Wyatt is number 54, the field lights came on at 7:14, and somewhere between the National Anthem and the opening kickoff a booster mom named Cheryl handed me a paper boat of nachos with a smile that said congratulations on your purchase and absolutely no follow-up questions.
The cheese on those nachos was the same temperature as my hand. It was the same temperature as the bleacher. It was, I am convinced, the same temperature as it had been when Cheryl scooped it from the warming bin at 6 p.m., and it will be the same temperature when the custodian throws the tray out tomorrow morning. Real cheese moves. Real cheese pools, separates, betrays you in front of your son’s friends. This cheese held its shape like a small orange brick. Cheryl told me, beaming, that the booster cheese has not separated once in 40 years. She said it like it was a school record.
I posted a picture in Stadium Foods and What’s Really In Them and a woman named Pauline who used to do quality control for a regional dairy co-op said the only way a cheese sauce stays emulsified that long is if there’s no actual dairy load-bearing in it, and that what I was eating was technically a ‘shelf-stable analog’ classified somewhere between processed cheese food and weatherproofing. Pauline is now my second-favorite person in that group, behind only the woman who blew the whistle on the soft pretzels at SeaWorld.
I tried to ask Cheryl what brand the cheese was and she told me the booster club gets it in a #10 can with a label that just says CHEESE FOOD PRODUCT and a lot number. She was thrilled to share this. She said they buy it by the pallet from a restaurant supply in Hickory and that the same can does the nachos, the soft pretzels, AND the baked potato bar at homecoming. One can. Three menu items. An entire football season. I asked if I could see the can and she said it was ‘in the back,’ which is a phrase I now understand means ‘I am not going to let you see the can.’
Meanwhile the hot dog situation behind her is, candidly, a federal matter. They are microwaving the hot dogs inside the plastic sleeves. Cheryl confirmed this without me even asking. She said it ‘keeps the juices in.’ She said it like she was passing down a recipe. Garrett’s cousin Mae, who works the front desk at a pediatric clinic and has basically nursing-level instincts about plastics, has told me a hundred times that you do not microwave anything in a sleeve, much less a sleeve that is touching a cured meat made of three different mammals. The plasticizers leach. They just leach. That’s what they do. They are leachers.
The Gatorade situation I will spare you, except to say that the booster club offers it in five colors, and three of those colors do not occur anywhere on earth that is not a Gatorade bottle or a poison dart frog. Cleo asked for the blue one and I told her the blue one was specifically engineered in 1987 to make a child run for 90 more seconds and then lie down for the rest of her natural life. She took a juice box from my tote with the resigned dignity of a child who knows her mother.
I had, of course, packed for this. Sourdough turkey sandwiches on the loaf I started Wednesday, a thermos of raw milk from the Yoder farm, a baggie of soaked almonds, and four hard-boiled eggs from the girls (the chickens, not my daughters; my daughters do not lay). Marlene saw the spread, looked at her own paper boat of glowing nachos, and asked if I had a spare egg. I gave her two. That’s what neighbors do.
Wyatt scored a touchdown in the third quarter, ran straight to the concession stand at halftime, and ate three baskets of nachos in the parking lot before I could intercept him. Cheryl gave him the fourth one for free. He was glowing slightly under the field lights. I’m telling myself it was the eye black.