Looking Back Read online

  We didn’t play football. The parents in a university town are too concerned with brains and concussions for that, perhaps. Our boys (we thought of them possessively as ours, although I never dared lay claim to them myself) were never as burly as those from the nearby factory towns. There was a casual, compact, debonair quality about them—even when sweating—that suited soccer.

  I followed all the games from bake sale tables, selling popcorn to support a prom I doubted I’d attend, watching the players less than their cheerleader girl friends whose prom thrones and rose arbors, I reflected bitterly, my popcorn and my brownies would be financing. I disliked cheerleaders on principle because they spent so much time on what had always seemed to me (a scholar-TV watcher) a meaningless activity; because they were always getting out of English early and riding the team bus to away games, because they spent their idle moments in classes going over cheers under their breath, doing little tap dances under their desks; because their hair was always blond and their noses always turned up and their voices always smart enough to sound lovably dumb—but of course what I really held against cheerleaders was the fact that I wasn’t one of them.

  While the sustaining spirit of the cheering squad depended most of all on jealousy and bitchiness (it seemed to me), with every girl cartwheeling for herself, each one trying to kick and flip higher than the one before with what, to me, was depressing perkiness, the team itself—the soccer boys—seemed really to be composed of friends, dribbling and passing to each other; sprawling in the mud and patting bottoms (the cheerleaders wiggled theirs) in a brotherly spirit their fans along the side lines never matched. School spirit that we heard so much about meant yelling things like “Kill him” “Cream them” “Smash them” and, when we failed to kill, “You bastard.”

  And that was what was cultivated. Every morning, after a game, our principal would read the soccer scores over the PA system (“Oyster River 8, Farmington Zilch”) with a gusto he could never muster for debate and math. Then, before the big, end-of-fall championship, there’d be a compulsory pep rally held in the gym, with a speech from the coach and a big hand for all “our boys” and a recap of the season’s highlights, which meant every play of every game, and a pentecostal-style audience-participation cheer, beginning with “Who’s the greatest team?” led by the principal. And we’d scream “Bobcats” back, in answer. “Who’s Number One?” “Bobcats!” “What did you say?” “Bobcats!” “LOUDER!” “BOBCATS!”

  And then, of course, the cheerleaders would lead a cheer, spotless in white and blue, proclaiming our team to be “Rrrrred HOT,” while the boys themselves stood by examining their sneakers, looking mostly pink. Some of us tried to escape the rallies, hiding in bathrooms or ducking out side doors and going home, but there were always teachers on patrol to catch us, and the penalties for poor school spirit were stiff ones, so we rarely tried to get away. The school hippies openly yawned or made up their own cheers, lounging on the bleachers in happy groups. For me it wasn’t so much a matter of deep conviction that I couldn’t cheer (I liked soccer); I simply couldn’t shout out “Bobcats,” I guess because cheering reduced my value to that of just another mouth, another set of vocal chords, another bandwagon-jumper. To some—the ones who cheered so happily—it was, I guess, a pleasure to feel part of a huge and seemingly united crowd—assimilated. But not everyone was as confident and comfortable as they looked, I suspect. (Sometimes safety comes not out of silence but from making noise.) Many others may, like me, have mouthed the words and tossed their jelly beans out of the bus window the next day, riding home victorious, from The Biggest Game of all, not out of true abandonment but out of the desire to look that way.

  Almost every high school drama club I know of has a Green Room backstage. It may not be green, and it may not even be much of a room (a closet, a loft, a corner by the fire escape) but there will be someplace where The Drama People sit, not just during plays and rehearsals, but between plays too (we called them “Shows”—very Broadway, we were) and during lunch hours and study halls and skipped classes. They come—members of the drama club, and I was one—to play cards and to talk plays and past, relived glories, quoting lines from old productions of Teahouse of the August Moon and Harvey, with lots of in jokes. They give to costumes and to the set attention that their classes never arouse; they play with the lighting and bristle when someone who isn’t Drama Club comes near it; they hang lights, sending messages back and forth on walkie-talkies, though they’re standing barely fifteen feet apart

