In tenth grade I started bringing my lunch to school in a “Pigs in Space” lunchbox, a shiny black metal number with a canary yellow handle and a whole bunch of Muppets in lavender astronaut uniforms cavorting on every side. When I told a bunch of geeky-chic teenage students of mine this in 2001, they were all, “Dude! You were the shit!”
Well, no. Not exactly.
I’d spent the late ’80s trying to fit in at my Midwestern junior high, naively thinking this was possible despite copious evidence to the contrary. I had one friend, zero boyfriends, and precious few friendly acquaintances other than my teachers. The few boys who ever approached me at school dances would all turn out to be gay. I could not afford, socially speaking, to carry my lunch to school in anything other than a paper bag.
No amount of arguing or pleading could convince my parents I needed the peg-legged acid-washed Guess jeans and caramel-colored Bass loafers the popular girls wore. And even though I applied a hot curling iron to my hair every morning, I could not ever get my bangs to stand up to regulation ’80s heights for longer than ten minutes—probably because I wasn’t willing to spritz on enough Bold Hold to defy gravity, concerned as I was about the systematic destruction of the ozone layer by aerosol sprays.
For two interminable years I longed for girls to smile at me in the stairwell and slip notes into my locker inviting me over to their houses after school to make chocolate chip cookies and dissect the plotline of the most recent episode of Degrassi Junior High. I dreamed about boys teasing me just the right amount and choosing me for their teams in gym class even though every time a ball came my way I ducked my head and closed my eyes.
I’d optimistically imagined that junior high would be like elementary school but bigger and with more interesting homework. Instead I was presented with a trial that frequently drove me to tears, weeping to my mom, “Why can’t anyone just be nice?” I clung to my friend and envied the Guess jeans and Bass shoes her parents bought her even though they were Mennonite.
When the occasional invitation from a girl other than the well-appointed Anabaptist came my way, the girls themselves tended to be interested in applying teal or electric blue mascara to my nervous eyelashes (This wasn’t tested on rabbits, was it?), while I tended to be interested in hanging out in the kitchen with their parents discussing the merits of Quakerism or the inhumanity of the death penalty or the presidential chances of Michael Dukakis.
I simultaneously yearned to be admired for being myself and to fit in with a group of kids I didn’t find particularly compelling. As an older friend said to me before I started eighth grade, “If my fiancé turned to me on our wedding day and said, ‘Honey, did I ever tell you that junior high was the best time of my life?’ I would turn around right then and leave him at the altar.”
I made halfhearted stabs at assimilation, spending my babysitting money on a pair of Guess jeans that were dark blue instead of acid-washed and Bass loafers in dark brown instead of the requisite caramel. Neither the jeans nor the shoes were identical enough to make me just like everybody else, but they weren’t unique enough for me to feel like I was being true to my artful inner self, either. Mostly, nobody paid attention to my legs or feet at all.
Truthfully, my favorite outfit wasn’t a pair of jeans anyway but a plum colored skirt and top that I paired with a matching plum sunhat and bright blue tights. I thought it was a compelling look and was secretly—but genuinely—disappointed that no modeling agency representatives had discovered me, much less that no boys had asked me to the movies or girls had asked me to park my paper lunch sack next to theirs in the cafeteria.
Starting high school brought some relief, a tiny bit of breathing room in which I realized the incompatibility of my desires. I wasn’t consciously trying to draw attention with my eclectic tastes and preference for adult conversation, but it seemed that attention—often in the form of snickering—was part of the deal. If I wanted to wear a short purple skirt with blue tights and expound on the horrors of Dan Quayle, people would stare.
When classmates asked why I carried a lunchbox depicting a passé television show featuring animal puppets, I kept it simple, telling them oh so charmingly that I wouldn’t be responsible for destroying the environment with disposable bags. But this was a cover for the fact that The Muppet Show held a special place in my heart—a tiny pocket reserved for talking puppets and John Denver and pigs pretending to be astronauts—but a pocket nonetheless. If everyone was being honest, wouldn’t they cop to having a fondness for such things?
Securely in my grasp, my Pigs in Space lunchbox brought me courage and served as a post-junior-high rebellion—rebellion against the status quo, the hierarchy of popularity, the cult of Bold Hold. So what if I wasn’t allowed to wear contact lenses? So what if I was the only white kid in school who didn’t have some kind of sandwich in her lunch? So what if no boy ever asked me out? I had enough inner strength and humor to carry a lunchbox that no one but me thought was cool.
It was a mild and quiet form of rebellion—until the lunchbox clattered ridiculously to the ground in front of all my classmates. When dropped, a metal lunchbox sounds sort of like a drawer full of flatware or a toolbox full of wrenches clanging to the ground and sort of like a fourteen year-old girl’s self-confidence clanking into a trillion jangly pieces on the hard, gritty linoleum floor of adolescence.
The sound was the worst part because it got everybody staring. The next worst part was retrieving the highly personal contents—blueberry muffin, chunk of cheddar cheese, handful of green pepper slices, plastic container of pre-sliced grapefruit—under the judging gaze of football players and cheerleaders and kids that played bass in their own rock bands. Somehow I never managed to drop the lunchbox in an empty hallway or a hallway filled with Environmental Club members. Classmates rolled their eyes and muttered to each other while I stuffed the items back into the lunchbox and held on for dear life until I could shove the cause of embarrassment into my locker for the afternoon, and possibly for the rest of my life.
But the color in my cheeks always subsided and reason took over, and I figured that carrying the lunchbox wasn’t the problem—dropping it was.
I vowed to hold on a little tighter, to grasp the plastic handle just right so it wouldn’t fly out of my hand, to protect myself from further instances of mortification. I held tight to the belief that after high school people will smile at you as they hand you your dropped belongings, regardless of the brand of your jeans (or tights) or the color of your shoes or the height of your bangs. I lived inside the hope that in the real world people invite you to their houses for cookies and conversations about plot structure and religion and politics and the horrors of adolescence and how grateful everyone is they only have to live through it once.
Wilson Diehl | Contributor
Wilson Diehl lives in Seattle where she writes, teaches, and cuts food into very small pieces for her child to eat. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa and has published pieces in Salon, The Iowa Review, Mudfish, The Paterson Literary Review, Seattle Metropolitan, and on buses around Seattle. Her short, sassy film “How to Go on a Man Date” made the rounds on the national film festival circuit and is anthologized in the Seattle Women in Film DVD. She’s currently working on a book of essays about bra shopping, being a reader in a runner’s world, and all the things they don’t tell you about pregnancy or marriage until it’s too late.
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