Original Sins (25 page)

Hundreds of cheerleaders from all over the South gathered at the cheerleading clinic on the college campus near Birmingham to stay in the dormitories and learn each other's cheers. In the mornings the huge football field was packed with girls in uniforms practicing. Several instructors, in outfits like tennis dresses, sauntered around, watching and critiquing.

“The little blonde in the middle … Yes, you. More pep to your jump, honey! Bounce when you come down!”

In the afternoon were workshops on poster painting, float construction, pom-pom making. Sally was inseparable from her notebook, in which she wrote down new cheers and project ideas.

And in the evenings the clinic head, a short pudgy gym teacher from Mobile, lectured on school spirit: “In order for our teams to play their very best, girls—be the game football, basketball, baseball, or track—our boys need to know that the entire school is behind them one hundred percent all the way! They aren't just playing for themselves, or for the coach, or for the team—they're playing for your whole student body. And in fact, they're playing for your whole town. Their victories reflect credit and glory on the entire community of which they and us are a part of. And it's up to us, girls, as the chosen representatives of that community, to let our boys out there on that field know that, whatever happens, we're behind them one hundred percent all the way!”

Everyone cheered. Sally wrote in her notebook: “Team represents entire community.” She chewed the tip of her pencil. As the youngest member of the Newland squad, she felt she should try hardest. Mo was always telling everyone she was “a real good little worker,” and it made her proud. Sally was hoping Mo might nominate her as her successor as president of Ingenue the following year. She had finally decided she was satisfied with being only second runner-up in the Miss Newland contest. She got to ride on the JayCee float in the Fourth of July parade next summer. And besides, it gave her something to work toward.

“Now some of you girls are old timers at all this. And you know as well as I do that being a good cheerleader requires exactly the identical qualities as being a good wife does. You have to know your man—only in this case, you have to know a couple of dozen of them!”

Everyone laughed.

“Now I'm not joking, girls. When your team comes out of that locker room after a defeat, you have to be there to let them know they're still winners in your book. Now some boys you have to hug. Others, you should stay away from and let them recover alone. Some like to explain to you what went wrong. Others like to make it into a big joke. And your job, girls, is to know which player to treat which way. And this quality, girls, is what makes the difference between a good cheerleader and a really great cheerleader!”

Everyone cheered, and Sally wrote, “Great cheerleader = knowing how to treat each player after a defeat.” She nodded her head forcefully. That was really true, too. Now, Jed you had to baby, while he grumbled. Hank would bite your head off if you got near him. She vowed to try harder to be more attentive to the individual needs of each of her players. It was good practice, too, for when she had her a family of her own. This was what her own mother always did—anticipated her husband's moods and needs. She did it with her children, too, knowing when to hug them and when to stay out of the way. Sally guessed her own mother was just about the perfect woman, taking pleasure in making her family comfortable and happy.

Jed got up late, lifted weights, worked on the Chevy, practiced with the football team. Some afternoons he and Sally would go water skiing with Bobby and Hank. With beers on the dashboard, they'd haul her around the lake as, time after time, she failed to stand up on the skis. She would toss her head, frown, and purse her lips, as she bobbed in the water, holding the handle between her two skis. He would take off with a roar; and she would be dragged under the water, arms first, her skis tangling and shooting off in all directions, and her bathing suit top billowing out to reveal breasts, and sometimes nipples. As hard as it was to understand how she could fail to stand up, he just had to glance at her pouty little face to roar with laughter and then circle around to try again, chugging his beer. Hank and Bobby would yell over the roar of the motor, “You're one lucky man, Tatro. Jesus, would I like a piece of her action!”

Jed, pleased, would try to look annoyed. “Yeah? And how'd you like this beer can up your ass, Osborne?”

After eighteen or twenty tries, Hank would drive the boat while Jed swooped around on a single ski, enveloped in a fine spray. He would leap across the wake and shoot out to the side, almost even with the boat, where he would raise the handle high over his head to keep from sinking while the boat caught up.

