Throw Like A Girl

by Jean Thompson

  Leslie works in a small insurance office, sending out policies and fielding claims. From time to time she takes classes at the community college, business classes mostly, but once in a while something just for pleasure, like art history or photography or Spanish. She’s always hoping to discover some special interest or aptitude in herself, something that will propel her into a different life. On Fridays after work she meets her married boss in a Holiday Inn north on I-5, where they fix drinks from the bottle of Scotch he brings with him, make love, talk in bed for a time, then shower and dress and eat dinner at one or another of the surrounding chain restaurants. Happy hour, they call it. Her boss is older than Leslie, forty-two, and he makes sad jokes about how typical this is, his age and the whole younger woman thing. His name is Wes and he is prone to depression, and sometimes when he talks about his two small children, their little hands and their wise, artless remarks, their innocent joy when he returns home, he gets weepy. “I don’t deserve you,” he tells Leslie. “I don’t deserve to be so happy, I’m a bad person, I ruin everything.”

  Then Leslie soothes him and tells him not to be silly, that he’s a nice man, he’s always nice to her. But she thinks he’s right, he doesn’t deserve her. He’s already hogged more than his share of normal happiness. He makes all the sounds and gestures of suffering and guilt so that he does not actually suffer or feel guilty. As for her, she likes the good old sex part of things, the regularity of it, something you can count on. And more: she takes pleasure in the idea that she’s getting away with this, that Wes doesn’t belong to her and she’s stealing him the same as you might steal money or goods. He’s partial compensation for all the things that have been stolen from her, and if that’s a sick, horrible way to feel, then that’s what she is, sick and horrible, and it’s nobody’s business but hers.

  Ten o’clock at night and Leslie is in her bedroom, reading a chick magazine that features advice on diet and career moves and hairstyles. She consumes such magazines the way other women eat chocolate. They are her guilty pleasure. Silly, most of them, their blend of earnestness and zippy prose. She has a store of knowledge about things like cucumber slices placed over the eyes, breast self-examination, stitched-down pleats, and how to handle harassment in the workplace, ha ha. And really, where else was she going to learn such things? Leslie was still a child when her mother began having her troubles, and as for Patsy, you might as well ask a nun about boys or mascara or which shoes went with what.

  Patsy practically is a nun, with her big, pudding face and thick ankles and churchy exhortations. Leslie and Jack used to wonder, meanly, if Patsy had ever known the love of a man. It was easy fun to pretend she was like one of those dolls manufactured with a seamless crotch, that she was plastic clear through and that no sexual notion ever found means of entry. It is something else to consider she might have started out like anybody else, full of nervous flutterings and fears and bodily secrets and the desire to become one flesh with another being. Maybe there was somebody once, some boy or man that Patsy fancied, maybe there were excuses to brush up against each other, or mouths pressed wetly together, or even fumblings involving zippers and elastic. But Leslie can’t go farther than this in her imagination. It simply shuts down, or becomes a vision of Patsy saying no no no. If she lets herself think otherwise it might put her off sex of any kind for a long time. So Leslie falls back on her old bitterness instead. Because Patsy—whom she hears in the kitchen, trying to be quiet about getting herself a drink—never allows herself any straightforward human desire. When she came from Chicago to live with them she was full of nice making and solicitude, but it was all a show, this vision of her noble sacrifice, giving up her own life—as if Patsy had any life worth giving up!—to raise her poor young relatives. And surely the part of the equation that Patsy did not allow herself to acknowledge was the calculation that if she took care of them, sooner or later they would have to take care of her.

  Most nights Leslie needs pills to get to sleep. Without the pills, she lies on her back and feels each grain of the sheets on her skin, an unpleasant, abrading sensation that she can’t get away from. Her thoughts begin to wheel and chase each other. Any stupid little thing will get her going. If she feels herself falling asleep, she catches herself at it, then tries to forget she’s done so, and by then everything is spoiled. But when she takes the pills, they bury her under a layer of black unconsciousness and leave holes where her dreams should be. So that every night is a choice, pill or no pill, bad sleep or no sleep, willpower or chemistry.

