Throw Like A Girl Read online

  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 ag
ain, 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.

  I reached for the bedsheet and tore a big strip off the end and made another joke about how he was going to have to buy me a new one and all the while another voice in me said, Murder murder murder.

  He said, “It’s not like her and me get along that great. We fight a lot.”

  “About what?”

  “Stupid stuff.”

  “Like what?” I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. If I was going to have the blonde crammed down my throat, I wanted the goods on her.

  “Like spending money or being on time or being late or who didn’t clean up their mess.”

  “Oh, wife stuff.”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  “You might as well.”

  He was getting mad. I didn’t care. Mad was probably what I wanted right about then. I said, “Yeah, I guess that’s what happens when you’re together a long time. You turn into Ma and Pa. Not that it’s such a bad thing.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “The wife, now, I bet when you talk about sheets, it’s a conversation about fabric softener.”

  “Not funny.”

  “So, life between the sheets. Tell me about the ups and downs. The ins and outs. Ins and outs, that’s funny, isn’t it? Where’s your sense of—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Make me.”

  He was on me that quick. He pinned me so hard I had trouble drawing breath. “Wife,” I got out in a choked kind of voice, just to taunt him, and he wrestled me down and lord he was strong, I might have been created for the express purpose of being a weak thing he could use his strength against. He eased up and let me breathe again. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. But I was trying to hurt him in any way I could, and I’d already used up words so I was left with fucking, with opening my legs around him and taking him in and punishing him with how good I could make it, how hard and fast he’d have to want me.

  And when we were done it was as if we’d been through some ordeal that had ended happily, rescued at sea after days adrift, or plucked out of an avalanche. My God, we said, and kept saying, and there was a lot of kissing and we both got a little weepy-eyed. When he had to go he told me not to get up, that he wanted to keep looking at me just as I was. And so I stayed right like that, naked in the middle of the ruined sheets. This was who I was turning into, the girl you came to when you wanted to wreck things.

  I know for a fact that I went to school, went to work, wrote papers, talked with friends, did normal life things. But all I can really remember of that year is the time we spent in bed. The weather turned cold. We had more clothes to climb out of now, and I piled quilts on the bed. I said, “I’m never really warm unless you’re right here with me.” The sky was gray and bulging and a steady cold rain rattled the panes of glass above our heads. I made us tea with hot milk and it was nice being there to gether, and not worrying about anything outside. He said that school was going all right for him, he wasn’t quite as dumb as everybody said, and I told him who was everybody, what did they know.

  I touched the scar on his arm. The tip of my finger slid into the groove of puckered flesh. “Did it hurt?”

  “Not right away. That’s shock. You have to figure out what happened first, then it hurts like sin.”

  “Tell me.”

  He started talking in the careful way of a story you’ve told before, following the trail of words you’ve laid: “We were on base. People don’t get shot on base. There’s a secure perimeter, and razor wire, and sandbags, and all the ammo in the world. You get so you think nothing bad’s allowed to happen. You forget, the whole point of the damn war is anything can happen. One second I’m standing there drinking coffee, the next I’m in the dirt. Timber. And everybody’s shouting and kneeling over me and I still don’t get it and I turn my head—”

  I watched his head on the pillow incline toward the arm with the scar. His blue-black eyes had the memory in them. I thought if I watched his eyes long enough, I might get inside the memory too.

  “—and here’s this piece of my arm not there, and guys calling for the medic. It was some kind of weird good luck the bullet knocked me down. The bastard was aiming for me. If he’d had another shot, he might have finished me off. No, we never caught him. You never saw who was shooting at you. Sometimes you’d see guys get hit and you could tell, they didn’t know they were dead yet. It all happened that fast.”

  We both lay quiet for a while, thinking how strange life was, the bullet that hit him and the bullet that missed, all so he could end up a world away, in my bed on a rainy afternoon. I put my head against his chest and listened to his heart speak its one word over and over again, alive alive alive. I said, “I bet you were a good soldier.”

  “Now how would you know that.”

  “I guess I can just tell things about you.”

  He was quiet for a moment and I knew I was right. Whatever he set out to do, he wanted to be purely good at it. In one sense, he was a soldier all his life. He said, “It was a really stupid way to get shot.”

  “I don’t think there’s any smart way.” Neither of us was a big talker, but there were times we could say things and have them land in the right place.

  We didn’t do any more talking about the blonde girl. Sometimes he was with me and sometimes her. It wasn’t much of a secret anymore. On occasions I’d see them together down in the Commons or on the street. I hated that girl, but even then I knew there was something formal and technical about certain kinds of hating. Sometimes I wonder how her life turned out, if she kept finding people to love her. That’s how it is for some girls. They never set foot beyond a certain boundary, an idea of themselves as precious commodities, and everything follows from that.

  It was past Christmas but still winter, a time of year that has no excuses for itself. The weather of the world matched the weather down in the Commons, and I spent a lot of days in that stale, used-up air, studying or not studying. Everyone I knew was holed up in there, smoking and waiting for life to land on them. Come spring a lot of them were going to graduate in spite of themselves. The boys were worried about the draft. Nobody had any such thing as a job offer, or any intentions of finding a real, grown-up job. My friends were English majors, history majors, poets. They prided themselves on not being useful. They had plans to go to Europe or California or maybe Japan. Or they were going to b
uy farmland and live in stoned harmony with nature, or do something beautiful and artistic and not care about money. But I think we knew without wanting to admit it that a lot of things were coming to an end, including that kind of aimlessness.

  If I walked into the Commons and the black-haired boy was already sitting there with the other girl, I ignored them and took a seat on the opposite side of the room. They’d pretend not to notice me. It never worked in reverse, me with him, and the blonde walking in to encounter us. I don’t remember ever seeing that girl out anywhere on her own, as if she was a doll that had to be taken down from a shelf.

  But on this particular day I was feeling mean and resentful from another session of work, where the boss gave me a hard time just because he could, and school, where I was made to feel unimportant in other ways. I was tired of chapped skin and of the lumpy winter coat I’d worn every day for weeks—it was beginning to look like some unclean animal—and of picking my way across icy crudded sidewalks to get to places I didn’t really want to go anyway. I walked into the Commons and there they were, him reading a newspaper with his long legs stretched out, her tearing crumbs off a roll, making a mess of her food until it wasn’t anything you’d want to eat.

  It wasn’t any different from any other time I’d seen them together, but it was one more time. And on top of everything, or maybe it was at the bottom, I guess I was mad at him, the way you build a mad out of all your unworthy grievances. A friend of mine was sitting at the far end of the same long table, and my friend waved and said, “Hey, come on over, grab a chair,” and so I did.

  I didn’t say hello or even look at them. I launched into an unnaturally natural, vivacious conversation with my friend. Right away the blonde girl got up and walked over to the women’s bathroom. She stayed in there a long, long time. I know that mercy and charity and forgiveness and all those soft virtues have value, and the world is a better place for them. But there’s nothing like the rush of pure righteous triumph you get when a rival won’t stand their ground.