The Talk-Funny Girl (17 page)

My mother tapped the mouth end of the unlit cigarette on the scratched-up wood between her hands. She looked down the length of the table at her husband, and then, just for an instant, at me. “Because God didn’t given you a girl for your own,” she said.

“Meaning what?”

“You want charge of ours.”

“That’s what you think?”

My mother nodded, once.

“God bosses,” my father said, but I could hear a kind of crack in the words, a line in stone where it was weak, where you could break it by hitting it sharp with the hammer in a certain place. He was worried about the money. About how he would live without help from Aunt Elaine. Almost one thousand dollars a year, plus what Aunt Elaine gave them from her own pocket—that was too much money to let go of easily. “God bosses,” he repeated, his voice quiet and unsteady. “God needs a given penance.”

“God gave you a child and you let someone do this to her,” Aunt Elaine said. “Look at her face, Curtis. Look at it, I’m saying. I should by all rights take her to the emergency room and report this to the police. I have a mind to do that. Look!”

My father’s eyes slid over to my face for one second and jumped away.

“God knows who gets a child,” my mother said. “God’s law makes it so.”

“Should I talk to Chief Allans about God’s law?”

At the third mention of the police, I felt the air crack around my ears.

“Should I?”

“Enh,” my father said, one syllable of surrender. He moved his chin to the side and down.

I felt my aunt’s hands shaking on my shoulders, then felt them move away. I saw money being counted out onto the table. Eight tens, fresh from the bank, gray-green and perfectly unwrinkled. I watched my father try to keep his eyes away from the bills, but he couldn’t do it. On his left leg his hand was moving in quick jumps.

The money sat on the table like a noise. “Marjorie, come outside,” Aunt Elaine said when she was finished. I thought, at first, that I wouldn’t go, that it would be too much to step back into the house and face my parents after Aunt Elaine had left, that I ought to make some
gesture of loyalty to them, for the sake of my own survival. But I stood up, feeling cold air on the back of my neck. By the time I was standing in the dirt next to one of the woodpiles, looking at my aunt, my breath was coming as fast as if I had run all the way from the 112 Store.

“Hold out your hand,” my aunt said. She put some more bills there, then folded my fingers up around them. She reached up and touched my face gently and I pulled back. “Honey, look at me. Do you want to come and live with me? Right now?”

I shook my head.

“Are you absolutely sure? I’ll take you in a second if you say yes. I have room. Are you sure you want to stay living here?”

I nodded.

My aunt waited, her head tilted up at me, her eyes going back and forth across my face. “If anything else like this happens. Just one time. Anything, you tell Sands and he’ll tell me, or you get to a phone and call me and I’ll come for you. Do you understand? No matter what time of the day or night.”

“Sure.”

“You’re not going to that church ever again.”

“I don’t want of.”

“You won’t. If your parents try to make you, you go to the store and call and I’ll come get you.”

I wanted to tell her then what had happened the one time I’d run away and gone to her house, but there had been enough trouble for one day, and there was more trouble coming to me, I knew. I wanted to leave with my aunt, but I just could not make myself do that. Every leaf on every tree, every word, everything seemed to have a coating of fear hanging from it, as if the temperature had dropped thirty degrees and there had been an ice storm while we’d been inside. I was frozen almost into a solid block.

“I’m going now. You’re working on Monday, tomorrow, right? If you’re not at work, I’m coming here. I’m going now and I’m going to call about the preacher. What is his name?”

“Pastor Schect,” I said quietly.

“Where is the church?”

“Into Vermont. West Ober.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure.”

“Did this happen to you ever before?”

I shook my head.

“Does it happen to other people?”

I shook my head again, and then changed my mind. “Twicet I saw.”

“Does it hurt very much now?”

I shook my head. “Don’t to say to the police about of my parents.”

“I think I just will.”

“Don’t to, kindly. My father then will be time upstate. And my mother will to have me alone.”

My aunt got tears in her eyes then. For a few seconds there wasn’t much of the black bear in her, and I remember, just for that little time, that I felt like the stronger one of the two of us. Older even. I knew how the world worked and she didn’t. I could stand there and not cry and she couldn’t. Being tough was what people like us had to be proud of—boys and girls, both—instead of a good house or a good job or money, or other things. It has taken me all these years to see that, and to halfway let it go.

