Looking Back (8 page)

I think it was in notes, more than in conversations or Girl Scout meetings or Saturday mornings together on our bikes, that friendships and hatreds were established. We committed ourselves on paper to things we never would have said out loud (this seems odd to me now) and we saved them all—round-lettered, backhand messages written on blue-lined loose-leaf paper, the corners of old workbook pages, candy wrappers, lunch bags; they circulated around the classroom from desk to desk and year to year (once, in the seventh grade, we even had a pulley between desks). These were, I think, the greatest writing practice we got in school. Sometimes the notes contained news, stretched out in soap opera-type installment doses, to last us through an uneventful day. Stories leaked slowly—“Guess what?” would travel down my row to Becky till, at last, the teacher’s mind deep in another matter, my note would cross the hardest point along its course, the latitudinal gulch between our rows (not within them) and she would unwrap it, folded like an origami bird, and write her answer, “What?” and pass it back to me. We wrote about TV shows watched the night before, about how much we hated math and what our weekend and after-school plans were (“Are you going to walk home or take the bus?” “Short cut or long way around?”).

Great wars, or so they seemed to us, were waged in notes, based on elaborate strategies we worked out, like homework, the night before. If things were getting dull, I’d plan to pick a fight, with accusations of two-facedness (talking about someone behind his back was the most common offense) or cruelty to an underdog. Realizing early that I wasn’t going to be a leader among the
in,
and refusing to simply follow, I became the champion of the class failures. The boy with the harelip, the girl who lived in a trailer and smelled bad, the one who tended to drool a little on her collar, I defended (enjoying the image of myself as kind and gentle benefactress, protecting the sensitive, the poet soul) from the group I loved and envied—for their coolness—and hated for the fact that they had never quite admitted me. I lectured Margie in suffering, histrionic moralistic tones (“You, who have always been popular, cannot know what it’s like not to be. Think, for a moment, what Franny feels like when you laugh at her or lead her on to make a fool of herself, because she thinks that then you’ll be her friend. I
know—
I know what it’s like on this side of the fence …”) Margie, a genuinely friendly girl, would be first puzzled and defensive. And then, as her troops moved in on me, sarcastic and coldly vicious. She’d write back to deny the charges, and there would be the ghastly period I always forgot about, setting out on my battles, when I seemed to be sinking and friendless, and wished I’d never started the whole thing.

Nothing felt worse than Margie’s green eyes on you when you were out of favor, waiting for you to reveal weakness. When we were fighting, our lips set tight, and we walked in a special way, skirts swishing, tossing our hair behind our backs in a show of more confidence and contempt than we really felt. Margie’s alliances were her advantage. Mine was my loner stance, the pretense I kept up of not caring, and the confidence I felt as a devastating note writer. (Inevitably, we got down to that—she scornful of the big words I used, I of her small ones. Our logic lacked much, but at the time I always felt like Perry Mason, pouncing down on her verbal inadequacies with what I saw as killing sarcasm. “It’s clear from your spelling of ‘deceive,’ ” I’d write, “that you are deceived yourself. Perhaps you need a dictionary.” That, in seventh grade, seemed the height of cutting sophistication.) Finally the storm would break and we’d come to that lovely warm moment when, like the generals of warring armies meeting in no-man’s land to make peace and shake hands, in separate and mutual admiration, we’d make up. First there would be long, honest outpourings from both sides, effusive apologies and confessions, secrets and much Honesty. Then she would smile at me and I would glow with the humble pride and gratitude that comes from understandings and alliances between adversaries. I loved those brief periods when we were friends.

Not until we graduated from high school and found ourselves, once out of competition, to be
friends,
did I discover that Margie, too—the coolest, most confident-looking golden girl of our class, whom I had always admired and envied, was herself less blithe than I’d imagined. We all have something of the observer in us, the detached outsider, the self-conscious partygoer who’s capable of worrying, deep in a back-seat embrace, whether his/her breath smells of pizza, something of the grandstand football fan who’s never quite sure, when the cheerleaders demand “Give us a
B
—” whether to give them one or not (looking around to see what the other kids—who may be looking at
him—
are doing). We are none of us quite as carefree as we look.

