An Impression, A Likeness

Before being transformed and disguised to look like bank cards, Food Stamps resembled true, paper money. Smaller than real bills, they came crowded together in wallet-sized checkbooks, in pastel denominations of 5’s, 10’s and 20’s. We’d wander through the supermarket, my mother and I, collecting cold slabs of beef, discounted soups, and stacks of bleached, flavorless breads. Government rules for Food Stamps were unflinching, and prepared or “hot” foods were strictly forbidden, so we kept clear of the deli, the bakery, of the shimmering spits of rotisserie chickens and pies baking fresh in roaring, steel ovens. We could see, we could smell, but we could not touch or take home.

At the register, my mother tore the stamps from the book. The soothing pink of a 5. The cool blue of a 10. The velvet green of a 20. In her fingers, a rainbow of stained paper colors emerged. She’d hand the cashiers the bright, make-believe money, and they’d give her real money in change. I watched her shove the crumpled bills down her pocket, an alchemy of conversion that seemed surreal and near magic. Presto! Fake money into real money, from nothing into something.

“This is for us, for free?” The boxes were stacked at our door, dropped off by volunteers from local food shelters. Thick chunks of mud, a gift from our gravel swamp of a driveway, clung to these volunteers’ shoes, leaving fossilized canyons of muck on our sagging front porch. “This is just ours?” I’d ask. “We get all of this?”

Inside the box, an assortment of items sealed in industrialized, black and tan cardboard. Waxy blocks of sharp cheddar cheese. Instant, fat-free dehydrated milk. Unsalted crackers. Every box, every month, the same foods every time, including a white, plastic package labeled in aggressive black caps, “BROWNIE BATTER.”

“Please,” my brother and I begged, presenting the bag to our mother. “Please, can we eat this?” Her sigh was a nonverbal surrender, and we’d pour sweet heaps of dark chocolate dust into cracked plastic tumblers, blend it with tap water, and drink/chew our way through clots of generic, cake-flavored sludge.

“So good,” we’d say to each other through teeth stained black with saccharine grit. We’d consider our privilege, our luck, that allowed us to drink brownie mix from a cup. What other kids in the world could do that? “So good,” we’d say. “Isn’t this good?”

The Gleaners, as they were known in our area, set up shop outside of a different house every month. Sometimes they’d be in someone’s backyard, other times spilling out of a cluttered garage, 4X4 parts and slick oil stains sneaking up to their backs. Hovering behind a hodgepodge of plastic card tables, they’d heap “past their sale date” donuts, cupcakes, and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches into oversized, clear plastic bags. The leftovers, the discards, of nearby mini-marts and chain grocery outlets.

A mile of people piled ahead in a line, no matter how early or late we arrived. Our mother, forced to endure her children’s whining and fighting, would threaten us with spankings, with groundings, with things we knew she lacked the strength to deliver. So we stuck to our fighting, we leaned into our whining, water from soaking wet grass unearthing holes in our sneakers, drowning our feet.

“Thank you so much,” she’d say when it became our turn at the tables, hoisting the plastic bag she was handed into her arms. I’d watch her face strain from the burden. “And, well, I guess we’ll see you next month.” Heading home, the air candied and sick from the scent of our haul, my brother and I plunged our hands into the bag’s sticky innards, battling for pastries, our fingers like slight, fleshly scales that could measure by touch the weight of each donut’s freshness.

“A sandwich first, then dessert,” our mother commanded. She’d catch our eyes in the rearview mirror. “And the date. Make sure you check the date.”

I pulled a half sandwich from the bag. Turkey, with cheese, on white bread, mummified in clear cellophane. On a faint, gummy label, a series of numbers I could barely make out. I passed the sandwich to my mother. She squinted at the label and again, I watched her face strain from the burden.

“Okay. I think… this… should be okay.”

On a bright Monday morning, a girl in my class raised her hand when our teacher asked what we did over the weekend. She’d had a birthday, and she wanted to show off the fine, silver watch she’d received. Other kids followed suit, raising their hands, and an impromptu exhibit of watches, bracelets, and jewelry began. No watch, no bracelets, no jewelry to share, I kept my hands locked at my sides.

That Monday afternoon, I flashed my monthly lunch card, a gift from the county, at a boy in line next to me inside our school cafeteria. He had to pay for his lunch, $2.00 a day, every day, with money he received from his parents. They all did. Wadded up singles folded into wallets or fistfuls of coins in zipped sandwich baggies, surrendered to our lunchroom cashier. But not me. I received a new card every month, which I signed in my most extravagant cursive, each letter building up to a crescendo that screamed out my name. I wanted to show off what I had. Look at my name on the back of this card, after all. Look at how fancy, look what it told the world about me.

“I don’t have to pay for my lunch,” I said, revealing my card. “See? This means I don’t pay.”

The boy glanced at my card. He snorted. “You don’t have to pay because you can’t afford to pay. That’s what that card means. You get your lunch for free because you’re poor.”

Made out of paper, frail as it was thin, the lunch card collapsed as my fingers wrapped around it. Somewhere inside, some frail part of me, collapsed just the same. I looked down at my clothes, at my plain yellow t-shirt and faded blue jeans, my grubby white sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. They weren’t so different from the clothes of everyone else standing near me. In the same way that food stamps gave an impression of currency, hadn’t I given an impression of sameness? But the county was paying my bill and my bill alone. No one else in the lunch line could brag about that. Look at my name on this lunch card, I’d said, and my classmates had all along. And they knew exactly what it said about me.

My turn in line, and I handed my card to the cashier. And suddenly, how easy I could see through the eyes of my mother, handing a fistful of food stamps to the grocery store checker.

My turn in line, and I was handed a tray of food I didn’t pay for. And how easy it I could see through the eyes of my mother, hoisting a box of basic foods from our porch, struggling a bag of expiring baked goods and meats into the backseat of her car.

My turn in line, and how easy to now imagine my mother, herself as a child, in a lunch line at school, thinking a paper lunch card made her special, unaware it was for all the wrong reasons, unaware of what it said of her now, of her there at that moment, and what it threatened to say for her future.