Hopscotch and Jumprope

 

I walked out onto the playground, seeing the kids playing individually and in groups. The sawdust underfoot was frozen into a solid mass, the chunks on the surface frosted decoratively where they hadn’t been stepped on. The sky was a perfectly even gray, the Sun a white disk that you could look directly at. I imagined a flag, like the Japanese flag, but white on gray.

I looked around. A group of boys were throwing a football. I didn’t like football, or playing catch. Boys and girls were on the swings, but there weren’t any swings empty. The jungle gym was crowded. On the asphalt patch, groups of girls were playing hopscotch and jumprope and that weird game where one of them crouched down in the center and they formed a circle around her and sang a song while she stood up. Actually, maybe there was more than one game like that. I had a feeling I’d heard more than one song, anyway.

I didn’t like being on the asphalt during recess. I thought of playing on asphalt as an opportunity to fall down and tear your pants and gouge your hands. Still, I’d always wondered about the games girls played. I’d already learned that boys’ games were magic, and could take you to far-off places and allow you to live other lives, almost as well as books could, if you observed the rituals and didn’t mess with them. It was easy to mess up the magic, of course. What sort of magic did girls use, though? I decided I’d like to find out.

I walked over to where the girls were jumping rope. I saw that two girls were twirling the rope, and the girl in the middle was not watching for it – she was actually not facing towards it, and couldn’t see it coming. She was dancing in time to the rope’s swing, dancing with the rope, as its partner. So . . . .

I watched two girls playing Hopscotch. That was trickier, and finally I asked them to explain it. They were annoyed at being asked to explain, but tried to be polite. They even invited me to try it, but when I tossed the stick they were using, it landed outside of a square, and when I skipped down the squares, I didn’t land inside them, and wrong-footed, and didn’t understand their explanation of what I had done wrong, and went away annoyed.

I didn’t even try with the circle of singing girls.

And so I never did learn the secret of girl magic.

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47247/in-just