The Cheer Leader

by Jill McCorkle

  “Look, if something’s bugging you, tell me.” Bobby pours his cup of Tang into the dark green water and stares behind it as though he can find the orange Tang down in all that green.

  “Nothing bothers me—not ever—jamais plus!”

  “Josie, you know that I love you don’t you?” Bobby looks up and he looks like he is going to cry. It is like waiting for the rain to start at her Grandma Spencer’s house where there is a tin awning over the porch and each drop can be heard, one by one, until there is a steady drone, the humming of rain. There, slowly, one drop. She can hear it as it rolls down his face. “I can’t stand to see you like this.”

  “Like what?” she asks and casts her line way out. It’s the farthest that she has ever cast a line.

  “Pat said that you said all kinds of things. I couldn’t believe that you would act like that.” Bobby hides his face in his hands. “He said you sort of came on to him but that he knew it wasn’t like you at all. He said you had had too much to drink.”

  “And you believe all that?” she asks. “So what if I did? Haven’t you ever done anything like that? Huh? Maybe I just wanted a little of what you’ve got, you know? You’ve got everything, Bobby, you’ve always had everything. Look what you’ve got right now, you’re going to med school, you’ve got somebody that you love, somebody that loves you! Really loves you! Don’t you see how I just wanted to have something like that? What about that time that you took all of my Easter eggs and ate them? You’ve always had everything!”

  “Things haven’t always worked out for me,” he says. “Don’t you remember Nancy Carson?”

  “Whore bag.”

  “Pat said that you said that at the party.” Bobby rubs his hand over his face and halfway smiles. “You were probably right about that but you shouldn’t have said it.” Bobby puts both of his hands on her face and makes her look up. “Things will work out for you, too, Jo. You just have to give it time.”

  Hurry up please, it’s time. “I’m tired of waiting,” she says.

  “But, you’re young.”

  “But, I feel very old.”

  “Mom says you’re doing real well in Poetry.”

  “I have an A.”

  “Can I see some of your stuff?” he asks and puts his arm around her.

  “Maybe but you’ll have to wait until I’m better.”

  “You mean feeling better?” He gets a serious look again.

  “Writing better,” she says and laughs. There is a look of relief on Bobby’s face and she thinks for a minute that maybe things will get better. Maybe things will get worse. She doesn’t know, can’t see, because the trees are blocking the horizon. They sit on the pier until late in the afternoon when the sun looks like a big orange ball sinking behind those trees, and it is a sad sight, just the very way that it moves and goes away. They haven’t caught any fish but Bobby says that it has been worth the trip. She has not heard or seen Red but his presence has been in every silent moment, every dark green ripple beneath that pier at Moon Lake, and she wishes that he would get out of her head because he has no business being there.

  It is the second part of the second semester so she must begin again. The nightmare, that exposed ghost nightmare, has only come to her one early gray morning since spring break and now, she has come up with a solution to keep that nightmare away: She must go back to the original rules except that she will go to all of her classes and make good grades instead of riding the buses. Then, after she eats dinner with Andy, she will stay in that robin egg blue room and study. She will no longer go where everybody goes because right now, she is a nobody and must prove herself otherwise. She must not drink too much. Bobby said that she should not drink too much. “And especially during the week!” he had said. “No wonder you’re flunking a subject.” But if she doesn’t drink, she cannot sleep during the night because that is when the other nightmare comes, the one where she is running through the gray. She must start all over. She must begin by catching up on her English II journal because she is way behind, because she made a C- on her research paper because she didn’t DO any REAL research because there were no footnotes. “An interesting topic though not what I asked for,” the scratchy red ink said. Don’t worry about that, look ahead, start over. Wasn’t that what Bobby had said?

