Throw Like A Girl

by Jean Thompson

  I sat in my Sunday school class, listening to Mrs. Fugate tell us about Jesus speaking with the elders in the temple, amazing them with his wisdom, when he was no older than you are, boys and girls. We slumped in our chairs. We were used to being exhorted to measure up to the overachievers. Brian Billings was playing with himself behind a propped-up copy of Bible Stories for Young People. He always did it and everybody else pretended not to notice.

  I was thinking about how somewhere out there in the world right now was a boy I was going to have to marry, and a perfectly strange name that I’d have to call myself. At school there was a boy named Zitt and one named Thulstrup, and while I wasn’t going to marry either one of them if I could help it, I was left with an unpleasant sense of the possibilities.

  I thought about my father too, and if he would ever be happy with us again. Maybe we could get Ruth Ann to go back to dressing like the rest of us. We could try harder to get along with each other, stop the fighting and sniping and name-calling, be more helpful and pleasant. Because as much as we might all roll our eyes at our father’s generalship of our lives, his rules, his enthusiasms, his angry disappointments, we could not help wishing to be enfolded in the greater entity of Barcus, stamped with approval and belonging and rightness.

  Ruth Ann broke up with Arthur Kelly. She said he was “juvenile,” and if there was some new boy she made out with in the practice rooms after school, she kept it to herself. She continued to wear her ordinary school clothes on Sundays and she and my father continued to ignore each other whenever possible. The rest of us maneuvered around them, heading for an exit whenever we were in danger of being in a room with the two of them. All of us wondered what would happen at Christmas, if she’d still refuse to cooperate. There might be no Barcus Christmas card, no wreath of happy faces dressed in holiday colors.

  Then, just after Thanksgiving, my father came up with an idea that cheered him. He would construct plywood letters to spell out MERRY CHRISTMAS and display them on the front lawn. It was the kind of hands-on project he enjoyed, and for a week he hauled materials into the garage and filled the air with industrious sawing and hammering. Then he emerged with a flock of enormous letters, three-and-

  a-half-foot high Rs and Ms and Ss. His intention had been to paint them Christmas red, but the paint turned out orange, and with a peculiar fluorescent cast. Still he was pleased with the results and busied himself with setting things up in the yard, measuring spaces and anchoring each letter with its own built-in stakes and supports. There were floodlights too, so that at night the letters were illuminated, and their giant tilting shadows fell across us as we walked from room to room.

  My mother was not happy. She complained that it looked like something a Polish bakery would come up with. My father smiled and treated it as a great joke. The signage seemed to restore his hopeful spirits, bruised as they’d been by Ruth Ann’s defection. He took to hanging around outside and waving to the neighbors, who often stopped to chat with him and admire his creation. We children were morbidly sensitive to ridicule, and we suspected that many of these same neighbors went home and laughed themselves silly.

  MERRY CHRISTMAS had been up perhaps three or four days, and my father was delighted to realize that only a few more letters would allow him to spell out HAPPY NEW YEAR, and then he would be set for HAPPY EASTER, and so on. We didn’t need much foresight to imagine the Fourth of July, and Hallowe’en, and Thanksgiving, and perhaps Veteran’s Day and Labor Day thrown in there also. There would be articles in the hometown newspaper. We would never live it down.

  But one night as we were just starting our dinner, there was a knock on the door, and a policeman asked my father to step outside with him.

  “Sit,” my mother told us when we tried to get up and follow him.

  “Is Daddy getting arrested?” Louise asked.

  “Of course not. Drink your milk.”

  “I bet it’s illegal to have stuff like that in your yard,” said Roy, but my mother told him not to be silly.

  My father came back inside and sat down. His face was grim, and when we clamored to hear what had happened, he wouldn’t say. I looked past him to the front room. The curtains were dark; the floodlights had been turned off. My father filled his plate with salmon patties and creamed corn. We stared at him, stricken.

