Free When She Was Good by Philip Roth Page A

himself on Saturday nightssaying things like “They sure gave you the rush act today, Joe,” or “How’s Bart’s ankle?” or “How bad’s the rib going to be on the Guardello kid?” Some nights now it was Ellie who had to do the waiting while the three men finished up discussing whether Dorsey ought to have converted Sigerson from a tackle in the first place; or whether Bobby (Rackstraw) was going to be too slight for college ball, bullet arm or no bullet arm; or whether Wild Bill ought to go to Michigan (which had the big name) or to Kansas State, where at least he could be sure he was going to be with a coach who liked to move the old ball in the air.
    Those afternoons Roy went over to watch football practice he would almost always end up moseying over to the wooden bleachers back of the goal post so as to watch head-on as Joe placed his fifty through the uprights.
    “How you doin’, Joe?”
    “Oh, hi, Roy.”
    “How’s the old toe?”
    “Oh, holding up, I guess.”
    “That a boy.”
    It was also down at this end of the field that the cheerleaders practiced. After Joe had finished up—“So long, Roy”; “See you, kiddo”—Roy would button his field jacket, turn up the collar, lean back on his elbows, stretch his legs down across three rows of wooden stands, and with a little smile on his face, hang around a few minutes more watching the cheerleaders go through their oh-so-imporant repertoire of tricks.
    “Give me an L—”
    “L,” Roy would say, in a soft mocking voice, not caring whether they heard or not.
    “Give me an I—
Give me a B—”
    Throughout his four years of high school Roy had had a secret crush on Ginger Donnelly, who had become head cheerleaderwhen they were juniors. Whenever he saw her in the halls he would begin to perspire along his upper lip, just as he did in class when suddenly he found himself called upon to answer a question he hadn’t even heard the teacher ask. And the fact was that he and Ginger had never exchanged a word, and probably never would. However, she was built, as the saying goes, like a brick s. house, a fact Roy couldn’t seem to ignore, not that he always tried. In bed at night he would begin to think about the way she had of leaning back from the waist to do the Liberty Center locomotive, and he would get an erection; at the games themselves, after a touchdown, Ginger would do cartwheels the length of the field, and everybody would be screaming and cheering, and Roy would be sitting there with an erection. And it was ridiculous, because she wasn’t that kind of girl at all. Nobody had ever even kissed her, supposedly, and besides, she was a Catholic, and Catholic girls wouldn’t even let you put your arm around them in the movies until you were married, or at least engaged. Or so went one story. Another was that all you had to do was
tell
them you were going to marry them, right after graduation, and they “spread,” as the saying goes, on the very first date.
    Even where Ginger was concerned there had been stories. Almost every guy in Liberty Center would tell you that you couldn’t get near her with a ten-foot pole, and a lot of the girls said she was actually thinking about becoming a nun. But then this fellow named Mufflin, who was about twenty-five and used to hang around the high school smoking with kids, said that his friends over in Winnisaw told him that at a party across the river one night, back in Ginger’s freshman year (before she’d gotten so snooty), she had practically taken on the whole Winnisaw football team. The reason nobody knew about it was because the truth was immediately suppressed by the Catholic priest, who threatened to have all those involved thrown in jail for rape if even one of them opened his mouth.
    It was a typical Mufflin story, and yet some guys actually believed it—though Roy wasn’t one.
    Roy’s usual taste in girls ran to the ones who were a little more serious and sedate about things—Bev Collison,