But when he talked about his cathedral, a tone came into his voice that didn’t sound like anything evil. For a few minutes it had seemed he would let me work, and pay me regularly, and not hurt me, and then he said the part about being alive. If my aunt Elaine really knew him, she’d never mentioned it. No one named Ivers. No one with a ponytail. No one with part-dark skin. I looked at him. I was accustomed to my father moving all the time, shifting his weight, playing with the stump of his missing finger, his eyes running over every object within view, his head tilting right and left as if he was trying to shake water out of his ears after a swim in the quarry. I was used to my mother’s smoking and the constant twists and secret messages of her mouth and lips. But this man was standing as still as an oak tree, studying me, and in the shadows his face gave away absolutely nothing.
“Want to give it a shot?”
“I’m not knowing yet.”
He lifted his eyebrows, surprised. “Why don’t you think about it, then? And if you want the job, come here tomorrow after school and we can start. You’ll have to wear boots, though. You can’t do this work in sneakers or shoes, too dangerous. If I don’t see you, I’ll assume it wasn’t right for you and there will be no hard feelings.”
I looked at him. “I have boots only for the snow kind.”
“Well you’ll have to buy some then. Steel-toed.”
I nodded, and could feel the warmth running beneath the skin of my face.
“Now I’ll drive you home.”
“You didn’t say what money.”
“What do you mean?”
“What money you are paying me for, you didn’t tell.”
“You’d work three afternoons a week for two hours, at first. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And six hours on Saturday. Twelve hours a week to start. I’d pay you a hundred dollars.”
“In a month?”
“A week.”
I looked at him.
“That’s a little more than eight dollars an hour. I’d nudge it up as you learn the trade, and in summer you could work more.”
The legal minimum wage then had just been raised to three dollars and eighty cents. At Emily’s Dough Nuts, I had been paid two dollars and fifty cents an hour, cash money. I looked at him. I bit down on my lips. I put my hand up and took hold of a small fistful of my hair behind my right ear, tugging against the roots but not too hard.
“You think about it,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”
“Just to the 112. Then I could walk to home for there.”
“Fine.”
We rode back along the highway without speaking. I kept replaying everything he’d said, and every few hundred yards I turned and looked at the side of his face. I wondered if there were any seventeen-year-old girls in the world who made eight dollars an hour, or if it was just part of his trick, an impossible promise like that.
When the truck pulled into the lot and stopped and I had my fingers on the door handle and the backpack on my lap, I said, “If I want for the work I come on tomorrow when school has done.”
He turned to face me, the lenses shining in the light. “I believe I understood that, yes. Tomorrow after school, with steel-toed work boots. You can buy them tonight. The mall is open until late. And if I don’t see you, that’s okay, too.”
He held out his hand and I shook it, feeling the calluses there. I thanked him and got out and waited until he’d driven away before I showed what direction I would walk in. By the time I’d gone along the dark, cold stretch of highway and down Waldrup Road and turned in at my house and seen that my father’s truck wasn’t in the driveway but my aunt’s car was, I had already made up my mind.
Five
Once a month—twice a month on those occasions when they had a little extra money—my mother and father would disappear for a night and a day. This usually happened not long after my father received his disability check—which arrived in a gray envelope with the olive green check visible in the window and the name of an insurance company printed in the upper left-hand corner. If my mother hadn’t gotten there first, it was one of my jobs to fetch the mail from the mailbox at the end of our short dirt driveway. I’d pull down the squeaking metal door of the box, take whatever I found, and bring it inside. Sometimes there were bills—property taxes, electricity, a reminder about an old unpaid dentist visit—which sent my mother into half-hour spells of muttering. On Wednesday there were always store coupons in a newspaper insert, which she balled up and stuffed in the woodstove. (In summer, when the stove wasn’t used, these newspaper balls overflowed the black iron belly so that, after the middle of July, the door never closed all the way. When heating season came around again in the fall, she’d scoop out most of the balled-up newspapers and leave them in a pile on the floor, put in some kindling and one or two of the dry hardwood billets my father stacked in the yard, and light a match.)
