The Talk-Funny Girl (21 page)

“There’s something I know it.”

Sands let the truck slow back down to the speed we’d been going before the conversation took its strange turn. I glanced across at him, and then at the road, and then back. “You have for something else to want saying,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said, but for another mile he didn’t speak. When I stopped watching him and turned my eyes forward again, he said, “I’m supposed to ask if you want to testify against the preacher who did that to your face.”

“He wasn’t who did on it.”

“Somebody did it, though.”

“Other people did on it. At in the church. I wasn’t the only one who ever had it neither.”

“Do you want to testify?”

“In the law, you mean?”

“In court.”

“Do you want to of push a stone in your mouth and choke and die and go in hell?” I said.

“That’s a nice way to put it.”

“Because it’s just as the same.”

“Your aunt called the police about it. The police are going to try to get your mother or father to testify.”

“They should have a good luck about that.”

S
ands stopped talking then, leaving me in a swarm of thoughts, with something, a bad new feeling, creeping up the bones of my arms like cold water. I was thinking about Aunt Elaine and secrets, and I was trying to form a picture of policemen coming to our house and asking to speak to my father or mother, but the picture kept dissolving into an image of me in the Quonset hut in West Ober, and Pastor Schect standing at the pulpit with a paper bag in his hand. Although I did not know exactly what they might be, I understood that there were penances worse than facing, boying, and hungering, and those things seemed suspended in my near future, inevitable as the coming of another week.

As we drew close to the city, I was able, by staring hard out the window, to put those thoughts to one side. Boston was a world of concrete and asphalt, of roads running together, huge buildings pushing at the sky, and what seemed to me like millions of cars … and then, as we turned off the highway onto smaller streets, so many people on the sidewalks that I couldn’t sort them out one from the next, couldn’t think of them as individuals. I was leaning forward against the seat belt.

Sands turned into a parking lot and pulled up beside a wooden shed that reminded me of the bus shelter at the corner of Waldrup Road. A man with the blackest face I’d ever seen took money from Sands for the parking and directed us to an empty space at the far corner of the lot. From there it was a two-minute walk to the museum. Sands seemed to have fallen again into one of his somber moods. He said nothing. He walked half a step in front of me, and I worried, looking around at the buildings and cars, listening to the street noises, the honking horns and echoing sirens, that he’d get too far ahead and lose me there. Aunt Elaine was his mother, he said. Aunt Elaine was his mother. He was
her son. A half-black man. Molested. My father’s truck had been at Weedon’s.

The museum turned out to be a building nearly as large as my school, all huge stone blocks, with fifteen or twenty stone steps, wide and smooth, leading up to a double front door with a frame of dark wood. To either side of the door stood windows with glass so clean it looked like silvery paper. As I started up the steps, with Sands a few feet to my right and ahead, I all of a sudden became aware of what I was wearing: not-new jeans, a plain green T-shirt covered by a ragged sweatshirt my mother had found at Salvation Army. It was the color of peas and had
AIR FORCE ACADEMY
stenciled in worn gold letters across the front. I stopped. Sands went another few steps then turned and looked back. I took the cloth of the sweatshirt in my fingers and held it out away from my body like an apology.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said in a voice that other people coming up the steps could hear. I hesitated. He waved at me impatiently, almost angrily. I closed my eyes and opened them, and then decided to focus on the stone beneath my feet, to think about the people who’d placed it there and smoothed the mortar between the joints, to pretend they were speaking to me in encouraging tones, in the language of work, urging me forward.

