Throw Like A Girl (19 page)

“I'll come back and see him,” threatened Roberta. “You know I will. How come you're the only one who ever gets to have any fun?” She was sitting on Bruno's lap now. This had happened while Olivia had not been paying attention. The despicable Bruno was jiggling and rearranging her for his own gratification. The bar had become impossibly loud.

“Fun?” Olivia tried to get out of her chair, but the crowd hemmed her in. “Show me where I'm having so much fun, what is this place anyway, Little Transylvania?”

“There you go again. Being this
character
.”

Drakko said, “In America, everything is always so funny.”

“We'll go home and talk,” said Olivia. “We'll work it all out. What about Larry, shouldn't you be thinking about him?”

“You don't even like Larry. See? You say whatever you think I want to hear, then you take it all back because you're always drunk.”

“Am not. Besides, so are you.”

Bruno spoke up then. His mouth was nibbling at Roberta's armpit and his voice came out muffled. “For money, Mamma give permission?”

“For free, Mamma break your face.”

Marlon had gotten up from the table to go to the bathroom, and now he was back. “They have a condom machine with international brands,” he reported. “Isn't that something?”

“What? Who cares? Roberta! How does anyone even get to Bosnia, I bet nobody you ever heard of flies there.” She was aware that she was exhausting all her good arguments.

“Bosna i Hercegovina,”
Drakko said, “is the correct name.” His dentures made a sound like a stick rubbed across a picket fence.

Roberta said, “I bet I could take classes there. It would be like study abroad.”

“Aren't they all Muslims?” asked Olivia, vaguely. She was trying to stay awake, stay conscious until the bar closed, when one or another thing would surely happen without her needing to struggle further, assert herself again and again. She was so tired.

“Muslim, Orthodox, Roman Catholic,” Drakko explained. “Lots of God.”

“Here's a deal for you,” said Roberta. “I won't go if you stop drinking. And I'll stop too. Can you even think about doing that? Huh, Mom?”

“This isn't about drinking.”

“Sure it is.”

Drakko said, “My country is where they is try to kill God. Knife and club. Gun and bomb. But here he is back again.”

Were everybody's stories just the same old story all along?

About sacrifice, and giving things up? She said, “That's what it's gonna take, huh.” There was a sensation in her head of birds flapping. Battering against her skull, trying to get out.

“Right here right now. Promise. And keep promising.”

“You know you'd miss the way we are,” she told Roberta. “You know we wouldn't be able to be the same. Hang out the same.”

“Some,” said Roberta. “Sure. But it's no good anymore, Mom.” She was crying, and something in the makeup turned her face shiny, as if it was coated in sheets of cellophane. “Look where we ended up.”

“Almost in Bosnia,” Olivia agreed. It was the universe again, smacking her around, claiming its due. Killing her off and bringing her back again, changed and unrecognizable, no more high old bad old times or raging fun. And she didn't want to do it. That was the sacrifice part. “I promise,” she said, not meaning it yet. She guessed that would be one more thing that came later.

S
he
wanted them to have a normal life, she told him, and he said he wanted that too. They deserved it. After all the bad business of sneaking around and trysting in motel parking lots and telling the necessary lies. It had gone on for a long, rotten time and had filled them with loathing admiration for their own slick, dishonest skills. After the expensive wreckage of his marriage and the decertification of hers. It had been hell, their tricky love. Now they were finally together. The awful legalities had been played out. The angry children had said hateful things and transferred their allegiances. That was a sore point but you had to expect some sore points, you had to believe the children would eventually come around. For now they were happy, and free to revel in all the boring, normal things they'd been denied: grocery shopping together, and falling asleep in front of the television, and padding around the house in their sock feet.

Money would be tight for a while with the legal bills and child support, but they agreed that it was brave and freeing to live simply. Melanie had a small import business specializing in Asian gifts and gimcracks, carved elephants, bamboo trays, kites, fans, lanterns, beadwork, lacquerware. Mass-produced exotica for American living rooms. She thought she could squeeze a little more out of the business, now that she was no longer preoccupied with all the apparatus of an affair, the lingerie, the secret phone calls, the cover stories. Chad worked selling advertising for a radio station with a classic rock format. The ringtone on his cell phone played “Layla.” It could be a melancholy job, since the station's demographic skewed to middle age and so many of the advertisements were for active retirement communities, investment funds, prostate screening tests and the like, reminders of the march of time, of bodily failure and mortality. Chad was forty-five and Melanie forty-three. They told themselves that they were still a long way from old. With any luck at all they'd have a considerable span of healthy years together. And after all, they had leapt and grasped at happiness, made purposeful, invigorating choices. Surely that was good for a few bonus points in the actuarial tables.

