The Talk-Funny Girl (2 page)

At that time of year the river that winds beside that two-lane
country highway was swollen with snowmelt, and the leaves from the previous fall were matted and damp on the road shoulder. I went along in my hand-me-down pants and sweater and tied-back chestnut-brown hair and made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t go home without having found a job. The night before—it was their way of acknowledging my birthday—my parents told me I had to get what they referred to as “full-pay work.” I’d worked “part-pay” for as long as I could remember: mother’s helper and babysitter for other families that belonged to Pastor Schect’s church, and then cleaning the grease racks and sweeping the floor at Emily’s Dough Nuts until the chain doughnut shop came to the town and sent Emily’s out of business. All the money from those jobs went to my parents, who did not work for either full or part pay. My mother bought the food and cooked. My father cut our stove wood, fished the stream behind our house, and sometimes was able to sell the skins of animals he trapped in the woods in late winter. Every month he received a disability check for back troubles he didn’t suffer from. But all that together wasn’t really enough for us to live on, even the way we lived, so they told me it was time to find real work. If I had to quit school in order to help support the family, my mother said, I wouldn’t be the first person in the world to put up a sacrifice.

The blackflies hadn’t come out yet—still too cold for them—and the trees hadn’t gone into bud or blossom. Set along the north side of the road stood two small wood-frame houses. When I returned to make that walk again, on the same date in April, those houses were still there and had worn-out American flags flying from their front porches, snowmobiles in the yards, one rusted car, one pickup, a bow target left over from hunting season. Just as they had years before, lumber trucks rumbled down out of the hills loaded with ash, pine, hemlock, and oak, and the sound echoed in the valley where the river ran. You could still feel the hard fist of northern New England winter in the hills to either side. I liked being outdoors, though, I’ve always liked it. And, as a girl, I enjoyed that walk especially, because, in the same way school did, it
made me feel connected to the world of people, the more-or-less sane, more-or-less normal world.

On that birthday walk into town the first place that offered any chance of work was C&P Welding. It has long been out of business now, but in those days it was housed in a low, cement-block building close beside the road, with a gravel lot out front. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I stopped in there—out of spite, I think, to upset my parents and to show I wasn’t afraid of the owner, Cary Patanauk, a snake of a man. There had always been some unexplained trouble between Mr. Patanauk and my father. Though I hadn’t really met Mr. Patanauk before that day, I’d seen him a few years earlier in the church we attended, and I’d heard about him often enough. I knew his nephew at school. The Patanauk name was a kind of curse word in our house, and it’s probably a mark of how foolish I was then, how naïve in certain ways, even at seventeen, how angry deep down inside, that I set foot in that building at all.

There was an old-fashioned metal knocker on the door. In my mind I can still see the coppery shine where people’s fingers had rubbed away the blue-green tarnish. I lifted the knocker and let it fall. No one answered. I waited, knocked again, thought I heard a voice, and pushed the door open. Inside, there was a mess of gas cylinders, metal parts, and tools, and Cary Patanauk stood at a wooden table mending what looked like a tractor axle. The room smelled of oil and acetylene. Mr. Patanauk closed down the blowtorch, lifted the welding mask, and looked at me.

“I come for a try for paying work,” I said into the sudden silence, because that was the way I spoke then, with a private, mixed-up grammar that belonged to my father, and to his father, and to me. Even my mother started to talk that way after she’d been married to my father for a while. My kids think I’m joking when I reproduce that speech now. No matter what I say, no matter what their father tells them, they think that, at the very least, I must be exaggerating.

Mr. Patanauk’s eyes went from my face to my chest and back to my face again. “You come for a try for paying work?” he mimicked.

“Yes. I could.”

“You could what?”

I looked away from him. Beside me hung a calendar, notes scribbled on some of the days and, on the top half, a mostly naked woman holding a welding torch across her middle.

“You could what?” Mr. Patanauk said a second time. I looked at him and noticed that he hadn’t shaved in several days. His pants were held up with suspenders.

“Any of a thing for pay.”

He watched me. “Your father and granddad talks of a that of a way, too,” he said in a voice as mean as smoke. There was a kind of vapor surrounding him, a nastiness, a vulgar stink; the words seemed to slide out of that.

“I have a good liking for work.”

“I could give you lots of jobs,” he told me after thinking about it for a few seconds. Across the skin of his face crawled a kind of purplish hope, or need, and it was mixed in with the sense that the world owed him a debt. You could feel the anger in him, too, a quarter inch below the surface. The way he used the torch seemed angry, the way he shut down the flame, the way he stood with his arms drooping. “There’s a lot of things you could do for me,” he said, out of that anger. “But you’d have to not say a word about it to your crazy old man or your mother.”

“I couldn’t not say on them.”

“Good money for it, you know, and you might have some fun.”

I shook my head.

“You wouldn’t even have to talk right. You wouldn’t even have to talk at all.”

I had, then, the nervous habit of bending my lips in between my teeth and biting down on them. I did that. I shook my head. We were standing probably fifteen feet from each other.

Mr. Patanauk let his eyes run over me one more time, top to middle and back again, then with a jerk of his head he nodded the mask down over his face and fired up the torch, and after a few seconds I realized the conversation was finished and I turned and went out the door.

