Michigan Writers Network

...and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the
pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of
chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-
skirted...later in mini-skirts, then pants...where the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound...a revolving ball of mirrors powdering the dancers with a snow of light.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

I never played varsity sports at the junior high, high school, or college level. That was not an option for most women my age. There were no girls' teams in junior high or high school, and by the time I arrived at college when women from Concord began to play women from Randolph Macon, Radford, or West Virginia Wesleyan, I was an English major and almost no one ever played on the college team who was not "in Physical Education." Despite that fact, many of the significant moments in my life took place in a gymnasium.

The junior high gym: a pit sunken in the center of the school, accessible from the second floor doors, concrete bleachers in the balcony forever worn smooth by the shifting of adolescent bottoms, where high, smudged windows illuminated the cathedral of games. Here were held the Noonday Dances, every Wednesday, where gangly boys lined upon the north side of the wall and nervous girls on the south side, where bobby socks and saddle oxfords were the only acceptable uniform, where I learned to be a spectator in the realm of the popular. Here my friend Susan broke her foot jumping from the bleachers to the floor in seventh grade gym class. Here we wore snap-up bloomer-suits, faded blue because they were often purchased second hand from girls lucky enough to escape gym class, which we tucked up in our underwear to make short shorts. Here we tried to assassinate Miss Burgess, the student teacher, during a dodge ball game, all balls aimed at her as the clock struck 10:18, taking her totally by surprise as she stood in command of the whistle and sending her fleeing from the room, sending us, "the ringleaders," to the principal's office and assuring us of a "C" for the nine week term. Here I watched, at age thirteen, the first woman (girl) I had a crush on pitch stupendously in the kick pin ball games. Here I found my first (and only, for many years) adult female role model: Mrs. Angelo, the gym teacher. She did not wear dresses and hose to work as other women must; she was not confined to typewriters and file cabinets all day nor did she have chalk smudges on her navy blue suit. She did not make us do homework. She did not have teacher's pets. Funny, she reminded me of my mother, a legal secretary, whom she was not like at all.

The high school gym: when I went from the ninth grade at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School to the tenth grade at Charleston High School, Mrs. Angelo went, too. The dreaded Miss Francis, who had been my mother's high school gym teacher and still held court on the polished floor, who blushed when anyone said the word "pregnancy" and who would have died before she said the word "lesbian"(which she probably was), retired. There was much rejoicing about her retirement among the junior high gym assistants, of which I was one, despite my incorrigible behavior, because Mrs. Angelo would now be moving down the street with us when we graduated. In the high school gym. I discovered I got seasick on the trampoline, and I envied the girls who fluttered moth-like above its taut surface. I hated callisthenics: I knew you could hemorrhage from too many jumping jacks, have a stroke from too many squat-thrusts. This was the early 1960s, the years of the new young President and his nationwide physical fitness initiative, the standard tests we all had to pass. There was the bongo board, to perfect balance, upon which more than once I launched myself into the yellow brick wall or onto the glassy wooden floor. There was half court basketball where one team wore orange pennies for uniforms, mine always with broken or missing ties, where I always fouled out. There was watching another woman (girl) I fell in love with somersault across tumbling mats and catapult into the air where she twisted like an Olympic diver, below her no water, into the arms of boys. I signed away study hall period for two years to spend my sixth period every day in a cavern that was too cold in winter, too hot in fall and spring, with a handful of friends - Susan, Ingrid, Johanna, Betty. I would have taken my now burgundy gymsuit (with button down collar and cuffed legs...this was the 60s) over a homecoming crown any day. And threading through all three years was Mrs. Angelo - laughing at us when we were goofy teenagers, furious with us when we were irresponsible helpers, compassionate toward us when our fragile worlds fell apart, befriending us with holiday gatherings at her house where we made Nuts'n Bolts (now called Chex Party Mix) to give to the needy at Christmas. These were the times I did not think I could bear to leave when I graduated.

The college gym: a whole separate building, named for some long dead athlete and/or benefactor. Where I tried out for teams I never made. Where I was chastised, in public, for saying "phys ed" instead of "physical education" by a teacher who was a clone of Miss Francis and who lectured that "physical ed-you-ka- she-un" is not something that comes in a bottle and is carbonated, but is a discipline of the mind and body." Yes. Where I watched the boy I dated for two long years, and almost married, keep the statistics for the varsity men;s basketball games, and where I watched the woman I loved, in a sorority sweatshirt that bore the same Greek letters as my own, be not the star of every intramural game, but the one everyone watched. And I walked out with her after every game -- volleyball, basketball, ping pong tournaments, swim meets --into the biting chill of the night, while she lit a cigarette, called me always by my last name, as I did her, and we took the long way home to the dormitory. She was a year ahead of me. I would have done anything for her. She knew it. Where I was, for the first time, in this building, a real member of a real team, and though we probably won fewer than half our games, I felt like a winner every night because of the women I called teammates, the strength and sense of humor I saw in all of us, and where I learned the great and most enduring lesson of my life: it is the women beside you, around you, cheering with you and for you who matter. Not the score, not the skill, not even the sport.