“I couldn’t run from him, so I walked up and stood next to him, and I didn’t even set the bag of clothes on the ground I was so determined to go. For a little time he just smoked and drank and stared out at the dark street. I told him I was going. He said I could go if I had made up my mind to go, but that I could never come home if I went, that he would no longer be my father.
“My mother had died when I was very young, and so for him to say these things to me was …”
“Would be like to having nobody.”
“Something like that … I listened to him, and then I said that I loved him and I would miss him, but I was going. He turned away from me then, just turned his back and went into the house and as long as I live I’ll remember seeing him go like that, up the walk and up the steps and through the front door without looking back. I stood there. I waited—a few minutes too long, as it turned out—then I decided and I started walking into town, to the bus station, and I was late, and hurrying, and then I was running, and when I got there the bus had just gone. I could hear the engine for a few seconds. A woman was standing near the door. I asked her if she’d seen a black man waiting and then getting on the bus, and she said no, she hadn’t, so I assumed Edmund had not really wanted to have me leave with him and I didn’t try to follow him. There were no more buses that night anyway. I would have had to hitchhike in the dark.”
“Crazy you would to do that.”
“Yes. The sad thing was, though, that the woman I asked was lying, or crazy, or both. Or she just hadn’t seen him. Edmund had been there, it turned out, had been waiting for me, had decided I wasn’t coming, and so he’d gotten on the last bus and left. He sent me one letter, which I still have. I’ll show it to you if you’d like. I take it out and read it every few years. He was the first man I made love with.”
Aunt Elaine paused and lifted her coffee cup to her lips, but I could see she wasn’t drinking from it. She set it back down and after a minute she went on. “I stayed awake in my bedroom all that night, thinking he hadn’t ever planned to go with me, hadn’t come to the bus station. Even so, in the morning, I called the orchard and asked if they knew a way I could get in touch with him. They didn’t know anything. The person who managed the orchard said all the Jamaican workers had left. She said she didn’t know Edmund from any of the rest of them. So I sat there for a long while, trying to decide what to do. It seemed like I’d end up having the baby by myself and living … I didn’t know where, there were no shelters then. After a long time I stood up and went to find my father and I told him I would go away, and give the baby away when it came. I could see how much it pleased him, and I wanted to please him so desperately. He spoke to me again, treated me like his daughter again. After another few weeks I went to relatives of his in Wisconsin. Eau Claire. I stayed with them until the birth. My father and stepmother told your mother I was away at school taking a special course. I held the baby for a while, then gave him into the arms of the nurse.… Every time after that, every day of my life, I thought about him. I wrote Edmund, telling him what had happened, and he wrote back that one letter I told you about. He wrote that he’d been at the bus station and thought I didn’t want to raise the child with him and that was why I hadn’t come. He was upset about the baby, but he said we’d have other children, and we’d find the boy I’d given away, and that I should come to Jamaica as soon as I could. I was going back to college. I wrote him and told him I’d come as soon as I finished the work for that term. And then I got a letter back, from his sister, saying he’d been killed.”
“By how?”
“A bus accident, strangely enough. So after that I got my nurse’s degree, and after that I moved all over the country trying to run away from what I’d done—Idaho, California, Hawaii. All those years when your mother was growing up, and then getting married, and having you, I was gone. I barely knew her. When I did finally come back she was changed into the person she is now, and you were in the world, and she did everything she could to keep me away from you. That’s another story I’ll tell you someday.”
“And Sands found you on later?”
She nodded and brushed the back of one wrist across her eyes. “I knew when he was eighteen he could come looking for me, and I kept track of the time and I waited for that phone call, or that letter. Every day I waited for that young man, my son, to come and knock on my front door. Every day for years. Every time I saw a baby, and then a young boy, and then an adolescent boy, I felt like I’d given away my soul, doing what I did, that I’d been responsible for Edmund’s death, that I’d killed someone, or something beautiful in the world. I devoted myself to nursing. I helped people—”
“Like for a penance.”
“I was running away the whole time. I had a relationship in Hawaii, no children, and when it ended, I decided to come back here. There was a job in Watsonboro that was right for me. My father had been diagnosed with cirrhosis and given about six months to live. So I came back. I took care of my father while he was dying but we never spoke about my pregnancy. Your mother was like a stranger to me, extremely cold. It was only because I wanted to see you so much that I even had anything to do with her. And then I started to feel guilty about that, too—I had money, I had a decent life, I’d done something I couldn’t forgive myself for, and even though she had so much less than I did she’d decided to raise her child and not give it away. She had always stood up to my father—her stepfather—in a way I hadn’t been able to.”
One tear broke from my aunt’s eye and ran down her cheek but she didn’t put a hand to it.
“But you never did to kill anyone,” I said.