As Hank steered the hurtling boat between submerged logs and rocks, Sally would squint into the sun at Jed. He could feel her eyes moving all over his brown muscled body as it rippled and glistened in the spray. He would tuck one knee behind the other, and lean over to form a forty-five-degree angle with the lake surface. Sometimes, if there wasn't much activity on the lake, Bobby and Hank would leave them off at a ski jump and go for a long long drive, while Jed's white buttocks drove insistently up and down on top of her.

At night he would pick her up, wearing his Benson Mill cap and T-shirt. Her father would either question him minutely about when they'd be home, or would eye him with distaste and stalk from the room. Jed would just smile. Sally was his now, he could afford to be generous to her grouchy old man.

She would sit on the bleachers and watch him play third base. He loved to have her there. He'd chatter more to the pitcher: “Pitcherrightintherebabyattaboyhxunbabyhum.” He'd jump higher than he thought he could. He'd throw straighter and faster to first. He'd hit home runs. Her presence gave him powers. He felt larger than life—this must be what it meant to be in love. He would never leave her.

Afterward they would go to the quarry and make love in the back seat, him streaked with dust, sweat, and grass stains.

You drove several hours up narrow twisting dirt roads to reach the bowl that contained a small lake, a log dining hall, and several groupings of four-person tents with cots and wooden floors. Camp Tuscarora, where Emily was a junior counselor.

The director, a hearty woman in a green gym suit and yellow Girl Scout tie, instructed the staff on orientation day as they sat around the tables in the dining hall: “The parents of our campers have entrusted us with their most precious possessions, girls—their daughters. And it's up to us to see that these little children are kept safe here at Camp Tuscarora. But I don't need to tell yall that your job involves much more. Parents are sending their daughters here to give them experiences they couldn't have at home—good Christian fellowship with clean-living, God-fearing young women. Now yall must set a good example, girls. No smoking except in the counselors' hut. It goes without saying that you don't drink—at camp or anywhere else.

“Now, when campers come to yall with their little problems, girls, it's up to yall to give them love and comfort. This will be good practice for when yall have husbands and children of your very own in a few years. This is a woman's rightful responsibility in this life, and it's never too early to learn how to do it right. And of course yall wouldn't be here tonight if we didn't feel you'd already exhibited this ability. A good counselor will attune herself to the unspoken needs of her campers.”

Emily was nervous. Could she be a good counselor? Sometimes she thought she didn't even like children much. But when she heard herself think like this, she was appalled. What kind of a woman didn't like children? A monster. She expected to have at least five or six of her own. But sometimes she watched her own mother around the house and garden, and thought that the poor woman didn't much like any of it, had gotten stuck with it and was trying to make the best of tilings. There didn't appear to be much pleasure in it for her.

She was assigned to help the early teens, who were doing primitive camping, digging latrine holes in the forest and lashing limbs between tree trunks for toilet seats, cooking over open fires with black pots and reflector ovens. Their pup tents were pitched in a circle on a soft floor of pine needles. Often they hiked down to the lake for swimming and canoeing, sometimes for a meal in the dining hall with the other campers. Each morning they attended the flag ceremony in the field above the dining hall, and at night they sat around the fire, sang songs, told stories, and acted out skits.

Emily wrote Raymond in the light from a kerosene lantern. His latest letters to her conveyed the same elation as his first: “When I'm not working, I walk around the city taking pictures. The wharves where the ocean liners dock. The streets off Seventh Avenue crammed with boys pushing racks of suits and dresses. Messengers on Wall Street with attaché cases chained to their wrists. The fancy stores on Fifth Avenue. Mulberry Street and the Italian delicatessens, their windows crammed with sausages and salamis, strings of peppers, bunches of herbs. Chinatown. The weirdos around the fountain in Washington Square. (That's in Greenwich Village.) The wholesale flower market. Yorkville, the townhouses in the East Sixties. One night I walked by chance out into Times Square. A huge cigarette billboard was blowing smoke rings. Neon signs glittered like a vault of precious gems.

