Throw Like A Girl

by Jean Thompson

  “Stop it,” I said.

  She flicked her cigarette lighter open and held it up like a torch. “I want to be burned alive,” she announced. “An inch at a time.”

  “Give me that thing and sit back down.”

  “A ceremonial thing, a kind of performance art thing. A holy barbecue.”

  I slapped the lighter out of her hand and it skittered sideways across the floor. A man sitting at the other end of the bar retrieved it and brought it back to Janey. “Thank you,” she told him. “You have a kind face.”

  I said, “If you’re trying for pathetic spectacle, this is the way to go about it.”

  She started bawling again. People were looking at her. I was aware of the bartender standing in some calculated, professional proximity. “It’s all right,” I told him. “We just haven’t seen each other in a really long time.” He put the check down in front of us and walked away.

  I got Janey out of there, and we went up to my room, and drank some more, and talked some more, and we were sorry about everything. There’s something about people you knew when you were young that lets you fall back on that early common ground and retrace your steps to the present.

  Janey passed out on the other bed. When I got up to get ready for my flight, she was still asleep. I was out of the shower, I was already dressed and packing when she sat up, wild-haired and blinking. “Apache mouth,” she croaked, and I got her a glass of water. She got up to go to the bathroom. When she came out, she flopped onto the bed again, face down in the pillows. “What time’s checkout?”

  “Noon, I’m pretty sure.”

  “I’m going back to sleep.”

  “Don’t you have to go to work?” I said, but she waved that away. “You drink too much.”

  “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  “Don’t just agree with me. Do something about it.”

  “Glib. You were always glib.”

  “This isn’t about me.” I waited, but she didn’t come back with anything. “Go to a doctor. Go to AA. Start somewhere.”

  “Oh what do you care what I do. You only drop in every ten years or so.”

  “I will come back next month and kick your drunk ass down the stairs.”

  Janey rolled over and refocused her eyes to peer at me. “I guess we’re stuck with each other, huh?”

  “Not if you don’t get your stupid act together.”

  “God, you’re a pain. Kiss kiss hug hug.” Janey buried her face in the pillows again, and I wrestled my suitcases out the door.

  After that, I’d call or Janey would call. She started going to AA. She said she didn’t buy into all of it, the praying parts, mostly, but it was all right. She hadn’t had a drink for a couple of months. She was losing weight and her brain felt less like an old sofa with sagging spots where the springs were giving way. I said that maybe she could find herself a nice recovering alcoholic boyfriend. Janey said call her a snob, but she wanted to steer clear of guys who lived in their vehicles or at the YMCA.

  “Besides,” Janey said, “we should quit talking about boys all the time, it’s dumb. We’re getting to an age where some fantasies are insupportable.”

  I told her I’d come see her again but she put me off, and I could tell she didn’t really want me there. From long distance it was hard to tell what was really going on. I knew that untruthfulness was a part of alcoholism, and that it was perfectly possible for Janey to tell me one thing and do another. But the fact that I was hearing from her regularly seemed hopeful. She was holding down a job. She wasn’t making any more resentful accusations about indignities she’d suffered at my hands long years ago. I was glad we’d found our way back to each other. There are some friendships that come to be more about longevity than anything else. Like Janey said, we were stuck with each other.

  I was pushing forty, and then I was past it. I’d settled and slowed into my own routines. There was work, and work had allowed me a little of the world’s goods, and there was the house I’d bought and the things the house required. There was the occasional love affair, though more and more often they took place only inside my head. Sometimes I was lonely, sometimes not. I realized I’d never been able to imagine any other life for myself.

  I didn’t see Janey until a couple of years later, at a wedding. Our friends who had been married were all starting to get divorced and to pair off again, the hopeful process of serial monogamy. Janey didn’t drink, or if she did, I didn’t see it, and I didn’t press her on it. She looked both a little better and a little worse, that is, she was no longer untidy or bloated, but it was as if she’d had a pin stuck in her and was shrinking down to some wizened core. But then, we all looked older. We made droll jokes about it. We professed admiration for (but were secretly appalled by) the friend who’d let her hair go entirely gray and chopped it off short.

  Janey and I went out for coffee. She said there were still times, plenty of times, when she felt like drinking, it didn’t go away. Any more than the desperate and unlovable parts of ourselves had ever gone away. But she hoped now that she could feed them something besides alcohol. “I was pretty mad at you there for a while. I felt you were looking down on me for drinking, the way you always looked down on me. Oh don’t worry. Blaming other people is just part of being a drunk. I blamed my mother. Every guy I ever fucked. Then once you take away the alcohol, you start to get it. None of those other people are wasting time sitting around bitching about you, well, my mother probably is, but the point still holds.”

  She said that she felt lucky to be getting sober right when it was turning into an industry. She meant, look at all the paperback books, look at all the rehab places and talk shows, it was downright trendy to be in recovery. And AA meetings were rollicking, really; they were the best free shows in town. I said that she had always been a trendsetter. She thought about that and said, Yeah, she guessed so, but she wished they were better trends.

