Tailbone, 1960

Carol Barrett

Miss Galambos sprouted short curly hair, a whistle around her neck often in her teeth for a quick blast. Our white cotton romper gym uniforms snapped up, with a collar and short sleeves, wide elastic waist, and cuffs on the legs just below the crotch. They had to be laundered daily and brought back to school, ironed. If you weren’t ironed, no A for the day. Couldn’t manage that at our house. Six kids, a daily wash, trouble enough.

Miss Galambos told us that a certain number of babies were born with a tail that had to be cut away at birth. Proof we were descended from monkeys. She had been to medical school and used that authority to coach our slack bodies into daily submission: twelve pushups, forty sit-ups, seventy-five jumping jacks. Nancy Munk got the highest grade on the standing broad jump. Her long legs landed a good six inches beyond mine, even though I practiced at night in the basement, trying to go another tile further.

I told my mom and dad about the monkey babies. My father, who was a doctor, said if Miss Galambos went to medical school, she flunked out. I asked him then why is it called the tailbone? He couldn’t say. That hard spot between buttocks – my sanitary belt was always getting snagged on it, the little metal triangle holding elastic to circle hips, from which the pad was suspended. It hurt when it got stuck, digging in, yielding its own blood.

But not as bad as the day I cracked it, doing a slide on the floor in modern dance, one hand one foot for ballast, the body supposed to glide along the tongue of the floor like a banana popsicle. I heard the crack. No treatment, just let it mend. When my brother took me for a ride in his motorboat and jumped the waves, I muffled shrieks of pain. I still resist hard chairs.

Miss Galambos had other peculiarities. Her name, in Hungarian, means keeper of doves. She liked to drive certain girls around town in her convertible with the lid back. Nikki Kissinger often got a ride home. She too had short curly hair and, well, “developed early,” as they say. In square dancing the boys loved to swing her around. I am sure they could feel her sweatered breasts. They grinned when they got her.

One day Miss Galambos told us we didn’t have to iron our gym suits to get an A anymore. They just had to be clean. A major reversal of the rule, so I asked why she changed her mind. She said because your mom complained. Didn’t have to inform the whole class, but she did. I stopped telling my folks about Miss Galambos after that, until September came and she was gone. Mom said she went to another district. Wonder how she knew ahead of us, if the tailbone had anything to do with it.

Some years later, sad news – Nikki Kissinger died of breast cancer. First of my classmates. Way too young. Her shape – I imagine, hard to find the culprit. No way to know what was hiding there. I wish I could have told Miss Galambos what happened to Nikki, who always came to gym class ironed, even when we didn’t have to.

Carol Barrett holds doctorates in both clinical psychology and creative writing. She coordinates the Creative Writing Certificate Program at Union Institute & University, where she heads a program to enable students who are ABD from another school to finish their doctorate. Her books include Calling in the Bones, which won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, Drawing Lessons from Finishing Line Press, and Pansies – creative nonfiction from Sonder Press, and a recent finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. Her creative work has appeared in JAMA, Poetry International, Christian Century, The Women’s Review of Books, and many other venues, including over fifty anthologies. A former NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has lived in nine states and in England.