Throw Like A Girl (11 page)

Sunday came around, and I was the first one downstairs. My mother had set out our clothes the night before, so I was wearing an autumn-hued shadow-plaid shirtwaist. It was from last year and my chest pulled at the buttons, leaving gaps. The elastic of the puffy sleeves chafed my arms.

Ruth Ann came down next. She had on a white sweater and a denim skirt. “Aren't you going to church?” I asked.

“Uh-uh.”

“Well you better get dressed.”

“I am dressed.”

“Oh boy,” I said.

Ruth Ann went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice. I trailed after her. “Dad's going to have a fit.”

Ruth Ann pushed the refrigerator door shut. She'd done something bright blue to her eyes. The sweater made her boobs stick out. “I don't care. I'm sick of pretending we're some high-wire act or something, the Flying Barcuses. When I get married I won't even be a Barcus anymore. Neither will you, and neither will Louise.”

I hadn't considered that before. “So who would I be instead?”

“That depends on who you marry, dope.”

My mother came downstairs then. “Oh Ruth Ann” was all she said.

“Mom, relax, OK?”

The boys appeared next, both in their shadow-plaid blazers. The sight of Ruth Ann transfixed them. “Wow,” said Roy, quietly. Wayne said, “Mom, can I wear something different too?” My mother told him to hush.

My father descended the stairs whistling. We waited for the thunderclap, but he barely glanced at Ruth Ann. “All right, Barcuses, let's saddle up.” To my mother he said, “Louise needs help with her shoes.”

“Dad,” Wayne began, in an aggrieved tone, but Louise came clumping down the stairs then in her untied shoes, and my father swept her up and perched her on his hip. “Who's my little pony,” he said, flapping his hands and making faces until she squealed with pleasure. “Who's my pony pony pony girl?”

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
R
s and
M
s and
S
s. 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, fretting, 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.

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.