  She was the first one to get breast cancer. She called to tell me she’d already had the biopsy, she was scheduled for surgery, followed by chemo, radiation, the works. They were hopeful, the treatment team. That’s what they called them now, a team. Rah rah. There had been all sorts of medical advances. They had really come a long way.

  I said I was sorry, not knowing, in the shock of the news, where else to begin, and Janey said impatiently that it wasn’t my fault. I asked her how she was doing, really, and she said, “How do you think? How do you think you’d feel?” The mass—tumor, whatever—was deep inside, you couldn’t tell it was there, but she kept trying. It was compulsive, she said. She’d lie in bed and prod and poke and squeeze, as if it was something she could pinch out. There was the sense of the body’s betrayal. It was dizzying, really, to think of all the thousand thousand things that could, and did, go wrong with the human physical plant. It was another compulsion, the enumeration and cataloguing of them all. Diseases of the brain, the blood, the skin, the bones, the circulation, the musculature, the digestion, of the apparatus for breathing, and for locomotion, and for speech and the control of speech, and for sleep. Sleep! Did any of us appreciate sleep until we were deprived of it? The miraculous meshing of heart rate, brain waves, all the involuntary processes. We took everything for granted until it was too goddamned late.

  I let her talk on. I figured that was my function for now, to be the ear, the receptacle. I asked if she wanted me to be there for the surgery and she said no, she had enough people to help her out. Maybe I could come later. She said it would really make her feel like a goner, if all the old crew started showing up.

  I thought of that when she was actually dying, and all we could do was send chocolates and flowers. Did she wonder where we were? Did it make any difference, as the cancer burned her alive, inch by inch?

  I went to New York four months later. She said not to come until she was done with the chemo, that she was as bald as a light-bulb and besides, she felt like shit. I took a cab from the airport to the Manhattan address she’d given me. The landscap
e of the city was familiar only because of my inability to make sense of it, its parkways and throughways and frantic traffic and unimaginable density.

  Janey’s building depressed me, even with what I knew by then of rents in New York and how people had to arrange their lives. I rode a creepy, rattletrap elevator up to Janey’s floor. She’d buzzed me in, and waved at me from the other end of the hallway. “It’s OK,” she said as I stooped to hug her. “I know what I look like.”

  The apartment was small, either two rooms or one and a half, depending on how you counted. She had it fixed up nicely, with good pictures on the walls and a good rug underfoot. She made us a pot of tea, something herbal and medicinal, and we sat at the kitchen table, looking out on the ordinary city street. It was autumn but there was nothing of nature in the view, only a low sky spitting rain. The radiator sent out its mating call, clanking and gurgling.

  Janey said, “I’m glad you’re here. It makes sense, you always see me at my worst.”

  I said that wasn’t true, I’d seen her at her best as well. We both smiled and maybe we were thinking of the same thing. Janey when she was fearless and outrageous and eager, and just how long ago that had been. “Besides, it’s not your worst. It’s just illness.”

  Janey shrugged. “You can get used to anything. I’ve learned that. It’s only hair. It grows back…” Her small skull was covered with pinkish bristles. When she smiled, her gums were pale. She looked damaged but fierce, like a prisoner doing hard time. I was in awe of her.

  She said she was tired these days. “Tired right down to my radiated bones. But the doctors are happy with me. My lab work is coming back clean. It looks like what’s left of me is going to live a little while longer.”

  She said, “Getting sober is pretty good preparation for getting cancer. No, really. They’re both about giving things up. I can do that now like a champ.”

  It wasn’t the last time I ever saw her. You start to think that way once somebody’s gone, you start counting backward. Janey had another three good years, and we managed to meet one place or another. A group of us chipped in to get her a home computer and Internet service and we all sent e-mails chattering back and forth. I try not to think of things in final milestones, because then I’d have to count that scattered, morphine-flattened phone call, and all the other sad lasts.

  So let me end with that day instead. We drank our tea, and ate pieces of candied ginger from a tin Janey brought out. How many times had we sat together at one or another table. Each of us alone, except for the other. “I didn’t look down on you,” I said. “I never did. You were the brave one, always.”

  “Ah, but you were the one I wanted to impress,” she said, smiling her pale smile. “All those times I went too far into one or another crazy thing.”

  And now, she said, she would go ahead of me into dying. No, I didn’t have to bother acting all shocked, it was simple fact, statistical probability. And I was not to be afraid, because she would have gone there before me, shown me how it was done. The last voyage of the Starship Enterprise.

  She lifted her shirt to show me the bite the cancer had taken out of her, the dark ridged scar, the angry absence. Wouldn’t it be something, she said, if they could cut out only the parts you didn’t want. Everything that was timid, doubtful, self-hating, sad. Did I know what they had her doing for rehab, to train the remaining shocked, stripped muscles? She was to take a ball, an ordinary rubber ball with some give to it, and practice squeezing it. There were specific repetitions, a few more each day. And then you advanced to involving the whole shoulder, drawing it back and the aching arm along with it, back and back, then extension and release. Wasn’t it funny, she said, and she knew I’d get the joke, that after all this time she was finally learning how to throw like a girl?

