The Cheer Leader

by Jill McCorkle

  “With a G or a J?” he asks and he seems to think that this is a cute thing to say. She does not think so but she will not hold it against him.

  “With a G would be Go,” she says. “My whole name is Joslyn so you know it’s got to be a J. If it was a G, it would be Goslyn like baby goose.”

  “I see,” he says. “Well, can I buy you a beer Jo with a J?”

  “Okay,” she says, “and I’ll buy my friends’ for them.”

  “You don’t have a date do you?” he asks. “I saw you sitting with that guy.”

  “As a matter of fact, as rare as it is,” she says, “I don’t have a date tonight. Paul is just a friend of my friend.”

  “Guess I’m in luck, then,” Jeff Stevens says.

  “Guess you are,” she says and smiles probably the prettiest smile that has ever been seen. It is happening; there are effects.

  Jo Spencer introduces Jeff Stevens to Paul and Becky and then all of them get up to dance. It is a real fast song and Jo Spencer always feels like a fool shaking around. There should be steps, proper steps, rules of the dance but there are not so she makes her own rules: Jump side to side, one way your hands are in front, the other way they’re behind you. Bob your head.

  “Jo’s doing the pony!” Beck screams. “I haven’t thought of that in ages!” Beck starts doing the pony and even though they are making faces and laughing, Paul and Jeff do the pony. Now, it is fun because it is a real dance that they are engaging in. Jo Spencer wants to try another one: Do the swim! Hold your nose and jump down, come back up. Do the hitchhiker! Lick your thumb and hold it out. Come on baby, let’s do the twist. She is having a wonderful time and she knows yet another dance. She can do the four corners. No, make them stop doing that dance. She needs to sit down because everything’s spinning. I’m spinning, spinning like a top! No, both of those are bad dances to do; they are Beatrice’s dances. Jo Spencer must walk off the floor and get back in her chair, sit very still.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Beck asks and follows her. They all follow her. “Jo, you’re so white,” Beck says. “You must have gotten too hot.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” she says and it is hard to make the room stop moving, to go slower, to let her off.

  “Hey, let’s go outside for some air,” Jeff Stevens says. “How about it?”

  “Okay,” she says. “I think maybe I’d better go home.”

  “Sure, Jo,” Beck says. “I’ll tell the other girls that we’re leaving.”

  “No need for that,” Jeff Stevens says. “I’ll walk her back. Let me get my coat.” He walks back over to the other table where he was sitting earlier.

  “Jo, do you know him?” Beck asks and squats down beside the chair. “I don’t mind leaving now at all.”

  “I’m fine,” she says. “He’s real nice, don’t you think? He reminds me of someone that I know.”

  “Well, if you’re sure,” Beck says and looks intently for an intent answer.

  “I’m sure.”

  It is cool outside and feels good. She must take three deep breaths and every step must be the exact same stride. She holds onto Jeff Stevens’ arm and it is a nice way to walk. It makes her feel like she is in another time, another town.

  “Feeling better?” he asks and she nods. He puts his arm around her and pulls her up close, closer, closest. He stops and gets her to sit on the old cold steps of one of the campus buildings.

  “Here, I’ll show you where I live before I walk you home,” he says. She looks up. How long has she been here? How long has she kissed this person? “Want to?”

  “Yeah, all right,” she says and they walk for what seems like hours in that cold and her whole body is going to sleep, going numb. Is this what it feels like to die? They are at a house, it must be a fraternity house. She wants to ask which fraternity house but she is too tired, must sit down in that big black chair, be very still, listen to the music from the jukebox, watch the last few people leave the room. Red is sitting beside her now, just like all of those nights that they sat at the lake and watched T.V. He is kissing her, again and again. “I better go home,” she mumbles and he nods. “In a minute,” he says just like he always used to.

  “I still love you, Red,” she says when he hugs her so close.

  “What?” he asks.

  “But I’m so tired. You see Jaspar is waiting for me to get home.”

  “Who’s Jaspar?” he whispers in her ear.

