Throw Like A Girl

by Jean Thompson

By the time she finally came back and sat at the far end of the table on my side, there were a couple of people who’d filled in the space between us. The black-haired boy asked her if she was all right, and she said yes, in a whiny little voice, and I hated him for asking it like he cared and I hated myself for going along with this messed-up deal in the first place.

  It was the end of playing fair, or maybe there had never been any fairness in it. I wanted to do something horrible. I looked over the heads of the people between me and the blonde. I said, “You know who I am, right?”

  She didn’t turn my way. She still had that plate of picked-apart food before her and she stared into it like it was a face staring back. I said, “This is so stupid. Really. I quit. He’s all yours.”

  There was enough noise at the table, three or four different conversations going, that no one else had paid attention to me at first. Then they got a whiff of what was happening and they all quieted down. Now I had to keep going. “You can tie him to the front porch so he doesn’t stray. Whatever.”

  She got out of there fast. Scooped up her coat and flew. I waited for him to go tearing after her so they could have one of those big reconciliations they were so good at. I didn’t care what happened anymore. Everybody was watching us. Waves of watching spread out from our table across the room. I guess I’d had to say things in front of other people so it would be for real.

  He took his time getting up and he didn’t say anything, which I guess disappointed the crowd but didn’t surprise me, none of this having much to do with words in the first place. But he gave me a look and the look said, Is this how you want it? And my eyes said, Yes. No. Yes, and he walked out but through another door, and I left a little while later, all three of us going off in different directions.

  I wish I could say that was the end of it. The big scene, the clean (or jagged) break, the gradual return of clearheadedness and self-respect, the lurking regrets and shames and then life moving on to the next absorbing challenge. It wasn’t that way. The very next day I went to his place, where I’d only been once before—the fear being that the blonde girl might stop by—and that’s why I went there now, to kick all that caution in the face. I told him if it was finished he had to tell me now, right here. And I’d meant everything I’d said, and nothing could be the same. He only had one room, a little space for a bed and all the rest, and he paced it from one end to the other and said I wanted him to say things he didn’t mean, and I said no, feel free, tell me she was prettier, sweeter, whatever more than me, I could handle that. He said it wasn’t like that but he owed her something after all those years, he had to be loyal, and I had myself a laugh over his idea of loyal. It was one of those fights that are about everything all at once, with no rules or boundaries, and you end up fucking just to put an end to argument.

  And in spite of everything he might have promised or I might have threatened, eventually we went right back to the way things had been. Sometimes I could feel almost philosophical. It was nobody’s fault that there were two of us and only one of him. Weren’t there places in the world, times in history, where this was how people arranged things and everyone was happy about it? Or was it only the way men wanted it and the women were bullied into going along? I guess you’d have to be a cow not to care, some big calm slow-moving animal who didn’t much notice what was going on back there. Sometimes when we were in bed I’d try to lift myself out of my body and be that animal, reduce everything to matters of sweating and friction. But it was nothing you could pretend your way out of.

  The weather turned warm in a hurry that year, and in my memory it’s as if we went from ice storms one week to bees and white clouds and new grass the next. I know that’s not true, but I know why I see it that way, because the end was coming up fast even as it seemed like a beginning. He and the blonde girl had one more enormous, pointless fight and finally wore each other out. It seemed I’d won through arbitration, or by process of elimination, but I was too happy and greedy to care. If there’s ever been a time in your life when everything was perfect, you know you can’t really do it justice, can’t get inside it. It’s like looking at someone else’s vacation pictures. But I will say I stood in front of a grove of flowering trees, although I don’t remember where, and the trees were an explosion of pink and white blossom, although I never knew what they were called, and it’s true my mind was probably bent around some drug at the time, but I thought if I died right there and then, it would be all right.

