Throw Like A Girl

by Jean Thompson

  “He’s a little old for you, your Steve.”

  “I’m eighteen,” Jessie said and watched Pat not believe it.

  “Wish I was your age again. Young love, nothing like it. ’Course how would you know that, what do you have to compare it to. You plan on getting married?”

  Jessie said yes, probably, just not right away. Making that up along with everything else. Pat nodded and blew smoke through her nostrils. “Well, don’t feel like you have to rush it. Marriage. It’s like a damn bathtub. Once you’re in it and you’re used to it, it’s not so hot.”

  The sunlight was so thick, she had trouble focusing on Pat’s voice, which was melting into a sloppy buzz. Where was this boat anyway? She didn’t see a harbor or anything like that, just streets and parking lots and the heat deep down in the pavement where you couldn’t get away from it.

  “Jer and I been married eight years. I was married before and he was married before. So we’re experts at it. Sex doesn’t stay the same after a while. I’m only telling you because I wish somebody would have told me.”

  Was there any way to get her to quit talking? She couldn’t believe it, this woman she only met two seconds ago. Jessie said, “Thank you.”

  “Oh, now you’re upset, don’t pay attention to me, you get as old as I am, you lose all shame.”

  “It’s OK,” Jessie said. “Really.” Pat probably thought she was embarrassed. She was just tired of everybody who thought all the sex stuff was so important.

  She felt Pat’s hand brush against her hair, graze her shoulder. She held herself rigid. “You ever think about wearing your hair up? You have such a pretty little face but you can’t see it.” The hand dropped away. “Now what does that fool want?”

  Jerry was waving at them to catch up. “How about a grocery run? Something to throw on the grill.”

  They were right in front of a grocery store. The rest of them seemed to think this was a good idea. Jessie could tell the kind of evening this was going to be, starting off in one direction, then getting distracted and heading off in another. At least the store was air-conditioned. She left Pat and Jerry at the shopping carts, fussing over what they should buy. R.B. was standing in front of the ice-cream freezer.

  “Lookit that.” He indicated the freezer shelves. “Butter brickle. You can’t hardly find it anymore.”

  “Who are these guys, why are we hanging around with them?”

  “Relax. I’m gonna do them a favor. Then they’re gonna do us one.”

  “That lady’s kind of strange. How old are they anyway? I don’t think we should be going around with people as old as them.”

  R.B. opened the freezer and picked up the ice cream one-handed. “I said relax. Nobody’s going to get bad hurt.”

  She stared up at him, trying to tell if he was joking. “What are you going to—”

  “You ever been on a fancy boat like they got? Mommy and Daddy have one of those?”

  “Please, R.B.”

  “I’m just messing with you, Worry Wart. We’re gonna drink their beer and get their boat fixed so they can go on their merry way.”

  “Promise we won’t have to stay real late. Promise—”

  R.B. made a sign to her to be quiet, because Pat and Jerry were coming up behind them with the cart. They’d already picked up different bottles of steak sauce and barbecue sauce and two jars of fancy olives. “Mesquite chips,” Jerry said. “Help me remember that. Mesquite chips, mesquite chips, mesquite chips.” R.B. put the ice cream in the cart and they wandered up and down the aisles, adding anything that caught their eye, a platter of cocktail shrimp, big red trays of steaks, tomatoes, garlic bread, tubs of bean salad and macaroni salad, a frozen coconut cream pie. Then Pat and Jerry got into another stupid argument about how were they going to get it all back to the boat because they hadn’t even gotten to the liquor aisle yet and didn’t they need ice too?

  R.B. said it was no problem, he’d go back for the car and drive them to the harbor. Pat and Jerry acted like nobody in the history of time ever had such a good idea. Jessie wondered if it wasn’t something R.B. had planned all along. And anyway, now he wouldn’t have to help pay for the groceries.