They regarded the grubby corners of their new, undersized home with a certain fondness. Each of them had come away from the marriages with a few pieces of family furniture, a rocking chair or dresser or hutch. Melanie rummaged her business inventory for decorative lamps and shell-encrusted mirrors and embroidered pillows, giving the rooms the look of a struggling carnival. It was like being kids all over again, back when they were just starting out. For each of them had once lived in similar small, lumpen houses at the beginning of their previous married lives. Each of them had arranged (with Diana, with Greg) similar sparse belongings in vacant spaces. They had not known each other then and they were jealous of all the time they'd missed.

“I bet you were nervous about cooking,” Chad teased, and Melanie said that she guessed she was, she couldn't remember. Then, realizing she should make more of an effort to get into the spirit of things, she said, gaily, that she had been a terrible cook at first. She'd burned everything. And when she had managed to put meals together, she'd served roasts and steaks and slabs of ribs, large, shuddering cuts of meat, dripping with blood and cholesterol, the kind of thing she wouldn't even touch nowadays. There had been the notion that men liked meat, great caveman portions of it, and in fact Greg had always gobbled it down. Of course, Melanie added, that was before anybody knew better, and long before Greg's bypass surgery. These days it was all about steamed kale and bran.

“Ha ha,” Chad said, and rested one hand casually on his chest so that he could feel his own heart, its reassuring
dump dump dump
sound. He already took medications for high blood pressure and for anxiety. He had a bad knee and a worse shoulder. He was rusting out. Sex would probably be the next thing to go. He struggled with gloomy thoughts. He was beginning to feel he might have launched himself under a false flag, misrepresented himself as bold and resolute, or at least talked himself into thinking he was. There were times he half wished he was still undivorced, back home in his garage, changing his car's oil. He hadn't been happy with Diana but he'd gotten good at ignoring her. He missed the old habits, old routines, being able to find his toothbrush or coffee mug or keys without thinking. Now everything required premeditation. He wondered if his brain was too old to learn new pathways, new responses, if it was already folded into indelible creases like the lines in his palms. There were still times when he woke up in this strange bed in this strange house and did not remember where he was. Then he'd become aware of Melanie's industrious sleeping—she sighed and twitched and burrowed—and reach out for the nearest friendly body part breast, crotch, thigh—and fall back to sleep with his hand still there, warm and nested.

Melanie wished there was more than one bathroom in the new house. She was used to privacy for certain bodily functions, though Chad seemed to have no such problem. Well, that was all right, it was all part of the normal life thing. She could and would adapt. She was determined to make this new marriage work. Somehow it was always the woman's job. Fine. She was going to nail the sucker. She stepped lightly around Chad when he sank into one of his moods or broods, gave him back rubs when he came home from work bent into peculiar shapes from driving while talking on his cell phone. She rehearsed sprightly topics of conversation. She pushed sex about as far as it could go, which turned out to be pretty far indeed. Thank God for the reliability of male lust, that handy switch that was so easy to flip on. Who would have thought it, after all those years of good old married sex, or of doing without (often the same thing), that you could still make love with your whole heart and soul, not to mention skin?

Of course, this was something that might change over time.

One of Chad's kids, one of his daughters, was having a particularly hard adjustment to the new marital configuration. The daughter was twenty, which in Melanie's opinion was old enough to roll with a few of the punches the world aimed at you, although she refrained from voicing this. The daughter's name was Danielle. She still lived at home with her mother and attended a local community college. She was studying art history and hotel management. She was stalking them.

Chad and Melanie had been so exquisitely tactful about each other's children. They had understood the pitfalls. They had arranged the initial introductions in neutral public places, casual restaurants and parks. They had avoided bribes and false enthusiasms. There had been assurances and welcoming gestures. Fat lot of good it had done them. Chad's youngest girl put her hands over her ears and howled, refusing to listen to Melanie's taking-an-interest questions about ballet lessons. Melanie's middle son called her a big stupid slut and stomped out of the Denny's with his mouth full of french fries. Her oldest boy relayed messages through Greg. He was writing a rap song in which she featured prominently. He was going to get a “Mom” tattoo on his biceps and then cut his arm off.

All that was bad enough, but Danielle was a different kind of problem, a plump, sad-sack blonde girl with eyes that reminded Melanie of oysters: quivering, viscous, bruised. Melanie had never seen her when she wasn't crying, or clouded up on the brink of crying, or scrubbing her abraded eyes after a bout of crying. Chad said that Danielle had always been sensitive, always been a bit of a Daddy's girl. Danielle phoned to say she was in the middle of some kind of attack—heart? asthma? anxiety?—and was having trouble breathing. Chad was able to talk her down from that crisis by getting her to admit she'd been drinking enough coffee to stun a lumberjack. “She gets all wound up and doesn't think things through,” Chad explained.

One night as they were getting ready for bed there was a knock on the door. Chad opened it to find Danielle propped against the doorframe, dripping with rain, her oyster eyes swimming. “I can't feel my hands and feet!”