  And that would be a good place to end a story or a life, except nothing ends that pretty. When someone says, We have to talk, it’s nothing you want to hear. He told me the blonde girl was pregnant. I asked was she sure, and was he sure, meaning, sure it was his. He said yes and yes. He wouldn’t sit down, as if standing was some kind of penance, and he looked sick and shaken but I had no sympathy for him.

  “How could you let this happen?”

  “Nobody let it. It just did.”

  “She did it on purpose.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know I’d never do this to you. Make you be with me because of a baby.”

  Because I knew he was going to do the upright thing, take her on as an obligation if nothing else. I was crying by then. “You should have met me first.”

  He didn’t speak. We both knew there was no point in wishing or unwishing things, but I said, “It should be me you can’t leave.”

  “Yes. It should be you.”

  He walked back down my stairs and I covered my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear the exact moment when he wasn’t there anymore.

  I had to get to work only a little while later and so I wrung out a cold washcloth for my eyes and put on my counter girl clothes and walked downtown. When I opened the door the owner put on his annoyed face, ready to start in on me. The owner was a middle-aged man who limped from childhood polio. He was short and rat-nosed and bald except for a slick of rat-colored hair, and when he was angry about something, which was most of the time, his upper lip would draw back and twitch in a way that could scare you. He said, “Let’s check that attitude at the door.”

  “What attitude?”

  “None of your backtalk, missy. How about you quit the princess act and get to work now.”

  “Don’t call me missy.”

  He stopped shuffling his way toward the back room and turned around. “What’s that?”

  “Don’t call me princess either.”

  He limped over to me and his lip was doing that twitching thing again and he wasn’t any taller than me so our eyes were dead level. And because he was ugly and unlovable and in pain, all the things I felt myself to be, I said, “This is a crap job to begin with and your nasty mouth’s the worst part.”

  He was shaking so hard I expected to see parts of him spin off, his smeared glasses, maybe, or his percolating forehead. I wanted him to hit me so I could hit him back, but he just told me to get out, and I did, and there I was back on the sidewalk, not two minutes since I’d gone in, and a job was one more thing I didn’t have anymore.

  School was done for the term, and although I could have found somewhere else to work, there didn’t seem much reason to do so. My rent was month to month. There was nobody to tell me not to leave town. I decided I would move back home to my parents’ house, take whatever dose of disapproval they’d dish out—as long as I was in school they’d been able to tell themselves I still had potential—and find another crap job that might pay a little better. Out of my group of friends, I was probably the first to give up on all that vague, splendid ambition.

  I was leaving town in two weeks, and then it was one, and then it was down to days. I’d already told him I was moving and I watched him say that maybe it was for the best, and I agreed, and that was our story and we were sticking to it. But the night before I left town I called and begged him to come see me one more time, and if there’s a more abject word than beg, that’s what I did. Please, I said, and he said he wanted to as bad as ever but it couldn
’t happen, the baby changed everything, and Please, I kept saying, and finally we knew who we were. Me who put nothing above the wanting, him and his soldier’s honor.

  I used to have an album with a picture of him in it but I lost it somewhere. It was a picture I took of him standing next to the motorcycle in his beat-up boots and jeans. His arms were crossed and his chin was up in a tough-guy stare and he wasn’t smiling but the second after I snapped the shutter he did, and that’s what I remember now. The smile, not the picture.

  The blonde girl never did have the baby—it was another thing lost—though I didn’t ever learn the whole story. Time went on and he married someone else and then unmarried them, just as I married and unmarried. He had his kids and I had mine. He was married again when he died, yes died, in one of those stupid freak accidents that you think nobody ever dies from, like a giant wave sweeping you off a cliff, or getting struck by lightning. He’d moved to another state so the news didn’t reach me right away, and because there was the wife I couldn’t be part of any official mourning. He went fast. His heart stopped speaking and I imagine he didn’t even know he was dead.

