Throw Like A Girl (34 page)

The apartment was small, either two rooms or one and a half, depending on how you counted. She had it fixed up nicely, with good pictures on the walls and a good rug underfoot. She made us a pot of tea, something herbal and medicinal, and we sat at the kitchen table, looking out on the ordinary city street. It was autumn but there was nothing of nature in the view, only a low sky spitting rain. The radiator sent out its mating call, clanking and gurgling.

Janey said, “I'm glad you're here. It makes sense, you always see me at my worst.”

I said that wasn't true, I'd seen her at her best as well. We both smiled and maybe we were thinking of the same thing. Janey when she was fearless and outrageous and eager, and just how long ago that had been. “Besides, it's not your worst. It's just illness.”

Janey shrugged. “You can get used to anything. I've learned that. It's only hair. It grows back…” Her small skull was covered with pinkish bristles. When she smiled, her gums were pale. She looked damaged but fierce, like a prisoner doing hard time. I was in awe of her.

She said she was tired these days. “Tired right down to my radiated bones. But the doctors are happy with me. My lab work is coming back clean. It looks like what's left of me is going to live a little while longer.”

She said, “Getting sober is pretty good preparation for getting cancer. No, really. They're both about giving things up. I can do that now like a champ.”

It wasn't the last time I ever saw her. You start to think that way once somebody's gone, you start counting backward. Janey had another three good years, and we managed to meet one place or another. A group of us chipped in to get her a home computer and Internet service and we all sent e-mails chattering back and forth. I try not to think of things in final milestones, because then I'd have to count that scattered, morphine-flattened phone call, and all the other sad lasts.

So let me end with that day instead. We drank our tea, and ate pieces of candied ginger from a tin Janey brought out. How many times had we sat together at one or another table. Each of us alone, except for the other. “I didn't look down on you,” I said. “I never did. You were the brave one, always.”

“Ah, but you were the one I wanted to impress,” she said, smiling her pale smile. “All those times I went too far into one or another crazy thing.”

And now, she said, she would go ahead of me into dying. No, I didn't have to bother acting all shocked, it was simple fact, statistical probability. And I was not to be afraid, because she would have gone there before me, shown me how it was done. The last voyage of the
Starship Enterprise.

She lifted her shirt to show me the bite the cancer had taken out of her, the dark ridged scar, the angry absence. Wouldn't it be something, she said, if they could cut out only the parts you didn't want. Everything that was timid, doubtful, self-hating, sad. Did I know what they had her doing for rehab, to train the remaining shocked, stripped muscles? She was to take a ball, an ordinary rubber ball with some give to it, and practice squeezing it. There were specific repetitions, a few more each day. And then you advanced to involving the whole shoulder, drawing it back and the aching arm along with it, back and back, then extension and release. Wasn't it funny, she said, and she knew I'd get the joke, that after all this time she was finally learning how to throw like a girl?

1. In
The Brat
, we read Iris's tale of teenage angst and violence. As she gazes down at her tormentor, she muses “if she shot him nobody would ever have to look at him again. That would definitely be something real. Or she could take the gun home and shoot her mother or Kyle.” (p. 20) Do you think her actions are primarily motivated by her desire for something exciting to happen? Considering recent school shootings and violence, did this story hold more relevance? Did it resonate more or less? What about the ending—was it what you expected?

2.
The Five Senses
is probably the most sinister and eerie of the stories in this collection. In it, we follow Jessie as she goes on the run with R.B., her boyfriend. In a flashback, Jessie tells a counselor her parents' real problem with her relationship: “They're afraid people will see the two of us together, me and him, and I won't look like anyone they'd want to be their daughter. I'll look like I belong to him.” (p. 36) What does Jessie mean by this? What do you think happened to her parents? Do you think R.B. is a sociopath? Discuss the significance of the title.

3. Why do you think the majority of the violence in
The Five Senses
is alluded to and not shown? Do you think it's more effective this way? Discuss the flashbacks. How do they help to further the story?

4. Kelly Ann, the listless Army wife and mother in
It Would Not Make Me Tremble to See Ten Thousand Fall
, decides to enlist herself, much to her family's chagrin. Why do you think she does this? What is the significance of the title? Do you think her marriage will survive her radical decision?

5.
The Family Barcus
is about a suburban family during the 1950s and 1960s and how they are affected when their father leaves his job to start his own risky venture. The narrator, Cindy, reflects back on this difficult time in her family's life and remembers that once, years later, she went to one of those rotating restaurants. How is this a metaphor for her family's ultimate collapse? Were you surprised that the father left for good after telling his daughter that “family is everything. It's our sword and shield against the world”?

6. There is an undercurrent of sadness, almost melancholy, running through most of these stories. Did you find this realistic or disheartening? Why is it that the characters are nameless in
Lost
?

7. In
The Inside Passage
, Mike tells our narrator, “Everybody gets married. Everybody's gotta bite the bullet.” (p. 131) In
The Woman Taken in Adultery
, the wife remarks “you start out being married together and you end up being married apart.” (p. 219) What do you think of these views of marriage?

8. Many of these stories deal with restless characters trying to change their lives. Chad, the husband trying to make a success of his start-up radio station in
A Normal Life
muses on his radio show “I wonder if any of us can ever really make decisions without second-guessing and regrets.” (p. 171) What do you think of this notion? Why was Melanie upset with him after this comment? After Melanie returns from Thailand, she hears Chad on his show saying “the Dalai Lama says that the purpose of life is happiness.” (p. 192) Do you agree?

