Pinup Girls

I. Fly

In my earliest memory, I am running full-speed down someone’s concrete driveway, maybe my grandmother’s. I am clutching a croquet mallet, might be chasing a runaway ball. Small craters filled with gravel rush up at me. Cut to the bright lights above the dentist chair. Not my dentist. Maybe my grandmother’s. They sit me up and hand me a small orange eraser in the shape of a bear, like a gummy but opaque. You were brave they say. What a brave girl. And maybe, Slow down.

Photos taken later don’t show any chipped teeth. But there must have been a lot of blood to land me in a dentist chair far from home.

There was blood, yes, when I taught myself how to swim butterfly at age six. I’d seen other people do it, arching up onto surface and sweeping their arms overhead. I got myself launched and was doing it, really doing it, I thought, with no awareness of the oncoming wall. Onto the pool deck I flopped, eyebrow to concrete. I felt nothing except water running into one eye and warm blood into the other. In the pool office, the lifeguards pulled my hand away, pressed butterfly tape across my split skin.

Eyebrow hairs never did grow back in that spot, but I liked the scar. It was proof of me, like the four light moles on my right temple in the pattern of a baseball diamond. My divine tattoo. Girl at play.

II. Grace

I was the toddler who ran from my mom just so she would chase me. I climbed furniture, got into everything. Fell down often and hard.

“You were all gross motor,” my mom always says. She gave me the nickname “Grace.”

Grace, who had trouble with the vault in gymnastics because she kept running into the horse. She just couldn’t slow down.

Grace, who once knocked herself cold attempting a trick on a playground balance beam.

Grace, who didn’t progress past year one of tap and ballet at Sandy Bee’s Dance Academy and when dressed in that yellow leotard and tutu for recital, looked like half a cob of sweet corn. Whether they told me directly or implied it, the message from my instructors was clear: You are no dancer. Too stocky. Too clunky. Thick muscles, short lines. Too much and not enough, all at the same time.

III. Broad

The first year I played organized baseball I broke my right clavicle. I was chasing down a grounder when I got tangled with a teammate and fell hard on the ball. Crunch. I got right back up, arm dangling heavy at my side. My other hand went to touch it. Woozy, I said I’m ok I’m ok.

They put me in a figure-eight brace of canvas and foam. For the last few months of first grade I wore only button-down shirts because I couldn’t lift my arm above my head. It was holding me together, this itchy, pilling thing and the reason I wasn’t allowed to go swimming. It was a secret just beneath the fabric of my shirt, pulling me back into place.

Later, in high school, maybe sooner, I heard a boy say a certain girl had shoulders like a linebacker. It wasn’t a compliment. I suspected—worried—the same thing could be said about mine, so I always pointed them out first, made a joke. Wore the shame of my broadness like a yoke.

But secretly I liked my shoulders. They gave me size where I wanted it, space in a crowd. I found comfort in believing I could lower one if I needed to and jack someone square. Which I did sometimes with boys I liked. The ones I really liked understood that I wanted them to push me back.

IV. Swan

That dream I had when I was nine, in which I spent a whole day with Svetlana Boginskaya, the gymnast competing for the Unified Team in Barcelona. Long lean legs. Back a perfect V. Older though, the commentators said. Nineteen. Womanbody. Belarusian Swan.

In that dream, at the end right before I woke up, when Svetlana told me, gently, that even though we’d had the best day together, we couldn’t be best friends.

When she explained that I was having a dream.

When I knew she was a real person having a life somewhere far away, smoothing back her ponytail with metal clips and applying makeup. That I would never have her for myself.

When I carried her with me for days afterward, grieving a loss of someone I’d never even had.

Believing all along that she was tall for a gymnast, as I had been. Ill fitting. Strong in the wrong way. We had those shoulders, wide ones.

And then learning, later on, that she was five feet two. Not too tall after all. Just right. Smaller than I.

To me, though, always bigger. Filling out my shadow corners. Making space for all of me.

V. Walls

When I was thirteen and my parents were getting divorced, my dad gave me girls: Point guards. Shortstops. Middle-distance runners. They were high-school standouts, Olympic hopefuls, full-ride scholars. They came in articles torn from Sports Illustrated and newsprint photos clipped from our local paper, They arrived in the mail between my dad’s designated Thursdays and every-other weekends. Most of the time they came with a note, some scripture, a motivational quote.

I filed most of the girls in a big black binder my dad gave me, but some of the girls I hung on my wall. Rebecca (Lobo). Kellie (Jolly). Tamika (Catchings). Chamique (Holdsclaw).

This was the beginning of me and basketball falling in full-on love. I couldn’t get enough Vols and Huskies, Sheryl Swoopes and Team USA. Yes, I’d just finished a summer of fast-pitch. I’d even made the all-star team. I still loved Lisa (Fernandez) and Dot (Richardson), all the Wildcats and Bruins, but basketball was there for me when the season changed and winter fell. When my family was breaking up and I had a duffel bag and two rooms.

