Throw Like A Girl

by Jean Thompson

  “First time you Thailand?” The driver was proud of his English.

  “Yes.” That didn’t seem emphatic enough, so Melanie nodded, yes yes yes.

  “First you Pattaya?”

  Again she nodded, wondering if it was a trick question, and why one answer hadn’t been enough. But a middle-aged white woman traveling solo to a notorious center of sexual entrepreneurship might require extra scrutiny. Perhaps she was actually a retired transvestite nightclub performer, or else she was in need of some unguessable variety of personal companionship. Melanie fell asleep again and woke a couple of hours later when they arrived at her respectable, extravagant hotel. She was installed in a room carefully incorporating East meets West: rice paper screens, low platform bed with excellent box spring, big honking television.

  It was night, but now she was unable to sleep. Twenty stories up, she watched the hectic lights that outlined the crescent of beach and the life beyond, the lurid goings-on at the beer bars, discos, hostess bars, go-go bars.

  She checked her phone again but there were no messages.

  She lay down and must have slept a little because she opened her eyes to daylight. She ordered an American-style breakfast from room service. Her head felt like a helium balloon, lightly tethered. She dressed and had the concierge call her driver.

  The Christian Relief and Rescue Center was on the edge of the pleasure district. Melanie caught glimpses of jumbled, empty streetscapes with signs in different scripts, their neon gone blind in daylight, cartoon posters of winking, come-hither girls, the fake-looking thatched roof of an open-air bar. It was early and there was still a little freshness in the air, a sea breeze that stirred the cooked, garbagey smells. Street cleaners were hosing down the pavement. Vendors were setting up food carts. Here and there some of the aimless, dissipated sex tourists were out for a stroll, looking as if they were afraid of running into somebody else from Sioux Falls.

  The center was housed in a two-story frame house with wrought-iron balconies and tall, flamingo pink shutters. Melanie couldn’t help thinking it looked rather like a whorehouse itself, except for the cross out front. She told the driver to wait. The front door was ajar; it opened into a long hallway. The cheerful sound of a typewriter encouraged her. At the first door, a pretty Thai girl wearing a plain white blouse and slacks looked up from her typing and smiled. “Good morning,” she said, her voice a slight singsong.

  Melanie’s heart rolled around inside her like a pinball. “I’m looking for Poona Chumnoi.”

  “Ah,” said the girl. “Ah.” She got up from the desk, recalibrated her smile, and asked Melanie to wait, please.

  So she wasn’t Miss Chumnoi. She’d been so sure. Left alone, Melanie studied a framed poem on the wall about God bringing the rain to grow the roses. Girls’ voices called out to each other from somewhere in the building. Light feet padded unseen on the stairs. A stout white woman about Melanie’s age, with her hair going gray in pieces, came in. “May I help you?”

  Melanie introduced herself. The woman’s face registered no recognition. “I got a letter from her—Poona Chumnoi—about the center, the work you do. I sent a donation. We’ve been e-mailing…” Melanie trailed off. She really had no good explanation for being here.

  “Would you like something to drink?” the woman asked. “Iced tea? Lemonade? I’m Greta, by the way.” Melanie followed Greta down the long hallway. An old-fashioned ceiling fan stirred the air. The hall led outside to a small brick terrace, shaded by trees with thick, glossy, unnatural leaves. Greta sat down on a bench and patted the space beside her. “Would you like to try the iced tea? It’s good old Lipton’s. Reminds me of home.”

  Melanie said yes, thank you. Greta’s growing-in gray hair made her look rather like a badger. Melanie guessed she was some kind of housemother, a missionary, probably. She wore black-framed glasses and had a big pink wart in one eyebrow. Did you have to be homely to live a virtuous life? She hoped not. Greta called out something in Thai and another girl who might have been Miss Chumnoi but was not appeared with a pitcher and glasses.

  The tea steadied her though she still felt, and no doubt looked, shipwrecked. Greta said, “You say you got a fund-raising letter from us? How extraordinary.”

