The Cheerleader - Softcover

MacDougall, Ruth Doan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966335201 ISBN 13: 9780966335200

Publisher: Frigate Books, 1998

Synopsis

Here is what it was like to grow up in the 1950s in the years of ponytails, pajama parties, proms, and parking, when to be popular was important and when, if you were a girl, being important meant being a cheerleader. THE CHEERLEADER is a best-selling novel about the loss of innocence, the growth of passion, and the awakening of ambition.A classic.--PUBLISHERS WEEKLYOne of the truest portraits of an American girl ever written.--DETROIT FREE PRESSIt's heartbreaking at times, hilarious at others, and she's got it all down beautifully.--PHILADELPHIA INQUIRERIf future historians and sociologists are ever impelled to find out what it was like to be a high school student in America at mid 20th century, they will need go no farther than THE CHEERLEADER for documentation and enlightenment...Utterly honest, accurate, and sympathetic.--KANSAS CITY STARA devastatingly accurate portrait of the '50s.--LIBRARY JOURNAL

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Doan MacDougall was born on a chicken farm near Laconia, NH. After Dartmouth, her father, Daniel Doan, had taken up farming, the idea being that he could both raise chickens and, in a makeshift office in an extra hen house, write stories and novels. But the income wasn't enough to support a family, so eventually the Doans moved into town and Dan took a job at a manufacturing company.

Although Dan gave up farming, he didn't give up writing. Ruth remembers falling asleep each evening listening to what she later would call "a literary lullaby," the sound of his typewriter as he wrote at night. By the time she was six, she had written her first story and knew that she too was a writer.

Her work now includes nine novels:

The Lilting House (Bobbs-Merrill)

The Cost of Living (Putnam)

One Minus One (Putnam)

The Cheerleader (Putnam)

Wife and Mother (Putnam)

Aunt Pleasantine (Harper)

The Flowers of the Forest (Atheneum)

A Lovely Time Was Had By All (Atheneum)

Snowy, a sequel to The Cheerleader (St. Martin's)

The Cheerleader became a national best-seller in its Bantam paperback edition. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, optioned by Twentieth Century Fox, and made into an NBC sitcom pilot.

On the 25th anniversary of its publication, The Cheerleader has been rereleased by Frigate Books.

Ruth's short stories have appeared in Redbook and been winners in the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project competitions. She has reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review, Newsday, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other newspapers.

Since her father's death in 1993, Ruth has assumed the authorship of his popular hiking guidebooks, 50 Hikes in the White Mountains and 50 More Hikes in New Hampshire; she has checked the trails for new editions and added prefaces, some new hikes, and new photographs. She edited Dan's Indian Stream Republic: Settling A New England Frontier, 1785-1842.

Ruth lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Donald K. MacDougall, who was a football player at Laconia High School when she was a cheerleader.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I.

The dance had begun. The gym was darkened now, and sawdust-wax had been sprinkled on the floor, but the smell of hot sweat from the basketball game still lingered. Down the darkness echoed record-player music.

Henrietta Snow, known as Snowy, stood with another of the JV cheerleaders in the doorway. She was fifteen years old. She wore dungarees and her white cheerleading blouse, its collar turned up and its starch softened, and she wore her long dark-blond hair brushed into a ponytail that looked like an upside-down question mark. She said, "How disgusting!"

But Jean Pond, who was known as Puddles and also known for saying out loud what everyone else was thinking, said, "Maybe we should've been bawling in there, too. Maybe it's our last game, too."

Snowy felt sharply sick. "Shut up," she said. "Please shut up." She glanced at her left hand, where today's date had been stamped by the boy at the desk outside the gym. March 4, the stamp said clearly. Soon it would begin to smudge. March 4, 1955.

The JV cheerleaders had changed out of their uniforms during the Varsity game. They couldn't take showers; the visiting basketball team was using the girls' locker room, and they changed in the girls' gym office and clogged their sweat with Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder. So they had no real excuse for being in the gym office again after the Varsity game, but sensing drama, they all had wandered back. They were rewarded. The last basketball game of the year, and the Varsity cheerleaders were weeping, hugging each other, sobbing. There were six seniors on the Varsity squad; they wept for the end of glory. And the two juniors, who would be Varsity cheerleaders again next year and probably co-captains, wept partly for the end of this squad but mostly because they were expected to. The JV's sympathized, and the JV captain, a senior, burst into tears, and so did the twin who was very emotional. The gym office was a little room jammed with megaphones, lockers, the gym teachers' desks, square-dancing records, basketballs, volleyballs, and a bulletin board of game schedules, clippings, and jokes. A full-length mirror reflected the clinging group of girls, the Varsity in short green jumpers, the JV's in their dungarees and white blouses, Snowy standing wide-eyed watching.

