The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “How long will you be gone?” she asked faintly.

  “Two weeks,” he replied with a wide smile. He went on business trips to Boston like a sailor going on shore leave after months of deprivation on the high seas.

  “Business?”

  “Mostly. I don’t know if I told you — we’re thinking of moving to Boston.”

  Scandalized, Ginny looked at him quickly. “How could you? This is our home.”

  “Not mine it isn’t. I’ve always hated this town. You know that. I intended to stay here just a year, as part of my training for a job in Boston. But then I met your mother, who couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Hullsport. Though God only knows why.”

  “But how could you just forfeit thirty-five years of memories?” Ginny wailed, knowing the incredible difficulty she experienced in letting go of anything out of her past, however objectionable.

  “Easily. Very easily,” he said with a laugh. He threw down the rest of his coffee, stood up, kissed Ginny on the forehead, and raced for his plane, like the candidate for cardiac arrest that he was. Though how a heart of stone could be subject to malfunctions escaped Ginny at the time.

  Two and a half months later he was dead, of a heart attack.

  After watching Mrs. Yancy’s plane take off, Ginny wandered home via the perplexing network of new superhighways and shopping malls. She felt as though another bout of separation anxiety was imminent. It was all too much: her mother sick in the hospital, the Major dead, her childhood home on the auction block, Hullsport being strangled by a kind of cancer. Everything familiar to her in this place seemed to be slipping away. And since Ira had kicked her out, she had no other home, no other family.

  She drove by Hullsport Regional High School, a massive red brick construction with white trim. Next to the building was a vast practice field. She was intimately acquainted with every tussock and pothole in that field because she had marched up and down it endlessly, trying to bend her legs at the knees in perfect right angles, almost every afternoon for two years as flag swinger for the Hullsport Pirates. This honor entitled her to strut in front of the marching band at football games, wearing gray twill short shorts and a braided maroon uniform jacket with silver epaulets and white tasseled go-go boots and a high white-plastic visored helmet with a maroon ostrich feather anchored in its band. She carried a maroon and gray flag with the school crest in the middle — a torch of knowledge. And above the crest was the school motto, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The flagstaff had a bulb handle that enabled her to twirl and snap the flag around her as she marched, in a variety of dazzling patterns to accompany the fight songs being struggled through by the band. The prestige!

  Ginny was driving very slowly past the practice field, savoring crumbs of glory from her past and pondering the fact that it was possible to condition a person to take pride in doing almost anything if his environment labeled that activity desirable.

  She knew that cinder track and practice field in another way than just marching over it, though. After she had dropped out of flag swinging, Clem Cloyd and she, if there were no coaches around, would roar out onto the track and race round it on Clem’s Harley. The flying wheels would throw cinders up into the red straining faces of the dripping track team, Joe Bob Sparks among them, who would be yelling, “Get that goddam cycle off our track!”

  Then Ginny noticed that some boys were in fact running the cinder track now, their bare chests, with their newly sprouting fleeces of hair, slick with sweat under the hot midsummer sun.

  Suddenly she jammed on the Jeep brakes and stared at one of the figures. Swerving into the curb, she sat there short of breath. She’d have known that sweaty back anywhere! The muscular ridges that rose up on either side of the backbone were rippling rhythmically as their owner ran. How many times had she danced holding onto those ridges with her hands and wishing fervently that that hard-muscled body were moving up and down on top of hers? Dear God, it was Joe Bob Sparks himself!

  3

  Walking the Knife’s Edge, or Blue Balls in Bibleland

  The first time I ever saw “the Sparkplug of the Hullsport Pirates” as the sportscaster of WHPT referred to Joe Bob Sparks, he came flying through a paper portrait of a snarling pirate who had a black patch over one eye and a knife between his teeth and a bandanna around his head. Joe Bob led with one cleated foot, his elbows extended and his shoulder pads hunched up around his maroon helmet. Number thirty-eight he was, halfback and captain. I had of course heard of him. He was an area legend by this time. But I had never seen him close up, only on distant athletic fields, because he lived in a housing development on the opposite side of town and we had gone to different elementary schools.