  The sleep problems have come on within the last year, and they are worrisome because insomnia was one sign of her mother’s illness. If Angela slept at all it was in the late afternoon, so that Leslie and her brother, arriving home from school, had to tiptoe around, keep the television and their music turned down low, as if their mother worked the night shift.

  But Angela didn’t work. And at some point she had ceased to cook meals, in any normally understood sense of meals, or make beds, or dust, or go grocery shopping, or remember her children’s birthdays, or check to see if they were in bed when they were supposed to be or up and dressed on school days, or kept their doctor’s appointments, or much of anything else. She was always unwell in some hard-to-explain fashion that didn’t involve things like chicken pox or broken bones. Leslie’s father moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer and the children picked out what they needed from the clean pile. He bought groceries on his way home from work, or when Leslie got older, he left money on the kitchen table and she would be the one to shop and fry up the hamburgers or make spaghetti. Her little brother Jack ate all his meals in front of the television. He didn’t remember ever doing things differently.

  When her mother woke up in the early evening, Leslie would take a plate into the bedroom for her. The bedroom drapes were always drawn and the room had an odor of much habitation, like a hamster cage. “That food hurts my throat,” Angela would say. “Bring me something else.” She only wanted soft, sweet foods, like cake or iced doughnuts or crumbly tea cakes with heavy lemon sugar glaze, and after a time that was what Leslie fed her. Angela lived on sugar like the ants in the pantry. Her body became a strange combination of stringiness and bloat, and when Leslie was close enough to her, she smelled something that she knew to be decay. The inside of Angela’s mouth, dying.

  “There is too much population in the world now, and not enough food.”

  The first time Leslie heard her mother say such a thing, it frightened her because she believed it. The true facts, said Angela, were that human beings had no natural predators these days, and so the law of nature was that we would kill ourselves through our own appetites. Soon it would be necessary to eat in conditions of utmost secrecy.

  Once Leslie knew better, or at least realized that starvation would not be happening very soon or anywhere very nearby, she turned impatient, even scornful. “Nobody’s running out of food,” she said, watching Angela lick the paper tray that contained the packaged cinnamon rolls. “Least of all you.” She was, after all, still a child, and no one had instructed her in kindness.

  Angela’s eyes rolled inward, her concentration shifting to the bubbling and squeezing of her digestion. She yawned like a crocodile. “Wait and see,” she said, nodding. “Wait until everybody lets their hungers loose all at once.”

  Leslie’s father took to sleeping on the couch in the den. “What’s wrong with Mom?” Leslie asked him once, timidly. They did not make a habit of talking about Angela. Her father gave her a look that was nearly unfriendly. “She worries too much,” he said. “About things she can’t change or do anything about. The doctor is giving her a new prescription so she won’t worry all the time and wear herself out.”

  Things like hunger? Leslie wondered. Like the world filling up with other people’s hungers and crowding you out? What could be changed and what couldn’t, and why was it so bad to think about it all? Soon after, her father begins, the process of leaving their lives, spending more and mo
re time at work or anywhere else that is not home, culminating in his packed suitcases and a call to Patsy. The new prescription doesn’t help her mother—pills, it’s always pills—and eventually other measures are taken. The thing that all of them worried about was Angela. The thing you can’t change is the past. Leslie decides she’ll read a little while longer before trying to sleep.

  Leslie’s brother Jack will turn nineteen next month. He wanted to go into the navy but the time or two he got into trouble over pot caught up with him. Jack never thought of himself as the college type and nobody else did either. When the navy didn’t work out he got on with Caltrans as a flagger, traveling the state highways a quarter mile at a time. But it was hot and deadly boring and his ass was always hanging out there, waiting to get taken out by the next drunk or meth freak who didn’t believe in slowing down. Caltrans couldn’t find him a spot doing anything else, not that shoveling asphalt or jackhammering or baking your skin until it turned maroon was such a great deal either.

