The Cheer Leader (6 page)

This picture is dark because it was taken outside at night. We are all at Beatrice's house for a Halloween party. Nobody even dressed up; it was not a fun party.
I am sitting on a trash can, away from the garage where everyone else is making out. Pat Reeves is beside me as he had been for over a year, and we still had a lot to talk about. We talked about poetry or the movies that we had seen, our childhoods, families. Being with Pat was comfortable because it was like being with Bobby. But, it seemed to me that something was missing, that I was at a dead end, missing out on the excitement that everyone else claimed to have. That's why out of the blue I decided to break up with Pat Reeves. That's why I spent most of the night staring at Howard who is the tall guy with curly hair smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. He was in the eleventh grade and known as a “lady's man.” I was impressed by this. Why the hell I don't know, but I was impressed, and I stared at him all night long, even before I broke up with Pat, even after Pat asked me “why?,” looked back and forth from me to Howard who was talking to Lisa, looked out at that little spark of fire in the yard where Beatrice and Mark Fuller were smoking a joint, and then turned and walked away so slow motioned without saying a word. I didn't even feel sorry for him, just for myself.

Here, I should feel like something in my Jay Vee cheering suit. I'm in front of the bleachers kicking my legs and yelling “boogie woogie, right on, right on,” but I didn't feel like anything. I felt like nothing. I wanted to lie down on the court and blend with the lines, get stomped.
At this time I had very mixed feelings about everything which made it difficult to concentrate on anything. I was a xeroxed either/or. All the time, an either/or. Either a cheerleader representing my school as fine moral fiber Or Howard's girlfriend and managing to fake my way through all the parties with an occasional “wow man” or “cool.” I had not heard of
The Feminine Mystique
at that time and it is a blessing or things would have been complicated. My salvation was to look at all the people in the stands and to think how they all had lives and how they would go home to their own homes, sleep in their own beds. They were like ants or the amoebae that I had seen sliding around in biology, looking like everyone else but not being anyone else. It took a great deal of thought and it was a secret thought, the kind that could keep me safe.

This is Bobby in his graduation robe. He looks very distinguished and we are all very proud of him. Nancy Carson is all scrunched up beside him smiling. Everyone thought she looked so pretty that night, except me. I thought she looked somewhat whorish in that tight red dress. Howard is in the background, slumped on the couch, and it looks like he is staring at Nancy's chest. “Howard is a doll” all of my friends said except for Pat Reeves who would not even talk to me. But Howard was not a doll and I had discerned this long before; I knew that very night with him slumped there, his hair falling in his eyes, that he was not the one for me, yet, I made no
effort to do anything about it. It was perfectly obvious that I had no future with such a person, a person who was very popular in school, but a person who used double negatives constantly, a person who had shoplifted a radio. He did those kinds of things, things that Bobby or Pat Reeves never would have done. This is a good picture of Bobby, though, except for the fact that Nancy Carson should have been cut away, especially since she broke up with him just two days after the picture was made. He locked himself in his room for the entire night. He did not even come out when I went to his door and told him that
Marcus Welby
was on. We watched that show together every single Tuesday night and that is why it took years before I could forgive Nancy Carson that one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 when 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.

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.