The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  “This is Ivers,” a man’s voice said over the phone line.

  “This is I’m Marjorie. Mr. Warner told I could to call you. I am ready on to work.”

  There was a pause, and then the man said, “Can you drive over here for a quick interview?”

  “I’m seventeen just now,” I said. “But I don’t can’t drive.” I held the phone very tightly and listened. The man didn’t say anything. “But nobody works for so hard as me. Nobody does.”

  “That’s what Mr. Warner said.”

  “What kind doesn’t to matter. Different kinds I did before. Nobody can.”

  “It’s an apprenticeship.”

  “All right. I do that kind.”

  I heard the man make a small laugh and I felt like I’d become a little girl again, a little girl trying desperately to say the thing her daddy wanted to hear. The top part of the phone was pressed against my ear, and I had a hand up over my other ear so the noise from lumber trucks and tractor trailers passing on the road wouldn’t cause me to miss a word. “I’m at beside the 112 Store on the road that goes for to town.” I swallowed. “In a little time I … my mother and father want that I’m home then. But I can to walk in town for it and see you.”

  “I’ll come pick you up there. We can drive over here and look at the job site and then I’ll bring you home and introduce myself to your parents. I have a black truck. I can be there in eight minutes.”

  I squeezed the phone. “All right,” I said. And then, “I have hair the color of brown and a backpack.”

  There was another small laugh. The man was shy, or he was a trickster, I couldn’t tell. I had the thought that I should ask him to give me his license plate number so I could pass it on to Mrs. Jensen in the store. That was something the teachers talked about in school. But it would ruin any chance for the job, I was sure of that, so I said only, “I’ll to stand right against the road waiting.”

  “I’m eight minutes away,” the man said a second time, and it sounded to me as if he’d known I would call, that he had something all planned. Maybe he’d seen me go into Warners’ looking for work and had gone in there after I left and made up the idea of a job as a way to get me into his truck.

  But it seemed to me that I had very little to lose then, so I stood out next to the road with the backpack against my right ankle and waited. In northern New England, in spring and fall, there is a warm stretch of the day that lasts from about late morning until middle afternoon. The nights are still cold, and the cold stays on for a few hours even after the sun has come up; and then, when late afternoon arrives, you can feel the cold reaching toward you again, as if the night is marching back down the river valley, chasing off the weaker soldiers of the sun. While I waited, I could feel the night coming. Even pushed down in the pockets of my pants, my hands were cold. The cars and trucks had turned on their headlights. Every time I saw a set of lights come around the bend in the road, half a mile to the west of where I stood, I would think it was the man in his black truck, and a cool tickling would run up the muscles of my back. He was going to train me. Train me to do what?

  I saw a pair of lights, then the dark fenders and roof. The driver flashed his lights, waited for a car going in the opposite direction, then looped into the lot and pulled up so that I was a few feet from the window. The man—Mr. Ivers he was pretending to be called—slid the window down and leaned his face out. He was only a little older than some of the boys in school. His face was not exactly the face of a white man—square cut, the skin either tanned at the wrong time of year or light brown to begin with, a pair of thick spectacles over eyes I couldn’t yet get a read on, the curly charcoal-colored hair tied back in a short ponytail. For an instant, I thought I recognized him, or at least that he reminded me of someone I knew. From what I could see of the neck and shoulders, and part of his forearm near the hand that held the wheel, he was stronger even than my father.

  “Marjorie?” He pushed the glasses back up against the top of his nose and I could see his eyes then. They were green eyes, strange against the light brown face, and in them, and in the way he spoke my name, he seemed to me, even from that first minute, like a shy boy. Or like someone pretending to be a shy boy.

  He held out his hand. I hesitated. I stepped closer and shook it.

  “Come on. Get in. So I can take you to see the work site before it gets too dark.”

  I looked at the windows of the store, at a person, a woman, going up the steps there. Beneath the woman’s weight, I could hear the sound of the steps creaking, like a series of small screams, and then the loud bang of the door. For a few seconds, in my imagination, I was the girl on the other side of the river, deciding whether or not to get into the stranger’s car. I wondered if the sight of the woman going up the stairs would be one of the last things I would ever see. There were ways of playing tricks, of saying you knew somebody when you didn’t really know them. My aunt had never mentioned Mr. Warner as being a friend of hers, and no one I knew had a friend who wasn’t white, no one at church, no one in school. Someone had said that the person who was making the girls disappear was a black man. I looked back at Mr. Ivers, at his eyes behind the glasses, his big shoulders, the tanned skin in mid-April. I looked into the bed of the truck: a steel rack for carrying lumber. Concrete blocks. Rope.

  He said, “If you want, I can let you take my license number and call your folks, or leave it with the people in the store.”

  It was either a trick or it wasn’t. He was either a good man, shy, different, or he was the devil come to take me. I thought of what it would feel like for this man to change his mind about offering me the job, because I didn’t trust him, because I didn’t have the courage to get into his truck, and then for me to walk down the highway in the dark and turn onto Waldrup Road and go home, and what it would be like to go into my house and tell my parents things hadn’t worked out.

