The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  The trees I saw out the side window were similar to those I saw at home, though there were more pine, spruce, and hemlock at that altitude, with white birch mixed in. There were some MOOSE CROSSING signs, and high-tension wires, too. Now and again I saw a house on a hillside, a lawn cut out of the woods around it, cars or a truck in the driveway. Once, a swimming pool. I swiveled my head to watch as it fell behind. Sometimes as we drove I could see towns from above, and I could tell the way they’d been built around factories and churches, the flat gray roofs and pointed steeples, the roads coming together. Pastor Schect didn’t allow movies or TV; he was very strict about those things and mentioned them often in his sermons. But I’d seen television several times at Cindy’s house before my parents had forbidden me to go there, and sometimes at school there would be a movie. At Aunt Elaine’s, when my aunt and mother were in the kitchen preparing the Thanksgiving meal and my father was pacing the backyard spitting tobacco and muttering, I sometimes turned on the TV and watched for a little while with the voices muted. It was one of my small rebellions. In the 112 Store, in the pharmacy downtown, and in the library at school, I’d looked at magazines and seen New York and other places, photographs from other countries. I saw girls my own age dressed in fancy clothes, sitting together in a restaurant, laughing, and I read the letters they wrote about skin problems, boyfriends, making out, and trouble with their parents, who wanted them home at a certain hour after a date. I studied those pictures and letters for many minutes at a time, committing them to memory, building around them whole imaginary worlds. And at moments I felt myself drawn toward those worlds like the big pale luna moths at my window screen on a July night.

  “I don’t for why know I’m afraid,” I said to Sands. “Because of there could be the black people maybe. Other kinds of, too.”

  “I’m half-black.”

  I was only partly surprised. Probably more surprised at the easy way he said it than the fact itself. Aaron had said something about it, and on some level, I’d known from the moment I’d first seen Sands that he wasn’t exactly a white man. Dark-skinned men and women were exotic to us, tourists with New York license plates, pictures in a textbook or a magazine, one or two families here and there. “Your mother or of your father was, which person?”

  “My father.”

  “You see them at town on days,” I said. “Going back at New York from after skiing the mountain, or driving for the leaves color. They eat, they get gas to the cars. For a while there was one black girl at ninth grade where I go at school … The kids wouldn’t make laughing at you and that?”

  “Not so much where I lived, no.”

  I wanted to ask him then where he had lived, what kind of place it was where you could be half-black and not laughed at, not chased out of the school, not hit or spit on or have your dress ripped open from behind, but I was still hearing the matter-of-fact tone of his voice when he told me. We went some miles without either of us speaking, and I slid my eyes sideways to examine, for the hundredth time, his skin and hair and mouth.

  “Do you know …,” Sands said, and then he hesitated, glanced at me across the seat, turned a dial on the dashboard to bring a bit of air into the cab. I was sure he was going to go on and tell me more about black people, until he said, “About sex and all that?”

  That question changed the mood inside me. It made me feel young. Made me suspect him again after I thought I’d completely gotten past that. Trying not to let him see, I moved over another inch closer to the door. People said the girl who’d been kidnapped and killed across the river—maybe all the girls—had been abducted by a black man. I’d heard that at school. It had made another spot on my mind. My thoughts about Sands shifted completely, as if a bank of clouds had glided in suddenly across what had been, only seconds before, a clear blue sky. A certain voice was activated in my inner ear and the voice said that this was exactly the way a person who kidnapped someone would act: talking to you in order to get you into his truck, preparing it for weeks, step by step, letting you say no first and then getting you to trust him and then asking again. Tricks like that took time, which was why the girls had been disappearing at the rate of one only every five or six months. The man would trick you into his truck like that, and then he’d start talking about sex. It seemed to me that I’d read about this in one of the magazines.

  “I know for what means a rape is.”

