When the handsome young teacher of our split fourth and fifth-grade class had playground duty it never looked like duty. If he was on patrol, no one could tell. He would stroll around with apparent aimlessness with two girls under each long arm and holding the hands of a fifth and sixth girl who flanked the edges of what looked like the wings of a giant butterfly protruding from the center: a body furry with wool sweater, and capped not with antennae but with dreamy waves of medium brown hair.
That is how Annie, Vicky and I spent the beginning of each recess if we were lucky to get to him first or to be a few of the ecstatic girls pre-chosen by him. After about ten minutes he would send us off to play and within seconds another six girls would fill our places, forming wings of new shapes, patterns and colors.
Any time we weren’t blissfully enveloped by the protective arms of our teacher, the three of us played catch while the rest of the fourth and fifth grade girls played jump rope, and the fourth and fifth grade boys, oblivious to the roving adulation of all the girls for our teacher, played touch football. After a while though, our game of catch began to wear thin. We tried varying regular throws with grounders, pop-ups and high flies, but there was no game to it. The other girls refused to play ball and the boys were already busy playing real games of football, with strategies and scores. We talked it over and decided we wanted in with the boys.
It didn’t seem like something we needed permission for, so the next day the three of us gobbled down our lunches and followed the biggest and most popular fifth grade boy out onto the playground. As soon as the boys chose captains and the captains were ready to choose their teams, we announced that we three girls were also available for choosing. The boys looked flummoxed.
“You can’t play football with us. You’re girls!” one of the fourth grade boys squeaked in a high voice, stating the obvious.
Vicky and Annie looked down at the ground but I took a step forward.
“So what?”
Several of the other boys joined in: “It’s too rough. You might get hurt. You have to ask the teacher.”
“It’s touch football,” I answered derisively. “Why should anybody have to ask anybody?”
I had grown up playing stickball in the street with my cousins and neighborhood kids, and later, after we moved to a new house down the road from the new school, touch football too. Sometimes fathers would join us, and there was no better moment than when one of the dads would throw the ball hard and far to me. I would see it hurtling through the air, a giant almond spinning gorgeously on its axis. I would reach for it, or leap up and grab it with both hands, bring it into my chest, surprise them all.
I wasn’t about to be excluded, so when all the boys had been chosen, including even the weakest and slowest of the fourth-graders, Annie, Vicky and I were reluctantly divvied up onto the two teams, but not before the two captains had an extended argument about who would get two girls and who would get one.
Neither team wanted two of us.
Finally one captain decided that having two girls was only slightly worse than having one, and gave in. The game was on!
The captains inclined their foreheads toward each other and at the count of once, twice, three, shoot, flung out one or a pair of fingers to decide who would kick and who would receive. Annie and I lined up with the boys on our team, ready to run, and maybe, maybe, catch the kicked ball. Legs apart, knees bent under my flared cotton skirt, elbows close to knees, I bounced on the balls of my feet and quivered with anticipation. The other team’s kicker started forward.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!”
The butterfly had arrived, stopping him on one foot. “What’s going on here? What are you girls doing?”
Once again I stepped forward. Unafraid and in a tone that leaked joy, I replied, “We’re playing football!”
“No, I don’t think so, not today,” the teacher said, scrunching up his face in disapproval. And before any of us could respond, he guided his butterfly wings into rotation until all seven people had their backs to us, and glided off.
That was enough for the boys. “Sorry,” several of them sniggered.
Annie seemed to accept this but Vicky and I were outraged and humiliated. We strode off with red faces but fiercely straight backs. I could feel the boys’ eyes boring into the napes of our necks as I concentrated hard on walking away, so deliberately I feared I might trip. Vicky, who was self-conscious normally, gathered all of her fighting spirit and matched me step for step.
Back in the classroom that afternoon I couldn’t pay attention. All I could think of was the injustice. We had learned about prejudice in race and religion. Wasn’t there also prejudice against girls? When halfway through an unrelated lesson the teacher asked if we had any questions, my hand shot up so fast and automatically it was as if it had a brain of its own.
“Why can’t girls play football?”
For a second he looked discombobulated; then he recovered: “It’s not that girls can’t play football,” he said slowly, obviously choosing his words, “it’s just that I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Sometimes the boys get hurt and they still keep playing.”
“But girls…,” he began, and then thought better of completing the sentence.
I saw my way in. “This is an example of prejudice, isn’t it?”
He looked at me with a serious expression and I knew he was thinking many things at once. I also knew to wait patiently while he unraveled his thoughts.
“All right,” he said finally. “Tomorrow you can play with the boys.”
I kept my eyes looking at the top of my desk so they wouldn’t roam triumphantly to Annie or Vicky, sensing even at the age of nine that it would be bad politics. One or two of the boys groaned, but a look from the teacher quashed further protest.
When that afternoon my mother asked, “How was school today?” I knew enough to respond with the standard “Okay,” though I was so excited that at night I could barely sleep.
There was one boy absent the next day, so the choosing of sides went more smoothly: the last captain to pick got two girls and that was that.
