Throw Like A Girl

by Jean Thompson

  Jeffy set the pie basket on the porch and said that strawberry-rhubarb was his favorite pie. “Until you come along with next month’s, that is.” It was the joke he always made.

  “Pray that there is a next month, Jeffy,” said Mrs. Colley, trying to make it come out humorous instead of small and quavering, as it did. Jeffy clasped Mrs. Colley’s hands in his big brown ones and when he bowed his head she felt obliged to do likewise. When Jeffy raised up again and said, “Amen,” Mrs. Colley felt embarrassed, as if she’d taken advantage.

  The last stop on the pie route was always her daughter Margery’s, so that Mrs. Colley could visit with the grandbabies. Margery did not bake her own pies because she worked part-time, in addition to chasing after two kids whenever she was home and never having a minute to herself.

  Mrs. Colley tried not to pass judgment on any of this, or on the state of Margery’s house, which today as usual was at sixes and sevens. Cheerios floated in the kitchen sink. Every towel in the house seemed to have assembled on the bathroom floor. The television was on, although no one was watching it. The President was doing a commercial for the War. Ronnie and his little sister, Crystal, were playing chase. Ronnie had a potato peeler in his mouth and his arms spread out, airplane-style. He made rat-tat-tat noises as he tried to trap Crystal in a corner and dive-bomb her. “Look, darlings, Grandma’s here! I brought you a strawberry-rhubarb pie!”

  “I hate strawberry,” said Ronnie, talking around the potato peeler.

  “I hate rhubarb,” Crystal chimed in, although she didn’t really. She was just being cute.

  Margery cleared a space for the pie on the kitchen counter but didn’t go out of her way to act appreciative. Margery sometimes sneaked cigarettes. Mrs. Colley was not supposed to know about this but she did anyway. Margery still wore her red smock from work. She was a sales associate at SuperStuff. Margery said, “They cut back my hours again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ronnie, knock it off,” Margery called, but without energy. The thunder of feet kept shaking the house. “Yeah. I guess I should be glad, since it’s only the worst job in the world.”

  Mrs. Colley watched as Margery took a number of items out of the freezer to start supper: a bag of Tater Tots, package of corn, fish fillets stuck together in the shape of a brick. Mrs. Colley said, “I saw somewhere that fish can give you mercury poisoning.”

  “Not if it’s frozen, I don’t think.”

  They didn’t say anything else about the hours cutback, and after a while Mrs. Colley took herself home.

  It didn’t used to be that husband and wife both had to work to put food on the table. She and Mr. Colley had managed. But there had not been so many things to buy back then, and there hadn’t been a stock market, or there had been but it wasn’t full of crooks who sucked all the money out of the world overnight. Times were hard. Jeffy Johnson said it was the seven lean years like in the Bible. The President said there were always sacrifices in time of War. Mrs. Colley took a Rainbow pill and slept for nine and a half hours.

  June was cherry pie month, one of Mrs. Colley’s favorites, even though cherry juice stained like the dickens. Mrs. Colley still got up on a stepladder and picked cherries from her own tree. There was nothing quite as pretty as a cherry tree, the sprays of red fruit against the green leaves. The birds were never happier than in cherry season. June was always good. June was fireflies and brides. Crops were planted and there had not yet been too much or not enough rain. School got out and children planned long campaigns of play.

  Mrs. Colley and Mrs. Pulliam ran cherries through the hand-cranked cherry pitter, saving the juice to can later. Mrs. Colley used a plastic form to stamp out the lattice crusts, which was cheating, sort of, but couldn’t be helped. She knew her crust was not the equal of Mrs. Pulliam’s, although only a longtime subscriber might notice the difference. She flattered herself that she had a better flair for the fruit pies, a more generous hand with the fillings than Mrs. Pulliam. Her best cherry pies made you wish there was such a thing as a cherry pie tree.

  The last few weeks she’d kept a close eye on Mrs. Pulliam, watching for signs of discontent. But Mrs. Pulliam pitted cherries and weighed out sugar and did her share of the chores without complaint. Just as Mrs. Colley was taking the last of the last batch of cherry pies out of the oven, Mrs. Pulliam said, out of nowhere, “Bobby called.”