  “You know Jaspar, my big old dog.” It is safe here, warm and the dream can’t get her when she is so tired, when she is at home, with Red.

  It is gray, early gray, and at first there is that comfort of going back to sleep, dreamless sleep. But there is no comfort, now, only panic. Jo Spencer sits up and freezes as though paralyzed. Where is she? She is under a sheet, in a bed, an exposed ghost. Who is that person? It is a nightmare and she must wake up, she must run through the gray, the early foggy gray so that she will wake up, so that she will lose this thought.

  The lobby of the dorm is still dark and she must tiptoe up the stairs until she can see those fluorescent lights outside of her own door. Ease it open without a creak. Beck is asleep, facing the wall. She must put on her nightgown, lie on her own bed. She must stay there but she must not sleep. That nightmare must not come back.

  The sun is up and the room is very bright when Beck wakes up. Beck sits on the edge of her bed and whispers, “Jo? Are you awake?”

  “Yeah,” she says very sleepily even though it has been hours since she slept.

  “You had a late night,” Beck says. “I got up to use the bathroom around five and you weren’t here. I was sort of worried.”

  “Oh, I was fine,” she says. “I wasn’t tired so I sat down in the lobby and watched T.V.” Beck looks like she doesn’t believe this. It must appear real. “It was one of those old science fiction movies.”

  “Oh,” Beck says and runs her fingers through her hair. “I had a great time last night. It’s always so good to see Paul.”

  Paul? “Oh yeah, he’s a real nice guy.”

  “Yeah, he really liked you,” Beck says. “I told him that you weren’t dating anyone in particular. Hope you don’t mind cause he might ask you out.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” she says and pushes back her quilt. She wants to take a hot shower and sit for awhile.

  “You acted like you really liked that Jeff guy,” Beck says like it’s not a question but really it is.

  “He’s all right,” she says. “Not really my type.”

  “What is your type, Jo?” Beck asks and laughs.

  She must think about this. It is a question without an answer. “I’m not really sure.”

  She lets the water run until it is very hot and then she sits in the corner and lathers her legs. The hairs have grown out and she can see where each one comes from, its root, its very own place to stay and live and grow. It was just a nightmare, that’s all, the pubic hair is right where it was yesterday, still dry, protected. Nothing has happened. Nothing has changed. She holds her hand up and stares at it. Yes, she would recognize her hand if it was put with thousands of others just because it belongs to her—the little mole right near her thumb, the short square nails, the veins that push up when she does her hand like a claw. She can move her hands many different ways and these have meanings. Yes, the person that she loves must be able to read her hands, to get the meaning. It was all a nightmare and she can call home to Blue Springs and her Mama and Daddy will be coming in from church; Andy will be taking a quick spin on his minibike before lunch—fried chicken, mashed potatoes, garden peas and great big rolls with butter—pecan pie—and a slow sunny Sunday afternoon. She could call Bobby in Winston-Salem and he would be so glad to hear her. He would say, “Can you believe it, Josie? I’m going to graduate in three-and-a-half months. I’m going to med school. Christine says hey. Isn’t she great, Josie. She’s going to be your sister one of these days soon. I love you, Jo Jo. Buzzy wants to kiss you, Jo Jo.” This makes her cry, slo
wly, silently, spinelessly—as slow and silent as a Sunday in Blue Springs.

