The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  Before we even reached the commercial strip, Cindy said, “Me and Carl went the full way.”

  “Did it to hurt?”

  “A little at the first and then it felt nice like nothing you could ever do by yourself.”

  “Do you want to be p.g.?”

  “I don’t. But if I did I wouldn’t care that much and Carl wouldn’t neither.”

  “They might make you to go from school.”

  “I don’t care that much.”

  “The kids could laugh on you.”

  “They do already.”

  It seemed that Cindy wanted me to be excited about the new adventure, and so I pretended I was. It took some effort. All day I’d been replaying the sight of Pastor Schect coming across the threshold of our house. Even by the standards of our family life, it was something odd and horrible, a new level of trouble. And with the news about another abducted girl, I was finding it more and more difficult not to tell someone about the look on Pastor’s face when he’d thought he’d found me alone. The question was: who to tell? Cindy? Aunt Elaine? Sands? My father? The police? There were problems in each case, and I couldn’t be sure if it would mean more trouble for me or less, if it would help anything, if the look on his face had anything at all to do with the abductions. His car was dark but he wasn’t. And, compared to the other men I knew, there was a weakness about him in the arms and hands, not the kind of thing you’d expect in a person who was grabbing teenage girls from the roadside and killing them.

  “There was no feeling ever like it,” Cindy repeated when we were in the middle of downtown.

  I was pretending to be interested, keeping a curious, admiring look on my face. We walked past the storefronts as if carrying between us the weight and thrill of all the world’s secrets.

  “You should let Aaron do it so you’d know the way it feels,” she said as we came within sight of Sands’s cathedral.

  “Maybe I would soon.”

  “You should.”

  When we reached the cathedral property, I saw that Sands was already at work. I waved to him and he waved back. “My boss,” I told Cindy.

  “It looks like a small church.”

  “His own private one. This part he wants of making this summer and then more parts for later.”

  “Is he black?”

  “Partways.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is he weird?”

  “He’s nice. You can to talk on him if you want that.”

  Cindy shook her head. “Watch out for everybody,” she said. “My dad can get you a knife, you know.”

  “My dad could to get me one. I might to ask him.”

  Cindy nodded in a worried way and said good-bye, and I stepped onto the work site and felt, as I always did there, a small lift of good mood under my feet. At home, in school, with Cindy, I almost always felt younger than my age, as if I’d learned to play a role, hiding my real thoughts and abilities, tamping down whatever intelligence and maturity I possessed as if they were ugly, threatening things. For just the first few happy minutes with Aaron in his truck and talking with Aunt Elaine, and when I worked—those were the times I felt like what I thought a seventeen-year-old girl should feel like.

  I changed into my boots. Sands was standing, hands on hips, working out some puzzle in his mind.

  “The walls are getting pretty high,” he said when I stood beside him. As he spoke, he was looking at the work, not at me, so I understood he was having one of his shy moods.

  “It’s not hard to build the staging up that high,” he went on, scuffing one boot on the old church foundation and punching the glasses back against his nose with his gloved index finger. “But how to get the stones up there is what I’m wondering. I could buy a chain fall, I guess—that’s a tool for lifting heavy things—but I kind of like lifting them up by hand.… It slows us down, though. Now it’s going to get even slower. I can’t picture putting them one at a time in a knapsack or something and hiking up the ladder, can you? It would take forever.”

  “You could to use small stones,” I said.

  “We could, Laney. It’s not just my project.”

  “We could of.”

  Sands turned and looked at me, as if he’d heard something different in my voice. He ran his eyes over my face then turned back to the walls. “It would look funny. Plus, another few feet up and we’ll be at the top of the walls for this section. And that’s where we have to put a notch for the roof rafters. They’re going to bear the weight of the roof, and the more mortar there is—the higher the ratio of mortar to stone, I mean—the weaker the walls will end up being.”

  I walked over to my backpack and removed the book he’d given me. I checked to see that I’d been careful enough with it, that there were no marks on the hard cover, no bent pages. Then I carried it over and stood next to him, paging through. Without exception, the stones near the tops of the walls of all the great cathedrals were the same size as those on the bottom. “How did they do for it those days then?” I asked him.

  “Ropes and pulleys and ramps, from what I’ve been able to read.”

  “Then we could of the same.”

  Sands was shaking his head. “They had teams of men rolling or sliding the stones up the ramps, or using ropes and pulleys to lift them up in big wooden crates.”

  “What about to make steps like for the sill ribbons and to lift on them up like it?”

  “We could. It would be very slow.”

  After a minute, I said, “I’m not strong, aren’t I? Because that’s what’s wrong.”

  “You’re fine,” Sands said, but I could tell he didn’t mean it. I wondered if he would hire a man to help us, or even to take my place, but I’d noticed that he wasn’t particularly comfortable around men. Whenever we went to Warners’ with an order, or when someone came to make a delivery, I saw that the shyness in him blossomed out. He could shake their hands, and even sometimes make a joke with them, but there was something else running under the skin of his face, a kind of fear or discomfort or defense that reminded me of myself at home.

