.  Two more banks of lights went dark.  

 "Hey, Roy!!” I yelled.  “I’m back here, man!"  

Bang.  

"Don’t shut the lights out, Roy!" 

 Bang bang bang bang.  Damn this soundproofing.  I leaned the handle of  my dust mop to the right and propped the handle against a bookshelf. Stepping around the wide flat mop head, I began to move toward the center aisle.  "Hey!"  Too late.  Bang bang bang bang bang.  Total darkness.

Numb panic paralyzed me.  I recalled childhood terror during a tour of Mammoth Cave when the lights were turned out so we could all see how dark it was.  The tour guide pretended that there’s been a power failure and I was young enough to believe him.  "Mom?” I said nervously, and I felt the warm press of her hand.  “They’re just fooling,” she said.  “They’ll turn the lights on in a minute.”

After the five minutes of Mammoth Cave fear, deep darkness had always freaked me out.  When I was about 20, I bravely went spelunking with a friend’s boyfriend and I would have been all right except for the story he told me about why each person needs three light sources when caving:  on an earlier expedition, he’d smacked the headlight on his helmet against the top of a tunnel, and then his flashlight had gotten wet and shorted out. He’d been three miles into the cave and had gotten out by getting on his belly and doing a commando crawl through a small stream.  He knew the water flowed south so as long as the water pushed against him as he moved, he would find his way to the hole he’d climbed down.  He told me he’d just started to feel really afraid that he couldn’t find his way out when he saw, a quarter-mile away, the faint light of the opening.

He told me this story as we drove out to the country, and by the time we got to our destination, I was spooked.  I climbed down through the large hole which opened into the cave tunnel, but then I couldn’t leave the natural skylight of the cave mouth. I tried to keep going, I really did.  I told myself firmly that I’d given my word to this poor guy that I’d go caving with him, and that we were perfectly safe.  People knew we were here, and we each had two flashlights and a Bic lighter and a candle.

No dice.  Every time I took a step outside the reassuring circle of light on the ridged stone floor of the cave, terror swallowed me up like the deepest shadow in the deepest cave in the world.  After twenty minutes of watching me struggle to overcome my fear, the spelunker suggested me climb up out of the cave and drive back to town.  He was really nice about the let-down.

Now here I was, alone and helpless in the pitch-black again.  Helpless?  No, I say to myself, you know exactly where you are.  If that guy could crawl three miles on his belly in a rocky stream, you can certainly find your way out of the Undergraduate Library.  You are in the next to last row from the back wall, and about seven or eight shelf-lengths in.

I resolve to work my way to the center aisle by using my palms to touch the spines of the books which I know are nicely Dewey Decimaled in front of me.  I am in the 817s and 818s. If I could see the book spines I'd know I was looking at The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and Cornelia Otis Skinner's collection of monologues.

 Crossing one arm over the other and stepping sideways to the left as though doing the cha-cha-cha, I reach the wide middle aisle which divides the long sets of shelving.  I prepare to hit the floor to do my Rambo imitation, slithering along the cool tile while I touch the edges of the shelves to orient myself.  Eventually I will get near enough to the stairway door that I’ll be able to see the yellow glow of the lights on the stairs through the small window in the stairway door.

Happily, the commando crawl is unnecessary.  As I palm my way to the corner and turn into the center aisle, I can see the tiny glow of the emergency exit light over the stairway door.  It’s very small but bright, like a single star in the blackest part of the night sky.  I follow the light las a spelunker who working her way upstream might do, and at last I am at the stairway door, and I can find the light switch slots and use my key. I flip on the lights, go back to the dust mop I left in the last row of the stacks, and I began to clean the floor again.

When, a year or two later, I gave notice, I don’t think anyone asked me to turn in the tiny forked light switch key.  I suppose I kept it, but if I did, it's become lost.  If I ever spot a light switch key in a pile of junk at a yard sale, I will buy it and put it on my keyring.  Maybe I’ll paint it red, like the Badge of Courage.



                                                                   

Dr. Kildare and My Tonsils

                                                       

When I woke up, I didn't understand where I was. I seemed to be in someone's basement. I found myself lying down, which was good because I was a little sleepy. This basement room was cool and there weren't any windows. The walls were odd. Instead of the usual unfinished gray porous cement,  each of the blocks in the wall had been surfaced with green ceramic tile. This was a very fancy basement.


The blank green tile wall was at my left, so I turned my head to the right, trying to orient myself by the sounds coming mostly from that way. Machines were humming. Adults I didn't know were chatting and laughing about something or other.  I heard and felt a kind of crackly sound-sensation as I moved. I seemed to be resting on a couple of layers of waxed paper or something.


I was lying on my back on a semi-soft surface, like a naugahyde sofa maybe. I was face up, but I couldn't see very much because there was so much glare. The lights weren't hurting my eyes, exactly, but they were very bright and they washed everything out around them so the world looked faded. Also the light fixtures seemed really  unusual.  I thought the ceiling lamps looked weird and ultra-modern, like something in that new space-age cartoon "The Jetsons." Chrome housings, with brilliant white bulbs and no frosted covers to soften or diffuse the intensely white light coming from the bulbs. The lamps were really large and there were a lot of them, way more than anybody would have in a basement rec room.

Funny lights, I thought hazily. Those lights reminded of something, something on television. Because my poor mother had three small children underfoot, TV was my babysitter and by the age of five, I had already watched a lot of shows I didn't understand.  Along with "Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman" and some gloomy film noir flicks, I'd seen some medical dramas and old movies on Channel 8. Hospitals and emergency operation excitement were in a lot of shows. Hey, those big bright lights were for a surgical suite. A-HA! I was in the operating room and my consciousness had overcome the ether. I'd woken up in the middle of my tonsillectomy. How exciting!

