The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  His face, when he finally turned it to me, was almost purple. “Turpetine!” he screamed. “Go at 112, boy! Turpetine! Turpetine! Turpetine!”

  I had blisters on the backs of my heels, and I thought for a moment about changing from my father’s boots to sneakers, but it seemed wiser to get out of the yard as fast as I could, so I hurried off down the driveway and onto Waldrup Road, staying along the edges where the mud wasn’t deep, moving as quickly as the boots and the blisters allowed. I felt like a clown in the clothes, of course, the rope belt, the man’s shirt, the baggy pants. I felt as though I was hurrying along in a hot spotlight, and I was sure somebody from school would see me and tell the whole world. At the corner of Route 112, the right boot went sideways and fell off. I stopped and laced it up tighter. As I passed C&P Welding I couldn’t keep myself from looking at the building, but there was no sign of Cary Patanauk there.

  In the 112 Store, Mrs. Jensen sold me a can of paint thinner on credit (“Margie, are you helping your dad in those clothes? Nobody calls it turpentine anymore. Why, you’re all out of breath!”) and I carried it back as fast as I could and found my father sitting on the oak stump where he split wood, his chin on his chest, his hands resting palms-up on his knees, covered in sticky caulk. I unscrewed the can, only to find a thin metal seal over the opening. My father was lifting his heels up and tapping them on the dirt in an impatient rhythm. “Screwendrive!” he yelled. “Screwendrive!” I went to the shed, found a screwdriver, and poked it through the seal. He held his hands out in front of him and I poured some paint thinner on them and watched him rubbing his palms together furiously, then trying to get the caulk off with a rag. He didn’t look at me. He put his hands out again, and I poured more paint thinner into them, and I could feel my mother watching us from the half-open window, getting ready to make one of her remarks. She seemed to me incapable of not making those remarks—little acid-tipped darts aimed at her husband’s eyelids and lips—but, at the same time, she had an understanding that there was a line she shouldn’t cross. On those times when she did cross the line, accidentally or otherwise, my father would respond, usually after some delay, with a show of craziness. It was like a lion roaring in the jungle, Stop or I’ll kill you! Once, when I was very young, probably only about four, he burned down a larger and better-built shed that had occupied the place in the yard where the ramshackle shed now stood. An hour or so after their argument—I was too small to understand what they’d been fighting about—he went to the shed and methodically took out the shovels and chain saw and his traps, laid them in neat rows some distance away in the dirt, with me and my mother watching from inside the house. He spread gasoline along the base of the outside wall of the shed, set the can down with the rest of the tools, and tossed a match. I had the feeling my mother liked seeing him that way, that it excited her. It was one of my earliest memories, watching that shed burn, the scarlet flames licking up near the trees, my father standing ten yards away with his arms hanging down and his head tilted sideways. Another time he flattened two tires of his truck and left it sitting like that for a week. Another time—this was when Dad Paul went to jail and my mother said he deserved to for what he’d done—he punched his good hand through a pane of glass in the living room and it was a long time before he could stop the bleeding.

  In the midst of the caulk and paint thinner cleanup, my mother opened the window and called over, “Messy job, huh?” My father didn’t respond. His face didn’t change. After another minute, he stood up. He ran the rag over the stump of his left index finger and wiped it uselessly across the caulk on his pants. When he threw it on the ground, I reached to pick it up, and he aimed a kick at me and caught me in the back of the left thigh. I fell over, surprised. Except for two whippings with braided willow branches, it was the only time he’d ever actually struck me. I picked up the rag and limped over and threw it into the woods where my mother tossed the trash. Then I put the roll of tar paper back in the shed, and the caulking gun, and I looked around for any more nails on the ground, making sure there was nothing left anywhere that might remind my father of the project.