  So here she was, trailing after the two of them, Pat and Jerry, like she was their kid or something. Now that would be strange. If they did have a kid, it would be totally screwed up. It seemed that the longer they were in the store, the more reckless Pat and Jerry got about piling things in the cart, frozen waffles, cashews, onion dip, rice, nothing that made sense in terms of a meal. She couldn’t imagine eating any of it. Something had come in between her and hunger lately. Jessie figured Pat and Jerry were just warming up for the liquor aisle. Sure enough, once they reached it they started hefting the bottles like pros. Jessie wandered off.

  She was bored. One of the odd things about this new life was that she didn’t have to do anything, school or chores or homework or anything else. It took some getting used to. She and R.B. just ended up in one place or another, doing the next thing that happened. It hadn’t even been that long. A bunch of days. But already it felt like she’d never lived any other way. R.B. said it was better like that. They had made a clean break. They were born again, just like people sang about in church except it was better than church, it was their own invention, nobody but them could live like this, brand-new every minute. And Jessie believed him, except there were still those weird times when the gray and floating part of her mind got in the way.

  “Now I know you are an intelligent person, so I am going to discuss things with you in professional terms. I’d like us to work on self-esteem issues. Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t always do a very good job at making young women feel positively about themselves and their achievements and their futures. There are books about it, I can loan them to you if you’d like to read them. I’m offering to do this because, as I said, I know you are intelligent enough to understand them. And I’m sure you understand why your parents are so worried about you. They feel that Ron is not the sort of person who will help you reach your full potential. That even if he cares about you, even if he has the best intentions, you would be making choices that you’ll—”

  “No.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Jessie had been staring at the totally uninteresting carpet. Nubby beige. The whole office was designed to give you nothing you could really look at. “That’s not why they don’t like him.”

  A small silence while the woman rearranged her voice to be especially patient, neutral, and flat, a voice like a beige carpet. “Why not, then?”

  “They’re afraid people will see the two of us together, me and him, and I won’t look like anyone they’d want to be their daughter, I’ll look like I belong with him.”

  She drifted back to Pat and Jerry when they reached the checkout. Pat couldn’t find Camel hard packs and didn’t want to settle for soft and wouldn’t quit going on about it. Jerry was puffing out his cheeks and poking his tongue around like he had food stuck between his teeth, a serious expression on his face. They were idiots, she didn’t care what happened to them. But what if this was her punishment, that they would be her parents now? R.B. would disappear forever and leave her with these horrible braying fools making her follow them around.

  Then she saw her father sitting on a bench at the front of the store. Even as she knew this was impossible, even as she recognized that it was just another thick-faced old man wearing a cowboy hat, something her father would never do, Jessie couldn’t work free of the shock of it. The way the man in the cowboy hat kept his mouth set so nothing could get in or out of it unless he gave permission. He was alone on the bench, no one anywhere near him. He had a fierce expression, meant to let people know he preferred it this way and nobody had to feel sorry for him, nor would he acknowledge that he was old now, that he was slack and puffy and angry about everything and he was wearing a ridiculous hat that someone must have put on his head without his noticing, just to make a fool of him, Oh Daddy.


  “Want some gum?”

  Jerry was holding out the pack to her. He already had a big wad of the stuff working; hot sugary breath wafted from him. For a moment she couldn’t remember where she was or who she was supposed to be. “No thanks.”

  “You sure? Double your pleasure.”

  She shook her head. Pat was still in the checkout line, yanking the cart around and pawing through the fifty-seven grocery bags, looking for something. Jessie couldn’t decide which one of them was worse to be stuck talking to. When she looked over at the bench where the man in the cowboy hat had been, he was gone.

  “This your spring break?” Jerry asked her. “Fun in the sun?”

  “No, it’s just…a trip. I’m not in school anymore.”

  “I went to UAB for a year,” Jerry offered. “But I was a dummy.”

  “Ha ha,” said Jessie, politely.

  “You’re a quiet type, aren’t you. Still waters.”

  “I guess.” It was as good an excuse as any not to talk to him. He kept working the gum around, showing all the wet mechanics of his tongue and teeth. Why were there always things you didn’t want to see?