  Sands sent me a puzzled look, pinching up his face almost the same way he did when he banged his finger between two stones. A terrible quiet rose up between us then. He made the truck go faster.

  “I know for it hurts,” I went on, because, even raised on silence as I had been, I couldn’t bear a silence like that one. “I’m not so young.”

  Again Sands squeezed his face. I saw three lines of wrinkles to the side of his eye, and for once he looked older than the boys I knew. After another few seconds he said, “You sound like you think I asked that because I want to have sex with you.”

  “Don’t it?”

  “You sound like you think I’m going to hurt you.”

  “You made speeded the truck up.”

  He laughed then, in just the way a kidnapper would laugh, a man who had fooled you into trusting him, and then took you away and raped you and killed you and threw you dead in the weeds at the side of a logging road for a hunter to find the next year. I know it was illogical and foolish of me to be thinking like that—Sands was ten times more deserving of trust than, for example, Aaron Patanauk. But Aaron was my own kind. White. Shy. Small-town. Bad, yes, but the kind of bad I knew. For all his kindness, Sands’s way of being in the world was an alien creature to me.

  “I just asked because I wanted to be sure you knew, so that nothing happened to you, so that you didn’t have bad information about it, that’s all.”

  “I’m not for a little young of a girl. I’m not for slow in at school.”

  “I know you’re not. If you want me to stop talking about it, I will.”

  I said nothing. I watched the skin near his eyes and then the tendons of his wrist as he squeezed the steering wheel.

  “I was molested as a boy. Do you know what that is?”

  “Everyone person knows it.”

  “A man—he was a minister—did sexual things to me when I was ten and eleven. I was asking because I wouldn’t ever want things like that to happen to you, that’s all.”

  “Nothing of that didn’t happen on me. And wouldn’t of neither because my father would to kill the person if he ever.”

  “I don’t think it will happen. If it does, you should always tell someone. Tell your aunt, or me, or a teacher. Anyone you really trust.”

  I thought about that for a moment, searching my list of adult acquaintances for one of them I could imagine talking to about such a thing. I said, “Nothing of that happened.”

  “You said that. Okay.”

  “And I’m not any of ten years old, in the case if you didn’t see.”

  Sands squeezed the wheel and couldn’t look at me. “You’re a beautiful young woman. Anyone with half a brain would see that. That’s why I asked you. There are men who might want to hurt you, or take advantage, that’s all.”

  We drove along in a rippling silence. My thoughts skipped back to what I’d been doing with Aaron in the truck on Old Quarry Road. In school, Aaron had said to me something very similar to what Sands had just said—that I was beautiful—and I’d recognized it both times as a lie, a tactic, exactly the opposite of what I’d been hearing from my mother, over and over again, for as long as I could remember. “How do you are friends with Aunt Elaine?” I said. The words had been living on the underside of my tongue for a long time. I sent them out into the air as a way of not talking about what we had been talking about.

  Sands didn’t answer. It was clear to me then, from his silence, that what he wanted to talk about was sex, about the way I looked, about what men could do to me. It was, I suspected, the reason he’d offered me the job in the first p
lace, the reason Mr. Warner had said he wanted to “train” somebody. I knew a little bit about that kind of training. Hurt, hurt, hurt.

  But after another stretch of awkwardness Sands said, “She’s my mother,” and for me then it was as if the truck door flew open and the pavement of the interstate was flashing by a few inches from my face. In another instant I would fall out.

  “That’s a weird of a joke,” I tried.

  “Isn’t a joke.”

  “I was to my aunt Elaine’s house for three times. You weren’t ever there, and not any other kids neither weren’t, or any pictures of kids, or any husband or a boyfriend.”

  “She gave me up to be adopted when I was a few hours old.”

  I listened without looking at him, concentrating on the words.

  “She had an affair in the summer after her first year of college and got pregnant. The man was black. Jamaican. Her parents were furious about it, her father especially. Partly because of her being pregnant, and mainly because of who had gotten her pregnant. Her father helped her hide the pregnancy by sending her away, and he made her promise she would give the child up—give me up—when I was born. Even your mother doesn’t know. Nobody knew.”

