Throw Like A Girl (12 page)

When we'd pretty much cleaned out the casserole, I expected him to tell me to scoot on off to bed. But he seemed to be in a meditative mood. The refrigerator motor hummed, then shut off with a thud as he stared into the solid black of the kitchen window. He said, “You kids are lucky that you have each other. You don't appreciate that now but you will. You'll all grow up and get married and have your own families, and everybody will have a ton of cousins and nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles.”

“I'm not going to get married,” I said. It wasn't anything I'd decided until then. It wasn't anything I knew I was going to say until it was already out of my mouth.

My father gave me a startled, appraising look. “Don't be silly. The right guy will come along, and bells are going to go off, and pretty soon your old dad's going to be paying for a wedding.”

“I don't like weddings.” I was imagining myself in a big white dress, a church full of people looking me up and down. “I don't want any family. I want everybody to leave me alone.”

He was quiet a moment. “You don't mean that. Family is everything. It's our sword and shield against the world. Wait until you really are alone sometime. Then you'll see. You'll want all the family you can get.”

But I was tired of being told what I should want and not want. “I'm going to live in a big house all by myself except for a lot of cats and dogs. And I'm going to paint the furniture all different colors. Red and blue and green and white.”

My father sighed but his mood seemed to lighten, I suppose because he didn't believe me. He stacked our dishes in the sink and ran hot water over them to soak. “You just make sure you do your homework and mind your mother and be a good girl.”

I wanted to be Roy Rogers and Zorro and Sky King. But there wasn't any point in telling him that.

A few days later, he was gone. There was a note on the refrigerator saying he was very excited about exploring new, untapped markets for Vita-Juice and that he would be away for a little while. We'd better mind our p's and q's while he was away. He'd find out if we didn't, make no mistake about that.

It took us a while to realize that he wasn't coming back. After an interval of sorrowing guilt and confusion, we adjusted. My mother got on full-time at the fabric store. Ruth Ann took a job after school and weekends, waiting tables. Roy also found work, bagging groceries at the A&P. Wayne and I did most of the household chores and ganged up to boss Louise around. My father had taken the Chevy but left the cartons of Vita-Juice behind. They stayed in the garage until they began to leak an evil-smelling fluid, and then we threw them out. The matching outfits hung in the back of our closets until we had safely outgrown them.

We got by. There was a way in which we missed our father, but there was also a way in which we could not allow ourselves to miss him. Our lives moved on without him, closed over his absence like water over a stone. He'd given up on us, or given up on himself, and this great sadness and failure was something we had to pretend did not concern us, did not exist.

Wayne drew a Christmas card that year and put it on the refrigerator door. It showed a deep blue night with an incongruous rayed sun in the center, and off to the side, a slim crescent moon and five little lopsided stars. Even when he was not among us, my father took up all the space in the sky.

I
was twenty years old and about as pretty as I was ever going to be, although I didn't know that yet. I had long long hair, all the girls did. Mine was nearly down to my waist. It swung across my back like a bell. I had nice legs. There was always some boy I was crazy for, always trouble with some boy. There was never any useful purpose to it. I could never figure out what to do with them, besides wanting them to distraction. I was working as a counter girl in a photo studio and going to school part-time. I went to school mostly so I wouldn't have to say I was just a counter girl. But school wasn't that important and neither was work. They were only the background for the main business of my life, which was to have exciting things happen. That was me back then.

A black-haired boy on a motorcycle turned around to stare at me as he rode past. He kept his head swiveled around for most of a block. It was almost comical, like a cartoon where someone smacks into a lightpost with a lot of exclamation points. Of course he didn't crash, just kept going until he was out of sight. I'd never seen him before. He looked like a pirate, with that head of black hair and his black mustache and beard. The way he stared burned through me. You think it has to mean something, a moment like that, and sometimes it does.

I met him two or three weeks later. I'd asked around, I knew a few things about him by then. He'd been in my mind, the way that something not yet real occupies space in your head and takes on different, agreeable shapes. I'd been thinking about him and the next minute there he was, like a magic trick.

I was sitting in the school's Commons, the big hangout spot in the basement. There were people who never seemed to do anything else besides sit there. They'd hold court at their favorite tables, little groups of them engaged in lounging and spite and the other minor vices. Outside it was September, still hot, with a polished sky and color in the trees. But down in that basement it was always lurid midnight on some seasonless planet. Unhealthy yellow fluorescent lights turned the air intense and artificial. You have to realize how much people smoked back then. Curtains of smoke wavered and reformed, like the currents of talk and gossip, everybody watching everybody else, eyes like smoke, wandering everywhere.