  We had one of our silent lunches, baked beans and bacon, my father wearing different pants and eating very slowly and my mother trying not to smile between bites. For the rest of the day my parents left me alone but wouldn’t let me change out of the clothes, so I read a schoolbook in my room, then went out and sat on a stone by the stream because I’ve always liked the sound of running water. Missing a day of school didn’t matter much to me, but I worried Sands would fire me for not coming to work, and I tried to trace back the line of events that had led to my penance. What could I have done differently? How could I change things in the future so this wouldn’t happen again? Was there some way to impress Pastor Schect with the amount of money I’d be earning, maybe put a dollar of my own in the woven basket, so that he’d tell my parents good things about me? Or was the idea of working on another church such an enormous sin that no amount of punishment or sacrifice could erase it?

  It was typical of what I’d do after a penance—that kind of desperate searching for answers—but it was useless, and part of me knew that. There was no particular logic to my parents’ thinking. Something came into their minds. They held that something up against the background of what they’d been hearing in the Quonset hut in West Ober, and reading for years in True Home and Country, and then my mother would make a suggestion to my father, and eventually he’d agree. In their minds, in Pastor Schect’s mind, a child being punished according to the Ancient Way of the Lord was an act that paid for the sins of everyone on earth, as if we were underage stand-ins for Christ on the cross.

  In later years, long after these penances were finished, I told a therapist about them and she asked why I hadn’t run away. “I did run once,” I said. “To my aunt’s. But after two days I went back home. My aunt tried everything she could to keep me from going back, but I lied and told her it had happened just that once, an argument, a small punishment.” The therapist asked me why I had done that and I wanted to say, “Because I knew I was a sinner in the eyes of God. Because I wasn’t at home in the peaceful world. Because I wanted my father to love me.” But the real reason runs deeper than that, scurrying around behind the walls of the pain museum. Any person who goes back to being beaten knows about that. The real reason hides in a deeper place.

  Nine

  As always on the day after a boying, I woke up feeling disconnected from my body. I was happy to be able to dress for school in my own clothes, but, with my underwear especially, it almost felt as though I was putting the fabric over someone else’s hips, shoulders, and breasts, and that was not a feeling I liked. I went into the kitchen and before I’d even poured myself a glass of lemonade or taken a square of the gingerbread my mother had made, I said, “Pa and you should to let me to work for this job. For the money they’ll be, I—”

  “Who’s not letting you?” my mother said over her shoulder. She turned from her place at the table, ran her eyes over my pants and shirt and sneakers and nodded the way she did when she was satisfied with something.

  I knew enough then to swallow the next words in my mouth. Just from seeing that she had made gingerbread I should have known my mother’s mood was good—which almost always meant my father’s mood had been good, also, before he went out to the forest. From the gingerbread, from the expression on her face, the corners of her eyes slightly turned up, her mouth relaxed … I understood that the winds had shifted during the night. It was important not to do or say anything to shift them back.

  “Go work for all you want to,” she said, then she returned to her coffee and her food.

  I drank half the glass of water, wrapped two pieces of gingerbread in a paper napkin, lifted my backpack onto one shoulder, and stepped out the door. As I went along Waldrup Road eating my breakfast, I tried, for the thousandth time, to puzzle out the mystery of my parents’ thoughts, to see if there might have been some trick there, behind my mother’s
encouragement. I had been boyed; that always flushed some of the anger out of them. But it was more complicated than that, more complicated even than what they might have done with each other in the bedroom at night, or how much money they still had in the jar on their bureau, or what they’d decided they’d get from me in the way of income. Their moods shifted the way a bat flew at twilight, not in a straight line, not according to any pattern anyone else could understand. That morning, unless there was a trick, the winds that blew across my parents’ inner landscape had simply turned in a different direction. They would be happy now, for a day or two; my father would be contentedly splitting wood when I came home, and might carry his plate to the sink after dinner, or sit on the couch and listen to his wife read. My mother might touch me on the shoulder before I went to bed, or ask for a kiss.