  Bobby was Mrs. Pulliam’s bad son in Chicago. He did not often call. Mrs. Colley, as she was meant to, kept her eyes on the pies as she asked, “Well, how’s Bobby?”

  “He’s part of a group now.”

  When Mrs. Pulliam didn’t say anything more helpful, Mrs. Colley was forced to ask what kind of group.

  “It’s a No More War group.”

  You might expect as much from long-haired, pot-smoking Bobby, and Mrs. Colley was about to murmur something by way of consolation, when Mrs. Pulliam spoke again. “Bobby says we aren’t winning the War, we’re losing it.”

  This was such an unexpected idea that Mrs. Colley had no response, only stood there with her hands in oven mitts. Mrs. Pulliam went on. “He says we keep having Wars just so everyone stays all stirred up and scared.”

  “Now what possible reason would anyone have for wanting that?”

  Mrs. Pulliam only shrugged and went back to balancing the month’s accounts.

  The last week in June the meatpacking plant fired all the Mexicans. The government said it was not safe to have foreigners, people of unknown, undocumented backgrounds, motives, and sympathies, at work in the sensitive area of food supply. Many of the Mexicans just disappeared. Overnight, it seemed, they were gone. They left behind cars, the children’s bicycles, food in kitchens, shoes in closets. It was hard to get new workers to replace them. The worst job in the world wasn’t at SuperStuff, in spite of what Margery said. Everyone knew the worst jobs were probably in the meatpacking plant, in the slaughter room, or the hide room, or the rendering room. The Texas bank that had already bought up a lot of the farms took over the plant and cut back on the shifts.

  Mrs. Colley found that she missed the Mexicans, the black-eyed babies, the snatches of Spanish radio on Main Street. Some people said they must have done something criminal, clearing out like that, but Mrs. Colley wondered if they weren’t just afraid. The Mexicans who remained behind were having a hard time making ends meet, and the churches in Hi Ho organized a food drive for them. The Lutheran pastor, young Reverend Higgs, gave a sermon about charity and brotherhood and overcoming differences, which made everybody feel better, since that was exactly what they’d done. Summer baseball leagues started up. There was a bank robbery in Des Moines and Mrs. Colley was terribly worried about her son, John, who worked in a bank, until she reached him on the phone and found out it was a different bank. The War was said to be winding down, although things still blew up now and then. For whole days at a time you could almost forget there was a War going on; there was too much else to crowd it out. But the War was like a pie you’d left in the oven, something nagging at you, a task left unfinished.

  July was for blueberry pies. Blueberries were grown in cool places, and when you sifted through the fruit, washing and straining and picking out stems, you thought of pine trees, of gray, chill lakes and seagulls. Blueberry was the easiest of the fruit pies, nothing to pit or peel, and that was a mercy. July was always so blamed hot. The sun rode the sky all day long. There was no rain (the drought had been going on almost as long as the Wars), except for those times when a black storm swept in and sent forks of lightning and crop-shredding hail.

  There was a Fourth of July parade, with the fire truck going five miles an hour and running its siren, the high school band, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (by which was meant the old-fashioned Wars that were already in the history books), marching in formation, and some convertibles donated by a car dealership. Mrs. Pulliam got her hands on a quantity of nearly flawless blackberries and donated a dozen pies to the Freedom Celebration picnic. When you cut into the pies e
ach blackberry was still perfectly shaped, glistening with grains of undissolved sugar. No one had ever seen or tasted anything like them.

  Mrs. Pulliam stood beneath the awning that covered the picnic tables, accepting compliments. Mrs. Colley was pleased to see her friend getting the recognition that she deserved, pleased also that Mrs. Pulliam seemed to be enjoying herself, after a fashion. She had even dressed up a little, for her, in a new red and white blouse that seemed more cheerful than Mrs. Pulliam herself. For there was a kind of formality, even aloofness, to Mrs. Pulliam as she acknowledged people’s thank-yous, and that was to be expected. There was for every artist the awful moment when they stepped out from behind their splendid creation and revealed the meager, human-sized self that was bound to disappoint by comparison. People filled their mouths with sweet corn and potato salad and fried chicken and pie, pie, pie. The excellence of the food was some consolation for the fireworks show, which everyone agreed was not as good as last year’s.