  “She gave you off?”

  He pushed his lips out and made five or six small movements with his chin, half nods.

  “That’s worse for than …”

  “Than what?”

  “Than of anything.”

  “Think so?”

  “Sure so. At least for a person is supposed to be having a mother or and a father.”

  “I had parents. I had good parents. They were an older couple, in their early fifties when they took me. Both black. They’d never been able to have children of their own and always wanted to, and they didn’t mind a baby who was half-white. He was a college professor, at Penn. She had a little florist shop in Center City until they decided to adopt, and then she sold it so she could stay home with me. They were as good parents as anybody could ask for. They’re both dead now. They were pretty well off. The money I got from selling their home—the house I grew up in—and what they left me, that’s what I used to buy the church. And what I live on.”

  “And for to paying me,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “But you had somebody touch you on the wrong.”

  “My parents didn’t know about it.”

  “Because of you never had told.”

  “That’s right. I was afraid to tell them. Ashamed. They were religious people. To them, a pastor was like God’s friend sent down to save us.”

  “Aunt Elaine didn’t all that time know where you went, from one day?”

  “We both went looking for each other and we finally found each other not too long ago. We met in New York City the first time—I’ll take you there, too, if you want, it’s my favorite place—and then, a few weeks later, I drove up from Philadelphia to see where she lived. Watsonboro. She took me for a ride up to the town where we work, where the cathedral project is, and then out on the road where I drop you off every night. I think she was going to introduce me to you and your family but changed her mind at the last minute and we ended up just going into Warners’ and talking with her friend there. Zeke. You know him. I think she dated him for a while or something. I saw the town, and what was left of the church, and I had been working with stone for a long time—with a stonemason during the summers when I was in high school and college, and then on my own—and I’d always wanted to build something special. Something that would last. I’d just inherited the money, less than a year earlier. I’d been thinking of getting out of the city. And when I saw the church it all came together. I asked Zeke Warner and he said he had a feeling I could buy it for not very much money, and then I had the idea to build my cathedral. He called Elaine when you came in looking for a job, and she told me.”

  I filed this bit of information away, tried not to show any reaction. But I understood that I had been part of a complicated plan, a kind of trick, and while some of me was happy about the result, I’d never liked to have things hidden from me, and I wondered about what other secrets my aunt and Sands were keeping. I said, “To build a cathedral is an idea that for a weird person would get.”

  “I’m a weird person. You ought to have figured that out by now.”

  “I did figure,” I told him. “I just think of how much weird, is all. Weird which of a way.”

  Sands smiled and I watched his mouth and thought that if he was a kidnapper, he was good at making up stories that made him seem like he wasn’t.

  “Weird which of a way besides in the way a pastor did bad things on you and so now you think to build up a church.”

  “There are different kinds of churches.”

  “There’s something I know it.”

  Sands let the truck slow back down to the speed we’d been going before the conversation took its strange turn. I glanced across at him, and then at the road, and then back. “You have for something else to want saying,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said, but for another mile he didn’t speak. When I stopped watching him and turned my eyes forward again, he said, “I’m supposed to ask if you want to testify against the preacher who did that to your face.”

  “He wasn’t who did on it.”

  “Somebody did it, though.”

  “Other people did on it. At in the church. I wasn’t the only one who ever had it neither.”

  “Do you want to testify?”

  “In the law, you mean?”

  “In court.”

  “Do you want to of push a stone in your mouth and choke and die and go in hell?” I said.

  “That’s a nice way to put it.”

  “Because it’s just as the same.”

  “Your aunt called the police about it. The police are going to try to get your mother or father to testify.”

  “They should have a good luck about that.”