                                                                       
                                                                     

                                                                     

                                                                 

I wasn't scared because I knew doctors from television and they were kind and helpful and they knew what they were doing. The one helping me with my tonsils wore the same green surgical cap and the rectangular face mask (untied and lying open like a white bib) that Dr. Kildare wore on his television show. I knew he always did everything right, because on TV the Kildare patients always got well. Therefore all would be well with me by the end of this episode when the commercial would come on.

But then I felt the string on the right side of my throat, and that string was on the inside. I was sure it must be a piece of kite string. I had no idea that tonsils were cut out with a scalpel. No one had explained to me how the doctor got rid of the bad old germy things. I had assumed they were taken out by tying a string around each and then pulling, the way baby teeth were being extracted at home. The string on the right must be looped around my right tonsil, and feeling the length of kite string touch my throat on the inside set off my gag reflex. I began to cough and choke.

The surgeon, who I could see now was older and heavier than Richard Chamberlain (was he Dr. Kildare's father?) saw me struggling and he picked up a glass beaker with some liquid in it. Something blobby was in the beaker with the opaque fluid. The surgeon held up the beaker, and began to swirl it, so that whatever was in there spun around a bit.  "Don't you want to see your tonsils?" he said, grinning.

Of course I did. I was a little kid. I liked gross stuff, and the weirder the better. While I was distracted, the anesthesiologist had sneaked up to the head of the operating table and now the rubber mask was once again over my nose and mouth.

I knew all about the black rubber mask. It was attached to the hose which was in turn attached to the ether gas canister on the rolling metal cart. I'd been pretty excited at the start of the operation when it was time for me to breathe in the anesthetic. I wasn't scared at all. The mask was cool because it reminded me of the oxygen mask that fighter pilots wore in World War II movies which I saw on "Afternoon Matinee" on our black and white television at home. "Blackjack Four! Bogey at four o'clock!"


                     

                                                                     

I'd wanted my tonsils out for weeks. Terrible earaches had made my existence hellish for a long time, and then a previous surgery date had been scrubbed when I'd had a flare-up and was too sick for the operation. What a disappointment that had been! So now it was finally the day and I wanted to be put under so the evil earache-causing tonsils could be taken out. I'd been promised ice cream (in fact, asked for which flavor I preferred) but mostly I was thrilled to have the pain go away for good.

But there was one little thing I needed to take care of before the sweet ether gas took me off to dreamland. 

"Hey," I told the anesthesiologist just before I'd first been put to sleep for the operation. "You should put more in there for me." I pointed to the canister on the cart. "I have more --" I was groping for the word "personality," maybe, or "energy," but I didn't have the words at five years old. "It will take more medicine for me to stay asleep."


                                                                           

                                                         


He smiled indulgently, ignored my warning, and clamped the rubber cup over my nose and mouth. The odor was sweet and slightly toxic, a little like Crest toothpaste mixed with gasoline. I quickly forgot my previous concern.  I was told to count backwards and I was proud to have gotten all the way to 96 before. . .


                                                                           

And I'd been right! The doctors had given me the standard dosage of anesthetic without understanding that some people were more spirited than others. My strong curious mind had risen through the fog of the sleeping gas like \giant octopus rising from the bottom of the ocean in "It Came From Beneath The Sea."


                                                                   

      



After I woke up the second time, I was sick to my stomach and my throat hurt, and I realized that the promise of ice cream had been a terrible lie. They knew, I realized. They knew the whole time it wouldn't matter if I said vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. I wasn't going to have any darn ice cream. They just said that.



                                                                         

But my bitterness was short-lived, because my parents, along with the surgeon, who was possibly Dr. Kildare's father, had come by to see me in my hospital room, after the surgery. And I could joyfully tell them all, croakily, that I had been right. It was going to be so gratifying. No one ever listened to a little kid, especially a little girl. But I had known I would wake up. I had told the doctor with the black face mask to give me extra ether, and he hadn't listened and I had been proved right. I didn't feel a whit of resentment or alarm; I was quite pleased that I'd been the guinea pig in my own last-minute impromptu medical theory and now I had proof! I was a geeeeeenius!


                                                                         

"I woke up!!" I said, gloating over the memory of the green tiled walls and the surgical lights and the floating tonsils in the jar. (I'd forgotten the "string," which of course must have been the suction tube.) "I woke up and I saw the operation!"

Each of my parents turned to look at the surgeon, each with the same worried, confused facial expression.

He smiled reassuringly at my mother and father. "Very common with the anesthetic," he said. "Children, you know. The medicine and then their imaginations. . ."




                                                                             

I was outraged. "It wasn't a dream, I --" My voice became a raspy squeak and there was a stab of pain. A nurse hurried in to give me a drink of red Kool-Aid with several mini-cubes of ice floating in it. The cold metal straw had a permanent bend it it, I remember.

All four adults told me to rest, and my teddy bear was tucked under the blanket with me, and the hospital blanket was pulled up to my chin, and my parents said they would come and get me in the morning. They did, and I believe later in the day I was given first choice of a scoop from a paper carton of Neapolitan ice cream, which I was totally capable of consuming happily.


                                                                     

                                                                        
                                                                               

There is another part of the memory of the tonsillectomy which does seem like a dream, and yet I don't think it was.  I was in a "semi-private" room in the children's wing of St. Francis Hospital, which meant that a heavy curtain on rings separated the room into mirror images of each other: two hospital beds with matching night stands and a visitor's chair each. I remember that I was in the bed on the right side of the room as visitors came in the door from the hallway, and I also remember that the girl I shared my room with was African-American.