  And except for an occasional dark horse discovery—fresh talent, new blood—they get all the parts in all the plays. Rarely, one or two may have some flair, but most of them have picked up what they know from plays on “Hallmark Hall of Fame” and from the high school English teacher who directs them, and teaches them how to fall on stage, and how to put on spirit gum, and how to sit down like a little old man. (Loosen your trousers first, then lower slowly, putting your hand on the chair seat first to indicate unsteadiness. We worked it into every play.) Each one has his specialty: there is the perpetual ingénue, who must have been told once that she looked cute when she bit her lip and has been doing it ever since; the English accent specialist, the boy who kisses well onstage and the ham, who all the people in the audience think has great talent (“Straight to Hollywood, kid,” they inscribe in his yearbook). A great ad libber, he has been known to change the whole ending of a play—his Macduff forgot about the “from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripp’d” business, but no one cared because he made such funny faces when he carried Macbeth’s head onstage.

  Something about amateur dramatics invites cliquishness. It’s the roar-of-the-grease-paint, on-with-the-show, break-a-leg glitter that even the treading of our high school’s squeaky boards and the rising of our mothy velvet curtain gave us—“show biz.” Acting was, for the uncreative, an entree to the arts, for the show-off a legitimate excuse to do just that, a chance to be looked at and listened to by everyone. You can’t fake being a musician; you may fake talent, but either you know how to make notes come from the instrument or you don’t. There’s no short cut to the discipline that comes from hours of playing scales or, for a dancer, working at the barre, but anyone can learn a line, step on a stage, project his voice and call himself an actor. Without self-discipline or training or talent, amateur actors fall in love with the intoxicating sound of applause and the idea that they are dashing, exciting, colorful people, instead of potential outcasts who have found a niche, not in the obscure corners of the school, but on center stage.

  The desire to be thin began to haunt the girls of my generation. We were not the only ones who counted calories, of course, but we are specially prone to the obsession, caring not so much about figure as about flatness. Never really aware of Marilyn Monroe (she died when we were nine; we knew her best from an Andy Warhol silk screen), our models came from the ironing board school—large eyed, elbow-jutting girls in Seventeen and, of course, Twiggy. It’s as if we rejected growing up and sought, with flat chests and hips narrow enough to slip through a porthole, to keep forever young—pre-teen, in fact, frozen in a time when life (as we remember it at least) seemed simpler. Maybe they still seek curves and cleavages in the Midwest and South, where a teen-ager’s perfect weight stands at a full ten pounds beyond the Eastern and Pacific ideal, but in New York the girl who blossoms early mourns her ripeness and looks enviously at the lucky ones whose bikini tops fit better on the back—those starving-orphan shoulder blades—than on the front.

  Current fashion dictates a thin image or, maybe, the thin image dictates current fashion. Purple tights are meant for spindle legs; boys’ sleeveless undershirts are embroidered for girls who want to look like boys—girls with sad eyes and trembling lips who dress and move and talk, in this era of de-masking, T-grouping, group-groping, with what’s become a favorite noun, the highest compliment—vulnerability. The plastic wrappings and metallic layers we sported in the sixties have disappeared along with heavy, masking m
ake-up and stiff lacquered hairdos sculptured from a night in jumbo rollers.

  And flesh, once the sign of a generous, passionate soul, is now a kind of mask itself—a sign of unecological wastefulness, consumerism, undisciplined living. From love-of-flesh we’ve come to love-of-bone, to the striving for bodies that mirror our tastes in books (Zen) and foods (health) and clothes (artfully drab and down-home) and occupations (the austere Me—farming) and people. On all sides we’re bombarded with reinforcements of our thin ideal—in store windows and movies and magazines that cannot go a month without some exercise or diet, magazines that fill their pages with before-and-after tales of former fatness and with send-away-for sauna pants and strange-looking “mummy wraps” that let you sweat away an unwise ice cream cone.

