Captives of Fashion

I love it when my body delivers, like when a casual leap over a low wall turns out to be just that. This isn’t a thing only now that I’m over fifty. It was a thing back in the day. The worst was having to run in middle school PE. I remember the field at Moore Junior High. It wrapped around the world. We wore ugly snap-up one-piece baby-blue gym outfits, probably from the fifties, the 1850s, which always packed the threat of a mean girl grabbing the front and yanking all the snaps open. Buttons would have been much safer, or even a zipper. 

Wearing that we had to run. It was probably a mile, but it felt like a decade, like we had to run until we were twenty two, still in the same outfit, we’d probably have outgrown, our feet would ache, but still running…one more lap…and a chain-link fence containing us all, with a brown worn path along it from eons of kids forced to lap the dry patchy southern California-baked field again and again and again and again, like dogs, wearing a path along the fence holding them captive and being way out at the far, far corner of the field, where no one would naturally have traveled, not even the kids up to no good. No one went out there, except when they had to run for PE class.

My mind ran, too, thinking about boys, the weird ones who gave me too much attention and the cute ones, none, except maybe to say “thanks” when I passed out a paper to them. But they weren’t talking to me. To them, I was the calendar stapled to the wall. My lungs would yank back my attention, now that they’d filled with cotton. Air.

Then there’d be a break in the fence, but we were expected to continue past it, as if it weren’t there, but it was and I’d think about ducking out, just one simple side step and I’d be free from class, free from not being picked for a baseball team, free from the mean girls commenting on my stick legs not filling out the leg openings of my uniform. Then I understood the uniforms. No one would be caught dead in the civilized world wearing one. So I ran, tomato-faced, past the break, my skinny legs delivering me to the end. Not first, but never last. Thank God.