Cute.
Cute meant a lot.
I was never cute.
Let me be clear: I wanted to be. Every girl wanted to be, I thought. I still think they did.
Seventy-five years have passed since I first knew what cute was. Seventy years since I aspired to be it. Sixty-five years since I gave it up – and replaced cute with a worthier aspiration.
Strike that.
I never did.
When did I lurch into serious – scholarly – teachers’ pet, parents’ pride?
Strike that, too. I never did.
What, then, did I do? Who, then, was I? Or, more to the point, what was imaginable for a too-tall plain girl in the 1950s with average dull-brown snarly hair – thick waist – and no sense of fashion at all?
Well, I was an athlete of sorts, solitary sorts: My parents had a little cottage on a little lake where, in the summer, I swam, biked, canoed, mostly by myself – until at last I met a boy who asked for a date. He was a roller-skating boy who habituated the local rink: tall, skinny, gawky – but he could really skate, as in: he didn’t fall down.
I couldn’t skate, but it didn’t look hard. It required only standing straight up on pretty white lace-up boot-shoes equipped on the bottom with multiple thick little wheels. My Aunt Edna, who had a sewing machine, made me a girly lavender short skating-skirt – which I wore proudly and she watched proudly as I whirled around her living room, trying it on. While wearing my red Keds. Edna herself was an “old maid” and yes, that’s what she seemed to me, living “alone” with her lifetime companion, who I learned to call “Aunt” Lela – though that’s another story. They shared a frighteningly fecund cat named Dusty, who birthed herself to death courtesy of mysterious feline “fathers” who never declared themselves.
Another story.
In any case, I had a “date.”
***
I ask myself now why it meant so much. I wanted to be a girl, that’s all; to have real girly things to chatter about when I was at overnight pajama parties with other girls from school – the popular girls. The girls who might be nice enough at school but never invited me to such parties – which probably were not nearly as numerous, and surely not as delightful, as I fantasized them to be.
Skip two generations.
This happened, and that happened, and then another thing happened. The little skating skirt found second life as a cleaning rag. My roller-skating boyfriend followed his dad into the plumbing business, and when I spotted him years later in Woolworth’s with a tall pretty blond woman and two little blond girls, he looked straight at me but clearly didn’t recognize me. I thought he didn’t much resemble a plumber – whatever that would have meant – but I was glad to see him mated and healthy and in Woolworth’s. Only later did I wonder whether it had really been him.
***
My life is fine. I need nothing that I do not have. I do not long to have been anything that I was unsuited to be. But I am angered sometimes, even tormented, by how little I was allotted – how little we all were. As girls in the forties. In the fifties.
There were no girls’ athletics. Not really. My high school fielded an important boys’ basketball team; it was covered in the local papers, and even beyond. The best boy players became local legends over time; even today, and even far from that town, you might recognize their names.
And on one early-autumn day each year, while summer still lingered in the air, the football program celebrated initiation of its season. It was Homecoming Day for everyone – though no girls’ teams had gone anywhere or were destined to. Our school always hosted another school’s football team for a big game. Locals came, alums returned, and all the students celebrated their brief respite from the resumed dull classes heavy with test tubes, small-print dictionaries, and unpronounceable foreign words, most of which we would never hear again after graduation.
The few lucky pretty girls selected for the Cheerleading squad were ready to perform in their flirty blue-and-yellow short-skirted costumes, while holding their fluffy yellow-and-blue shakos. The Majorettes were in place, dressed in martial (but also short) uniforms, ready to twirl their batons. And it was a special day for the other girls, too – those who had tried out but not made the squad, and cowards like me who had pleaded themselves too “busy” to try. (I recall claiming a “bad knee” once; I smile at the memory because now, I really have not one, but two bad knees.)
Still – we clunky chunky un-cute girls had something to celebrate, also: it was the only day of the year when we were allowed to wear trousers to school. Then, I appreciated the “favor”; later, I realized that it probably reflected concern about skirted girls disporting in the bleachers – as they climbed, their skirts billowing to reveal their underthings. Maybe.
On balance, though, that was a good day for everyone. Except the boys on the football team if they lost. But still …
***
Today, my three granddaughters – all in college now – play so many sports that I can barely keep track. Collectively, they have participated – and often competed – in volleyball, basketball, softball, biking, gymnastics, calisthenics, figure skating, dance … and more. Their friends, and we parents and grandparents, and the local newspapers and beyond – celebrate their victories and rejoice as if we had witnessed Martina, Wilma Rudoph, Billie Jean … No, wait. I’m dating myself again … and Caitlin and Coco and Simone.
***
The story above was a story.
My story, you imagined? Hardly! Now I’ll tell you mine, the real story:
WE Cheerleaders and the REST OF THEM: Growing Up Popular in the Fifties – OUR Crowd
Leaping high in the air, living disproof of gravity until coming down, light-footed and gracefully balanced! The other girls were envious, I knew … But we were comrades, we were sisters, no one of us ever alone. And every one of them admired every one of us. Us.
We loved them only for their admiration. Of us.
***
One had to love us: We were adored by real boyfriends. Wore charm bracelets that bore mementos of the romantic tales we told when we gathered in fleece robes, on tufted rugs, before lights-out.
We were all CHEERLEADERS – or maybe Majorettes – leaping, laughing, fast-stepping in perfect unison. Wearing matched little skirts, school-emblazoned big sweaters. We were all …
I knew I was one of them. Whether or not they knew it, knew me, or even saw me.
That was all I wanted.
***
Today, so many decades, grandchildren, and gray hairs later – still, today, I know it was real. I was one of them … I should have been one of them.
One of them.
***
Mary Biggs is a retired English professor, and has written numerous short stories, essays and articles, and a book on contemporary American poetry. Mary has also served as an editor and consultant on several literary magazines and a legendary small press, The Spirit That Moves Us, for which she co-edited two collections of new fiction and poetry.
