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Pamela Wright 17 1 Holding Up Food stamps. It’s amazing how much such a simple thing could possibly become a study in human nature. The staples were miniature vises holding each booklet together. I flipped through the paper rectangles and crisply plucked the correct strip of paper out of a booklet. The fake dollar bills were in order of ones, fives, tens, and twenties, but the number of each bill per booklet was unpredictable. Some booklets had been partially used, and some were fresh, but they had been stapled together according to how much the government felt I was allowed. One time, I had decided to be ingenuous and save myself time by snipping out all the papers and organizing them by value, but then I couldn’t buy food. The belated but strict instruction was that value only existed when those papers were ripped out in front of a cashier. Only in front of a cashier. In all, it was excruciating trying to find the right amount of money with icy sweat beading up on my hot face and neck, running in slow rivulets down my body. Judgmental eyes stared at me from vague heads floating in my periphery, igniting my insides with humiliating fire. Breathless, I slapped down the last bill then gasped for air. Slowly I looked up into the cashier’s doughy and pious face, and peered from behind my heavy schoolgirl bangs at the people in line. Varying degrees of disgust and impatience glowered back at me. I looked at my son fidgeting in the cart, dissatisfied with the confines the cart allowed him. He played with his toy, babbling and jerking his hands rhythmically. He happily communicated something in baby-language to me and I blanked, unable to play-talk back. I quickly caught myself, “Not-his-fault . . . not-his-fault . . . not-hisfault . . .” I looked away into space, put one finger into both of his palms and felt his tight grips become fists, warm and firm. I began thinking, “Who is holding up whom?” I stood in the grocery store line waiting for the cashier, who had just watched me ferret out my food stamps, to pick each bill slowly, to collect them in a neat stack, to pinch them between her fingers, to raise them to the level of her bifocals, and then to count them slowly. I watched each bill flip backward, and with each flip, the heat in my face went up several degrees. Each week, the same routine. Different cashiers, same drama. I darted another quick look behind me and repeated my weekly thanks that I was deaf; at least I didn’t have to hear what the condescending eyes behind me were muttering. And I could see clearly, these people were muttering something. I was holding up their line. Reprinted, with permission and revisions, from The Tactile Mind Press Quarterly, in the “Vertigo” issue, Winter 2003–2004. Main_Pgs_1-330.indd 171 3/28/2012 10:24:54 AM 172 Pamela Wright I was nineteen when the joys of independent motherhood were bestowed upon me. Some were impressed with my moxie when I refused to call myself an unwed or single mother. I despised the term unwed. Not only is it so archaic—simply voicing the word is horrible, considering that the stress of the word lies in the un not the wed, therefore emphasizing the shame of the un. I refused to be called a single mother for the same reason I hated the term unwed. Using the word single still has a ring of “you should be married” to it; it is like saying, “lacking a substantial, endorsed-by-society-other-half.” These words slide off people’s minds loaded with pity. So I called myself an independent mother. I was adamant in my choice not to marry. My predicament was enough—why add the idiotic mistake of marrying a guy that clearly didn’t want to be around and might not even stay around? He had been perfect as a witty playmate boyfriend, an Adonis with a neglected IQ of 135. Fun was to be had and together, we had the world! We toyed around with the idea of marriage, but when honesty played its cards, he wasn’t the forever-and-ever type. So, I wasn’t too surprised when he turned on his heels and ran, taking off like a spooked colt. I was deeply devastated, feeling pain on every nerve in my being...

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