Story of the Month: Twirling

In my high school, it was presumed, with the unquestioning trust of folk wisdom, that cheerleaders were popular, but majorettes were fast.  I guess there’s just something about women who wear boots and carry sticks.

But the two cases I knew personally did not fit the stereotype.  My younger sister was one.  A tomboy, she had mastered the baton for the physical challenge of it, as in younger years she had excelled with yo-yos, hula hoops, and softballs.  The other twirler I knew was my best friend, Christine Stavros.  Christine was an unlikely majorette.  She had dark, bony good looks which high school boys did not recognize as pretty.  She was smart and level-headed, not given to fads of dress or language.

Christine and I were in all the same classes, from American History to Gym.  She lived close to the high school, and her street was part of my own route home, so we walked together after school nearly every day.  Through humid Septembers and Junes and the snows and rains of winter, past piles of dusty leaves in late autumn and beside the brave yellow announcement of forsythia bushes in early spring — we were as faithful as mailmen.

Sometimes, on Fridays, I’d stay overnight at her house.  It was an old house, dark and crowded with furniture, except for Christine’s room.  She had the largest bedroom, as neat and uncluttered as a convent and high enough above the big maples outside to be bright in the afternoon and dappled with moonlight or car headlights at night.  When I climbed the narrow, carpeted stairs to Christine’s bedroom, it was like ascending from a deeply shaded forest to a snowy, mint-scented plateau.  The open space and still whiteness of Christine’s room were striking not only because of the contrast with the rest of her house, but also because of the contrast with my house — small and busy, a place of bright colors and swarming motion — and the cubbyhole quality of my bedroom with its slanted, attic ceiling and scribbled-on floral wallpaper, its grandmotherly mahogany dresser and high, fourposter bed.

After an evening spent talking or playing cards, Christine and I would nestle into the twin beds and lie in the dark talking some more.  One by one, her two older sisters and two older brothers, arriving home from various pursuits and hearing our voices, would stick their heads in the door to say hello.  They never seemed to go out together.  We were visited by each one individually.  They all had jobs, but they still lived at home with their parents, native Greeks.  Perhaps that was their way.

Christine’s sisters usually just stood in the doorway a few minutes and then moved on, as if we were a museum exhibit or a way station on a pilgrimage, but the brothers came in and sat on one bed or the other and spoke softly about nothing, chiding us and making us laugh.  They were never drunk, but there was often a beery smell about them.  In winter, cold air still emanated from their jackets.

Of course, I had a terrible crush on the younger of the two brothers — Pete, with his handsome Greek face and boyish good humor.  Theo, the other brother, was equally friendly, though not as slyly flirtatious as Pete, but Theo was decidedly homely, with the limpid eyes of an abandoned puppy, and he seemed vastly older, a man.

With Christine as its youngest member, it was a household of adults, a very different experience for me.  I had five younger siblings, and my home was a chaotic realm of children.  Christine’s parents were formal and remote, but I always felt a great sense of warmth in that family because of all the attention Christine got from her brothers and sisters.  Though Christine and I spent most of our time together alone, and though I certainly loved her for herself, the pull of that family group was an inseparable part of my attachment to her.  In Christine’s house, I could still be a child, and a pampered one at that; at home, I was more often the junior mother.

I can’t recall now what Christine and I talked about on our walks, during our overnights, in our daily phone calls.  (We were on the phone together, televisions on in the background, when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.)  I do know we never talked about why she became a twirler, though I remember watching her practice in her back yard.  The baton flashed, passing from one hand to the other with such natural control that the thing and the person became one, and Christine herself seemed the source of the rotating bar of light.  She spun it in figure eights between her legs and around her hips with breathtaking speed and fluttering grace.  When she dropped it, which she rarely did, even her retrieval of it from the grass was graceful, a smooth curtsy, a quick scoop of her fingertips, and when she thew it up in the air, it appeared to fall back to her softly and slowly, like it was coming home.

Christine’s body was like her baton, lean and efficient.  One of my strongest memories of her is from a gymnastics unit in Phys Ed class.  We were tumbling partners and had to perform some springing and rolling maneuvers over each other.  As she passed above me, I smelled in quick succession the warm odors from her armpits and her groin.  It seemed a terribly intimate moment, intensified because she was ignorant of it.  I found myself waiting to catch her scent again the next time she jumped over me, as if to verify it.  It was stunning to realize that my body made those same odors.  I watched her face to see if she noticed when it came my turn to tumble over her.  She gave no clues.

We also never talked about boys, even though by junior year I had a steady boyfriend.  He began as a creature of Saturday nights and the telephone.  With him, I was unfolding a self that seemed apart from every other aspect of my life, even though the unfolding invaded every private behavior, from shaving my armpits for the first time to what I had to tell the priest in the confessional box.  Eventually, we were lovers in all but the most technical sense, and by the spring of my senior year, instead of walking home with Christine every afternoon, I was drowning in sensuality on my boyfriend’s parents’ couch.

Though neither Christine nor I had a closer girlfriend, we hid some of the truths of our selves from each other, the truths that didn’t fit into our closed, virginal world.  In the end, it was that tradition of the unspoken that helped part us.

