The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  In the 112 Store parking lot, with my backpack on my lap and my fingers on the door handle, I said, “Thank you,” as I always did. And then I added, “For on the ride and the job too.”

  “When school gets out you can work more hours if you want. More money, too.”

  “Thank you,” I said a second time, but by then I wasn’t sure of my voice anymore. I wanted to say something about my father, to explain him to Sands—the way he looked, the way he talked, the way he acted—to apologize for him and for not being able to go to Boston, but the words just wouldn’t come out of my throat.

  “And I’ll ask you again about Boston. Another time. You’d be welcome to bring along a friend … if she’s skinny enough to fit on the seat here.”

  “Okay,” I said. I opened the door.

  “That was a little joke, but I meant it about the friend.”

  “All right then.”

  “What’s dowsha?” he said when I was standing on the gravel with the door still open.

  I squinted my eyes as if he’d said something I hadn’t quite heard. The gesture felt to me exactly like telling the lie had felt. It caused a particular kind of sourness to run up into my mouth.

  “What your father said to you at the end. ‘Dowsha.’ What did it mean?”

  “I didn’t listen on it,” I said, and I thanked him again, quickly, before he could say anything else about it or change his mind about my job. I closed the door and walked away.

  Eleven

  At that time of year, the middle of May, the blackflies fill the air, as Aunt Elaine says, like pepper grains sprayed out of a fire hose. They like the damp, and the cool, and places where the water runs, and they swarm around people’s faces as if they’ve been waiting all winter for the taste of human flesh. Mosquitoes you can hear and kill fairly easily, but blackflies are small, quiet, and quick. The best you can do is swing your arms around or hope for a breeze to push them off. Sometimes they get into your mouth and you swallow one. “The price we pay for living in a great place like this,” I often heard people say about the blackflies. They said it, too, about the long winters, the twenty-below-zero nights, about frost heaves on the road, and mud season, and power outages caused by falling trees in ice storms, about the flocks of tourists who come in early October to see the leaves change and clog the roads. There were, I sometimes thought, a lot of high prices to pay for living there.

  That afternoon, while I was walking away from the 112 Store along the highway, the blackflies were especially bad. There were times when a driver passing a pedestrian waving arms around her face in May would stop and offer a ride. It is fairly typical of that part of the world, where, even now, strangers often stop to help a stranded driver push a car out of a snowbank, and where, when I was a girl and before the abductions, you’d still occasionally see someone hitchhiking without being afraid. But I never accepted those offers. Even before the girls were taken I had been afraid to do that.

  That day no one stopped. With the blackflies swarming around me, I hurried past Warners’, and Patanauk’s, and the two houses, then made the left onto Waldrup Road and slowed down. I didn’t know what effect my father’s trip to the work site would have on the mood of the household, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. Sometimes he said he’d douse me and then he seemed to forget or have a change of heart. Sometimes, after an embarrassment or an argument or a bad moment with my mother, he’d fall silent for a day or two, and I could feel the anger and the humiliating memory growing inside him. And then he would act. You never knew. My parents were like gasoline spread around a room—there was the sharp smell of danger, the threat that something might erupt, but it could just as easily evaporate as explode.

  Lately, my mother had started throwing up in the bathroom—from all the years of drinking wine, I suspected. It hadn’t made her any easier to live with. On top of that, my father’s mood usually turned sour in spring, when the soft earth and bugs made it more difficult to work the woods, and the uplifted spirits of everyone else formed a sunny background to his belief that life was made up of nothing but disappointment and insult.