Now in the gym the record player sang: "Earth angel, earth angel,/Will you be mine?/My darling dear,/Love you all the time."

"Well," Snowy said, and she and Puddles strolled casually over to the bleachers, but they didn't sit down because this would make them seem too obviously waiting for somebody to ask them to dance. They stood half-turned from the dance floor, as if they didn't care, as if they were on the brink of dashing off to something far more exciting. There was, however, nothing in their world more exciting than this.

The gym, in the basement of the main school building, was a sunken place, deeper than the basement classrooms surrounding it on three sides. The indoor windows high above were observation posts where kids out in the corridor would lean to watch gym classes or cheerleaders practicing or games or dances. A deep dark-brown sunken place.

But to Snowy, it was where love might find her.

She stood small and vulnerable there, her heart-shaped face tilted, listening to Puddles.

"Six," Puddles said, looking fierce, surprisingly so, because her features were very delicate. Her brown hair, not quite shoulder-length, curled at its tips like soft snails. She was taller than Snowy and fragile, but her round bottom was packed as tightly into her dungarees as Snowy's was, and her blouse had more of a shelf. "Okay," she said, once again beginning to calculate openings on the Varsity cheerleading squad, "we've got two juniors on JV's, and us five sophomores, that's seven trying for six vacancies. Somebody's got to go, and it'll be one of us sophomores. They'll move up the juniors; I can see no reason why they wouldn't move up the juniors."

"They" were the two women gym teachers, Miss Gilson who coached Varsity and Miss Jones who coached JV's. Gilly and Jonesy.

Snowy said, "They never moved up Maureen."

Puddles said, "With her looks?" Maureen, the JV captain, was plump and good-natured, a mother hen. Puddles added, "Rita and Nutty have got to make Varsity; Nutty is such a brown-noser and Rita's the only one of us who can do a split."

Snowy turned and scanned the dance floor. "I don't see Rita and Tom here yet, do you?"

"Nope. Maybe they've skipped the dance and gone parking right away."

"Oh, Puddles!"

It was a time when goals shone clear, and Snowy's goal was glittering success, and success included love. Love meant Tom Forbes. Tom was a junior and one of the biggest catches in Gunthwaite High School, but so far no one had caught him except her best friend, Beverly Colby, and Bev had caught him only briefly; yet lately he'd been going out with Rita Beaupre as regularly as if they were going steady. Every Monday morning before homeroom, Snowy walked past Rita's chattering group of junior girls to see whether or not Rita had got her hands on his little gold football over the weekend.

"Hey," Puddles said, "there goes New Boy making a beeline for Linda. Isn't he a doll?"

Puddles herself had once been a New Girl, arriving in the middle of eighth grade when her family moved here to Gunthwaite, New Hampshire, from Portland, Maine. The homeroom teacher asked Snowy to take care of her. Puddles, Snowy discovered, didn't really need taking care of.

New Boy had appeared in their algebra class this week. The teacher assigned him to the desk behind Puddles', and today he'd begun what Puddles considered overtures, shoving her chair forward with his feet until she was almost squashed against her desk, then yanking it back. But now he and Linda Littlefield walked together to the dance floor as the record player yelled "Shake, rattle and roll!"

The kids jitterbugged smoothly, gazing past each other with distant bemused expressions.

Snowy strove to conform, to wear the same clothes as the popular girls, to wear her hair fashionably, to carry her books and speak the slang and know the hit songs all absolutely correctly. She had worn an anklet when anklets over socks were fashionable; she had bleached her bangs; she had dotted her i's with circles; and because she was quick, she'd always been one of the first to sense a change in styles and change herself. But one thing neither she nor Bev had been able to learn properly was jitterbugging. Puddles tried to teach them, to the record player in her living room; Snowy and Bev would giggle so much she didn't succeed.

"You'll never do nothing/To save your doggone soul!/I said, shake, rattle and roll!"

Snowy watched Bev dancing with Roger Lambert and noted that Bev had certainly improved, taught by Roger. The co-captain of the basketball team, he was tall and coolly jaunty, and he terrified Snowy because he was a senior and so suave.

Then she saw Tom coming in, his arm around Rita's shoulders.

Edition details

• Publisher: Frigate Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0966335201
• ISBN 13: 9780966335200
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288