                                                                 

                                                                

Indianapolis, in 1962, was totally racially segregated. There was no mixing of whites with people of color. There were Black grocery stores and gas stations and shoe stores and then there were groceries and filling stations and shoe stores for white people. This went double for personal spaces like restaurants or bathrooms or medical offices. Indianapolis didn't even need to post "Whites Only" signs as the code was understood. If one went somewhere, and you saw people of the other race there, that meant you were in the wrong place. You should go find "your own" people there and do business, get needed services, or shop with people whose skin tone matched yours.


But I remember the girl in the other half of the hospital room, and she was very sad about being hurt or sick, especially after visiting hours when it was just the two of us in the room. It had been better for her in the afternoon.  A lot of other Black people had come over to Beech Grove's hospital to see her, and I remember thinking "Oh, that's her family." I know it sounds odd, but I had almost no contact with Black people up till then, and I don't think I'd realized until that moment that if a kid was African-American, then their mother, father, aunts, and uncles likely would be too. I do realize how this sounds, but I was pretty clueless and at the age where I thought, when my parents said "When I was little. . " they meant they had been miniature versions of themselves. I didn't realize yet that my parents had once been children who had grown up into adults. So I wasn't too clear on how race worked, but I was catching on that it was connected with who your relatives were.

I did understand unfairness, and I did understand that people of my race were often mean to Black people or lost patience with them or didn't try to understand who they were or how they lived. I wasn't even in school yet but I already saw how racism worked. So I wasn't surprised that the white  nurse used me to shame my roommate, but I felt awful about it.

As I said, the other girl in my room was sad about being sick or needing an operation or whyever she was in St. Francis, and I don't think she'd ever been away from home either.  So she was crying in her bed, but not dramatically or loudly. There was no wailing or pleading for help or sympathy. She just kind of snuffled and made little sad crying noises like a kitten that wanted the mommy cat.

The nurse came in and said sternly, "See how good this little girl (meaning me) is being?" She beamed at me, then frowned at the other girl.  "She doesn't cry and carry on."

That's not fair! I thought. I have a teddy bear hidden under my blanket! That girl doesn't have a teddy so she's lonely.

I wish I could report that I had gotten up, and gone over to comfort her with eyes full of compassion like Elizabeth Taylor in "Jane Eyre," perhaps given her the use of my teddy bear till she fell asleep. But no, I was five.  (And what does it say that I was five years old and hiding my teddy so the nurse wouldn't think I was a baby? Sheesh.)



                                                                               

I also wish that I could say that this early experience helped me to deepen my cultural competence later in life so I didn't have to look at my own racial attitudes. But alas, no again. When you are raised in segregation, you are deprived of real world practice in living with people who look, think, and make life choices different from your own appearance, decisions, tastes, and experiences. I still had to try and figure it all out later.

                                          
                                                                              

                                                                       


It was 1962. The Civil Rights Act hadn't been signed.  We'd never heard of National Brotherhood Week. And you know, I was still at the age where I thought that doctors pulled your tonsils out with a string.


                                                      The musical portion of our program!




                                                               

My Father in the Passenger Seat

1966.  I was 9 years old.

Dad, who had vision problems, always sat on the glove-box side of the car while my mother drove.  This arrangement drove other kids crazy when they first met our family.  “Why doesn’t your father drive?” my classmates and neighbors asked me.  The arrangement seemed crazily backwards to them. Was this Earth, or was this Htrae, the Bizarro World in Superman comic books? A woman driving while a man was a passenger?

I didn't understand the question. My father, in our eyes, was not the passenger.  He was the navigator. He alone knew where we were going and how to get there.  My mother, intelligent and intuitive, was also dyslexic and nervous about city driving. She was, after all, from a town of forty people in really rural West Virginia. Where Mom had grown up, a single pickup truck might go down the country road in an hour's time.  Now that she was driving the family sedan through Indianapolis' busy streets, she needed my father's experience. Dad was from the East Coast and hip to all aspects of metropolitan life, including travel.

Dad not only knew where we were and where we were going, but several alternate routes to our destination.  On good days, my parents made a decent tag team.  Not as good a tag team as Dick the Bruiser and Crusher Lisowski on "All Star Championship Wrestling," but the two of them got the family to the correct location and back again and everyone was usually still speaking to everyone else.

On Sunday afternoons, when gasoline cost a quarter per gallon, my parents and the three of us kids would jostle noisliy into the mist-blue Chevy Impala and go for a ride in the country.  Dad, in his plaid sport shirt, would squint as he blurrily scaned the world through the passenger half of the windshield.  As the car rolled down the road, my father radiated the eagerness and enthusiasm of a golden retriever, ears flapping in the wind, on his way to a dog park. Or maybe Dad was more like Captain Bligh before the mutiny, when the ship's crew kept the Bounty sailing o'er the bounding main. 

As Mom drove, Dad always rested the elbow of his right arm on the lower rim of the open car window; he gripped the upper rim firmly, fingers curled around the strip of metal trim which outlined the window.  “Turn left at the light, Lydia,” he would say.  “We’ll take Sherman Drive, because there are only three traffic lights that way.”

 Dad would then explain out loud to all of us, at some length, the various routes we could have taken instead of the way we came. He'd speculate on topics connected to travel and Indianapolis infrastructure,  including the effects that road construction scheduled for 1969 might likely have.  No one listened, including Mom, but that didn’t bother Dad.  His baritone voice rumbled along happily, explaining explaining explaining.

