The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  Close beside the man’s house stood a small log cabin that served as his workshop and was as tidy inside and out as the cab of Sands’s truck. The man was nearly finished with the first set of windows. He’d laid them out on a long workbench for Sands’s inspection. Four of the windows were rectangles with curved tops, seven feet by three, and one was a circle four feet across. Sands had told him not to put images of saints or Christ in them, and no words, but to make them so just the colors and shapes gave a feeling of peacefulness. When we opened the door and stepped in, there was sun pouring into the log cabin, and even though it wasn’t shining through the stained glass windows, it was falling on them, and I could see that the white-haired man had done his job. The windows showed curling vines and green leaves against a background of clouds, and the designs were lit by a light that was somehow mysterious. Looking at the colors and shapes, I even had the sense that the kindhearted God Aunt Elaine talked about might have sneaked in and touched the windows with a finger and then sneaked out again before there could be any trouble. I could see how much Sands liked them. He kept pushing his glasses up, glancing at me, walking back and forth in the shop so he could examine the windows from different angles. He stood still finally, ran his fingers along the lead solders, looked at the designs again the way he had looked at the paintings in the Boston museum, met my eyes.

  He wrote the man a check and shook his hand enthusiastically, but I could see that he didn’t want to leave. He asked the man about the delivery schedule, and how we were going to lift the windows into the spaces in the wall and hold them there, and how we were going to seal them to keep the rain and snow and cold out, and if it was better to put the roof on first or not. The man answered in short sentences, always smiling at Sands and ignoring me. I noticed that he seemed odd or different in a certain way, and that Sands seemed more comfortable with him than with some of the other men we’d had dealings with.

  At last, Sands shook the man’s hand again and we got back in the truck and headed down toward the river.

  Just at the place where I imagined the girl had been abducted, I said, “Are you a Q?”

  “What?”

  “A Q.”

  “How did you know?” he said. We were winding down the road, and I could see that the girl probably couldn’t have ridden her bike up a hill like this unless she’d had very strong legs. It would have been natural for her, especially if she was late or tired, to leave her bike in the weeds and start to walk, or to stick out her thumb and hope for a ride. It had been a mistake to do that, but the size of the punishment didn’t fit the mistake at all, so why had God let that happen?

  A piece of the river, like a ribbon of green metal, showed between the hills below.

  “How did you know?” Sands said again.

  “Because you don’t to have a girlfriend ever.”

  “I’m a little … what are you talking about?”

  “Q,” I said again, vaguely disappointed. “Queer.”

  “Gay?”

  “That’s the same. The kids say ‘Q’ now.”

  “You’re asking me if I’m gay?”

  “Never a mind. You just said. It doesn’t make a lot of matter to me.”

  Sands was laughing in a quiet way I didn’t like. He looked across the seat at me when I thought he should have been watching the road. “I’m a Quaker,” he said, laughing, and then smiling in a way that made me twist in my seat. “I thought that’s what you meant. Q. For Quaker. I thought your pastor wouldn’t let you say the word or something.”

  “He’s not anymore.”

  The road bottomed out, then came, after a ways, to the old two-lane highway that ran along the river. We turned south on that road, went along a few hundred yards, and made a left onto the bridge.

  “Do you know what a Quaker is?” Sands asked over the noise the tires made on the steel roadway.

  “It means you don’t like boys or girls but you like to hurt with birds. Crows you like so much. Kissing on sparrows is your fun.”

  He was smiling and watching the road. “You’re a joker now, all of a sudden.”

  “I was before. You just didn’t see of it.”

  “I just didn’t understand you, I think.”

  “The girl what talks funny is why.”

  “That’s what they call you in school?”

  I decided not to answer. Since school had let out, ten days after I’d moved to Aunt Elaine’s, I’d been making more and more of an effort to change the way I talked. Tiny steps in the direction of the polished world. But I was nervous then, on that ride, and the old words bubbled out of me. “You don’t to having girlfriends, don’t you,” I said.

