Throw Like A Girl by Jean Thompson Page B

dear. I hope it’s not too hard on you.”
    â€œIt’s an opportunity to help my country.”
    â€œWell sure it is. And to be near Jack. I understand that. You’re young, and youth must be served. Did we ever do that ballad in class, the one about the girl who disguises herself as a soldier to go look for her true love on the field of battle?” Jonesy raised her eyes and drew herself up in her seat, the stance she assumed when reciting:
    Your waist is light and slender
    Your fingers neat and small
    Your cheeks too red and rosy
    To face the cannon ball .
    Although my waist is slender
    My fingers neat and small
    It would not make me tremble
    To see ten thousand fall .
    â€œThat’s how it goes. There’s a lot more, but I can’t recall it.”
    â€œI don’t think we got to that one.” Out of the corner of her eye, Kelly Ann saw the carhop coming out with her food. “It was real nice seeing you, Mrs. Jones.”
    â€œYou were such a good student. You were one of those that made me look forward to class.”
    â€œThank you,” Kelly Ann said. Jonesy backed her car away from the curb in another fit of waving. Kelly Ann paid for her food and decided to take it home with her. She was surprised to find a blur of tears in her eyes. Jonesy might be ridiculous, with her rattling beads and her old-fashioned poems, but it was also true that she’d been a good student and that Jonesy was fond of her, and it made Kelly Ann feel bad to be deceiving her along with everybody else.
    Because she was like the killdeer, dragging her wing to lead intruders away from her real reasons. Joining the Army didn’t have all that much to do with Jack. Her feelings toward him had settled over time. She figured they could pick up where they left off on the other side of the Army, or maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, she was going to be a warrior. She was going to have a life worth remembering. The baby stirred in the back seat, waking up, and Kelly Ann spoke to her in the coaxing voice she used to keep her from fussing. There was a moment when her heart mis-gave her, but she made herself imagine the way they’d stencil her name on her uniform: K. PARDEE. A name she hadn’t had before, but now it was out there waiting for her.

The
Family
Barcus
    F or a time when I was growing up, my father liked to see his family dressed in matching outfits. There were five of us kids. Ruth Ann was the oldest, then my brother Roy, then me in the middle, then Wayne, then Louise, the baby. Our mother sewed. She did heaps of mending and alterations—this was long before Wal-Mart or anything like it, long before cheap, nearly disposable clothing—but the fancy sewing was her pride. We had a variety of dresses and blazers in stair-step sizes. There were seersuckers and printed cottons for summer, and a nautical ensemble with sailor collars, and olive drab twills, and snowflake-patterned pullovers for cold weather. At Christmas we were photographed in red tartan pinafores and waistcoats. My mother worked up a skirt for herself of the same material, and a red plaid bow tie for my father. “Season’s Greetings from the Family Barcus,” our card proclaimed, and the grandness of that inversion spoke of my father’s vision for us.
    This was back in the late fifties and early sixties, when you could do such things to children without it seeming remarkable. People gave us looks of fond approval as we trooped past in our homemade finery, on our way to church or some other outing. “Step lively there, Barcuses,” my father said encouragingly. “Eyes forward, shoulders back. Pick up the pace.” He complained that we resembled a straggling parade of ducklings. What he had in mind for us was always more purposeful and robust. I think he would have liked a larger family, six or maybe seven kids. It wasn’t so unusual back then, even if you weren’t Catholic. But my