They brought her inside and sat her down and Danielle held her flaccid hands up for them to see, and stretched out her legs to display her equally afflicted feet. Melanie fetched towels and tried to mop up some of the water that was streaming and puddling around her. “How did you get so wet?”

I couldn't walk! I practically had to crawl to the car!”

“Let's see those hands,” Chad said, rubbing them energetically between his own. “What was it, like, pins and needles?”

“Knives! Like knives stabbing me!”

“Sounds like a nerve thing, a little old pinched nerve.” Chad lifted his head to ask Melanie, “How about you fix her some hot chocolate? Does hot chocolate sound good, sweetie?”

Danielle allowed, piteously, that hot chocolate would not be unwelcome.

Melanie went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. They had some envelopes of cocoa with marshmallows and she emptied one into a mug. For herself she uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured a glass. She drank and watched the crown of blue flame flicker beneath the kettle. Chad came in and began opening cupboard doors. “Do we have cookies, anything like that?” Melanie produced a package of saltines. “Hmm. I guess I could put jelly on them.”

“Chad.”

He looked up from arranging the crackers in a circular pattern on a plate. “What?”

“There's nothing wrong with her.”

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure she's just a little freaked out. They can be pretty scary, these nerve—”

“No, I mean there's nothing wrong with her.”

“You don't know that.”

“Call it a hunch.”

“What am I supposed to do, send her back out into the rain?” The kettle began to whistle. Chad poured the water and took the cocoa and crackers out to the living room. Danielle spent the night sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor and in the morning Melanie fixed everybody blueberry pancakes and cantaloupe and Danielle said that her hands and feet felt nearly normal and wasn't it great that they could all have breakfast together?

The next week Danielle's car broke down at two a.m. and she hitchhiked to Chad and Melanie's because it was closer than home. Then she had a fight with her mother and showed up with a suitcase. This was when Chad had a talk with her about setting boundaries and respecting privacy, and how they would welcome her visits at agreed-upon times.

They began to get hang-up phone calls. They caught odd glimpses of Danielle as they went about their rounds of work and errands: her furtive, peering head, an unexplained wad of crumpled Kleenex. They unplugged the phone at night when they went to bed. They didn't answer the door after dark. Danielle took to pulling her car into their driveway and idling there for long stretches of the night. If they got up to use the bathroom, her headlights illuminated the hallway. Sometimes, if the night was quiet, they heard floating bits of music from the car's stereo, hectic rock songs rendered sweet and blurred by distance. Every so often Danielle would fall asleep in the car and in the morning one of them would have to go out and ask her to move.

The station Chad worked for was taken over by one of the big radio networks and the format changed to religious programming and angry politics. Chad stayed on—jobs didn't grow on trees at his age—as did the control room staff and Liz, the receptionist and bookkeeper. The new shows were rebroadcast from remote studios and intruded only as aggrieved voices buzzing from the building speakers.

But other things were different. A new station manager was installed, The Kid, Chad called him, though not to his face. The Kid was a real go-getter. He liked shaking hands. He hummed along with commercial ditties. He instituted weekly staff meetings where coffee and violently sugared pastries were served. “Who's come up with the next great idea for performance enhancement?” he'd ask, and when nobody had any, he read from the newest round of corporate directives, which always involved doing more work in the same amount of time.

Chad ate a chocolate doughnut—he was never able to resist the doughnuts—and felt his nerves twitch and jangle. “So, Chad,” The Kid said, turning to him with practiced, managerial enthusiasm. “How are the ad quotas coming along?”

“Like gangbusters,” Chad said. He had the lingo down by now.

“Glad to hear it. How about you work up a few quarterly projections, then give me a shout?”

Chad reached for another doughnut. “Roger wilco.” Sometimes he got through an entire meeting speaking only gibberish.

The Kid said that would be super. Chad filled his mouth with more doughnut and gave a thumbs-up sign. The Kid's eyes fixed on something remote and unseen as his brain went through a sequence of calculator functions. You'd think that people like The Kid, working for a corporation representing such stalwart values, might be especially religious, or supernut patriots, or both. But no. His real faith was money.

After the meeting Chad stopped by Liz's desk to sign out before his sales calls. The speakers were playing the current program, one of the preachers. The preacher's voice was full of weepy glissandos that conveyed the consciousness of sin and the hope of redemption: “Oh hallelujah, hallelujah,” the speakers groaned. “Hallelujah, hallelujah.” Chad strolled out to the parking lot, and the glass front doors cut off the preacher's plangent noise. His account quotas were in the toilet.

The problem, as he explained to Melanie, was that the network had upped the ad prices and also squeezed the local accounts into less and less airtime. He was supposed to bully his clients into ponying up more money for less exposure on the strength of the network's proven high audience share. “Like every day is the Super Bowl. I'm embarrassed to show up in these people's offices. I feel like I'm collecting on juice loans.”