“I went with Gus to his parents' in New Jersey for Sunday lunch last week. We came back across the George Washington Bridge, and there was the skyline stretching below us. We drove down the Henry Hudson Parkway past huge brick apartment buildings with all this fancy molding and with thousands of windows reflecting the sunset. I felt a great surge of pride that I was part of this now. Sometimes I stand for half an hour or more on Park Avenue in the Forties and stare at these huge glass and steel skyscrapers. They take my breath away, Emily. This city is like a turbine. It throbs with energy …”

Emily blew out the lantern and stretched out in her sleeping bag, listening to the frogs and crickets and an occasional mournful owl. Babs, her tentmate, a sophomore Phys. Ed. major from the University of Georgia, taught canoeing. The first time she saw Babs, Emily was standing on the porch of the counselors' hut on orientation day, looking down to the lake. A tanned girl in a red tank suit was gripping the edge of the diving board and slowly pressing herself into a handstand. After coming down, she jumped into a canoe and glided across the lake, executing complicated maneuvers. She landed at the dock accurately, then hoisted the aluminum canoe out of the water and carried it to the rack. Emily sat by her at dinner that night and studied her burnt nose, coated with greasy white ointment.

The campers arrived a couple of days later—mostly from Newland and other towns in the valley. One girl named Rowena was from a farm on the road up to camp. Her eyes were crossed, her hair was stringy and greasy, she was overweight, acned, and mildly retarded. She wore someone's cast-off gabardine maternity slacks and a coral Orion sweater. Her tongue hung from a corner of her mouth when she laughed. The other campers avoided her. They wore blouses with Peter Pan collars and circle pins. Bermuda shorts, new tennis shoes called Grasshoppers, which had only two holes per side for laces, and college sweatshirts from older brothers and sisters. They made Emily nervous. She was sure they'd be voted into Ingenue when they got to high school. They always knew the right thing to wear, the right thing to say.

There was an uneven number, and Rowena ended up tenting by herself. Emily paired herself with Rowena in jobs requiring partners, and talked with Georgia and Sissy, the most popular campers, trying to persuade them to include Rowena. They were just at the age to start thinking that Girl Scout ideals like kindness were finky.

Rowena began following Emily around like a dog, trying to sit beside her at meals and to stand beside her at flag ceremony. Emily in turn was devoting effort to standing and sitting beside Babs. Emily's skin crawled as Rowena tried to hold her hand. But she wouldn't have minded holding Babs's. Babs was pinned to a Sigma Nu named Rob. She wore a tiny gold crown studded with pearls on her breast. After supper, they sometimes played keepaway. Emily and Babs passed the ball under their legs and behind their backs as they ran—while the campers squealed with delight and frustration. Rowena galumphed up and down the field with very little idea what was going on, screaming with laughter, her tongue protruding over the corner of her lower lip. Emily tried to toss her the ball every so often, but she always threw it straight up in the air, howling with delight.

One night the campers hid Rob's photo. He was a handsome chunky-looking young man with dark curly hair, a sneaky grin, and a beer mug tie tack. Emily and Babs searched the woods. Finally Rowena led them to it behind a boulder, and stood looking at them with her crossed eyes, hungry for praise.

Back in the tent Babs murmured, “It's really gross not seeing him all summer.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Sort of. He's in New York City now, though. Has a job up there.”

“For good?”

“Looks like it.”

“Gee, that's tough.”

“Well, I don't know. We're more like friends, I guess. We grew up together.”

“Oh, that's nice.”

“It's nice, but it's not very romantic.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean. Why don't you get somebody else?”

“Nobody else asks me out. I guess they figure Raymond and I are going steady or something. I guess we are really. Or were.”

“Well, now's your chance.”

“Yeah, but there's nobody I'm much interested in.”

“That's what you always think right after you break up. But someone else always comes along.”

“But we didn't actually break up.”

“But you weren't actually going steady?”