While her husband put the world in order for our limited minds to comprehend, Mom smoked Winstons, which she mostly held out the open driver’s window so she wouldn’t poison the children.  My mother was a nurse and sometimes remembered that smoke was bad for my asthma. 

How did my mother occupy her thoughts while my father explained the intricacies of how timed traffic signals worked?  While she was driving, my mother probably alternated between picturing herself as the Hollywood movie star she had once been pretty enough to be, and plotting her escape.  Since my father kept all the available cash in his worn leather wallet and since Mom would need her husband to navigate her out of town, she probably toggled back often to the Hollywood reverie.

I have a both a Saturday afternoon memory and a Saturday morning memory of the five of us driving with Mom in the driver’s seat, Dad navigating, and the three of us girls lined up in back by age, me behind Mom, Eileen in the middle, and Joanne behind Dad.  One memory is sad and one is funny.

The sad day was on a Sunday, when my parents decided to go to the Liberty Bell store on East Washington Street in Indianapolis. All businesses had once been closed on Sundays, but later they'd been allowed to open after noon, once church had let out.  The storefront is still there, at the corner of Washington Street  and Post Road, and now holds a flea market and a carpet store.  Both have the Liberty Bell name, but not many people remember that there was a discount store there, something a little like K-Mart. 

I dreaded the car trip on that Sund. I'd always hated the Liberty Bell store, as we’d gone there three times and all three times, my parents had gotten into a front-seat argument which lasted long after we got home again. The Sunday afternoon of the fourth trip, we were going to buy a tree for the front yard. 

Our inexpensive ranch house sat on a quarter-acre lot, which was a long narrow strip. This strip of land was  marshy at the back yard end but the front yard was nice. The front windows looked out on a pleasant rural view of black walnut and hickory trees near the split rail fence along a narrow black tar road.   This real estate layout left a long empty strip of lawn from the concrete front porch  to the little clump of trees near the road. This looked odd, so one weekend my parents decided to get a tree sapling to plant near the driveway and a few yards from the house.

Indianapolis is a sprawling city and it was a long drive to anywhere.  By the time we got to Post Road, my parents had begun to bicker, probably over the type of tree or its cost.  Then, in the store, where my baby sister had been given a balloon, there was a loud pop in the next aisle as some other children’s balloon broke. My father was startled and put his hands over his ears, wincing.  My mother was clearly embarrassed that her husband was scared of a balloon popping. She said nothing and my father led the way silently to front register. He paid for the tree and we all stayed silent as we tropped otu to the car. We kids got into the car without the usual fighting and my father got the tree sapling into the trunk, putting it down on its side and then tying down the Chevy’s trunk lid with a piece of half-unravelled, hairy yellow rope.

Driving the family car, full of noisy children and with a trunk full of tree, was irritating to my mother and she made a wrong turn which irritated my father.  Mom then spent some time on the subject of grown men who were afraid of balloons. My father had lost his happy golden retreiver enjoyment in the car ride, and now sat angrily, with a glare that might have melted the windshield had the drive home been a little longer.

I remember staring out the triangular back window on my side of the car, quietly humming “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” which we had learned in school the day before.  But my parents’ painful struggles in the front seat kept breaking through to my awareness.  My father, anyone could see, wished he had married a woman like his mother Edith, who was a schoolteacher before she'd  given up work to marry my grandfather Harry.  Grandma Edith was smart, and yet always seemed to be listening closely to Grandpa Harry when he talked. Being a schoolteacher, she could say short  intelligent things to show that she understood.

My mother, on the other hand, wished she had married a man like her own father, who had physically built the house she’d grown up in, a man who not only stayed calm when balloons exploded, but could also have tied a tree into the trunk of an Impala so that the trunk lid didn’t bounce up like the lid of a jack-in-the-box as though the clown is going to pop up suddenly. 

And I wished neither of my parents had ever met the other one, and furthermore, that I could put my belongings in a pillowcase and go live with the Boxcar Children. But instead I rode home with the rest of my sullen family, and sometime over the coming week, my father planted the tree. It did grow, despite all the bad vibrations surrounding it for an hour while it was stuck sideways in an old car's trunk with the trink lid banging up and down on it.


                                                                                  *****

The Saturday morning memory of our family in the car is a much happier one.  We were on our way to the optometrist’s office to pick up my new glasses, and then we were all going to have hot dogs and root beer at the Dog N Suds drive-in.  The street to the eye doctor’s was a steep incline,  I remember, and there was a traffic light at the top of the hill.  We were waiting, blinkers on, to turn left when a souped-up black Dodge Charger painted with gleaming racing stripes roared up next to us.

There were three men in the car, and they gave us all scathing looks, especially my father in the passenger seat.  The driver of the Charger rolled the hot rod back and then vroomed up a bit, rolled the car back and vroomed up, giving the powerful engine a little extra gas each time so that the heavy rumble shook our poor old rusty car.  The driver, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, grinned and shot my father “You and your wife at the wheel wanna race?” looks. 

My parents both stared through the windshield. They were just quiet people, Sunday school teachers who didn't know what to make of ruffians in hot rods.  When the light turned green, the Dodge rolled backward one more time, dug its wide tires into the pavement, and got ready to launch. The driver stomped the gas, fueling the V-8 with hi-octane power.  

We prepared ourselves to be left behind, blasted with dirty exhaust and foul language.

There was a tremendous metallic bang, and a large flat chunk of the powerful car fell off. It exploded down from between the back tires and smashed into smaller pieces on the roadway.  Wheels and cogs and gear wheels rolled away, a few pieces falling between the slots in the drainhole cover along the gutter.

All of us, including Mom, were astonished and we looked at my father for an explanation. 

