During the summer when I was nine, Merwin happened to run into me in the 112 Store, where I’d gone with my mother. I don’t remember that encounter, but Mrs. Jensen did. Merwin noticed—he had a painter’s eye, he said, as a way of softening the observation, I think—that I was poorly dressed, even a bit dirty it seemed, and that when I spoke to my mother it was in a dialect of the English language he’d never before heard. My way of talking piqued his interest. Out of innocent curiosity, he began to walk more often toward Route 112, and to look for me and my parents as he passed. On one of those trips he saw something strange: me dressed as a boy, in huge work boots, huge overalls, and a cap, being ordered about the yard by my father in a series of short commands. We had some project going—rebuilding a shed, it seemed—and even from a momentary glance Merwin could see that my father was inept. Merwin was a decent carpenter and would have stopped and offered assistance, he said, except that when my father saw him, he hustled me inside.
This only made him more curious. A week or so later, he saw me in the store again: My mother was pushing me roughly out the door. He asked Mrs. Jensen about our family. Mrs. Jensen said we were an odd trio, that the pretty light-haired girl might even be mildly retarded, she couldn’t tell. As far as she knew, the girl never went to school.
“She has a strange way of talking, doesn’t she?” he said.
And Mrs. Jensen said, “Yes,” and kept her eyes on him for a moment, as if his interest seemed unhealthy to her, the probing eye of the uppity outsider, or as if in commenting on my speech he was casting a critical net over all the people who lived in those parts.
Curious as he was, Merwin might have chalked up everything to the eccentricities of rural existence, except that late one afternoon, just as the light was fading, he was driving past the house and happened to see me standing with my back to the stream. My father was emptying a bucket of water over my head. For a moment, he said, he thought it was the country equivalent of letting kids play in the spray of a fire hydrant. But the day was cool and rainy, and, from that distance, he thought he detected an expression of pain on my face. Just as he was about to pass, he saw me sprint away from the man—my father—who stood there, with the bucket held low in one hand, watching me go.
Merwin debated with himself that night, and the next day he made a call to the state social services agency. The call prompted an investigation. A caseworker came to the house—I have a memory of this woman speaking to us at the table. Many questions were asked of me and my parents, we all told careful lies, and in the end it was determined that I was not a victim of any serious abuse. However, my parents were informed they had to send me to school beginning that September. Not long after that, Ronald Merwin put his cabin and land up for sale and retreated to the city—no one knew exactly why; people thought he’d been happy there. But Merwin told me that my father had gone to his cabin one afternoon shortly after I started school and run his chain saw through the railing on his deck and the casing of his front door—with Merwin watching, horrified—and told him not to call the police, and not to come back the following summer, or, next time, my father said, he was going to “send the saw through halfway on your arms.”
“I suppose it was cowardly of me,” Merwin told me, sitting in his Chelsea apartment with a glass of beer in front of him and the sunlight showing a white forest of hair sprouting from both ears, “not to call the police and charge your father with assault or damaging property or something of that sort. I suppose I should have stayed and fought. But I had gone there for a peaceful escape, a place to work quietly, and there wasn’t much peace for me there after that.… I’m glad, at least, that it all resulted in your going to school. I’m glad you made the effort to find me. I’m sorry.”
In my first hours of my first day at school, the teacher realized I couldn’t even identify all the letters of the alphabet. I knew some numbers but couldn’t do even the simplest math problems. They asked questions about my family. I made up simple lies, said my parents were shy people, good to me, said they wanted me to learn but had been afraid to send me on the bus to school. The teachers did some tests, and the tests showed I had a capable mind. I was put in a special class. By the end of the first year I’d learned to read and write and solve basic addition and subtraction problems. And I’d made a friend, a girl named Cindy Rogers.
After that, year by year, with the help of several caring teachers, I closed the gap between myself and the other kids my age. By the end of my second year—I was ten years old—I could read simple chapter books. I stayed in the special class because the teachers were concerned that I’d be socially and academically out of place in fourth grade. Cindy and I were inseparable.
By the time we reached high school age, Cindy was still in special classes for part of the day but I had climbed to within a grade of the other boys and girls my age. I was in the bottom section in all areas of study, and nothing the teachers tried could shake me free of my way of speaking. But I could read capably, I could understand what I read, and whenever I handed in a written assignment it was in something close to standard English. There were more interviews and evaluations. There were arguments among the teachers and administrators as to how hard they should push me toward proper speech. Some of my classmates made fun of me—it was really not much worse than what they did to a few of the other boys and girls—and some didn’t, but through it all I was happy to walk to the bus stop in the morning, happy to have a friend, happy to be around adults who were interested in learning and treated me well. There was always a strain between the way people wanted me to talk at school and the way my parents expected me to talk at home. From the start, my mother and father watched carefully to see if going to school would change me. When, in the beginning, I came home with books under my arm and said things like “I brought them home to read” instead of “I broughten them to home for a read,” they willow-whipped me, six strokes. That was enough for me: It was not a hard choice between having a few kids make fun of you and having the skin at the back of your legs ripped raw with a braid of three thin willow branches. Not a hard choice at all.