  The cheerleaders were leading the packed stands in a frantic yell: ‘Sparky! Sparky! He’s our may-un! If he cain’t do hit, Dole cay-un!’ (It seemed unlikely to me then, from the fierce good looks of Joe Bob, that there was anything he couldn’t do. Being all palpitating pudenda, I hadn’t yet realized that the ability to think did have its occasional uses.) Then Doyle charged through the deflowered paper hoop. The cheerleaders in their white and brown saddle shoes spun wildly, their full maroon and gray skirts swirling up around their waists to reveal maroon body suits. I spun, too, twirling my flag.

  I could see Joe Bob in the middle of the field as I did so. He was prancing in place like a horse in the starting line at the Derby. Once the team had all established that they could leap through the hoop, Head Coach Bicknell appeared, surrounded by his assistants like a Mafioso by his bodyguards. All the players removed their helmets and tucked them under their left arms. The cheerleaders and I stood at attention, me with my flag shouldered like a rifle. The band blared through its unrecognizable rendering of The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and I watched with approval as Joe Bob placed his huge right hand over his breast and stared reverently at Old Glory, while most of his teammates fidgeted and flexed. Then the team formed a tight circle, their eyes closed, and Joe Bob’s closed most intently of all. Coach Bicknell led them in a prayer for good sportsmanship and teamwork, and, as an afterthought, victory.

  Then the cheerleaders led our packed stands in welcoming the Sow Gap Lynxes: “Our game is rough, /Our boys are rowdy./But we send Sow Gap/A great big howdy!”

  The Kinflicks of that first heady game, which Mother was shooting from the front row of the bleachers, show me in a variety of prescribed poses: I remove my plumed helmet and do cartwheels as though the rotation of the earth depended on it; I grab up the cheerleaders’ megaphone and shriek fervently toward the bleachers, “Y’all yell, ya hee-yah?” ; I fall to my knees and raise my eyes to the heavens, pleading for a touchdown; after our first touchdown, I skip through an allemande left with the seven cheerleaders while the band blasts out its unique drum-dominated version of the school song to the tune of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” And in one sequence I prophetically savor each letter as, after his first touchdown, we spell out “Sparky.” (People around school called Joe Bob “Sparky,” though I always preferred the more dignified “Joe Bob.”) “Gimme an Ess!” “Ess!” “Gimme a P!” “P!” And so on. “Whaddaya got?” “SPARKY!”

  We watched the clock on the scoreboard and counted down the last thirty seconds in a roar. Joe Bob had scored three touchdowns and had led the Pirates to a crashing victory over the Lynxes. He was carried from the field on the shoulders of fans who spilled from the stands. The entire town attended all the high school athletic matches. Meets with neighboring towns brought out all the latent intertown hostilities. It was as though each town were a warring city-state, and the high school teams were the town heavies.

  A victory dance was held in the school gym, which was decorated with maroon and gray streamers and fierce pirates on poster paper. I stood in my short shorts and go-go boots with a couple of the cheerleaders and watched my classmates milling around. Occasionally, I’d flash a smile at a familiar face, a smile too enthusiastic for credibility, and would offer the ritual Hulls-port H
igh greeting: “Say hey!”

  I was distracted by the presence a few feet away of Joe Bob Sparks himself, changed into a neat plaid sports shirt and slacks, his light brown crew cut still damp from the shower. People kept clapping him on the back and saying, “Great game, Sparky!” Joe Bob would smile his moronic smile and look at the floor with a modest shrug.

  Then, as though in response to my yearnings from the sidelines, he sauntered up to me, fans falling away from him on every side like from Christ on Palm Sunday, and introduced himself. Or rather, he presented himself, since he correctly assumed that everyone already knew who he was.

