The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

Walking from the bus station to school—only about a mile—and, later in the day, from school to the work site, I was constantly alert. I expected to see my father’s truck come spluttering around a corner and pull up to the curb, or have him step out of a doorway in front of me; I expected to reach the cathedral and find both my parents there waiting for me, new penances whirling in their minds.

  In the first week, especially, I was sure my father would simply appear at Aunt Elaine’s house one day, the way his own father, Dad Paul, used to appear at our house in the woods. I’d come out of my room early in the morning, and Dad Paul would be sitting there at the table like a ghost in flannel shirt and suspenders. The first twenty times I stepped out of Aunt Elaine’s sewing room I looked nervously around the kitchen and living room. I knew the lock on the door would do nothing to stop my father, but I locked it anyway when Aunt Elaine was out of the house. Once my father realized there would be no more eighty dollars a month coming to him from my work, I thought there would be nothing to keep him away. But day after day I didn’t see him on the streets of the town, or at the house, and little by little the fear started to drain out of me.

  Aunt Elaine worked from three in the afternoon until eleven. I made supper for myself, and often made something for her, too, and kept it in a covered pot on the stove or in a covered dish in the refrigerator in case she was hungry when she got home. At night, I locked the door and did my schoolwork. It was past the middle of June. There was only a week of school left. We’d finished the exams and reports, and the rest of the work wasn’t taken seriously; I did it for myself, mostly. With the sunshine pouring through the windows, and the summer air whispering at us, it was all my teachers could do to keep the kids from breaking into celebrations in the classrooms and halls. I had one more encounter with Mrs. Eckstrom, who called me into the office to tell me I was going to be promoted, my work was satisfactory, even strong in some classes, but there had been discussions among my teachers at a recent meeting and it was going to be “exceedingly difficult” for me to be awarded a diploma if I didn’t do something about the way I talked. “You won’t make a very good advertisement for the school system, will you, if you walk around town talking like you do.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t of.”

  “Won’t. Not won’t of.”

  I nodded and acted in as agreeable a manner as I could and she waved a hand and told me to leave. The conversation had some effect on me, though, I have to admit. Being away from my parents had some effect, too. Once or twice I experimented with saying things to Sands that were a little different from the way I usually said them. He didn’t seem to notice.

  On the first two Sundays, instead of going to church, which was what I expected her to do, Aunt Elaine slept late, then suggested we walk into downtown Watsonboro. We had breakfast both times in a place where there were ten different kinds of tea in boxes on the shelf, and things on the menu that I’d never seen before. Whole wheat pancakes. Eggs Benedict with spinach. Yogurt drinks. I asked my aunt about all of them but was content to keep to foods I knew: eggs and sausage and juice.

  Afterward, we walked to a small bookstore that opened at noon. Since moving to my aunt’s, in addition to eating as much as I wanted, I was allowed to stay in the shower as long as I wanted—an unimaginable luxury for me—and I’d started washing my hair every other day, and spending a long time brushing it, and my clothes were not used clothes from the shed at the dump but new jeans and colorful short-sleeved shirts, and even a pair of sandals, something I had never worn but took an immediate liking to. There was a young man working in the bookstore, not much older than Aaron, and he showed me where to find books about stonework, and recommended other things he thought I might like to read. On our second visit, when I was sitting in a corner paging through the books, he came over and stood near me and asked why I was interested in masonry. Was my dad or my boyfriend a bricklayer? Was I working on a project at school?

  “No, I’m for making a cathedral with a friend I’m having,” I said, and he nodded and blinked his eyes fast and soon drifted back to the front desk. He hadn’t said anything about the way I talked, but it was easy enough to read the confusion on his face. That small moment with him had some effect on me, too, but I wasn’t yet ready to let go of the shield of my broken-up speech. I didn’t feel I could just all of a sudden blend into the normal world, as if I’d always been welcome and comfortable there. I couldn’t let myself trust people, not completely, not even Sands and Aunt Elaine. Ask someone who was in prison for seventeen years what it’s like when he first gets out, how easy it is to put on a good shirt and pants and go order dinner in a nice restaurant.

  When we were walking home from the bookstore that day, Aunt Elaine asked if I was happy. It wasn’t a question I ever remembered hearing and not something I often thought about then. With the exception of the first minute she’d seen me, in front of the diner, and one attempt on that first night, she’d been good about staying clear of the hard subjects. We talked about everyday things: the weather, items I should pick up at the market, errands I might do, gardening, the progress of the cathedral, whether Sands was coming for dinner on a certain night or staying up at the rectory. Then, on that walk, she suddenly said, “Are you happy?”

  “I don’t think about being it,” I answered. We were on the sidewalk, going past the front yards of tidy wooden houses. People were out in some of those yards planting flowers, or fixing a front gate, or washing their cars or trucks with a bucket and a sponge and a hose. I was surprised at the way those people, who didn’t seem to know Aunt Elaine by name and didn’t know me, would greet us as we went past, smile at us, say something about the weather.

  “What do you think about?” Aunt Elaine asked when there were no people nearby.

