Throw Like A Girl (24 page)

Leslie's father took to sleeping on the couch in the den. “What's wrong with Mom?” Leslie asked him once, timidly. They did not make a habit of talking about Angela. Her father gave her a look that was nearly unfriendly. “She worries too much,” he said. “About things she can't change or do anything about. The doctor is giving her a new prescription so she won't worry all the time and wear herself out.”

Things like hunger?
Leslie wondered.
Like the world filling up with other people's hungers and crowding you out? What could be changed and what couldn't, and why was it so bad to think about it all?
Soon after, her father begins, the process of leaving their lives, spending more and more time at work or anywhere else that is not home, culminating in his packed suitcases and a call to Patsy. The new prescription doesn't help her mother—pills, it's always pills—and eventually other measures are taken. The thing that all of them worried about was Angela. The thing you can't change is the past. Leslie decides she'll read a little while longer before trying to sleep.

Leslie's brother Jack will turn nineteen next month. He wanted to go into the navy but the time or two he got into trouble over pot caught up with him. Jack never thought of himself as the college type and nobody else did either. When the navy didn't work out he got on with Caltrans as a flagger, traveling the state highways a quarter mile at a time. But it was hot and deadly boring and his ass was always hanging out there, waiting to get taken out by the next drunk or meth freak who didn't believe in slowing down. Caltrans couldn't find him a spot doing anything else, not that shoveling asphalt or jackhammering or baking your skin until it turned maroon was such a great deal either.

So he quit and came back home, and now that he's pissed away his money, he's thinking of hiring on as a firefighter. They need more crews all the time, it's good pay, and so what if it's dangerous, at least you're doing something important. He's stirred by news accounts of firefighters working thirty-six-hour shifts and collapsing into sleep on any available surface once they have the chance, how they dig fire lines and light backfires and keep roads open and rescue the lost and singed pets left behind when people evacuate. Jack has never had a pet of any kind, but he imagines how he'd find a dog or cat, cradle it in his arms, soothe its terrors, and maybe, if the owners couldn't be found, bring it home with him. If it was a dog, he'd name it Ranger.

Jack has taken up residence in the garage. The cars are parked in the driveway to make space for his weight bench and his boom box and the couch where he sleeps and watches television. His clothes are in piles among the paint cans and antifreeze and busted garden hose and all the other garage junk. He keeps a fan running for coolness and that works pretty well. He still uses the bathroom inside the house, but as Patsy suspects, he often goes out the side door of the garage to pee in the yard, especially at night.

The house has come to seem unfriendly to him, he can't explain it. He never felt one way or the other about the place. It's not like he has any store of happy memories or crap like that. He doesn't even remember that much from being a little kid. Isn't that weird? He wonders if there's something wrong with him, if he's short-circuited or incomplete. Other people always seem to expect him to be different. He's too goofy, too flaky, meaning he doesn't always take serious things seriously. If he's asked about his parents and he says, “My dad's down in L.A. My mom's in a nuthouse,” people's faces go wary, like they are waiting to be told it's a joke. “No, really,” Jack says. “OK, a hospital. A hospital for mentals.”

If he's supposed to sound all choked up about it then he guesses he's got it wrong. Jack knows, because he sees it on television and other places, that parents, families, are a big deal, that they are, in general, important, and the occasion for much carrying on. Well that's great, and he's always polite when people talk in that way. His “family” is Leslie and Patsy, but neither of them, either separately or together, has enough substance to bear all the weight the term implies. Jack doesn't think he'll ever get married or have kids, but he likes the idea of a steady girlfriend, of always having someone around, different girls, probably, but always someone.

