Throw Like A Girl

by Jean Thompson

  But of course he wasn’t there, and if he knew she was getting weird again, something she had promised to quit doing Well it wasn’t just an act, she was weird, she couldn’t help it, you might as well try to stop yourself from vomiting as try to keep the weirdness from coming out. Her hands felt soiled. She rinsed them in the gray water and dried them on her pants.

  R.B. was still asleep back in the room. He didn’t like getting up early or walking just for walking’s sake. He was full of such things, little prickly dislikes. People who went around acting like theirs didn’t stink. Certain movies, the stupid ones where they didn’t do anything but talk. Certain kinds of foods. It was all Jessie could do to get him to drink orange juice instead of orange soda. He only ate when he was hungry, didn’t make a big deal out of it. He didn’t care about a lot of things other people thought were so important.

  He was proud. He didn’t like her paying for things, even when it was her own money; she had to slip it to him beneath the table in restaurants. It was as if all the ordinary hungers he didn’t have or couldn’t be bothered with went into being proud. She understood that about him, she had reached out with her heart and soul and touched that hard, hungry part of him.

  Jessie turned her back on the ocean and crossed the road, wondering if he’d want something to eat once he woke up. There was a doughnut shop a couple of blocks down, she didn’t mind going into places like that where nobody noticed what you looked like or who you were. Jessie stood patiently in line, flicking her eyes over her reflection in the mirrored panels. An average-to-plain girl with long straight hair falling in her eyes, no one you’d remember, and for the first time in her life she was glad for that because nobody was supposed to know where they were. She bought six doughnuts and a large iced tea which she balanced carefully on her way back to the room. She couldn’t believe they were staying in a real motel.

  R.B. was still asleep. He slept like he was a puppet dropped from some great height. Arms and legs flopped everywhere. His head was flung back and his mouth was open. Watching him sleep was still new to her, so she just sat there for a while. How amazing that when he was asleep, not talking, moving, watching things and working them around, he wasn’t really R.B. at all. He was this long, blue-pale, skinned-looking creature, like a shell, but she had to stop thinking about those.

  Jessie drank her iced tea and ate one of the doughnuts and then because she was getting bored she made some small, experimental noises to see if he might wake up. Scootched around in her chair. Ran water in the bathroom. She had already learned that if she wanted him to get up she should go about it in this roundabout way.

  Finally his eyes fluttered and he regarded the ceiling. Then he rolled over. “Hey,” Jessie said.

  “What are you doing?”

  He meant the doughnuts. Jessie held the bag out to him and he rummaged around in it. “Chocolate. All right.”

  And she was happy, because the doughnuts made him happy. R.B. got up to go to the bathroom with half a doughnut still clamped in his mouth and that was both funny and awful, to think of him doing both those things at once. Well, this was her new life, she should get accustomed to all manner of strangeness.

  When he got back into bed he patted the space next to him, meaning she should lie down with him which also felt strange, since she was dressed and he wasn’t wearing anything. She rested her head on his chest and R.B. ran one hand down her back and underneath the top of her pants while his other hand worked at getting a cigarette going. Once she heard the snap of the lighter and smelled smoke, Jessie said, “So what do you want to do today?”

  “Here I just woke up and you’re already after me to make plans.”

  “I was just asking. Come on.”

  There was a little while when the smoke drew in and out, then he said, “I think I’ll go get me a new girlfriend.”

  “Oh sure. Funny.”

  “Hot car, long blond hair, killer bod. Plenty of money.”

  “How are you going to work that, hypnotize her?”

  R.B.’s hand administered a little slap. “One that’s not so damned sassy.”

  “Oh, I’ll show you sassy. Wait and see,” she said, knowing that he liked it when she pretended to talk back. She kept her ear on his chest, listening to the muddy bumping of his heart as he put his cigarette down and used both hands to pull at her pants. Jessie wriggled out of one leg, then kicked the other loose. She understood what he wanted, which was for her to get him hard with her mouth and then climb on top. It was different for guys, the things they liked.