  I think about my parents every minute, I wanted to tell her, but I was still not ready for that conversation so I shifted to another truth. “I think about to living the life God gives me.”

  We turned a corner, heading away from the river and the center of town. There, still a twenty-minute walk from my aunt’s front gate, the houses were farther apart, some of them with large yards and neat lawns. Walking side by side, we climbed a long slope, and it was much easier for me than for my aunt. I knew she had cigarettes in the house, and I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to sneak them, that I was used to people smoking.

  “Is that what the pastor told you to do?”

  “In the start. Now I want to do it for my own. Do you think on that? On going to church and God and that?”

  “Not much.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. I think about what I have to do around the house, or someone we’re taking care of at work, and about you and your life, and Sands and his life, and wanting you both to be happy.” She fell silent for a few steps and then added, “I think about your parents.”

  “I do,” I admitted. “My mother special, getting big with the baby and that. And then what it could be like there now.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “Do you want that I do?”

  “Not at all. I’m just wondering.”

  “Not all much.”

  “Do you think that was the way God meant for you to live? I mean with your parents. The way they treated you.”

  “For then it was. Otherwise it wouldn’t of been.”

  “And for now?”

  A man was mowing his huge lawn, riding back and forth in even lines on his mower, and for a few minutes the noise made it impossible to speak. I watched two squirrels in the middle of the street, stopping with their tails up, and then hopping across to the curb and scampering up the back of a maple tree, fighting and chirping at each other. I noticed we were near a catalpa tree, my favorite, and that it had dropped its flowers—like miniature orchids—in a white and pink circle on the concrete. I didn’t want to answer the question, but when Aunt Elaine asked it again I said, “I have two feelings in me now. One is for good, strong. And one �
� I think God now will to punish me for what I done. Send my father killing me, or some other way.”

  “For what you did?”

  “Leaving away my parents. My mother p.g. and everything. My father wanting for me to help in the woods and to bring in money, and my mother to help at the cooking and that.”

  We walked along. At the top of the hill my aunt was breathing hard and she couldn’t make any more conversation until the road went flat again. Her house appeared in the distance like a small square sun, the pine tree out front, the porch with three chairs on it, where we sometimes sat with Sands at night and drank cold tea.

  “What if …,” Aunt Elaine said, and then she waited. “What if God wanted you to have a life with a man who loved you and treated you well, and children who loved you, and work you enjoyed, and enough money to buy the things and do the things you wanted, and a house that was peaceful and clean and nice to live in? What about that kind of life? Do you ever dream of something like that?”

  “You don’t to have that life,” I said, because as she was describing it, I felt two fists pushing through my shirt and through my skin and through the muscles over my belly and down far inside me. “Cindy doesn’t to have it. Aaron Patanauk doesn’t to. My mother and father.”

  “I have pieces of it. There are people in these houses we’ve been walking past who have lives like that. Good people. What if God wants that for you?”

  “There’s a lot of sins inside me. A lot of penances I should to make.”

  “Do you really believe that, honey?”

  “Inside me I do.”

  “But what if it turned out you’d made all the penances you needed to, and God forgave you any sins that remained and wanted to give you a life like that?”

  “It would make you afraid to think of,” I said. “You wouldn’t want ever to die.” I couldn’t look at her, because my aunt was raising shades in store windows that had things in there I believed I would never be able to own.

  “What if your finding the stonework you love, and moving away from your parents, and leaving the pastor, and starting to read different kinds of books and dress differently, what if all that was God beginning to give you that other life? Asking you whether you wanted to have it or not? Have you ever thought of it that way?”

  “Before now never.”

  “Well, what if it was?”

  We turned through the gate. Aunt Elaine stopped there with her hand on the pickets and looked at me. Her face was a nice, clean face, I thought, without any tricks under the skin. Just a mouth and a nose, just eyes on you, just a face that said, “Here I am. A bear sometimes. A mother who let go of her own child. A nice aunt. A person.”

  “Then he could grab it away off you any minute.”

  “He could, yes. But what if, at least for a number of years, he really wanted you to have a life like that, and didn’t take it away, and offered it to you as a gift, and gave you an opportunity to pass on some of the happiness of it to somebody else, maybe your own children, or your friends, or a husband? What if he was saying that if you worked hard you could keep it, at least for a while?”

  “Then a lot of people would have it the wrong way about him,” I said. I could feel a balloon inflating inside me and it made me as afraid as anything that had happened in my life. In the world Aunt Elaine was describing I would have so much to lose.

  “That’s right. A lot of people would. But a lot of other people would have it right. I want you to start looking for those other people. Would you do that?”

  “I could,” I said.

  We went inside and I retreated to my room and quietly shut the door. I sat on the couch with the book on stained glass windows that I’d bought with my own money from the friendly boy at the bookstore. I tried to concentrate on the pictures and words, but my mind kept returning to the conversation with Aunt Elaine, and the feelings it had raised in me. I went out onto the porch and sat there, and tried to read the book where it was warm and sunny, but I couldn’t do it.