  She must turn to a new clean sheet and begin. She cannot get off of her bed even to use the bathroom until something is done:

  Some people think that Columbus was Jewish and I can believe this because I only know a couple of Jews that I think are dumb. The rest are very smart. I heard one time that overall they are the very smartest with Japanese coming in second and I can easily believe this if Chris indeed, was one. Some people think that Jews are trying to take over the world but they aren’t. I know who is though. Swinish people whose names are the names of colors; those people (other than Warren Beatty) with sort of simian features. They are the kind of people who will murder and screw anything on two legs. It isn’t the Jews. What does that mean anyway? I know a lot of Jews that are better Christians than a lot of Christians but I have never seen a Christian who is a better Jew than a Jew. I am a Christian but not a Christian’s Christian. I do not hand out pamphlets at K-Mart’s, nor can I abide bumper stickers that say “Honk if you love Jesus,” or “Jesus is coming soon.” I have never and never intend to give a testimony or to sing “Day by Day” for contributions. So what kind of a Christian am I? If Columbus was or was not Jewish really isn’t important. What is important is that he took a chance and I have recently heard that there is no room for chance in a deterministic society. It is all a matter of survival of the fittest and yet, the meek shall inherit the earth? Contradictions upon contradictions and yet, if I could only contradict the contradictions that I made another time, then I would be back where I started from. But sometimes that is more difficult than it sounds. I simply am not certain. Once, a long time ago, someone told me that I was frigid and I contradicted that and now, I will contradict that contradiction. I am that way and it is only during those winter months when the weather outside is colder than I am that I appear to be thawing, to be warm. I’m not. I’m stone cold, stone cold sober and drunk, petrified. The good part is that hair in the bathroom because it is always there every time that I go in and my hands are there, the same hands that used to catch grasshoppers, only a little bigger, these hands that finger-painted with a cross-eyed girl who it seems got her eyes fixed but could not fix anything else like dying. That’s how it seems but these are the same hands. I read a story about hands one time that I liked a lot and I could probably write something about hands, my own hands because I know them so well.

  Now, she must sit and think, about hands. Beck has come in and wants to know what she is doing but she cannot let on about the thinking.

  “I have to write a poem,” she says very intently so that Beck will be quiet.

  “Want to go out? Paul and a bunch of us are going bar hopping.”

  “Thanks,” Jo Spencer says. “But I’m behind in my work.”

  “Maybe you can get it all done,” Beck says and gets her books. “I’m going to the library. Be back soon.”

  “Okay,” she says and acts like she will try real hard to get her work done so that she can go, too, when all the time, she knows that she is not going to go. She must concentrate very hard; she must take a chance. You must stay on this bed, in this room. You must not even consider going bar hopping until you gain control, until your false feet make controlled patterned steps, or you will wake up in a place that you don’t know, your hands will have touched someone that you don’t know. Oh no! Not these hands!

  Now, it is dark. Beck left over two hours ago. The light at the window has failed and she cannot see to see. Turn on a lamp. There, and then there was light! She must sit with her legs crossed very tightly, endure those little pee shivers, until she gets the very end for her poem. She cannot help but wonder what the poetry professor sees in her poems. What does he think of her? Does he think that she take
s chances? Does he think that she has a chance? It has become a very important part of her day to think about this—to think about what he must think. If she had to pick a new Daddy, she would pick this man. If she had been born forty years ago and had found herself in a dim smoky room where people were dancing to the good songs, she would have asked this man to dance. If she ever had a son, he would be just like this man.

  The shivers are getting worse and she must hurry and finish the poem, read it over very carefully, and if it meets her approval, she may be excused. It is something to look forward to. What can she name it? The hardest part about writing a poem is finding a name for it. The professor had said that the title is very important, because sometimes the title helps to understand. But some poems don’t have titles and this poem is not difficult to understand. It is about using your hands to talk, but not sign language, something bigger than sign langauge. “When someone holds my hands a certain way, I feel that they are holding every word that I will ever say.” Warm hands/cold heart, deceptive digits. She will call it “Hands.” Now, she can go to the bathroom so she walks slowly, steadily, down that fluorescent hall. She can endure the pain now that she can see relief. That is a very important thought but she must not think about it until she is seated. It takes a minute for this very natural bodily occurrence to begin because she has waited so long. And then, relief, and it is the first time that she has ever realized what a pleasurable event this can be. It is a part of life that is taken for granted just like hands and it shouldn’t be, and even though everyone enjoys this function, hers is isolated from all the others because she sees the pleasure. And why? Because she has suffered through the waiting. Isn’t that what they say in philosophy? To know pleasure and truly appreciate it, you must know pain, the opposites, to be happy you must know sadness. To enjoy using the bathroom, you must endure the pain of not going. Yes, and by not eating very much, she will one day find pleasure in devouring a pepperoni pizza! That is what it’s all about, the opposites.

