Eight years old and her crying could rattle the windows of the empty gym. “Again,”
her mother said, and the girl picked up the baton,
sniffed once, and was back in her pose before the rewinding cassette tape’s hollow
whine crescendoed and snapped
to an end. All through that interminable winter, while the same shrill music played
over and over, she practiced her baton,
which, ball to tip, was almost as long as she was. My father judged me old enough
to trust with the keys to the school, so he’d sent me
through the spitting sleet to unlock the doors. It was winter inside the gym, too,
but I took off my gloves and shot a few baskets
while they worked, the cold just another part of the training. She thumb-tossed
the baton toward the lights, spun once, twice, and sometimes
it was where she hoped it would be to retrieve from its spinning descent. Already,
I wanted to write down everything I saw,
but I was unwilling to have any piece of me aired in the words. Were my empty
notebook pages a failure of nerve or some simpler fault
practice might fix? After I was gone from there for good, my mother called one
Saturday afternoon to tell me the hometown girl was twirling
on TV. I was living in an apartment with dusty radiators that didn’t want to work,
waking up while it was still dark to pore over
literary magazines with forgotten names and library editions of dead poets’
collected letters, hoping someone could show me the right way
to suffer. “Everyone here’s watching her,” she said, so I turned on my hand-me-
down set and cocked the rabbit ears until I could tell
how much of the snow in the picture was snow. She marched down the frozen
field, head majorette at the University of Oklahoma, smiling
like she’d never been taught what cold could do, though a raw wind pulled at her
baton when she flung it and she was wearing next to nothing.