“You put a cool washcloth on your eye now. And if you can’t see out of it tomorrow, you call me, understand?”

“I will.”

“And one more thing. Listen to me. The next time Sands asks if you want to go to Boston with him, you go, understand? No matter what it seems like, or what your parents are going to say about it, you just go. Even if you’re afraid, you go.”

I promised I would, but I was surprised she knew he’d asked me. Still with water in her eyes, Aunt Elaine touched me on the shoulder with one hand, then got into her car and backed it up so it was facing out the driveway. She looked over at me one last time, as if she’d heard
something, and at that moment I wanted to yell out to her to stop, to wait. But the fear of what my parents would do caught me in its cold fingers again, and the pride in being tough caught me, and in another second there was a small puff of dust behind the car and it was going up Waldrup Road, out of sight. I watched the dirt settle, and then I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I pushed the money down into my pocket and turned and walked into the house. My father wasn’t at the table. My mother was standing at the counter in a cloud of cigarette smoke, holding a leg of fried chicken with one hand. I was hungry but I knew I wouldn’t eat. As I went toward my room I heard my mother say, “Who’s gonto take a whippin’ now, you Majie? Now who’s gonto?”

Fourteen

T
here had been one other time in my life—much earlier—when someone had tried to help me the way Aunt Elaine tried that day. I learned about it only as an adult, on my private project, my research into the past. On my second or third trip back, I stopped in the cathedral for an hour of private prayer, and during that prayer I thought of looking up Mrs. Jensen, the woman who’d owned the 112 Store. She was in late middle age by then, and had sold the store, but she still lived in the town and I found her without any trouble and we sat in her living room and had a cup of tea. During that conversation she happened to mention a man named Ronald Merwin, who, she said, had been the person responsible for my going to school. I’d never heard the name before that day and had never thought about why, after years of keeping me at home, my parents suddenly decided I could go to school.

Merwin was an established painter with an apartment in New York City (I found him there, in his seventies and still painting). In search of a quiet country retreat, he’d purchased a cabin on twenty acres off Waldrup Road, and he lived there most of several summers, working on his abstract canvases, putting new siding and a new roof on the cabin, and taking long solitary walks up and down the eight miles of dirt road. If he followed the road northeast, it came to a dead end at the boundary
of the state forest, and sometimes he hiked on the trails there. Walking in the other direction took him past our house and to Route 112.

Merwin was a quiet, middle-aged man, divorced, childless, immersed in his art, and fond of solitude. If he passed anyone on his walks he’d say good morning or good afternoon, or he’d raise a hand in a polite wave, or, rarely, stop for a few minutes’ conversation. When I found him in New York, he told me that, more than once on those walks, he’d seen me out in the yard helping my father or playing at the stream. He waved to me but he said I only looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. He waved or nodded to my mother and father, also, but, unlike the other country people he encountered, they didn’t acknowledge him, sometimes even turned away so he couldn’t see their faces. He said I was a pretty child—long legs, light brown hair—and he remembered me and even occasionally put a partial image of me into his paintings.

During the summer when I was nine, Merwin happened to run into me in the 112 Store, where I’d gone with my mother. I don’t remember that encounter, but Mrs. Jensen did. Merwin noticed—he had a painter’s eye, he said, as a way of softening the observation, I think—that I was poorly dressed, even a bit dirty it seemed, and that when I spoke to my mother it was in a dialect of the English language he’d never before heard. My way of talking piqued his interest. Out of innocent curiosity, he began to walk more often toward Route 112, and to look for me and my parents as he passed. On one of those trips he saw something strange: me dressed as a boy, in huge work boots, huge overalls, and a cap, being ordered about the yard by my father in a series of short commands. We had some project going—rebuilding a shed, it seemed—and even from a momentary glance Merwin could see that my father was inept. Merwin was a decent carpenter and would have stopped and offered assistance, he said, except that when my father saw him, he hustled me inside.

