The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  Thirteen

  For as long as I could remember, I had heard my mother refer to Aunt Elaine as “my sister,” though, in fact, they were stepsisters. My mother was the child of a man her own mother never spoke about. She’d been eighteen months old when her mother moved in with Aunt Elaine’s father. The stepsisters were as different from each other as two people could possibly be. When my mother was paying for food at the market, or cooking something at the stove, or sitting poor-postured in the passenger seat of the pickup, it often seemed to me she was only half-present, that her real self, her spirit, lay hidden behind the disguise of her face and slim body. In certain kinds of light, I saw her as a skeleton or a ghost, the clothes and skin and flesh and hair just things that had been pasted on and could fall away with one shake. Even her eyes seemed to turn inward, most of her attention focused backward and down, as if she was looking for herself in there, or looking for a way out of the person she had become.

  Aunt Elaine, on the other hand, was like the black bears that passed through our yard in May and June when there wasn’t yet enough food for them in the deep woods. Not that she was particularly overweight. It was more a way she had of appearing to control the air around her, just the way the bears seemed to, a complete not-caring about what others thought, a large-scale unselfconsciousness.

  When she stood on the front step of our house that day—the day I was faced—there was the sense that you wouldn’t be walking past her without something happening. There was a bear on the front step and it had no natural predators. It wasn’t so much that she was about to attack you—black bears rarely hurt people—it was just that you somehow couldn’t ignore her, and you knew that, and the bear knew it, too.

  “What in God’s breath happened?” she asked when she had me at arm’s length again. But I knew she was sending the question back toward my parents and not at me.

  “She tried running out church,” my mother said. “Tripped. Gravel. Splat at her face. Big-chest girls like her shouldn’t to run.”

  Aunt Elaine kept moving her nurse’s eyes over the marks on me, moving her gaze across my cheeks, my closed eye, the blood on my lips. She was a few inches taller, but only because she was on the first step and I was standing on the dirt. “Is that true, Marjorie?”

  I heard my father slam the truck door. My mother was so close I could smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes. “No,” I said.

  “Majie!” my mother hissed. “No lying, you Majie!”

  “Is it true that you fell?”

  “No,” I said a second time. That word seemed to rise out of me like a bird that had escaped its cage. Ten, fifteen, seventeen years it had been held there behind thin metal lies and now it was out in the air. I said, “I got faced is true.” And, really, a new life began for me at that moment.

  “What is ‘faced’?”

  “Faced is tripped on the gravel in your face because you runned,” my mother said.

  I heard my father spit.

  “What is ‘faced,’ Marjorie? Tell me.”

  “Faced.” I was able to speak that one syllable before my mouth snapped closed and the words that were lined up behind my teeth all died. My good eye went sideways. I was no longer seeing my aunt, but the four shagbark hickory trees that stood next to each other near the stream. They looked, with their fraying dark skin, as if they had been whipped every week of their lives.

  Aunt Elaine took my chin gently in her fingers and turned my head back to her. She seemed to ask the question again with her eyes, and I felt the words again, pushing at the inside of my sore lips. The air around my head swirled with pain memories: dousing, hungering, boying. I almost wanted to reach up and swat them away, but then Aunt Elaine gave me the gentlest of shakes and the words broke free. “Faced is how somebody takes a paper bag over you in at the front of church and people come up. The people two-finger you into the bag, hard.”

  “It in receiving a penance,” my father spat out behind me.

  “Penance?” Aunt Elaine didn’t speak the word, she growled it. To me the sound seemed as hard as a frying pan. “Penance!”

  “Right with our religious. No one knows you to understand it so.”

  I could see Aunt Elaine only as a blur in front of me. There was something like electricity coming off her body. I half expected the brown and gray hair to go standing up away from her scalp. “I’m going to tell you now about understand,” she said, in a voice that wobbled with fury. “We’re going in the house and we’re going to sit at the table, all of us, and I’m going to tell you about understand.”

  I had never in my life heard a person speak that way to my father.

  Aunt Elaine held the door open with her arm. There was something like a command in the way she did it. I went inside and stood next to the table because there weren’t enough chairs for all of us. My mother came in, my father. Aunt Elaine let the screen door slap and followed my parents inside. She seemed, at that moment, three times as big as I remembered her. “Sit,” she ordered. “Marjorie. All of you. Sit.”

  For a second, I was sure my mother and father wouldn’t do it. My mother had a cigarette in her hand, and I expected to be told to light it in. My father slid one foot along the floor planks; he rubbed the stump of his index finger with his thumb.

  “Don’t smoke,” Aunt Elaine said. “And don’t dawdle.”

  Amazingly, my parents sat, though my father kept himself half turned away.

  Aunt Elaine came around behind me and put her hands on the back of my chair. “For this kind of thing,” she said in the frying-pan voice, “people go to jail. Do you know about that law, Curtis? Do you know about it, Emmy?”

