The Talk-Funny Girl (16 page)

From a shelf inside the pulpit he took a plain paper shopping bag
and held it over his head. I felt my mother’s hand on the back of my neck, the fingers hot. I had a sense—I didn’t know where it came from—that my father might shout out “No,” just then, might take his wife’s hand, remove it from my neck, and tell Pastor Schect that she’d made a mistake, they didn’t have such a child, not this week. No. But in all the years we’d been going there for services, no one had ever challenged Pastor Schect, no adult and no child, and in another moment I felt my father’s hands on my shoulders, turning me, and I kept my eyes on my mother’s denim shirt as we walked out of the aisle and up to the front of the church. I forced myself not to urinate, not to move my eyes from the blue and white threads of the cloth covering my mother’s thin back, not to run.

“Name!” Pastor Schect yelled when we were standing in front of him. He had his back to the congregation now and I could see them studying me, wondering what my terrible sin had been.

“Majie Richards,” my mother said, almost proudly.

“Sin?”

“Disobey,” my father said, but I heard a tremble in his voice, something to match the muscles in my legs. For one last second I hoped he might rescue me.

Pastor Schect shook the brown grocery bag once, violently, so it opened with a snapping sound. He lifted it up high again to allow the congregation a better view. And then, with a ceremonial flourish, he brought the bag down over my head so the open edges of it rested against my collarbones and the back of my neck. There was a small hole near my mouth, but even taking in short, fast breaths, I couldn’t quite get enough air through it. I felt my mother’s fingers holding the bag in place, and I knew Pastor Schect must have waved his hand then, because I heard a scraping of chair legs against the concrete floor, and clanking metallic noises as the chairs were pushed back and knocked against each other. I heard footsteps, a little girl starting to cry. A few drops of pee went into my underwear. “If ever you get faced,” Aaron had told me once, “just keep your eyes and your mouth real tight closed
and pull down your chin so somebody by accident or on purpose don’t hit your apple.” So I did that. I listened to the sounds of the shoes and boots on the cement floor. The girl was still crying. Someone stopped in front of me. I felt my parents’ hands go tight on my arms and then heard a woman’s voice, “Go, sin no more.” The woman jammed two rigid fingers hard into the bag and hit me just beneath my right eye. I made a small noise; I couldn’t help myself.

“Go, sin no more,” a man said next. He poked me hard, too, right in the eyelid, and I cried out and tried to lift my arms but they were held down against my sides.

“Silence, sinner,” Pastor Schect ordered.

One after the next—probably fifteen adults on that day—people came up and poked two straight fingers into the paper covering my face. There were some who didn’t hit with much force or who purposely aimed for my forehead, where it would hurt least. But my lips were hit several times, my right eye, my cheeks, the tip of my nose. Someone hit me in the throat, and I coughed, squeezed my hands so tight that the nails, even worn down by the stonework, cut into my callused palms. The last person, a woman muttering words I didn’t understand, hit me straight in the mouth and I felt the tip of one fingernail go between my lips and hard against my teeth. I tasted blood. I couldn’t stop crying then, couldn’t stop my legs from shaking.

Pastor Schect made me wait inside the darkness of the bag, let me wonder if there were more people in line or if he would call them all up for a second turn. I felt my father squeeze my right wrist, three quick squeezes, a signal that it was over, and then Pastor shouted out, “Go, Majie Ree-shard, sin no more, say!” And the people answered him in unison.
“Go, sin no more!”
And I felt the bag—it was torn and bloodstained by then—lifted up over my head. The light hurt the one eye I could keep open. I gulped in big breaths of air. I couldn’t look at anyone. Pastor touched me on top of the head in a blessing, and then I was aware of nothing else until I was outside the church with my mother and father, and I could see my father’s truck, a blurred red shape in the
rain. My lips and nose were bleeding, but not very badly. I couldn’t see out of my right eye and felt the throbbing pain in a dozen different places. But I didn’t cry and I didn’t speak and I didn’t turn my good eye to look at them.

“There’s not no money for Mimi’s today but at Pastor’s he’s having people on to coffee and so.”

It seemed to me that my mother expected an answer from me, but I wouldn’t give it.

“No,” my father said, after a few seconds. “To home.” We got in the truck and pulled out of the lot so fast the tires spit stones.

The rain stopped. The pain in my face grew stronger, and the smoke from my mother’s cigarette made me close both eyes. I didn’t let my body touch any part of my parents’ bodies. Every time the truck went over a bump in the road the pain ricocheted around the bones of my face, but I kept my mind fixed on the cathedral, the work that waited for me there. I went deep inside myself to a place where the pain seemed distant, and the memory of the humiliation only circled and circled without touching down. I went deep and tried to speak a prayer to God to ask forgiveness for everything I had done wrong in my life. But God’s face didn’t appear to me then, and the words wouldn’t come.