“Transmission fell out,” he said simply.  Up in the traffic light box, the green arrow for the turn lane flashed on, Mom turned the steering wheel to the left, and off we putted off in the trusty old Impala, leaving the three men in their dead car, angry horns honking at them from behind, at the clogged intersection

Four Months Spent Sitting Next to a Large Green Machine

1972.  I am sixteen years old.

My high school classmate Tom stops me as I slouch toward our first class after lunch.  “You look like your dog died,” he said.  “What’s the matter?”

“I hate Rapid Reading,” I say.  “And I’m still in the last chair.” I shift my armload of schoolbooks and sigh, lingering outside the doorway, not ready to go in. Knowing I'll never really be ready but at least I can wait till the bell changs.

Back during the first week of school, Tom and I, along with the rest of the class, were told that the seats in the Rapid Reading classroom would soon be arranged by the students' reading speed.  To determine our starting pace, we students sat in the darkened classroom, staring at a pull-down white screen. As we gazed at a rectangle of light, which shone from a machine on a cart, something that looked like a fancy slide projector, our teacher flashed a series of words and sentences onto the screen.

We sophomores were to copy down any words or letters we had time to read and comprehend.   After the test was given and the classroom lights were flicked back on, each of us handed answer sheets over our shoulders till they reached the students sitting in the front seats of the classroom. Our answer sheets were collected and put in order, fastest reader to slowest, and we were assigned to Rapid Reading desks.

This concrete-block room, painted white but seeming yellowish in the glare of buzzing overhead fluorescent fixtures,  hasn't been well-adapted for current use. Originally designed for twenty-eght students to sit in rows and watch film strips, the smallish space has never been intended for speed-reading technology.  The desks were now wedged tightly around three walls of the classroom and we all sit shoulder to shoulder. The effect is a crowded-school-bus level of companionship, too close for comfort. In front of each of us, an electric reading box, made of industrial green metal with silver accents, sits on a desk. The ATM hasn't been invented yet but that's what the Rapid Reading machines look like; they are as large as wall-mounted automatic teller machines will be in the future.

We students are supposed to put our books flat on the floors of openings in the boxes. Each box has a built-in bar of light which starts at the top of each page and then moves down. The idea is to read the lines as they are lit. A dial setting puts the speed that this light bar moves at the rate where we scored on the comprehension test. Over time, we are supposed to move the dial up so that the light bar moves more quickly and we must try to keep up with it. We are seated by reading speed so we'll know if we are doing well compared to the others in the class. This ranking is supposed to motivate us to adjust our 1-to-10 reading dials to 11 (a la "This Is Spinal Tap") so we can blow past the other slowpokes and move to a seat closer to the pole position.

I am used to this motivational style. It's a factory town, Indianapolis, and the schools are run like factories. Production speed and work quality must always be on the rise.  In seventh grade, we’d all gotten IQ tests and been put us into classes by perceived intelligence, classes labeled A-1 to C-3.  A-1s were the smart people. C-3’s did not actually learn anything, but were used around the junior high to do useful tasks. For instance, it was the C-3s who spread cinders on the running track.

But the pressure to compete had started long before that. Eight years earlier,  my second-grade teacher tried to get the other pupils and I to scramble around on the floor, bloomers showing, and fight over candy after the papeer-mache donkey pinata was broken.  Then when my family moved and I started fourth grade at Lowell Elementary, I'd struggled over damp mimeographed sheets filled with weekly "math races." Kids who came in first, second, and third in solving addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems got blue, silver, or red stars on sheets of construction paper. These award sheets, with our names written neatly on them by the teacher, were posted along the top margins of the classroom walls. I never got any stars, ever, but every week I tried feverishly to get at least one red star. I tried various methods of flipping the mimeo over as soon as the "Go" signal was given, to get a half-second advantage. Never worked.

 Competition was still big when I got to junior high. By that time, I still tried to win but I set my sets lower. In the school orchestra, I had to "challenge" my way from the second violins to the first violins.  The seconds had to play lots of four-measure drone notes while the firsts got to do the melodies. I worked my way up only to the last seat in the first violins, but never got close to becomeing concert mistress. At least I got to play something besides D for eight counts and then G for eight counts, and then D again. Sort of a win.

But today, outside the Rapid Reading room with my buddy Tom, I am in the tenth grade and it's been a quick slide to Loserville over the winter. Here it is March, and I am reading at exactly the same speed as when Rapid Reading began. I hadn't been able to get beyond the last seat of the first violin section in junior high, and here I am now in my sophomore year, still in the same seat in the speed-reading classroom. I'm stuck, stuck for the year and probably stuck for life now.

And I'm bitter too, and for good reason. Of course I haven’t made any progress in the last four months!  I can’t use the darn machine.  The Rapid Reading machine is like a big metal cave into which I'm supposed to insert the open book. The light scanner bar is mounted in the top of the opening and is supposed to move over the pages at the bottom of the access opening.  The problem is that I'm legally blind. I can only read with my left eye, and only in a sort of porthole in the middle of the visual field. My focal length is about four inches, but I can’t put my head into the machine with the book. The opening is wide enough, but not tall enough.  If I put my head in there, my nose would be smashed into the crease between the pages, which is where it sometimes is anyway. When mean kids see me holding my face really close to my book, they smash the book into my face or my face into the book, saying "Think you have that close enough??"

Also, if I put my head inside the machine, the scanner bar would just move uselessly over the back of my head. My noggin is like a permanent eclipse for the Rapid Reading system.