  And here are the teen-age girls, hopping on and off their scales three times daily holding in their breath to hold in their stomachs, weighing bird-sized scoops of cottage cheese to reach a size still smaller, agonizing over a gained pound (“I can’t believe it! I’m up to ninety-nine!”) and fasting to an almost hallucinatory high—all for that glorious moment when someone says “Honey, you look just awful, you’re so thin,” at which point they know they’re almost thin enough. Sometimes they try to sleep the weight off, or stick a finger down their throats to purge their stomachs of an extra bowl of yoghurt. They talk endlessly of diets about to be embarked on (like trips, with every day’s itinerary mapped out, except this is a tour of sights not seen, foods not eaten) and tally calories and carbohydrate counts with a skill that somehow disappears during math exams. They think more about food than the people who still eat, but they cherish an image of themselves as disregarding food altogether. Eating is a masculine pastime; it’s daintier to refuse food than to take it, and more feminine to sip unflavored gelatin than to bite a hamburger. The Scarlett O’Hara who ate before the picnic so that she wouldn’t gorge herself in front of her beaux is not dead yet.

  Still, there’s something absolutely contemporary about The Diet: the idea that you can accomplish change—transformation—not by anything you do (for we are an often lethargic group) but by the thing you don’t do—that is, eating. I think of the cafeteria table where I sat and didn’t eat lunch all through my junior year—an all-girl table of constant dieters who would inform us of the calorie count of every item that appeared on the table moments before it disappeared into someone’s mouth. “Carrot stick—fifteen calories!” some helpful friend would announce. “Oh no,” someone would say, “you’re forgetting the energy you burn up chewing. It’s actually—2.”

  We should all have been telephone poles, but there were those after-school Cokes downtown (like something out of Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney, with a jukebox soundtrack) to make up for the dieting. And bake sales. Every Saturday, just about, some club would be raising money with a card table full of brownies set up beside the drugstore. Sometimes there would be a car wash instead, but car washes called for boys, and the boys weren’t much for fund-raising. It was the girls—the women behind the men—who ran our school, the smart cheerleaders who made their big, grinning boy friends think they were thinking. And it was the girls who baked the chocolate-chip cookies that sent the Outing Club canoeing, the shortbread for somebody’s open-heart surgery (we loved to rally for a cause; valentine hearts or real ones—it hardly mattered). It was the girls who kneaded the bread dough—often the very ones who were the most dedicated dieters—that paid for the prom decorations only girls would notice anyway, and the girls, some of them, who baked even though they’d never get nearer to the prom than clean-up day the morning after. But somehow kneading that bread and selling it brought them closer to the event, so they spent on their banana breads and their German tortes what they would have put into eye make-up and Grecian curls.

  Anyway, we’d all write these club activities down on our college applications. Suddenly, being “extracurricular” mattered tremendously. How would college admissions offices know that all my two years in the French club meant was that I could bake gâteau chocolat as well as angel food? So it wasn’t all for nothing. Then there were the boys, who wheeled past (they just happened to be in the neighborhood) to see what was up and to eat free cookies, and we laughed dumb-femininely at their smart comments, pretended to be hurt when they said the cake frosting tasted like car grease, because after all, without them we might have decorations, but we wouldn’t have dates. Some of us didn’t anyway. For those there was compensation in the leftovers—the broken cookies and the loaves of French bread someone had returned for a refund because the dough was unbaked in the middle. We often ate more than we sold, nibbling through our wares as if God or Providence made an exception for broken cookies and crumbs of fudge. But on Monday morning we’d be dieting again, of course, with celery sticks held like cigarettes between our fingers as we planned who’d bake what next Saturday.

  AFTER THE LAUNCHING OF Friendship 7, the first U.S. orbital spaceship—we were in second grade, and, gathered around a TV in the gym, we joined in the countdown, out loud: ten, nine, eight, seven … —after that, NASA held little interest for most of us. I watched the first space walk, hoping, I think, for Major White’s cord to snap and send him off in space (just as I hoped on “Dr. Kildare” for incurable disease) and imagining what it would be like to die floating in space. I watched the moon walk too, but after the first novelty and the realization that no moon men would appear, that there would be no oxygen leaks or short circuits, I turned off the set and haven’t seen a space walk since.

