The Cheer Leader Page 5

  JULY ’72

  This is Andy out in the backyard. He has big scabs on both knees and is dripping with water and mud. He had tried to make a slip and slide in our backyard by hoeing up the grass and wetting the dirt. It didn’t work very well and right after Bobby took this picture, Andy got the worst whipping that I can ever remember him getting. It seems to me that Andy always had big scabs and even now, I expect to see Band-Aids on his arms and legs. Of course, that’s ridiculous because he has changed since his slip and slide days. Bobby had to replant the grass and he was so quiet, that day and all summer. I knew it was either Nancy, or the thought of going off to school, but he shouldn’t have been upset, ever, not Bobby.

  AUGUST ’72

  I feel very scared without Bobby. We are on our way home from taking him to school and Andy and I are standing in front of a Tastee Freez. Andy has a huge milkshake so that he will have to stop every five miles to pee but I only drink a small Coke because I am so very upset that Bobby is gone. I feel like he’s gone forever and I realize for the first time that I love that dark haired creature who used to stand at the end of my crib more than I have ever loved anyone. It makes me see just how little I love Howard even though I’ve told him twice that I do. All I can think about is Bobby’s face, kind of white like he wanted to cry but not crying just like the summer when he busted his head wide open at Moon Lake. I had cried then, too, but not Bobby, not Wally Cleaver, and I wonder why I don’t love a nice boy, a smart boy who plays sports and keeps his hair clean and short like Pat Reeves. I think about Pat Reeves the rest of the way home and seeing the way the sun hits that Tastee Freez sign makes me remember a very important thought: “One day, I will really fall in love,” I think and by then it is dark.

  FALL ’72

  It is hard to remember exact dates now because everything starts going real fast. I’m in the tenth grade, a cheerleader, honor roll student and for some reason, I still date Howard. Here we are after the Homecoming dance and we are in my living room kissing which is what we have in common. Mama leaves us alone after she takes this picture of us, me with my funeral mum corsage, and Howard tells me that my face looks like the inside of a kaleidoscope. This hurts my feelings greatly because I know that he must think that I’m very unattractive. Then he explains to me that the reason is because he does drugs. This makes me feel much better because I realize that it is his fault and not mine that my face looks screwy. I try to reform Howard by giving him a book called Getting High on Life. He says that is stupid, that he loves flowers and trees and me. He wants to touch my padded bra but I don’t let him. I tell him that he should only take drugs if he’s sick. He says I don’t know where he’s coming from, he wants nature to be intensified, he says that nobody is a virgin anymore. He says I am a nobody in so many words and this upsets me more because I am not ready to be exposed; I am too young to be exposed and so I must do a difficult thing; I must let Howard have his freedom, I must thrust him into that field that people play, where they sow oats.

  I shouldn’t have been upset about Howard because I knew that last night when he held my hand that things were not the same. You can tell a lot by holding hands; it is much more intimate than those parts which serve no other purpose except sexual functions. Those parts just sit around waiting for something to happen but your hands do everything. Somebody told me once that I couldn’t talk if my hands were tied behind my back and that’s probably true because I use them constantly. I don’t just mean to do the little quote signs that a reformed hoodlum turned preacher did once in church when he said “crap” and “screw” to shock the congregation. I mean to kind of show each syllable, comma and period. When someone holds my hand I feel like they are holding on to everything that I’ve ever said or ever will say. If Howard felt any words that last night, they were in a different language; a colorful “groovy” language that I did not know nor have any desire to learn. It just wasn’t right, not the way that I remembered holding hands with Jeff Johnson in front of the Quick Stop.

  Howard had said that I was a virgin, a nobody and this truly infuriated me. I wanted to be “good” and “nice.” I wanted to be somebody. Mary was a virgin and she was somebody famous but this made things worse. I had never really understood how all that happened, how Joseph had been such an understanding gentleman about the whole thing. It was just one of those questions without an answer, the kind that must be accepted. What I couldn’t accept was ME and what I had in common with HER. Mary was chosen because she was so good and I needed to think of something fast because Jesus was supposed to come back and if there really weren’t ANY virgins (as Howard had said) to choose from, I might be a possible choice. No, I had to do something. That’s why I started smoking Salem cigarettes in my bathroom late at night, fanning towels and spraying deodorant so that no one would know. It was a bad thing to do and since I hid it from the world, that made me a lying hypocrite and that was even better. I could be both good and bad.

  SPRING ’73

  The spring goes even faster than the fall. Pat Reeves has come back to me and we do nice things like go to the movies and play tennis. I am not in love with him but I am a May Court sponsor along with Tricia, Cindy and Lisa. I smoke cigarettes in front of them and say “damn” and “shit” a lot. This keeps me “in” without exposing myself. I make excellent grades and I am very fit. I am so fit that I buy an itsy bitsy teeny weeny chartreuse polka dot bikini for the summer that comes so fast it makes my head spin.