The solution, such as it is, is that I sit at the desk with my assigned machine taking up most of the available space, and I jam the book in at the edge of the machine and just read normally. Well, normally for me. I stoop over the open paperback copy of The Hobbit, the tip of my nose not far from the printed page.  Next to me, the speed-reader, set to the proper pace on the calibrated dial, hums as the bar of light silently moves over the empty tray. Hundreds of invisible unread lines light up one by one during each hour of Rapid Reading.  And this is why I am still in the last desk, with everyone in the overcrowded aware that I am still number 28 out of 28 after four months of everyone else moving their machine settings up and jostling each other out of their seat rankings.

Tom, someone I've been in classes with since Lowell Elementary, knows about how I can't see and can't use the machine. I don't need to explain the situation to him.

Instead, he explains it to me, as the red bell high on the tile wall begins clanging and we are forced to quit stalling and move into the classroom.  “You’re not the last one,” Tom says, as we push our way the Rapid Reading room.  “You’re in the first chair.“  He points to my desk.  “It starts there and goes this way.”  He swings his index finger toward the end of the line, the desk of the kid I’ve believed, for fourth months, is the fastest reader. That kid is actually Number 28, not me. I am Number 1.

No one has ever told me which way the desks were set up; I’ve just assumed I am last.  Faced with the truth, I am relieved to know I am not the slowest reader in the room, but I don't enjoy that session of Rapid Reading, or any of the remaining classes. It always gives me a crick in my neck, because it's hard to get comfortable bending over my worn copy of The Hobbit with the Rapid Reading machine crowding me off my own desk. And I am developing cynicism, the kind from comes from the recognition, at the age of sixteen, that when a new system is put into place (and paid for with scarce Hoosier education dollars), we all have to pretend that the system works no matter what. Nearly-blind person can't use the machine? Make her sit next it and scrunch herself into the actual reading space. School is a factory, and the whole production line can't stop because one person ran out of rivets.

So am old enough to understand that we bend to the system, the system doesn't bend to us, and yet ut as a high school sophomore, I don't have enough worldly experience to ask myself why we are doing Rapid Reading as a system. Many of the students at Warren Central will drop out of high school in the next few months, as soon as they are old enough to get work permits. Why are we all enrolled in speed-reading? Is it to help us get through War and Peace on our half-hour lunch breaks on assembly line jobs? Can't be. Breaks are for smoking, going to the bathroom, and desperately hunting for another binful of rivets before the line starts up again.

I'm also too young to be grateful that I am even allowed to borrow The Hobbit from the school library. If one of the parents were to find out that the book has magic and pagan rituals in it, it would be yanked out from under my nose. But timing and culture are on my side. It's i972, and no one thinks much about J.R.R. Tolkien. The movie version of Mario Puzo's The Godfather has just come out, and car dealers are on television making potential buyers offers they can't refuse. So for the moment I have this tale of elves, hobbits and dwarves to keep me busy until the bell rings for the end of Rapid Reading. If I hurry, I can get another chapter read before Algebra I begins at 2:15.

The Cloak Room, a Refuge for the Spirit

1963.  I am 6 years old.

The cloak room smells pleasantly of old wood. It's not cedar but something else, clean with hints of  oil and citrus. The tall, deep closet, insulated by all these winter coats, is blessedly dark and quiet.  Sitting inside by myself,  I hear only faint sounds of my first grade teacher instructing the other thirty-one students on the subject of the days in a week.

My teacher’s name is something like Mrs. Rigatoni.  She is thin, usually tense with very good posture, and she wears beaded chains on her glasses. She adds an "r" to certain words, which I find sophisticated, though I don't dare, personally, to call the nation’s capitol “Warshington."  Mrs. Rigatoni calls our winter coats our "wraps," which I find odd. What are we, Christmas presents? Cocktail weenies rolled up in browned biscuit dough?

Because the left legs of the school desks are all lined up along the seams in the speckled green linoleum floor, and because everyone must sit up straight, with both feet on that floor, there's no screeching or creaking of bodies or furniture moving coming in from the other side of the heavy  cloak room door. All I hear is the unpleasant, never-ending sharp buzz of the teacher's voice. When she talks, she reminds me of a radio station that's not quite tuned in all the way; at first, the buzz doesn't bother me, but after a few minutes, my nerves are starting to feel irritated and my muscles begin to feel twitchy.

I feel sorry for the poor saps sitting under the glare of the fluorescent lights, learning the difference between Tuesday and Thursday whether they want to know or not. I can't see them, but I imagine some of them are looking down, any time they can break the "eyes front" command. Bored, they run their fingertips along the   round indentations at the top right corners of the desks where inkwells used to sit in the old-fashioned days.  The wooden desktops lift on hinges, and inside we are to have our own personal set of school supplies in there, and nothing else. Most especially, we are not to have anything in our desks which belongs to the school or to another student.

I know this is because we live in a slum, and our teacher isn't from around here. Some of us don't get the things we require daily from our parents, and we solve the problems of no lunch or no pencil by taking what we need by stealth or force. This doesn't happen very often, really, considering how poor most of us are. Sometimes the consent to let someone "borrow is only semi-consent. but and it's something we all live with.  Since our teacher isn't from our world, she thinks we all live very badly and have the morality of stray dogs.

Taking things that aren't ours is stealing, and stealing is really, really bad. If even the tiniest object belonging to any student disappears, say a used fancy pen/pencil eraser which is gray on one end and white on the other, there is hell to pay. We all must open our desks while the teacher rummages around and looks for the stolen item. It doesn't hether the missing eraser was actually stolen, lost, misplaced, or used up. There will be prolonged confrontation, frantic rummaging, and descending mists of helplessness and shame which drift down over us like the yellow sulfurous exhaust from the tall smokestacks of the nearby coke-processing plant.