  “Not at the present moment.”

  “What about the state police girl?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “Why not? Because of to be a Quaker?”

  “Because I’m waiting for the love of my life.”

  “God might to send her someday.”

  “I hope so.” Sands watched the road for a few minutes and then turned to me again. “You have a boyfriend, you said, am I right? That boy with the truck? A girl who looks like you, I’d think you’d have a lot of boys asking you out.”

  “I think, probably, he’s a went-away boyfriend for now. I think most of likely his uncle made him not be my boyfriend anymore, and other things.”

  “Why?”

  “I think because my father tried at cutting his hand over.”

  “Cutting his hand off, you mean? Your boyfriend’s hand?”

  “His uncle’s.”

  “Why would your dad do a thing like that? Did he try to hurt you?”

  “He wanted to hurt, sure, but it was really because my father knows his uncle forced my mother once in the long away when he been time.”

  “You lost me.”

  The truck turned into town and stopped at a light there.

  “There’s a lot, in this town here, of people who know other people’s people, and might of, in the years long away, had trouble on them.”

  “Still lost.”

  “I don’t have for one, that’s all.”

  “And I don’t have for one either,” he said, but he didn’t seem to be making fun. “There’s the shyness factor, I suppose. There’s the dirty-clothes-every-day factor.”

  “There is it both,” I said, and I watched two people crossing at the light. They were holding hands, and there was something in the way they walked with each other that raised a whole cathedral of hope inside me. But hope isn’t exactly the right word. Possibility is better. And right beside that possibility I felt a new kind of fear. It had nothing to do with my father and mother coming after me. It was bigger than that. Deep down inside I was used to fighting a solitary battle—to stay alive, to stay sane, to protect a part of myself that my parents and Pastor Schect, and even God sometimes, seemed to want to suffocate. In order to do that, I’d developed all kinds of strategies and built all kinds of walls between myself and other people. I remember watching the young couple crossing the street and imagining, just for one minute, what it would be like to let go of that.

  Twenty-six

  We went through the middle of that summer, working five and a half days each week and watching the first section of what Sands had taken to calling the Connecticut River Cathedral take shape. The blackflies had disappeared, replaced first by deerflies—slower, larger, with a stronger bite, but easier to kill—and then a second hatching of mosquitoes. The days were hot and the nights cool and good for sleeping.

  Aunt Elaine let me work in the garden with her. Sands let me help him build the window and door arches—they were a kind of miracle that defied gravity—and, after the conversation on the ride home from Hensonville, we seemed to get along more easily. With every new stone we cemented in place I buried the past a little deeper. Food, clothes, speech, some television now and then—everything was new.

  When the crane and the man with the puffy white hair arrived to put in the stained glass w
indows, a small crowd gathered on the sidewalk to watch. From time to time I’d turn my eyes to them, expecting to see my mother or father there, but I didn’t see them. I saw Aaron’s truck go past but couldn’t catch a glimpse of his face, and I didn’t really care very much. In spite of my admiration for his work, I didn’t like the window man any more than I had on the visit to his shop. I had a vague intuition that he was not as kind and meek as he pretended to be.

  Once the crane work started, I stood in a safe place in the middle of the cathedral floor and watched how the sun poured colors through the stained glass, how the windows seemed to light up with a life they’d only been hinting at in the man’s workshop, golds and yellows and the green leaves in a combination of shapes that suggested something hopeful. Seeing the windows go perfectly into their places one after the next, slowly, methodically, without trouble, I was almost convinced that the cathedral might stop being a weird curiosity or a demon place in the minds of the people in town and that, instead of being just another local eccentric, Sands might be lifted up to the status of semi-celebrity, the young brown-skinned guy with a ponytail who’d built himself a beautiful church.

  Once he noticed the small crowd, Sands put up ropes and sawhorses to keep people off the site and away from the sweep of the crane. I could see that he was shining inside and that the creator of the windows was proud, too, strutting around here and there, sending hand signals to the crane operator, watching carefully to see that Sands and his invisible girl helper caulked the windows tightly from their places on the staging and didn’t smudge the glass.