To be
popular,
like having a “good sense of humor” or “a great personality,” has always seemed to me one of the doubtful virtues ascribed to cheerleaders in yearbooks. Although popularity is a word I’ve never warmed up to, I recognized the results of it every time we chose up teams in gym, every time there was a dance or a field trip. One could tell from where we sat in the lunchroom—the tables of girls with too-long dresses and hair that curled in the bent, squared-off way that came from using bobby pins; the tables of matching mohair skirts and sweaters, and shoulder bags bursting with notes and cosmetics, the girls who had only their failures in common, and the ones who sat together in victory feasting. Some tables, a few, were boy-girl, but mostly there was segregation—the boys set apart from the girls, and the popular from those who weren’t. Oddly, we all knew our places, what seats we were destined to sit in. I remember once a lunch hour bake sale took away three tables, leaving a group of confused ninth graders with voices not yet changed and legs too long for their elastic-waisted corduroy trousers. They moved one table back to where the senior boys, the ones with flasks of Bourbon in their lunch bags, normally sat. Like a delicate marshland environment, our whole ecology, our structure collapsed that day.

How do kids decide, as they invariably do, which people to admire and which ones to ignore or laugh at? It’s more than looks (good looks often happen
after
popularity, in the happy confidence that comes from admiration). Anyway, beauty, real beauty, wasn’t all that successful at my school, any more than grades over B+ were. Cuteness, on the other hand, was fine—for girls
and
boys—especially in junior high, when too much tough male handsomeness comes frighteningly close to big-league sex. It’s been the making of all those junior high-style idols—Bobby Sherman, the Monkees, David Cassidy. I’d study girls’ faces and imagine how they looked just out of bed, still puffy-eyed, before mascara. Besides the button noses and clean hair (a shampoo every night) there wasn’t much that make-up couldn’t manufacture.

If nobody at Oyster River especially longed to be anything as uncomfortably extreme as
beautiful,
everybody, but everybody, very much wanted to be Good-Looking, and preferably terrifically Good-Looking. Most of us thought it had a lot to do with clothes and make-up. But the instincts—to know
which
make-up, how to look as if you really didn’t care and it was just by accident that peach blusher brushed across your cheeks, like a leaf or a wind—that was the rare thing and the thing that, unlike looks, you had to be born with. Some girls would try too hard and end up with lipstick on their teeth, a place around the jawline where, like a mask, the make-up color ended and the skin began and notes circulating about them—“What’s she trying to look like, a fashion model?”

For a boy to be Good-Looking, it was mainly a matter of how to look as if you didn’t care how you looked, and still look good. It was the ability to wear a tucked-in shirt (the over-blouse, shirttail effect always resembled the styles worn by pregnant women) and still not come off short-waisted and stilt-legged. A dozen accidents of pure luck entered in—how a boy took his liquor (one sick messy drunk, or three, might haunt him forever) and when the choir-boy lilt changed to a grunting bass, and how much squeaking and warbling came between the two. One boy I remember stayed locked into that halfway period from seventh grade through twelfth, never sure, ahead of time, which way his voice would come out when he spoke. Sometimes it yodeled from one octave to another, or broke off altogether so he’d mouth the word and nothing came. He ended up not saying anything, of course, for which one unobservant teacher penalized him heavily and finally put him back a grade, so that his station in the school, like his sad, thin voice, remained in limbo for another year.

Sometimes the body alone killed one’s chances to be good-looking or attractive. There were boys with girlish hips (and I’m afraid we walked behind and imitated them) and there were girls whose legs and arms were boyish. There were girls who, from third grade on, hunched over with the weight and shame of early bras—I remember the shadow that showed through under white blouses, and the moment, each September in the locker room, when we pulled off our shirts and revealed just what had happened over the summer and just who would join the club. For some that moment came too early and for others, like me—scrambling frantically in the bathroom to get my gym suit on, snapping the fasteners that concealed an undershirt, while lines of girls formed outside the door and called “Hurry up in there, I’ve gotta go”—it came fatally late.

Before describing what seemed for years a hopeless career at sports, a never-ending battle between myself and The Ball (base-, foot- or volley-)—before doing all that, my pride and vanity demands an interjection into present time. So, for whatever it’s worth, or for all the other struck-out, last-to-be-chosen, ball-fumbling, race-losing gym class failures, I want to say that I know now I’m
not
a total washout at sports; I
can
run and swim and throw a ball; I can do sit-ups and jumping jacks (it always seemed a marvel of co-ordination, getting your legs and arms to work at the same time like that). But what athletic prowess I have now comes not because of, but in spite of, elementary and junior high and high school gym.