  So he quit and came back home, and now that he’s pissed away his money, he’s thinking of hiring on as a firefighter. They need more crews all the time, it’s good pay, and so what if it’s dangerous, at least you’re doing something important. He’s stirred by news accounts of firefighters working thirty-six-hour shifts and collapsing into sleep on any available surface once they have the chance, how they dig fire lines and light backfires and keep roads open and rescue the lost and singed pets left behind when people evacuate. Jack has never had a pet of any kind, but he imagines how he’d find a dog or cat, cradle it in his arms, soothe its terrors, and maybe, if the owners couldn’t be found, bring it home with him. If it was a dog, he’d name it Ranger.

  Jack has taken up residence in the garage. The cars are parked in the driveway to make space for his weight bench and his boom box and the couch where he sleeps and watches television. His clothes are in piles among the paint cans and antifreeze and busted garden hose and all the other garage junk. He keeps a fan running for coolness and that works pretty well. He still uses the bathroom inside the house, but as Patsy suspects, he often goes out the side door of the garage to pee in the yard, especially at night.

  The house has come to seem unfriendly to him, he can’t explain it. He never felt one way or the other about the place. It’s not like he has any store of happy memories or crap like that. He doesn’t even remember that much from being a little kid. Isn’t that weird? He wonders if there’s something wrong with him, if he’s short-circuited or incomplete. Other people always seem to expect him to be different. He’s too goofy, too flaky, meaning he doesn’t always take serious things seriously. If he’s asked about his parents and he says, “My dad’s down in L.A. My mom’s in a nuthouse,” people’s faces go wary, like they are waiting to be told it’s a joke. “No, really,” Jack says. “OK, a hospital. A hospital for mentals.”

  If he’s supposed to sound all choked up about it then he guesses he’s got it wrong. Jack knows, because he sees it on television and other places, that parents, families, are a big deal, that they are, in general, important, and the occasion for much carrying on. Well that’s great, and he’s always polite when people talk in that way. His “family” is Leslie and Patsy, but neither of them, either separately or together, has enough substance to bear all the weight the term implies. Jack doesn’t think he’ll ever get married or have kids, but he likes the idea of a steady girlfriend, of always having someone around, different girls, probably, but always someone.

  This thing with the house came on unexpectedly. When he got back from his Caltrans job and tried to sleep in his old bed, he couldn’t get stretched out, couldn’t make his body fit the well-worn groove of the mattress. The air seemed stale, and the familiar noises coming through the walls—his sister moving around in her own room or flushing the toilet—kept him wakeful and irritated. Then the den, the place where he sat to watch his television, started getting on his nerves. Patsy was always sticking her head in to ask, “Oh, what are you watching?” Not that she cared. She was only looking for a hook to hang a conversation on, an excuse to park herself and complain about the heat or her foot troubles or make useless comments about why anyone would want to watch a program where people ate bugs off a plate or just sat around their living rooms talking, why, the television people might as well show up with a camera at their own front door and put her, Patsy, on a show!

  Patsy laughed to show how silly that idea was. Jack said, Uh-huh, and kept his attention on the television screen. If you ignore Patsy, she eventually goes away. Jack does not really dislike his aunt. It’s more that he spends so much time alone, in his own head, that he can’t climb out of it to make the kind of noises required to engage with her. He’s a target of opportunity for her, a sitting duck. One more reason not to be there. But even when he’s alone in the house there’s something about it that makes him…sad? Restless? Whatever it is, it has a different, vaguer shape than a memory, more like an animal coming across a scent and backing away from it.