When the teenage years arrived, though I was poorly dressed and poorly groomed, a few boys started to show an interest. One boy was a bit kinder than the others. His name was Aaron Patanauk—nephew to the welder—and if none of his friends was close by he would sometimes make a little conversation with me. Aaron and his family and his uncle had been regulars at Pastor Schect’s church for a while, and then stopped going. He was the first person I ever saw faced. I’d even walked to the front of the church with my parents and watched as they poked their fingers into the bag; I still remember the noises he made, whimpers and quick shrieks. He was a big gangly boy whose arms and legs moved like puppets’ limbs, hinged at the joint.
Aaron was sixteen and a half in ninth grade. During the summers when I was fourteen and fifteen, I had sometimes been allowed to ride my bicycle to Cindy’s house, which was just off Route 112 in the opposite direction from town. Aaron lived nearby, and sometimes when he saw me there he drove over in the truck his uncle had given him and asked if I wanted to take a ride. I always declined. Cindy and I called it the Ugly Truck because the driver and passenger doors were gray and the rest of the truck a rose red, and the whole thing was dented and patched in a dozen places, the front seat torn, the tires almost bald. The next summer when Cindy and I went walking to the pond behind her house, Aaron followed along on foot. Sometimes Cindy left us alone, and Aaron and I talked a bit, and twice I let him kiss me, and once put his hands up inside my shirt. Somehow my father learned about it—I never understood how; Aaron must have told someone, who told someone else, and word had eventually circled around to my father or mother—and in a fit of anger he smashed my bicycle to pieces against one of his wood piles and forbade me from ever going to Cindy’s house again. The next year Aaron had some trouble and went away to a place we called Robertson’s Farm, which was a kind of minor-league jail for teenage country boys. He said h
e’d sent me some letters from Robertson’s, but I never received them.
In any case, when I came to school on the day after my facing, I rode with Cindy on the bus, as always. She asked only one quick question about what had happened. I answered with one quick lie. She had odd parents, too, and after the bicycle-smashing incident we’d fallen into an unspoken agreement not to talk about what went on in our families. My right eye was closed and purple, and there were small round bruises, like dark pennies, on my cheeks and throat and around my eyes. My top lip was still swollen. Things are different these days, of course. Teachers are more aware of abuse in the home, more willing to involve the police. But twenty years ago, at least where we lived, they would sometimes choose to ignore the signs of children being hurt. I was happy enough to be ignored; I preferred it, in fact. When Mrs. Land, my third-period teacher, asked about the injuries, I told her what I’d told Cindy—that I’d been in the woods near the end of the day and had run straight into a tree with a lot of low branches. It was an obvious lie; the other girls and boys laughed. After class Mrs. Land sent me to see the assistant principal, Mrs. Eckstrom.
I’d been to Mrs. Eckstrom’s office twice before, both times for conversations about my speech problems. I didn’t like the woman, didn’t like the solid-color dresses she wore that always came exactly to the middle of her kneecap, didn’t like the sound of her heavy-heeled shoes in the corridor, didn’t like the way she made me wait outside her office where passing students could see and then ordered me inside and made me sit facing her across a desk with nothing on it but a sheet or two of paper and two perfectly lined-up pens.
“What’s this now?” Mrs. Eckstrom demanded. Her eyebrows made dark lines across the top part of her face. “Some kind of fight?”
“Nothing kind of,” I said.
“ ‘Nothing kind of’? What language would that be? The language of the woods? If you are a student here you will speak properly.”
“Yes,” I said.
“What happened?”
“I had a fall.”
“On school property?”
“No.”
“Do you need to see the nurse?”
I shook my head. The palms of my hands were wet so I tucked them under the tops of my thighs.
“What then?”
“I’m trying for … I’m trying to talk different now. Mrs. Land said to tell.”
“To tell you.”
“No.” I pointed at Mrs. Eckstrom across the desk. “To tell for you.”
Mrs. Eckstrom fixed her eyes on me, her gaze flicking to the bruises and closed eye. One blink. A widening of the nostrils. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Do you know that expression?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what your grandfather went to jail for?”
“No.”
“You truly don’t?”
“No.”
“Well let me give you three pieces of advice then. First, stop drinking. Second, learn to speak correctly. Third, if the day ever comes that you have children of your own, male children especially, and if your grandfather is back in circulation by then, keep them away from him. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“Go.”
At lunch, Aaron sat directly across the table from me in the cafeteria. His boxy head was tilted to one side and he waited until no one else was around and then said, “Looks like you got faced.”
“Aren’t you a smart to of notice.”
Aaron smiled. “Hurts, don’t it? But only a few days. Then they usually don’t never face anybody twicet.”
“I think Pastor Schect is going to call some trouble on for himself when he keeps to facing kids.”
“Your dad gonna fix him?”
“Somebody would.”
“People worry about your dad, you know. Word is he kilt a man when he was younger an me.”
“Who lied that?”