  I waited for the bus and thought about them. My father spent most of his time in our woods, twelve acres that were thick with old-growth pine, spruce, and the typical mix of northern New England hardwoods. Most days he’d go out in the morning, without a helmet or any kind of eye protection, usually without gloves, and fell a tree. (I remember, as a small small girl, being terrified at hearing the slow passage of the falling tree through the limbs of its neighbors, then the big crash-boom when it hit the ground.) He cut the tree into stove-length logs, piled the logs into a wheelbarrow, and ferried them back to the yard. Depending on the size of the tree, and the distance, this could take twenty loads or more and all of a day. When that job was done, he’d split the logs into billets and, sometimes with my help, stack them in one-cord piles, eight feet long and four feet tall. These piles, more than two dozen of them, sat at various angles around the yard like stacks of oversized coffins awaiting selection by the bereaved. Altogether, there was enough drying firewood near the house for three or four hard winters into the future, but my father kept felling trees, sawing them up in a roar of chips and fumes, hauling in his harvest of logs. I sometimes saw it as an act of love, as if he had a premonition that the Lord would take him from us at some point in the near future, and he wanted to make sure his family didn’t freeze.

  When he grew tired of putting up stove wood, or when the precariousness of our money situation came into clear focus for him, my father would set out his traps in the woods, sometimes on land that didn’t belong to us. His late friend Mac Kins had taught him how to boil and paraffin the traps to keep the human scent off them. Setting them could be done only in winter, when the animals’ coats were full and when, as my father said, “they bring off a good price.” Beaver, fox, possum, coyote, otter, woodchuck, mink, fisher cat, weasel—even selling them to a less than fair buyer, these skins brought in significant cash, and, because of that, my father paid as little attention to the dates of the legal trapping season as he did to the NO TRESPASSING signs stapled up on trees at the border between our property and our neighbors’. “No one couldn’t say on you what you do and don’t do in the woods,” he told me, more than once. “Dad Paul told.”

  He fished, too, but wasn’t good at it. He used a bobbin and a worm in our stream, which had never been stocked and on which most other fishermen might have chosen to use flies and light tackle. On days when he was feeling less angry at people, he might take his cane, fishing pole, and a can of worms, go to the far side of town, and fish from the bridge that crossed the Connecticut. There he had better luck. Sometimes he’d bring home a walleye (“wally” he called them) or a large trout. My mother would cook it up, and we’d have a family feast, with a little talk, some wine for the adults and lemonade for me.

  In poor weather—sleet or hard rain—he drove to Weedon’s Bar, where he nursed a single draft beer for hours and made conversation with an acquaintance or two, people who shared his ideas about the government and the laws. He knew men who belonged to a local militia—the Granitemen, it was called—and he told me that on more than one occasion he’d been asked to join up. But he never did. It required a firearm, for one thing, and for another thing, it was too social an activity for him. Other people involved, meetings, training sessions, talk. Once, in one of his spurts of fatherly affection, he took me to Weedon’s with him. We sat at a table, not the bar, and he let me sip from his glass, and listen in on his conversation, and though I was under the legal drinking age, the owner made no complaint about it. My father wasn’t much for celebrating holidays or birthdays, but on the day before Christmas he’d go into the woods, cut down a balsam fir, and lean it in one corner of the house for a week. When I was younger, in the years before True Home and Country, he would occasionally make me a present. One birthday he carved a small bird out of a piece of maple and set it at my place at the table. He didn’t like to be touched or embraced, so I thanked him three times and left it at that. I have the carved bird to this day.