  “Bali Ha’i. That’s the name of my boat. Like from the movie. What’s its name. You know the one I mean?”

  She stared out the windows, willing R.B. to appear.

  “South Pacific. That’s it. Bali Ha’i is this beautiful beautiful island, people go there to get the hell away from it all. Isn’t that a great name for a boat?”

  He seemed to want her to answer. She figured he was one of those guys who needed somebody saying yes or uh-huh to him every two seconds. The underside of his tongue had a pulpy look. “Yeah, it’s great.”

  “Because a boat’s sort of like an island. Once you get in the middle of nowhere. Nobody watching you. Total privacy.”

  It was harder not to hear than not to see, because you couldn’t close your ears. See hear taste smell touch. You ought to be able to shut them down when you didn’t need them.

  The car pulled up and R.B. honked the horn. Jessie wound up in the back seat, squished in with Pat and the groceries. She could tell R.B. had cleaned the car some, thrown out the worst of the junk. Like it wasn’t still the same old wreck. Was he trying to impress them, fool them? Steve and Kathy, that nice young couple from Ohio, whose old but clean car didn’t have Ohio plates although there was an explanation for that. In the front seat Jerry was telling R.B. about Bali Ha’i. There was a song too, which Jerry tried to sing in his bellowing voice, “Bali Hi-iy may call you,” until Pat told him he just sucked. Jessie caught R.B.’s eye in the rearview mirror and he winked.

  She decided she would just go along with things but not really be there in any feeling sense. Maybe you couldn’t help seeing and hearing and all the rest, but you didn’t have to think about it. She would be an island, all to herself. They parked in the harbor lot and walked past rows and rows of boats until they came to the Bali Ha’i. Jessie thought it was kind of small, though she didn’t say so. It had a cabin over the wheelhouse, and some padded benches around the edges of the deck, and a ladder leading down to whatever else there was. Right away Jerry made a big deal about filling the beer cooler and getting a pitcher of margaritas started, even before he and R.B. went to look at the engine. These guys were total alcoholics.

  “Come on, we’ll get the groceries squared away,” Pat said to her. Jessie lowered herself step by step down the ladder. Even tied up like this, the boat had a wobble to it. The kitchen was just a corner space that was instantly too small with both of them standing in it. “Home away from home,” Pat said breezily. Behind them a door was half open on a room almost entirely filled with a double bed. It was rumpled and unmade. Jessie turned away from it, not wanting to see where they slept and did things to each other.

  Pat handed her a plastic bowl. “There’s crackers or pretzels or something you can put in here. I should get that grill started. So what do you think of Jerry?”

  “Oh, he’s—” She stopped. Did she have to think anything about him? “What do you mean?”

  “I think we can get by with paper plates, don’t you? Oh, nothing. Just asking. How about a shrimp?” Pat balanced the platter and stabbed at it with a plastic toothpick in the shape of a sword. The shrimp looked like a skinned knuckle.

  “No thanks.”

  “We just have to get you into more of a partying mood. How about a drink? Well, suit yourself.”

  Then her and her big hair went back up the ladder. Jessie found the pretzels and put them in the bowl. Her stomach rocked back and forth with the boat’s motion. She thought she would just stay down there until someone made her do something else. She was supposed to say she liked Jerry, the same way she was supposed to like shrimp and margaritas. Was this part of her new life? Was she going crazy, or was it just that crazy things were happening? She kept trying not to look at that bedroom, that half-open door and the wreckage of the sheets.

  She must have spaced out, floated away, stopped feeling things right there as she stood. Here was R.B., his hands and arms all oiled and grimed from the engine, saying, “Babe? What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re not getting weird on me, are you? We got no time for that shit.”

  “No, I’m just…Where did they go?”

  “Who, Popeye and Olive Oyl? No place. They’re up there burning the ass off those steaks. Come on, we’re gonna go for a little cruise.”

  “I thought the boat didn’t work.” She kept talking so as to smooth over the muffled panic in her head. She was imagining the vastness of the world, skies and oceans and the shapes of the continents as seen from space, and herself, very small, down in a hole on this boat in a place she’d never been before.