  When he was done, he said, “You’re sweet, you know?”

  “Do you like me that way? Sweet?”

  “You know that I do.”

  Then that was what she would be. In a new life you could start over, change your nature. R.B. was her new life. It was that simple.

  He clicked the television on and Jessie figured this would be another day like yesterday where they stayed inside doing nothing and they could have done that anywhere, there was no need to come such a long way.

  But R.B. got up to take a shower and when he was dressed and had his hair dried he said she should get ready, they were going out.

  “Out where?”

  “Outside, Miss Worry Wart.”

  He was in that kind of mood, pleased with making secrets out of nothing. So Jessie put her clothes on and got herself outside. The sun was shining now, and just like that it was instantly warm and the glimpse of ocean she caught was blue, changed all of a sudden like a magic trick. R.B. was walking fast, she had to trot to keep up with him. The sun made the inside of the car hot and kicked up all its scruffy smells, vinyl and cigarettes and whatever R.B. had tracked into it. The car was the first thing her parents had not liked about him, before they even met him. Of course he hadn’t bought it new, so there was another layer of grit, smells, stains that didn’t belong to anyone they knew, only more of the lurking filth of the world, stupid dirty vomit-making horrible stop that. She pinched her nostrils shut and breathed through her mouth.

  They followed the main road into town. With the sun out, things looked a lot more like Florida. There were palm trees and hibiscus and houses painted pink or blue or mint green in little square yards of crimped grass. Once they reached the business district, R.B. found a place to park. He led her down a sidewalk as if he knew exactly where he was going, although when they’d come here they’d driven straight through town. He was like that, confident.

  He steered them into a House of Pancakes. R.B. got pecan waffles and a Coke and Jessie ordered a salad because she couldn’t remember the last time she ate anything that qualified as a vegetable. She poked around in the mass of watery lettuce. They didn’t talk much. R.B. didn’t like talking at meals. He said it wasn’t the way he was raised up. Jessie was trying to figure out a good time to ask him some of the important things like where they were going and what they were supposed to do from now on.

  “So don’t you trust me? Don’t say yes just because you think it’s what I want to hear. I can tell.”

  Which confused her, because if he knew that much, wouldn’t he know if she trusted him? She lowered her eyes. She didn’t want to look at him and have him see something she hadn’t really meant.

  “Yes or no. I’m not gonna get mad at you.”

  “Yes. I trust you.”

  “You better be sure about what you’re saying because this is absolute, this is no halfway, half-assed contract between you and me, this means you trust me with your life and I trust you with mine and there’s no going back. The bastard world hasn’t done right by either of us but that’s about to change. Come here. Don’t be scared. Don’t you know we’re one person now?”

  R.B. finished his waffles and shoved his plate away and got another cigarette going, his eyes shut against the sunlight. It was strange sometimes, here they were so close and yet she could examine him as if he was someone she’d never seen before. It felt disloyal to be doing so, but she couldn’t help it, couldn’t a
lways stay in the zone of closeness, be half of one person with him. It was the weak, untrusting part of her. She loved his face but it was not at all a good-looking face, once you took it apart feature by feature. His skin was patchy and his eyes were too close together and his hair never sat right. But even his looks were something he could work around to his advantage. People underestimated him, dismissed him as common, underbred, some dumb hick with his head full of wrestling and beer. She’d seen them do it, stare right past him, and then be as surprised as hell when they wound up losing out to him.

  R.B. was for Ronald Boone. She’d known him most of a month before he told her what the initials stood for, that’s how much he hated being Ronald Boone. Ronald Boone was a slow learner, a discipline problem, a bad influence, a mug shot, a loser. It was a name with a permanent bad record. R.B. was somebody he could make up as he went along.

  R.B. put his cigarette out and said, “You get enough to eat? That didn’t hardly look like a mouthful.”

  “It was fine.”