  In mid-July it was announced the SuperStuff would be closing. The national chains were all cutting their losses, tightening their belts. The store hired a number of the Mexicans to stand on street corners with red, white, and blue signs that said Everything Must Go! Prices were reduced by twenty, then thirty, then forty percent and more. For a time the SuperStuff’s parking lot was jam-packed and they did more business in a weekend than they might have in a month. Mrs. Colley stocked up on those items of apparel which a lady of her age and size required. People wandered the aisles. There was a pleasant sense that everything in the store was available for the taking, for free or very nearly free. Everyone in Hi Ho had new dish towels and sheet sets and garden hoses and CD players and fishing rods and generators, and then the store was shut for good.

  Margery found work a few hours a week at the dry cleaners, running clothes through the machines that tumbled them and took out spots and gave them that dry cleaning smell. A while back there had been some kind of alarm about dry cleaning, about the chemicals used, but then it was determined that exposure was within acceptable limits. Mrs. Colley babysat Ronnie and Crystal to help out. Ronnie said he wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up. Crystal said she wanted to be a television lady. There was a scare about eating beef, something that had nothing to do with the Mexicans, and just like that you couldn’t give beef away. Everyone knew the scare would wear off sooner or later but before it could, the Texas bank closed the meatpacking plant and hauled all the equipment down to Texas or who knows where and padlocked the gates. Most of the local farmers had long since sold off their cattle because of the drought, but still it was a blow. For a time there was talk that the state might build one of its new prisons in the county and bring back some jobs, but nothing ever came of it.

  You wanted so badly to believe that life was basically good, that people were basically good. And Mrs. Colley did believe it. She might not go around announcing that she was wonderful and blessed, but she reminded herself often that there were many terrible places she could have been born into but had not. Nothing abnormally bad had ever happened to her personally or was likely to happen except for, eventually, dying, oh well. But nowadays there was so little you could trust to stay good, as if there was a pinhole at the bottom of the world and all the best things were leaking out of it.

  In August, everyone’s water bills doubled. It came out that the water utility had been bought up by a company in Belgium. Belgium! Most people in Hi Ho were unaware that you could do such a thing as sell the water, and it was unclear why anyone in Belgium should own a lot of the water in Iowa. It was some consolation that Belguim was not one of the hot countries; when people looked it up on maps, it was right up there with normal nations like France and Germany. The new Belgian water company said the increased bills reflected higher costs for security, that it was now necessary to guard against the possibility of the water supply being blown up or poisoned. That was odd, since the workers at the filtration plant still kept the side gate wide open in summer. That way they could leave their cars in the shade of the adjoining park, and take their lunch coolers out there at break time.

  “Bobby says it isn’t really countries that fight Wars now. It’s corporations. The corporations are bigger than the countries.”

  “I just can’t keep up with all of Bobby’s ideas,” said Mrs. Colley, which she hoped was a tactful way of saying she was tired of hearing about them. Bobby and Mrs. Pulliam talked a lot these days, and after every conversation Mrs. Pulliam offered up some new, outlandish opinion.

  “Bobby says everything’s global now. Things that happen on the other side of the world, even small things, affect everyone else. He says we are a global village.”

  “Well that sounds nice,” said Mrs. Colley, still trying to be agreeable. “I think I would like to live there.”

  Mrs. Pulliam shook her head darkly. “The news we see these days isn’t the real news,” she began. Fortunately the oven timer went off just then.

  They were in the middle of the August peach pies. Peach pies were murder. The fruit had to be perfect, firm enough to handle but ripe enough to juice up. The skins almost never came off easy, and by the time you dug the pits out, you threw away more than you saved. August was murder. Ponds turned green and stagnant, the ground dried and split into thirsty cracks. Only the air was humid, like breathing through blankets. When Mrs. Colley and Mrs. Pulliam baked peach pies they didn’t even try to run the AC, just set up big fans to blow the heat away. It was a lot of effort, but a good peach pie was a triumph. Mrs. Pulliam always cut smiling sun faces into the top crusts, because the pies had the sun in them, that was what you tasted, everything yellow and ripe.

