Physical Education
My personal rules in the girls’ locker room: no talking, listening, or looking. Change clothes very quickly. At the end, dress under the towel.
I wear my cut-off full slip, as I have every school day for a month or more. I’ve left it long enough to tuck into a skirt and into my gym shorts. The only shape to my chest comes from my bony ribs, but that’s not what concerns me. I wear the thing so I don’t have to expose myself completely during P.E. as The One Girl Without a Bra.
By now the slip’s silky shoulder straps and lace trim have gone from white to grayish, but washing it is impossible without letting my mother see. She would ask why on earth I’d cut up a perfectly good slip, why on earth I’d let it get so dirty, why on earth. Worse, she might throw it out in a fit of pragmatism as she had thrown out the tattered quilt Great Aunt Dory made in some other century, the perfectly heavy one that used to cover my bed.
On this one day when I button the clean white shirt of my gym uniform over the stiffening cut-off slip, I grow queasy with the certainty that no matter what, this cannot go on. But all around me there are girls—one in particular, it will turn out—buttoning shirts and tying shoelaces, and I’m not about to take the thing off.
We all head out to “the field”—a grass square enclosed in a wire fence surrounded by streets and houses. I mill around in the sun with twenty other girls for the first part of the mandatory half hour, growing hot and aware of yet another layer of sweat accumulating on my jerry-rigged undergarment. Some girls seem inexplicably relaxed in P.E. class, laughing and waving their arms, throwing and catching balls. Today there’s a new girl who is especially enthusiastic, even when the teacher has us stand in a row for instructions about a timed run, which makes an instant knot of my stomach.
“One at a time,” the teacher yells, “when I say go, you’ll run—as fast as you can—from this marker to the fence and back.” She has paced the distance with her even strides, and now her thumb is poised on the button of her stopwatch. The new girl, solid in a slim-hipped, square-shouldered way, actually trots in place in her bright white gym shoes, her ponytail bouncing. The first girl in the row steps up to the marker. I’m somewhere in the middle, desperate to get out of running in front of all those girls. Especially the new girl. Pretend to be sick? Really be sick? I’ve had some experience with both.
“Go!” calls the teacher. The first girl takes off. I watch, embarrassed for her and certain how ridiculous I will look when my turn comes. If I run, I’ll want to keep going, not turn and run back and have to see everyone looking at me. But there is that fence. And anyway, I wouldn’t have the nerve to keep going. I nurture my queasiness. I begin to feel slightly feverish, like my legs have the chills. The first girl runs back huffing like a steam engine. I look sideways at the new girl’s big smile. Everyone else is talking, but no one talks to her. I try to think of something intelligent to say. The second girl in line steps out, and I advance one place—definitely sick now and getting ready to raise my hand.
Then a P.E. assistant emerges from the gym building and comes toward us across the field at a march, holding a square of paper straight out in front of her. She hands it off to my teacher.
“Laurie!” yells the teacher. Everyone goes silent and looks at me.
I raise a hand partway, like I’m about to swear on a bible. I feel my face and ears heat up.
“This note says your sister’s baby has been born. It’s a boy.”
It’s as though she said everyone talk! Girls’ voices rise around me as I try to imagine not-quite-eighteen-year-old Cherie with the baby. I’m not used to the husband yet, and have tried to avoid even glancing at Cherie’s ballooning belly.
In an amazing stroke of luck, the timed runs are postponed. The baby gets everyone a pardon. I take a deep breath and my chills and queasiness vanish. We head early to the showers, and the whole time, the girls keep up talking and laughing about their big sisters or cousins or mothers who’ve had babies. The new girl picks up a stray basketball and is busy dribbling it into the gym. I see her a few times through my bangs until she disappears inside the building.
No one is in any hurry to shower. It’s required, but we’re all in the habit of trying to get away with as little washing as possible. We know that when we file out of the shower room the teacher will check for water on necks and shoulders above each towel, so if we’re bold enough all we have to do is throw some water there. For me this is an exceptionally good deal. I pull it off, as always, towel tucked tight, eyes on the floor.
Back at my locker after the so-called shower, I have just shoved my head and arms back into the dirty cut-off slip without exposing anything when I glimpse the new girl at a locker near mine. I’m so fast, I had already dressed my bottom half in undies, a garter belt and nylons, a half-slip and a skirt, all without removing my towel from around my chest.
