The Talk-Funny Girl
Read The Talk-Funny Girl Online
Authors: Roland Merullo
Also by Roland Merullo
Fiction
Fidel’s Last Days
American Savior
Breakfast with Buddha
Golfing with God
A Little Love Story
In Revere, in Those Days
Revere Beach Boulevard
A Russian Requiem
Leaving Losapas
Nonfiction
The Italian Summer
Revere Beach Elegy
Passion for Golf
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Roland Merullo
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN
and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Merullo, Roland.
Talk funny girl : a novel / Roland Merullo.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Self-realization in women—Fiction. I. Title
PS3563.E748T35 2011
813′.54—dc22 2011003328
eISBN: 978-0-307-45294-8
Title page photography by Emily Lahteine
Jacket design by Nupoor Gordon
Jacket photography © Ocean/Corbis
v3.1
for
Shaye Areheart
Author’s Note
A
lthough this story grew out of a chance encounter in a Vermont convenience store twenty-five years ago—a glimpse into the hidden world of New England’s rural poor—the people described here are creatures of my imagination. While the places where some of the main scenes are set bear a resemblance to certain old New Hampshire mill towns, they are made-up places and should not be confused with those actual towns.
Many people helped with this book, and I would like to express my gratitude to them. First thanks, as always, to my wife, Amanda, for her unflappable love and optimism in the face of the persistent uncertainty of the writing life and the quirks and moods of her husband. My inexpressible gratitude to her, and to Alexandra and Juliana for the gift of their presence.
It is a huge favor to spend hours reading a manuscript and offering suggestions. I am grateful to Craig Nova, Peter Grudin, Jeffrey Forhan, and Amanda Merullo for their time and care in doing that. Thanks to my neighbor Joe Miraglia for passing on some of his extensive knowledge of New England’s natural world; to Paul Wetzel for his expertise about the New England woods; to John Recco for his knowledge of stonework; to my agents Marly Rusoff and Michael Radulescu for their consistent support, hard work on my behalf, and sound advice; to Anne Pardun, Sarah Stearns, and Jackie Hudak, my three therapist sisters-in-law, for insight into the intricacies of family psychology; to Shaye Areheart and Kate Kennedy for their wise editing and their belief in this book from start to finish; to Aja Pollock for her wonderful copyediting job; to Tim DeChristopher, master stoneworker, for his help with the technical aspects of cathedral buildings; to the late Alan Schiffmann for his courage, support, and good conversation. Any mistakes or omissions in these pages belong to me, not to these generous friends.
I would like to offer a last word—not of thanks but of empathy—to boys and girls like the fictional Marjorie Richards, wherever they might be. May the busy, self-important adult world someday see you as the full souls you are.
T
he more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.
—Benjamin Spock
O
ur children are not individuals whose rights and tastes are casually respected from infancy, as they are in some primitive societies.… They are fundamentally extensions of our own egos and give a special opportunity for the display of authority.
—Ruth Benedict
Contents
Prologue
I
am a grown woman now, married and raising children, and happy enough most of the time. Underneath that happiness, though, showing its face every now and again, is a part of me still connected to a time when I was a girl living with her parents in the New Hampshire hills. That girl was not treated well, and when anyone is hurt like that—especially a child—the hurt burrows down inside and makes a kind of museum there, with images of the bad times displayed on every wall. Some people try to forget the museum exists and keep their mind occupied with drink or drugs or food, or by staying busy with work, or they chase one kind of excitement after another, while the memories fester there in the dark. I understand all that, and I don’t lay a judgment, as we used to say, over any of it. Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others, or for soaking in self-pity, or for a sharp anger that knifes up through the surface whenever something reminds them of what happened long ago. Some people spend their lives trying never to do what was done to them.
I have all those impulses in me—anger and self-pity, the urge to hide, and, sometimes, the urge to hurt. But there is a stronger, warmer part of me, and some courage and kindness, too, and a stubbornness that makes it hard for me to give up on things. I’ve been lucky to find
a loving husband and to have children with him, but even when the people close to you are caring and good, there are going to be times when they say or do something that throws open the museum doors, pushes you in there, forces you to look.
My children are eleven and eight now, their lives different in so many ways from the life I knew at that age. I had fear instead of dreams. I was so much tougher than they are, and paid such a high price for that toughness. Enormous as it was, I couldn’t have found the anger inside me with a flashlight and magnifying glass, but their anger is right there on the surface and they know—sometimes too well—how to express it. There have been times when things they’ve done or said, or forgotten to do or say, have flung me back into the past—it happens to every parent, I think—and I reacted in ways they were confused or hurt by, ways I’m not proud of. Sometimes this has happened with my husband, too, a man who wrestles with his own demons. If I could close down the museum for good, or rip the pictures off the walls and burn them in some kind of healing ceremony, I would do that. But something my husband showed me a long time ago has given me a method of wearing away at the foundations of the trouble, little by little, year after year, the way water erodes stone. As part of my own healing, I decided, not long ago, to open the doors and windows of the museum and let the light in. I returned to the place I was raised, only twenty miles from where we live now, and I walked the roads and went into the buildings, and talked to some of the people I recognized and who remembered me. “Mom’s own private history project,” the kids called it, but, of course, they had no idea what I was really doing. It was more than a history project and had nothing to do with nostalgia. It was my way of trying to stand up to the worst memories, eye to eye, so that they wouldn’t send their poisons, through me, into my children.
The events I’m going to describe here happened more than twenty years ago. I was a different person then, the demons so much larger in my world. While I don’t pretend to remember conversations exactly, I do remember the spirit of them. Strange as it may seem to readers in
the main stream of society, I really did talk that way, and the people around me really did behave that way. Though the pain of my upbringing made me stronger, I can’t say I’m grateful, and I would never wish anything like it for any other child on this earth. At the same time I don’t let myself feel much self-pity. Hard things happen to people—that’s the nature of the world—and, horrible as that can be, I believe there has to be some purpose behind it all. The question isn’t
Why did this happen to me?
but
What do I do with it?
The past shouts at you, the ugly words or actions echo down across the years. You’re walking through the museum with headphones on, listening to all that, your children and husband nearby, the world asking you to grow up, clean up, straighten out, pass on something good. What do you do?
One
T
here are a lot of places I could begin the story, and a lot of ways I could change a few details and make it easier to read. But I’m after the truth here—the truth is what heals you—so I’ll just begin where it seems right, on my seventeenth birthday, and tell the story as it sits in my memory.
On the day I turned seventeen I went looking for a job. I was close to finishing tenth grade then, a year behind where I should have been. Classes let out just before lunch that day. I remember pretending to myself it was in honor of my birthday, but it must have been for a teachers’ meeting or a conference or something like that. I remember it was warm for April in middle-north New Hampshire and that I stepped out the school’s front door into sunlight and saw the buses lined up in the driveway, engines grumbling, yellow fenders marked with mud. I should have just walked into town, but I needed time to get ready for what I had to do, and so I stepped onto my bus with the other kids, sat with my friend Cindy, and rode all the way back to the corner of Waldrup Road, near where my parents and I lived. Because I didn’t want to go home first, I hid my backpack in the trees there, tried to gather up some courage, and then set off on foot back toward town along highway 112.