Throw Like A Girl (31 page)

“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. Sunlight 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?

By the time Mrs. Colley felt well enough to get out of bed and open her blinds, it was already September and the yellow heat had dropped out of the sky.

“I'm still weak as a kitten,” she fretted to Mrs. Pulliam over the phone. “I've never been so useless in all my days.”

“Then there's no point in you even leaving the house. Make yourself sick all over again.”

“But the apple pies!”

September was apple.
A
for apple in the children's school-books. Red apple barns and wagons, the promise of fall. Apple pie being what it was, there were people who doubled their September orders. Apple was the queen of pies. A baker's reputation rose or fell on it.

“I'll manage fine,” said Mrs. Pulliam. “The last thing I need is you getting your old germs all over the place.”

“I don't have germs anymore, don't be rude.”

“Or falling face down into the flour bin. I'm not going to argue with you.”

“I've got the rest of the week to get my strength back,” said Mrs. Colley stubbornly.

But when baking day came around she wasn't much better, still short of breath and unsteady on her feet. “I can still do the deliveries,” she told Mrs. Pulliam when she called. In the background she heard water running, pans clashing like cymbals.

“Get Margery to help you. I'll leave some money for her trouble.”

“Leave? Where are you going to be?”

“I'm going to visit Bobby.” There was a whirring, grinding sound that Mrs. Colley knew was the device that took off apple peel in a long thin spiral, cored and cut the fruit into slices. “Don't worry, the pies will be ready.”

“You're going to Chicago?” The enormity of this was enough to make Mrs. Colley wonder if she was having another fever dream, as if her sickness had loosened the top of her head like a box lid and now strange things were always falling in and out. “For how long?”

“For a spell. If a grown woman can't take herself on an occasional trip, then I don't know what. Now shoo, I have work to do.”

“What is it you aren't telling me? What don't I know?”

The clatter in the background stopped. “You already know everything you need to know. You just have to let yourself believe it,” said Mrs. Pulliam, and then she hung up.

Mrs. Colley woke early and drove herself to Mrs. Pulliam's house. It seemed like a long time since she had been outside, and the season had changed. There were dew-covered spiderwebs in the long grass. She noted here and there an early tree, ash or elm, getting ready to turn. The sky was still pink from sunrise. Far overhead a plane pulled a line of silver from west to east. You knew these things because you saw them. Wasn't seeing believing?

When she parked the car in Mrs. Pulliam's driveway, a cinnamon wind enveloped her, wafting from every chink and window. The back door was open. Two pieces of knowledge registered with Mrs. Colley at the same time: that the house was full of pies, and that Mrs. Pulliam was gone, like the Mexicans.

Or not really like the Mexicans, since everything was scrubbed and ordered and cleared away. There were bags of clothes with labels directing them to the Goodwill, tags on furniture, boxes of household goods stacked in the laundry room. And everywhere there were pies.

On the kitchen table, lined up on the counters. The cupboard doors were open to make space for pies. The dining room table and every chair, the bookshelves and dressers. The mattress was covered in a thin, clean sheet, and two dozen pies were set out on it. There were even pies in the bathtub, wrapped up in plastic. And on every top crust, words had been cut out, one hundred, two hundred times, pie after pie after pie:

Mrs. Colley both knew and believed that if she counted, there would be a pie for every household in Hi Ho. On the kitchen table was an envelope filled with money, all the proceeds from this year's subscriptions. The pies on the table were still warm. Mrs. Pulliam must have left only minutes before.

Mrs. Colley removed a pie from a chair so she could sit down. She cradled a pie in her lap as if it were a living thing, a bird or a lamb or a child. In a little while she would call Margery and they would begin their chores. Mrs. Colley would take baskets of pie to the trailer court and ask the Mexicans how you said it in Spanish, NO MORE WAR. All over town, people would be eating apple pie, swallowing the words down, NO MORE WAR, and they would put it on the license plates of their cars, and pastors would spell it out on the brick-framed billboards in front of churches, it would deck the marquee of the old Cinema, NO MORE WAR. Farmers bringing in their crops would carve the words into the earth with tractors, so that the President himself, aloft in the great sleek airship that signified the power and swiftness of eagles, could look down and read it in the green Iowa hills, NO MORE WAR.