  The job took the whole day. When it was finished, we toasted with cartons of chocolate milk from the rectory refrigerator. The window man looked at me, finally, but as if I was a stranger to the human condition, an alien of some sort, a brown-haired robot in overalls who didn’t speak like anyone else and who shouldn’t have been allowed to work on a project that showcased his glorious glass. He drove away in his dark van and I was glad to see him go.

  Sands had decided to keep the crane a second day and use it to set the beams in place across the middle of the nave, resting the thick pieces of oak in notches on the tops of the side walls. On the second afternoon two men he called “specialists” came all the way from Keene to supervise the setting of the precut roof rafters. That evening, when the crane and the specialists had gone and Sands and I had put away the tools, we stood back and admired the work.

  “Now it’s starting to look like something,” he said proudly.

  “You can start to see what it would be,” I agreed. I slanted my head behind me at a small collection of onlookers that had stopped by after work. “People come for watching it now all the time.”

  “Your dad came by,” Sands said after a minute.

  I tried to pretend the news hadn’t hit me like a two-by-four swung against my ribs. I took a breath, kept my eyes on the cathedral walls, which looked now, suddenly, like something unconnected to me.

  “It was the other night, late. Just when it was getting dark. I came out to make a last check of things and he was standing very still on the sidewalk, staring. He looked at me for a minute, and I looked at him, and just when I was about to say something, he walked off.”

  I couldn’t seem to move or speak.

  “Don’t worry,” Sands said. “If he was going to bother you, he would have by now.”

  “You don’t know it.”

  “Just don’t worry, okay?”

  The next day—Sands had promised to give me the afternoon off—we covered the windows with heavy tarpaulins to avoid accidental breakage and to reduce the temptation to stone-throwing passersby. A truck with a noisy engine drove up onto the site. It was loaded with the heavy oak boards that would sheathe the rafters, and when we’d helped unload it and piled the boards neatly on the site, and when Sands had taken me into town for a shared pizza and salad, he wrote me a paycheck and told me to go have some fun, we’d meet at the site at six o’clock and he’d drive me to Aunt Elaine’s.

  I hadn’t seen Cindy since school let out, so I’d brought my new bathing suit and planned, after a quick stop at the bank, to spend the afternoon at the quarry. She was there, as I’d expected, and she greeted me on the stony shore, looking tanned and happy. She wasn’t yet pregnant, she said when we were out in the water and floating around, but all she seemed to want to talk about was what she and Carl did with each other and how it felt. The song in her voice made me think they’d found a kind of heaven for themselves.

  “You still haven’t done it yet?” Cindy asked me quietly.

  “No.”

  “Aaron tells everyone you did, with him, and he didn’t think it was no good so he busted off with you.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Your talk’s a little bit different.”

  “A little.”

  “It’s good now.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Pretty soon you’ll be too smart to be friends with me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  We swam over to the bank and sat on the rocks there, watching boys and girls jump or dive from the highest ledge. It seemed that all my life I’d been hearing stories about the quarry, about young people who’d drowned there during a night of drinking or hurt themselves diving from the top rock. There were stories of my father as a boy, performing the wildest acrobatics—somersaults, backflips, long looping swan dives—and staying under so long that other boys would dive in, thinking they had to save him. I couldn’t imagine my father doing anything like that, couldn’t picture him making a graceful dive the way these young boys were doing, or coming to the surface like them, spluttering and laughing. I couldn’t imagine my aunt and my mother swimming here as sisters and walking home together. I tried, but no picture of it would form in my mind. I wondered if having a child was what took all the laughing out of a person.

  For a time, as we sat there drying in the sun, I thought about telling Cindy what had happened with my father and mother on my last night at home, and why I’d moved away and was living with my aunt, but Cindy was asking about the cathedral, and complimenting me on my muscles, and saying I should get more sun because my stomach and legs were pure white and looked funny against the brown of my face and neck and arms. She asked me what I thought about possibly getting back together with Aaron.