  Melanie explained the import business. She said she guessed she was on all kinds of lists. Greta waved that away. “We’re Mennonite,” she explained. “We don’t solicit outside of our own church family. The letter was from Poona? So you’ve never actually met her.”

  “No, we just…correspond. Like pen pals. But, you know, by e-mail.” The more she tried to explain herself, the more abjectly witless she felt. Something black and harsh and foreboding was taking shape, like a flapping crow. “Is Poona all right? Did anything happen?”

  Greta sighed. “This is really most distressing. I have to wonder who else she wrote to. I’m afraid she’s gone off the reservation.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Recidivism. It’s a chronic problem. The girls can earn so much more as prostitutes than doing anything else. I always believed that Poona was sincere in her religious feeling. And she may well be. A sinner can be every bit as genuinely religious as a saint. They just don’t test as well.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “We haven’t seen her in almost a week. I expect she’s back at one of the clubs. If you sent her any money, I’m sorry to say it’s probably gone.”

  “That’s all right,” Melanie said. By now any catastrophe was filtered through a thick layer of jet lag and disorientation. She wanted to go back to the hotel and sleep.

  “Try not to judge her too harshly. These poor girls. So often they just don’t believe they’re worthy of redemption. If you’ll give me an address, I can certainly let you know if we hear anything.”

  Melanie produced a business card. Greta studied it. “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you here? This isn’t your typical resort spot. Well, it is and it isn’t, if you take my meaning.”

  “My husband and I have been having some problems.” She had foolishly entrusted her life to love, and it had disappointed her, and she’d had some goopy notion of self-sacrifice, or maybe it was self-punishment, of making amends. Living humbly in service to others. Being worthy of redemption. So much for that. “I guess I needed to get away for a while.”

  Greta’s eyebrows, wart and all, lifted ironically. “I’d say you managed to get pretty far away, dear.”

  The phone rang in the deep dark dreamtime of Chad’s sleep. He was out of bed looking for it before he was actually awake. When he picked it up he was just glad the noise had stopped, and didn’t say anything until Melanie’s voice detonated in his ear. “Chad! Are you there?”

  “Crap.” She’d startled him and he’d banged his shin on a table.

  “Did I wake you? I’m sorry. I keep forgetting if it’s earlier or later here.”

  “Where’s here, where are you?”

  “Thailand.”

  Silence spread like a pool of water between them. “Chad? Hey.”

  “Thailand, the country?”

  “Yes, but never mind that now. I miss you so much. How was the concert?”

  He was waking up now, beginning to assemble the various pieces of consciousness and memory. “It was OK. Fine. Good. You’re kidding, right? Where are you really?”

  He heard music starting up in the background, a boom-boom beat with squalling saxophones, a jabber of excited voices speaking some monkey dialect. “I’m coming home tomorrow. Or is it still yesterday? Anyway, soon.”

  “You could have told me where you were going.”

  “Well you could have called me.”

  “I did! I tried but the phone didn’t work.” Melanie was saying something the music drowned out. “I can’t hear you.”

  More jabbering, sound of rushing air, things slamming. “That’s better,” Melanie said. “I’m in the car. Thanks, Niran. Niran’s my driver. We’ve grown very close. Tell me about the concert.”

/>   “It was a little crazy. They’re one of those anarchy-rage bands.” The lead singer had briefly set his own hair on fire. There had been a simulated crucifixion. At least, Chad thought it was simulated. “I guess I hadn’t heard about their stage shows.” There had been considerable damage to the club, and a minor street riot. They were still trying to figure out liability.

  “But you got your publicity, right?”

  “I’d say so.” There had already been a couple of letters to the editor and a resolution introduced in the city council. Of course none of this would necessarily be bad for business. It would be a great irony if he ended up making money in spite of himself. “Oh, Danielle left town with the band. She put a note on my car’s windshield. She said she was tired of watching out for me, and I was on my own, and from now on she was just going to try and be happy.”

  “She said that? Watch out for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Melanie pondered. “You know what’s strange? I’m going to miss her. It was kind of comforting, having her hang out in the driveway. Like a night-light or something.”