A
quarter mile beyond the welding shop stood a brown shingled house with a sagging roof and a sign out front:
112 STORE
. It’s still there, though it’s been fixed up now, and painted a lighter color, and they sell, along with a few groceries, toiletries, and lottery tickets, used CDs and movies from a table at the back. It was the place my mother shopped when my father wouldn’t drive her into town. She complained that prices were unfair at the 112, and she made up for that by stealing things in small amounts—a can of baked beans, a box of tampons, one of what she called the “fold-papers” she liked to read. The young owner of the store then, Mrs. Jensen, never caught her in any of those thefts, or maybe only pretended never to catch her, and always treated me with a reserved country kindness. No doubt she had some idea what went on in our family, but probably she felt—as most people felt in those parts and still do—that what happened in our house wasn’t any of her business, that it was part of life, that I’d survive it the way so many other children did. On that day she greeted me with a pleasant voice and when I asked about work she told me things were slow just then, money was tight all around. But I could stop back in a few months if things seemed to have turned a little for the better. She looked at my sweater and pants and sneakers. “Are you hungry, Margie?” she asked. “I have some muffins I made this morning and they’re not going to sell. I could give you one, and some milk if you wanted.”

“I’m for thanking you, but no today.”

“You sure?”

I nodded, stomach empty. “Today’s a day for to finding work.”

“Well, good luck then.”

N
ext along the route was Warner and Sons Gravel and Stone, where Zeke Warner took my name and said they had nothing there for seventeen-year-old girls unless they happened to know how to drive a dump truck, but if something came up he’d be sure to get in touch. Did I have a phone number I could leave?

“We aren’t to have one,” I told him. “Pastor Schect isn’t liking for us to have on a phone or the TV or to curse.”

“Well, the not-cursing’s probably a good idea. I know your aunt Elaine. I’ll contact you through her if something comes, or I’ll mention it to your father if I see him at Weedon’s. Okay?”

I thanked him and went along.

On that afternoon I walked all the way into town and back, just under eight miles. Fourteen or fifteen places of business I made myself step into—Art and Pat’s Diner, the Sewing Shop, the chain doughnut place—and the answer was the same in all of them. It was a bad time for the country, especially bad where we lived. Along the Honey River, which ran through town and fed the Connecticut, the concrete of the bridge abutments had broken away in places, showing rusting reinforcing rod. There were men in old clothes and dirty hats fishing from the span. On the street corners there were knots of kids my own age—some of them turned and looked at me as I passed—smoking cigarettes and spitting, dressed dark and shabby, slanting their eyes around as if any minute somebody in a car with out-of-state plates would drive up and hand them a small package of delight. The paper mills and machine shops—industries that town had been built on—were closing, one after the next. People were losing their houses, and a sucking quicksand of debt was forming along the banks of the river where the factories had been. Who was going to have extra money to pay a seventeen-year-old girl?

Even used to walking as I was, that trip exhausted me. In the cold dusk I found my backpack behind the beech tree and set off on the last leg, down Waldrup Road. By then it was almost dark. The tree trunks
were black and the stream was loud and I had to stay near the edge of the road where the mud wasn’t deep. I saw our mailbox, tilted at a crooked angle on its post, and then, beyond my father’s stacks of stove wood, a square of yellow light that was our kitchen window.

My mother was sitting on the counter with a bottle of cheap wine beside her and a mug of it between her legs. The ceiling light made shadows near her eyes. “Damn better say you found something, you Majie,” she said. She and my father were the only ones who called me by that name, MAY-gee. No one calls me that now.

My mother took a drink from the mug. I watched the muscles work in her thin neck and her legs jiggle as if small animals inside the jeans were trying to break free. Her hair, dark as used motor oil, had fallen loose and hung down along the sides of her jaw. She had full lips like I do and a straight small nose and pretty green eyes buried in the shadows and in webs of wrinkles. If we had a little money and she fell into a certain mood she’d buy herself a bottle of Hammonds Rosé and sit for half a day on the counter or the couch, her shoulders hunched and her eyes cast down, and she’d drink her way through most of the bottle. There was something methodical about the way she did it, something brutally efficient, as if she was feeling her way back, decision by decision, across an unlit landscape mined with regret. There was something quietly terrifying about her when she drank; her regret had a murderous quality. People told me then, and have told me since then, that my mother was very attractive as a girl and grew up in a family that wasn’t desperately poor. She had a stepsister—my aunt Elaine—seven years older, and a stepfather who worked in a hardware store and had one wife and then another who died young. After the second of those deaths—my grandmother’s—a kind of wildness broke loose from inside my mother. Against the advice of every relative and friend, she started riding around with the man who would become my father, Curtis John Richards. Curtis John was known for swan-diving from the top ledge—sixty-five feet—into the quarry and climbing up into the treetops during thunderstorms. He scaled the trellis of the railroad
bridge at night to mark his initials there in gold paint.
C j R
, you can still see them. He struggled in school, and had a father who taught him how to fight and drink and chew tobacco and not much beyond that. He pronounced his last name as if it were French Canadian—it wasn’t—and that probably seemed exotic to my mother. He had a motorcycle, which she loved, and a future painted in the bleakest of northern New England colors, which she couldn’t see. He was twenty-six. My mother married him a day after she turned sixteen and no longer needed her stepfather’s consent. She didn’t speak about it very much, but from the one-or-two-line comments she passed down to me over the years, I understood that she liked being married, at least in the early going. In that part of America, in those years, among the girls she called her friends, it counted for something to be able to say the words “my husband” and to show off a real gold ring. In the warm weather, she and Curtis John liked to go riding in the hills. When it was cold, she told me, “We drunk and screwed.”

Having a child had not been part of their plans, if they had any plans, and once I was born, what little chance they had for a prosperous, peaceful life seemed to evaporate like river splash on hot stone. My mother was nineteen and a half when I came into the world. She didn’t like to get out of bed in the night to mix formula. She didn’t like people telling her to give up cigarettes. She didn’t like changing diapers, or making regular appointments with the pediatrician, or taking the stroller to a place where there were sidewalks and meandering around with other young mothers, discussing the joys and troubles of parenthood. She hated having to give up the motorcycle rides, and she didn’t appreciate the change in her sex life that having a baby in the house brought on.