  I was sure of this: Anything having to do with money carried the potential for trouble. So I wasn’t surprised to step into what felt like an ominous quiet in the house. I could smell food being cooked and knew instantly what it was: beans and baked potatoes. That meant we’d come to the point in the month where there wasn’t enough money for meat. My father’s store of homemade venison sausage had run out. The money from the check had almost run out. This was the worry that had driven him to come to the site; I understood that now. I knew he’d spent money on chewing tobacco that should have been spent on something else, perhaps a pound of bacon or hamburger, but that he hadn’t wanted to face Sands without that prop, without his good hat; hadn’t wanted to drive his loud, rusted-out, ten-year-old truck to the site and ask somebody he didn’t even know to pay his daughter an amount he wasn’t even sure of. It had been a big event for him—dressing up, going to a store, leaving his cane in the truck, and forcing himself to walk through town to where his daughter was employed, while he wasn’t and hadn’t been for years. The few minutes with Sands—so big and young and unintimidated—had been an enormous humiliation for him, and it had been smoldering in his mind all the hours since. I knew that without looking directly at him where he sat, his chair angled away from the table, the hat and tobacco gone, his eyes cast down and to the side and fixed there, while his fingers jiggled on his legs.

  I helped my mother by putting out the bowls and spoons and then serving the food into them. My father didn’t turn his chair to face us as he ate and made no eye contact. No meat, no meat, no meat—that was the chorus running through his thoughts, I was sure of it. That and the idea of Aunt Elaine with cash money in her hand while his family ate beans and baked potatoes. I kept my eyes down. I listened to the sound of fork tines scraping the potato skins for the last bits of white; I heard peeper frogs whistling in the stream outside. It took us only minutes to finish the meal. I brought the bowls to the sink and washed them, turning them upside down on a dish towel to dry. My father went out to his woodpile. My mother told me to light in a Prime, then sat tightly squeezed into a corner of the ratty sofa, surrounded by smoke.

  I retreated to my room and lay down on my stomach so that the pillow pressed against the place where I felt hungry. Outside my window, the peepers’ song moved up and down in a slow, whistling rhythm and I could hear the bang … bang of my father’s maul, regular as a clock. I imagined going to Boston in Sands’s truck and eating with him in a restaurant there. I thought he probably wasn’t playing any kind of a trick on me, but even if he was, it almost didn’t matter.

  Twelve

  It seemed strange to me that we went to the service that Sunday, because usually when my parents had come to the end of their money for the month they stayed home. Even if we skipped the luxury of the breakfast buffet at Mimi’s—which we surely would—there was the two dollars for the collection basket and the cost of gas to consider. But when I’d been awake only a few minutes, my mother put her head in past the doorjamb and told me to dress for church, so I did. We made the forty-minute drive in a light, steady rain, the smoky inside of the cab as gray as the overcast sky. In the Quonset hut there were only about half as many people as on a typical Sunday, and I suspected some of the other families had run out of money, too. On Pastor Schect’s face I thought I could see ripples of anger bubbling his skin from the inside, pressing against his eyes, as if the rows of empty chairs were taunting him.

  As he often did, Pastor Schect began the service by walking back and forth in front of us, head lowered, arms hanging limp at his shoulders, his voice little more than a mumble that seemed to evaporate into the air before it reached the arched metal ceiling. But after a time—and this, too, was typical—as if he had needed only to warm up his vocal cords, Pastor lifted his eyes and strengthened his voice, and stood still facing us. He raked his wounded gaze across the empty chairs a
nd the handful of attentive faces. “Jesus Christ the Lord of Lords, what did he do when there were sinners amongst the youths nearby him? What did he do?!” Pastor Schect shouted those last words, the veins in his neck and forehead bulging and his dyed hair making small jumps on his head. A little boy in front laughed at the sight. Pastor Schect looked straight at the boy and shouted, “He stoneth them, say!” so forcefully that the boy burst into tears and wrapped both arms around his mother’s leg. Pastor Schect went over and stood behind the homemade pulpit. He slapped the palm of his hand down on it, and the bang! echoed around the church. “Stonethed them! Let he cast the first stone! Let he!” Pastor jabbed himself in the chest with a straight index finger. “It would be better for the children, say, if they had a mill hung around their necks and were dropped in the river, it tells in the Bible. Isn’t it?”

  Men and women nodded solemnly, but I noticed that a certain kind of stillness had fallen across my parents. They weren’t moving at all; they seemed not to be breathing. The silence came off them like the charred smell after a house fire, and I puzzled over it, almost to the point of not paying attention to Pastor Schect’s words. Something was different. Something wasn’t right.

