Girls, At Play | Part 1
décembre 19, 2017
This is how we play the game: pink means kissing; red means tongue.
Green means up your shirt; blue means down his pants. Purple means in your mouth. Black means all the way. We play the game at recess, and the teachers don’t notice. We stand on the playground by the flagpole, arms ringed with colored bracelets from the drugstore, waiting. The boys come past us, in a bunch, all elbows, laughing. They pretend not to look. We pretend not to see them. One of them reaches out and snaps a bracelet off one of us, breaking it like a rubber band, fast and sharp as plucking a guitar string. He won’t look back. He’ll walk back the way he came, along the edge of the football field. And whoever he picked, Angie or Carrie or Mandy, will watch him go. After a minute she’ll follow him and meet him under the bleachers, far down the field, where the teachers can’t see. We play the game every day. In eighth grade we’re too old for four-square and tetherball and kickball. It doesn’t have a name, this game, and we don’t talk about it even when we’re by ourselves, after school, the boys gone off to football or paper routes or hockey and no teachers around. But the game has rules. You go with the boy who snaps your bracelet. You don’t pick the boy; he picks you; they’re all the same to you. You do exactly what the color prescribes, even if you hate him, like we hate Travis Coleman whose fingernails are always grubby. No talking other than hello. Don’t tell anyone if you hate it, if his tongue feels like a dead fish in your mouth, if his hands leave snail-trails of sweat down your sides. No talking with the boys outside of the game. No talking about it afterwards, no laughing, no anything, even if it’s just the three of us. Pretend it never happened.
Rub the dent on your arm, the red welt where the bracelet snapped and split, until it goes away. Ask anyone in Cleveland and they’ll tell you that girls in Lakeview Heights don’t play this kind of game. Maybe down in Cleveland Heights they play it, or across town on the west side. Maybe there are a few naughty girls at the high school, reapplying lipstick in the rear view mirror before they slide out of their cars and tug their miniskirts down over their thighs. But certainly not at the junior high school, where the kids still get recess, where parents still pack lunches sometimes, where Mr. Petroski the principal still comes on the P.A. every morning to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. Not in this tidy little world where there are still four-square courts and hopscotch grids painted on the blacktop. Certainly no one plays games like that here. The other girls pretend not to know us. Their worlds are full of wholesome extracurriculars: riding lessons, field hockey practice, violin, ballet. They crowd like cattle on the playground, whispering and looking our way. Some of them say we’re stupid, or high. Some of them say we don’t know any better. Some call us sluts. We are the fallen women of Lakeview Heights Middle. We aren’t stupid, or high. We don’t do it because we don’t know better. And it isn’t hormones either. If you asked us, we couldn’t explain, but it has something to do with their stares. They’ve always stared. Because we live south of Scottsdale Avenue, where the houses are smaller and mostly rentals. Because we carry our lunches in plastic grocery bags instead of paper sacks, since crisp little paper sacks cost money and we get plastic bags free from the Sav-Mart. Because Carrie’s dad works nights at the liquor store, and Mandy’s mom wraps gifts at the mall customer service desk, because Angie lives with her grandmother and her parents are off in Vegas maybe, or is it L.A.? We hate the stares and we love them too and maybe that’s why we play the game. After school nobody says, “Should we stop by the drugstore today?” We just walk single-file, the automatic door half shutting between each of us, like it’s saying, “All right, Angie, but not you, Carrie—all right, Carrie too, but not you, Mandy—all right all right.” We walk through the candy aisle to the back of the store, and Carrie maybe picks up a Baby Ruth to eat on the way home. Then we stroll down the toy aisle, with its neon-plastic cars and its fake Barbie dolls, the ones with fake Barbie names like Trissy, whose skin is a little too orange, whose hair is a little too blond and you can see the roots of it set in little holes. We hate them because when we were younger our moms bought us Trissy, as if we couldn’t tell the difference between the real thing and the cheap imitation. Sometimes we turn their boxes around so the dolls face the chipped paint on the back of the rack. Once Angie stole a black Sharpie from Mr. Hanson the gym teacher and we drew on the cellophane window of every doll, big handlebar mustaches and goatee-beards and devil-horns. On the last one, a Trissy in a frosting-pink tutu with ribbons up her legs, Angie X’d out the eyes and drew a balloon squeezing out of her mouth. It said, “I’m an ugly whore.” Today we don’t mess with the dolls. We go straight to the fake jewelry and pick a pack of bracelets each. These aren’t the hard plastic kind spray-painted fake gold. Those are for little girls, girls that still want to play princess.
