“The father of Doris put a piece of paper on my desk,” Coach Biggs said, and I realized that I had been holding my breath. He stood at the front of the Elks Lodge with one hand on his grandson arm and the other on the microphone stand, his oxygen tube trailing, and he spoke slowly, like a man setting down a heavy load one stone at a time. “It was a notice of foreclosure on my house. Three months overdue. Mr. Pennington said, Harold, I understand you are about to pick a cheer squad. My daughter wants the last spot. I would hate to see anything happen to your family. And I was thirty four years old with a wife and three babies.”
The silence in the room was complete. Two hundred people who had laughed a minute earlier now sat as still as stones. Somebody dropped a fork. Doris Pennington Whitfield had not moved from the podium. Her lipstick looked suddenly too bright against her face. “Coach, that was a long time ago,” she said, and her voice shook. “Nobody needs to hear this.” But the coach was not finished. “Arlene Kowalski got the highest score of every girl who tried out,” he said. “She had a spirit that could light a stadium. I scratched her name out with my own pen, and I have hated myself for sixty three years.”
He turned toward me. I had not realized that I was standing in the middle of the floor, in my red sweater, with my purse clutched against my chest. “Arlene,” he said. “I should have told you the truth at the time. I was a coward. I let you think you were not good enough, and you were the best we had. I am ninety six years old. I could not leave this world without telling you. I am so sorry.” I tried to speak. Nothing came. I walked across that polished floor, across sixty three years, and put my arms around an old man in a wheelchair, and I felt his whole body shake.
A piece of paper in 1962 had taken a girl from the squad, and sixty three years later it took a room of strangers to put her back.
When I looked up, Doris was crying. Not the way I expected, not angry. She was standing very small at the microphone, an eighty year old woman in an expensive jacket, and she said, “I did not know.” She said it three times. “Arlene, I swear to you. My father told me the other girl had withdrawn. I found out in 1971, when he was very ill, and I never had the courage to say it. And then I looked at you in that sweater tonight, and I was ashamed, and I did the cruelest thing I knew how to do. I laughed. I have been laughing at you for sixty years, so I would not have to look.”
I want to tell you that I forgave her on the spot. The truth is slower. I stood there with my hand on the coach shoulder and the whole room watching, and I thought of the sixteen year old girl who had cried in her bedroom, and the woman who had kept a sweater in a cedar chest for sixty three years because she could not bear to wear it or throw it away. Then I looked at Doris, and I saw a frightened girl, too. A girl who had been handed a gift she never asked for, and who had spent her whole life guarding it. “Doris,” I said, “come down from there.”
She came down. Her heels clicked on the floor. We stood facing each other in front of two hundred people, two old women in two colors, and she held out her hands, and I took them. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “I am so sorry.” I said, “I know. It is all right.” I am not sure that it was all right. But it was the beginning, which is more than we had the day before. Behind us a man started to clap. Then another. Then the whole lodge, the band, the waiters, the people at the back by the coat rack, until the sound filled the rafters and rattled the glasses on the tables.
Then something happened that I could not have planned in a hundred years. The doors at the end of the lodge swung open, and in came the varsity cheerleaders of Ridgemont High, all twelve of them, in their red and white uniforms, with their pom-poms. Doris had arranged them for the evening, a little surprise for the class. They had been waiting in the lobby for the slideshow to end. The captain, a girl of seventeen named Brianna, walked up to me and held out a pair of pom-poms. “Mrs. Fitzpatrick,” she said, “we heard what happened. Would you lead us?”
I have done a lot of things in eighty years. I have raised five children, lost a husband, and typed ten thousand school letters. I have never been so afraid as I was in that moment. My knees are not what they were. I had no idea what to do. But the girls formed a line, and the band struck up the Ridgemont fight song, and my feet remembered. I did not do a split. I did not do a cartwheel. But I lifted both arms over my head, and I shouted the cheer I had practiced in my backyard for six months in 1962, and every person in that lodge shouted it back.
The next week, the principal of Ridgemont High called me. The school had voted unanimously. They were retiring a number in the gym, and adding a name to the old squad photograph from 1962, the one hanging outside the trophy case. Arlene Kowalski Fitzpatrick, Cheerleader, Class of 1965. The coach came to the ceremony in his wheelchair, with his oxygen tank, and pinned a small silver whistle to my sweater. It was his own, from his first season. Doris donated the new uniforms for the entire squad, and she did not ask for her name on a plaque.
Coach Biggs passed in the winter, quietly, in his sleep, with that whistle on the table beside his bed. His grandson told me he had slept better in his last three months than in many years. I wear the red sweater every Friday now, to the home games, in the bleachers, with the sugar maple coming gold in October. The girls wave at me. I wave back. And every once in a while, when the home team scores, I stand up in front of everyone and cheer, loudly, without shame, because it turned out that sixty three years was just the wait.