  Out of the side of my working eye, I saw my mother and father look away from me, as if I was a dirty thing, dangerous to them in the way an infectious disease might be. I did not ever remember hearing my parents’ names spoken in that room. The names seemed to knock against the walls and the glass in the windows and then come echoing back over the table like the sound of frozen tree branches cracking on a winter night.

  “Do you?”

  “Not if the pastor what tells you to,” my father said through his teeth. I looked at him. He was squinting his eyes, slanting them down to the floor.

  “You believe that, don’t you?” Aunt Elaine told him. “You’re that much disconnected from reality that you believe it.”

  “Gone from out my house,” my father said.

  “Is that what you want, Curtis? Really? Because if I go from this house now, I don’t ever come back, and not only don’t I come back, but no money comes back with me, not Marjorie’s money, and not any more of my own. No money, no food, no clothes, no gasoline for the saw, no repairs for the truck. No lawyer when you need it, no bail, no insurance. Not anything. Is that what you want?”

  My parents didn’t speak. For me, it was the same as when my father took the plastic off the outside of the windows in spring. One sheet, then another, one opening-up after the next. Light in the house.

  “I have eighty dollars for you,” Aunt Elaine said, turning to my mother and then my father as she said it, her voice stronger in one ear and then the other. “Twenty dollars a week, which is your share of the money from what Marjorie earned for working a straight month.”

  “Majie,” my mother corrected her.

  “I am calling her by her name. Eighty dollars a month is nine hundred sixty dollars a year. I came to give you the eighty dollars because she has finished working one month. And I brought food—fried chicken in a box, apples, and bread—the way I always do. I’m going to give you the eighty dollars, and I’m going to tell you what is going to happen. Marjorie will not be hit again. Ever. Not by the preacher, and not by you. Not ever. I am going to give her money every week for buying clothes and things she needs, and you are not going to take it away from her for your own spending. When I get home, I am going to call the police and report what goes on at the church, without mentioning her name or your names. If you want to fight that, good, fine
, you go talk to the police about it, but I am going to close down the church. In two weeks I’m coming again with twenty dollars more, and I am going to take Marjorie out and have lunch with her, and look at her, and talk to her, and if I see the smallest mark on her from you, or hear the smallest little bad story about what you’ve been doing to her, then you are going back upstate, Curtis, to be with your dad. And, Emmy, you are going right with him to the woman’s side.” Aunt Elaine stopped for a breath. I could feel the back of the chair shaking but I didn’t know whether my aunt or I was causing it to shake. “Now,” Aunt Elaine said, moving her hands onto my shoulders. “If you have something to say back to me, you say it. It’s your house, Curtis, you’re right, and your and Emmy’s daughter here. But things get taken away from people who don’t care for them. Even dogs get taken now, when they’re badly treated. Dogs, never mind young women. You want to say something to me, you say it.”

  My mother tapped the mouth end of the unlit cigarette on the scratched-up wood between her hands. She looked down the length of the table at her husband, and then, just for an instant, at me. “Because God didn’t given you a girl for your own,” she said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “You want charge of ours.”

  “That’s what you think?”

  My mother nodded, once.

  “God bosses,” my father said, but I could hear a kind of crack in the words, a line in stone where it was weak, where you could break it by hitting it sharp with the hammer in a certain place. He was worried about the money. About how he would live without help from Aunt Elaine. Almost one thousand dollars a year, plus what Aunt Elaine gave them from her own pocket—that was too much money to let go of easily. “God bosses,” he repeated, his voice quiet and unsteady. “God needs a given penance.”

  “God gave you a child and you let someone do this to her,” Aunt Elaine said. “Look at her face, Curtis. Look at it, I’m saying. I should by all rights take her to the emergency room and report this to the police. I have a mind to do that. Look!”

  My father’s eyes slid over to my face for one second and jumped away.

  “God knows who gets a child,” my mother said. “God’s law makes it so.”

  “Should I talk to Chief Allans about God’s law?”

  At the third mention of the police, I felt the air crack around my ears.

  “Should I?”

  “Enh,” my father said, one syllable of surrender. He moved his chin to the side and down.

  I felt my aunt’s hands shaking on my shoulders, then felt them move away. I saw money being counted out onto the table. Eight tens, fresh from the bank, gray-green and perfectly unwrinkled. I watched my father try to keep his eyes away from the bills, but he couldn’t do it. On his left leg his hand was moving in quick jumps.

  The money sat on the table like a noise. “Marjorie, come outside,” Aunt Elaine said when she was finished. I thought, at first, that I wouldn’t go, that it would be too much to step back into the house and face my parents after Aunt Elaine had left, that I ought to make some gesture of loyalty to them, for the sake of my own survival. But I stood up, feeling cold air on the back of my neck. By the time I was standing in the dirt next to one of the woodpiles, looking at my aunt, my breath was coming as fast as if I had run all the way from the 112 Store.

  “Hold out your hand,” my aunt said. She put some more bills there, then folded my fingers up around them. She reached up and touched my face gently and I pulled back. “Honey, look at me. Do you want to come and live with me? Right now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you absolutely sure? I’ll take you in a second if you say yes. I have room. Are you sure you want to stay living here?”