  Over the years I’d heard from him now and then, a card or a letter. It was nice that he did that, kept in touch in a friendly way. Once he wrote and told me he was going to be visiting the city where I lived. But he had one of the wives in tow and she was funny about old girlfriends, who could blame her, and he didn’t know if he could get away. There was a night when the phone rang late—I was already in bed—and I listened but nobody spoke into the machine and I didn’t get up to answer. He told me later that was him. Now if a phone rings late at night when the house is dark, he’s who I think of, although I know the dead don’t make calls, at least not in that way.

  I’m older now than he was when he died. Things happen to the body over time that are God’s practical joke, and I don’t much like this face I’ve got now. My life turned out pretty ordinary. Not great, not awful, I’m not complaining. Nobody looking at me now would guess there had ever been anything wild in me, anything as desperate as that loving. I know we’re meant to grow from experience, like a tree, send out roots and branches of wisdom and patience and understanding. But my best and truest self was a tree in blossom. All those years since, there’s a sense in which they count for less, even as they take up space, crowd out the past. That quick, there goes your life, like a black-haired boy on a motorcycle, looking back until he’s out of sight.

  The

  Inside

  Passage

  You had to be ready for the bears, the photographer said. You had to be sharp. He pointed to a spit of sand at one end of the cove. They would camp there, he said, out in the open. Sleep away from the cook fire and seal the food. Use a rattle along the trails so the bears knew you were coming. That wasn’t all you needed; they had a rifle strapped in with the rest of their gear. The rifle didn’t look real to me, although I knew it was. It could have been a child’s toy. If I ever saw a bear it probably wouldn’t look real to me either. It would eat me up while I was still thinking none of this was happening.

  The boat’s engines slowed to an idle. I looked around me and I thought, this was wilderness. The water snaked between gray cliffs five hundred feet high, sheer rock at their tops, spruce and hemlock around their knees. Glacier country, not so long ago. Small waterfalls fell over the cliff face like knots of lace. I said they were “spectacular.” Oh yes, said the photographer knowledgeably, but the trick was to make each shot different. After a while, a waterfall was a waterfall. He had done this sort of thing many times before. He was a famous photographer, I could tell that, even though I’d never heard of him before. He and his assistant would spend four days in the wilderness, camping and taking pictures. They wore orange Gore-Tex jackets and pants, and they carried tents, maps, a first aid kit, freeze-dried food, a cookstove, and of course the cameras and lenses and tripods and film, all trussed up in waterproof packs. I liked the idea of carrying everything with you, of not needing anything you couldn’t carry.

  The captain of the boat helped them launch their yellow rubber raft. The water was dark green and glossy, like a polished stone. The boat reversed course and, looking back, you saw the colors, orange and yellow. Then a shoulder of rock cut them off. I was only in the wilderness on a day trip, a few hours out from town. A part of me would have liked to stay there with them. It was the closest you could come to being nowhere at all.

  Back in Ketchikan I tried to call Mac from the hotel lobby. I called his office. Both his wife and his secretary knew who I was, but the office seemed safer. I used someone else’s credit card number. It was not the sort of thing I usually did. Mac was not the sort of thing I usually did either. I’d overheard an old woman giving the number to an operator two days ago. She said it extra loud for the operator to hear, like it never occurred to her there were people like me in the world.

  The connection was clear. Sometimes you got a good connection, sometimes it was pocked with static and echoes and odd metallic whooping, as if you really were calling from nowhere at all. The secretary answered. I pinched my voice through my nose. “Mr. Mackenzie please.”

  She asked who was calling. I said, “Northwestern Mutual Insurance.” I was proud of that one. I figured I could be an insurance company a few more times at least.

  The secretary said she was sorry, but Mr. Mackenzie wasn’t in. The secretary was nobody’s fool. She didn’t like me. She was a fifty-two-year-old divorcée with daffodil hair and poison green eye shadow. She had two daughters, also divorced, who lived with her. I guess there was no real reason for her to like anyone. I hung up the phone. I thought the secretary would know it was me and wouldn’t put my call through. I had to tell Mac I had run away to Alaska. It wasn’t any good being here if he didn’t know.

