THE HAND-ME-DOWN BAG

I came home from school to find a garbage bag on the front porch. I knew what was in it without having to open the knotted ties. The contents were soft enough that they didn’t poke out anywhere along the edge of the black plastic, but rather seemed to be trying to spread out as far as possible. It was the thing I hated most in the world. It was a bag of hand-me-down clothes.

At eleven years old, I was at the in-between stage where I didn’t know how to make things look good on me. But I knew very well what things looked bad on me. I was five foot five and I had bird-thin legs and arms, but a stomach that sagged in the middle and breasts that were an annoyance in everything. They were just too big. They’d grown quickly, over the last year, and I had stretch marks on the sides of my chest like my mom has on her stomach, from six pregnancies. I still remember vividly how comfortable I used to feel in my ten year-old body. I remember not noticing the clothes that I put on. I looked in my closet, took out a pair of pants and a shirt, and stuck out arms and legs to fill them out. There weren’t colors that didn’t match or styles that didn’t look good together.

Mom wouldn’t be home for several hours. I tried to heft the bag, but it weighed sixty or seventy pounds. I couldn’t budge it, and the more I poked at it, the more unstable the contents became. If I made everything fall out onto the dirt, Mom would be really mad at me. She talked about last year in the same way that I felt about it. Last year, when Dad was still alive. When she didn’t have to work. When we only got a few hand-me-downs, offered one at a time from friends who offered something we’d said we’d liked. When we weren’t yet the neighborhood charity cases.

What I wanted to do was dump the hand-me-downs into the garbage can wholesale. If only I could lift the whole thing in.

I could wait until the younger kids got home from school and see if one of them could help me. But Jace was the oldest and she was a good head shorter than I was, and the garbage can was nearly as tall as me. Plus she didn’t mind the hand-me-downs as much. She didn’t notice the long, lingering stares of the other girls at school, the ones who had anonymously given their clothes up for the sacrifice of the bag. The ones who would never say what they meant, that I was ugly, that they liked looking down on me, that it pleased them to know they had power over me.

Instead, they said, “Nice top, Cherry. Where’d you get it? Macy’s?”

Or, “I had a top just like that. Last year.”

Or, “You and I have such similar tastes. I’d pick that same outfit out, I think, if I hadn’t lost all that weight over the summer.”

Or “My grandmother got me a dress like that like year for Christmas. I don’t think I ever wore it. Is that one from your grandmother, too?”

I tried to wear things inside out or under sweaters, even if it was nearly summer, so that they wouldn’t make comments. But it always happened. The problem was that the hand-me-down bag didn’t come with a name or a card on it. They didn’t want to embarrass us. That was what Mom said. They didn’t want to feel like they were insulting us by suggesting we needed hand-me-downs.

So I didn’t know who to avoid when I walked into school. I didn’t even know—truly—that they meant to be vicious to me. Maybe they hadn’t known that the clothes were coming to me. Maybe they really did think it was just a coincidence.

When Mom comes into my room to look through my clothes, I am always trying to get her to take things out that I hate. “Please, those purple jeans from K-mart with the purple thread flowers embroiders up the sides. I hate those, Mom. I’m never going to wear them again.”

But Mom held them up to my waist, tilted her head to the side. “They still fit you,” she said. “I’m not giving away clothes that still fit. You have to wear them out if you want to get rid of them, Cherry.”

It was clearly not the rule that other parents used. Not one of the things in the hand-me-down bags were torn or ripped or dirty. Not even the panties or bras that sometimes came. Mom insisted I take the ones that were in my size, and she wouldn’t buy me new ones until I proved to her that I didn’t have any left in my drawer.

I let them sit for weeks on end, washing my two other pair in the sink each night so that I always had a spare, just in case. Until the new ones gradually came to have my house smell and I put them on one leg first, one night. And then the other leg, without pulling them up. And then to the knees. And then all the way, but just for a minute. And then they were mine.

If I put the whole bag in the garbage can, Mom would be sure to see it, though. I’d have better luck if I put in one item at a time, for weeks on end, and covered it with potato clippings and leaves from the garden. But first I had to make sure that the other kids didn’t find out about it.

I pushed and pulled the bag into the front room. Then I puncture the plastic at the top and began to take things out, one at a time. I was thinking as I went. I could leave out all the things that were too small for me, that were for the younger kids. They wouldn’t care. I only had to make sure that there was nothing in the bag that was my size.