I don’t think people who are athletic can understand people who aren’t, as people with a gift for music just can’t comprehend what tone deafness would be like. All through those years, I feared and dreaded gym class and expended more effort in trying to get out of it than would have been required if I’d gone. I forged medical excuses and said I’d lost my sneakers (“so borrow some,” the teacher said, and for the next hour I clumped around in someone else’s smelly shoes). I hid in closets, I said I was getting adjusted to contact lenses, or nauseous or that I had cramps—this every two weeks or so, until the teacher caught on and started keeping records. It was my early failures on the playground—tripping when I jump-roped Pepper, freezing at the top of the slide, unable to go down and having to retreat finally, down the ladder I’d mounted so nervously, all those things made me decide, by age eight, that I was what at our school was called
spastic
(“no offense,” they’d say)—a flop at all things physical. And once you decide you are, or let other people decide it for you, you become so. Those who are labeled unco-ordinated grow worse every year from nerves and lack of practice (no one picks them when teams are chosen up, and once they’ve been dealt out, their team captain juggles the batting order so they never have to play).

By sixth grade, when we started having gym class three times a week and playing more than volleyball, I stopped questioning the fact that I was unco-ordinated and accepted my role as bench warmer and occasional team comedian, a guaranteed laugh whenever I went up to bat or tried to dribble down the basketball court. That rarely happened though—kids knew better than to toss the ball to me. Running back and forth, up and down the gym to chase a ball that I would never catch seemed pointless to me, so I took to giving myself little rests—sitting down on the goal line or drifting off into the woods when I played the outfield. My teammates must have been relieved to see me go, but the gym teachers never gave up, each one clearly hoping that she would be the one to break through to me, each one taking my failures as a personal insult to her.

Gym teachers were forever trying to bring out something that wasn’t there. It wasn’t just that my muscles seemed improperly strung and my stamina lacking, my problem lay in the fact that I simply didn’t care. Oh, I cared a great deal about looking clumsy as I struggled up the climbing rope and ran, knees knocking, to first base on the pinch-hit home run made by a friend. I cared, when teams were chosen, that I was picked last or dealt out like a handicap to whichever seemed the better team. But I had no feeling for nets and baskets and spinning, bouncing leather-covered spheres. I never felt, when watching a game, the way suspenseful books and movies make me feel—tense and excited, muttering under my breath (a cinematic cheerleader) “Come on, you can do it. Hurry up!”

One thing that saved me was that the class “nummers,” “retards,” “spastics” like me always came in pairs. All through the years I spent at war with balls and gym teachers, I had an ally. Sometimes she would be the class fat girl or someone born with a leg that never grew right, or a poor girl from the country with wishbone legs and bangs that fell down in her eyes and no real gym suit, which was (I suspected) the real reason why she didn’t play. Most often my companion on the outfield would be a borderline outsider like me, someone who wrote poetry or got talked about for her funny hand-me-downs, or a hysterical giggler who chewed her nails and wrote dirty jokes with me in study hall.

The way athletic competence had been distributed among us always fascinated me. It happened too often to be a coincidence, that the same people who were cool and cute-looking and bright (in an unthreatening way)—and popular—were the ones who got picked first, were, in fact, the captains of the teams. Their grace—no, it was ease, really, and confidence—seemed to be transferable from one part of life to another. The line between Winners and Losers cut through all phases of school life almost from kindergarten on, and to cross it was as hard as kicking the ball past the goal posts. At age thirteen I felt my life was fated from then on—I saw the pattern that had followed me so far as never-changing right up to my death. That was what frightened and discouraged me most about phys. ed.—the feeling (reinforced at every step) that I was a loser. It seemed as though the sole object of those classes was to chip away the ego, bit by bit. I felt it on the baseball field and at the spider ball net, stumbling through the obstacle course (alone, the whole class watching) and back in the locker room, where even my sweatlessness pointed to my inadequacy, where the jaunty, casual talk in the great open shower stall (it comes to me in nightmares still—a gas chamber) made me blush, where the weekly inspection to make sure we’d really showered sent me fleeing to the bathroom stalls (I’d bared myself enough in class without adding the shame of a flat chest to my list of failures), where even opening the combination lock of a locker was impossible for me.