  “Somebody rearranged the letters.”

  What, what? we all asked.

  He didn’t want to tell us. “MERRY S-H-I-T,” he muttered finally.

  I was sitting across from Roy and I watched his face process disbelief, then evil joy, then caution, as my father picked up his fork and began to eat in silence. The plywood letters took up residence in the back of the garage and weren’t mentioned again. We never found out which of the neighborhood bad boys had done the deed. But the wicked and subversive among us began exchanging discreet “Merry Shits.”

  Years later I went to one of those restaurants that revolved on the top of a skyscraper. The gear that made everything turn sent out a rubbing, vibrating noise, faint and nervous-making, that forced you to imagine the mechanism revving into overdrive and sending the whole restaurant—diners, waiters, tables set with white linen, shining glassware, coffeepots—spinning away like a Frisbee. The rotation itself was very gradual. You knew it was happening, you tried to see it, but only when you closed your eyes and reopened them was the movement perceptible. So it was with the world I grew up in, and my father’s pride, his buoyant vision, and the inexorable process of change.

  But sometimes the world spun hard enough to make you dizzy. We knew that my father’s business was not prospering. We could tell from his weighty silences, and the increasing amounts of time he spent away from home, even the occasional overnight trip. He kept having to range farther and farther to sell his product. The problem, I understood from more basement eavesdropping, was that while my father was a persuasive and successful salesman, few people, once they had tried Vita-Juice, were moved to keep on drinking it. Even the weather was glum. The cold settled in early that year. There were mornings of heavy, icinglike frost that made the grass snap underfoot. The old Chevy was still parked out on the driveway. If the temperature was below freezing, it balked and wouldn’t start, and my father would have to wait until the day warmed up, or else ask Mr. Schwartz across the alley to come over with his truck and jumper cables.

  “What a stupid car,” Wayne said, watching my father labor under the hood. “We should drive it to the junkyard and leave it there. Then buy a new one.”

  “Cars cost money, mister,” my mother told him. “Now eat your oatmeal.”

  “I don’t like oatmeal. I want Sugar Frosted Flakes.”

  “Packaged cereal costs money too.”

  “Then let’s get some more money,” said Wayne, nine years old and single-minded.

  “We are. I’m going to start working at Nancy’s Fabrics.”

  Wayne and I were the only ones in the kitchen. There was no one else to look at but each other. “Mo-om,” I protested.

  “It’s only part-time. You won’t even notice I’m gone. Now that Louise is in school, I need something to keep me busy.”

  The idea was ludicrous. She was never not busy. “Does Dad know about this?” I asked.

  “Of course he does, honey. It’s just a little pin money. Your father’s the one who holds down the real job. That’s what fathers do.”

  The Chevy’s engine turned over. My father waved to us as he backed down the driveway.

  My mother worked at Nancy’s Fabrics from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, when Louise’s school let out. She said it was a pleasure; the other ladies who worked there were so nice, and of course there was nothing she liked better than sewing, talking about sewing and helping the customers with their projects. But more often than not she came home tired and went into her bedroom to lie down.

  The house echoed without her. My brothers held silent, vicious wrestling contests in the living room. Louise trailed me around the house, fr
etting, and I fed her chocolate milk and graham crackers to keep her quiet. Ruth Ann had band practice and whatever she got into after band practice.

  Then one afternoon she came home lugging a guitar case. She refused to say where it came from. She wasn’t going to be in the band next semester, she announced. She was going to play guitar instead.

  “Rock and roll!” Wayne said.

  “Folk songs,” Ruth Ann corrected. “Protest music.”

  “You can’t play a lick,” Roy scoffed.

  “Says you. There’s a guy who’s teaching me. For free.” Ruth Ann slung the guitar strap around her neck and tuned up. She was letting her hair hang long and straight these days. With the guitar on her knee and her hair falling in her eyes and her sullen, intense expression she looked, for the first time in her life, nearly glamorous.