Pajamas were one of the main things that we got in hand-me-downs. I think because most kids don’t wear out their pajamas because they only sleep in them. Also, there were often nice winter coats and boots that had been grown out of too quickly. No gloves, but scarves and winter hats that Grandma had knitted.

A Teddy bear in neon green.

A leotard and tutu that would be great for Ellie, who at seven wanted to have dancing lessons that Mom couldn’t afford. Now she could turn on the television and at least dance along to the lessons that you could get for free.

A Sunday dress that would fit Tara at nine and make her happy to dance around, even if the skirt was rumpled and the lace a little worse for wear.

Nothing for me.

Nothing for me.

I dug through the bag an item at a time, carefully taking it out and refolding it when I had examined it for size. I didn’t want Mom to yell at me for showing no respect or for ruining clothes that might otherwise have been usable.

I came to the bottom of the bag and pulled out a pair of glass slippers.

At first I thought they were cheap dress-up slippers they sell at toy stores these days, the ones made out of plastic that break the first time you try to do a pirouette in them. But then I lifted them out of the bag, pushed away the black plastic, and weighed them in my hand. They were real glass. They had the weight of glass and the look of it. You could see straight through from one end to the other, though it was a little distorted, like looking through several feet of water.

They were pumps, covering the whole toe, with a modest heel in the back. And they were just my size.

I laughed and put one on.

I turned my foot this way and that.

“Where would I ever wear them?” I asked out loud.

If they were real glass slippers, they would be very fragile. Not to mention how uncomfortable. And you would always be worrying about them breaking and the shards of glass getting imbedded into the soles of your feet.

But I put the other one on anyway. “This is ridiculous,” I said out loud.

And I stood up.

What did I need feet for, anyway? If I got cut with shards of glass, then I could stay home from school for a few weeks and get out of P.E., which I had always been bad at. It didn’t seem like such a loss until I considered how much a hospital visit like that would cost Mom. We didn’t have insurance and every time one of the kids got a sniffle Mom would start feeding them chicken soup and orange juice in hopes of staving off an expensive visit to the doctor.

The slippers were remarkably comfortable. I had been so sure they were made out of glass, but now they felt flexible, as if they moved with every step. I took a couple of dance steps from the waltz we’d learned in eighth grade. They worked just fine. But then I felt so good I tried to do a leap in them. When I was up in the air, I was terrified of what would happen when I landed, but it felt better than any running shoe I’d ever tried on. Not that Mom could afford the really expensive ones.

I took off the shoes and looked at them again. No cushioning, no padding. There was nothing inside the sole, between the glass and my foot. And when I felt the glass with my hand, it felt like glass. Hard, immobile. It was only when I put it back on my foot that I felt the soft, pliable material again that the glass seemed to become.

I was so caught up in trying out the glass slippers that I didn’t think about time passing or my younger siblings getting home from elementary school until the door opened and they walked in, all four of them at once.

Jace, Tara, Ellie, and Mark.

“Hand-me-downs,” said Tara.

“What’s for me?” asked Ellie.

Jace and Mark were not as interested, at first.

But Tara found the green Teddy bear.

And Ellie found the leotard and tutu.

And I realized that the magic wasn’t in the glass slippers. It was in the bag itself. The black plastic hand-me-down bag that I had carelessly ripped open and intended to throw away. Almost everything in it had some magical power, if it were tried out by the one of us who was the right size, who was “meant” for it, to so speak.

When Ellie put on the leotard and tutu, she could actually do ballet. She knew all the positions. She could plie, jete, pirouette. The shoes that she had on seemed to turn into ballet shoes, even if they were snow boots. I don’t know how it worked. If I stared at the boots for a long time, I could eventually see that they were really snow boots and not ballet slippers. But me seeing the bootness of the boots did not change the fact that when Ellie had the leotard and tutu on, they acted like ballet shoes. She could stand on the tips of her toes and turn and she had amazing grace. Her arms seemed to get longer when she held them out, and she had a sense of rhythm that we’d laughed about before, because she said she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up, but she sang a half measure behind everyone else.

The leotard didn’t work on its own, nor did the tutu. She had to put them both together for the magic.

For Tara, it was the neon green Teddy bear that I had set aside as horrible that was hers. She loved all stuffed animals, but she had a special collection of Teddy bears, though none of them in this spectacular color. Tara hated not having a stuffed animal to carry around with her. On the first day of Kindergarten, when Mom had pried the little stuffed turtle out of her hand, she had screamed. It had taken Mom three hours to calm her down and get her into the classroom.

