Throw Like A Girl (9 page)

“Thank you,” Kelly Ann said. Jonesy backed her car away from the curb in another fit of waving. Kelly Ann paid for her food and decided to take it home with her. She was surprised to find a blur of tears in her eyes. Jonesy might be ridiculous, with her rattling beads and her old-fashioned poems, but it was also true that she'd been a good student and that Jonesy was fond of her, and it made Kelly Ann feel bad to be deceiving her along with everybody else.

Because she was like the killdeer, dragging her wing to lead intruders away from her real reasons. Joining the Army didn't have all that much to do with Jack. Her feelings toward him had settled over time. She figured they could pick up where they left off on the other side of the Army, or maybe they wouldn't. Either way, she was going to be a warrior. She was going to have a life worth remembering. The baby stirred in the back seat, waking up, and Kelly Ann spoke to her in the coaxing voice she used to keep her from fussing. There was a moment when her heart mis-gave her, but she made herself imagine the way they'd stencil her name on her uniform: K. PARDEE. A name she hadn't had before, but now it was out there waiting for her.

F
or
a time when I was growing up, my father liked to see his family dressed in matching outfits. There were five of us kids. Ruth Ann was the oldest, then my brother Roy, then me in the middle, then Wayne, then Louise, the baby. Our mother sewed. She did heaps of mending and alterations—this was long before Wal-Mart or anything like it, long before cheap, nearly disposable clothing—but the fancy sewing was her pride. We had a variety of dresses and blazers in stair-step sizes. There were seersuckers and printed cottons for summer, and a nautical ensemble with sailor collars, and olive drab twills, and snowflake-patterned pullovers for cold weather. At Christmas we were photographed in red tartan pinafores and waistcoats. My mother worked up a skirt for herself of the same material, and a red plaid bow tie for my father. “Season's Greetings from the Family Barcus,” our card proclaimed, and the grandness of that inversion spoke of my father's vision for us.

This was back in the late fifties and early sixties, when you could do such things to children without it seeming remarkable. People gave us looks of fond approval as we trooped past in our homemade finery, on our way to church or some other outing. “Step lively there, Barcuses,” my father said encouragingly. “Eyes forward, shoulders back. Pick up the pace.” He complained that we resembled a straggling parade of ducklings. What he had in mind for us was always more purposeful and robust. I think he would have liked a larger family, six or maybe seven kids. It wasn't so unusual back then, even if you weren't Catholic. But my mother held the line. She had her own powers, of resistance, silence, and obstruction, even as my father issued orders and proclamations.

Ruth Ann was in charge of us during our public appearances, a responsibility she took seriously. Roy challenged her with his strutting and insolence, while Louise whined and dawdled, and Wayne and I plodded on, undistinguished foot soldiers. Ruth Ann was one more person giving me orders, and I resented her for it. She was two years older than Roy and five years older than me. The clothes were hardest on her. Adolescence hit her first, and she suffered public shame. She looked gawky and wrong in my mother's ruffled confections. Girls her age wore madras blouses, narrow skirts, loafers, charm bracelets, circle pins. This was the look she had on schooldays, only to succumb, on Sundays and special occasions, to my father's version of the Von Trapp Family Singers. She wasn't an especially pretty girl; none of us, except baby Louise, gave any promise of beauty. Ruth Ann had long, coarse dark hair that never took to bouffants, small, intent brown eyes, and a lumpy figure. She needed every particle of style she could get. In the family photographs, Ruth Ann is the one looking out from behind her hair, hating the camera.

My father was an only child. His father, my grandfather Barcus, was a carpenter and odd-jobber who picked up what work he could. When my father was seven, eight, or nine years old, there were times when Grandpa would come home and tell him, “Get in the truck, you're coming with me.” They'd drive out to a construction site and my father would be sent up a ladder with a pouch of roofing nails and a hammer. Darkness came on while he was still up there. The roof was high, the wind treacherous, the ladder unsteady. Grandpa wasn't forgiving about mistakes. We heard this story from my father often enough, so it must have been a formative, if miserable, experience. “Get in the truck, you're coming with me” turned into one of those catchphrases we kids used when we were horsing around. Grandma was still alive when I was little, although she exists only as a dim, disapproving memory and a smell of Vicks VapoRub. She had come from Finland when she was a girl. The cold glooms of that place clung to her. She was closemouthed and thrifty and her cooking was meager. It wasn't surprising that my father grew up wanting more of everything.