  Jo Spencer has taken all of her midterms and is flunking Geology. She has a C in French. C’est terrible. She has a C in Philosophy and why? Because she wrote that some questions have no answers and if Aristotle and Plato could not find concrete answers, how could she? At the time it had seemed like the right thing to say. She has a B in English II but she has no idea what she is going to make on her theme. She thought that it was a very good idea and also very creative. Her thesis was “We can see all of the changes that our society has undergone by studying television programs of the past and present. From this study I will show how the values and morals of the American population have changed. T.V. is representative of what people want to see, how they want to live.” Then she had gone on to explore various aspects. For instance, I Love Lucy is about a housewife in the fifties; Ricky works, and Lucy stays home and gets in trouble; they sleep in twin beds, have a kid, and the entertainment world is all elegant and exciting. Then That Girl is about a single young girl who goes off to New York City all by herself to seek fame and fortune. New York still resembles the way it was in Breakfast at Tiffany’s where Audrey Hepburn sits out on her fire escape and sings Moon River. That Girl has boyfriend Donald, but she is not dependent on him as Lucy is on Ricky and Ricky’s income. She cites lots of interesting material like the way that Mary Tyler Moore went from Dick Van Dyke, son Richie and twin beds, to Minnesota where she became a single, on-the-go associate producer of a T.V. station. Now, people sleep in double beds even if they are not married. Nobody makes Westerns. Shows do not have moral endings like Father Knows Best—Ozzie and Harriet—Leave It to Beaver—Andy Griffith—And who would have ever thought that little Opie Taylor would grow up and leave Mayberry, move to Milwaukee to become Richie Cunningham? She ended it all by posing a very philosophical question: “Whatever happened to Alfalfa?” She put a great deal of thought into that question and she did find an answer, there really was an answer.

  Whatever happened to Alfalfa? I think about that sometimes and then I turn on the T.V. either early in the morning or late in the afternoon (when the good shows come on) and there he is, preserved in black and white, forever a little boy, a skinny little cowlicked boy who cannot sing worth a damn. He has been that way for years and he will continue to be that way as long as the old shows keep playing. It is all real as long as you don’t change the channel, cut it off—real for thirty minutes. It doesn’t just work for Alfalfa—Richie Cunningham can go back to being Opie Taylor and yet, he’s just Opie Taylor because at the time of the viewing nobody knows (or should know) that he is going to grow up to be Richie. Really, they are two different people. Time has not changed them, Alfalfa, Beaver Cleaver, Lucy Ricardo; they live the same episodes again and again—their words and expressions identical each time, every time, a resolution. But life is not that way—you can’t preserve yourself that way—can’t rewind yourself and do the episode all over. All you can do is think about it over and over and often it is hard to remember exactly how it was. Often, you don’t even know whatever happened to so and so, and so you get a picture of the last time that you saw that person. But then you really see that person and they are so different that they have become a new person and you forget all about who they used to be. Life is on a reel-to-reel and it spins so very fast at times that it can make you dizzy, things happen over and over but never the same way. Resolutions are hard to find. This is why people who say that T.V. is not true to life are correct. If it were true to life, then they would show the show once and then throw it away and people would soon forget that Richie Cunningham used to be Opie Taylor. No, T.V. is better than life because it gives people a chance to go backwards, legally to go backwards, and it is all accepted unlike people who start to live backwards, old people who think they are children, or even those people who were born backwards. T.V. captures and preserves, pickles in the pink. The only other way for this to happen is to die at a very early age. The End.

  She has an A in Poetry and that is what makes everything else bearable, especially the nightmare, waking in strange places, gray places. And why does that of all things keep happening over and over? Same time—Same channel—No resolution.

  Jo Spencer goes home for spring break and everything is the same. Andy is trying to make a computer for his science project. He is too smart for his own good. Bobby comes home for the weekend and he looks the same but Jaspar looks very old; his eyes are blueing, blurring and it makes her very sad. It seems that she has seen those eyes before, another place, another time, and she cannot help but cry, to sit on the back porch and cry and the yard looks so small, not at all like it had looked that time that she had sat there with her first period and read Where the Red Fern Grows for the fifteenth time.

  The house seems silent; when she walks into a room, everything gets silent, dead silent. The feeling is big and scary and it makes her get her pink rhinocerous off of the shelf and get into her bed. She pulls the covers up over her head so that it is dark, just like nighttime and all that she can see are her hands, her very own hands holding her very own rhino.

  “Jo? Honey, aren’t you feeling well?” Her mother sits on the bed and pulls back the covers. The light is too bright and she has to close her eyes and see only the blood red patterns stamped on her eyelids. “You only have a week you know.” She hates that her mother has said this because she has tried to forget that; she wants to think that she can stay in this house, in this bed forever, this house that she loves, these people. “You haven’t even told us about school.”