  “Say hey!” he said with his dopey smile, which smile I tried to overlook the whole time I dated him. It was a smile in excess of any possible stimulus. In fact, now that I think about it, Joe-Bob’s smile was usually unrelated to external stimuli and generally appeared at the most unlikely or inappropriate times. This smile (I dwell on it so obsessively because, like Mona Lisa’s, it embodied his very essence) contorted his entire face. Most people smile from their noses downward. But not Joe Bob. His smile narrowed his eyes to slits, raised his cheekbones to temple level, wrinkled his forehead, and lifted his crew cut. And in spite of the exaggerated width of the smile, his lips never parted, probably because of his omnipresent wad of Juicy Fruit gum, which he minced daintily with his front teeth. In short, Joe Bob’s smile was demented. But I managed to overlook this fact almost until the day I left him because I wasn’t remotely interested in the state of his mind.

  It was his remarkable body that occupied virtually all my thoughts. I loved the way he had no visible neck, his head being permanently stove into his shoulders from leading with it in blocking and tackling. I worshipped his chipped front teeth and mangled upper lip from the time he’d dropped the barbell on his face while trying to press 275 pounds. I adored the Kirk Douglas cleft that made his chin look like an upside-down heart, which cleft was actually a crater from an opponent’s cleat. I admired the way his left eye had only half an eyebrow from once when he had hit the linesman’s stake after being tackled. Joe Bob was evidently indestructible — a quality of incalculable appeal for someone like me, who was braced for disaster around every corner. But most of all, I loved that sunken valley down the middle of his spine, with the rugged ranges of muscle upon muscle rising up on either side. I loved to hold them, one hand on each ridge, as we danced.

  Joe Bob didn’t talk much. He preferred to be known by his actions. But when he did talk, his voice was soft and babyish; he would grin and open his mouth much wider than necessary and make flapping sounds. In retrospect, I realize that he had a speech defect, but at the time at Hullsport High a soft baby talk in imitation of Big Sparky was all the rage. His favorite expression, and hence the favorite expression of the entire school, was “Do whut?” He said “Do whut?” punctuated by his demented grin every time he didn’t understand what someone had said to him, which was often. It was an all-purpose question, the equivalent of “I beg your pardon?”

  For example, after saying “Say hey!” to me at the victory dance, he next asked, “Why haven’t ah seed you around before?” As though it were his personal prerogative to approve each student at Hullsport High.

  “I’m a sophomore,” I explained faintly, dazzled to be the sole focus of his attention. The music was so loud that it drowned me out.

  Joe Bob grinned and tilted his head down and said, “Do whut?”

  “A sophomore!” I yelled. “I’m a sophomore!”

  He nodded, still grinning. “Wanna dance?”

  And so we performed those mating rituals called the boogaloo and the chicken scratch. We circled each other slowly with carefully calculated flailings of arms and legs, with coyly disguised thrusts of hips and profferings of breasts. Joe Bob’s movements lagged behind by about half a beat due to the five-pound canvas-covered wrist and ankle weights he was wearing, shackle-like, to build up his arms and legs. As though they needed any more building.

  Occasionally, unable to tolerate the mounting tension, one of us would whirl off and, back to the other, writhe in narcissistic isolation, eventually spinning back around, restored, to face the other and resume our invocation of the muse of adolescent lust.

  And then the reward: a slow song. “Why does my heart go on beating? /Why do these eyes of mine cry? /Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?/It ended when you said good-by.” The heartbreak of the song merely increased Joe Bob’s and my delight at having found each other in a world in which, so Skeeter Davis assured us, the only certainty was loss. Joe Bob wrapped his muscled arms around me as though enfolding a football for a line drive, his wrist weights clanking together behind my back. I shyly put my arms around his waist and first discovered those two delightful ranges of rippling muscle down his back.

  We didn’t really dance. In fact, we scarcely moved, swaying in time to the adenoidal wailings with only enough friction between us to give him an erection, which prodded my lower abdomen. Not knowing then what an erection was, I assumed that this strange protuberance was the result of yet another football injury, a hernia or something. I politely pretended not to notice, as I’d pretended not to notice his moronic smile, though I did wonder at the reason for his chagrined glances down at me.