These missing-school-supply panic drills are so stressful that there are one of the major reasons I have taken to sitting in the cloak room as often as I can get away with it. Even in the calmer periods when the pencils, erasers and manila paper are all present and accounted for, I still find first grade hard to take, as it is so boring and I am a natural fidgeter. We first-graders all know what trouble fidgeting can bring. (The best thing that can happen is that you'll be asked in front of the whole class is you are restless because you need to be excused to go to the restroom.)

But of course it's boring. I can already read and it is excruciating to sit in restless silence while the teacher pressures the more dyslexic kids to sound out the words. This public humiliation, along with the "borrowing," is another cultural gaffe on the teacher's part. She does not understand that our families are all Appalachian people who moved to the factory town from the world of tobacco farms and coal mines,  three hours' drive south of where we sit. Our culture has few advantages to middle-class life, but one of the things we experience at home is that failures and mistakes and inadequacies are dealt with privately. To "show up" someone in an area where they lack ability is considered to be extreme. Even fools, drunkards and ignoramuses are left their humanity and dignity, and someone influential is sent to help the struggler get back on the right path of life. This business of forcing a kid to sound out short words letter by letter is not only dull, but it makes me angry at the teacher. How can a grown-up lady with chains on her glasses not even know that we don't treat others this way? And of course, I'm also mad that I know there is nothing I can say about it. The teacher is convinced that of the thirty-three people in this room, thirty-two of them are wrong in nearly every action, thought, and belief.

My stomach twists as we move around the reading circle and each of these strugglers tries, with a shaking voice, to make enough effort to please our tormentor and take her attention away from themselves. We are all new to this social situation, and none of us knows what to expect from moment to moment. In the Indianapolis public school system at the end of the baby boom, there was no daycare, no kindergarten, no social conditioning of any kind except for playing with neighbor kids in the front yards.  At age six, we  had all been simply enrolled in a full day of school five days a week. From the second day onwards, we are expected to be productive, neat, and courteous, and on time.  It is a factory town and an education will aid us in life to. . . oh, c'mon. Even at the age of six, I sense that school is really an excuse to explain our failures to achieve. If only we would try to learn to put a "T" on the calendar for Tuesday and a "Th" for Thursday, we would not have to drop out of school at sixteen, work on an assembly line for forty years, and die before we are sixty. Maybe I don't know the details of all that, but I'll tell you what I do know: old people are rare on my street.

Public School No. 2 has one classroom for each of the six grades. At the basement level is a large open room where we sometimes play musical chairs, which I am terrible at, and where we sometimes take naps on canvas-covered mats, which I am good at.  I have exceptionally fine nap skills, actually. I always find my mat quickly by looking for my picture. Each mat has a the metal-rimmed round tag which encircles a small round black-and-white photo of me, trimmed from an extra copy of the class picture taken in the fall.   In the photo, my bangs are at a slant because my mother cuts my hair with her sewing scissors but I love myself anyway and I am glad to have found my own face among the thirty-two circle photo tags.

I am always among the first students to find the correct nap mat. Each afternoon we troop down the basement stairs, I quickly drag my tan cotton-covered pad to the farthest corner. By curling up on my side and turning to face the wall and then waiting until the teacher shuts out the banks of ceiling lights one by one till my corner turns dim, I can sneak my thumb into my mouth for a few minutes of comfort.  At home, the pad and nail of my thumb are usually painted with a bitter substance. This thumb stuff comes in a small glass jar which has a tiny brush coming down from the inside of the lid. I've seen this kind of brush spread rubber cement on the backs of square photographs before they went onto heavy black paper pages in photo albums. The thumb stuff in the little jar could also be rubber cement, for all I know. It tastes horrible and that means I can't suck my thumb at home.

By maneuvering myself into the dimmest back corner, facing the wall and having a peaceful moment with my non-bitter thumb, I have come a paragon of Rest Time virtue. The other children are restless and giggle and poke each other, while I am held up to the class as a good example. This makes me feel a little guilty because of the secret thumb-sucking.  By first grade, I already understand that self-medicating is a weakness is character, but what can I do?  Those afternoon nap periods are pretty short  – fifteen minutes or so – and there is no way lying there on a thin mat on waxed linoleum, listening to giggling and threats to tattle, will restore my soul without the aid of my thumb.

Even if I get to suck my thumb during rest time, I am still pretty overwhelmed by the intensity of Public School No. 2.  The teacher is cranky because she is supposed to have twenty-six students, and she's got thirty-two. The kids are not happy because they have already been yelled at forty-two times, their school shoes are too tight but their dad got laid off from GE, and they had to hold the red lunch ticket in the cafeteria, the one that says your parents didn't have fifteen cents for a hot lunch. I personally live in a house where everybody's mad at everybody else most of the time anyway, so to steep in a classroom full of resentment is really more than I can tolerate, whether I get to suck my thumb on my nap mat or not.

To supplement resting time, I have taken to hiding in the cloak room. This "room" is a tall dark closet built out from the wall of the classroom, on the same side of the room as the glass-paneled door to the hallway. The door naturally drifts shut on its own, because the school is on an embankment, and over time, the school building's foundation has begun to tilt toward Rural Street.

Inside the cloak room, narrow bench runs around three sides, just under the bottom hems of the winter coats.  We children sit on this bench to put on or take off our rain boots, which we call rubbers, or our winter boots, which we call galoshes. The dark wood ceiling is high, and the cloak room seems roomy to me then but of course I am very small.  I like to nestle into the space between two winter coats, and sit sleepy and content as I listen to the softened sounds of the classroom.