  Sands stopped talking then, leaving me in a swarm of thoughts, with something, a bad new feeling, creeping up the bones of my arms like cold water. I was thinking about Aunt Elaine and secrets, and I was trying to form a picture of policemen coming to our house and asking to speak to my father or mother, but the picture kept dissolving into an image of me in the Quonset hut in West Ober, and Pastor Schect standing at the pulpit with a paper bag in his hand. Although I did not know exactly what they might be, I understood that there were penances worse than facing, boying, and hungering, and those things seemed suspended in my near future, inevitable as the coming of another week.

  As we drew close to the city, I was able, by staring hard out the window, to put those thoughts to one side. Boston was a world of concrete and asphalt, of roads running together, huge buildings pushing at the sky, and what seemed to me like millions of cars … and then, as we turned off the highway onto smaller streets, so many people on the sidewalks that I couldn’t sort them out one from the next, couldn’t think of them as individuals. I was leaning forward against the seat belt.

  Sands turned into a parking lot and pulled up beside a wooden shed that reminded me of the bus shelter at the corner of Waldrup Road. A man with the blackest face I’d ever seen took money from Sands for the parking and directed us to an empty space at the far corner of the lot. From there it was a two-minute walk to the museum. Sands seemed to have fallen again into one of his somber moods. He said nothing. He walked half a step in front of me, and I worried, looking around at the buildings and cars, listening to the street noises, the honking horns and echoing sirens, that he’d get too far ahead and lose me there. Aunt Elaine was his mother, he said. Aunt Elaine was his mother. He was her son. A half-black man. Molested. My father’s truck had been at Weedon’s.

  The museum turned out to be a building nearly as large as my school, all huge stone blocks, with fifteen or twenty stone steps, wide and smooth, leading up to a double front door with a frame of dark wood. To either side of the door stood windows with glass so clean it looked like
silvery paper. As I started up the steps, with Sands a few feet to my right and ahead, I all of a sudden became aware of what I was wearing: not-new jeans, a plain green T-shirt covered by a ragged sweatshirt my mother had found at Salvation Army. It was the color of peas and had AIR FORCE ACADEMY stenciled in worn gold letters across the front. I stopped. Sands went another few steps then turned and looked back. I took the cloth of the sweatshirt in my fingers and held it out away from my body like an apology.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said in a voice that other people coming up the steps could hear. I hesitated. He waved at me impatiently, almost angrily. I closed my eyes and opened them, and then decided to focus on the stone beneath my feet, to think about the people who’d placed it there and smoothed the mortar between the joints, to pretend they were speaking to me in encouraging tones, in the language of work, urging me forward.

  Through the door I went, half a step behind him. In the dim light of the entranceway, I stopped again to let my eyes focus. There was a long desk or table set sideways to us, and Sands was gesturing for me to come up beside him, and then handing over more money to a woman sitting on a stool and wearing a puffy-shouldered white blouse and circular gold earrings. The woman looked at my sweatshirt and then into my face, but only for a second. I swiveled my head and tried to get a sense of the other people there. Even the little girls and boys were so much better dressed and groomed than I was. The other kids about my age looked like they belonged in a magazine and seemed more comfortable there—in that light, in that cool stone smell, beside the potted plants taller than a man—than I felt in my own house. The mothers and fathers were what I thought of as city people, though I couldn’t have said exactly why. They seemed like they’d all taken showers a few minutes before stepping through the door, and the words they spoke had a quiet, happy tone to them that sounded like the voices of the reporters on Sands’s truck radio, telling the news. It looked like someone had made their clothes just for them: It was the way the women’s dresses hung so perfectly on the corners of their shoulders, the way the men’s shirts had collars so neat and straight against their necks. Their pants had tight cuffs at the bottom. Everyone looked like a teacher on the first day of school, like they were going to church, like they’d eaten their favorite food for breakfast and every part of their life was filled up like a tire with exactly the right amount of air in it, something that would hum against the pavement with a confident note.