  Twenty-five

  Sands called it “the Laney System,” the way we lifted stones up to the top courses of the walls with the ramp, wagon, and pulley. It made me happy to hear him say that. I was beginning to believe I had some real value to him, as a worker. And, as the worst of the fear lifted a little ways away from me, I was beginning to see—slowly and against strong waves of doubt—that he had some interest in me that went beyond the cathedral project. Sometimes I’d lift my eyes from the work and catch him looking at me, and he’d quickly try to pretend he hadn’t been. When he drove me into town at the end of the day and waited to see that I got safely onto the Watsonboro-bound bus, I had the sense that he might be a person who could protect me from my father, or Cary Patanauk, or Pastor Schect. I could feel that he enjoyed my company, enjoyed sitting across from me when he had dinner at Aunt Elaine’s. When he drove me to Watsonboro on those nights, he put music on his radio and said very little, but I was accustomed to that in people and preferred it to Aunt Elaine’s talk, which was pleasant enough, but, as the weeks went on, would veer in close to subjects I didn’t yet want to think about—my parents, my future. I felt a warmth in the middle of my body when I was with Sands, and I see now that it was something more than sexual.

  Once in a while, even with the rails he’d attached to the upper part of the ramp, and even with our adjustments to the system, the heavily loaded wagon would flip over the side. Depending on the way it fell, and the way the stones fell with it, the wagon could be slightly dented or completely ruined, so we bought a second, and then a third, to keep in the rectory basement as a spare. But even with those small failures the Laney System worked. Soon we’d reached the tops of the side walls and the front wall, and two of the small angular connecting walls, and we were putting together the arches above the windows—the most interesting job yet. By then it was time to make a trip to Vermont to talk with the man who was building the windows.

  We went west from downtown and over the long bridge that crossed the Connecticut. Out the side window I studied the men fishing there to see if one of them might be my father. But they were unfamiliar men in jeans and baseball caps, standing close to each other and talking. My father would have been off alone at the rail with his cane propped conspicuously beside him, not acknowledging anyone else, just staring down into the water, willing a fish to take his hook and then jerking it up in the air with a violent motion. Even with the possibility of a legal threat from Aunt Elaine—who had, she told me, managed to permanently close down Pastor Schect’s church—it seemed strange and worrisome that, in two, three, and now almost four weeks, my father had never driven by the work site, or come and bothered me there. It didn’t make sense that he would have started a penance like that and not finished it, or that he’d passively accept the end of the income from my work with Sands. I wondered if he’d found an under-the-table job, or moved away, if Aunt Elaine had sent them money or a threatening letter, if Cary Patanauk had gone to the police after all and filed an assault charge, or if Sands was too frightening a figure for my father to face a second time. I wondered how my mother was feeling, well into her pregnancy, but I didn’t speak of those things with anyone.

  We crossed the river and climbed into the hills on the Vermont side. The road there brought us through the hamlet of Hensonville, which had been in the news a few months earlier. As we were passing through the tiny town center—a general store, a gas station, a pizza place—I thought of mentioning it to Sands. This is where the girl was coming home to, I wanted to say. Somewhere right along this road was where the police found her bike. But I held my silence, as if I believed that speaking about something so evil and horrible would invite it into my own life. I looked at the houses we passed, wondering if the girl had lived in one of them and what her parents thought about when they drove by the place where their daughter’s bicycle had been found. What they thought when they got into their bed and it was dark all around them, and the room where their daughter had slept was e
mpty, night after night, morning after morning. One body had been found—the most recent disappearance—and there was a rumor that the police had clues from it and were close to arresting someone. I looked carefully through the newspaper that was delivered to my aunt’s house every afternoon but saw nothing beyond those few facts and letters to the editor from fearful citizens. Why, they wanted to know, after two years and what seemed to be five murders, had the police detained only one suspect—who turned out to have an alibi, at that. With all the state troopers in town, all the police overtime, why hadn’t the killer been caught? What tormented me more than anything was the question of whether or not I should go to the police and tell them about Pastor Schect. But, in our family, voluntarily going to the police had always been the near equivalent of spying for the Russians or defacing a statue of Christ—something done by traitors, sinners, or crazy people. And, in any case, what would I tell them? That the pastor had come to our house, one time, and I thought I’d seen something evil in his eyes? The same kind of thing I’d seen in Cary Patanauk’s eyes, the blaze of lust, a desperate hunger for a female body? No, where men like that were concerned, the best thing to do was avoid talking and thinking about them, keep them as far away from your mind as possible. Finding the kidnapper was a job for the states, for people like Sands’s friend.

  Still, I was sometimes touched by a nibble of guilt.

  The man who was making the cathedral windows carried a bush of white hair on the sides of his head and had a kind of name I’d never heard before. There was something about him I immediately disliked. I was used to men we met—at the hardware store, at the lumberyard—staring at me in a certain way; it wasn’t the way of Pastor Schect and Patanauk, it wasn’t bad. But the window maker shook Sands’s hand and barely acknowledged me, as if I couldn’t be a true worker, just a girl. Being ignored like that, after all the work I’d been doing, lit a familiar fuse of insult in me. Dad Paul had been that way: I’d been invisible to him.