  I nodded.

  My aunt waited, her head tilted up at me, her eyes going back and forth across my face. “If anything else like this happens. Just one time. Anything, you tell Sands and he’ll tell me, or you get to a phone and call me and I’ll come for you. Do you understand? No matter what time of the day or night.”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re not going to that church ever again.”

  “I don’t want of.”

  “You won’t. If your parents try to make you, you go to the store and call and I’ll come get you.”

  I wanted to tell her then what had happened the one time I’d run away and gone to her house, but there had been enough trouble for one day, and there was more trouble coming to me, I knew. I wanted to leave with my aunt, but I just could not make myself do that. Every leaf on every tree, every word, everything seemed to have a coating of fear hanging from it, as if the temperature had dropped thirty degrees and there had been an ice storm while we’d been inside. I was frozen almost into a solid block.

  “I’m going now. You’re working on Monday, tomorrow, right? If you’re not at work, I’m coming here. I’m going now and I’m going to call about the preacher. What is his name?”

  “Pastor Schect,” I said quietly.

  “Where is the church?”

  “Into Vermont. West Ober.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did this happen to you ever before?”

  I shook my head.

  “Does it happen to other people?”

  I shook my head again, and then changed my mind. “Twicet I saw.”

  “Does it hurt very much now?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t to say to the police about of my parents.”

  “I think I just will.”

  “Don’t to, kindly. My father then will be time upstate. And my mother will to have me alone.”

  My aunt got tears in her eyes then. For a few seconds there wasn’t much of the black bear in her, and I remember, just for that little time, that I felt like the stronger one of the two of us. Older even. I knew how the world worked and she didn’t. I could stand there and not cry and she couldn’t. Being tough was what people like us had to be proud of—boys and girls, both—instead of a good house or a good job or money, or other things. It has taken me all these years to see that, and to halfway let it go.

  “You put a cool washcloth on your eye now. And if you can’t see out of it tomorrow, you call me, understand?”

  “I will.”

  “And one more thing. Listen to me. The next time Sands asks if you want to go to Boston with him, you go, understand? No matter what it seems like, or what your parents are going to say about it, you just go. Even if you’re afraid, you go.”

  I promised I would, but I was surprised she knew he’d asked me. Still with water in her eyes, Aunt Elaine touched me on the shoulder with one hand, then got into her car and backed it up so it was facing out the driveway. She looked over at me one last time, as if she’d heard something, and at that moment I wanted to yell out to her to stop, to wait. But the fear of what my parents would do caught me in its cold fingers again, and the pride in being tough caught me, and in another second there was a small puff of dust behind the car and it was going up Waldrup Road, out of sight. I watched the dirt settle, and then I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I pushed the money down into my pocket and turned and walked into the house. My father wasn’t at the table. My mother was standing at the counter in a cloud of cigarette smoke, holding a leg of fried chicken with one hand. I was hungry but I knew I wouldn’t eat. As I went toward my room I heard my mother say, “Who’s gonto take a whippin’ now, you Majie? Now who’s gonto?”

  Fourteen

  There had been one other time in my life—much earlier—when someone had tried to help me the way Aunt Elaine tried that day. I learned about it only as an adult, on my private project, my research into the past. On my second or third trip back, I stopped in the cathedral for an hour of private prayer, and during that prayer I thought of looking up Mrs. Jensen, the woman who’d owned the 112 Store. She was in late middle age by then, and had sold the store, but she still lived in the town and I found her without any trouble and we sat in her living room and had a
cup of tea. During that conversation she happened to mention a man named Ronald Merwin, who, she said, had been the person responsible for my going to school. I’d never heard the name before that day and had never thought about why, after years of keeping me at home, my parents suddenly decided I could go to school.

  Merwin was an established painter with an apartment in New York City (I found him there, in his seventies and still painting). In search of a quiet country retreat, he’d purchased a cabin on twenty acres off Waldrup Road, and he lived there most of several summers, working on his abstract canvases, putting new siding and a new roof on the cabin, and taking long solitary walks up and down the eight miles of dirt road. If he followed the road northeast, it came to a dead end at the boundary of the state forest, and sometimes he hiked on the trails there. Walking in the other direction took him past our house and to Route 112.

  Merwin was a quiet, middle-aged man, divorced, childless, immersed in his art, and fond of solitude. If he passed anyone on his walks he’d say good morning or good afternoon, or he’d raise a hand in a polite wave, or, rarely, stop for a few minutes’ conversation. When I found him in New York, he told me that, more than once on those walks, he’d seen me out in the yard helping my father or playing at the stream. He waved to me but he said I only looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. He waved or nodded to my mother and father, also, but, unlike the other country people he encountered, they didn’t acknowledge him, sometimes even turned away so he couldn’t see their faces. He said I was a pretty child—long legs, light brown hair—and he remembered me and even occasionally put a partial image of me into his paintings.