“My uncle. Only it ain’t a lie. Maybe he kilt other people, too.”
“He never kilt,” I said, but inside myself I had the same feeling that had come over me when Mrs. Eckstrom mentioned Dad Paul. It was as if the walls of my mind were crashing out sideways, creating a new, larger room, and the new room had bureaus and closets in it, and the shelves and drawers contained secrets coiled like snakes.
“He never about hits me,” I said, which was not exactly the full truth, but I was used to saying it to the teachers and was able to repeat it to Aaron with some conviction.
“It was a long time ago, but my uncle says it happened.”
“Your uncle hasn’t a lie maker ever either, right?”
“Girl chaser not a lie maker,” Aaron said. Another smile. His top front teeth folded one over the other. “The talk-funny girl,” he said, but almost kindly. “Everybody’s still goin’ on about the big church you’re building in town. It looks nice.”
“I make some money on it.”
“Sure. You’re lucky. Could I drive you home someday after you’re done working?”
“So you can put your hands up at my shirt, that’s why.”
“Aren’t you smart to guess,” he said, and he smiled and stood up, with the hinges flexing in his legs, and he went across the cafeteria like a puppet worked by strings from above, lifting his knees and swinging his shoulders, leaning his boxy head to one side.
When I went to work that day, I could tell Sands was looking at the marks on my face, and I was glad he didn’t mention them. But the facing and having to lie about it had stirred a small circle of anger in me. Something had started to shift and change. The few minutes with Mrs. Eckstrom had made me think, again, about the way I talked, made me think about Dad Paul and my father. The half hour with Aunt Elaine had upset me at a depth of emotion where I wasn’t used to spending time. Many years earlier, I had set a heavy blanket over the feelings in that deep place, but now I felt them—just started to feel them—moving their arms and legs and pushing up toward the light. I tried hard to keep from thinking about what my parents would do, what kind of punishment was boiling now in the stew of humiliation in my father’s mind. After years of practice, I was very good at concentrating on the present moment—schoolwork, housework, and now stonework—and putting off the inevitable hour of penance until it actually arrived. But something was starting to change.
That week, because the days were growing longer, Sands asked if I could work an extra half hour each afternoon—he’d pay me more, of course, he said, or that extra half hour could go to pay off the boots. I agreed without having to think about it. The cathedral was starting to have a shape. In the section we were building (which, Sands said, was going to be only about a third of the eventual size, but he wanted to have one part of the building roofed in before the snow came), the walls were as high as my chest. I could see the outline of the front door, and the lower part of the two windows in the front wall, and three each, evenly spaced, along the sides. At the base of those windows, we had to lay down what Sands called “sill ribbons,” long pieces of red sandstone that contrasted in a way I loved with the grays and browns of the rest of the stones. The sills were too heavy for him to lift up that high on his own, and I couldn’t lift them at all, so we built a system of moveable wooden steps, four feet wide, to help us get the sill ribbons in place. Sands lifted one end up onto the first step. I held it there by leaning all my weight against it to be sure it didn’t slip. He went over to the other end of it, said, “Ready?” and then lifted while I held my side.
Little by little, with time allowed for Sands to rest, we moved the sill up onto the top step of the makeshift stairway. I prepared a small batch of mortar, my face so sore in the gritty wind I was nearly crying into the mixture, and Sands showed me how to trowel it evenly onto the layer of stones where the sill would rest. When that was done, it wasn’t hard to move the sandstone across and onto the mortar. Sands checked it with his level, tapped it a bit this way or that with the heel of the trowel handle, then we stood back and admired the work.
“Sure,” I said. “So the water can run away out, if while it rains.”
Sands looked at me the way he sometimes did, a way that partly pleased me and partly made me uncomfortable. I thought it might be the way an older brother would look at me, if I’d had one. “You’re smarter than you act,” he said.
“Same on you,” I said, but again he missed the joke, and again I told myself to keep my comments within certain boundaries, not to forget that he was my boss and could take the job away at any time. There wasn’t another adult on earth I felt I could joke with, not even Aunt Elaine, but something in Sands brought out a different part of me.
“Why, though?” he said, still looking.
I kept my eyes on the windowsill and shrugged. “If you have a like for school, you don’t show, that’s all.”
Sands watched me for another few seconds. “Why not?”
“You’re not of as smart as you look, for asking that.” He laughed but didn’t look away. “Your father talks like you do.”
“Same as.”
“And your mother, too?”
“Not so as much but sure.”
“Did they send you to school when you were first of the age to go?”
“I’m of my same grade except one now.”
“Right, but did they send you?”
“They taughted me home until I was nine. I learned cooking, all the trees’ names, things for fishing, to cutting wood.”
“Those are good skills to know.”
“Reading now I like. In my room a lot of times I do it if I have on a book from the library at school.” He seemed to be watching me in a different way, peering down inside me, and the whole conversation was making me feel I had tiptoed out onto a high wire over the Connecticut River. I didn’t know if it was wiser to go forward to the far bank or retreat. “Now we can might lift the other one,” I said.
The Talk-Funny Girl Page 14