  SPRING ’74

  I’m spinning, spinning like a top. My how time flies when you’re so much fun!! Again, I am a May Court sponsor! Again, I am so “in.” I am still completely unexposed and no one even knows this except me. They don’t realize that in being identical to them that I am so unique, that I am merely using this as a disguise. It is such a way to stay fit, to survive! Beatrice is no longer even a little bit fit; she is a misfit and that must be where the word comes from, misfit, one who is not in shape, one not fit enough to survive among the rest, as a part of the rest. I am not even sorry that Pat Reeves, my loyal standby, is going to graduate and go away to school. Why, there are so many fish out swimming around all night with their eyes open, just waiting for me to throw my bait!

  SUMMER ’74

  This picture has a date, July 7, 1974; however, I choose to simply call it Summer ’74, because it could be any day, every day of that summer, when we would all go down to Moon Lake to lie out in the sun. Tricia, Cindy, Lisa and I are sitting on colorful towels at the end of a pier, and it makes me remember so many things, our bodies greased with Hawaiian Tropic, the smell of a banana and coconut blend. On the pier to our right when facing the lake (though they are not in this picture) were the college people, the All American bronzed beauties of Bobby’s class, destined for fame, fortune, MBAs. To our left, at the far end of the lake, was a dock where the water was dark and slimy, where (as Blue Springs reputations went) dark and slimy people hung out. That end of the lake was shady and none of those people ever sunned; they all wore long jeans and long hair in spite of our swampy summers. I remember thinking how odd to see Beatrice at that end of the lake instead of with us, in the middle.

  I liked to lie on my stomach and pull my towel up to my neck so that I could see through a crack in the pier down to the cool green water. It seemed so small that way, just a crack, and the surrounding voices would evaporate just like the water on my legs and I felt alone just as I had years before in my bathrobe. It was nice feeling small, detached, like I had escaped being similar to so many people, like I was not in the limelight of Blue Springs High which I most definitely was: chief cheerleader for the coming year, National Honor Society, a May Court representative for two years; the list went on and on, all of the good things of all the best years of my life, something like Gidget goes to Moon Lake. Yet, something was odd; something in the curve of the horizon that was blocked from my sight by the row of pine trees, by the very way that the world moved, not letting me see what was beyond. There was a time wh
en such a sight would have brought to mind Christopher Columbus and the story of how he held an orange and watched a butterfly creep up the side, appearing slowly like the sails of a ship on the horizon, but it seems that then, I had other things on my mind. I remember thinking the words “All I could see from where I stood were three long mountains and a wood” and I couldn’t believe that Edna St. Vincent Millay had written that when she was just a little older than I was then, the thought that someone so young would have had the power to describe something as big as a rebirth. Sometimes when I was lying there, I would get an almost sexless feeling. It wasn’t that I wasn’t feminine because I was (though never the frilly type) and it wasn’t that I was masculine even though I was quite athletic and prided myself on being so. There was no reason for this feeling; I wasn’t beautiful like Tricia but I wasn’t unattractive. I was the one that always managed to merit “cute” which is really a half-assed thing to say about someone, though superior to ugly. It was a nothing feeling that seemed to spread over me: not feminine, not masculine, not heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, not penis envy or any other such shit. No, it was sexless, asexual, like the tiny amoebae that I had seen under the microscope in biology, sliding, changing, splitting, totally independent, a single organism and yet, identical to the other millions. Was there an original somewhere in that green cool water where a population greater than the world fed and bred? It was such a big thought, something to hold onto, that all of the days seemed the same. This picture is a picture of every day of the summer of 1974.

  LOOSE SHOTS

  It goes faster and faster once summer ends. Here I am in my Varsity cheering suit. There is a big hairy arm around my waist but I have cut away the person that this hand belongs to. Here I am again at Christmas in my brand new coat and again there is an obstrusive hairy arm. What is that story about the hairy buried arm? Here, I am the May Queen. Finally, I wear the crown, a tinfoil looking crown and I am wearing a strapless dress with a tulle skirt. Pat Reeves is behind me and he has not changed one bit, though I look different, something is different. The theme of the dance was something ridiculous like “Venus and Mars Are All Right Tonight” (you know, the Paul McCartney song) and there are these tacky chicken wire planets hanging all around. Here, I am in front of my college dorm that late summer day when my parents left me there and it almost doesn’t look like me at all. My hair is long, longer than it has ever been, and I don’t look as fit as I have before. I’m not even looking at the camera. I am looking at my hands like a complete fool, but pictures get that way, old and strange, some of them total misrepresentations of the given moment.

