The Talk-Funny Girl (7 page)

The other thing I could count on when the check arrived was that, at some point within a day or two, my parents would disappear. This had been going on for years and I was used to it. When I was younger—ten and twelve and fourteen—I’d been left alone many times, and had, except for one bit of trouble (I tried to cook an egg in oil and started a small fire and put it out with a dish towel), managed fairly well. But when I was about fifteen, something changed, I never understood what, exactly, and my aunt—who’d moved back closer to home after years of living in other places—would usually come stay with me. I was old enough to be alone by then, of course, but she said she wanted to spend time with me and so it wasn’t a surprise to see her car there on those nights. My mother and father never told me when they were going, never left a note. This is something I have neglected to ever ask my aunt about, but I suppose my mother went to the pay phone at the 112 Store and called to say they were going, or they had some other kind of arrangement. A day or two after the check appeared, I’d come home from school—or, in summer, get out of bed—and find that my parents were gone, the truck gone, the house quiet, and Aunt Elaine making breakfast or dinner at the stove, or standing in the doorway to greet me when I walked home from the bus.

Aunt Elaine was older than my mother by seven years. Their lives
belonged to different universes. So different, in fact, that I often imagined they weren’t really stepsisters, but that they’d formed some kind of agreement to tell people they were. I sometimes even imagined that my mother paid Aunt Elaine to pretend she was her sister, and that, when I grew to be an adult, I might find someone I could hire to fill the same role. In the time since she’d returned to the area, we visited Aunt Elaine only once a year, for Thanksgiving dinner, and it was a torment for my father to do even that. Beyond his occasional beer at Weedon’s, and a few sips of wine to celebrate the arrival of his check, he wasn’t a drinker, not compared to my mother, at least, but on Thanksgiving he would start drinking whiskey from the early morning and be so drunk by the time we left for Watsonboro that he’d be forced to let my mother drive the pickup, something he rarely did. With its sunny rooms and raked lawn, Aunt Elaine’s house always seemed like a kind of heaven to me, but I knew that it was, for my father, one of the promised torments of hell. He would rather pull a fishhook out through his fingernail, he said one time on the way home, than go to that Elaine’s. He would rather step in a sharp-tooth fox trap barefoot. “Oncet a year ain’t much even for visitin’ to hell,” my mother told him, but my father didn’t even look at her.

Aunt Elaine was pretty and dark haired, like my mother, though they had no blood relation and did not resemble each other. Elaine’s nose was wider, her hair a few shades lighter and touched with streaks of gray. She had no husband or children, or even any particular friend, as far as I could see. She worked as a nurse in the children’s ward in the hospital in Watsonboro, and lived in that city, in a small yellow house with a porch. Forty minutes south and across the wide river into Vermont, Watsonboro was so alien to my mother and father and to me—ethnic restaurants, bookstores, yoga studios—that it might as well have been a place we needed a passport to go to, a place where a different language was spoken.

It was, I came to understand, the orderliness of Aunt Elaine’s life that tormented my father. The walls of her house were carefully
painted, books in bookcases on the walls, pans and pots hanging from hooks. The slate roof didn’t leak, the front steps weren’t soft with rot, the toilet always made a clean flush when you tugged down the handle. Aunt Elaine’s hair was tied back with a bright clip, her eyes were clear, her fingernails trimmed; the dishes she put on the table when we visited were shining and unchipped. As if by magic, everything seemed to go well—the turkey was never overcooked, the wine wasn’t spilled, the dessert came to the table on small plates with golden trim. Cast against this tidy background, the life we lived became a spectacle of shoddiness, and every year I had a stronger sense of the shame of that.

On the night when I walked home from the 112 Store after meeting the strange Mr. Ivers, I saw Aunt Elaine standing on the front steps of the house, and I felt suddenly brave and grown-up and hopeful. My aunt was strongly built, full hipped and full breasted, dressed that day in new sneakers, clean jeans, and a red and cream striped woolen sweater. Standing there, with the sagging, half-painted, badly patched house sinking and slanting behind her, Aunt Elaine looked like a new store-bought doll set down in front of a dollhouse that had been rescued from a trash can. “My Marjorie,” she said, holding her arms wide and hugging me close. The top of her head came up to the point of my nose. “You look so beautiful, a beautiful young woman.”