  “What about the flute?” I asked.

  “You can’t sing while you play the flute.” She strummed a careful chord and cleared her throat.

  In Scarlet Town where I was born

  There was a fair maid dwellin’

  Made every lad cry “welladay”

  Her name was Barbara Allen

  She stretched out “maid” so it was “may-ayd.” Her voice wasn’t terrible, a little scratchy on the high notes, but it was weird hearing her, like watching her get undressed. And not one line of the song made sense to us. Roy said, “I’d stick to the flute if I were you,” and Ruth Ann told him to shut up.

  Not long after that came a night when I got out of bed in the room I shared with Louise and went down to the kitchen to gorge on leftover tuna noodle casserole. Such secret eating was becoming my refuge and my solace. I had thought that everyone else was asleep, but once I was gobbling out of the casserole dish by the light of the open refrigerator, my father appeared in the doorway, dressed in his bathrobe and pajamas. “Cindy? What are you doing?”

  My mouth was full of the cold tuna paste and I couldn’t answer. He crossed the room and turned on the small light over the sink. “You know your mother was saving that for lunch tomorrow.”

  I was too miserable and guilty to meet his eye. I’d reached that pubescent stage where baby fat solidifies, and my father had already made a number of critical remarks about my increasing size. I heard him rattling in the cupboards, then he scooped a helping of the dangling noodles out of the casserole and onto a plate. “Here,” he said, handing me another plate. “Don’t eat straight out of the dish.”

  We ate for a time in silence. I have to emphasize how relatively rare it was for any two of the Barcuses to be alone together. My father encouraged as much togetherness as possible. Even if it hadn’t been encouraged, the house was small and we were always climbing over each other like a bucket of crabs. We experienced each other mostly as obstacles to be negotiated, or as mouths saying, Me me me. This could not have been the first or only private moment I’d shared with my father. But it’s the only one I remember.

  When we’d pretty much cleaned out the casserole, I expected him to tell me to scoot on off to bed. But he seemed to be in a meditative mood. The refrigerator motor hummed, then shut off with a thud as he stared into the solid black of the kitchen window. He said, “You kids are lucky that you have each other. You don’t appreciate that now but you will. You’ll all grow up and get married and have your own families, and everybody will have a ton of cousins and nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles.”

  “I’m not going to get married,” I said. It wasn’t anything I’d decided until then. It wasn’t anything I knew I was going to say until it was already out of my mouth.

  My father gave me a startled, appraising look. “Don’t be silly. The right guy will come along, and bells are going to go off, and pretty soon your old dad’s going to be paying for a wedding.”

  “I don’t like weddings.” I was imagining myself in a big white dress, a church full of people looking me up and down. “I don’t want any family. I want everybody to leave me alone.”

  He was quiet a moment. “You don’t mean that. Family is everything. It’s our sword and shield against the world. Wait until you really are alone sometime. Then you’ll see. You’ll want all the family you can get.”

  But I was tired of being told what I should want and not want. “I’m going to live in a big house all by myself except for a lot of cats and dogs. And I’m going to paint the furniture all different colors. Red and blue and green and white.”

  My father sighed but his mood seemed to lighten, I suppose because he didn’t believe me. He stacked our dishes in the sink and ran hot water over them to soak. “You just make sure you do your homework and mind your mother and be a good girl.”

  I wanted to be Roy Rogers and Zorro and Sky King. But there wasn’t any point in telling him that.

  A few days later, he was gone. There was a note on the refrigerator saying he was very excited about exploring new, untapped markets for Vita-Juice and that he would be away for a little while. We’d better mind our p’s and q’s while he was away. He’d find out if we didn’t, make no mistake about that.

