Kinflicks by Lisa Alther Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    The other cars accompanying us in this rite contained either established couples from school, or a bunch of unclaimed boys on the prowl, or a bunch of unclaimed girls trying to feign lack of interest. Occasionally, at a stop light, as though compelled by cosmic signals, half the unclaimed girls in one car would leap out and exchange places with half the unclaimed boys in another car in an adolescent version of fruit-basket-upside-down; it was as though each car were an atom exchanging electrons with another atom so as to neutralize their charges. From the air it would have looked like an intricate square-dance figure. It was the modern American adaptation of the old Spanish custom in which the single young people stroll around the town plaza eying each other with scarcely