Tetherballs and Underpants
An Object Lesson in Playground Reticence
My dog Arlo and I are out for our usual loop when I stop short. In the shade of an oak tree, glimpsed over a nominal fence, stands a lowly metal pole with a dirty yellow ball tethered from the top.
All at once, it’s morning recess at the Gardner Bullis School. The bell rings. I jump up from my metal desk and spring for the door. Speed walking to the edge of the covered breezeway that links our classrooms, I break into a full sprint. The fastest girl in school, the odds of being beat to the tetherball pole by one of my female classmates is slim to none. My real concern is the boys.
That I’m wearing a skirt hasn’t yet crossed my mind—an oversight that will haunt me for years to come.
To claim the first game, I must a) reach the tetherball court before anyone else and b) climb to the top of the pole and then descend, ready to serve the first game.
I have no idea how made up these rules. I don’t care. I want to be Queen of the Court. And this is morning recess, so my reign will be a short, regardless.
Decades on I see it all. My legs, mostly bare except for knee socks, are wrapped around the pole; my sneakers—white canvas Keds with thick rubber soles—hold me in place. I’ve just claimed the game and am about to descend when the teasing starts.
“I can see your underpants!”
“Look at Holly’s underpants!”
Suddenly, a small crowd of mostly boys—all the losers I beat to the court—are teasing me about my Carter’s underwear. White cotton and covered with tiny colored flowers, these undies cover my entire bottom and then some. Whatever. That’s what I should have said. Except I didn’t.
Below me inside the circular court stands the third-grade boy who is my nemesis. His name is lost to me but not his expression: short, smug, with ebony hair and blue eyes, he stands below me like a miniature Napoleon, pointing a rigid finger up at my bottom.
Exposed, ashamed, and competitively hobbled, I slid down the pole, burning the skin on my thighs in the process, and ran for the girls’ bathroom where I cried.
Ah, the blunt force of that first humiliation. There’s nothing like it to turn a care-free kid into a painfully self-conscious adolescent.
I kept playing tetherball at recess but never with the abandon I had before that day. Before running to the court, I checked my clothes first. If I’d forgotten to pack shorts to wear under my skirt or dress, I’d hang back and let someone else claim the first serve.
All this I remembered as I stared at my neighbor’s tetherball. Funny, right? The power of an otherwise unremarkable object to conjure formative childhood anguish.
I’m sure some of you reading this have an object, like my tetherball, that is emblematic of some defining moment in your life. Feel free to share below if so inclined. This blog was conceived in the spirit of tapping the universal truths, joys and humiliations, that give our human lives texture, cotton flowers and all.
Post note:
A favorite novelist of mine, Dana Spiotta, is a master at using common objects to tell her fictional stories. Her narratives, Innocents and Others among them, are rich with vintage cameras, phones, and other everyday detritus, that her characters use and abuse in the service of their fictional lives.
I rediscovered a 2017 interview with the author and pulled out the quote below, thinking it apropos to my story about tetherball.
“I do know that when I write about the past, I get ideas about the present. What we discarded or what is now obsolete tells us a lot about who we are as a culture.”
Culturally speaking, our attitude toward tetherball as a playground sport hasn’t changed much since I was a kid in the 70’s. Grade school norms have changed, however, when it comes to outfitting little girls for playground games. With the advent of undershorts, girls in skirts and dresses can climb tetherball poles and hang upside on monkey bars without anyone calling them out for their underpants—or their audacity.
Hallelujah.
I’ll race you to the court.
Featured image by David Tonelson via Dreamstime