  I tried to do what I often did—look past the features of a person’s face and in through their eyes and come to a decision about what they wanted from me. If they would hurt me or not, and how badly. I hesitated another second, then grabbed my backpack, walked around to the far side of the pickup, and climbed in.

  The man asked me to put my seat belt on, something my father did not ever do. As I clicked the buckle in place I noticed there was a loop of wooden beads hanging from the stem of the rearview mirror. For strangling teenage girls before you dumped them in the woods, I thought. I ran my eyes over the new upholstery and the carpet at my feet, and over the dashboard, looking for blood. Without saying a word the man pulled out onto the highway, and he went along there on the smooth pavement, turning the truck easily with one hand as the road wound, keeping his eyes forward. Trying not to let him see, I looked at the curly ponytail, at the glasses, at his square face.

  “You’re afraid,” he said.

  My right leg twitched. “I’m not having afraid of anything.”

  He nodded. “I’m only going to take you into the center of town, show you the work site, tell you what I’d expect, ask you a couple of questions, let you ask me a couple of questions, and then drive you straight home.”

  “I can do walking.”

  “I wouldn’t let you walk,” he said.

  “I want it. I make a lot of walking. I’m strong.”

  He didn’t answer. By then it was almost dark beyond the windows, just the last shreds of light hanging above the hills, lights on in the houses, a broken string of lights coming at us on the other side of the highway. “Why do you talk like that?” the man asked after a minute.

  “I don’t talk for bad now.”

  “No, it’s just … different.”

  “We talk like the same for everybody,” I said, but I knew it wasn’t true and I looked away from him and out the window and pressed my lips hard against each other. It was something I’d heard so many times before, for years and years. During all those years, there had been meetings with school counselors, with principals, with speech therapists. They a
ll ended up saying, “You can speak correctly, we know you can from your written work, Marjorie. So why don’t you?” It was from not going to school all those years when I was young, they said. It was something I could change, it was important to talk like other people, important for doing well in school, going to college, getting a good job. Almost every day some of the other kids would make fun of me, calling me “the talk-funny girl,” or greeting me with strange forms of hello in the hallways (“to hi to you in of Margie!” was a favorite). Most high school kids would have tried to change, I know that, would have tried desperately to fit in. But I had a lot of my father in me then, the same woundedness, the same fierce stubbornness, and I believed that if I changed, if I came halfway out to meet people, they’d only make fun of me anyway and I’d be whipped and ridiculed at home. The best strategy was to burrow down deep into myself, to stay different, to keep a distance. I knew our speech was odd, obviously, but it had been natural to me for so long that, really, I preferred the sound of it to standard American English. I hadn’t gone to school until I was nine, and for those first years I’d had one or two occasional playmates but no television or radio to learn from. My parents never read to me from children’s books; they barely spoke themselves and were so removed from society that, like some tribe living in isolation, they’d evolved their own dialect. They were mocked, too, my father especially. But, like me, he used it as a kind of protective barrier between him and other people, a way of avoiding questions and probing conversations, of keeping strangers at arm’s length. He had learned that trick from his own father, Dad Paul, and I had learned it well from him. Until I was seventeen and a half, being the talk-funny girl was a soft, ugly cushion I held close around myself in every human interaction.

  We crossed the bridge over the river; the metal grating hummed under the truck tires. I looked down at the waterfall and the mills there on both banks, redbrick buildings as long as downtown, with boarded windows and weedy parking lots and graffiti all across the lower floors. My grandfather, Dad Paul, had worked in one of those buildings for a little while before going to pump gas at Zeski’s and then, later, being sent upstate, and I remember wondering if somehow this was a trick he’d organized from prison. He would have met some bad people there; he might have mentioned he had a granddaughter who needed work; he might have told them my name and where I lived.

  Mr. Ivers—who looked to me, with his weightlifter’s arms and shoulders, like the kind of man who might have been in jail once—turned the truck left onto Main Street. Some of the shops had lights in their front windows. A line of cars and pickup trucks stood at the traffic signal, waiting for it to change. Three blocks south of the strip of stores he pulled to the curb and cut the engine. “Here it is,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “This is where I work.”

  “It’s not at anything.”

  The man laughed his shy laugh again and looked across the seat at me. He hadn’t driven me into the hills, at least not this time, not yet. There were lights reflecting on the lenses of his glasses and I couldn’t see his eyes.

  “This used to be St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.”

  “I know it.”

  “The old boiler exploded, did you know that, too?”

  “There was a fire at it. Everybody knows.”

  “The fire destroyed the timbers, the crossbeams inside,” he went on in what seemed to me a nervous voice. “They held the walls up from falling away from each other. When they burned, and the cables burned, and the rafters of the roof started to burn, the roof fell in and the walls fell outward. The explosion had already blown away part of the base of one of them. The people who owned the church had been trying to save money by not insuring the building for what it would cost to rebuild, and so when this happened they couldn’t afford to rebuild it. They paid somebody to come and knock down the broken walls and cart away the roof. That’s as far as they got. Then they ended up moving the congregation to Walpole, and sharing a church there, and they’ve been trying to sell this lot ever since.”