  “Yeah.” But the strangest thing to him was the conjunction of the words happy and Danielle.

  “Girls. They’re always running off somewhere, aren’t they?”

  Chad shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He didn’t know what she meant, but he gathered that he wasn’t supposed to. He hadn’t told her everything about the concert. How he’d been stressed, and worried about her, and feeling sorry for himself, his chickenshit, sorrowful self that always held back, always stopped just short, and what good had it done him? So he’d gone backstage with the band, drinking shots of tequila with them, tequila and God knows what else, things smoked, things ingested, things inhaled. How the memory of the next twelve hours had been snipped from his brain like a piece of film. He woke up on the floor of the band’s hotel suite, sick, sweated, shaking, alone. The band’s hit song, “The Path of Excess Leads to Wisdom,” was blaring from the stereo. He felt the edge of a broken tooth with his tongue.

  A little anarchy and rage, he discovered, went a long way. He’d tried, and failed, to commit rock-and-roll suicide. Who knew what he had done, and with whom? Bile crept up his throat. From now on, any stranger on the street might have the goods on him.

  “You know what I think?” Melanie’s voice broke in on him. He shook his head, forgetting that she couldn’t see him. One of her Buddha statues sat on a shelf in front of him. He’d seen it countless times before. Or maybe he had never seen it. His vision was adjusted to the dark by now. The Buddha’s grave, placid face drew him in and he stood there, his mind fixed on exactly nothing.

  Melanie again. “I think life isn’t supposed to be normal.”

  “What is it supposed to be?” Chad asked, but the connection failed then.

  Thirty-six hours later, Melanie guided her car cautiously along the airport access road. She seemed to have forgotten how to drive, although she assumed this was a temporary condition. There was a certain apprehension involved in seeing Chad. There would be explanations, recriminations, promises. They would have to start all over again and keep starting over. It was possible that they had learned nothing at all.

  Melanie turned the radio on and found the station’s signal. “Graceland” was playing. Then the song ended and Chad said, “That’s one guy I never get tired of listening to. The great Paul Simon.” Simultaneously near and distant, absent and present, his radio voice struck her as miraculous. The sky was filled with waves of invisible electronic longing.

  “Special thanks and greetings going out to all my clean and sober friends. You’re my everyday heroes. Stay strong. Stay in the now. And I’ve been thinking…”

  There was a pause while Chad took a sip of coffee and set the mug down again. Melanie could see him as clearly as if she was in the room.

  “…about the big questions and the little ones, and whether there’s really any difference between them. The Dalai Lama says that the purpose of life is happiness. Isn’t that grand? Isn’t that a relief?”

  It was. But Melanie knew something the Dalai Lama didn’t, or maybe he knew everything and just hadn’t said it yet, or maybe everything in the world was always and continually being said again and again: that happiness too was something you had to work at. She took a turn and Chad’s voice faded. She circled until she found the signal once more, then aimed the car straight toward it.

  Hunger

  It’s forest fire season and every day the newspaper runs a map of the state to show where the big fires are. These are marked with flames, stylized drawings of flames sprouting up in Los Gatos and Kings Canyon and Grass Valley and Mariposa. Nowhere close, and none of them places that Patsy’s ever going to go. But it scares her, ten years in California and she still can’t get used to it, land itself burning. Fires are meant for houses or other normal buildings, and fire engines with sirens are meant to pull up and open hydrants and take care of business. That’s what she’s always been used to and she’s too old to change her way of thinking. But in California it’s trees and grass that burn, all the dried-up, dried-out vegetation caused by the unnatural way it doesn’t rain out here. In California there are smoke jumpers, and planes with bellyfuls of chemicals, and exhausted men with soot-blackened skin and lungs scarred from breathing the smoke from burning poison oak, and whole neighborhoods lost under flames that rise up and crash like ocean waves.