  It took us a while to realize that he wasn’t coming back. After an interval of sorrowing guilt and confusion, we adjusted. My mother got on full-time at the fabric store. Ruth Ann took a job after school and weekends, waiting tables. Roy also found work, bagging groceries at the A&P. Wayne and I did most of the household chores and ganged up to boss Louise around. My father had taken the Chevy but left the cartons of Vita-Juice behind. They stayed in the garage until they began to leak an evil-smelling fluid, and then we threw them out. The matching outfits hung in the back of our closets until we had safely outgrown them.

  We got by. There was a way in which we missed our father, but there was also a way in which we could not allow ourselves to miss him. Our lives moved on without him, closed over his absence like water over a stone. He’d given up on us, or given up on himself, and this great sadness and failure was something we had to pretend did not concern us, did not exist.

  Wayne drew a Christmas card that year and put it on the refrigerator door. It showed a deep blue night with an incongruous rayed sun in the center, and off to the side, a slim crescent moon and five little lopsided stars. Even when he was not among us, my father took up all the space in the sky.

  Lost

  I was twenty years old and about as pretty as I was ever going to be, although I didn’t know that yet. I had long long hair, all the girls did. Mine was nearly down to my waist. It swung across my back like a bell. I had nice legs. There was always some boy I was crazy for, always trouble with some boy. There was never any useful purpose to it. I could never figure out what to do with them, besides wanting them to distraction. I was working as a counter girl in a photo studio and going to school part-time. I went to school mostly so I wouldn’t have to say I was just a counter girl. But school wasn’t that important and neither was work. They were only the background for the main business of my life, which was to have exciting things happen. That was me back then.

  A black-haired boy on a motorcycle turned around to stare at me as he rode past. He kept his head swiveled around for most of a block. It was almost comical, like a cartoon where someone smacks into a lightpost with a lot of exclamation points. Of course he didn’t crash, just kept going until he was out of sight. I’d never seen him before. He looked like a pirate, with that head of black hair and his black mustache and beard. The way he stared burned through me. You think it has to mean something, a moment like that, and sometimes it does.

  I met him two or three weeks later. I’d asked around, I knew a few things about him by then. He’d been in my mind, the way that something not yet real occupies space in your head and takes on different, agreeable shapes. I’d been thinking about him and the next minute there he was, like a magic trick.

  I was sitting in the school’s Commons, the big hangout spot in the basement. There were people who never seemed to do anything else besides sit there. They’d hold court at their favorite tables, little groups
of them engaged in lounging and spite and the other minor vices. Outside it was September, still hot, with a polished sky and color in the trees. But down in that basement it was always lurid midnight on some seasonless planet. Unhealthy yellow fluorescent lights turned the air intense and artificial. You have to realize how much people smoked back then. Curtains of smoke wavered and reformed, like the currents of talk and gossip, everybody watching everybody else, eyes like smoke, wandering everywhere.

  The black-haired boy was tall, he had that tall kind of walk, all long legs. He came across the room to sit down across from me. I forget just how we started talking. He was older than I’d thought, a few years past me. He had blue eyes with a black rim around the iris. I’d never seen eyes like that before and I haven’t since.

  After a while he said, “You should come for a ride on the bike with me.”

  “Maybe sometime.” I was pretending not to be that interested. I had a paper cup of something melted down to watery sweetness, and I tipped the cup so the liquid touched my mouth, though I didn’t drink.

  “How about now? Come on.”

  Around his neck he wore a bullet with a hole drilled through it, threaded on a rawhide lace. I’d never seen anything like that either. Oh my heart was a monster. It roared and showed its teeth. Back then I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it. I still do, I guess, but now I’ve learned that I can’t necessarily have it. And so I stood up and walked out with him.

  Everybody watched us go. I knew he had a girlfriend, or an old girlfriend who wasn’t quite gone yet. I knew who she was, a blonde with one of those naturally expressionless faces, like a cat’s. They had some long, messed-up history. I had a boyfriend, sort of, one who came and went. And now here we were, giving people a whole new story.