  My mother had come from a different background: a family that didn’t know the woods, a house with books and women in it, a father who hadn’t ended up in jail for crimes no one talked about. Unlike her husband, she could read well, and in certain moods she’d read aloud from the tabloids: stories about a mysterious epidemic of black babies being born in China, or a government conspiracy involving nuclear power, or the affairs of one celebrity or another. Someone famous was secretly homosexual. Someone else had a drug habit, or had given a baby away because it was black, or was actually a mass murderer. And so on. These accounts held the force of biblical truth for her and seemed to reinforce her sense of the chaotic nature of the world, as well as her good fortune in having married a man who liked living apart from it. Sometimes my mother would hum pieces of songs from her childhood, tunes with no real beginning or end, just a twirl of melody. She smoked as much as she could afford to, and drank a bottle of cheap wine when she was lonely, and she met her household responsibilities with some sense of discipline: buying and cooking the food and paying the bills with money orders from the post office. In certain moods, more common as I got older, she’d seem to float out of herself and walk around in a distracted way, mumbling, humming, whispering parts of sentences that made no sense. And she seemed to me to be excited by an odd power: saying and doing things that made her husband want to hit her—though, as far as I could tell, he never did that. In a kind of twisted foreplay, she’d lead him right to the edge of his patience, taunting him, ridiculing him, doing things (dropping cigarette ashes inside the truck when she smoked, boiling the eggs four minutes instead of five) she knew annoyed him, choosing the worst possible moment to remark on the shape of his face, his missing finger, the slant of his ears.

  I was a watcher, and I knew all this from years of observation, but what my parents actually thought about most of the time remained a mystery to me. They had a huge fear inside them, Aunt Elaine told me once. They lived as if enemies surrounded them on all sides, and they were terrified of being humiliated—for not being able to pay the property taxes or a doctor’s bill, by seeing a newspaper ad for a vacation they could never afford to take, by their clothes, their speech, the cough and stutter of our truck on the downtown streets. “Your father was brought up to be constantly afraid,” Aunt Elaine told me. “His father—Dad Paul, you knew him before he was sent upstate, didn’t you?—was a very odd man. He had your father with a woman twenty years older than he was and never lived with him until the woman died. He’d visit him at her house once a week, take him out in the yard and teach him to fight. People would drive by and see them wrestling in the dirt. When your father was just a teenager, Dad Paul would take him to visit prostitutes in Montreal. At his job, he’d pump gas and yell at the customers. You’d see him downtown, drunk, pounding on store windows. The whole town was terrified of him.”

  I’d been afraid of Dad Paul, too, and was still afraid of my father and mother at certain times. But I had decided during the night that no amount of fear—not of dousing or boying, or even of facing or hungering—was going to keep me from the church project. Running down inside me, very deep, was a stream of rebelliousness. For the most part, I worked hard to plea
se my parents and to offend God as little as I could. But there were moments when I found myself talking back to my mother and sometimes even my father, when I’d do something I knew they wouldn’t approve of—looking at a magazine in the school library, failing to say my prayers, sneaking a glance at a television set in a store window or at my aunt’s house. I had my protective shell of funny talk and shyness, but underneath that lived a wilder me, a girl who would take punishment, and take it, and take it, but who would never let go of herself all the way, never completely surrender.

  I heard the rumble of the school bus engine as it rounded the curve (Waldrup Road was so narrow and rutted and so icy in winter that Joanne the bus driver was not required to use it) and tried to make myself stop thinking about things that had no explanation. Joanne smiled at me when I climbed the steps, as if to signal that yes, spring had, in fact, arrived. On either side of the highway the hillsides were starting to go into bud. That dark, that cold, that ice, that snow piling up to the bottom of my bedroom window by mid-January, those gray skies—it took a few weeks of forsythia blossoms and free-running streams to make the people in our part of the world believe the fist of winter had really gone loose. Joanne was the first person to show a smile in springtime, the first spark of hope. I chewed my last bite of gingerbread and smiled back. The warm morning had brought out the wildness in some of my schoolmates. Walking down the aisle, I saw that my friend Cindy wasn’t on the bus—sick again, or trouble at home again—and that the boys in the back rows were punching and wrestling with each other as if a small war had broken out there. “Hey,” one of them called out, “Margie’s teachin’ Mr. Bronsante’s English class today, ain’t ya, Marge! I don’t can’t say why for!”