First Attraction
by Jennifer Cherry
The evening my 14-year-old daughter returns home from her first high school basketball game, I am curled up on the couch with my youngest, holding him close, listening to the even breathing of his peaceful seven-year-old sleep. She stands in the doorway separating the dining room from the living room, watching images flash across the screen of the muted television. I ask how the game was.
“Fine. Fun,” she replies, turning on her heel and disappearing. I listen to her footsteps on the stairs, to the creaks from overhead, which tell me she has gone to her bedroom. Sometime later, she returns, wearing her pink-with-green-frogs pajama bottoms and the too large, bright orange University of Illinois T-shirt. She slips into the small open space at the end of the couch, her hip pressing against the bottom of my feet.
“Who won?” I ask.
“Central.”
“Was the gym packed like they hoped?”
“Yeah. We had to sit on these step thingies at one end of the court because the bleachers were full.”
In the flickering light cast from the TV, I watch my daughter. Her long blonde hair, loosed from its ponytail holder, swings around her shoulders, across her cheeks. The tousled hair, the oversized shirt, the baggy pajama bottoms cannot detract from the natural prettiness she possesses. More often than not, she is at ease with her prettiness, is confident with how she appears to others. I wonder where her ease comes from, for when I was her age, I had obsessed over my looks, had always hoped I looked pleasing to whoever might be in the room. Even now, after marriage, after giving birth to three children, after passing my fortieth birthday and knowing my looks are on the downward slope of attractiveness, I still hope others find me, if nothing else, at least nice looking.
“I’m going to bed,” my daughter says. “I’m tired.” She stands then leans over to offer our goodnight ritual of brushing her cheek against mine, each of us whispering goodnight to the other. Her hair falls across my face, and I inhale all at once the smells of orange citrus shampoo, school cafeteria lunch, and basketball game concessions. A twinge of remembering my own days of high school basketball games nudges me, and I for an instant see me sitting in the bleachers, cheering on our team, giggling with my friends. Though 23 years have passed since those days and though slightly blurry and ragged around the edges, the memories tumble forth. For awhile, I sink into the broken montages, letting them play out. Then, when the reel runs clean of memories and the mental projector turns itself off, I muse that now it’s my daughter’s turn to make memories, which will one day, when she’s older, come forth at the whim of a scent.
The next morning, we climb into the SUV to make our way to the kids’ school, then me to work. After backing out of the driveway, I glance at my daughter and notice a small smile playing around her lips.
“What’s the smile for?” I ask.
She turns to me, her smile growing. “Last night, at the game, the boys from Holy Trinity kept egging each other on to come over and talk to me, find out my name.” Her face is a light shining brightly, and it appears the light switch had been flipped from OFF to ON during a two-hour high school boys’ basketball game. I have never seen my daughter react to boys’ attention like she is now. Though she has had her share of “boyfriends” during her elementary and junior high school years, she has never taken any of these childhood relationships seriously. Boys were always a very distant last on her list of important things. Now, it appears, the list is reordering itself.
Her giddiness, while humorous, makes me sad, for I wonder if she will be like so many other girls who, at the sudden attention of boys, allow that attention to turn a once reasonably stable world into a world of confusion, a confusion that snakes its way into the deepest, most vulnerable parts of their psyches. Will she become the me I was at her age, critically self-conscious, always wondering what others, especially boys, think about the clothes she’s wearing, the style of her hair, the application of her make-up? Will she become the me I was at her age and, though maybe she doesn’t understand she’s doing it just as I didn’t, question her value as an individual based on what others, especially boys, see on the outside rather than on the inside?
“So how many actually got up the nerve to ask?” I query.
“A couple. One wouldn’t ask me directly. He asked Jorie.”
“And what did Jorie think of these boys?”
“She laughed. She thought the whole thing was funny.”
“What do you think about these boys?”
My daughter grins. “It was interesting.”
Interesting? I wonder, though I think I already know, what my daughter isn’t saying. Is she the me at her age, giving a safe answer while reveling in the strange but pleasant sensations stirring in her limbs, her core? Not wanting to share these feelings because they are delicious, and admitting so will be embarrassing? I try to come up with a way to ask my daughter, but I silently stammer, unable to put a coherent thought together.
“I don’t get why it’s so difficult to go up to someone and ask what her name is,” she says. I hear the shift in tone and am relieved that my daughter’s practical side emerges, replacing the giddiness I saw seconds before.
We continue on to school, our conversation turning to other matters, and her no-nonsense persona takes charge. She is again the focused individual concerned with her B in social studies, wondering if that one B on her report card will mean the difference between her or her friend Austin being crowned valedictorian of their eighth grade class. She calculates aloud the grade she could receive if she takes on the offered extra credit, and determines she will do the extra credit work just to be on the safe side. After making this determination, she talks about having her friends over to work on a school project. They have to make a board game with the U.S. Constitution as its basis. When we arrive at the school, she hops out, smiling and saying, “Have a great day, Mama,” just like she has done every day since starting kindergarten.
In the quiet of the SUV, I head to work. I think about the teenage boys wanting to know my daughter, and my daughter’s response to her first taste of attraction. She, like the me at her age, has realized the pleasure which comes from knowing boys want to know her. I think about how I, at her age, fell under the spell of attraction and hope she, unlike the me I was at her age, will see the spell, examine it and its workings, and be able to control it rather than letting it control her. Amidst the circling of these concerns is the thought I am over-thinking my daughter’s reaction, and at this I laugh out loud. I’ve known for many years, at every age she has lived, that my daughter isn’t the me, has never been the me I was at 5, at 9, at 14, and for this, I have always been glad.
Jennifer Cherry teaches English composition and the occasional Literature of Golf class at a small Midwestern community college. Her passion is her family, which includes her husband who is her biggest supporter; her three children who show her every day how truly wonderful this thing called “life” is; and the family dog, Max, who has taught the whole family how to run excitedly to the door to give a proper homecoming of hugs and smiles to all who enter.
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