Inside, the table was set for the two of us, and I could smell chicken cooking. “Wash up,” my aunt said. “Food’s all ready.” Like everything else that came out of Aunt Elaine’s mouth, this was said in what I thought of as a “clean” voice, a voice some of my teachers used, a voice that gave me a feeling like the feeling you have when you’ve begun to sense the flu leaving your body. It wasn’t the words and the grammar, but an underlying tone—something with no threat or worry in it. I washed my face and hands and brushed my hair and then came and sat close to my aunt at the corner of the table. There was steam coming up off the chicken breasts and mashed potatoes. From Watsonboro, Aunt Elaine had brought a loaf of the kind of bread you have to
slice yourself, and there was a slice of it, brown and already buttered, on a small dish beside my plate, and a glass of milk, and peas with butter melting on them.

“Eat a few bites,” Aunt Elaine said, “and then tell me about your day.”

I knew we wouldn’t be saying any blessing so I cut a small piece of chicken and put it into my mouth, but I couldn’t swallow at first, couldn’t get the food past what was in my throat, and couldn’t look at her. The plate full of food was blurry. I blinked my eyes and concentrated on opening my throat, on chewing, and my aunt pretended to go to the stove and check on something she had in the oven. In a minute, I could swallow again. Juicy chicken, creamy potatoes, peas coated in butter, and the thick slice of bread, which I nibbled at to be polite but did not really like the taste of. It seemed to me that the silence around us had a different quality from the silences I was used to, as if it wasn’t silence at all but something as sweet as birdsong in deep woods, the vireos whistling their down-swinging circles on a summer night.

“Eat slowly,” Aunt Elaine said. “There’s no rush. There’s cookies for afterward but just take your time, honey. School was all right?”

“Good all.”

“The kids aren’t causing you any trouble?”

“Some of them can for times. I don’t to make a pal with them.”

“You and Cindy are still close?”

“Cindy has got to having a boyfriend now. Carl. She does a lot of the time with him but in lunch we see.”

“Only lunch? You don’t go out together? Bowling? Or for ice cream?”

“In the summer we have swimming on the quarry, but now I don’t have a time for it because today I got to be given a job.”

“Really? Tell me.”

I told her about going to Warners’, and the slip of paper, and the strange man with the funny name who was going to build a cathedral
where St. Mark’s had been, if he wasn’t lying. My aunt watched me as I talked, her eyes running this way and that across my eyes and mouth and hair.

“Do your parents know?”

“They knew I was going asking.”

“They’ll be pleased.”

“Sure.”

“Well, I think it’s wonderful. He sounds like a good man, too. Does he seem that way to you?”

“I was worried a little that he could might to be the kidnapping person. I think he’s not a white man. The way he had talk with me on the phone, then the way he looked on me. I had some to be afraid, getting in his truck. But then when he went us on at the church and started having talk about what he was to do, it just was that he could be weird, not scary.”

“It sounds good,” my aunt said, but something in the way she said it made me suspicious. Just then, I remembered Zeke Warner saying he knew her, and I remembered Mr. Ivers telling me about the payment arrangement. “You know to him,” I said. “Or was he making a lie about it?”

Aunt Elaine got up and went to the stove. She pulled open the oven door and bent down to look in, and it seemed that she was trying to keep from showing me the expression on her face. “He won’t hurt you, I’m sure of that.”

“He told he is for paying you, not me.”

“He won’t cheat you, honey. And you know I won’t.”

“He said to pay eight dollars in for the hour. No girl can to make it eight dollars. Not too many of grown-ups make.”

“I wanted to talk to you about that,” Aunt Elaine said, coming back to the table.

“Oh.”

She smiled, but there was now clearly something crouching behind her face, not deceit exactly but some kind of disappointing secret about
to be revealed. I knew eight dollars an hour had been an impossible amount and told myself I’d been right to hold my hope tight and not let it soar up.

“Are you finished? Did you save room for a cookie or two?”

“I’ll to clear off the dishes and so.”

“No, stay. Sit.”

“He won’t then give it for paying me? It was a trick?”

“He will. But I’m going to keep some of that money in an account for you. How much did he say you’d earn in a week?”