Every two weeks there was the eight-page True Home and Country newsletter in the mailbox. If she was in a good mood, my mother would read aloud from it at night, with my father sitting at the other end of the couch, eyes turned away, listening closely, sometimes pressing his lips into a frown if he found the news—what the government was doing to us, what a conspiracy of environmentalists or homosexual activists or Jewish financiers was doing—especially disturbing. True Home and Country had other articles I sometimes looked at: articles claiming nuclear power was a trick of the government to make people sick and control them; that Jews, especially, but Catholics and Muslims, too, had spies and scouts hidden in the population. They were searching for Christ, who would come in disguise this time. Perhaps he had already come and was hiding from these demonic groups. When they found Christ, who, the Bible told, had promised to come to America this time instead of Egypt, these scouts were going to take him to a secret location in the mountains of California, torture him, kill him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in 144 different places on earth so he would never be able to return to save the good white people, the people he had come to protect in the first place, since the Egyptians were the only whites in all of Africa.
Mixed in with these feature pieces were other, shorter articles, giving practical suggestions about hunting, trapping, fishing, putting up vegetables and salting meat, books to read and never to read, ways of arguing with non-churchgoing people so you could convince them of the truth, and tips for chastising children according to what the newsletter referred to as the Ancient Way of the Lord. Dousing. Facing. Boying or girling. Hungering. And so on. It was through the True Home and Country newsletter that my parents had found Pastor Schect (who had relocated to West Ober from parts unknown eight years earlier), and these articles and the pastor were all the spiritual guidance they seemed to need. It felt to me, though, even then, that they needed this guidance, and needed the newsletter and the visits to the church in West Ober, in a desperate way, as if without the advice of such people, they would find themselves adrift in a world so complicated and terrifying it would, as my mother put it, “run you right off insane.”
In terms of the most anticipated mail, though, True Home and Country stood in a distant second place behind my father’s check. When the check came, my mother and I always made sure to put it on top of the small stack of mail one of us carried into the house. During the day, my father liked to be out in the forest, or splitting stove wood in the yard, or—if it was pouring rain—nursing a draft beer at Weedon’s Bar, where he was allowed to run a tab. So it would almost always be my mother who first saw the mail I brought inside. She would be balanced up on the counter on her small hips, smoking and drinking; or she’d be standing over beans and creamed corn at the stove; or she’d be lying down in a “sorry mind,” as she called her bad moods, on the worn sofa that had been there since Dad Paul’s hunting days, with her face pressed into the corner of the cushions and an ashtray on the floor near her dangling arm. Whatever position or state of mind I found her in, I was supposed to immediately show her the mail. If she saw the envelope from the ins
urance company it would be as if you snapped on a flashlight and shone it on the features of her face. She’d sit up on the couch, or step away from the stove, or slide down off the counter. For a second, a twitch of a smile would show in the muscles of her cheeks, and a sense of relief would surround her, as if she had spent the past fourteen days and nights imagining various scenarios in which the money failed to arrive. She would never dare open the envelope, but would take and set it in the middle of the dining room table, with nothing around it, so my father would see it as soon as he stepped into the house. Then, if she hadn’t already started cooking, and if there was time to send me to the 112 Store (where we were also allowed to buy on credit), she would prepare his favorite supper—hamburger and onion fried crisp, mixed with a can of tomato soup and poured over white rice. The presence of the envelope in the house would change the language of her body. Sometimes, if the meal was ready and my father wasn’t yet home, she’d take a shower (my parents never used the timer and could stay in the shower as long as the hot water lasted) and change her shirt, and then anyone could see that she really had been pretty once, as people said. On the night of the check’s arrival—I understood this as I grew older—my parents would drink a little and talk a little until I went to bed, and then they would have sex. I could hear the sounds of it from my room. The head of their bed would knock against the wall in a certain urgent rhythm, and my father would be saying, “Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt!” loudly, while my mother made sounds that fell somewhere between whimpers of pain and small bullets of laughter. I’d lie in my bed, looking up at the dark ceiling, wondering how much of what kids in school said about it was true.
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 c
ircles 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.”
The Talk-Funny Girl Page 5