  “It works fine now. What are you worried about?”

  She shook her head. Nothing.

  R.B. put his mouth right up against her ear so she couldn’t not hear him. “You think I can’t handle these guys? You think I can’t take care of you? How’d we get all this way here? You remember all I done for you? Oh yes, it was for you. Anything you’re too scared to do for yourself, here I am to do it for you. Now can you be sweet for me like you promised? Can you put a smile on your face and come up and eat these people’s food? I want to hear you say it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like you mean it.”

  “Yes. I can.”

  “What’s my name?”

  “Steve.”

  He gave her a nudge and she started up the ladder ahead of him. By the time she came up the stairs she was smiling, she had his arm wrapped around her waist, dirt and all, so it appeared as if they’d been down there carrying on and were just a little bashful about it. Pat and Jerry looked drunker. Funny how that was the first thing you noticed about someone. Jerry’s mouth was sloppy with barbecue sauce he hadn’t wiped away. Pat’s hair seemed lopsided. Whatever held that stack of stiff curls on top of her head had tilted. “Lookit the lovebirds,” Jerry said. He swatted Pat on her bony rear. “Were you ever that young and cute?”

  “I was but you weren’t. Fix yourself a plate.” Her hand with its silver dagger nails and fistful of rings indicated the food spread out on the benches and deck chairs, a mess of wrappings and opened jars. One of the steaks was still on the grill. It was dry and gnarled. Jessie filled a plate with other stuff instead. It was easy to smile and tell them how nice everything was because she wasn’t really inside herself anymore. She’d crawled out and left only the shell behind. It was cooler now, the sun was down and a breeze ruffled the water. R.B. was in the wheelhouse. He must have figured out how the boat worked. Jerry kept calling him Skipper.

  Then the boat was moving. The engine vibrated. The dock slipped away from them. “Hey Skipper, slow down for Christ’s sake.” It took a while to get out past the other boats. Behind them, a V-shaped trail of water churned up white. She was no longer on land but on the enormous, greedy ocean. The shore was outlined in lights. It kept getting smaller and smaller and t
he ocean darker until there was just a line of light marking the edge of the world and if you took that away you could turn the earth end over end and wind up nowhere.

  The boat’s engine stopped. There was a light in the wheelhouse where R.B. and Jerry stood. Pat was sitting next to her now, saying was she tired, did she want to take a little nap downstairs? Jessie said she was just fine. “Oh come on,” said Pat. “I want to show you something. Jerry needs you to help him with something downstairs.”

  “No,” she said. That bed and those disordered sheets were the insides of everything, the last place she wanted to be. Pat lit a cigarette. She snapped her lighter shut and took little mad puffs. Then she went away. Jerry was standing in front of her now, saying, “What’sa matter, huh? What’sa matter with the party girl?”

  R.B. was gone. Pat was gone. She’d spaced out again, missed something. There was only Jerry. He was too close to her. He was blocking the light and she could smell him more than see him. He held out a drink. “Here you go. Jump in.”

  She took the glass but didn’t drink. Although she had not moved, her skin began a slow, shrinking retreat. “Where’s R.B.?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “Where’s Steve?”

  “Around somewhere. He’s a nut, you know? Regular hell on wheels.”

  “Go away.”

  “Why’re you so sad? You always sad like this?”

  “I’m not sad.”

  “Or scared. Don’t be scared. This is Bali Ha’i.”

  He kissed her. It wasn’t like she would have expected. His mouth tasted sweet, from the barbecue sauce.

  Somebody screamed but it wasn’t her. Jerry staggered and his weight and heat landed on top of her. The boat caught a wave and the deck heaved up. Jerry tried to get himself on his feet. “…the fucking…”

  Pat’s head appeared in the hatch of the staircase except there was something wrong, her hair was gone, the tower of curls. Her hair underneath was short and slick, wet-looking, and her nose was bleeding. She opened her mouth and you could see blood there too, dark and glossy, and then before she could scream again, something pulled her back under.