  By the end of March, it is so warm that everyone starts lying out in the sun. Even Jo Spencer can do this because she has had a great deal of experience. She puts on her old one piece that she was wearing (What was it? Two years ago?) when Red came up and introduced himself but she doesn’t even think of this because she has remembered to forget him. She is so thin and trim, just the way that a girl of her age should be.

  “Jo,” Beck squeals. “Aren’t you going to shave your legs?” Jo looks down at the hairs that she has so carefully cultivated. Beck has shaved her legs, silky smooth, hairless, but isn’t that dishonest? To hide your roots? “I don’t have a razor,” she says.

  “You mean that you’ve never shaved your legs?” Beck is laughing. “How could you ever sleep with anyone without shaving your legs?” Beck says “ever” like she is horrified. But, Jo Spencer does not sleep with people, so what they don’t see can’t hurt them.

  “I used to,” she says and knows that this is true. She doesn’t remember when she stopped. She just knows that once she did and now she doesn’t.

  “Used to what? Shave your legs or sleep with someone without shaving your legs?” Beck finds this terribly funny. C’est terrible.

  “Shave,” she says. “I don’t do the other.” This makes Beck laugh even harder.

  “So what if you do or don’t? It’s no big deal.” Did Beck really say that? No big deal? “Here, you can use my razor.” Beck fishes around in the plastic bucket that she carries to and from the shower.

  “Oh no, I couldn’t,” she says. “I couldn’t use another person’s razor.”

  “You think I’ve got skin disease or something?” Beck laughs again with her head thrown back just the way that people are supposed to laugh. “You’re a weird bird, Jo Spencer.” Beck picks up her towel and baby oil. “Come on, we’re missing the very best sun.” Jo Spencer follows Beck down the long flight of stairs and the floor is cool to her bare feet. Outside it is very hot and there are tons of girls like flies in bright bikinis swarming all around. She hopes that Beck will not call one of these girls over to join them.

  Jo Spencer spreads out her towel and lies very still. It feels so good that if she could, she would just go to sleep in this warmth. There is a transistor radio playing somewhere but she can’t tell what the song is. She can only hear sparse fragmented notes that occasionally rise above the buzzing.

  “I can’t stay out here long,” Jo Spencer says and rubs some baby oil on her legs. It makes all the hairs stand up like teeny tiny soldiers, an army marching in place to different drummers. “I’ve got Geology today.”

  “This is the time of year to cut classes,” Beck says. “You’ve been studying too hard lately. The year’s almost over!”

  “But, I’m not doing real well in that class,” she says and closes her eyes. It is so bright that when she closes her eyes, she sees all the colors and when she opens them, she sees the black spots that grow and grow. She sees that magnolia tree, so green and cool, so different from the way it looks at night.

  The geology professor is boring but she never gets bored because there is too much to think about. The good thing about Geology is the words. The bad part about Geology is defining rocks because there IS a right answer, a correct definition and that is no fun. Who gives a damn? She feels like a fool licking, scratching and sniffing rocks. She must do something else. She must pretend that she is listening and taking good notes, write frantically, though not notes. She can just sit and make a list of the good words, words like erode and debris, lode, core, meandering, silt, buried, glacier, ice, stone, brittle, all of those words that can be so apt if she chooses to describe a person. Yes, those are good words but they make her very tired, the residue, the erosion, and so she must leave class, tiptoe away, get some sleep before it gets too dark.