And in this way a small thing might become a big thing, easy as pie.

T
he
night we got the news about Janey I dreamed I was a ghost, like her. In the dream I kept shouting with no breath in my lungs, kept jumping up and falling back down again, as thin as a piece of paper curling over on itself. No one noticed me. It was desolate, being dead. My heart, or the bitter space where it used to be, flooded with salt tears. All of this was absolutely and purely real, the way any dream is, so that for a little space of brain wave activity I knew how profoundly lonesome it was to stand outside the living world and watch it go on without you. Then I woke up, ashamed at having turned her death into my own commonplace fears.

In the bathroom I stood in front of the mirror. I didn't look like a ghost, which I imagined to be something wan, unearthly, and refined. My face was frowsy with stale sleep. Its every heaving pore and blinking, rheumy aspect seemed to give testimony to the ongoing internal combustion process we call life. Janey used to say I had the face of a gun moll in an old black-and-white B movie. Gee, thanks, I told her, and she said she meant it as a compliment, meant I was tough and savvy and sexy. You know. A broad. A dame.

I never quite bought into it. Janey's compliments often had that little dig to them. But this morning I looked like nothing so much as a mug shot, and I have to say I didn't mind.

When Janey got sick again she went back home, to the western city where she'd grown up. She moved into her mother's house and slept in the little upstairs bedroom with the slanting ceiling that had been hers as a child. Later the dining room was converted into her sickroom, with a hospital bed and a potty and all the accumulating cards and flowers and teddy bears. There was hospice care, and visits from the clergy, and casseroles dropped off at the back door. This we knew from the one friend who'd been in that town on business, and whom the mother had not been able to prevent from coming to the house.

The rest of us had not been allowed to come visit. The mother controlled access, and kept everybody out except her own circle. When we called, the mother told us that Janey couldn't handle distractions, she needed all her strength to fight this thing. We fell all over ourselves saying that we understood. She was our first death, after all, and we were cowed by the family prerogative.

But Janey and her mother had never gotten along very well. Janey had been a disappointing daughter, willful and careless about living her life in any way that would have gratified a certain kind of mother. There was a sense that this final episode of illness, the fight Janey wasn't going to win, was the mother's chance to turn Janey into a better, if tragic, story. Maybe that's what a dying person needs, a bossy mother in charge of everything. But we were her friends, and we resented being kept at a distance and not even getting the chance to talk to Janey on the phone until the morphine drip had already done most of the work of stealing her away.

Now there was going to be a memorial. None of us was going. Why would we want to sit in the mother's church and drink tea from her cup and saucer set and listen to a lot of talk about God's will and how suffering made us more Christlike? I thought that suffering only made you suffer, and I'm pretty sure Janey did too. She'd never bought into religion, or the kind of backward explanations you got from religion. I didn't like the idea of all the praying that must have gone on, and her too weak to tell them all to shove it.

It was so unfair that the cancer had come back, but maybe fairness is one more word that belongs to the realm of explanations. What I mean is, four years ago Janey had been through the diagnosis, the disfiguring surgery, the rehab, the debate about treatment, the hopeful statistics, the chemo, the survivor group and their cheerleading, the checkups, the cautious prognosis, the pink ribbons, the encouragement and the false encouragement. “Boobs,” she said, exasperated. “How much time do we waste worrying about them, one way or another?”