  “When I was two grades ago they had it this way.”

  “Right. It’s been a while. I bought it at the end of last month.”

  “Why for?”

  “Because it was inexpensive, and it has that little building off in the back, that wasn’t damaged too badly. That was the rectory. It’s inhabitable, more or less.”

  “You want for making it so you live there?”

  “I’m going to build a cathedral here, what I call a cathedral anyway. I designed it myself and I’m going to build it myself and use it to show people what kind of work I can do. I have some money. I’m going to have a business here in this town, building walls and stone houses and doing repairs.”

  I looked at the piles of stones, the weeds growing out of them as if there were green-haired spirits hiding half-underground, the streetlamp casting a light over all of it and against the two-story box of a building at the rear. The man was making up a story. Who bought a church and lived in it? Who did that?

  “Did you ever have a big dream for your life?” he asked.

  I shook my head and kept staring at the rubble. If he let me go I was going to carry a lie home to my mother and father. I never lied to them, almost never, because they had a miraculous instinct for secrets, fibs, and tricks, and they would penance me if they thought I wasn’t telling them the absolute truth. But this time it made no sense to tell the truth. Why was I late for supper? Because the man from Warners’ had told me to talk to this other man who was buying the blown-up church and building a new church over it. I went with him alone in a truck to see. We stayed there a long time while he talked.

  “Well, this is my dream for myself,” he was saying. “To design and build a cathedral, a place of worship, but not ordinary worship. A place of peace, not rules. A place you can go and be quiet and be left alone and not need a priest or a minister or a rabbi to dial God’s number on the phone so you can talk with him. Come on, let’s get out and do a quick inspection.”

  I didn’t want to leave my backpack in the truck, but when I started to pick it up the man reached over and put his hand on it. “Leave that,” he said, and I felt the cool sparkles go up my back muscles again.

  He got out, and I got out, too, and followed him across the sidewalk and onto what had been the church’s front lawn. Some of the larger debris must have been carted away—the roof, the burned wood—but there were piles of rubble everywhere, stones of different sizes, chunks of concrete, a few pieces of metal and wood. Weeds growing out of it all. The man was lying or he was crazy or both. It was cold.

  But I walked up the front steps and followed him, using the light from the streetlamp to keep from stepping on the rubble in a way that would make me fall.

  “See this?” Mr. Ivers tapped his work boot near what had been the back end of the church. He raised his eyes to the street for a second and I thought he might be looking for a police car, waiting for someone to come and chase him off church property. “The floor here is in good shape, except over there where the boiler burst up through it. The foundation is about eighty-five percent solid. I’m going to clear this rubble off and build a cathedral on the solid part of the floor. It won’t be as big as the church, at least to start with. I’m going to do it in sections.”

  “With all just your own hands?”

  He made his small nervous laugh and I didn’t know then if he was tricking me or making fun of me or if he was a good man and just shy. There was something in the laugh, and in him, that was different from any person I had ever met. In the light he looked older than he’d looked at first, and not as dark, and I tried to examine him without letting him see. “A long time that’s to take.”

  “Exactly. And I’ll need a helper. You came very highly recommended … unless you think a girl can’t do the work.”

  “She can do.”

  “Do you have any skills?”

  I looked at him. I knew what the word meant, of course, bu
t I never thought of myself that way, as having skills.

  “Can you do anything special with your hands?”

  “I have … I know to take out a fishhook with one hand out the mouth of it. My dad showed. I can to chop wood. Clean up good. A little cook.”

  “That’s it?”

  He seemed then almost to be mocking me. He was a big man, four or five inches taller than my father. Big shoulders, big arms, but thin in the middle, as if a child had been putting together a toy figure from two kits and had mismatched the muscle man’s arms with the little boy’s body. “Nobody can does work harder of me.”

  “Than I.”

  “Nobody does. You won’t be sorry if you ask me for the job.”

  “It’s not a job exactly, it’s an apprenticeship.”

  At those words—“not a job exactly”—I felt something drop out of my insides. I thought about how long it would take to walk home from there, about my backpack in his truck, about my mother’s voice.

  “Why you made it for me to come here then?”

  “A paid apprenticeship. You can learn the trade of stonemasonry.”

  “To pay?”

  “Right. I pay you. Except indirectly.”

  I looked at him. I heard cars passing behind me on the street.

  “You’d get money every month, through your aunt.”

  “How are you to know her?”

  “I met her at the hospital a long time ago.”

  “She works at there even still.”

  “I know. I’ll pay her. She’ll pay you. I’ll give you a two-week trial period, and if you can keep up, I’ll guarantee you a job as long as we’re both still alive. How’s that for a good deal?”

  I had been starting to think he wasn’t a bad man until he said “both still alive.” There was something not right about him, and as good as I was at reading people, understanding their motivations within a few minutes of meeting them, there was a dimension to this man that puzzled me. The mix of strong and shy, of manly and boyish, the idea of building a church for himself—who had the money and time to do that? And it seemed strange and wrong not to be paid directly; with all the work I’d done in my life, I’d never had a job like that.