This thing with the house came on unexpectedly. When he got back from his Caltrans job and tried to sleep in his old bed, he couldn't get stretched out, couldn't make his body fit the well-worn groove of the mattress. The air seemed stale, and the familiar noises coming through the walls—his sister moving around in her own room or flushing the toilet—kept him wakeful and irritated. Then the den, the place where he sat to watch his television, started getting on his nerves. Patsy was always sticking her head in to ask, “Oh, what are you watching?” Not that she cared. She was only looking for a hook to hang a conversation on, an excuse to park herself and complain about the heat or her foot troubles or make useless comments about why anyone would want to watch a program where people ate bugs off a plate or just sat around their living rooms talking, why, the television people might as well show up with a camera at their own front door and put her, Patsy, on a show!

Patsy laughed to show how silly that idea was. Jack said, Uh-huh, and kept his attention on the television screen. If you ignore Patsy, she eventually goes away. Jack does not really dislike his aunt. It's more that he spends so much time alone, in his own head, that he can't climb out of it to make the kind of noises required to engage with her. He's a target of opportunity for her, a sitting duck. One more reason not to be there. But even when he's alone in the house there's something about it that makes him…sad? Restless? Whatever it is, it has a different, vaguer shape than a memory, more like an animal coming across a scent and backing away from it.

Jack buys a twelve-inch color TV and takes it out to the garage, where his weight bench is already set up. He watches his shows while he lifts and does arm curls, ten sets of ten reps, keeping it slow so as to build longer muscles. He has an old boom box for music. The couch is one he finds on a curb with a sign that says Free. It's a little funky but he covers it with a bedspread and it's not so bad. The kitchen is only a place where food is stored, so it's easy enough to fix his morning cereal or his frozen dinners and carry everything out to the garage. Most nights Jack gets stoned and stays up watching kung fu movies or cop movies or billiard tournaments or infomercials, whatever's on. He tells time by the television, if he keeps track of it at all. There's a blank and tinny feel to anything after about three a.m., a sense that the world has been left in the care of machines that click and cycle through their mechanical paces.

Some nights he goes out the side door of the garage and gets in his car and drives everywhere and nowhere. Sacramento is now just one big suburb, a metropolitan area, it's called, towns placed along the freeways like knots on a string, Rancho Cordova, Citrus Heights, Roseville, each one with its acres of sprawl, its attendant shopping malls and schools, everything dead asleep, shimmering with heat haze. There's grass where people water it, and back yard swimming pools scented with chlorine, and oleander hedges, and lilies of the Nile, and other stuff he doesn't know the name of but it's all baked dry and powdery. On these drives he sometimes finds himself wondering how hard it would be to kill somebody, in the purest physical sense. He thinks it's probably not as easy as it's portrayed on television. How long would you have to cut off their air supply, or how hard would you have to hit them and where, in order to stop their heart, or maybe it was the brain you had to go for, since it controlled all the other systems. And these thoughts don't particularly alarm him because they are so curious and remote and impersonal. He gets back home before there's any light in the sky, he's like a vampire or something, and beats off so he can fall asleep.

His sister tells him he shouldn't stay cooped up like this, he should get out and do things. What things, Jack always counters, stalling, and Leslie says, “Call somebody up, go to a movie or just hang out. Don't you know any girls? You're not so ugly that you couldn't get a girl to go out with you.”

Good old Les. He gets a kick out of her, he really does, the way she's always trying to nag him into having fun, which he doesn't mind. Jack thinks she could use a little fun herself but he can't come up with suggestions. The truth is he doesn't know any girls anymore, or much of anybody else. He never had that many friends to begin with, and they've all receded since high school. As for girls, it would feel like a big dorky deal to call one of them up out of the blue and make the sort of conversation that would get him one bit closer to getting laid. He thinks he'll wait until after he's done the firefighter thing so he'll have something to talk about. He won't have to go into details, or maybe after the details have already happened they'll come out of his mouth on their own in some effortless way. He figures he can get by with saying, “It was pretty tough,” and by then he might have some attractive wound or scar that would speak for itself. Tomorrow, he promises himself, he'll find the number you call about the fire crews. He hears Patsy in the kitchen—she has a particular sound, like a mouse in bedroom slippers—and when she's receded back down the hallway, he goes in and fetches himself a couple of beers.