  When they’d finished the last of the pies and done the washing up and put everything away, they sat on Mrs. Colley’s screened-in porch to let the house cool down. It was nighttime. A haze of heat blurred the stars. The fireflies were mostly gone by August, but here and there one sent up a faint, greenish spark. Cicadas and mosquitoes bumped against the screens. Mrs. Colley had put sprigs of mint in the iced tea and they let the ice melt a little so it was good and cold. If you raised your eyes beyond the lights of town you saw, or imagined you saw, the outline of the grass-covered hills that had been there, exactly the same, for a thousand thousand years.

  “What’s got into you lately?” Mrs. Colley heard herself saying. It just popped out. She held her breath.

  Mrs. Pulliam was silent for a moment, then she said, “I think I may have gone about as far as it’s possible to go with pie.”

  “I don’t understand. Going farther? Why do you have to go anywhere at all?”

  “Maybe the world makes you restless. Maybe you just get older, and wonder if you should have lived a different life. A bigger life.”

  Mrs. Colley thought that all the things she loved were small. They were all close by; she could practically reach out and touch them. She muddled her words trying to explain that this was not a bad thing. She only managed, “Well mercy sakes, Joyce, you talk like life was already over and done with.” Although even as she spoke she had a sense that so many things, if not over and done with, had long since been determined for her.

  In the darkness Mrs. Pulliam turned toward her and gave her a look, although the look itself was invisible. “I expect you’re right. Now I’d best be getting home. This heat! You could wring out the air like a dishrag.”

  At the end of August, the President said the War was over, and there was general public satisfaction at a job well done. But the very next week there was a new War, or rather, a return to one of the old Wars already won. It was breaking out again, like a rash, and once more there were flags and headlines and airships named after birds of prey. The following Sunday the Lutheran pastor, young Reverend Higgs, climbed up to the pulpit made of varnished blond oak and preached a sermon whose text was “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

  The Lutheran congregation sat as if they had been given orders not to flinch. Sunligh
t poured through the stained glass window depicting Jesus the Shepherd of His Flock. Oblongs and lozenges of red, violet, gold, and green moved imperceptibly across the blond oak floorboards. There was a vague sense that someone might come to arrest them all on the spot. When Reverend Higgs finished his sermon and the benediction and the organist played the first chords of the recessional, there were people who went out the exit without staying to greet and visit. There were others who filed out and shook hands with the pastor without knowing what to say.

  Mrs. Colley was one of these. Reverend Higgs looked pale and exhausted and noble, like Jesus. “Oh Pastor,” she began. Foolish tears brimmed in her eyes. A great confusion of words was welling up in her, but she only said again, “Oh Pastor.” The crowd behind her inched reluctantly forward, as if in line for vaccinations. Reverend Higgs murmured a blessing, and Mrs. Colley let her hand drop.

  That night she felt unwell. She slept fitfully, and had extraordinary and disturbing dreams. There was a rainbow in the sky that drifted closer and closer until you saw that it was really poison fumes in lurid, neon colors. Margery took packages of frozen sperm out of the freezer for supper. Mr. Colley appeared, dressed in the coveralls and straw hat he always wore for gardening, asking her where she put the. The. She couldn’t make out what he wanted because it was a small thing on the other side of the world. Mrs. Colley woke up with a fever and chills and a sore head and called Margery to take her to the doctor’s.

  The doctor said there was a lot of this going around lately and gave Mrs. Colley some new prescriptions and told her to stay in bed. Mrs. Colley dozed with her windowblinds closed against the heat and the air conditioner whispering to her. Margery fixed her meals of toast and fruit Jell-O, though she didn’t have much appetite and was content to sleep. The doctor said there was a lot of War sickness going around lately. Now wasn’t that silly. She knew she was dreaming. The cool sheets lulled her, the air conditioner sighed. How could you get sick from a War?