Every morning all the children at Sacred Redeemer went to Mass before school started. If you wanted to go to communion, you couldn’t eat breakfast before church. And if you didn’t want the teachers to think you were a sinner, you went to communion.
This always resulted in a messy free-for-all after the children returned to their classroom, where they either produced a shiny dime from home which furnished them milk and sweet rolls all week, or brought out crumpled paper bags of food.
Lilya longed for those wonderful rolls, huge lumps of sweet dough with a jam center, but her parents couldn’t afford such an extravagance. After church Sister Theodoretta would collect money from the privileged children and then reluctantly give the others permission to take out their egg or peanut butter sandwiches. Even if sweet rolls were unaffordable, a child could wash down a piece of toast with a carton of milk bought for a couple of pennies.
But Lilya’s parents couldn’t afford even the milk. She pulled out her bag of food and neatly arranged the toast and egg on a piece of wax paper. Her mother had put a spoon in her bag. She removed the spoon and tapped the egg.
Egg yolk went everywhere! It was all over her new blue sweater, all over her face, all over her hands. The boys laughed. The girls nibbling their tidy sweet rolls giggled.
Sister Theodoretta swooped down on the underprivileged child with a napkin and an exasperated sigh. Why couldn’t they all buy rolls and be done with it? She roughly swabbed sweater, face and hands, but the towel was a poor match for country eggs.
Lilya was not allowed to go to the rest room because it was not recess time, so she spent a miserable morning wiping flecks of yolk from her hands and face while the other children continued to snicker behind her back.
The morning dragged while Lilya’s stomach growled. By lunchtime she was very hungry, as Sister had thrown away her egg and toast after the cleanup. She stood in line in the cafeteria and promised herself she would eat everything, even the canned grapefruit sections and pasty lima beans, both of which she hated.
When Lilya got to the front of the line the cafeteria lady asked her for a lunch ticket. Lilya had never had to produce one, as she and her brothers were allowed to eat for free because her father worked for the Monsignor.
“I don’t have a ticket,” was all she could think to say.
“I’m sorry, but if you don’t have a ticket we can’t let you eat lunch,” the cafeteria lady said.
Lilya didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t go sit in the cafeteria without a lunch tray and watch everyone else eat. She also couldn’t just walk away from the cafeteria without permission. So she stood there.
“Hey, I’m hungry,” a boy yelled.
“Hurry up and pay, you stupid foreign kid,” said another.
One of the other first grade teachers came up and took Lilya’s hand. She walked her upstairs and out to the first grade building, where she told Lilya to sit quietly in the classroom until everyone came back from lunch. Then the teacher left.
Not only was Lilya going to miss lunch, she would also miss recess. She fought back tears. She didn’t want anyone to see her cry, because then the other children would make fun of her. Even worse, Sister would get angry and punish her.
She went to the back of the room and picked out a book. Reading was always good for taking her away from her unpleasant circumstances. She didn’t hear when Sister came in.
“What are you doing?” Sister Theodoretta asked.
Lilya quickly closed the book. “Nothing,” she said.
“Were you reading that book?” Sister asked, eyes narrowing.
“No,” Lilya lied.
“You’re lying,” Sister said. “Open that book and read to me.”
“I can’t,” Lilya said, which was mostly true. Even though she was able to read, having someone leaning over her was so upsetting the words swam before her eyes. She was terrified she would be punished, but knew she was losing ground.
The class had been reciting the alphabet for weeks, but Lilya—whose mother had taught her to read in Hungarian—found the transition to reading in English easy once she had learned to think in the new language.
Sister grabbed the book and opened it. “Read this page,” she said.
Lilya looked at the words and tried to pretend they were scratch marks. But her curiosity and love for the printed page overtook her stubbornness. “See David and Ann. See David play. See Ann pray.” Even to her six-year-old mind the words were overly simple, but the pictures filled in the gaps.
“You may sit down,” was all Sister said.
Lilya went home and told her mother that she did not get to eat lunch today. She did not tell her about the breakfast incident, nor did she dare mention the disgrace of having been “caught” reading ahead of the class.
That evening Lilya found out Monsignor had decided that with her father’s liberal wage of $1.00 an hour, and with the extra work he had given her parents, they were prospering and could now afford to pay for their children’s lunches themselves. Monsignor had relayed the news to the oldest brother’s teacher, who then passed the information on to the other teachers. Unfortunately, the news had been given the very day the pronouncement was to take effect. Right before lunch.
Lilya’s mother was furious. Her outrage thundered in the small kitchen.
“Why couldn’t Monsignor tell us himself?” She raged. “Why couldn’t he have waited until after lunch so the children could eat? Why did the teacher wait until just before noon to tell our son, when they knew our children would have no money to buy lunch?”
Lilya ate her bread and soup in silence. She wasn’t thinking about lunch. She was thinking about what kind of punishment she would get for reading when she wasn’t supposed to. It would probably be bad.
It was. The next day Sister Theodoretta told her to take everything out of her desk and go to the other first grade class, where they were already reading. She was heart-broken at losing the familiarity of this classroom, these classmates, her best friend. She would even miss Sister Theodoretta, because knowing someone troublesome was still better than having to meet a new teacher she didn’t know.
Lilya sighed inwardly. She had learned something that day. She had learned that it was very bad to break the rules.
