The View from Mount Joy (3 page)

“All right, girls,” said Kristi, flipping the ends of her shag with her fingers, “time to go!”

“But you just got here,” whined Blake.

“I’ve got a week’s worth of French to make up,” said Kristi. She put her arms around Blake and kissed him, smiling to her audience before kissing him again. “When I’m done with my verb conjugations, I’ll come over here to practice more of that.”

Olsen articulated what we were all thinking when he whispered, “Ooh la la.”

Two

From the
Ole Bulletin
September 1971

Fall means football, and at Ole Bull High,
football rules
! At least, so say the big red-and-black signs posted throughout the school. But our Roving Reporter wonders, in these trying times of Nixon and napalm, are football and its frantic fandom anachronistic? And so to those brave souls who’ve allowed us to put their views on record, RR asked: Do you think school spirit is passé?

Shannon Saxon, Ole Bull cheerleading mascot:
“No! School spirit will never be passé! School spirit is what drives the student body! School spirit brings us all together—united we stand, divided we fall! Ole Bull is number one because of our school spirit!”

Mike Oxenfire, senior:
“What’s
passé
mean, man?”
(Note from RR: Mr. Oxenfire is hopeful that this is the year he graduates, seeing as he’ll celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday in January.)

Darva Pratt, senior:
“Are you serious? With all that’s going on in the world, this is the best question you can come up with?”

Sam McGinness, phys ed teacher:
“If it is, you ought to find a way to get it back. Everyone works better when they feel a sense of community, an esprit de corps if you will. Get involved, people! Support one another, your teams, your teachers, your fellow students! Everybody wins when you’re all on the same side!”

The
Ole Bulletin
was put together by a staff of twelve students who met three days a week at seven o’clock in the morning.

“They don’t call it zero hour for nothing,” said Mr. Lutz, who had been advisor to the paper for more than ten years. “But for those of you yawning and grumbling about missing your beauty sleep, remember: The news waits for no one.”

“The news doesn’t have to wait,” said Greg Hoppe. “It’s asleep too.”

Mr. Lutz smiled as he unscrewed the cap of his plaid Thermos.

“Tell that to I. F. Stone,” he said, pouring coffee into a cup that read,
Newsmen deliver.
“Tell that to Nelly Bly. To H. L. Mencken. To Ernie Pyle.”

A girl raised her hand.

“Who are you talking about?”

Mr. Lutz narrowed his eyes as he sipped his coffee.

“Let me tell you something, O’Grady,” he said. “While I do believe there is no such thing as a stupid question, I also believe there are those that come awfully close. So with that in mind, your assignment, O’Grady, will be to write a three-hundred-word column on influential journalists of the modern age.”

“Dang!” said the girl. “I
thought
they were probably reporters.”

“A reporter’s job isn’t to think, O’Grady. It’s to
find out.
”

Mr. Lutz did something close to the impossible: He made it easy to get out of bed and get to school an hour before everyone else did. He joked and allowed you to joke back, and yet he made you want to work hard, made you think that gathering whatever was newsworthy in the halls of Ole Bull High was important.

“But,” he would remind us, “there is a wider world out there, as hard as it is to imagine.”

As editor in chief, Greg Hoppe was in charge of the assignment desk, which meant fielding and then okaying story ideas.

“I want to write about Doug Benson,” said a girl. “Did you know he got a perfect score on his SAT?”

“You wrote about your boyfriend last year, Pritchett. When he got a perfect score on the PSAT.”

“I’d like to write a piece about girls’ sports and how we always get the shaft,” said another girl. “I mean, it’s so unfair it’s unreal!”

“Sounds like it might work better as a commentary,” said Hoppe.

“How about a story about Gisela Brunhoffer, the new exchange student?”

“Go ahead, Myers. But don’t try to wangle a date out of it.”

I can’t remember if I volunteered to do the first “Roving Reporter” column or if Hoppe couldn’t get any other takers; either way I wound up asking students and teachers a pressing, probing, or totally inane question once a week for the rest of the school year. It was fun—it didn’t take a lot of thought on my part, plus it was a good way to introduce myself to cute girls. Shannon Saxon wasn’t in Kristi’s category, but she was cute enough.