Patsy is writing a letter to her sister Angela. It is unclear if Angela can still do any such thing as read, but Patsy always tucks her letters inside cheerful greeting cards. There isn't anybody who doesn't like to get mail.
Dear Angela
, she begins.
How are you? I hope you are well and feeling fine. We are all getting along pretty good. It sure is hot. I never thought there was anything hotter than a Chicago summer, but I see I didn't take Sacramento into account
.

Patsy measures the remaining space on the page with her eyes. It's always a challenge to fill it up with enough cheerful news of the sort appropriate for a disturbed person like her sister. Patsy is the only one who writes. Neither of Angela's own children do so, and as for Angela's husband, he hasn't had anything to do with them in years. He lives with another woman without benefit of clergy. He's never divorced Angela, even though you are allowed to do that once someone is certified disturbed. Maybe it's guilt, the same thing that keeps him making the mortgage payments on the house, well, he should feel guilty. What kind of man deserts his family in time of trouble? Or maybe that's the nature of men, to run off and leave the hard work to women.

Writing to Angela is another one of those things that Patsy has taken on herself. None of them visit Angela anymore, not since that single, scarifying occasion when the children were still genuine children. Patsy makes sure to send special cards on Angela's birthday and at Easter, and gifts at Christmas, sweaters or scented talcum powder or calendars or extra-warm socks. Patsy has struck up a friendship with Diamond, who is one of the nurse's aides at the hospital. Diamond and Patsy talk on the phone on a regular basis, and Diamond tells her that Angela is about the same, poor soul. “Why they call that place a hospital I surely don't know,” says Diamond. “Not nobody's leaving there cured.”

Although they always begin by talking about Angela, Patsy and Diamond are in the habit of staying on the phone and chatting. They are about the same age and they share certain attitudes, such as their frequently expressed observation that the world has changed, and not for the better. They lament the failures of the body that come with aging and they compare maladies. Diamond has a husband, Willie, who has his own absorbing health problems, and four grown children and numerous grandchildren and an abundance of other relations, cousins and great-uncles and her cousins' kids and everybody's mates and ex-mates. All of them enter the conversation with regularity, so that talking with Diamond is like following a particularly well-populated television series.

Patsy wishes she had more to contribute than Leslie and Jack, who never really do anything worth repeating, or even complaining about, except in static and uninteresting ways. Compared to Diamond's stories of hernias and diabetes and asthmatic babies and trips to the emergency room and domestic disturbances and the inadequacies of health insurance and landlords and law enforcement personnel, Patsy feels as if she has no right to her own unhappiness, as if she's never lived at all.

And that's ridiculous, because of everything she's been through with Angela. It's a tragedy, and if someone hadn't experienced it themselves, you couldn't hope to describe it and do it justice. True enough, but everything's already happened, hasn't it, and there's no longer any urgency in it. It's like a war fought a long time ago that everybody's forgotten, and that's so unfair. “Our Lord holds us all in the palm of His hand,” says Diamond, finishing her account of large and small misfortunes, indignities, setbacks, taking comfort in the profession of faith. And Patsy hurries to agree. But does she believe it? So much of life is unfairness. God could fix it in an instant if he wanted. A wave of his enormous, God-sized hand, and evil and sickness and death would be banished. God is supposed to love us, but sometimes it seems like he's just not paying enough attention.

Patsy takes out a new sheet of paper.
Dear Angela
. The wine makes her writing spiral out and out, uphill and downhill.
Are you glad you went crazy? I don't mean you did it on purpose because I don't think people can choose to be that way. And even if they could if you laid it all out for them the parts about hospitals and not looking very attractive after a while they'd say no. That's because they aren't crazy! But say once you are good and crazy you might find some advantages to it like you don't care what anybody else thinks and say you felt like a thing or didn't feel like a thing say you feel like you're a scream walking around on two legs