9. Thompson's stories have much subtext within them. What do you think the fire symbolizes at the end of
Hunger
? What does the title refer to? How are all the characters “hungry” in some way? Discuss the painting in
The Woman Taken in Adultery
, from which the story gets its name. How does Thompson use humor in the scene where the narrator is confronted by her paramour and her husband at the museum?

10.
Pie of the Month
starts out as this sweet story of two older women running a pie-making business and ends up with a more subversive agenda, addressing war, violence, immigration, and the economy. Do you think the shift in tone is effective in this story? How has the current political climate affected the town where you live?

11. The title story,
Throw Like a Girl
, describes a friendship over the course of twenty-plus years. Did knowing early on in the story that Janey would die intensify the drama? Her character and the narrator discuss the somewhat competitive nature between them. Do you think that competition is natural in women's friendships? Does this exist in male friendships? Why do you think that the collection is named for this story? Why does it come last?

12. Which story left the strongest impression on you? Which one left the least? Do you find the struggles of the characters relatable? Are you interested in reading more of Jean Thompson?

You've written both short stories and novels. Do you have a favorite format? When do you make the decision about whether an idea will become a story or a novel? Do you utilize outlines in your writing process? You go back and forth seamlessly from first-person narrative to third-person. How do you decide what voice to write in?

I suppose that short stories are my first love, and therefore my sentimental preference. I'm not sure that a particular idea needs sorting into story or novel. The idea is in a sense wedded to form, and the decision process has more to do with whether or not I feel ready, psychologically and practically, for the longer, sustained effort of the novel. First person is more intimate, more confidential, therefore I probably use it for characters with whom I feel a greater comfort level, and whose skin fits me better.

You have worked on the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana campus in their English Department since 1973. How do you reconcile teaching fledging writers and finding time to write yourself?

I no longer teach full-time, so that era is behind me. At its best, the teaching of writing and the process of writing are symbiotic, and issues in one's own work get examined and articulated in teaching. I'm not sure that teaching is any harder, in terms of finding writing time, than any other vocation. In fact one's time is often more flexible. The downside is when you have to read a spell of truly careless or outrageously bad writing, and begin to despair of the whole enterprise.

Your story, “Applause, Applause,” was featured in
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules,
a short story compilation edited by David Sedaris. How did you come to be included in this collection? Who are your favorite short-story writers?

David Sedaris came across “Applause, Applause” in an anthology edited by Tobias Wolff,
Matters of Life and Death
. The story obviously struck a chord with him, and he has very often and very generously singled it out. I'm delighted to be included in
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules
, alongside many of my favorite short story writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Charles Baxter, Joyce Carol Oates, and, to come full circle, Tobias Wolff.

You write about characters who sometimes make poor decisions and do horrible things yet it never seems like you are judging them. How do you keep your own feelings out of the picture?

Well, my own feelings are the picture. But like God, one strives to be present everywhere yet always unseen. Withholding judgment is mostly a matter of authorial control, of allowing the reader to arrive at their own judgments.

The Family Barcus
describes a typical suburban family of their time. Do you agree with Tolstoy that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?

For the most part I do agree, although so many unhappy families seem to have depressingly similar syndromes, such as alcoholism and addiction.

Why did you make
Throw Like a Girl
the title story of this collection? It reads like such a personal, heartfelt story. Was this based on something you experienced?

In fact I had recently lost a friend to cancer, although my friend was male, not female. I suppose I combined that experience with my notion of women's friendships, and how charged and difficult they can be. I wanted the title story to be a strong one, to anchor the collection, and I hope that this one is and does.

During the writing process, how helpful is it to read your work out loud? Is it helpful or harmful to read other writers while you are working on a new novel or story? Can you walk us through a typical day when you're at work on something?

The only time I read work out loud is when I'm practicing for an actual public event, a fiction reading, and want to see how something will come across. I think that reading can be helpful while you're writing, as long as you resist the temptation to become too stylistically enamored of your reading material, and therefore imitative. Typical working day: walk dogs, drink coffee, try not to get too involved with newspaper. Sit down and read previous day's new work, edit, brood, read the entirety of chapter/story, see if I feel like the new pages are heading in the right direction, retype, refine, then, once the new work has been incorporated into the whole and I'm pretty sure all that has gone before is good enough to serve as a foundation, launch into that day's new composition. Rinse, repeat.

With a story like
Pie of the Month,
it starts out seemingly so simple, but there are complex issues afoot, especially with the divorced Mrs. Pulliam, who begins to share her son's feelings about war. Did you set out to write something with an anti-war sentiment or did this just naturally evolve during the writing?

Believe it or not, I mostly wanted to write about pie. But pie in and of itself does not a story make. “Pie of the Month” was written just before the invasion of Iraq, and so that story line was grafted on. The war is played out as a kind of parable of small-town life, and the tone is, for the most part, simple, even naïve. That masks, or translates, the outrage and helplessness I was feeling at the time. The story itself becomes an anti-war pie.

What would you like readers to take away from your stories?

I would hope that readers come away with an appreciation of the transforming power of literature, how it can remove us from the everyday world and let us see with new eyes. I would hope that they would go on to seek out other writing, my own and that of others. There are so many wonderful authors out there who should be read and celebrated.

Keep track of author Jean Thompson through her publisher's website and you can find out if she's appearing in your area:
http://www.simonsays.com/content/destination.cfm?tab=3&pid=358973

If you enjoyed reading this short story collection, your group might want to check out others at this site, which recommends classic short stories for you to enjoy:
http://www.bnl.com/shorts/

For the more information on school violence,
go to
www.uhgfiles.org
and
www.crf-usa.org
.