  “I don’t want anybody saying I can’t take care of you. I don’t want you thinking I can’t take care of you.”

  “You know I never would. Come on.”

  “Because if it’s a matter of money, that’s the next thing on the list. I know you’re used to better.”

  “Come on,” Jessie said again, embarrassed when he brought up money and the house she’d grown up in and all the things in that house, so different from the way he’d lived, and why couldn’t he believe that none of it mattered or had ever made her happy? She was afraid her old life would turn out to be something he always held against her.

  R.B. put the cigarette out and dug for his wallet, fished out a twenty-dollar bill. “This is for if you want more to eat. I gotta go do something.”

  The worry in her started up again like a clock. “Where are you going?” she asked, knowing that he wouldn’t say. The more she asked, the more he wouldn’t tell.

  “No place you need to fret about.”

  “When—”

  “I’ll be back when I’m back. My job today is taking care of business, yours is to wait right here and eat pancakes. Now who has the tougher job? Nope, not that face. I don’t want to see you getting into a mood. Try looking like you’re on the vacation you always wanted to take. That’s my girl.”

  Then he was gone. God she hated this. He’d go off somewhere she wasn’t allowed to be and she’d sit for hours, maybe, never knowing when he’d take it into his head to come back.

  The waitress stopped at the table and asked Jessie if she wanted anything else and Jessie said she’d have coffee, not looking up. They wouldn’t kick you out if you were drinking coffee.

  But what if they did make her leave before R.B. came back and she went looking for the car and it wasn’t there? Even if she found a ride back to the motel, she didn’t have the room key. Even if she was brave enough to show her face at the office and talk them into giving her the key, what was there in that room to make a life of? What if she never saw R.B. again? She had nothing to go back to and no way of going forward.

  “Honey? I know you don’t want to believe me, but he is really not a nice boy. I don’t just mean that he comes from a different kind of home. I’m not even talking about manners, although those areimportant also and from what I’ve seen he doesn’t have any. He doesn’t know how to behave around a nice girl. You know that if someone doesn’t respect themselves, they can’t respect other people. Maybe it’s not even his fault, since he hasn’t had the advantages you take for granted. Now you think that because he’s hanging around and paying attention to you, you have to pay him attention back, but sweetheart, I promise you there will be other boys, you are a wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, special girl—”

  Jessie stared down at the placemat. The placemat had pictures of mermaids and anchors and seashells, the kinds of shells she had wanted to find: starfish, speckled cowries, sand dollars, conchs with their openings polished to the color of a rosy sunrise. She thought about asking the waitress if people ever actually came across the really gorgeous ones on the beach, or if maybe there was a factory that turned them out for tourists. Pretty things that weren’t real. What was real was the inside, the horrible stuff.

  Coffee coffee coffee, she didn’t even like the taste and it made her brain itch, but she kept drinking it down. From time to time she picked up the menu and frowned at it, as if contemplating another order, trying to make it look like she had some reason for staying. Not that anyone seemed to mind her sitting there. The place was dead, acres of empty tables and the waitresses off in the back somewhere, what time was it anyway? She hadn’t wanted to keep track of how long he’d been gone but it had been lunch and now it was not and if it got to be dinner what was she supposed to do? Maybe he was with some girl. He made jokes about it but what was stopping him? She knew he’d had other girlfriends, slept with them, sure. Who was she anyway, nobody special. What if he stopped being in love with her, what if he already had? She knew he didn’t spend every second worrying about her the way she did about him. He’d get bored with her, shrug her off. It was a lot easier to imagine this than to believe in some perfect happy life. She wasn’t meant to be happy. R.B. was only the particular way she had chosen to be unhappy, the sign that announced to the world that she was a truly fucked-up person. She almost hated him, him and his big plans and the blood trouble between them.

  Calm down. It was the coffee ripping through her and getting her so weird, oh sure, like coffee was the only thing wrong with her. She kept having to pee but she held it until it hurt every time because she was afraid R.B. would return while she was in the bathroom, see the empty table and walk out again.