Through the door I went, half a step behind him. In the dim light of the entranceway, I stopped again to let my eyes focus. There was a long desk or table set sideways to us, and Sands was gesturing for me to come up beside him, and then handing over more money to a woman sitting on a stool and wearing a puffy-shouldered white blouse and circular gold earrings. The woman looked at my sweatshirt and then into my face, but only for a second. I swiveled my head and tried to get a sense of the other people there. Even the little girls and boys were so much better dressed and groomed than I was. The other kids about my age looked like they belonged in a magazine and seemed more comfortable there—in that light, in that cool stone smell, beside the potted plants taller than a man—than I felt in my own house. The mothers
and fathers were what I thought of as city people, though I couldn’t have said exactly why. They seemed like they’d all taken showers a few minutes before stepping through the door, and the words they spoke had a quiet, happy tone to them that sounded like the voices of the reporters on Sands’s truck radio, telling the news. It looked like someone had made their clothes just for them: It was the way the women’s dresses hung so perfectly on the corners of their shoulders, the way the men’s shirts had collars so neat and straight against their necks. Their pants had tight cuffs at the bottom. Everyone looked like a teacher on the first day of school, like they were going to church, like they’d eaten their favorite food for breakfast and every part of their life was filled up like a tire with exactly the right amount of air in it, something that would hum against the pavement with a confident note.

Beyond the front desk I noticed again how cool it was, and how quiet. The floors were dark speckled tile, shining like stars. Everyone walked at a relaxed pace, as if thinking deeply. Sands and I went down a short hallway and then turned into a windowless room with a high ceiling. On the walls of the room hung paintings as large as the door of a car. Men and women stood still in front of the paintings, or went past them very slowly, sometimes saying a word to the person they were with or leaning in to read what was typed on the small piece of cardboard next to the bottom of the painting. Everything—the floor, the walls, the frames of the paintings, even the letters on the pieces of cardboard, everything was absolutely immaculate.

The bright canvases showed apples on a table, and vases of flowers, and farmhouses set on green fields as if floating there. I felt that I already knew those things, beautiful enough but ordinary, and so once I’d run my eyes over a painting I tried to look at the other people in the room without letting Sands see I was doing that. I made a special study of two girls close to my own age, whose mother and father would periodically lean toward them and say things in quiet tones. They seemed to be sisters, or friends. Sometimes one of the parents would touch them on the shoulder.

After we had made a circuit of the room, I told Sands I wanted to go around again, and I could see from the skin near his eyes that it made him happy. I didn’t say it was only partly to have another look at the paintings and mostly to study the way the people acted, the way they floated their eyes over the canvases as if the paint was whispering to them in a language they all understood.

“Do you like them?” Sands asked when we were most of the way around the second time.

“Can we go a more time again?”

“Another time?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a different room I want you to see.”

I nodded as if I had known all along that there was more than one room to the museum, but as we left the first room I turned and looked over my shoulder. I didn’t want to leave the colors and the cleanliness, the shirts and dresses and pants and faces. White faces and black faces and brown faces and what I thought of then as Chinese faces, all of them so calm. I didn’t want to leave behind the feeling that no one in the high-ceiling room was ever going to use his hand or her words to hurt any other person.

“This is why I really wanted to come here,” Sands said as we crossed the hall that felt to me like a cool shadow and entered another high-ceiling room, larger than the first. I could see that there were works of art in frames in this room, too, but they had no color to them. A quick disappointment passed over me. But then some of the people in front of me moved on, and I stepped close enough to see that the framed pictures on the walls were drawings, not paintings. The drawings were of cathedrals, and made in pencil, and so perfectly neat and orderly that I wanted to climb inside them.