But the green neon Teddy bear seemed to disappear when she held it. You couldn’t see it anymore. It was like the boots. Tara could feel it, and she didn’t have to such her thumb to feel calm again. The green neon Teddy bear was all she needed. Teachers wouldn’t see it. Or Mom. Or the other kids. Until she put it down. But Tara wasn’t likely to do that. She took a bath with it and when it got out of the tub, the Teddy bear didn’t drip. It hadn’t gotten wet at all.

Jace and Mark came in and watched us for a few minutes before they realized what was going on. Then they rummaged through the rest of the stuff, looking for just the right thing. Jace tried on the hat I thought looked like a grandmother had knitted it. And suddenly, she said, “I know how to do that math problem.” She rushed into the kitchen and worked through her math problems, without Mom’s help for three hours in the evening.

Mark found a pair of gloves.

“What do they do?” I asked him.

He flexed his hands. “I don’t know. They feel good,” he said.

“Maybe you can hit a baseball better with them,” I suggested.

He shrugged. “Don’t like baseball,” he said.

“Well, they have to be magical, don’t they? Everything else is.”

“I want to go play a video game,” he said.

We didn’t have any new ones, but someone had given us an old video game player and Mark played the ones we had.

I went and watched him. He was faster at his games. It didn’t seem like that would matter so much, but then I realized that it was what he wanted the most. The bag was giving each of us what mattered.

I took the glass slippers into Mom’s room, where there was a full-length mirror. I put them on while I was standing in front of it. I’m not sure I can explain what happened. It wasn’t like all my pimples went away or like I had a different hair cut. My clothes didn’t change labels. But they looked different on me.

I thought about the Cinderella fairy tale, about her glass slippers and how she went to the ball with them on, and everyone thought she was the most beautiful girl there. But then she ran away from the prince and lost one of her slippers and she turned back into the cinder girl, the servant. No one recognized her from the ball, not even her own stepmother and stepsisters.

I lifted one of my feet out of its slipper and looked at myself in the mirror again.

It hurt my head, like one of those fun house mirrors that distorts you. Only this time I was seeing myself the way I always looked. The drab hair, the shirt that made my middle look bigger, the pants that showed my ankles and made me look like a scarecrow. Both slippers had to be one to make it work. One of the rules of magic. There are always rules, I thought.

The Cinderella fairy tale talked about a fairy godmother who used a magic wand to make Cinderella look beautiful. But what if she hadn’t needed a magic wand? What if all she needed was the glass slippers left on her doorstep in a magic hand-me-down bag that her stepsisters took pleasure in passing along to her because they thought it would humiliate her to have to wear someone else’s clothes?

Or maybe the hand-me-down bag was all that was left of fairy godmothers these days. Or there were too many people who needed things and so the fairy godmothers got to them this way, all at once.

Mom came home and saw the mess in the living room of all the things in the hand-me-down bag. I hurried in with the other kids and we cleaned it up and put everything back in the bag.

Mom got a little more sleep that night than usual, because she didn’t have to spend so much time on homework, or on keeping the other kids happy.

The next day, I went to school with the glass slippers on.

I hadn’t changed anything else.

But it was like Cinderella in the ballroom. Everyone wanted to be by me. They whispered to me when I passed by.

“Do you think Cherry would let me watch her do her hair? I want to learn her tricks.”

“Did you see how that shirt makes her look? She could be a model.”

“I wish I had her figure.”

“She should go into fashion design.”

I got home and saw the hand-me-down bag was still there. The tear I had made in it with my hands to get at the things inside was healed, like the bag was a living creature, not just a thing.

“Good bag,” I said, patting it.

I felt a little guilty keeping all the other things in it. I didn’t know what they were meant for. They hadn’t done anything for any of us.

And then I knew what to do.

The hand-me-down bag was meant to be passed along.

I cinched it up around the top and walked outside. I roamed the streets, trying to think where I should take it. I was selfish enough to think—not that house. Not those girls. Not the way they treated me.

But after about an hour of this, I realized that I didn’t need to decide anything at all. The bag would decide for me. All I had to do was walk with it and let it guide me. I had the glass slippers on, and maybe that helped or maybe they just made the walking seem less painful.

The house I left it at was on the other side of town. I thought it would be a poor house, one like ours where you could see the need from the outside. But it wasn’t. It was one of those mansions that I had to look away from when we drove past because it made me feel a pit of envy in my stomach. I didn’t feel that anymore.

I just thought about the Cinderella who was waiting inside, not expecting a hand-me-down bag to have anything she wanted in it. But she would be surprised, like I was, at the magic. I didn’t know what she needed, but the bag would have it.