  The largest stones we needed to lift were about two feet long and a foot high, cut square and flat on their four edges, but front and back they were “beveled,” to use Sands’s word. I looked at the wooden staging already in place and the straight walls. We were almost ready to fit the windows into them; just another few courses of stone and we’d reach the tops of the window holes, where Sands said we had to make arches like the Romans did—from stones he’d ordered special at the quarry in Barre. Another few courses beyond that we’d be ready for the roof. “What if we made high ramps up?” I said. “Of a kind you could make to higher when you wanted. And then what if we had a little kids’ cart on it, wheels, and we put one of the stones to the cart and pulled on a rope to get it high? When we got it high what if we slided the stone over in a line at a shelf there, and then put the mortar, and then slided them on?”

  I’d never said so many words to Sands at one time. When I was finished, when he kept his eyes straight forward, I wondered if he’d turn an angry face to me, tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Everything that had happened at my house the day before sat inside me like a pile of dry brush. It seemed to me that one spark, any kind of spark, would set it ablaze.

  Sands turned to face me, but I couldn’t read his expression.

  “Probly we could do for one whole course in one day,” I added nervously, and then I told myself I wouldn’t speak another word.

  Sands kept looking. After a time he turned and examined the walls and the staging. I could see something in the muscles near his mouth. He said, “Let’s go get the wood for the ramps and find a place to buy a wagon.”

  We drove first to the lumberyard and then to the mall where he’d bought me boots, and we came back with heavy planks on the truck’s rack, and thick rope in loops on the seat between us, and a red wagon, large enough to hold two big stones at a time, in a cardboard box in the
pickup bed. While we were on these errands, and having a snack at Art and Pat’s, and then building the first of the moveable ramps, I found that if I focused on what we were doing, I could keep myself from thinking about what awaited me at home. I expected Sands to say something about the latest abduction—everyone in school had been talking about it; there were extra state police cars on the roads outside town and local police parked on the corners, and I’d heard a report about it on the radio news in Sands’s truck—but he held to his shy mood the whole day, working at a steady pace as he always did, never too fast or too slow.

  When we’d finished the ramp, he said, “Tomorrow we can try it out. Why don’t you come by, even though it isn’t a workday, and just put in half an hour or something? We’ll do a test.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s too late to try it now. Plus, your boyfriend’s here.”

  I turned and saw that Aaron had come to the work site in his ugly truck. He was parked at a little distance, standing outside, leaning against the gray door. I waved to him and he nodded, without smiling. He didn’t come over to talk.

  “Not for really,” I told Sands. “Not like a boyfriend true.”

  “Good. He doesn’t look smart enough for you.”

  We stowed the wheelbarrows, extension cords, and tools in the rectory basement, and he carried the cardboard box inside, too. “We’ll see you tomorrow then,” Sands said. “I’ll wait for you before I try it out. We’ll need both of us anyway.”

  “I could for the whole afternoon work.”

  “No stuff to do for school?”

  “School could be finished not long.”

  “No exams to study for?”

  “Sometimes at night I can.”

  “All right. But just for an hour or so.”

  I walked away from him, almost completely happy.

  On Old Quarry Road, Aaron pulled his truck into the trees, kissed me in a rough way, and ran his hands up under my shirt and sweatshirt. I thought he would want me to do what I’d done before, and I had started to do that, but Aaron was pulling at my zipper and tugging the pants down below my knees, and pulling my underwear down and putting his hand on me and then pushing me back on the seat and crawling on top. He was kissing me harder than usual, working his fingers in a funny way, and yanking down his jeans with the other hand. At first, with Cindy’s words sounding in my mind, I decided I liked the feeling. It was something new, something grown-up women did, something to make me believe I could change my life. Behind Aaron’s roughness and hurry I thought there could be a real affection. But then he hurt me a little bit, poking with his hand. My mind turned. I remembered what my mother had showed me with the cigarette, and I remembered something Aunt Elaine had said, and how upset my father had been at the news of my mother’s pregnancies. And then—it was the way Aaron was touching me—I just didn’t like the idea of doing what he wanted to do. I felt it in my body, in the center of myself, that I didn’t want to. I pulled my mouth away from his and said, “No.”

  Aaron kept kissing at my face and neck and working to get his pants down around his ankles, and trying to pry my legs apart with his knees. I said no again, but I could tell he wasn’t listening and then it came into my mind that it would be all right, it would hurt a little at first and then be all right, and I should just let my legs go loose. Still, something in me didn’t want that. I twisted my hips toward the back of the seat as much as I could with Aaron’s weight pressing on me. I reached down and put a hand between my legs. Aaron took hold of my wrist and wrenched it away. I put it back. “Stop,” I said, but he wouldn’t. My legs were strong from all the walking I did. Even with him trying to push them apart, I could squeeze my thighs tight to my hand, and I turned my face away so he couldn’t kiss me, and using all my muscles I tightened my body up into a knot I didn’t think he could untie.

