{"id":246,"date":"2016-10-17T19:26:08","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T19:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=246"},"modified":"2016-10-17T19:26:08","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T19:26:08","slug":"story-of-the-month-twirling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=246","title":{"rendered":"Story of the Month: Twirling"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"images\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In my high school, it was presumed, with the unquestioning trust of folk wisdom, that cheerleaders were popular, but majorettes were fast.\u00a0 I guess there\u2019s just something about women who wear boots and carry sticks.<\/p>\n

But the two cases I knew personally did not fit the stereotype.\u00a0 My younger sister was one.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The other twirler I knew was my best friend, Christine Stavros.\u00a0 Christine was an unlikely majorette.\u00a0 She had dark, bony good looks which high school boys did not recognize as pretty.\u00a0 She was smart and level-headed, not given to fads of dress or language.<\/p>\n

Christine and I were in all the same classes, from American History to Gym.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, on Fridays, I\u2019d stay overnight at her house.\u00a0 It was an old house, dark and crowded with furniture, except for Christine\u2019s room.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When I climbed the narrow, carpeted stairs to Christine\u2019s bedroom, it was like ascending from a deeply shaded forest to a snowy, mint-scented plateau.\u00a0 The open space and still whiteness of Christine\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They never seemed to go out together.\u00a0 We were visited by each one individually.\u00a0 They all had jobs, but they still lived at home with their parents, native Greeks.\u00a0 Perhaps that was their way.<\/p>\n

Christine\u2019s 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.\u00a0 They were never drunk, but there was often a beery smell about them.\u00a0 In winter, cold air still emanated from their jackets.<\/p>\n

Of course, I had a terrible crush on the younger of the two brothers — Pete, with his handsome Greek face and boyish good humor.\u00a0 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<\/i>.<\/p>\n

With Christine as its youngest member, it was a household of adults, a very different experience for me.\u00a0 I had five younger siblings, and my home was a chaotic realm of children.\u00a0 Christine\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In Christine\u2019s house, I could still be a child, and a pampered one at that; at home, I was more often the junior mother.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t recall now what Christine and I talked about on our walks, during our overnights, in our daily phone calls.\u00a0 (We were on the phone together, televisions on in the background, when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.)\u00a0 I do know we never talked about why she became a twirler, though I remember watching her practice in her back yard.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She spun it in figure eights between her legs and around her hips with breathtaking speed and fluttering grace.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Christine\u2019s body was like her baton, lean and efficient.\u00a0 One of my strongest memories of her is from a gymnastics unit in Phys Ed class.\u00a0 We were tumbling partners and had to perform some springing and rolling maneuvers over each other.\u00a0 As she passed above me, I smelled in quick succession the warm odors from her armpits and her groin.\u00a0 It seemed a terribly intimate moment, intensified because she was ignorant of it.\u00a0 I found myself waiting to catch her scent again the next time she jumped over me, as if to verify it.\u00a0 It was stunning to realize that my body made those same odors.\u00a0 I watched her face to see if she noticed when it came my turn to tumble over her.\u00a0 She gave no clues.<\/p>\n

We also never talked about boys, even though by junior year I had a steady boyfriend.\u00a0 He began as a creature of Saturday nights and the telephone.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s parents\u2019 couch.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t fit into our closed, virginal world.\u00a0 In the end, it was that tradition of the unspoken that helped part us.<\/p>\n

Christine and I went to different colleges.\u00a0 We saw each other at Thanksgiving that first year, but without the framing routine of our high school days, our interactions felt awkward.\u00a0 Her house, which had once seemed a sanctuary, now appeared restrained.\u00a0 I had never been a \u201ccrowd\u201d 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.\u00a0 At Thanksgiving, my hometown and my own family, not just Christine, felt like skins I had shed because they had become too small.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We\u2019d have more time at Christmas, I told myself; we\u2019d be able to be easy together again, retrace our way into the old niche and maybe even expand it.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 He had come, he said with considered nonchalance, to take me out to lunch.\u00a0 He acted as if he\u2019d simply been in the neighborhood and impulsively stopped by, when, in fact, he\u2019d driven three hours to get there, with no guarantee that he\u2019d be able to locate me once he arrived.<\/p>\n