“One hundred.”

“Okay. How about if I give you fifteen for yourself and another twenty that you can give your parents, and I’ll put the rest in the account for you for later. Would that be all right? It could earn some interest that way.”

“Fifteen for me? Dollars to a week?” I stopped and looked down at my plate. I could feel the hope soaring up through the middle of my chest and I wanted to wrestle with it and get it to lie flat there and not cause me trouble.

“You can say anything to me, honey. Always. Anything.”

“For the, for my father, I could think … he isn’t liking twenty dollars from the one hundred.”

“Let me take care of that.”

“You will, but for twenty from the one hundred, he doesn’t like it sure. Or my mother much.”

Aunt Elaine looked at me for a few seconds then went back to the stove. She took the tray out of the oven and set it on the stovetop to cool. One of the many things I loved about her was that, though I knew it sounded odd to her ear, she never tried to correct the way I spoke.

“Your mother had a spatula last time I was here.”

“Broke it up. She uses now the big knife. Sidewise.”

“What does she do when she makes an egg?”

“She boils.”

The drawer Aunt Elaine opened and closed made a squealing
sound. “Does she hit you, honey?” she asked then, not looking at me, working the knife under the edges of the warm cookies and lifting them carefully onto a plate. I will remember that question as long as I live, because it wasn’t something she had ever asked me before and because it was a moment when the truth—that ferocious animal—came nosing its way into my life. I shoved it back, naturally I did, but it was there, I could feel it. I could taste it.

“No,” I said quickly.

“Does your father?”

“No.”

“Really?” Aunt Elaine was still peeling cookies off the tray and sliding them onto the plate, piling them there in overlapping circles as if making a design, not looking at me, talking over her shoulder in a casual tone.

“Could I drink one other milk with of them?”

“As much as you want. I brought extra.”

“Do you want?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

I poured the milk and put the container back in the refrigerator. Of their own will, my legs seemed to be pulling me toward my room. I stood at the refrigerator for a minute, sipping, keeping my back to my aunt.

“Honey?”

I turned and looked at her, a few drops of milk spilling onto my hand.

“You can tell me. Nothing will happen.”

“Nothing bad they do.”

“Really?”

I nodded and returned to the table. I had just taken one of the warm cookies into my hand when my aunt said, “What is ‘facing’ and ‘boying’?”

I shrugged, avoided her eyes, concentrated on breaking the soft cookie in half.

“You don’t know, honey? Really?”

“I think in the school I heard kids say about it. Thank you and this cookie and milk. And the food for I’m thanking you.”

For a long few seconds I chewed and sipped, feeling my aunt’s eyes on me but not meeting them. I was working hard to pretend to be a young, innocent girl in her eyes, to push the truth down hard into its hiding place and keep the anger from rising up. The rare good hour in that house had been turned toward the bad again, even by my aunt. I ate another cookie and still didn’t look up, and after a time Aunt Elaine ate one, too. The only other question she asked was about
True Home and Country
. I said it was a newspaper my parents looked at sometimes, that was all I knew. Though it felt wrong and risky to do it, I found a recent copy near the sofa and brought it to her, but she only glanced at it and set it aside, and let the conversation die.

We washed and dried the dishes together. When everything was put away and clean, Aunt Elaine hugged me and said I was growing into a beautiful woman and I said I wanted to go to bed early because I was starting work the next day. I thanked her four or five times and let myself be hugged and kissed, and then, even though I could feel she wanted to go on with the earlier conversation, I went to my room and closed the door. My whole body was shaking. I climbed under the sheet and blanket with my clothes on and turned off the lamp and lay awake listening to the sounds in the woods, and I thought about the lies I had just told, and about what Aunt Elaine might read in the
True Home and Country
, about the mall and about steel-toed boots, and what might happen in the house if my parents came back early. It seemed to me that, in one day, some huge shift had taken place in my world—Aunt Elaine asking about things she’d never asked about before, the possibility of the job. It felt as though someone was lifting up the aluminum bucket and shining a light underneath it. I wanted that, of course. But at the same time it was like being in the start of an earthquake. Before that, whatever else happened, however bad things had been, you were at least sure the ground would stay still.