  “I have an A in Poetry,” she says. “The other grades are not so hot. But, I can get them up. Oh yes, I’ll get them up.”

  “You used to never have trouble with your grades in high school,” her mother says. “Of course, there’s a big difference in college, I know.”

  “Oh, there is,” she says and opens her eyes. Why does it feel like they aren’t her eyes.

  “Plus being away from home for the first time,” her mother says. “You’ve had right much to happen, what with Red and Beatrice.”

  “What about Red and Beatrice?” She has tried to forget all of that. She wants to forget that and the nightmares. They aren’t real. She must remember to forget and forget to remember.

  “Maybe you need to talk about it,” she says. “You know we’re always here.” Yes, she knows that and it is like a jolt to remember that. It is so big and so real that it makes her cry. It makes her reach up and put her arms around her mother and squeeze, to hide her face. “You know Bobby’s a good listener, too. And Y’all have always been so close. Right?”

  She nods. “I’m okay, really I am. It’s just good to be home, that’s all. I think I feel happy, that’s all.” She says that and now she must be happy; she must be a happy hoppy picture like a good Jo Jo. No sense in making them worry over nothing.

  Bobby wants her to go fishing, just the way that they used to. “We don’t have to go to the lake,” he says. “We can drive down to the beach for the day.”

  “I don’t mind going to the lake,” she says. “Come on, Bobby, do you think that will bother me? Nothing bothers me!”

  “Do you ever hear from any of your friends?” Bobby asks when they are in the car on the way to the lake.

  “Some,” she says. “They’re real busy, too.” No, she hadn’t heard from anybody recently and she hadn’t tried to get in touch with any of them. They probably were real busy, besides, it hasn’t been a good time to see people.

  It is a very calm day and Jo Spencer and her brother go out to the end of the pier where she used to lie out in the sun. The watch tower is still there and if the water wasn’t so cold, she would jump in and swim out there and dive and flip. She could still do it. The sun is very bright and Bobby pulls out his sunglasses and puts them on. They look so normal on him.

  “Hey, Christine left her sunglasses in my car. Wanna wear them?”

  “No, they make me feel funny,” she says
and pulls out a big fat bloodworm and slits him down the middle. He wiggles in three different pieces, still wiggling and looping when she sticks the hook through. She must put her hands in the water fast, get the blood off. “Out! Out! Damn spot!” she says and Bobby smiles but he doesn’t laugh the way that she had intended. Then they just sit and stare at their poles. Bobby looks like he always does when he is worried and just about to ask a question. Probably, does she think that Christine really loves him? Should he get married? Yes, she is an Ethiopian Queen, tie the knot, begin to begot. She expects to hear voices any minute, laughs, to feel the pier vibrating and to look up to see Red jogging up to her.

  “You thirsty?” Bobby asks.

  “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” she says and Bobby doesn’t see any humor in this at all. He pulls a thermos of Tang out of the canvas bag with all their junk and lunch in it.

  “Do you want some or not?” Bobby is mad.

  “To drink or not to drink . . .” Jo Spencer lifts her hand, one finger pointed upwards and Bobby slaps it; he slaps it hard.

  “Cut it out, Jo!” he screams. “Now, what in the hell is bugging you. I’m your brother, remember?” Remember to forget and forget to remember.

  “Do you?” he screams.

  “I know that,” she says. “Yeah, I remember that! Hooray!”

  “Jo, listen. I know you’re not doing well in school. Probably partying a little too much.”

  “I never go to parties,” she says. “Very rarely do I get invited to parties.”

  “Well, I know you went to one,” he says. “You know Pat Reeves called me because he was a little upset about you.”

  “Why should he have been upset?” She reels her line in slowly and watches it winding around the reel, around and around.

  “He said that you just weren’t yourself.”

  “Who did he say that I was?” That is a very clever thing to say. It is hilarious!