Authors: Joyce Maynard
I
N MY JUNIOR YEAR
I had English and algebra and French and art and history, but what I really had was fun. It was a year when I didn’t give a thought to welfare mothers or war or peace or brotherhood; the big questions in my life were whether to cut my hair and what the theme of the junior prom should be. (I left my hair long. We decided on a castle.) Looking back on a year of sitting around just talking and drinking beer and driving around drinking beer and dancing and drinking beer and just drinking beer, I can say
“Ah
yes, the post-Woodstock disenchantment; the post-Chicago, post-election apathy; the rootlessness of a generation whose leaders had all been killed …” But if that’s what it was, we certainly didn’t know it. Our lives were dominated by parties and pranks and dances and soccer games. (We won the state championship that year. Riding home in a streamer-trailing yellow bus, cheering “We’re Number One,” it never occurred to us that so were forty-nine other schools in forty-nine other states.) It was a time straight out of the goldfish-swallowing fifties, with a difference. We knew just enough to feel guilty, like trick or treaters nervously passing a ghost with a UNICEF box in his hand. We didn’t feel bad enough not to build a twenty-foot cardboard- and crepe-paper castle, but we knew enough to realize, as we ripped it down the next morning, Grecian curls unwinding limply down our backs, that silver painted cardboard and tissue paper carnations weren’t biodegradable.
H
IGH SCHOOL YEARBOOKS LIST
club memberships, not grades. Which makes sense because what is remembered, looking back, are hardly ever classes and books read but social events, what guidance counselors refer to as “extracurricular activities.” If you aren’t a part of class meetings and outing clubs and Latin banquets (we used to cut up sheets each year, parading in our permanent press togas) then it is the very absence of those things—and not the major themes in
Silas Marner—
that you’ll think of when you remember high school. My school was full of clubs—the outing club (we drank beer and planned trips that we never took); the pep club, math club, art club, dance club and lots of others—never named or listed in the yearbook, but just as tightly knit and clubbish—the “hippies” (they passed each other bags of chalk dust while the shocked “straights” whispered they were taking opium); the hoods, whose cars seemed always to need tinkering; the cute, the beautiful, the cool, the popular. If anybody doubted who was who, they had only to look up at the lobby wall where every April (Junior Prom time) the names of all the couples who were going were taped up. For some it was announcement of victory, and they will never have so fine a time, be so
on top,
again.
At Oyster River, the accomplishments of the debating team went almost unnoticed. There were just four on the team and the debate coach, their file boxes and attaché cases filled with blank paper and sharpened pencils for the scribbling down of points they rarely had rebuttals for. Their wins and, mostly, their losses went unannounced at Oyster River—the team brought no glory, no drama, no violence. The math team did a little better. The manipulation of numbers is maybe a more manly pastime, closer to sport. But even math failed to excite our student body. At our school it was sports that mattered.
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 make-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.”