“Your grandparents were fine people,” he used to tell us. “But they didn't have much family feeling.”

The church we went to was Presbyterian. I'm not sure why. The Presbyterians didn't have any particular denominational flavor to them, at least none that anyone was able to make clear to me. I grew up thinking there wasn't that much difference between the various Protestants, as if they too wore matching outfits. On Sundays we rode to church in a '57 Chevy, sea green, festooned with chrome, pneumatically cushioned, not quite big enough for the four oldest children to sit in comfort in the back.

Ruth Ann tried to hold herself steady on the edge of the seat. She was squeamish about touching thighs with the rest of us, especially Roy, who at twelve was already showing goatish male tendencies. Wayne bounced and squirmed. I was usually capsized into a crack in the seat, my legs stuck straight out in front of me, my feet in their turned-down anklets and patent leather shoes. I hated those shoes. They pulled my socks down at the heels and left me with scabby and bleeding feet.

The back of the front seat was equipped with two plush ropes, attached at either end to accommodate folded coats. Wayne liked to tug and snap at these. “Stop that,” my mother said without turning around.

“I'm not doing nothing.”

“Anything.”

“I'm not doing that too.”

“Sit back and be quiet.”

“Cindy keeps kicking me.”

“I didn't hardly touch him,” I said. I was preoccupied by a violent itch within my underpants and trying to rub it against the seat cushion. “It was about a millionth of a real kick. Where did I kick you, huh?”

Roy said, “Hey Wayne, what does
a-s-s
spell?”

“Shut up, poop-head.”

“Make me.”

Ruth Ann said, “I smell socks. Who didn't change their stinky socks?”

“Naw, that's your perfume,” said Roy, to general applause.

“That's about enough,” said my father. “Don't make me pull this car over.”

This caused us to subside, since the threat of the car pulling over was somehow connected to the wrath of an angry God we heard about in Sunday school. Floods might be loosed, or fire and pestilence. Louise, the baby, sang one of her songs, about the itsy-bitsy spider. It was winter. We wore black-
and-white houndstooth-check woolens. Buttoned, buckled, and zipped into our fancy clothes, we gazed out the windows with dull eyes.

But Wayne wasn't through yet. “Why do we have to go to church anyway? It's the boringest thing in the world.”

“Most boring,” my mother corrected, automatically.

“How about because I say so, and I'm your father.”

“Big deal,” said Wayne.

My father pulled the car over and shut the engine off. It made small ticking noises as it cooled. Our hearts went quiet waiting.

My father threw his arm across the back of the front seat and hiked himself around. His eyebrows were heavy and dark and at such times they carried on an angry life of their own. “We go to church to honor God and his creation. And because Jesus loved you so much he died on the cross, and how do you think he'd feel if you didn't love him back?”

“Well nobody asked him to,” said Wayne in his piping, smart aleck's voice.

There was an awful moment when my father's face went red-gray, like old meat, and anything could have happened, but my mother put a cautionary hand on his arm and he turned around and restarted the car. My mother murmured that Wayne was, after all, only seven. “Yes,” my father said. “Traditionally the age of reason, when children were held accountable for their actions, and could be executed for crimes.”

We had Spike Jones and Topper on the television, as well as Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers, Zorro, Robin Hood, and Sky King. We sang along to the jingles for Poll Parrot shoes and Ipana toothpaste. I thought Dinah Shore and Loretta Young were prissy and uninteresting, a separate, alien race of unfathomable adult women. But I didn't have much use for Dale Evans either, who never seemed like a real cowgirl, only a kind of dressed-up cheerleader for Roy. The Lennon Sisters, as you might imagine, were objects of special hatred. Sky King's niece Penny wasn't so bad, although she usually needed rescuing and had a pert blond ponytail that my limp-haired, towheaded self could never aspire to. And I was pretty sure I didn't want to grow up to be my mother.