  Aaron tried for another minute or so, then stopped. He lifted the top half of his body away from me and made his hand into a fist. I went to the place I went when my father was dousing me, squeezed my legs together with all my strength. Aaron spit into my face, and I tried to go tight down into myself for what would happen next. But instead of hitting me with the fist, he opened it and scratched his fingernails across my forehead, trying to pull me to look at him. I wouldn’t look, wouldn’t stop squinting my eyes. I felt him pushing me then, sitting the rest of the way up and shoving me hard out from under him and toward the door of the truck. I was trying to pull up my pants and wipe the saliva off my face and grab hold of my backpack all at once, with Aaron pushing and pushing. My forehead stung. He was cursing. He reached across and pulled the lever that opened the door and he pushed me once more and I tumbled right out, clutching the backpack. The ground there was soft against my shoulder and hip. I rolled away from the tires. With one of his long puppet arms Aaron pulled the door closed and then started the truck and spun the tires in reverse and backed out fast onto the road, sending up a spray of dirt onto me. I watched to see if he looked at me as he sped away but he didn’t. I sat up and breathed, wiped the spit off my face and one spurt of tears from my eyes, tried to shake the dirt out of my hair. I stood and pulled up my pants and wiped the sleeve of my sweatshirt across my forehead. Three thin lines of blood on it. I picked up my backpack and looped it over one shoulder, and stood just breathing deep for a few minutes. Then I went down to the end of the road, turned right where it met the highway, and I walked along there with my head lowered, feeling the push of air against me as the trucks drove past.

  Twenty-one

  From time to time as I walked, I would reach my fingers up and touch the scrapes on my forehead. There was only a little blood. I prayed as I followed the familiar route, prayers that were shaky and unsure. A combination of things—the way Aunt Elaine had spoken to my parents, the facing, Pastor Schect’s visit—had taken my dependable picture of God and erased half the lines on his face. In the best moments then, I felt I might be sketching it over again in a new way, but painstakingly, slowly, and without the kind of neatly drawn plan Sands had for his cathedral. My running away from Pastor Schect had been one of the new lines. My talking back to my mother. And now my saying no to Aaron. I felt like I was starting to build a new kind of person in me, to please this new God. But it was a job so full of pain and doubt, something I knew would bring such a flood of punishment onto me, that it seemed impossible to imagine it would ever end up in any tidy, finished shape. All my school life I’d seen teachers and some students who seemed to be made differently from my parents and Pastor Schect, people who were kind and calm, who dressed in nice clothes, and weren’t mean, and talked about good things that had happened in their families. Whenever I saw Aunt Elaine I had another glimpse of that kind of life. During all those years there was a way in which I believed people like that were a different species. There had been an invisible wall that stood between their lives and mine, something impossible to climb over or break through. And now in only a few weeks that had changed. I’d come to see that those people were different only because they knew something about being alive that my parents didn’t know. I was beginning to believe they worshipped a different, kinder God. The invisible wall had crashed to the ground in a million bits of old belief and now I felt as though I’d taken two or three careful steps into the territory beyond it—a nice feeling, but look at the price I’d already paid.

  It began to rain as I walked, drops tapping in the tree branches and wetting my face and hands. A trickle of diluted blood fell into my right eye; I wiped it away. I worked to brush the dirt off my clothes and make it seem as though no one had tried to take them off me. As I came within sight of our house—the patched roof, the slanting walls, the stacks of stove wood—I realized that the invisible wall had been made of fear. Fear stones. Fear mortar. It was still there, lying in pieces, but I believed I could walk over those pieces now. I thought I might be able to endure whatever my parents or Aaron or anyone else decided to do to me.

  My mother was sitting on the
couch reading the copy of True Home and Country that must have arrived earlier in the afternoon. When I came through the door, she lifted her eyes briefly, then went back to reading, then lifted them again and looked at my face. At that moment my father came out of the bathroom, straight in front of me. He was wearing just a T-shirt on top and his hair was wet and slicked back. Sometimes when he first saw me, in the house or the yard, he’d look at me in the eyes, and sometimes he wouldn’t. This time he looked. “Who done at you?” he said. From the day he’d found out about the baby he’d been going around as if someone was cooking his mind on high heat. I could see the boiling inside him then as clearly as if it was water in a pan on a stove. “At work there?”

  I shook my head.

  “Satan done it,” my mother said from the couch.

  “Pastor shook Satan away of in us,” my father said out of the side of his mouth. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the scratches on my forehead.

  “No he dint to her. She ran.”

  My father was stubbornly shaking his head. “Who done?” he demanded again.

  On the walk up the driveway, I’d told myself that if they asked I would say I’d slipped and fallen against the staging. But the newly built parts of me didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to feel young anymore, or to lie anymore, or to be afraid of saying certain things in my own house anymore. My father didn’t seem like he was going to hurt me. There was the boiling beneath the skin of his face, as bad as I’d ever seen. His bare arms hung at his sides, the fingers were curling and straightening, the muscles flexing and going loose, but he didn’t seem angry at me. “Aaron Patanauk,” I said. And then, “He tried to of force me.”

  “I could bet that,” my mother said, without looking up from the pamphlet.