  I must confess at this point that, in spite of having been flag swinger for Hullsport High and girl friend of Joe Bob Sparks and Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen, I hadn’t always been beautiful and gifted. There was a time, when I was thirteen, when I wanted nothing but to be a defensive left tackle for the Oakland Raiders. That was before I learned the bitter lesson that women led their lives through men. In short, that was before I became a flag swinger on the sidelines of Joe Bob’s triumphs. I must have suspected what was cooking, deep in the test kitchens of my unconscious, because my football playing had the desperation of the doomed to it. My tackles were performed with the fervor of a soldier making love on the eve of a lost battle. My blocks were positioned with the loving precision lavished on daily routines by terminal cancer patients. Something in me knew that I would never be an Oakland Raider, that I would never even be a Hullsport Pirate, that I would have to pull myself up by my training bra straps into some strange new arena of combat at some unspecified point in the near future.

  That point turned out to be the messy morning my first menstrual period began. My family may have been into death in a big way, but they definitely weren’t into sex. So unprepared was I for this deluge that I assumed I had dislodged some vital organ during football practice the previous afternoon and was hemorrhaging to death. Blushing and stammering, averting her eyes to Great-great-aunt Hattie’s epitaph on the wall, Mother assured me that what was happening was indeed horrible — but quite normal. That bleeding like a stuck pig every month was the price exacted for being allowed to scrub some man’s toilet bowl every week.

  “That’s life,” she concluded. She concluded many of her conversations with the phrase, like a fundamentalist preacher’s “Praise the Lord.” When she said it, though, the implication was not that one should accept the various indignities of corporeal existence with grace, but rather that one should shift one’s focus to the dignities of the dead.

  “No more football,” she added offhandedly. “You’re a young woman now.” I knew at that moment what Beethoven must have felt when informed that his ears would never hear music again. No more football? She might just as well have told Arthur Murray never to dance again. How was I to exist without the sweet smack of my shoulder pads against some halfback’s hips, without the delicious feel of my cleats piercing the turf? I went upstairs, and as I exchanged my shoulder pads for a sanitary pad and elastic belt, I knew that menstruation might just as well have been a gastrointestinal hemorrhage in terms of its repercussions on my life.

  But before long, I learned that the same body that could butt a blocking machine down a football field could be used in ways more subtle but just as effective. For example, it could be made to twist and twirl and prance.
Its hips could swing and slither with the same skill required to elude enclosing tacklers. Its budding breasts, heretofore regarded as a humiliating defect that distorted the number on my jersey, could be played up to advantage with a Never-Tell padded bra. In short, I was transformed from a left tackle into a flag swinger, into the new girl friend of Joe Bob Sparks. I got to be the one to bear his abuse for giving him blue balls, and eventually I got to be the one to give him hand jobs at the Family Drive-In.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. We started out together on a more modest scale. Joe Bob picked me up before school the Monday following the victory dance. He roared up our white quartz driveway in a white Ford convertible, which had “Sparkplug” painted in red on the rear fender. His horn blared. As Mother stood looking with horror through the green velvet curtains in the dining room, I slipped out the door and minced my way to the car, completely concealing the fact that, until recently, I could have vied with Joe Bob himself on line drives. I was wearing cordovan loafers with leather tassels and a madras shirtwaist with a Peter Pan collar. Its skirt came to the middle of my kneecaps. Joe Bob looked at me with his insane smile and said softly, “Say hey, Ginny!”

  I smiled a smile of infinite promise and climbed in, arranging my skin to cover my kneecaps, which were padded with scar tissue from being tackled in cinders in the end zone on touchdowns. Joe Bob wore tan chinos and a plaid Gant shirt and penny loafers. We each nodded to ourselves in satisfaction that the other, when not disguised as flag swinger or tailback, looked clean and pressed and identical to every other member of the Hullsport High student body — with the exception of the hoods like Clem Cloyd, in their unspeakable tight studded blue jeans with pegged legs, and black ankle boots and dark T-shirts and windbreakers.

  On Friday night we cruised Hull Street in Sparkplug with its top down, along with all the other students worthy of note from Hullsport High. We started at the church circle and drove slowly up Hull Street through three intersections to the train station, Sparkplug’s engine idling with noisy impatience. At the train station we circled around and headed back down Hull Street to the church circle, with Joe Bob playfully revving the engine in competition with whoever was stopped next to us at the lights. Then we repeated the circuit.