  I walked outside, down along the waterfront. Everywhere you looked was water and spruce-covered peaks. Tiny floatplanes took off and landed in the channel. They looked too small and wobbly, like something out of an old Buck Rogers movie. I had never been to Alaska before. I’d come here because I had the luxury of going somewhere exotic to be miserable. I was going to take the ferry on the Inside Passage, from island to island up and down the Panhandle to see what I could see.

  Ketchikan was the first stop. So far I’d seen totem poles, and the old whorehouses, restored and prettied up for tourists, and a stream full of enormous black salmon, grazing in the water like a herd of cows in a pasture, and the lumberjack bars that filled up by nine a.m. I hadn’t really met anyone, unless you counted the photographer. I was trying to get used to solitude. I allowed myself two or three conversations a day, the same way I allowed myself meals.

  The next morning the police came to my hotel room. It was another thing that was not usual for me. There were two of them, a ladycop and a man, standing in the hall. She did all the talking. There had been an armed robbery across the street and the robber had run into the hotel. Was anyone staying in the room with me?

  None of this was really happening. Oh no, I said. It was just me. A robber in the hotel? Was it safe here? Good gracious.

  Yes, they hoped it was safe, said the ladycop. They were here to make it safe. She was young, with her hair screwed up in a twist, and a tough little face. She reminded me of Mac’s secretary. Was I sure no one was staying with me?

  The night before I’d met a man in a bar who said he had cocaine. He came up to the room, and when he kissed me I tried to tell myself that it was like waterfalls, after a while a man was a man and there wasn’t any difference between them. But what had come out of my mouth was No, and he went away. Now I thought someone had seen him, or maybe he was the one who sent the police here to get back at me. I was thinking about the phone calls too, the way you think about things like that when the police come. I said, Mercy me, a robber. I surely hoped they would catch him and bring him to justice. No, no one else was here.

  The ladycop was losing patience with me. Maybe I was over-doing it. She would have liked
to arrest me for something, I could tell. The other cop hung back, as if he were bored or embarrassed or maybe just trying to get the right angle to look inside the room. They could only see a little ways behind me. There was plenty of space to hide a man, if I’d had one.

  When she asked me a third time if I was staying here alone, I affected a look of shocked prissiness and said, Heavens to Betsy, I certainly hoped they caught that fellow. They went away then. I sat on the bed for a long time. I guess a woman alone is always suspect, always an adjunct to some man. I would have liked to tell someone how well I’d handled things. I wondered how close I could get to trouble, bears, cops, men, without actually being in trouble. This was a dangerous place to be for somebody like me who had come here for the express purpose of messing myself up.

  Before the ferry left Ketchikan I tried to call Mac again, from a pay phone on the street. I dialed the number of a bar where we used to go, and asked for him. I heard laughter and the music of ice cubes before the bartender came back to say he wasn’t there.

  The ferry was blue and white and clean-looking, big as an office building. People drove cars right into its belly. People had kayaks, bicycles, dogs. Once again I felt underequipped. Cabins were expensive, so I slept on the floor of the lounge. The solarium and the observation deck were full of campers, kids who pitched tents and played guitars and smoked dope all night long. I could have joined them, but I was too busy being alone and tragic.

  The only person I would have talked to was the Solitary Traveler. That’s what I called him. He looked even more alone than me. He was an old hippie with gray hair down to his collar, a green army surplus parka, and lumpy boots. Little bits of fringe and leather sprouted from his clothes. He sat by himself on a deck chair, smoking a long curved pipe. He sat and smoked and watched the sun go down behind the blue-black hills, and he didn’t need one thing from anyone. I wanted to talk to him, though I knew I wouldn’t. Where was he from, and where was he going, I’d ask him.