We'd known each other for twenty-five years, which is some fraction of a life. More than half of Janey's, as it turned out. The whole group of us went back to college days, back when nobody had even thought about dying. Janey was the wild child, the one who couldn't wait to do too much of absolutely everything. It wasn't appetite or depravity, just the fear that she might be missing out on something. She had a mass of frizzy orange hair, like carrots run through a shredder. She weighed a hundred and eight pounds. She could dance all night and never come up for air. For a while she dyed her hair black, to go along with all the Goth stuff, but it made her look like everybody else and she changed it back. In spite of all her costumes and poses and ostentatious bad habits, she wasn't at all hard or tough. That would come later.

“Is sex supposed to hurt?”

She asked me that one day. We were hanging around her apartment, the way all of us used to do. Everybody knew where she kept her spare key and that she didn't mind if you came in and played her records—we had actual records back then—or smoked whatever you found in the ashtrays, or anything else. It was one of the nicest parts of life back then, feeling at home in someone else's space.

That day it was just her and me, killing time in between classes, or maybe instead of classes. It was spring but still cold, and we'd been watching the wind push the clouds around in the blue sky, and talking about nothing in particular. Maybe trying to plan exciting lives for ourselves. We did that a lot. We were convinced that the real world, brightly colored and meaningful, lay just beyond the boundaries of our own.

So I had to shift gears when she spoke. “What do you mean?”

“You know. Hurt.” She made an impatient face.

“Well it can,” I said, trying to sound like a judicious expert. We were both twenty years old at the time, and pretty sure we knew everything about sex, just because we were off to such a roaring start. I wondered who she might be talking about. We always had boys we kept company with, some we were serious about and others who were simply experiments. “Sure. Especially if a guy's real big.”

She shook her head. The window was behind her, and her hair looked like an orange cloud against the sky. “Not really. Kind of average. God. That's exactly what they're afraid we say about them, isn't it?”

“So what was…”

“I think he was trying to make it hurt.”

That made me queasy, I guess it shocked me. We didn't like thinking of ourselves as vulnerable, breakable, controllable objects, even if that was exactly the way some people saw us. I said that it wasn't right, what he'd done, and she said, Yeah, she knew. But she was still mulling it over, keeping something back. “What?” I said.

“I let him think I kind of liked it.”

I didn't want to hear that either. Because I understood why girls did such things, even a bold, harum-scarum girl like Janey, understood why we went along with so much, were so anxious to please, laughed when nothing was funny, kept silent when we should have spoken, bent ourselves into obliging shapes, did the things that shamed us, even as Janey was ashamed. There was some desperate and unlovable creature that lived inside us, and we had to keep it fed.

It's always easy to find solutions for somebody else's problems, so I told Janey she shouldn't see the guy again, or at least she shouldn't fuck him again, or at least she shouldn't act as if she liked it when she didn't, and she said I was right about everything. I guess I was looking pretty steamed by the time I finished my speech, because she waved a hand in front of my face to bring me out of it, and laughed a little. “Hey. It's all right. It was just one of those stupid things.”

“One that doesn't count.” That was our agreement about any kind of episode too hideous to want to remember: it didn't count.

“We should have been religious or something. Kept ourselves pure.”

“Too late now.”

“I wish I was a lesbian. Can you just decide to be one?”

“I don't think so.” It wasn't like I knew or anything. Lesbian, in my experience, was only a word guys used to insult you when you weren't interested in them. “You don't really want to be, do you?”

“Why not? Women are so much easier.”

“Sure they are. But I don't think I could do naked things with one.”

We were probably a little high, but I remember it being in the spirit of determined inquiry, rather than any sudden passion, that Janey scooted across the couch and pressed her small mouth against mine.

I didn't kiss her back, just let it happen, out of politeness, mostly. Her mouth took the tiniest taste of mine, like a mouse nibbling. I shifted my weight, trying to be accommodating—I wasn't shocked or mortified, still going along with things—and she crawled right up into my lap. I put an arm around her, since that seemed like the thing to do, and her entire restless weight pressed against me, a heap of bird bones and warmth, and then I did kiss her back, a little. Some of her hair caught in my mouth. It tasted powdery.