  “So we come forth in saving penance,” he was saying. “When you have a headache, you are saving penance, say! When you cut yourself with a knife. When you bang yourself and hurt, the pain is for a penance. Bad backs are for a penance, say. Bad backs! All the cancers are our penances being saved, say!”

  He stopped. He lifted his face to the ceiling, pushed out his lips, and his eyes seemed to go as empty as the dozens of empty chairs. His voice dropped so that he was almost humming the words. “But sometimes that God-given penance isn’t enough, say. Not enough. Sometimes the Lord of Gods wants more out of us. Suffer the little children, said Jesus Christ the Lord of Lords. Suffer the little children to our penance!”

  He closed his eyes as if in ecstasy, and at that moment I understood where everything was leading, why my parents had come to the service despite the money situation, why they were so still, what Pastor Schect was talking them toward. One drop of urine went into my underwear. I squeezed my legs together. I made my hands tight into fists and fought down an urge to sprint for the door.

  It was three or four more seconds before Pastor Schect went up on his toes and shouted, “Which parents among them, say, have a penance child today? A sacrifice! A child who must be faced!?”

  I noticed that my father’s arm moved a few inches, then flapped back down at his side. I felt a sweep of relief for all of one second before I realized my mother was raising her arm, so slowly that I wanted to reach out and take hold of it. I watched Pastor Schect’s eyes turn and fix on my mother’s hand, her fingers pressed tightly together, the elbow straight, the back of the hand slanted toward her as if she was a smart pupil who knew the answer. I squeezed my legs and hands to keep myself from running.

  “Come ye then, say,” Pastor Schect yelled in a victorious voice. There wouldn’t be much money in the woven basket on that day, but there would be a facing. A facing would help his reputation spread. Soon the multitudes of grateful parents would come, having found, at last, a God-sent man who could help them tame their children. That was Pastor Schect’s entire strategy, a strategy that came from the fact that, deep down inside him, he could not bear to see a child who was beyond his control. I understand that now. I have thought about it a thousand times during all these years. I’ve felt the same feelings in myself at bad moments with my own children, maybe all parents feel it—do what I want you to do, don’t disobey, don’t disregard me—but in him it was children in general, all children, and the feeling was intense beyond describing. He was smart enough to have an intuition that other adults felt the same, and he had staked out his corner of the spiritual territory as the pastor who could fix all those terrible kids, who understood what trouble they caused, what feelings of frustration they raised. He had an answer for that.

  From a shelf inside the pulpit he took a plain paper shopping bag and held it over his head. I felt my mother’s hand on the back of my neck, the fingers hot. I had a sense—I didn’t know where it came from—that my father might shout out “No,” just then, might take his wife’s hand, remove it from my neck, and tell Pastor Schect that she’d made a mistake, they didn’t have such a child, not this week. No. But in all the years we’d been going there for services, no one had ever challenged Pastor Schect, no adult and no child, and in another moment I felt my father’s hands on my shoulders, turning me, and I kept my eyes on my mother’s denim shirt as we walked out of the aisle and up to the front of the church. I forced myself not to urinate, not to move my eyes from the blue and white threads of the cloth covering my mother’s thin back, not to run.

  “Name!” Pastor Schect yelled when we were standing in front of him. He had his back to the congregation now and I could see them studying me, wondering what my terrible sin had been.

  “Majie Richards,” my mother said, almost proudly.

  “Sin?”

  “Disobey,” my father said, but I heard a tremble in his voice, something to match the muscles in my legs. For one last second I hoped he might rescue me.

  Pastor Schect shook the brown grocery bag once, violently, so it opened with a snapping sound. He lifted it up high again to allow the congregation a better view. And then, with a ceremonial flourish, he brought the bag down over my head so the open edges of it rested against my collarbones and the back of my neck. There was a small hole near my mouth, but even taking in short, fast breaths, I couldn’t quite get enough air through it. I felt my mother’s fingers holding the bag in place, and I knew Pastor Schect must have waved his hand then, because I heard a scraping of chair legs against the concrete floor, and clanking metallic noises as the chairs were pushed back and knocked against each other. I heard footsteps, a little girl starting to cry. A few drops of pee went into my underwear. “If ever you get faced,” Aaron had told me once, “just keep your eyes and your mouth real tight closed and pull down your chin so somebody by accident or on purpose don’t hit your apple.” So I did that. I listened to the sounds of the shoes and boots on the cement floor. The girl was still crying. Someone stopped in front of me. I felt my parents’ hands go tight on my arms and then heard a woman’s voice, “Go, sin no more.” The woman jammed two rigid fingers hard into the bag and hit me just beneath my right eye. I made a small noise; I couldn’t help myself.