  “Aaron and me I don’t think are friends no more.”

  “You want me to fix you up with Carl’s brother so you can try it?”

  “Maybe after the summer is done.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “I seen your mother at the 112 a few days ago. She didn’t look too good.”

  “She doesn’t never.”

  “Fat and thin at the same time, kind of.”

  I stood up and dove from the low ledge into the water and swam a hard crawl stroke back and forth until I was out of breath. I could hear and almost feel the splashes when the divers hit the water, and then a silence would fall over the people around the edges of the quarry, and then, when the diver surfaced, a group of nice-looking boys drinking beer on the far end of the bank would cheer and yell out, “Ten! Ten! Ten!” if they thought the dive had been a good one, or another number if they thought it was bad.

  Afterward, walking back into town to where Sands would meet me, with my hair wet and my shirt rubbing against my breasts, I remembered the noise of my parents’ bed hitting the wall on the nights they had sex. When I was small, I’d thought someone was knocking, wanting to be let in, and I’d gone to my bedroom window and looked out to see who was there.

  Sands drove me home that night, talking a little bit about his mother and father and how happy they’d been together, how kind they’d been to him, how he’d tried to pay some of that kindness back when they were sick. “They had some troubles in the marriage, like everybody, but there was a friendship there that you don’t see a lot. They ended up dying within about two months of each other, my dad first. It was like my mother couldn’t
imagine being alive with him not there.” I listened to the feelings running through his voice, and I tried to picture his mother and father and imagine what a marriage like that would be like. When we were at Aunt Elaine’s I asked him to stay for dinner but he said he couldn’t that night, no reason. I imagined he was going off to see a girlfriend somewhere near Watsonboro and just didn’t want to tell me. The next day we started to put the boards on the roof, sixteen-foot tongue-and-groove boards, inch-thick oak that was as hard and heavy as iron. We had to lift one end at a time up onto the staging shelf and then climb up and lay the board across the rafters just so. “If you put the first one on crooked,” he told me, “there will be trouble the whole rest of the way up. That’s really the first law of construction, you know: Get the beginning right.”

  By the end of the day we had set only two courses in place on one side of the roof, but Sands measured with his long yellow tape at the front and back, and from bottom to the peak the numbers were exactly the same. “Now it will get easier, instead of harder,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  When we’d finished putting the tools away, he surprised me by inviting me into the rectory to see his work. Except for going in and out of the basement for tools, or stepping inside to use the bathroom, I avoided the rectory as much as I could. I knew he slept there. I knew that, on days when we weren’t working—Sundays, rain days—Sands spent his time fixing up the interior, which had been damaged by weather coming through a hole in the roof and basically left to rot once the church was no longer used.

  “I think I should just to catch the bus,” I said.

  “I’ll drive you again tonight. Your aunt insists I have dinner there at least twice a week.”

  I noticed that he never said “my mother” but always called her “Elaine” or “your aunt.”

  “I just want you to see what I’ve been doing, Laney. Give me your professional opinion on the quality of the work.”

  There were two floors to the rectory. Up to that point, Sands had been working only on the bottom one. He’d completely renovated the kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms there, and I could see that everything he knew how to do with his hands—stonework, carpentry, painting, electrical, plumbing, tiling—had been put into the project. The hardwood floors—“These are all maple,” he told me, as if I didn’t already know—shone like gold. And the bedrooms, to me, were like something out of museum paintings, so orderly and colorful, with new beds covered with quilts and clean white pillows, the walls painted a deep green in one room and salmon pink in the other. I wondered if his state police friend had helped him with the decorating, because it didn’t seem like a job a man could do. I ran my hands over the window trim, the miter cuts made so well and nailed up so tight I couldn’t have fit a pine needle into the forty-five-degree joints at the corners. The wood was painted a glossy off-white, every surface so clean it seemed Sands had spent hours going over it with a washcloth and toothbrush.