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

  Reading Group Guide

  Throw Like a Girl

  Discussion Points

  1. In The Brat, we read Iris’s tale of teenage angst and violence. As she gazes down at her tormentor, she muses “if she shot him nobody would ever have to look at him again. That would definitely be something real. Or she could take the gun home and shoot her mother or Kyle.” (p. 20) Do you think her actions are primarily motivated by her desire for something exciting to happen? Considering recent school shootings and violence, did this story hold more relevance? Did it resonate more or less? What about the ending—was it what you expected?

  2. The Five Senses is probably the most sinister and eerie of the stories in this collection. In it, we follow Jessie as she goes on the run with R.B., her boyfriend. In a flashback, Jessie tells a counselor her parents’ real problem with her relationship: “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 to him.” (p. 36) What does Jessie mean by this? What do you think happened to her parents? Do you think R.B. is a sociopath? Discuss the significance of the title.

  3. Why do you think the majority of the violence in The Five Senses is alluded to and not shown? Do you think it’s more effective this way? Discuss the flashbacks. How do they help to further the story?

  4. Kelly Ann, the listless Army wife and mother in It Would Not Make Me Tremble to See Ten Thousand Fall, decides to enlist herself, much to her family’s chagrin. Why do you think she does this? What is the significance of the title? Do you think her marriage will survive her radical decision?

  5. The Family Barcus is about a suburban family during the 1950s and 1960s and how they are affected when their father leaves his job to start his own risky venture. The narrator, Cindy, reflects back on this difficult time in her family’s life and remembers that once, years later, she went to one of those rotating restaurants. How is this a metaphor for her family’s ultimate collapse? Were you surprised that the father left for good after telling his daughter that “family is everything. It’s our sword and shield against the world”?

  6. There is an undercurrent of sadness, almost melancholy, running through most of these stories. Did you find this realistic or disheartening? Why is it that the characters are nameless in Lost?

  7. In The Inside Passage, Mike tells our narrator, “Everybody gets married. Everybody’s gotta bite the bullet.” (p. 131) In The Woman Taken in Adultery, the wife remarks “you start out being married together and you end up being married apart.” (p. 219) What do you think of these views of marriage?

  8. Many of these stories deal with restless characters trying to change their lives. Chad, the husband trying to make a success of his start-up radio station in A Normal Life muses on his radio show “I wonder if any of us can ever really make decisions without second-guessing and regrets.” (p. 171) What do you think of this notion? Why was Melanie upset with him after this comment? After Melanie returns from Thailand, she hears Chad on his show saying “the Dalai Lama says that the purpose of life is happiness.” (p. 192) Do you agree?

  9. Thompson’s stories have much subtext within them. What do you think the fire symbolizes at the end of Hunger? What does the title refer to? How are all the characters “hungry” in some way? Discuss the painting in The Woman Taken in Adultery, from which the story gets its name. How does Thompson use humor in the scene where the narrator is confronted by her paramour and her husband at the museum?

  10. Pie of the Month starts out as this sweet story of two older women running a pie-making business and ends up with a more subversive agenda, addressing war, violence, immigration, and the economy. Do you think the shift in tone is effective in this story? How has the current political climate affected the town where you live?

  11. The title story, Throw Like a Girl, describes a friendship over the course of twenty-plus years. Did knowing early on in the story that Janey would die intensify the drama? Her character and the narrator discuss the somewhat competitive nature between them. Do you think that competition is natural in women’s friendships? Does this exist in male friendships? Why do you think th
at the collection is named for this story? Why does it come last?

  12. Which story left the strongest impression on you? Which one left the least? Do you find the struggles of the characters relatable? Are you interested in reading more of Jean Thompson?

  Q&A With Jean Thompson

  You’ve written both short stories and novels. Do you have a favorite format? When do you make the decision about whether an idea will become a story or a novel? Do you utilize outlines in your writing process? You go back and forth seamlessly from first-person narrative to third-person. How do you decide what voice to write in?

  I suppose that short stories are my first love, and therefore my sentimental preference. I’m not sure that a particular idea needs sorting into story or novel. The idea is in a sense wedded to form, and the decision process has more to do with whether or not I feel ready, psychologically and practically, for the longer, sustained effort of the novel. First person is more intimate, more confidential, therefore I probably use it for characters with whom I feel a greater comfort level, and whose skin fits me better.

  You have worked on the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana campus in their English Department since 1973. How do you reconcile teaching fledging writers and finding time to write yourself?

  I no longer teach full-time, so that era is behind me. At its best, the teaching of writing and the process of writing are symbiotic, and issues in one’s own work get examined and articulated in teaching. I’m not sure that teaching is any harder, in terms of finding writing time, than any other vocation. In fact one’s time is often more flexible. The downside is when you have to read a spell of truly careless or outrageously bad writing, and begin to despair of the whole enterprise.