  “Go, sin no more,” a man said next. He poked me hard, too, right in the eyelid, and I cried out and tried to lift my arms but they were held down against my sides.

  “Silence, sinner,” Pastor Schect ordered.

  One after the next—probably fifteen adults on that day—people came up and poked two straight fingers into the paper covering my face. There were some who didn’t hit with much force or who purposely aimed for my forehead, where it would hurt least. But my lips were hit several times, my right eye, my cheeks, the tip of my nose. Someone hit me in the throat, and I coughed, squeezed my hands so tight that the nails, even worn down by the stonework, cut into my callused palms. The last person, a woman muttering words I didn’t understand, hit me straight in the mouth and I felt the tip of one fingernail go between my lips and hard against my teeth. I tasted blood. I couldn’t stop crying then, couldn’t stop my legs from shaking.

  Pastor Schect made me wait inside the darkness of the bag, let me wonder if there were more people in line or if he would call them all up for a second turn. I felt my father squeeze my right wrist, three quick squeezes, a signal that it was over, and then Pastor shouted out, “Go, Majie Ree-shard, sin no more, say!” And the people answered him in unison. “Go, sin no more!” And I felt the bag—it was torn and bloodstained by then—lifted up over my head. The light hurt the one eye I could keep open. I gulped in big breaths of air. I couldn’t look at anyone. Pastor touched me on top of the head in a blessing, and then I was aware of nothing else until I was outside the church with my mother and fath
er, and I could see my father’s truck, a blurred red shape in the rain. My lips and nose were bleeding, but not very badly. I couldn’t see out of my right eye and felt the throbbing pain in a dozen different places. But I didn’t cry and I didn’t speak and I didn’t turn my good eye to look at them.

  “There’s not no money for Mimi’s today but at Pastor’s he’s having people on to coffee and so.”

  It seemed to me that my mother expected an answer from me, but I wouldn’t give it.

  “No,” my father said, after a few seconds. “To home.” We got in the truck and pulled out of the lot so fast the tires spit stones.

  The rain stopped. The pain in my face grew stronger, and the smoke from my mother’s cigarette made me close both eyes. I didn’t let my body touch any part of my parents’ bodies. Every time the truck went over a bump in the road the pain ricocheted around the bones of my face, but I kept my mind fixed on the cathedral, the work that waited for me there. I went deep inside myself to a place where the pain seemed distant, and the memory of the humiliation only circled and circled without touching down. I went deep and tried to speak a prayer to God to ask forgiveness for everything I had done wrong in my life. But God’s face didn’t appear to me then, and the words wouldn’t come.

  At last, the truck turned onto Waldrup Road and bounced along there, making the pain shoot through my lips and eyes and the skin of my bruised cheeks. I opened my eye just as my father was turning into the driveway, and what I saw, as if in a vision, was Aunt Elaine’s car parked in front of our house. My aunt was standing on the front step. I heard my father mutter, and I wondered if he’d turn the truck around and drive away. But he pulled into the yard and snapped the key to off. For one moment we were still and quiet in the cab, the three of us, and I wondered how I would explain myself to my aunt. But then something shifted inside me—I will never understand why it happened then. Maybe the facing was the work of God, after all, a blessing in thick disguise, baptism into a new life. Maybe in a strange, sick way, that’s what it was. I followed my mother out the passenger side, but then she hesitated there and I pushed past her toward the front of the house. I felt my parents lagging behind. I forced myself to keep moving forward, stepping through a dense fog of fear and old habit. Aunt Elaine was staring at me. When I reached the steps, she held me away from her at arm’s length, running her eyes over my face, then she wrapped her arms around me and hugged me very tight.