  She is trying to find him because something horrible is going to happen. She is not certain how or when or where; she just knows that it is going to happen and she must find him, warn him. He is so hard to find and it is so gray, gray fog all around, puffs of gray that swirl and swirl over the tall fields of weeds. Her feet are so heavy, her body, so heavy but there is the lake, yes, but she can barely see for the gray. There is a dock at the end of the pier and she must look there, yes, look, but hurry. There is a little house on the dock but it is empty. The wind is whipping faster and faster and the door creaks on its rusty hinges, the windows slam shut, open, shut. There is a buzzing, low at first and then louder, a steady drone getting louder and louder. She runs out of the house to the end of the pier. Wait! Wait! she yells but her voice is swallowed by the drone. There is a boat and she can see the lower half because the fog is clear there. It is a party and everyone that she knows is there. There is Bobby, Andy, Mama and Daddy; Tricia, Cindy, Lisa; Pat Reeves, the Monroes, teachers from Kindergarten and grammar school, high school; her poetry professor is serving coffee and he is wearing the most beautiful yellow hat. It looks like he sees her so she waves and yells as loud as she can, but no, he doesn’t see her; they can’t hear her. They are having a party and throwing confetti and they can’t see her. The boat is moving out now, but she can’t stop screaming because he is there somewhere. The boat moves further and further away and the fog lifts. The droning is so loud that she has to hold her ears. Now the sky is bright blue and the whistle sounds. Up on the top, leaning over the edge, are Lucille and Bertram. Lucille has her face, the long auburn hair but she knows it is Lucille because Bertram is beside her. She looks up higher on a small platform that was not there before and he is there. He sees her because his hand waves back and forth mechanically and slow motioned. Her grandmother is beside him looking just the way she did in old photographs, waving the same wave. She yells for them to stop, to wait, but they only wave while Beatrice walks very slowly up on the edge-rail of the boat. Beatrice sees her and waves like the others while the party goes on and on . . . Stop! Make it stop!

  “Jo? Jo?” It is Becky, shaking her. “Wake up, Jo.”

  She sits s
uddenly and looks up at the window. It is gray, early morning, not morning; it can’t be. “What time is it?”

  “Six.” Becky is sitting on her bed reading her history. Becky sleeps late in the morning, doesn’t she?

  “At night?” She runs and turns on the T.V. The news is on. “I missed it.”

  “What?” Becky asks and looks up over her book.

  “Andy Griffith.”

  “Well, I started to wake you up but I figured that you needed some sleep.” She puts down her book and leans forward the way that people always do when they are concerned, when they want to get intent. “You know you look so tired lately and I never even see you, at least I feel like I don’t. You’re always asleep when I’m awake.” She moves up closer, her fuzzy pink slippers inching on the rug, closer and closer. “Is anything wrong?” She doesn’t even wait for an answer. “Cause you can talk to me. I wouldn’t tell a soul.”

  She wonders about this. Can she talk to Becky? Does she have anything to say? She starts to pursue the question but the dream comes back like a flash, a jolt. Beatrice, Red, waving—her grandmother, waving, the grandmother that she had never known, the grandmother who had died three years before she was born. Lucille and Bertram were up there, dead, and Beatrice. And Red. Red was up there. “Oh, no,” she screams and her scalp feels bristly like it does when something scary happens—clothes on the closet door when she was five, John Kennedy in the T.V. “It is happening.”

  “What? What?” Becky jumps up from the bed, her blue eyes wide and almost frightened.

  “It’s happened, again,” she says and runs to the phone. The number is easy to remember; she will never forget that number. It rings, rings, rings, “Hello?” It is him; he’s alive. “Hello?” Is it him? “Hello?”

  “Red?” she whispers. “Is that you?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “You’ve forgotten me. Just that easy, you forgot.” She wraps the cord around and around her wrist and it looks like a snake bracelet. Yes, you look just like an Ethiopian Princess—goody-goody princess.