Throw Like A Girl by Jean Thompson

mother held the line. She had her own powers, of resistance, silence, and obstruction, even as my father issued orders and proclamations.
    Ruth Ann was in charge of us during our public appearances, a responsibility she took seriously. Roy challenged her with his strutting and insolence, while Louise whined and dawdled, and Wayne and I plodded on, undistinguished foot soldiers. Ruth Ann was one more person giving me orders, and I resented her for it. She was two years older than Roy and five years older than me. The clothes were hardest on her. Adolescence hit her first, and she suffered public shame. She looked gawky and wrong in my mother’s ruffled confections. Girls her age wore madras blouses, narrow skirts, loafers, charm bracelets, circle pins. This was the look she had on schooldays, only to succumb, on Sundays and special occasions, to my father’s version of the Von Trapp Family Singers. She wasn’t an especially pretty girl; none of us, except baby Louise, gave any promise of beauty. Ruth Ann had long, coarse dark hair that never took to bouffants, small, intent brown eyes, and a lumpy figure. She needed every particle of style she could get. In the family photographs, Ruth Ann is the one looking out from behind her hair, hating the camera.
    My father was an only child. His father, my grandfather Barcus, was a carpenter and odd-jobber who picked up what work he could. When my father was seven, eight, or nine years old, there were times when Grandpa would come home and tell him, “Get in the truck, you’re coming with me.” They’d drive out to a construction site and my father would be sent up a ladder with a pouch of roofing nails and a hammer. Darkness came on while he was still up there. The roof was high, the wind treacherous, the ladder unsteady. Grandpa wasn’t forgiving about mistakes. We heard this story from my father often enough, so it must have been a formative, if miserable, experience. “Get in the truck, you’re coming with me” turned into one of those catchphrases we kids used when we were horsing around. Grandma was still alive when I was little, although she exists only as a dim, disapproving memory and a smell of Vicks VapoRub. She had come from Finland when she was a girl. The cold glooms of that place clung to her. She was closemouthed and thrifty and her cooking was meager. It wasn’t surprising that my father grew up wanting more of everything.
    â€œYour grandparents were fine people,” he used to tell us. “But they didn’t have much family feeling.”
    The church we went to was Presbyterian. I’m not sure why. The Presbyterians didn’t have any particular denominational flavor to them, at least none that anyone was able to make clear to me. I grew up thinking there wasn’t that much difference between the various Protestants, as if they too wore matching outfits. On Sundays we rode to church in a ’57 Chevy, sea green, festooned with chrome, pneumatically cushioned, not quite big enough for the four oldest children to sit in comfort in the back.
    Ruth Ann tried to hold herself steady on the edge of the seat. She was squeamish about touching thighs with the rest of us, especially Roy, who at twelve was already showing goatish male tendencies. Wayne bounced and squirmed. I was usually capsized into a crack in the seat, my legs stuck straight out in front of me, my feet in their turned-down anklets and patent leather shoes. I hated those shoes. They pulled my socks down at the heels and left me with scabby and bleeding feet.
    The back of the front seat was equipped with two plush ropes, attached at either end to accommodate folded coats. Wayne liked to tug and snap at these. “Stop that,” my mother said without turning around.
    â€œI’m not doing nothing.”
    â€œAnything.”
    â€œI’m not doing that too.”
    â€œSit back and be quiet.”
    â€œCindy keeps kicking