The year I turned eleven, my father changed jobs. For as long as I could remember, he'd worked for Mr. J. G. “Jack” Spratt, who manufactured and sold a line of wood-veneer products. The things you grow up with become articles of faith, pillars of the universe, and so we children all believed in the thrifty, practical virtues of top-of-the-line, superior quality veneer products. Our house was furnished almost entirely with veneer credenzas, bureaus, coffee tables, nightstands, and so on. Our father worked in the front office, doing mysterious office things. He wore a white shirt and tie to work and for special meetings kept a sports coat in a cleaner's bag hanging in the office closet. There was also a showroom, filled with product samples and arranged in room-like groupings resembling a giant dollhouse. We used to love going to the office with our father on weekends and being loosed to run and dodge among the pretend rooms where nobody lived.

Then the air around us changed. Children have antennae that are fine-tuned to the whispered conversation, the low-pitched argument behind closed doors, the rising or falling barometric pressure between parents. “I just don't know,” my mother said, and said again, while my father's tone was wheedling or impatient. “…always holding me back,” we heard him say. “A man could make something of himself, if he wasn't so tied down.” My mother replied that he had five mouths to feed and she was all for any plan which included that. Then my father would reappear among us in the TV room and regard us with silent displeasure, while we tried our best to look unhungry.

We began finding brochures lying on the kitchen table, as if by accident, although we knew this was not the case. They had full-color drawings of golden landscapes, soft valleys with orderly rows of crops and fruit trees. Purple mountains, shining rivers. This was the backdrop for tableaux of happy cartoon people. A family picnicked in a green velvet park. An older lady watered her lollipop flowers. A group of men in overalls were building a house out of colored blocks. Above it all, in bold letters, were the words “VITA-JUICE! FOR HEALTH AND WELL-BEING.”

Roy caught me standing in the front hall, teasing one of the brochures out of our father's briefcase. I snatched my hand away, waiting for him to send up the cry that I was snooping in Dad's things. But he only snorted. “Vita-Crap. I bet it tastes just like turd juice.”

Roy always did have a mouth on him. He usually got away with it, since allowances were made for boys and their imperatives. “What,” I said. “What's Vita-Stuff?”

“Dad gave them all our money so he can be a Vita-Juice distributor. It's like Geritol,” he added, since I was still confused.

“It's supposed to be good for you?”

“You better hope somebody thinks so,” said Roy cryptically. He stalked off and I put the brochure back.

The next week a hand-lettered sign was taped to the refrigerator door, one of my father's executive communiqués:

Family meetings were always held in the living room. Like most people, we didn't spend any normal, relaxed time there. My mother had made her most severe efforts at decorating in that room, with matching lamps and swagged draperies and a bowl of sticky wax fruit. My father shooed us all in and surveyed us from where he stood in the clear space between the sofa and the skirted easy chair. He looked to be in a good, if nervous, mood, one hand fingering the coins and keys in his front pocket. “Settle down here, Barcuses. I need your complete attention.”

How much of anyone's childhood is spent in miserable sitting, on the receiving end of someone else's wisdom?

My father began by recounting his history with Spratt's, how just after the war Mr. Spratt had begun his enterprise, sensing a burgeoning market, a mighty swell, the growing demand for houses and everything that houses contained. And thanks to this shrewd and accurate judgment, Mr. Spratt had prospered. One had only to look at his spacious and well-appointed home in the fortunate suburbs, his powerful automobiles, the self-assurance that came from the knowledge that his family was well provided for. When a man could seize the tide of human affairs and was unafraid to take his destiny into his own hands and risk all, great rewards awaited.

I was aware of my mother sitting next to me on the couch, her hands folded in her lap, a heap of worn fingers. She had lost another battle.

My father said, “For the last few months I've been in negotiations with the Vita-Juice Company of Rutherford, New Jersey. And I've reached an agreement in principle to become one of their distributors in the Midwest region.”

My father paused, as if expecting some response, applause, perhaps, or excited questions. Nobody spoke. The older children knew better, and the youngest were uncomprehending.

My father shifted gears. He began to speak of the benefits of good health, something that we were too young and thoughtless to appreciate. Sure, we had the occasional tummyache or toothache, brought on in most cases by overindulgence. But all in all we were a rudely sturdy bunch, blessed by an abundant diet and first-rate, expensive medical care. It was only when we grew older that we would understand what he meant: the nagging little aches and pains, the unpleasant familiarity with certain of our internal organs. Oh yes, we'd see.