Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Skip It

We risk tripping because girlhood demands injury.

First we learn to jump rope, arc the cord overhead like the boys playing tetherball, swinging the rope to loop like a noose around the pole they tell us to dance on, or like our father’s belts when we are bad, though in this game we can escape the hurt if we are quick and small enough.

We hold our breaths and lift off the ground like hollow-boned birds, too-big hearts for such small bodies, hovering for a moment before coming down.

Sometimes we fall, like when we forget to expel the air from our bodies before we hold rigid as corpses, hovering like ghosts, or when we look foolish at our feet. Soaring means air out, eyes up, means flee somewhere else, surrender.

Girls learn jump rope while boys learn soccer. We are taught to hold still for success, to go up but only so high, while the boys learn to play the field, to score and celebrate. We learn to trip, a lifetime of falling.

At recess we practice. We fall in love with the boys who throw wads of spit in our hair, who force us to kiss them while the others jeer. We fall for each other, stuff love letters between the slits in our lockers, declare breathless that no one understands what it means to want to disappear. We fall into each other’s arms to discover trust is never guaranteed. If we are small and pretty as waifs we are caught and admired; if we are not, we learn letting go is punishment, never pleasure.

Now Toys “R” Us says fun is skipping, tripping. We each have one—a Skip It around our ankle like a shackle. We place our foot inside each lunch and recess, swing our leg to set the spiral in motion.

The game is this: Jump over the self-imposed hurdle each time it swings back around forever or fall.

More than one girl loses a tooth, bloodies a palm with her carelessness. Breonna is too clumsy, can’t keep up, her front teeth jutting from her lips so she never smiles. Savannah is too afraid to leap, limps and lisps away like in class when her tongue won’t cooperate and the boys point until she goes silent. Becky is too clumsy and cries out quit. So many of us learn to give up before the bell even rings.

We learn to give up like in math, where 2 + 2 = 4 except when we play tug of war and the same number of boys is so much stronger. All the problems are about billiards and trains, boys named Bill and Tim. We are gone altogether, like we are learning to feel lately, ignored when we raise our hands or when our fathers don’t like what we say.

For fun we try to outrun pain even though we are standing still. We jump and jump, trying to reach infinity. The spiral only stops when we do. The way to avoid hurt, we are learning, is to keep going forever.

We gather in a circle around each successful girl like a shrine, watch sweat shine on her brow, red and pained, her eyes up to the sun. We count how long she can avoid the inevitable. There is no need—the Skip It clicks each successful rotation, marking accomplishment like miles on a treadmill or calories on a wrapper, the tally scores some of us have started cutting on our arms and thighs.

We skip snack to jump, leave our lunch to leap. Like our mothers and theirs, we must be small to be a success. We skip secrets like how Meghan lets the history teacher dance with her sometimes or Dawn’s dad bruises her body. Each failure is a reason to prove ourselves again. We when trip—over feet and feelings—we reset the counter. We start back at zero.

The lesson is obsession, one we cannot forget these many years later, still braced for a lifetime of falling.

We learn to leap without looking, to accept injury as part of the game. Juicy Jackie shows her breasts to the boys for money to go to medical school until her brother steals the bank. Tiny Tori wins first prize in the horse jumping show but breaks her brittle bones and spends a summer in a cast looking up from her bed at all those blue ribbons. Mary runs away with the principal after graduation, just like Julie does with the band teacher, the one who taught her to purse her lips and blow.

Angela jumps her car off a cliff when her boyfriend leaves her, and so does Tanya a decade later, driving over a cliff into the sea, convinced—for just a moment—she can fly.

Brittany falls best, into bed with a hundred men and a camera, beautiful and breathless onscreen, her eyes to the skies just like we learned.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery (Twitter: @SF_Montgomery) the author of Halfway from Home (forthcoming Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University.