Deciding to Punt

My parents and I were eating dinner when the cheerleaders rang the doorbell. It was the night before Thanksgiving; the pair of cheerleaders carried posterboard, crepe paper and a three-foot-tall gold mylar balloon shaped like the number seven. When I showed them upstairs to my little brother’s room their platform sneakers thumped delicately, like rubber mallets wielded by diffident elves.

Generally we are not the sort of people who have our home crepe-papered by cheerleaders. However, late last summer my brother—despite having played only pick-up games of touch football, despite being built a lot like Stephen Crane, despite a congenital wussiness—decided to become the kicker for our high school’s varsity football team. As a senior gridder, he was assigned his very own cheerleader. Her name, according to the posters she scotch-taped to my brother’s mirror, is Shelli. According to age-old tradition, she was obliged to decorate my brother’s bedroom before the big Thanksgiving Day game against the Barnstable Red Raiders’ arch-rivals, the Falmouth Clippers. I was, of course, appalled. It was disturbing that at the dawn of the 21st century young women, rather than pursuing interests of their own, were forced to dedicate their efforts to fashioning glitter-dusted posters (“Kosman ... He’s Yet to Take Out the CLIPPERS at Falmouth”) for the football team; still more disturbing were the sexual implications of their decorating his bedroom. And apart from my feminist objections, I felt pretty bad about the fact that poor Shelli and her cohort had to squander their efforts on so marginal a football player as my brother.

“This is horrible,” I told my parents as I sat back down at the dinner table. “I can’t believe you’re letting them do this. Some liberals you are.” Behind me I heard the delicate clump-clump of the cheerleaders descending the stairs.

“May I get you girls anything?” my mother trilled to them.

“Enabling! You’re enabling!” I hissed at her as she handed them a roll of masking tape. “I’m going to write a letter to NOW and turn you in!”

“Please,” my mother said. Masking tape in hand, the cheerleaders clumped back upstairs to my brother’s bedroom. My parents and I heard them giggling as they shut the door.

“Listen,” I said, “haven’t we got some Betty Friedan in the basement? And I know The Second Sex is down there somewhere. Or, I tell you what, I’ll just dash down and grab something by Gloria Steinem. You can hand it to them on their way out. We’ll evangelize. We’ll be like the feminist version of Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

“Cute,” my mother said. “Will you pass me the butter?” Mom can be very cutting.

We finished dinner to an intermittent clumping overhead. As soon as the cheerleaders left, my parents and I dashed upstairs to see their handiwork. Festoons of intertwined red, black and white crepe paper dangled from the ceiling; a football-shaped piñata nestled at the foot of my brother’s bed. A feather boa was twined around his pillows. The cheerleaders had scattered glittery confetti over his sheets; they had hung a red fringe from the door lintel. The poster taped to his mirror read, “#7 Can Kick That Ball 2 Heaven...Just Use Ur Golden Toe. From Your: Cheerleader Shelli.” Red, white and black helium balloons bobbed against the ceiling. The cheerleaders had tethered the gold mylar seven to the window fan. I took pictures, supposing that nobody would believe me otherwise. My brother’s room seemed (well, seems—he’s not likely to dismantle it any time soon) so unbelievable because it seemed so anachronistic. I live 67 miles from Cambridge; it felt like another world.

On Thanksgiving Day, my family went to the big Barnstable-Falmouth game. It was warm and bright; the marching band played the national anthem, the Barnstable High School fight song, and then, at intervals, the “hey” song. The cheerleaders clapped rhythmically, bounced from foot to foot, and tried, unsuccessfully, to engage the crowd in call-and-response chants. When, for the first time since 1996, Barnstable lost, my brother says the other football players cried. “It’s weird how much it mattered to them,” he said.

And I suppose an outside observer—or my mother—might have said the same of me: “It’s weird how much it mattered to them.” At Harvard, we tend to be hyperaware of anything that might cause offense; House lists and dining halls become ad hoc forums for debate. After spending time at Harvard, I am inclined to be sanctimonious. But watching the cheerleaders bouncing from foot to foot, intent on the game, I realized that my quest to foist The Feminine Mystique upon them was not only quixotic but also, and far worse, patronizing. Their decorating my brother’s room wasn’t necessarily antifeminist—and they certainly didn’t see it that way. They saw it as their contribution to the community, as their part in the inter-town rivalry. “You just don’t get it,” my brother is wont to say of high school. “You never got it.” And looking at the feather boa on his pillow, I knew he was right.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.