The black-haired boy was tall, he had that tall kind of walk, all long legs. He came across the room to sit down across from me. I forget just how we started talking. He was older than I'd thought, a few years past me. He had blue eyes with a black rim around the iris. I'd never seen eyes like that before and I haven't since.

After a while he said, “You should come for a ride on the bike with me.”

“Maybe sometime.” I was pretending not to be that interested. I had a paper cup of something melted down to watery sweetness, and I tipped the cup so the liquid touched my mouth, though I didn't drink.

“How about now? Come on.”

Around his neck he wore a bullet with a hole drilled through it, threaded on a rawhide lace. I'd never seen anything like that either. Oh my heart was a monster. It roared and showed its teeth. Back then I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it. I still do, I guess, but now I've learned that I can't necessarily have it. And so I stood up and walked out with him.

Everybody watched us go. I knew he had a girlfriend, or an old girlfriend who wasn't quite gone yet. I knew who she was, a blonde with one of those naturally expressionless faces, like a cat's. They had some long, messed-up history. I had a boyfriend, sort of, one who came and went. And now here we were, giving people a whole new story.

I tucked my hair into my shirt collar so it wouldn't blow around wild. I climbed on the back of the bike like I'd been doing it all my life. That big loud engine started up beneath us. He drove fast, showing off. I held on to him hard. And even though holding on was one purpose of a ride like this, I wasn't doing it for show. I felt dizzy-sick. The realness of what I was doing caught up with me. I had to remind myself that the road flying away beneath my feet wasn't moving at all. And the sky was the sky. And this boy whose face I couldn't see was only going to be a stranger for a little while longer.

We rode out past the straggling ends of town, where there were little shops for auto parts and furniture repair. A grain elevator. A cemetery looking lonesome. Here and there were islands of trees, and maybe a few houses, some half-built subdivision rearing up through the flatness. But mostly it was farm fields and ditches full of zigzag weeds. A rail line ran parallel to the road, banked high above us on its gravel bed. A tractor churned through the fields, knocking over cornstalks and stripping the land down to its hard skin. I leaned into that boy and felt him lean into me. I squeezed my eyes shut against the wind and looked out through my eyelashes. Although it was a fine bright day that showed everything in its best light, the only thing beautiful out there was us.

We turned around and headed back into town, as if we'd proved some point about there being nothing we wanted in that direction. The boy—or was he a man, and how did you tell the difference, one more thing that thrilled and scared me—asked me where I lived, and I told him. Boy or man, they were all so dumb, in some ways. I already knew very well where he lived.

I had a place of my own on the third floor of what had once been a stately home. A turret grew out of the roof. There was a big sagging front porch and bits of frail, lovely stained glass above the transoms. The landlord had crammed a lot of cheap plumbing and fixtures into every available corner and chopped it up into rental units. You could lift the linoleum of my kitchen floor and see the lights shining in the apartment beneath. There was a bathtub that felt like getting into a coffin. The stove gave off a smell of gas. The rent was fifty-five dollars a month. It was my first real place. I loved that it was shabby and odd and had walls painted crazy bright colors and was more like a treehouse or a sailing ship than a normal house.

I led that boy up my stairs. I wanted what was going to happen so bad, I couldn't stand the waiting. In some sense I wanted it to be already over and done with. I closed the door behind us and we kissed standing up, and then we were on the bed. We lay side by side, touching each other through and under our clothes. There wasn't time to think about anything, no voice that comes in and reminds you, Pay attention, this is your life happening.

Next there was the awkwardness of getting out of our clothes. It's funny how being naked is almost less embarrassing.

His skin was both white and ruddy and I tried to see as much of him as I could before he got himself on top and inside of me. That's how we began and that's how we finished, though for a while in between he rolled me up to kneel over him so he could watch me work. And then we were done with that and later I went down on him and he said, “That was the best one of those I ever had.” And I know there's a difference between fucking and love, a good fuck and true love, at least, I know you're meant to think there is. I know all the serious, cautionary things you're supposed to say. I know you can have one without the other. But even so. They're both about wanting and finding, wanting and finding.

Then we lay in bed and talked. It was our first normal conversation. He told me he was twenty-three. He'd been in the army, enlisted for the reasons young men usually do, that is, to measure themselves against something big, and to get their growing-up accomplished. He'd been to the war and come back, one of the lucky ones. (This was the ugly, misbegotten war of our time. It was every bit as bad as you've heard.) Now he was in school again, trying to be serious about it this time. There was a sunken place along his arm about the length and width of a pencil, a war wound. If I wasn't a goner already, that would have done it for me right there.