Ours are thin as spaghetti and stretchy, all different colors and a dollar for five. We take them up to the register and pay for them and while we walk home we open the bags and slide the new stack of bracelets onto our right arms and toss the empty bags onto someone’s lawn. The next day we hold our arms across our bodies like we’re pinning towels to our waists and wait for the boys to come by. We are ready to play the game. We are stores of iniquity with a wide, wide selection. This is how we are when Grace moves to town. From all the way across the blacktop we can see that everything about her is wrong. Her shirt is too big: she’s tiny and it’s huge and hangs down past her butt. The cuffs of her pants stop at her ankle and a band of black cotton sock shows between hem and sneaker-top. Her shoes are too new, too stiff, too blindingly white in the lunchtime sun. Even the way she stands is wrong, hands clasped behind her back, index fingers linked, like she’s been told not to touch. The other girls don’t tease her, or call her names, or throw things at her. They just stand in a knot looking at her and talking loudly about other things, fingering the silver O charms around their necks that are in this year. We’ve never seen her before but something about her looks familiar: the way she stands, heels at right angles, left toe pointing towards the girls, right toe towards the football fields where the boys are shuffling our way. Then she turns her head towards us, and we remember exactly what it’s like to be her, alone and awkward on the open prairie of the playground. We know how those stares feel like blinding sunbeams, how you find yourself squinting when they hit your face. One shoulder comes up towards her ear, as if she’s half shrugging, and her ridiculous T-shirt puffs in the wind and we feel tenderness welling up inside us. We cross the asphalt and cluster around her, like mother elephants circling a calf. We shield her from the stares with our bodies. The boys drift toward the abandoned flagpole, their eyes longing after us. Without us they seem lost. One of them puts out his hand to the cold steel of the pole. Olly-olly-oxen-free. “What’s your name?” we say, and her face goes pink with surprise. Up close we can read her T-shirt. Under a picture of animals in the jungle it says, “If the Macaw saw what the Leopard spotted, then the Toucan can, and you can, too! SAVE THE RAINFOREST!” “Grace,” she says. “Grace,” we repeat. “Grace.” We like the sound of it, the round single syllable, like a polished metal bead. A simple name, a sweet name. A name not yet corrupted into a diminutive. We wonder, for a moment, if with Grace we can be Angela, Caroline, Amanda. “I like your bracelets,” she says. We push them under our coat sleeves. “They’re nothing,” we say. “Just old junk. Come sit with us. Tell us about you.” We lead her over to one of the picnic tables by the pine trees where no one ever eats, because we eat in the shiny cafeteria where the tiles are painted with vegetables and fruits and the food pyramid. She’s twelve, a year younger than us, and her birthday is in July and she’s in the seventh grade, Mrs. Derrick’s class. She came from Ketchikan, and before that she lived in Montana, and Louisiana, and Del Norte, Colorado, and Eureka, South Dakota. “My dad works for the army,” she says. “We move a lot.” She’s an only child. She had a dog once, a brown-and-white spaniel mutt named Goober, but he died three years ago. Her favorite food is lemon cake with chocolate icing. Her favorite color is blue. We drink in the minutiae of her life until the bell rings and it’s time to go in. Grace stands and looks around, as if she’s forgotten the way back into the building. “Meet us after school,” we say, and tuck a stray lock of blond behind her earlobe. Then she smiles and runs off.
That afternoon we don’t go to the drugstore. We take Grace over to the Tasty-Q and buy her a chocolate-dipped cone. She’s never had one before. She licks the melting ice cream from her fingers and the way she sits with her arms wrapped around her knees, trying to take up as little space as possible, you’d think she was ten. Grace tells us that she’s never lived in one place for more than six months. She’s never finished a school year in the same place she started. Her father does some kind of engineering work. We know engineers build bridges, and we picture him in a trim navy worksuit with blueprints in his hand. Her mother died of cancer when she was three. “Most days,” Grace says, “I’m a latch-key kid.” She doesn’t say so, but we know we’re the first real friends she’s ever had. At her house Grace pulls out toys—real toys, toys we had long ago, when we were still kids. We play Monopoly through the afternoons, Operation, even Candyland. We flub the Funny Bone and Charley Horse and Broken Heart operations just to feel the buzzer tingle our fingers. Weeks pass and we don’t go near the flagpole. At recess we see the boys out of the corner of our eyes. Some of them move on to other things, football, kickball, skateboarding. But some keep on, as if out of habit, moving towards the flagpole like a fog and then dissipating, disappointed. After a while we forget to even watch them. We’re busy, with Grace, because she hardly knows anything at all. We teach her important things, like how to find the best seats in the movie theater. Asking for butter in the middle of your popcorn, not just on top. How to snap your gum. How to tell the future with straws: Tie the paper wrapper in a knot. If it breaks the thing you’re thinking of will happen; if it stays knotted it won’t. Grace doesn’t know any of this. We give her things she’s never had before: cherry Cokes, Pixy Stix, curly fries. Things we can afford on our allowances, things we forgot the joy of.
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