This only made him more curious. A week or so later, he saw me in the store again: My mother was pushing me roughly out the door. He
asked Mrs. Jensen about our family. Mrs. Jensen said we were an odd trio, that the pretty light-haired girl might even be mildly retarded, she couldn’t tell. As far as she knew, the girl never went to school.

“She has a strange way of talking, doesn’t she?” he said.

And Mrs. Jensen said, “Yes,” and kept her eyes on him for a moment, as if his interest seemed unhealthy to her, the probing eye of the uppity outsider, or as if in commenting on my speech he was casting a critical net over all the people who lived in those parts.

Curious as he was, Merwin might have chalked up everything to the eccentricities of rural existence, except that late one afternoon, just as the light was fading, he was driving past the house and happened to see me standing with my back to the stream. My father was emptying a bucket of water over my head. For a moment, he said, he thought it was the country equivalent of letting kids play in the spray of a fire hydrant. But the day was cool and rainy, and, from that distance, he thought he detected an expression of pain on my face. Just as he was about to pass, he saw me sprint away from the man—my father—who stood there, with the bucket held low in one hand, watching me go.

Merwin debated with himself that night, and the next day he made a call to the state social services agency. The call prompted an investigation. A caseworker came to the house—I have a memory of this woman speaking to us at the table. Many questions were asked of me and my parents, we all told careful lies, and in the end it was determined that I was not a victim of any serious abuse. However, my parents were informed they had to send me to school beginning that September. Not long after that, Ronald Merwin put his cabin and land up for sale and retreated to the city—no one knew exactly why; people thought he’d been happy there. But Merwin told me that my father had gone to his cabin one afternoon shortly after I started school and run his chain saw through the railing on his deck and the casing of his front door—with Merwin watching, horrified—and told him not to call the police, and not to come back the following summer, or, next time, my father said, he was going to “send the saw through halfway on your arms.”

“I suppose it was cowardly of me,” Merwin told me, sitting in his Chelsea apartment with a glass of beer in front of him and the sunlight showing a white forest of hair sprouting from both ears, “not to call the police and charge your father with assault or damaging property or something of that sort. I suppose I should have stayed and fought. But I had gone there for a peaceful escape, a place to work quietly, and there wasn’t much peace for me there after that.… I’m glad, at least, that it all resulted in your going to school. I’m glad you made the effort to find me. I’m sorry.”

In my first hours of my first day at school, the teacher realized I couldn’t even identify all the letters of the alphabet. I knew some numbers but couldn’t do even the simplest math problems. They asked questions about my family. I made up simple lies, said my parents were shy people, good to me, said they wanted me to learn but had been afraid to send me on the bus to school. The teachers did some tests, and the tests showed I had a capable mind. I was put in a special class. By the end of the first year I’d learned to read and write and solve basic addition and subtraction problems. And I’d made a friend, a girl named Cindy Rogers.

After that, year by year, with the help of several caring teachers, I closed the gap between myself and the other kids my age. By the end of my second year—I was ten years old—I could read simple chapter books. I stayed in the special class because the teachers were concerned that I’d be socially and academically out of place in fourth grade. Cindy and I were inseparable.

By the time we reached high school age, Cindy was still in special classes for part of the day but I had climbed to within a grade of the other boys and girls my age. I was in the bottom section in all areas of study, and nothing the teachers tried could shake me free of my way of speaking. But I could read capably, I could understand what I read, and whenever I handed in a written assignment it was in something close to standard English. There were more interviews and evaluations. There were arguments among the teachers and administrators as to how hard
they should push me toward proper speech. Some of my classmates made fun of me—it was really not much worse than what they did to a few of the other boys and girls—and some didn’t, but through it all I was happy to walk to the bus stop in the morning, happy to have a friend, happy to be around adults who were interested in learning and treated me well. There was always a strain between the way people wanted me to talk at school and the way my parents expected me to talk at home. From the start, my mother and father watched carefully to see if going to school would change me. When, in the beginning, I came home with books under my arm and said things like “I brought them home to read” instead of “I broughten them to home for a read,” they willow-whipped me, six strokes. That was enough for me: It was not a hard choice between having a few kids make fun of you and having the skin at the back of your legs ripped raw with a braid of three thin willow branches. Not a hard choice at all.