I told him about myself, or whatever version of myself I was laying out at the time. It wasn't dishonesty. I just wasn't sure of anything beyond the kind of facts you could put on a driver's license. Was I smart or dumb? Pretty or plain? Brave, or just crazy? The different pieces of me skittered around too much for me to get a fix on them. It got to where I didn't much like to try. So I just said, “Oh, I guess I'm like everybody else. Your average basket case.”

“You don't really believe that.”

I looked at him, propped up against the pillows, the arm with the bullet scar stretched out behind his head, and the bullet around his neck. This time yesterday we hadn't yet spoken one word, and here he was with opinions. But I thought he was probably right. I didn't think I was like anybody else.

When it was time for him to go we kissed some more and grinned at each other. It was all too nice to mess up with saying too much. I watched from my window as he walked out to the street and got back on the bike and rode away. I know he knew I was watching. I made the bed and put on some music. I forget what song it was, it didn't much matter. It was one of those times when music pulls the heart out of you and takes it on a sweet ride, and maybe you sing along and think you sound great.

A couple of days later my boyfriend, not that he ever wanted to be called that, came by. I didn't like it when he just showed up and hung around waiting for me to guess his various wants and needs and then do something about them. He was a silent, gloomy boy. Over time we'd stopped having fun and were down to irritable sex. This day wasn't any different. We got smoked up and then we went to bed. It was no big deal anymore. Afterward I was in a hurry to dress and start doing something, put dishes away or straighten books, because I didn't want to lie next to him in bed.

He got up too, and dressed, and said, “So what's going on?”

“What do you mean?” Although I knew exactly what he meant.

“With that biker guy.”

“He's not a
biker
. Not like that.”

“Well what's the deal?”

I said, “I don't know.” And I didn't. I wasn't planning anything out, including what I said next. “Look, maybe we shouldn't do this anymore.” I'd just fucked him good-bye, though I hadn't known it at the time.

“Fine. Great.” He was pissed off, he said some things about sneaking around behind his back and I said no, it had all been pretty much right out in the open. And since when did he act like he cared about what I did or thought or wanted? Did we ever talk about anything, even the basics, like Let's let's not fuck other people? Hell no, because he didn't want to embarrass himself, didn't want to pretend we were anything important, didn't want to be bound by anything resembling a rule.

I'd saved all this up to tell him. I laid it on him and he didn't have much to say back and finally he slunk away. Even though I was through with him, I thought he should have tried harder to talk me out of it. Then again, trying harder was the part he could never bring himself to do.

This was what I knew about the blonde girlfriend with the face like a bored cat's: they went to high school together, right there in that same town. There was some high school stuff between them. Then when he got out of the army they'd started up again, moved in together. Her parents were religious, Baptist I think, and they'd squalled and threatened and made for a lot of drama. Then she wanted to go to California, and so they did, and while they were out there she broke up with him, reason unknown. And (this was the part he told me later) he crawled into some kind of black hole. Depressed, broke, lonesome. Days he never got out of bed. Drinking. Suicide thoughts.

I admit, I had so much crude and awful vanity, I wished it was me, that I could make someone suffer like that.

And then I guess the blonde changed her mind, about California, about him, and they came back here, and broke up, and renegotiated, and broke up again, but never entirely. It was a Situation. He told me the next time I saw him. Full Disclosure. Truth in Screwing.

“Just so you know,” he said. We were in bed again and we'd torn the place up. Literally. One of my old bedsheets had given out in the middle of us carrying on, and we'd put our feet through it and torn a big hole. We thought that was so funny. We laughed and howled and kept at it until the sheet was only ragged ribbons.

But now we had to quit being funny. I said, “What am I supposed to know, exactly? And what's she supposed to know?”

“I didn't tell her about…”

“No. I guess you wouldn't.”

He said, “I don't know what I want anymore. I used to think I did.”

“You just mean you want more than one thing.”

He looked unhappy. I knew this much about him by then: that he had a store of tender feelings, that he didn't like to think of himself as dishonorable. I said, “All right, now I know. Cheer up. You look all tragic.”

“I don't want to do this to you.”

I made a joke out of that, how I was pretty sure he wanted to do it to me, but I knew what he meant. We were already stuck in some trouble, like a fly in the last gluey inch of a honey jar. I decided I didn't want to make a scene. Scenes were not acceptable. None of us back then liked to think of ourselves as hung up on jealousy and possessiveness, which were equated with materialism and bourgeois values and all things bad about the old order. It was an attitude my sad-sack now-ex-boyfriend had taken to extremes. The ideal was to be free and honest and open and careless. It worked about as well as you'd expect.