I stopped in front of the first framed drawing, close beside Sands, and I didn’t move. The cathedral in the drawing was made with stones not unlike the stones we were using, various sizes, a bit rounded at the corners, the faces chiseled and uneven. It was a much larger building
than even St. Mark’s had been, with a steep slanted roof three times as long from bottom to top as our driveway from mailbox to front door. There were at least a dozen arched windows and a large circular one above the main entrance. I didn’t want to blink. After a time, Sands moved on, but I stayed and stepped in closer. He’d told me not to touch the paintings, and I saw that no one else was touching the drawings, but I had an almost irresistible urge to reach out and run my fingers over them. It was as if the people who had set those stones in place were connected to me, mind to mind. And there was some kind of sadness to it, also, because the cathedral in the drawing was finished. There was no longer work for anyone, no activity showing in the smooth landscape around it. Still, I wanted to go inside it and sit, and look at the light coming through the windows, and understand the way the ceiling was supported, the doors cut, why the arches didn’t collapse under the weight above them. From the moment I’d started to lay the first course of stones at Sands’s side, some part of me had awakened, as if the laws of architecture and masonry had been sleeping in the depths of my brain. I’d watched him set the first stones, and this new sense of line, weight, and order gave birth to a happy creature inside me. As I stared at the drawings, that creature stood up and began to sing.

I understood then why Sands would want to make a cathedral, because there was nothing in the structure in front of me that seemed connected to what had happened to him, or to what went on in the makeshift church in West Ober. Nothing. The stones created a space, and the space contained some feeling that life might turn itself around and be lit up with hope. For the first time it seemed true to me beyond any doubt that Pastor Schect had been wrong all those Sundays, that he had misunderstood and was causing my parents and the others to misunderstand. He had painted the wrong kind of God inside our heads. According to my old beliefs, that thought was a sin, surely. At the same time, it was as if I was standing in a shower, and the warm water was cleaning out something toxic inside my mind, washing it into the drain. Again, I had an urge to touch the drawing, and my hand lifted a little
ways from my side. Sands turned and looked at me and I lowered it quickly. I wanted to touch him then—which was an unfamiliar feeling for me—touch his big arms and thin body, as a way of thanking him, or asking him to forgive me for thinking he might want to hurt me. No kidnapper would bring you to a place like this.

All along the walls hung drawings of cathedrals and churches and chapels, exteriors and interiors, some in frames taller than either of us, some in frames smaller than the smallest stones we laid. I stopped for a long while at each one and each time had the feeling that my mind was being washed clean. I could sense people around me but I didn’t look at them. Small spurts of bad feeling rose up into the cleanliness—thoughts of Pastor Schect, the police interviewing my parents, boying, dousing, the stained fabric on the seat of Aaron’s truck. Then the incredible idea that Aunt Elaine might actually be Sands’s mother. I wanted to let all of it be washed away. I wanted, with my new, pure mind, to go to the stream where my father doused me, and put in a small boat there and ride that boat down along the rocky stream as far as the river that went along beside Route 112, and then turn and travel that river as it grew wider, pass beneath the bridges near town, and then under the larger metal bridge my father sometimes fished from, and then splash down on the Honey River, past the mills and into the big river, the Connecticut, and drift away across the ocean to the places where other kinds of people made buildings like this and drew pictures of them.

I went around four times. By the end, Sands was sitting on an armless wooden bench in the center of the room and studying me as attentively as I was studying the drawings.

There were even more rooms, it turned out, but Sands said we’d save those for another visit; the exhibits there had nothing to do with stonework and contained vases and statues and sculptures he didn’t think I would like as much.

When we were outside again—the light pressed into my eyes and
the buildings there seemed only halfway real—Sands kept turning to look at me. “I forgot something, be right out,” he said, and leaving me at the truck, he went back toward the museum. After a few minutes of waiting for him, I felt the world around me coming back into focus, but it wasn’t the same as it had been, and I wasn’t the same. On a peculiar impulse, as if possessed by a different Marjorie Elaine Richards, I walked over toward the shed where the attendant was staring at a miniature TV, and I stood a few yards away from it, watching the images jump and shift. The man looked over his shoulder and flapped his hand for me to come closer. I was surprisingly unafraid. His skin was as black as a piece of coal beside the railroad tracks, but I noticed that the palms of his hands were pink. He turned his back on the TV to make a slow examination of my face, my hair, my clothes. “How was that museum?” he asked, in what seemed a genuinely friendly way.

“Good.”

“Which part was the best?”