My blessed sanctuary was found on that lucky day when I had forgotten my tissues.  My mother, a licensed practical nurse and is thus hygienic, She always sends me to school in clean underwear and in my coat pocket there are three Kleenexes folded in half the long way

That October morning, the day of magic, I had settled myself onto the hard wooden seat of my desk and then, right after the bell rang, just as I was arranging my two pencils (pointed left) in the shallow pencil ditch at the top of the desk, I realized my Kleenexes were still in my coat pocket.  and I had to wait till after attendance was taken (last name first, first name last), for permission to go to the cloak room

My nose felt a potential drip but it held off, mercifully, as Mrs. Rigatoni checked off Tompkins, Lionel and Verren, Muriel and Wheatley, Jerome,  Being a first-grader with several weeks of experience under my patent-leather belt, I knew to wait for our teacher to stick a felt Mr. Sun face on the flannel board with “TODAY’S WEATHER” in felt alphabet letters in a semi-circle at the top.  Then I politely raised my hand, and when called on, I asked to visit the cloak room.

Mrs. Rigatoni searched the area around my desk with her eyes, then the desktop.  “I see that you already hung up your wrap before the bell, Marion, and that you have your two sharpened pencils.”

“I forgot my Kleenexes,” I said squeakily.

“So you have forgotten your tissues?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said nervously.  “I’m sorry.”

“You may go and fetch them this time,” said Mrs. Rigatoni.  “Please take more care in the future.”

I extracted myself from between desk and seat and went into the cloak room.  The door, on two oiled brass hinges, naturally closed behind me but the cloak room was far from claustrophobically dark. Even with the solid wooden door shut, I could see because a strong line of bright fluorescent light glowed at floor level, and more light crept in here and there between boards, adding a bit of pleasant zebra stripe pattern to the sleeves and collars of the wool and nylon and canvas duck coats and jackets hanging from the curved brass wall hooks.

I found my coat -- blue wool, smelling of mothballs, with a fur collar that had lost all its fluffiness before I inherited it from Cousin Sherry.  I lifted the pocket flap, and took out the folded Kleenexes, which I tucked under the fabric belt of my cotton shirt dress.  My cheap synthetic socks had scrunched down into my school shoes, so I sat down for a minute to pull up the tops of my socks and fold them over, though the creased fabric would not stay in shape for even a moment.

I leaned back against the wooden wall of the cloak room, enjoying the dark and quiet.  “Hey, it’s nice in here,” I thought, as I heard an irritated Mrs. Rigatoni teaching the class to print the word “doll.”

Safely inside the cloak room, I heard the commands “Ball, stick, ball, stick, stick!” followed by the shuffling sounds of shoe soles on the linoleum tiles as desperate children attempted to erase misplaced balls and sticks from the manila paper. This paper was printed with blue dotted lines in between two solid lines. The printed letters were supposed to touch top and bottom, but if you made a mistake and erased too vigorously, the soft paper tore in an accordion-pleated triangle of doom.

I stayed in the cloak room for a couple more minutes, then sighed and stood up. My own piece of manila paper was lying on my desk without the word "doll" penciled on it.  I eased the door open quietly and crept back to my seat.

Mrs. Rigatoni hadn't noticed my return.  She was hovering behind a boy named Nathan who was having a hard time with his pencil.  Eight years later, Nathan escaped into the Industrial Arts building, where he used a blowtorch to practice welding pieces of steel plate.  At this moment he was in capital letter versus small letter hell.  He had capitalized something he shouldn’t have, and if capital punishment had been an option in the first grade, Mrs. Rigatoni would have applied the maximum sentence possible.  Nathan would have been diagrammed out of the sentence of life.

*****

Now it is December, I have discovered that I can stay in the cloak room for an hour at a time if I like.  This overcrowded Baby Boomer classroom has so many student stuffed into it  that there is a partial row of desks crammed along the wall at the very back. The unfortunates whose names start with letters after T in the alphabet have their backs poked by the handles of the wooden supply drawers where the manila paper and jars of white paste are kept.  The room is so full of children that if my desk is empty for a while, everyone including Mrs. Rigatoni just feels a vague sense of relief that there is a little more available air for breathing.

All I have to do, when I need some peaceful solitude, is to ask, just after the attendance roll is called, to go and get a pencil or a tissue or my field trip permission slip from my coat pocket.  I am the only one who ever goes to the cloak room and stays, and I am surprised that no one else ever copycats me. All I can figure out is that the other students don’t notice me any more than Mrs. Rigatoni does.

On this day close to Christmastime, I am enjoying the comfort of darkness and wool, cheerfully nibbling at the crusts of a desiccated peanut butter and jelly sandwich left behind in a wrinkled paper sack, humming under my breath and enjoying the sacredness of time alone, when there is a silence where Mrs. Rigatoni’s constant, harsh voice should be.

I realize that I have been called on to read aloud.  Mrs. Rigatoni has said, “Marion, you read for us, starting at the top of page 67,” and then she has looked up to see that my desk is empty.  She must now be scanning the attendance sheet.  No, I am not absent.  She has now remembered vaguely that I asked to go get my eraser an hour and a half before Reading Time began.

In sharp hard steps her teacher shoes come down the side aisle and the cloak room door is jerked open. The sudden flash of fluorescent light is startlingly intense.  And I can’t remember what happens after the invasion begins.  It probably involves me being dragged by one arm, but she didn’t kill me or I wouldn't have written this.

[The photo above is of Public School #3 on North Rural Street in Indianapolis, which was the elementary school with the cloak room in it. The building is now a social-services center.]

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.