  There was so little drama to it all, everything charted and predictable, double checked, A-OK, over and out. What we wanted was the thrill of the unexpected. Sometimes we got it from real life episodes—an assassination, an election scandal, a mass murder—but never in the space program. It seemed that real life had been upstaged for us by scripted, manufactured dramas on the screen. Gemini and Apollo, “One small step for man …,” unglamorous-looking astronauts’ wives and short-haired, pale-faced astronauts (even their beards, at splashdown, seemed crew-cut), and the minor excitements created by a broken TV camera or a lunar module delay—none of them could compete with “Lost in Space” or “Star Trek’s” Mr. Spock and his zippered, jump-suited crew, battling “The Blob” or space fever. Magazines filled their coverage of the space shots with what’s called, I guess, the “human angle”—the tuna sandwich some astronaut ate once in the cabin, their “gees” and “gollys,” their in-flight references to Snoopy and the World Series, and the knowledge that astronauts drink Tang too. All of that took from the strangeness of space, brought it closer to home, made walking on the moon seem to us like jogging around the block. NASA robbed us of mystery, diminished the appeal of a once-forbidden fruit by increasing its attainability. (Suddenly we could get pomegranates in the supermarket. Moon rocks next?) No wonder, now, we have a science-fiction passion, a love of the occult, no wonder that Flash Gordon has suddenly reappeared at campus film festivals, or that we read our horoscopes daily and talk of witches.

  When we were seventeen, my friend Laura changed her name to Lucifera (Lucy for short) and announced she was a witch. She had always looked the part, a bit—very tall, very skinny, with strange, sharp features—and now, in her blue lipstick and long black gowns, with a locker she grew cobwebs and mushrooms in, until the principal ordered her to clean it out (“A hex on him” she said) she looked even more like one. Lucifera’s witch transformation came on the cusp of the supernatural era, when Rosemary’s Baby was born and astrology became fashionable, but it was more than just a fad, I think, taken on with obsessive energy—a game, at first, perhaps, that turned dead serious. Lucifera read old tracts on the subject, studied medieval documents, memorized chants and spells. Rumors spread—all true—that she slept in a graveyard and that the bloody marks on her arms and legs came from self-inflicted scratches made by her inch-long fingernails.

  People laughed at her—her strangeness uniting us in a comfortable, shared normality—but she frightened us too. There is a
scrap of doubt in all of us, ready to latch onto things outside the realm of biology books; we all carry with us the memory of strange unexplained events and when we meet a girl like Lucifera, we tend to pool our doubts and memories, like Girl Scouts trading ghost stories around a camp fire. Full moons and dark nights, voodoo dolls and stinging herbs and howling witchcraft left us uneasy. I saw the dirt under Lucifera’s purple fingernails and the Band-Aid box she kept her deadly nightshade in, but there were others who really believed, who saw only witchness, a few peripheral ninth-grade girls and an unloved outsider of a math-brain boy, and they attached themselves to Lucifera and to witchcraft, having a label, at last, for their outsiderness. As witches, they could flaunt it.

  They trouble me, these groups that band together with only their differences from the rest in common—these alliances that misfits make. Their eighteen-hour marathons, locked up together in a tiny room, till one of them reaches hysteria, their talk of “evil,” and the car accidents and illnesses that prove them right—their talk of evil turned out to be an evil in itself, and really dangerous. It spreads; strangeness and fear always do, as normality doesn’t. As once we attributed the unexplainable to God, and trusted and accepted it, now we may attribute it to witchcraft and the occult, and tamper with it.

  The witchcraft plague is surely a jackpot for television, and the new shows are full of it, because it’s chilling and dramatic, of course, without requiring explanation and the usual end-of-program tying up of strings or, for that matter, having to make any pretense at good sense. One program last year, I remember, dealt with a 1970s murderer (a vampire, the authorities suspected) who left his corpses drained of blood. I kept watching the show, in spite of my feeling that this was not just a bad program but a very ugly one, an evil one, because I wanted to see what rational explanation they would cook up at the end (a medical student practicing transfusions? an escaped mental patient?), but discovered instead that the killer really was a vampire, 1972-style, coffin, fangs and all. And when he was apprehended, as of course he had to be, it was by vampire-catching means (using a Bible and a crucifix) which left me feeling that, because the L.A. police force put themselves out for him, he’d really won. I’m overly protective of the viewing audience, perhaps, but I think the distinction between fantasy and reality is blurry enough without vampires and straight, Dragnet-type cops sharing one bill. We’re left uneasy, nervous, doubtful, and ready to pounce on victims like those Salem villagers more than two centuries ago.