  Jack buys a twelve-inch color TV and takes it out to the garage, where his weight bench is already set up. He watches his shows while he lifts and does arm curls, ten sets of ten reps, keeping it slow so as to build longer muscles. He has an old boom box for music. The couch is one he finds on a curb with a sign that says Free. It’s a little funky but he covers it with a bedspread and it’s not so bad. The kitchen is only a place where food is stored, so it’s easy enough to fix his morning cereal or his frozen dinners and carry everything out to the garage. Most nights Jack gets stoned and stays up watching kung fu movies or cop movies or billiard tournaments or infomercials, whatever’s on. He tells time by the television, if he keeps track of it at all. There’s a blank and tinny feel to anything after about three a.m., a sense that the world has been left in the care of machines that click and cycle through their mechanical paces.

  Some nights he goes out the side door of the garage and gets in his car and drives everywhere and nowhere. Sacramento is now just one big suburb, a metropolitan area, it’s called, towns placed along the freeways like knots on a string, Rancho Cordova, Citrus Heights, Roseville, each one with its acres of sprawl, its attendant shopping malls and schools, everything dead asleep, shimmering with heat haze. There’s grass where people water it, and back yard swimming pools scented with chlorine, and oleander hedges, and lilies of the Nile, and other stuff he doesn’t know the name of but it’s all baked dry and powdery. On these drives he sometimes finds himself wondering how hard it would be to kill somebody, in the purest physical sense. He thinks it’s probably not as easy as it’s portrayed on television. How long would you have to cut off their air supply, or how hard would you have to hit them and where, in order to stop their heart, or maybe it was the brain you had to go for, since it controlled all the other systems. And these thoughts don’t particularly alarm him because they are so curious and remote and impersonal. He gets back home before there’s any light in the sky, he’s like a vampire or something, and beats off so he can fall asleep.

  His sister tells him he shouldn’t stay cooped up like this, he should get out and do things. What things, Jack always counters, stalling, and Leslie says, “Call somebody up, go to a movie or just hang out. Don’t you know any girls? You’re not so ugly that you couldn’t get a girl to go out with you.”

  Good old Les. He gets a kick out of her, he really does, the way she’s always trying to nag him into having fun, which he doesn’t mind. Jack thinks she could use a little fun herself but he can’t come up with suggestions. The truth is he doesn’t know any girls anymore, or much of anybody else. He never had that many friends to begin with, and they’ve all receded since high school. As for girls, it would feel like a big dorky deal to call one of them up out of the blue and make the sort of conversation that would get him one bit closer to getting laid. He thinks he’ll wait until after he’s done the firefighter thing so he’ll have something to talk about. He won’t have to go into details, or maybe after the details
have already happened they’ll come out of his mouth on their own in some effortless way. He figures he can get by with saying, “It was pretty tough,” and by then he might have some attractive wound or scar that would speak for itself. Tomorrow, he promises himself, he’ll find the number you call about the fire crews. He hears Patsy in the kitchen—she has a particular sound, like a mouse in bedroom slippers—and when she’s receded back down the hallway, he goes in and fetches himself a couple of beers.

  Patsy is writing a letter to her sister Angela. It is unclear if Angela can still do any such thing as read, but Patsy always tucks her letters inside cheerful greeting cards. There isn’t anybody who doesn’t like to get mail. Dear Angela, she begins. How are you? I hope you are well and feeling fine. We are all getting along pretty good. It sure is hot. I never thought there was anything hotter than a Chicago summer, but I see I didn’t take Sacramento into account.

  Patsy measures the remaining space on the page with her eyes. It’s always a challenge to fill it up with enough cheerful news of the sort appropriate for a disturbed person like her sister. Patsy is the only one who writes. Neither of Angela’s own children do so, and as for Angela’s husband, he hasn’t had anything to do with them in years. He lives with another woman without benefit of clergy. He’s never divorced Angela, even though you are allowed to do that once someone is certified disturbed. Maybe it’s guilt, the same thing that keeps him making the mortgage payments on the house, well, he should feel guilty. What kind of man deserts his family in time of trouble? Or maybe that’s the nature of men, to run off and leave the hard work to women.