“No, but that’s what it felt like. I knew what day my son would turn eighteen, of course. And when he didn’t come looking for me, that day, or that year, or the next year, I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and I started to look for him. There are various ways now. Your mother didn’t know about all this. I tried and tried but I couldn’t find … I spent all the savings I had, trying to find him. It turned out that he’d been trying, too, and eventually he found me.”
“You gave for my parents money, too.”
“Give.”
“And they for that listen on you a little.”
“Did you tell them about Sands being my child?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell them now. Have they taken you to that church again?”
“Not at last Sunday. But tomorrow maybe they could. You called with the police, my mother told. On Pastor Schect.”
“I did,” Aunt Elaine said. “They knew about him. They were already suspicious.” She looked down at her soup; I looked at the cans of food on the shelves.
“Marjorie,” I heard her say. “Honey. Do you want to come and live with me?”
I turned my eyes back to her. I heard people come into the store. I could feel her waiting for an answer, watching me, but I avoided speaking for as long as I could. “Why for?” I said at last.
“Why? I should have taken you away years ago.”
“You for missed out with no baby is why?”
She swallowed. A wave of hurt went across her face. “Do you think it’s normal, being raised the way you’ve been raised?”
“I’m a normal.”
“I’m not talking about you. You have the sweetest heart of anyone I know. You’re a miracle girl. Do you know how beautiful you are? How intelligent? You’re stunning. But I’m talking about what’s been done to you. Do you think being poked in the eye and mouth at church, by adults, is normal?”
“My boyfriend had at the same to him.”
“You have a boyfriend?”
“Pretty much. Aaron.”
“Does he treat you well?”
“Pretty much.”
“Are you having sex with him?”
I looked away.
“Honey, I’m not meaning to pry. Has your mother told you about protection? About not getting pregnant, and not getting a disease and so on?”
I s
hifted in my chair and looked at the top of Aunt Elaine’s uneaten soup, on which a film was forming. It did not seem to me the right kind of thing to be talking about in Boory’s, with people coming in and going out, and walking right past the table, and with the girl with the crucifix tattoo standing behind the counter watching us, trying to hear.
“Honey.” Aunt Elaine reached out and put her hand on my wrist. “You’re not pregnant, too, are you?”
I shook my head.
“We haven’t not hurt yet. I haven’t done, I mean. You and Sands think I’m a young girl, the stupid girl.”
“I don’t think that.”
“You weren’t in protected.”
“I know I wasn’t. But for me and Sands’s father there was tenderness, there was love. That’s what I would want—”
“But he died and you never after had one husband.”
“I know that. Why are you angry at me? Because I didn’t help you all these years? I wanted to. You pushed me away just like your mother did. You came to my house that one time when things were bad—it must have been two years ago—you spent two nights and we got along so well and then you never came back, or called, or wrote. I sent you three letters you never answered.”
“That time for I came to your house on of my own? And found a place where I called you on my own?”
“Yes.”
“They had a whipped me very bad for that. Very bad. Three days I couldn’t to walk. If I told you on that then, if I went and run to come to you again …” I took hold of my lemonade glass as a way of removing my hand from Aunt Elaine’s. I had the thought then, just for one crazy second, that I would stand up and pull my jeans down right there in the middle of Boory’s and show her the scars. Tears came up in my eyes and I looked away, then swatted at them with my forearm and looked back.
“Your parents whipped you? Or the preacher?”
“The first of.”
“Where?”
“The back top on my legs. And no letters you sent I never saw them at the mailbox neither.”
Aunt Elaine reached for my hand then, but I took it from the Formica and put it under the table on the top of my thigh.
“If I promised you that no one could hurt you again, would you come and live with me? If I went to the police?”
I only looked at her. After a few seconds I said, “Did my father to kill somebody ever?”
“Your father wouldn’t hurt you anymore, I can promise you that. But you have to come away.”
“Did ever he?”
“No.”
“Didn’t he been time upstate?”
“Yes. He was in jail for something he did before you were born. Eighteen months.”
“Did for what?”
“It was a fight. Your grandfather Paul was famous for fighting and he brought your father up to believe that was the most important skill for a man to have in life. Your father started it, I think, though the man had done or said something he didn’t like. The man was badly hurt and came close to dying, but he lived, and your father went to jail. When he came out he was different from the way he had been when he went in, or not really different but … what was inside him had been turned up louder. Then, in a little while, he married your mother. They had been seeing each other before he was sent away. No one in my family wanted your mother to marry him. My father was especially upset about it, but she wasn’t really his daughter and she wouldn’t listen in any case and she was old enough, legally.”
“Aaron said he killed on that man, my father did.”
“Finish eating, honey. We’ll talk more outside. Finish up.”