“Thanks for putting me in your ‘Roving Reporter’ piece,” she said as we sat in a booth at Marty’s a few days later. “I didn’t come off stupid, though, did I?”

I shook my head even though I didn’t think she’d come across as
smart.

“I thought it was a good question to ask right before homecoming,” she said. “I mean, this is one game we need to get fired up for.”

Our homecoming game was against Southwest, and Shannon, who was the Ole Bull mascot, was nervous.

“Southwest’s the
worst,
” she complained. “Everyone in the stands pretends they’re playing a violin and makes this really obnoxious noise.” Making a face, Shannon mimed playing a violin and made a screeching sound loud enough to be heard over the Troggs on the jukebox.

“You’re right,” I said. “That is obnoxious.”

“Then they shout, ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’” She shook her head, disgust puckering her soft features. “Of all the dumb mascots in the world, I think ours has to be the dumbest.”

“Isn’t Roosevelt’s a teddy bear? That’s pretty dumb.”

Her lower lip jutted out in a pout, and if she thought the gesture was cute, we were poles apart in our opinions as to what constituted cute.

“The teddy bear is
cuddly.
A violin-playing bull is just stupid.”

“Okay, Shannon,” I sighed. “A violin-playing bull
is
stupid.”

She kicked me under the table, hard. “Thanks a lot, Joe. I thought you were on my side.”

As my shin throbbed, I stifled the urge to kick her back.

“I am on your side; I just agreed with you that a violin-playing bull is stupid. But what kind of mascot is a school named after an obscure Norwegian fiddle player
supposed
to have?”

Tears welled in Shannon’s cow-brown eyes. “I never even wanted to be the mascot—I wanted to be a regular cheerleader, but Kristi said I wasn’t the right body type. I guess she thinks I look better covered up in brown fur and horns.”

I laughed, but the glare Shannon returned showed me she wasn’t trying to be funny.

A couple of days earlier, Blake Erlandsson had pulled me aside after history class.

“I got a favor to ask you,” he’d said, and when I told him to fire away, he said, “Kristi wants you to ask Shannon Saxon to homecoming and then double-date with us.”

Somebody from the jostling herd that filled the hallways between bells bumped into me.

“Shannon Saxon? I interviewed her for the paper. Well, I asked her a question.”

“She’s a good friend of Kristi’s,” Blake had said “I think you’d like her.”

“Why not?” I’d said, shrugging.

“You’re a good man, Andreson,” Blake had said, clapping me on the shoulder. “I’ll give you the details as they come in.”

Shannon and I had both slid into the restaurant booth with the semi-high expectations anyone brings to a first date, but after I delivered the seventh or eighth joke to the same blank face, I realized that Shannon didn’t have a sense of humor. She also had a worldview limited to Ole Bull sports and cheerleading, which sort of limited conversational opportunities.

The fog of boredom lifted, however, when Shannon mentioned Kristi and her views as to what constituted a cheerleader’s body.

“Why would she think you’re not the right body type?”

“Well, geez, everyone knows a cheerleader has to be just about perfect.” Shannon leaned over the table, the pillows of her big chest threatening to knock over her malt glass. “You know how Nancy Hasberg stays so thin?” Opening her mouth wide, she pretended to stick her finger down her throat.

Clueless, I held up my hands. “What, she’s sick a lot?”

Shannon smiled the smile of the old Cheshire cat. “She
makes
herself sick a lot.”

I knew Rod Westby, Granite Creek’s top wrestler, often made himself puke before a match.

“Cheerleaders have to make weight?”

“Well, not formally,” said Shannon, and with her straw she jabbed at the last inch of butterscotch malt in her glass before sucking it down. “But
informally—
well, that’s why girls like me can be a mascot but not a cheerleader.”