Our team had the ball; first down. A simple plan was made: the quarterback was to throw the ball, or if nobody was open, to run with it.
“Hike!”
The quarterback received the ball and we all pushed forward, some blocking, some trying to get clear. I ran at an angle toward one side and found myself alone – no one thought enough of me to guard me. I waved my hands to attract the quarterback’s attention. He spotted me and with a slight shrug, hurled the ball like a laser in my direction.
The low spiral went straight into my hands! I tucked it under my left arm and took off for the chain link fence at the back of the playground, our makeshift goal. But my legs and feet felt leaden. They knew, as I knew, that everything was riding on this run but neither they nor I could move fast enough. We plodded forward, right knee right foot left knee left foot right knee, pumping pumping but as if the pump were clogged with mud, then suddenly I reached the fence and a cheer went up.
“Touchdown!” someone yelled and a few seconds later I felt a series of disconnected hands patting me on the back.
The big fifth-graders on my team had knocked away the competition to my left and right as I ran, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that I had caught the ball and miraculously, I had made a touchdown.
For the next heavenly week, Vicky, Annie and I played football. Now, like the boys, we too were occasionally guarded. In the whole week only one ball had been thrown toward me but to my great frustration, it had gone way over my head. I didn’t care. There was always hope: hope for the next play, hope for the next day, hope that one day one of us girls would be chosen before the last of the boys.
But Annie didn’t have hope. She was bored with football. The following week she dropped out and went to jump rope with the girls. Vicky stayed, out of love of the game or loyalty to me I didn’t know. And then one day we came out onto the playground and Vicky was holding a rubber ball. “Sorry Naps,” she shrugged, using the nickname she had made for me from my last name. “It’s not so much fun when they include us but really ignore us.” I shook my head up and down slowly in fake understanding and went to play football. Nothing would make me give it up.
As usual when the other team had the ball I was sent by whichever captain to stand at the center of the line of scrimmage.
“Is that really a position?” I questioned one of my teammates one day.
“Yeah, it’s an important one too. Just block the other team if you can,” he had answered, but basically he knew and I knew that they had put me into an imaginary hole where neither team could see me.
That is, until two days later.
It was the fourth down and the other team had to decide to throw the ball, run with it or kick. I was at the line of scrimmage gravely intent on keeping at least one of the fourth-graders from running forward. I could feel my eyebrows closing in on each other with determination. The other team spewed out a sequence of numbers and hiked the ball. One of the players grabbed it and placed its tip on the ground. A stocky fifth-grader who already had wispy lines of hair over his upper lip came running forward and with a loud grunt kicked the ball with all the force of his almost manly years. The ball traveled about three feet within less than a second before it was blocked… by my face.
A circle of boys was gathered around me as I tried to pick myself up off the ground as quickly as I could.
“Are you all right? Are you all right?” they kept asking.
I knew I had to answer but I also knew that if I tried to talk right away, all the tears that I squelched down into the middle of my throat would break loose and squirt out of my eyes. My neck felt swollen with the effort but I would not allow that to happen. I knew if there were tears I would lose their respect. I knew if I lost their respect by crying they would report it to the teacher and I would never be allowed to play football again.
I would not cry.
“I’m f-fine,” I finally managed, barely stuttering and struggling to my feet. My head throbbed and my face felt robbed of its features, as if a thousand bees had just stung it simultaneously. “Let’s play!”
The boys looked at me and looked at each other. My fifth grade captain, a foot taller than I and taller than most of the other boys as well, looked down on me and I saw something in his eyes I had not seen before: kindness.
“Sit it out for a few minutes,” he ordered.
I searched his eyes to see what else was there and saw it: respect. Gratefully, I walked over to the sideline and sat down on the ground to watch.
Back in the classroom I could see the boys eyeing me and some of the girls too. I wondered if my face looked as huge and mottled as it felt. The fifth grade side of the classroom was doing math problems. On our fourth grade side, we had just taken out our notebooks when the teacher cleared his throat and said he had something to say to us.
“I’m sorry, but no more girls playing football.”
He might as well have said “No more girl playing football.” My ears started to ring, whether from being hit in the face or from the shock of his words, I couldn’t tell. I stared at him, first in disbelief and then in defiance.
“That’s not fair!” I challenged.
“It may not feel fair,” he countered, “but that’s the way it is.”
I nearly rose out of my chair. “It doesn’t just feel not fair, it isn’t fair.”
All the tears I could have shed and hadn’t, all the tears that were still captured in my throat crept upward and reached the backs of my eyes. I fought with everything I had to keep them from marching forward. If I couldn’t have football, at least I could have pride.
The tears broke forth anyway and pooled in my eyes but I wouldn’t blink. I would not allow a single drop to rip down my cheek for any of them to see.
Especially not my teacher.
Especially not him.
***
Lee Napolin Chinalai has lived, worked, and played in the U.S., Thailand and Bahrain. She has written articles on tribal art for U.S. and GB publications, had an essay published in Sport Stories Press, and a “Tiny Love Story” in the NYT. Currently she is writing a memoir about living in Thailand as the American wife of a Thai man.