I looked at the sandwich and lemonade but couldn’t eat. Aunt Elaine paid. We went outside and sat in her car in front of Boory’s. For a few minutes we sat there without speaking, looking through the windshield at the town’s main street: brick-faced buildings and pickup trucks; a wide, northern New England commercial strip, all grays and reds with flecks of green from trees the town had planted the summer before. My eyes had dried by then. I wanted to keep talking about my father and mother, and I didn’t want to.
“I can go to court for a restraining order,” Aunt Elaine said, “and I think, I’m almost sure, I can make it so you can come and live with me, and your father and mother and the preacher can’t come and hurt you in any way.”
Almost sure, I remember thinking. Almost.
“Would you want to do that?”
“Then I couldn’t have work with Sands. It’s too far to you. My mother had nobody to help on the baby. My father had not enough money.”
“I can give them some money still. You could get a license and drive to work. It’s not that far, really.”
“It’s Watsonboro.”
“You just come up the highway.”
“In which of a truck?”
“Or … what if you lived in the church building with Sands? There’s several bedrooms there and he said he’s fixing them up. You could keep working, go to school still.”
It seemed to me then that my aunt was having a spell of craziness of the sort my mother sometimes had, where the things she said had no link to reality. There were times late at night when my mother would come into my room and sit on the edge of the bed until I woke up and she’d be talking like my father but without making sense: “When they get of a age is a time for going, that’s all. Your father knows. Pastor Schect. God sends a voice into a town and calls, and you answer for it to them. See?” And I’d pretend to understand her, and secretly sniff the air to see if she’d been drinking, and most of the time she hadn’t been. If my aunt wasn’t having a crazy spell like that, then she was talking about what I called “a dreamish life,” the way Sands sometimes did. A dreamish life in which the police could determine what went on inside your family. A life in which I could live alone in a house with a man and nothing would happen, and no one in the town would assume it did.
I shook my head.
“You have a life of your own, honey. You have to finish school and then you can have a good life. You’re seventeen. The baby is your mother and father’s responsibility. And the money for it should be their responsibility, too, not yours.”
“They don’t have much for it though, and how would it be for it? Another like me, or worse?”
“You like working with Sands, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“He says you’re an excellent worker. He used those words exactly.”
I couldn’t think of any reply. I was imagining a baby girl in the house, my mother refusing to change its diapers, feeding it only when she was in the mood. I was thinking the child would surely die if she didn’t have an older sister there to care for her.
My aunt reached across and put one hand on my knee, which made me jump, but I didn’t move away. “Look at me, honey.”
I turned my face.
“I love you,” my aunt said.
I couldn’t remember anyone ever having said that to me, not my mother or father and not any boy. All I could think to say was “All right.”
“I’m going to make things better now. I promise you that.”
“Things go along good just as now.”
Another wash of water came up into Aunt Elaine’s eyes. I looked away. It was a crying day for the two of us. Through the windshield I saw Aaron’s ugly truck go past, but Aaron didn’t see me, or if he saw me he didn’t wave.
“Look at me please, honey. Things aren’t fine, and they aren’t normal, and there isn’t a God anywhere who wants this to happen to you.”
“Why could he of let it, then?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question. But I know it is going to stop.”
I looked at my aunt’s face then. It was a good face, and kind, but the face of a person—this seemed obvious to me—who did not know much about the way the world worked. Not nearly as much as she thought she knew.
Nineteen
The next day, my mother and father didn’t go to church. With the exception of onc
e when my father had hurt himself in a bad fall in the woods, and those weeks when we were completely out of money, it was the first time since I was very small that I could remember staying home on a Sunday morning. Snowstorms, ice storms, the flu and sore throats, lack of decent clothes—almost nothing stopped us from making the trip to West Ober to pray with Pastor Schect. I was fairly certain why my parents weren’t going: The police must have come when I was away and asked them what had been happening at the church. But I wasn’t about to raise the subject.
For breakfast I made myself two slices of toast with peanut butter and honey, and drank two glasses of water to fill my stomach. (With my new earnings I had wanted to buy food for the house, but my father flew into a rage when I mentioned it—which was confusing to me: Hadn’t he been the one who wanted me to work and contribute money? Wasn’t he happy to have the extra income? So, instead of using some of it to buy food, I kept all my share of the money for myself, in an old pair of underwear in the back left corner of my closet, squeezed under a loose edge of Sheetrock next to the cathedral book.) My mother sat on her end of the couch, not offering to cook, not reading anything, not drinking, not even raising her eyes when I sat at the table. My father had gone out early into the woods, come back to get his keys (still holding his chain saw in one hand, as if it had become like another arm to him and he was unaware of it), and then driven away without speaking to either of us. I wondered if he’d gone to Weedon’s, or to find and hurt Aunt Elaine, or if he’d decided, in spite of the police investigation, to go to the service on his own.
The Talk-Funny Girl Page 19