It wasn’t that Shannon Saxon was fat. She did have big boobs—always a plus, I figure, no matter what your weight—and her ass would be more comfortably positioned in a Buick than a Jaguar, but still, she had the kind of curves guys like and girls seem determined to Tab-and-hard-boiled-egg away. (How I knew this bit of feminine arcana was because Shannon had told me the butterscotch malt she inhaled was a reward for sticking to a three-day diet of nothing but Tab and hardboiled eggs. My turtle sundae, judging from the way she helped herself to it, was part of her rewards system too.)

“So Kristi makes the rules for the cheerleading squad, huh?”

Shannon shrugged, eying the melted puddle at the bottom of my dish.

“You
are
new, aren’t you, Joe?” With a half twirl of her long spoon, she scooped up what remained of my sundae and swallowed it, as quick as a salamander downs a gnat. “Kristi Casey runs
everything.
”

After our trial run at Marty’s, I knew that in the malt-guzzling, whining Ole Bull mascot, I had not found my heart’s desire. Not by a light-year. It wasn’t that I was looking—but still, dread is not something you want to feel when corsage-shopping for your date.

“Why didn’t you say yes to me, Darva?” I asked as we walked the narrow aisle through the refrigerated, perfumy air of the florist shop.

“Joe, you know I can’t lower myself to barbaric social rituals like a homecoming dance.”

“But it wouldn’t be barbaric with me. It’d be fun.”

Darva put her arm around a tall vase and leaned in to the lilies it held, closing her eyes as she breathed in their scent. She was wearing a gauzy Indian tunic thing under a leather vest and earrings that jangled, and I was seized with the urge to take her arms and put them around me.

“Hey,” said the store clerk, a thin woman with a brown cloud of hair. “Don’t touch the flowers.”

“I wasn’t holding them,” said Darva evenly. “I was holding the vase.”

“Same diff,” said the clerk, and she snapped her gum so loudly I flinched.

“Where are your corsages?” I asked.

“For homecoming?”

She offered a sour smile as I nodded.

“You’ve got to order your corsage,” she said, pronouncing every syllable as if English wasn’t anywhere near my native language. “Then we can make them up with your school colors or to match your date’s dress.”

I looked at Darva, who rubbed one index finger on top of the other, as if scolding me for being naughty.

“Gee, Joe,” she said, “Don’t you know anything about barbaric social rituals?”

Leveling her gaze first at Darva and then at me, the clerk jangled some change in her smock pocket and said, “There might be some left in the case over there.” She nodded toward the back of the store, her shellacked hair unmoving.

The pickings were slim in the refrigerator case: There was a red-and-gold carnation corsage, a white one made from roses whose edges were turning brown, and a grouping of daisies and small yellow roses on an elastic band.

“Take the wrist corsage,” said Darva, opening up the refrigerator, “and let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

Snapping her gum all the while, the cashier gave me change and handed me the corsage in a clear plastic box.

“Aren’t you going to get him a boutonnière?” she asked Darva, her voice still coated with hostility.

Pulling out the Tootsie Pop she’d just put in her mouth and using it as a pointer, Darva gestured to me.

“You think I’m going to the homecoming dance with
him
? What would my lesbian lover think?”

The cashier’s mouth dropped open, revealing the pink gum wadded up on top of her molars. “Your lesbian lover…,” she began, as if by repeating the words she’d better understand them.

“Well, he hasn’t had the operation yet,” said Darva as I hustled her toward the door. “In fact, he wanted to quarterback the homecoming game before he starts his hormone treatment.”

As I opened the door, the cashier’s gum popped so loudly it sounded as if she had fired a gun at us.

“Say cheese!” said my mother again, throwing us into yet another half-second state of blindness.

She had been invited by Blake’s parents to come and record the happy couples before we skipped off to the homecoming dance.

“There’s no reason the girls’ families should get to take all the pictures,” said Mimi, Blake’s mother, who was wearing a hot-pink miniskirt and a black-and-white op-art shirt so swirly I could barely look at it. “I mean, we like our memories too!”

“Twelve scrapbooks of them,” said Blake in an aside to me. “One for every school year.” He was dressed in a well-cut suit that made the one I’d gotten at Granite Creek’s Dapper Duke for last year’s hockey banquet
look
like a suit I’d gotten at Granite Creek’s Dapper Duke for last year’s hockey banquet.