  II

  Even when we are beyond a change and can see it, there remain parts that are unaltered and maybe for just a second or maybe forever we will get that same feeling that we felt at that given point even though we know what is to come. Didn’t Marcel Proust on one depressing winter day spoon a morsel of cake to his mouth and find a youthful pleasure even though that pleasure will move toward youthful pain and eventually back to that cold depressing day? Why do we often forget what we know of a past future? Why was I always so frightened by the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz even when I knew year after year that Dorothy would be just fine, that it was all a dream? Why, even after I discovered that they were West Point cadets, servants of the U.S. of A.’s military flying incognito, did those monkeys make me so damn nervous? I feared for the lives of Lassie, Roy Rogers, Sky King even though I knew full well that they would be back the next week. Why am I always so hopeful when Lana Turner returns (the mysterious Madame X) and John Forsythe’s eyes light up in the courtroom; the young attorney (her son) is representing her in his first case and he sees her only as the social zero from skid row which she has now become? Why am I so hopeful when I know she is going to die and her son will never know that she is his mother? Why do I cry every single time that happens and why do I always hope that Natalie Wood will return from her sanitorium in Splendor in the Grass and find that Warren Beatty is not married and that they will resume as though nothing had ever happened? Am I ignorant or is it IGNOREance? How can Guy de Maupassant rip my gut out every single time I read The Necklace and why do I expect to read it just once and the words will have changed and the pitiful victim will discover that the necklace is paste before she works her ass off for the rest of her life to replace it? Why is irony so ironic? Why do I so often want to reconstruct my life, pretending that parts had never happened, wanting to go back to a time that seemed better? Why, even now, do I feel a sentimental stirring when I recall the summer before my senior year even though I know what is to come? It is a home movie, a romance, a horror film, playing in my head for free over and over. It begins slowly, as slow as that lazy summer where it begins.

  His name was Claude Williams but everyone called him Big Red, I suppose because he was both of those, and too, a name like Claude never could have done him justice. He was not handsome in that perfect chiseled feature way that Tricia found so attractive, nor did he have that Then Came Bronson ruggedness that Lisa was so enthralled with. He did not have that boyish All American appeal that I admired so in Bobby, either. Red Williams was different and I was immediately attracted to his disheveled dark auburn hair, the thick irregular waves that stayed even when his hair was wet, his broad erect shoulders, the bleached hairs that covered his chest and long muscular legs, the large brown eyes that seemed oddly misplaced, too soft for his other features. I noticed him the very first day of summer vacation when Tricia, Lisa, Cindy and I went to Moon Lake to sun and swim, and I knew with that first glance that he was different from anyone that I had ever met.

  The day itself was perfect, a blue cloudless day; there was a full turn-out of the college students who had returned to Blue Springs for the summer (another reason for our being there), and summer itself was a long lazy stretch in front of us, promising days just like that one, leading to our long awaited senior year.

  “Let’s get as close as we can to the college people,” Tricia whispered as soon as we got there. She had waited weeks to see Tom Fulton again, a guy from Bobby’s class who was now a Phi Delt at Carolina, a perfect face person whom Tricia had, in a spontaneous intoxicated moment, kissed at a Christmas party. We had all heard the story numerous times and were perfectly willing to go along with her. “I see him, he’s here,” she whispered.

  “Let’s just walk on over,” Lisa said all too loudly and pulled her shirt over her head to expose a tight black bikini that made her rounded hips and full thighs look even whiter. “You like my new suit?” She did a turn, her shirt thrown over her shoulder. This brought a few whistles from the pier where the older people were set up but none of us had the nerve to look over and see who had whistled.

  “God, make her stop,” Tricia hissed and looked at me as if I could control Lisa; no one could control Lisa.

  “You wanted to be noticed.” Lisa laughed and waved her hand as a thank-you to whoever had whistled. “Look, Jo’s brother is over there. We can say that we’ve come to talk to him.”

  “He’d kill me,” I said which probably wasn’t true, but I had to do something on Tricia’s behalf, who by then had her head turned in the opposite direction and was walking towards a small empty pier close by. Cindy was right behind her and I waited uncomfortably while Lisa took her time rearranging the thin straps that supported her top heavy top. “Come on,” I said and also looked in the other direction, towards the shady end of the lake where Beatrice and another girl from our class whom I vaguely knew, were stretched out on the hood of a car listening to a blast of hard rock. It startled me to see Beatrice down there in her tight jeans and tee shirt because I still always expected her to be with us, though that had all changed. I was startled more by whom she was talking to, bright green beach britches, the only person at that end of the lake with any skin showing. I wanted him to turn around.

  “I don’t know why Tricia gets so upset,” Lisa said and waited for me to say something which I did not. “She wanted Tom to s
ee her, didn’t she?” I just shrugged and we walked on. For all I knew it would be one of those unbearable days where Tricia and Lisa weren’t speaking and Cindy and I were caught in the middle. Tricia was already oiled up and leaned back with her eyes closed, and as I sat on my towel and waited for one of them to speak, I looked back towards the shady end. He was still there, hands on his hips, lifting his feet up and down as if he were walking in place. In the other direction was the college crew. Bobby was there, already tan, drinking beer, listening to the Beach Boys, and to my dismay, talking to Nancy Carson.