  And wouldn’t you know it, she was on her way back, hurrying, and here was R.B. coming through the front door. He spotted her and waved, and when he got closer he said, “Hey Kathy, I want you to meet some friends of mine.”

  There were two people, a guy and a girl, man and woman really, crowding in behind him, but Jessie didn’t focus on them right away, wondering what he was up to. He’d told her that there would be times when they’d go by these different, traveling names. She was Kathy and if anybody asked, she was eighteen. He was Steve. Everything else she should leave up to him. So she said, “Hi, nice to meet you” to the two of them, the big husky burnt-pink blond guy, and the woman with her hair fixed in stiff curls on the top of her head and a lot of gold bracelets and a navy blue blazer with gold buttons that was supposed to remind you of sailors. Jerry and Pat. She thought he was Jerry and she was Pat, although it could have been the other way around.

  R.B. said, “Jerry here’s got this boat. I’m gonna help him figure out what’s wrong with the engine.”

  Jerry said, “Yeah, we’re dead in the water.” He laughed, like this was the funniest thing in the world.

  Pat shook her head. Her hair didn’t move, as if it was made out of icing. “It’s the oil pressure. The big doofus didn’t check the oil.”

  “You’re not supposed to have to on a brand-new boat. Cherist.”

  “All the way from Mobile I said, what’s that light doing on, that red one, and he’d say, oh, it’s a new boat, don’t worry. Then when he finally goes to check it he can’t find the thing, the oil thing.”

  “Hey, it’s a design flaw.”

  “Yeah, your head’s not supposed to be up your ass either. More bad design.”

  They all laughed like crazy at this. Jessie figured they’d been at some bar.

  R.B. said to her, “So, if you’re ready to shake a leg…”

  R.B. paid the bill at the register. Then they were out on the sidewalk, Jerry and R.B. up ahead, she and Pat behind. The sun was low and the air had turned hot and heavy, so that sweat started up under her arms and slid along the insides of her jeans, and she found herself walking slowly as if wading through water. “So,” Pat said. “Steve tells me you’re from Ohio.”

  They weren’t, but Jessie nodded, wondering what else R.B. had said,
what else she’d have to go along with. She hoped Pat wasn’t a nosy type. What if she asked where in Ohio?

  But Pat was still going on about Jerry and his boat. “I just love to give him shit about his little toy, all the money he spends on it. He tries to sneak the checks past me. Fat chance.”

  “I guess boats are real expensive,” said Jessie, just to keep up her end of the conversation. It was so hot. They must have moved the heat in like furniture while she was inside the restaurant. Her head felt cottony. She didn’t want to think about what R.B. might be planning. She guessed that Jerry and Pat had a lot of money, although they didn’t act like it. They were too drunk.

  R.B. and Jerry were now instant best friends, pounding each other on the biceps and yukking it up. Jessie hoped they weren’t walking much farther. No one but her seemed to mind the heat. Pat was walking and talking and trying to get a cigarette out of her purse, all at the same time. She had long, silver-polished fingernails and big knuckles with sparkly rings perched on them. The rings looked cheap. Flashy, Jessie’s mother would have said, but they were probably real diamonds and real gold.

  Pat said, “So is Steve a good mechanic? I mean, we can always have somebody from the boatyard look at it.”

  “He’s good with cars,” said Jessie truthfully. “I guess a boat engine’s not that different.”

  Pat got her cigarette going and blew smoke. She had a narrow face and deep, gouged wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. “Oh, Jerry’s probably hoping there’s some quick easy fix. He’s putting off having the engine pulled and finding out he wrecked it. He thinks he can sort of ease into the bad news that way. Then maybe I won’t get on his fat ass about it.” Pat cocked her head and smiled at Jessie, like they were girlfriends sharing secrets. “Men. Little boys, every blessed one of them.”

  Jessie smiled back. She tried to imagine talking that way about R.B., like he was somebody you could be fond and jokey about.