Throw Like A Girl (13 page)

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 buy 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.

By the time she finally came back and sat at the far end of the table on my side, there were a couple of people who'd filled in the space between us. The black-haired boy asked her if she was all right, and she said yes, in a whiny little voice, and I hated him for asking it like he cared and I hated myself for going along with this messed-up deal in the first place.

It was the end of playing fair, or maybe there had never been any fairness in it. I wanted to do something horrible. I looked over the heads of the people between me and the blonde. I said, “You know who I am, right?”

She didn't turn my way. She still had that plate of picked-apart food before her and she stared into it like it was a face staring back. I said, “This is so stupid. Really. I quit. He's all yours.”

There was enough noise at the table, three or four different conversations going, that no one else had paid attention to me at first. Then they got a whiff of what was happening and they all quieted down. Now I had to keep going. “You can tie him to the front porch so he doesn't stray. Whatever.”

She got out of there fast. Scooped up her coat and flew. I waited for him to go tearing after her so they could have one of those big reconciliations they were so good at. I didn't care what happened anymore. Everybody was watching us. Waves of watching spread out from our table across the room. I guess I'd had to say things in front of other people so it would be for real.

He took his time getting up and he didn't say anything, which I guess disappointed the crowd but didn't surprise me, none of this having much to do with words in the first place. But he gave me a look and the look said,
Is this how you want it?
And my eyes said,
Yes. No. Yes
, and he walked out but through another door, and I left a little while later, all three of us going off in different directions.

I wish I could say that was the end of it. The big scene, the clean (or jagged) break, the gradual return of clearheadedness and self-respect, the lurking regrets and shames and then life moving on to the next absorbing challenge. It wasn't that way. The very next day I went to his place, where I'd only been once before—the fear being that the blonde girl might stop by—and that's why I went there now, to kick all that caution in the face. I told him if it was finished he had to tell me now, right here. And I'd meant everything I'd said, and nothing could be the same. He only had one room, a little space for a bed and all the rest, and he paced it from one end to the other and said I wanted him to say things he didn't mean, and I said no, feel free, tell me she was prettier, sweeter, whatever more than me, I could handle that. He said it wasn't like that but he owed her something after all those years, he had to be loyal, and I had myself a laugh over his idea of loyal. It was one of those fights that are about everything all at once, with no rules or boundaries, and you end up fucking just to put an end to argument.

And in spite of everything he might have promised or I might have threatened, eventually we went right back to the way things had been. Sometimes I could feel almost philosophical. It was nobody's fault that there were two of us and only one of him. Weren't there places in the world, times in history, where this was how people arranged things and everyone was happy about it? Or was it only the way men wanted it and the women were bullied into going along? I guess you'd have to be a cow not to care, some big calm slow-moving animal who didn't much notice what was going on back there. Sometimes when we were in bed I'd try to lift myself out of my body and be that animal, reduce everything to matters of sweating and friction. But it was nothing you could pretend your way out of.

The weather turned warm in a hurry that year, and in my memory it's as if we went from ice storms one week to bees and white clouds and new grass the next. I know that's not true, but I know why I see it that way, because the end was coming up fast even as it seemed like a beginning. He and the blonde girl had one more enormous, pointless fight and finally wore each other out. It seemed I'd won through arbitration, or by process of elimination, but I was too happy and greedy to care. If there's ever been a time in your life when everything was perfect, you know you can't really do it justice, can't get inside it. It's like looking at someone else's vacation pictures. But I will say I stood in front of a grove of flowering trees, although I don't remember where, and the trees were an explosion of pink and white blossom, although I never knew what they were called, and it's true my mind was probably bent around some drug at the time, but I thought if I died right there and then, it would be all right.

And that would be a good place to end a story or a life, except nothing ends that pretty. When someone says, We have to talk, it's nothing you want to hear. He told me the blonde girl was pregnant. I asked was she sure, and was he sure, meaning, sure it was his. He said yes and yes. He wouldn't sit down, as if standing was some kind of penance, and he looked sick and shaken but I had no sympathy for him.