It was an uncomfortable few hours.\u00a0 Theo was too attentive and too complimentary.\u00a0 I hoped my unenthusiastic politeness was sufficiently discouraging.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he appeared to be having a grand time.\u00a0 I did manage to convince him not to return the next Sunday.<\/p>\n

Early during Christmas break, Theo called and asked me out to dinner.\u00a0 Embarrassed on his behalf and unable to claim a full calendar, I couldn\u2019t think of how to say no, but I promised myself it would be the last time.\u00a0 We went to a steak house on the New Jersey palisades high above the Hudson River.\u00a0 All the other patrons were middle-aged couples.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I felt like I was eating dinner inside a giant heart.\u00a0 Theo spent a lot of the meal reminiscing about our lunch date.<\/p>\n

After dinner, we had to sit in the car a few minutes while the engine warmed up.\u00a0 I stared out the windshield at the sparsely populated parking lot, the naked trees, patches of old snow and ice on the ground.\u00a0 Barely listening to Theo\u2019s 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.\u00a0 My annoyance at being in this situation, which was a compound of Theo\u2019s unseemly pursuit and my own ineptitude at saying no, instantly swelled to repulsion.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I let him kiss me.\u00a0 I felt I was paying for my dinner, for a lesson in misplaced kindness, and, more vaguely, for a continued place in Christine\u2019s life.\u00a0 In a face-off between me and Theo, I could imagine around whom the sympathy of that tight family group would close.\u00a0 As yet, they didn\u2019t even know he was interested in me.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Theo was not a persistent Romeo, and I rallied enough self-regard to definitively fend him off after the first kiss.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Christine\u2019s family moved that year.\u00a0 I went to the new house once, in late summer.\u00a0 By then, I had turned Theo down often enough that he\u2019d stopped calling, but I still hadn\u2019t told Christine about any of it.\u00a0 She and I had become strangers.<\/p>\n

Christine showed me around the house, an airy but soulless tract home that her parents were very proud of having acquired.\u00a0 Her mother called to her.\u00a0 She left me in her bedroom to go see what was wanted.\u00a0 Suddenly, Theo was there, shutting the door behind him, staring at me with wet, hungry eyes.\u00a0 When I moved to leave the room, he grabbed me and pulled me to him, thrusting his thick, dry lips at my mouth.\u00a0 He had never before been so aggressive.\u00a0 I was not afraid of him, and I easily extricated myself.\u00a0 He leaned his dark head back against the bare, white wall and smiled at me.<\/p>\n

I did not want anyone to discover us, to discover his desire.\u00a0 It seemed damning evidence against not him, but me.\u00a0 It was as if, because of my silence or because of my mild acquiescence, I were guilty of something unforgivable, or at least incomprehensible.\u00a0 I made some abrupt excuse and left the house.\u00a0 I never saw or talked to Christine again.<\/p>\n

The intervention of a man between two women and the consequent demise of the women\u2019s friendship is a common enough tale.\u00a0 But usually it is a case of rivalry between the women for the man\u2019s affections, or the alignment of one of them with a man who monopolizes her time and energies.\u00a0 What happened to me and Christine was a variation on those familiar stories.\u00a0 Our friendship, with its careful limits, was the final, sweet space in which we could be girls.\u00a0 That refuge is what Theo\u2019s attentions to me destroyed.\u00a0 Invaded virginity, even symbolic virginity, can\u2019t be repaired.<\/p>\n

My wish to avoid Theo kept me away from Christine\u2019s house and family and away from Christine, but there was really no place to which to return anyway.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cTwirling\u201d was published in the anthology, An Intricate Weave: Women Write About Girls and Girlhood<\/i>, Laguna Beach, CA, 1997.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my high school, it was presumed, with the unquestioning trust of folk wisdom, that cheerleaders were popular, but majorettes […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-noellesickelswp","post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-allposts","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}