And so, on the plaster walls in the cold bedroom at my dad’s rented place, I hung my pinup girls, the known ones and the ones known only to me. Caroline McCombs, scrappy shooter and rebounder from nearby Youngstown State. Jamie, a guard for a high school in Akron who sparked her team with threes off the bench.

It wasn’t, of course, how they looked. It was how they moved: low and explosive; sure and demanding; tight off the pick and coast-to-coast. Rebecca ripping a rebound. McCombs driving the lane and getting air. Bodies caught in the act of doing what they wanted to do.

My dad gave me girls hoping they would inspire me and keep me focused—on sports, on school, on God.

But what they did was keep me company. And kept me focused, too—away from the other blank walls, the mostly-empty dresser, the bright side I was trying too hard to see.

VI. Press

Another image clipped from the newspaper, this one laminated for safekeeping:

A player in white and a player in maroon are on the move and tangled. The player in white is dribbling hard with her right hand. Her left arm is a bar to keep her defender at bay. The point guard’s eyes (fixed down on the ball) and her eyebrows (raised) say that she’s in trouble, is feeling the full-court press. The defender, in maroon, is opened wide and bellied up, one hand back, the other one swiping. She’s committing a reach-in foul, that’s obvious. But did she get called for it? I can’t remember. It’s not important. Nor is the position of her left foot important, a full step ahead and turned out. Nor is the fact of her ponytail flying sideways with effort, or the wiriness of her arms, or the leanness of her seventh-grade calf. But look at the defender’s face—mouth set, chin hard, brows fierce—and you’ll know everything that mattered to me, a girl’s insides out.

VII. Red

It’s been twenty-some years, and I can still see the bodies of my high school basketball teammates. The way they moved in our half-court offense, their strides in transition: clipped and equine or long and smooth. The way L’s head would fly back when she snapped a cross-court pass. C’s delicate follow-through and K’s fluid put-backs. B’s sharp elbows. N’s sharp knees.

I remember their calves and biceps. Their necks, waists, ankles, asses. Mid-winter tans. Fragrant body lotion and deodorant reapplied after practice. No one showered. Not that we could have. Dusty boxes filled the stalls in the back of the locker room. The faucets were rusted dry.

We saw each other every day of the week for hours but never naked. We took off our school clothes and put on cotton sports bras before tugging our regular bras out the bottom. After practice, we took off practice pinnies and put on fresh t-shirts and hoodies, covering ourselves again. Some of us wore t-shirts under our pinnies for comfort or sweat-catching. Or for that moment during practice when you were playing like shit or Coach was on you (or both) and he said “Go red” and for a moment while you accepted the demotion and turned your pinny inside out, the only thing between you and the world was your damp bra. Though most of us turned away as we were forced to go from white to red, in those moments our abs and bellies were on display, our innies and outies, pierced or plain; the trail of fuzz that retreated into the waistband of our shorts, always rolled for a better fit, knotted drawstrings loosening, always about to come undone but somehow staying put.

VIII. Dent

More than the locker room or the court, the weight room was where we could see ourselves, see what our bodies could do up close.

My lower body never let me down. Leg presses, calf raises, jump squats. These reinforced my sense of physical strength, promised an effective box-out, a vertical leap improved.

But I dreaded the bench press machine and worse, the overhead press. A simple move to grip the handles at my earlobes and push my knuckles skyward but difficult for me. My lifting partner, K, could press ten more pounds than I, her lips pursed and nose flaring. I’d watch the muscles on the top of her shoulder joint flex, peering into the divot they formed. She’d finish her reps and slide off the bench, lifting her arms again, sore now but weightless, checking her “dent” as we called it, satisfied. We checked our dents after each set, a quiet celebration of what our shoulders could do.

IX. Bare

At my dad’s house (a different one), where there were no girls on the walls of the room designated mine, where I spent little time because of basketball practice and track practice and because I had access to a car, I watched USA v. China come down to penalty kicks in the Rose Bowl.

I never played soccer and barely knew the game. But the hype around the Women’s World Cup Final was strong enough to pull me into the living room that summer day. I surely didn’t intend to watch the whole thing, didn’t expect after extra time to be fully prone, pounding the carpet with my fists, willing the ball past China’s goalkeeper.

You know what happens, of course. Chastain nails her shot and we win the whole thing. I whoop. I cry. I feel the collective goosebumps brush a whole generation of women and hear the unspoken alea iacta est whispered to each of us, the girls coming up next.

You know what happens after that, too. The thing that barely registered for me at the time but would be picked apart by millions of hungry eyes and slavering mouths.

The kit. Her bra. Her body exposed.

That’s what my dad said he remembered. The showboating. The player inexplicably taking off her shirt.

It has taken me twenty years and a few more World Cups to know what to say about this.

To say body and mean joy.

To say bra and mean alive.

To say here I am and mean, as I’ve always meant, here I go.

Carlee Tressel Alson is the author of several pieces of short fiction and nonfiction, including the essay “Liminal State” in Car Bombs and Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology (Belt, 2015). She lives and farms with her family in rural northwest Indiana.