The Lunch Table
Christine M. Estel
I wanted to hate Laura. I wanted to hate her straight, blonde hair and her curled tendrils on each temple, a far prettier sight than my wild and frizzy dirty-blonde mop. I hated when she’d tell her friends how her mom would take her and her little sister to breakfast some Saturday mornings, followed by a trip to the mall where they’d choose the latest trends on the racks at Limited Too. I’d listen to her disgusting tale, clad in my average department store finds or hand-me-downs from my mother’s friend’s daughter, three years my senior. And though my handwriting was already graceful and legible, and my vocabulary was solid, I even wanted to hate Laura’s precise “pretty girl” handwriting; how she emphasized each “s” through pursed lips and a tongue whistle behind her teeth, resulting in her trademark, “ssssuper” prissy voice.
Most of all, I wanted to hate her for the lunches her mom packed: a bento box (before they were a “thing” or before I knew what it was called), filled with a leftover chicken cutlet from their dinner the night before, carefully nestled between a scoop of homemade macaroni and cheese — because it was “way better than the box kind” — and a slice of soft Italian bread topped with a dainty pat of butter. Of course there was also one of her mom’s rich brownies, wrapped in crisp, brown parchment paper.
From my seat on the cafeteria bench, three spots away, I watched Laura’s prim hands brush the lid and unfasten it from the base. I wanted to rip that pastel pink paper napkin, folded on the diagonal, to shreds and stab her with her small silver fork. I wanted her to choke while drinking from her Perrier-filled Thermos because only snotty daughters of “pageant mom” types drank Perrier while the rest of us, like me, had tap water, or a Hi-C or Capri Sun. I wanted to tell her that her mother’s note, as adorned with hearts as the dots of her own “i”s, was full of lies; that she didn’t really love her daughter like she professed.
But, with age and experience, I realized I didn’t truly hate Laura. Not for any of it. It wasn’t until I made lunch for my son and propped it up on a pillow on our big red recliner so he could watch TV that I realized I just wanted a peanut butter sandwich with Dunkaroos like most of my friends got in the lunches their mothers packed each day. Actually, I just wanted my mother to watch me and talk to me while I made my own peanut butter sandwich and the ones for my younger siblings, or somehow slip in a cute note without me noticing. Actually, I just wanted my mother to be awake when I had to leave for school.
Christine M. Estel lives and writes in the Philadelphia area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in (mac)ro(mic), Schuylkill Valley Journal, Capsule Stories, Ethel Zine, and elsewhere. She tweets from @EstellingAStory.