  Sometimes when Patsy is on the very edge of sleep, the balance point between thought and dream, she sees the fires behind her closed eyes. Fire has devoured everything right down to the earth itself, a layer of black crust, and in the next instant the crust is eaten too and the fire has turned it into nothing. Inch by inch, the world falls away into nothing. It’s the End of Days, the final judgment, the failure of all things hopeful and human, the failure of kindness and courage and faith, of striving and beauty and of love itself, all fallen short, God’s great experiment ending in wrath and burning.

  This is when Patsy comes awake with her heart going hard, and looks around her to find the room is still here. This room will never change. There are worse things than the world ending. The leather recliner is shaped like some humpbacked dinosaur, the drapes are nubby and overwashed, the television never really changes either, no matter what the program is, if it talks or brays or sings. Time settles over every surface like dust. One more night and one more and one more. She’s fallen asleep in the recliner again. It’s a bad habit, this early, unsatisfactory sleep that keeps her from any genuine rest. The clock tells her it’s only a little after ten. The room is hot, all the heat of the day trapped inside. Waking up to it makes her fretful and heavy-headed. She listens for house sounds, her niece or nephew moving around, but everything is quiet.

  In the kitchen, in the back of the refrigerator, is a new bottle of wine that is not, technically, hidden, only placed in this inconspicuous spot. Patsy takes the bottle and a glass and slips back down the hall and settles into the recliner again. The television flickers and changes colors. She knows she’ll be awake for hours and hours. What would God do with himself if he destroyed the earth and everyone on it? Really, who would there be for him to punish and push around and be disappointed in? He’d still have the angels but they are perfect and boring, something else that never changes. What’s the point of being God if there’s no one around to be impressed? What a strange thing to be thinking. I am getting as bad as Angela, Patsy tells herself. But this is only a way of reassuring herself that she’s not anything like Angela. A kind of superstition or backward good luck charm. She’s too old to be so foolish, an old woman now, or maybe because she’s old she can be as foolish as she wants because nothing she does matters to anyone.

  The house is laid out in an L shape, one of countless ranch-style constructions from the eighties, one story, siding and shingle, attached garage. From the outside the house gives the impression of spaciousness, while inside you are conscious of how narrowly everything is laid out, wha
t sacrifices of space and comfort have been made in order to fit the requisite number of bathrooms, etc., and still come in under the price ceiling. The master suite, so called, which is Patsy’s, lies at one end of the L. The kitchen and living areas occupy the middle, and there are two more bedrooms and a bath at the far end. Sliding glass doors look out to the patio and the back yard. Although the patio is equipped with a grill and a picnic table and a movable fire pit and an umbrella for shade, all the apparatus of determined outdoor enjoyment, no one in the house goes out there. The drapes covering the glass doors are left closed.

  The grill and everything else date from ten years ago when Angela, Patsy’s younger sister, lived here with her husband. Their children, Leslie and Jack, still reside in the house, but neither they nor Patsy ever prepares or eats a meal outdoors, or comes out to sunbathe or tend the yard. Once, soon after Patsy came to live with them, she organized a back yard picnic with hot dogs and corn chips and orange soda and a bakery apple pie with ice cream. The children ate their food while Patsy admired the trellised roses and the hummingbird feeder and the ceramic frog perched on a railing, the verdant grass, the marvelous sunshine, the perfect lack of humidity.

  Leslie, who was fourteen at the time, remembers the careless food that was meant to be festive, remembers her heart turning to stone as her aunt went on and on, pointing out the yard’s attractive features, as if to convince them that they were fortunate, blessed, the possessors of rare vistas and enviable circumstances. How she hated her aunt for her stupid chirping noise, although she knew even at the time that Patsy jabbered away because of her own terror, her fear that if she let up for a moment she would be overwhelmed by her own inadequacy. Much later Leslie comes to realize just how fortunate she and Jack were, in a perverse, non-Patsy sense of the word, having someone so available for hating when they needed it most. Because the import and refrain of Patsy’s caretaking is that one has to look on the bright side, soldier on, do the best with what you are given and consider that many, many people have things far worse. Who wouldn’t hate that when all you want is to rage and curse and throw your anger into the air again and again, so that no one forgets for a minute what a heap of unfair crap has been shoveled onto your plate, what a screaming bad joke the world is.