Janey pulled away. “You didn't close your eyes,” she accused.

“Sorry.” I was still trying to sort out what had happened, if it was any kind of a big deal.

We looked at each other for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“So OK, not a lesbian.”

“Pretty sure,” I said. “You?”

“I don't think so. Or maybe you're just too butch. Kidding,” she said, though with Janey you were never sure. But we had another laugh, and then we let it go, and it didn't cast any shadow between us.

Now she was dead, my first and only girl kiss. Thinking of it was just one more way to grieve.

Another friend from back then called me. We were still actively mourning Janey, making our donations to the cancer people, checking in with each other regularly, remembering the old stories. She asked me if I thought Janey had been happy.

“You mean ever? Or in general?”

“With the way things turned out,” the friend said. “Marrying What's-his-name. The drinking. All that restlessness.”

Janey had only been married for a couple of years, in her twenties. Everything else had lasted longer. I said, “That's not fair to ask about anybody. It's like saying you knew what you wanted, and either you measured up or you didn't.”

“So you don't think she was,” the friend said, ignoring my words, knowing I was only trying to be loyal.

“No,” I said. “She wasn't.”

After we finished school, Janey moved to New York. She got some dinky job at one of those hipster publishing ventures that launched themselves like rockets and lasted just about as long. The rest of us had gone on to more ordinary things like grad school (me), or teaching, or jobs with various corporate masters. We didn't have much to crow about compared to Janey and her new life of clubbing and near-encounters with celebrities (including some names we were too out of it to recognize as celebrities) and cocaine-filled nights. We got used to saying things like “That sounds so exciting.” When I went to visit her in New York, a year and a half after graduation, I was sure I'd be wearing the wrong shoes and talking about crop forecasts.

I flew into LaGuardia. There was construction going on and when we left the plane we had to march through dim, temporary corridors and up and down miles of narrow stairs just to reach the gate. The flight had been bumpy and I was chilled and half sick and wishing I was back home in my own dull bed. I emerged blinking into an open, overbright space and there was Janey, her hair cut short and sleeked down, more auburn than red, wearing a striped skirt and high boots that were clunky, nearly orthopedic. She looked peculiar in a way that I recognized as highly fashionable.

She squealed and hugged me and I was very glad to see her, even unwashed and unwell as I felt. The next minute she was pulling a tall, droopy-looking blond boy in a down ski jacket out of the crowd. The boyfriend. He was new, I'd only just begun to hear about him. “Gail, this is What's-his-name.”

Of course he had a name, and we all remember it well enough, but we never liked him or the way he treated Janey, and so his name has been erased.

“Hey,” he said, not bothering to shake hands or look my way. Already I didn't like him.

We got my luggage and headed out to What's-
his-name's old beater car. It was the week after Christmas and the night was black and glassy cold. Janey made the boyfriend carry one of my suitcases. He acted aggrieved about it and stalked ahead of us through the parking lot. Janey said, “I can't believe you're finally here. We are going to par-
tay!
She's never been to New York before,” she informed the boyfriend's unresponsive back.

Cold entered me from all directions. At the last minute I'd decided to wear my more stylish coat instead of the uglier, heavy-duty one, and now I was paying for it. When we reached the car, Janey insisted that I sit up front with What's-his-name, so he could ignore me from close up. At least it positioned me next to the inadequate heater. “So what do you want to do?” Janey asked from the back seat. “You hungry, or you just want to hang out?”

I said I was sort of hungry, make that really hungry. I was still trying to orient myself, both to the unfamiliar nightscape of freeways and traffic and to Janey herself, who, like anyone you haven't seen for a while, was both recognizable and strange to me. She'd added a new layer of mannerisms, a brittleness I mistrusted. And I was feeling out of place and diminished, though that was not really anyone's fault. I doubted if I could measure up to New York, or to the high life, even temporarily.