Christine and I went to different colleges.  We saw each other at Thanksgiving that first year, but without the framing routine of our high school days, our interactions felt awkward.  Her house, which had once seemed a sanctuary, now appeared restrained.  I had never been a “crowd” person in high school; at college, living in a boisterous female dorm and being courted for the first time by many young men, I had entered a heady social realm, and I was pleased to find I could participate in it and still be myself.  At Thanksgiving, my hometown and my own family, not just Christine, felt like skins I had shed because they had become too small.  The oddly genteel distance between me and Christine saddened me, but it could not compete with the excitement and challenge of my new world, to which I was anxious to go back.  We’d have more time at Christmas, I told myself; we’d be able to be easy together again, retrace our way into the old niche and maybe even expand it.

Then one Sunday afternoon, the buzzer in my dorm room sounded, and when I went downstairs to the lounge, I was surprised to find Theo there, grinning sheepishly in a proper, well-brushed navy-blue suit.  He had come, he said with considered nonchalance, to take me out to lunch.  He acted as if he’d simply been in the neighborhood and impulsively stopped by, when, in fact, he’d driven three hours to get there, with no guarantee that he’d be able to locate me once he arrived.

It was an uncomfortable few hours.  Theo was too attentive and too complimentary.  I hoped my unenthusiastic politeness was sufficiently discouraging.  Unfortunately, he appeared to be having a grand time.  I did manage to convince him not to return the next Sunday.

Early during Christmas break, Theo called and asked me out to dinner.  Embarrassed on his behalf and unable to claim a full calendar, I couldn’t think of how to say no, but I promised myself it would be the last time.  We went to a steak house on the New Jersey palisades high above the Hudson River.  All the other patrons were middle-aged couples.  It was the kind of place that tried to create an intimate atmosphere in a large, formless, overheated space by using low lighting, upholstered red velvet chairs, starched tablecloths and crimson napkins, and a lot of dark wood.  I felt like I was eating dinner inside a giant heart.  Theo spent a lot of the meal reminiscing about our lunch date.

After dinner, we had to sit in the car a few minutes while the engine warmed up.  I stared out the windshield at the sparsely populated parking lot, the naked trees, patches of old snow and ice on the ground.  Barely listening to Theo’s patter, I was just thinking with relief that soon the evening would be behind me, when Theo leaned over with the obvious goal of kissing me.  My annoyance at being in this situation, which was a compound of Theo’s unseemly pursuit and my own ineptitude at saying no, instantly swelled to repulsion.  Nevertheless, I let him kiss me.  I felt I was paying for my dinner, for a lesson in misplaced kindness, and, more vaguely, for a continued place in Christine’s life.  In a face-off between me and Theo, I could imagine around whom the sympathy of that tight family group would close.  As yet, they didn’t even know he was interested in me.

Fortunately, Theo was not a persistent Romeo, and I rallied enough self-regard to definitively fend him off after the first kiss.  Except for my churning distaste, it had been a strangely incorporeal experience; we were both so padded against the cold by thick coats and gloves.

Christine’s family moved that year.  I went to the new house once, in late summer.  By then, I had turned Theo down often enough that he’d stopped calling, but I still hadn’t told Christine about any of it.  She and I had become strangers.

Christine showed me around the house, an airy but soulless tract home that her parents were very proud of having acquired.  Her mother called to her.  She left me in her bedroom to go see what was wanted.  Suddenly, Theo was there, shutting the door behind him, staring at me with wet, hungry eyes.  When I moved to leave the room, he grabbed me and pulled me to him, thrusting his thick, dry lips at my mouth.  He had never before been so aggressive.  I was not afraid of him, and I easily extricated myself.  He leaned his dark head back against the bare, white wall and smiled at me.

I did not want anyone to discover us, to discover his desire.  It seemed damning evidence against not him, but me.  It was as if, because of my silence or because of my mild acquiescence, I were guilty of something unforgivable, or at least incomprehensible.  I made some abrupt excuse and left the house.  I never saw or talked to Christine again.

The intervention of a man between two women and the consequent demise of the women’s friendship is a common enough tale.  But usually it is a case of rivalry between the women for the man’s affections, or the alignment of one of them with a man who monopolizes her time and energies.  What happened to me and Christine was a variation on those familiar stories.  Our friendship, with its careful limits, was the final, sweet space in which we could be girls.  That refuge is what Theo’s attentions to me destroyed.  Invaded virginity, even symbolic virginity, can’t be repaired.

My wish to avoid Theo kept me away from Christine’s house and family and away from Christine, but there was really no place to which to return anyway.  Christine and I had sown the seeds of dissolution ourselves on those long-ago whispered nights when I did not tell her about the dizzying passion my boyfriend could stir in me and she did not tell me about how it felt to be a twirler, parading before cheering crowds in a short skirt and tasseled white boots, throwing a spinning silver wand high, high into the air and catching it behind her back without missing the beat of a single kick-step.

 

“Twirling” was published in the anthology, An Intricate Weave: Women Write About Girls and Girlhood, Laguna Beach, CA, 1997.