No one is between us. I have my locker-room rules, but she is so . . . she gives off a kind of glow, and I have to steal some sideways looks. Her wet hair shines darkly under the fluorescent lights. She is wet all over—and her towel hangs from her hand. Did she see me slide the graying underthing over my head? Is she grinning? I keep facing my locker while I button my blouse, but I see clearly out of the corner of my eye as she lifts one foot to the low bench to dry herself all up one leg—I mean all the way up—like it’s the most natural thing. I pull my shoes on, clang my locker shut and rush past her, head down so my hair will cover my red cheek.
“Have fun with the baby,” she says. Her voice is as bold as everything else about her. A couple of other girls who are still dressing toss in a few yeahs but turn away quickly. I pivot toward her just long enough to manage a thanks before rushing out the exit.
While I hurry toward the principal’s office, where according to the note my parents will pick me up to visit Cherie in the hospital, it sinks in—the new girl talked to me. I find I have a picture of her in my head, all darks and lights with her shimmering hair and suntanned face-shoulders-arms-legs, the paler parts in between just a blur. Now my legs tingle again, and not in that chilly way.
But I try to forget all that. My father never takes time off from his schoolbus-driving job. I need to fit my thoughts to the gravity of the situation as I enter the echoing hall of the administration building.
*
Cherie looks sick among the skimpy hospital sheets and cold, shiny bed rails, and the baby is shriveled and red. My mother had announced that they were both “perfectly healthy.” Why wouldn’t they be, I wonder. Someone says something about breastfeeding. A small wave of shame laps at me—these are important matters that I should want to understand. Maybe I’m not a good sister. Maybe I’m not a good daughter. Much as I try, I can’t help having other things on my mind: the new girl’s wet hair, her tan, her voice. And my rotting non-bra. I envision her striking up a real conversation with me in the locker room, and in my imagination, I’m definitely wearing a bra. I’m positively nonchalant in it. Pretty, even. And unafraid.
The next morning, Saturday, I sit cross-legged on my twin bed, the bed on the right with the bumpy white chenille spread that replaced Great Aunt Dory’s quilt and that I secretly love, in my bedroom—mine alone, since Cherie got married—and contemplate my options. I have $2.50 left from babysitting, but that’s too little, I think. Besides, it would be embarrassing to talk to the saleslady. I could call my sister once she’s out of the hospital, but I’m sure she’s not that well in spite of my mother’s proclamation; and besides, Cherie would tell everyone and make a big joke out of it. So I absolutely have to ask my mother to get me a bra. I have no choice. I have to do it, and it has to work.
Just a year ago, I remind myself, when I had to tell her something even more dreadful, she had given me the elastic thing and a box of “pads” right away. She put them in my hands and I figured it out from there. Why should this be any different?
I leave my room and go to hers. I stand in the doorway.
“Can I have a bra?” I ask.
“Well . . .” she puts her book on her lap and seems to be mulling over this new idea. I’m almost fifteen years old, I’m almost fifteen years old, I chant in my head, sending the words telepathically. Fourteen and five-twelfths, I call silently, and besides, all the other girls have bras and most of them definitely don’t “need” them, and P.E. is horrible with that sawed-off slip thing that I can’t even mention to you, and what would make everything okay would be a br—
“I don’t see why not,” she says, turning back to her book.
That very afternoon, after a sudden rainstorm drives me and my book out of a web folding chair by the complex’s swimming pool and into our apartment, I find a small white J.C. Penney department-store bag on my bed. I close my door. I dry off first, put on clean clothes, and nestle in cross-legged on the chenille. I pull the slim paperboard box out of the bag, read the words printed on it, open it. I read the cloth tag stitched into a seam: Size Small Junior. Hand Wash. No more dirty cut-off slip; I’ll be wrapped in this excellent garment every day, and at night I will wash it with my own hands.
I handle my bra with care, smoothing the white cotton and gently sliding the white metal strap adjusters. The tag tells me my bra is called Isis. I get my dictionary down. Isis, it tells me, is an Egyptian goddess—goddess of magic and love. Perfect. Soon I will be talking to the new girl. She’ll smile, the same way she smiles all the time, but at me. At me in my bra. I can ask her name, where she’s from, why she likes P.E. so much. Maybe, since I will look normal, she’ll like me.
-Laurel Ferejohn
Laurel Ferejohn’s published fiction, memoir, poetry, and essays appear in journals including Quiddity, Southeast Review, Persimmon Tree, Flash Fiction, Sinister Wisdom, the Thomas Wolfe Review, Calyx. Her novel-in-search-of-a-publisher was named to the longlist for the Lee Smith Novel Prize from Blair, and one of its chapters won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. Since 2015, she has been an independent developmental editor for writers of creative prose. She lives with her wife in a small and vibrant foodie city. Find her at laurelferejohn.com.