At last, the truck turned onto Waldrup Road and bounced along there, making the pain shoot through my lips and eyes and the skin of my bruised cheeks. I opened my eye just as my father was turning into the driveway, and what I saw, as if in a vision, was Aunt Elaine’s car parked in front of our house. My aunt was standing on the front step. I heard my father mutter, and I wondered if he’d turn the truck around and drive away. But he pulled into the yard and snapped the key to off. For one moment we were still and quiet in the cab, the three of us, and I wondered how I would explain myself to my aunt. But then something shifted inside me—I will never understand why it happened then. Maybe the facing was the work of God, after all, a blessing in thick disguise, baptism into a new life. Maybe in a strange, sick way, that’s what it was. I followed my mother out the passenger side,
but then she hesitated there and I pushed past her toward the front of the house. I felt my parents lagging behind. I forced myself to keep moving forward, stepping through a dense fog of fear and old habit. Aunt Elaine was staring at me. When I reached the steps, she held me away from her at arm’s length, running her eyes over my face, then she wrapped her arms around me and hugged me very tight.

Thirteen

F
or as long as I could remember, I had heard my mother refer to Aunt Elaine as “my sister,” though, in fact, they were stepsisters. My mother was the child of a man her own mother never spoke about. She’d been eighteen months old when her mother moved in with Aunt Elaine’s father. The stepsisters were as different from each other as two people could possibly be. When my mother was paying for food at the market, or cooking something at the stove, or sitting poor-postured in the passenger seat of the pickup, it often seemed to me she was only half-present, that her real self, her spirit, lay hidden behind the disguise of her face and slim body. In certain kinds of light, I saw her as a skeleton or a ghost, the clothes and skin and flesh and hair just things that had been pasted on and could fall away with one shake. Even her eyes seemed to turn inward, most of her attention focused backward and down, as if she was looking for herself in there, or looking for a way out of the person she had become.

Aunt Elaine, on the other hand, was like the black bears that passed through our yard in May and June when there wasn’t yet enough food for them in the deep woods. Not that she was particularly overweight. It was more a way she had of appearing to control the air around her, just the way the bears seemed to, a complete not-caring about what others thought, a large-scale unselfconsciousness.

When she stood on the front step of our house that day—the day I was faced—there was the sense that you wouldn’t be walking past her without something happening. There was a bear on the front step and it had no natural predators. It wasn’t so much that she was about to attack you—black bears rarely hurt people—it was just that you somehow couldn’t ignore her, and you knew that, and the bear knew it, too.

“What in God’s breath happened?” she asked when she had me at arm’s length again. But I knew she was sending the question back toward my parents and not at me.

“She tried running out church,” my mother said. “Tripped. Gravel. Splat at her face. Big-chest girls like her shouldn’t to run.”

Aunt Elaine kept moving her nurse’s eyes over the marks on me, moving her gaze across my cheeks, my closed eye, the blood on my lips. She was a few inches taller, but only because she was on the first step and I was standing on the dirt. “Is that true, Marjorie?”

I heard my father slam the truck door. My mother was so close I could smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes. “No,” I said.

“Majie!” my mother hissed. “No lying, you Majie!”

“Is it true that you fell?”

“No,” I said a second time. That word seemed to rise out of me like a bird that had escaped its cage. Ten, fifteen, seventeen years it had been held there behind thin metal lies and now it was out in the air. I said, “I got faced is true.” And, really, a new life began for me at that moment.

“What is ‘faced’?”

“Faced is tripped on the gravel in your face because you runned,” my mother said.

I heard my father spit.

“What is ‘faced,’ Marjorie? Tell me.”

“Faced.” I was able to speak that one syllable before my mouth snapped closed and the words that were lined up behind my teeth all died. My good eye went sideways. I was no longer seeing my aunt, but the four shagbark hickory trees that stood next to each other near the
stream. They looked, with their fraying dark skin, as if they had been whipped every week of their lives.

Aunt Elaine took my chin gently in her fingers and turned my head back to her. She seemed to ask the question again with her eyes, and I felt the words again, pushing at the inside of my sore lips. The air around my head swirled with pain memories: dousing, hungering, boying. I almost wanted to reach up and swat them away, but then Aunt Elaine gave me the gentlest of shakes and the words broke free. “Faced is how somebody takes a paper bag over you in at the front of church and people come up. The people two-finger you into the bag, hard.”

“It in receiving a penance,” my father spat out behind me.

“Penance?” Aunt Elaine didn’t speak the word, she growled it. To me the sound seemed as hard as a frying pan. “Penance!”

“Right with our religious. No one knows you to understand it so.”

I could see Aunt Elaine only as a blur in front of me. There was something like electricity coming off her body. I half expected the brown and gray hair to go standing up away from her scalp. “I’m going to tell you now about understand,” she said, in a voice that wobbled with fury. “We’re going in the house and we’re going to sit at the table, all of us, and I’m going to tell you about
understand.
”

I had never in my life heard a person speak that way to my father.

Aunt Elaine held the door open with her arm. There was something like a command in the way she did it. I went inside and stood next to the table because there weren’t enough chairs for all of us. My mother came in, my father. Aunt Elaine let the screen door slap and followed my parents inside. She seemed, at that moment, three times as big as I remembered her. “Sit,” she ordered. “Marjorie. All of you. Sit.”

For a second, I was sure my mother and father wouldn’t do it. My mother had a cigarette in her hand, and I expected to be told to light it in. My father slid one foot along the floor planks; he rubbed the stump of his index finger with his thumb.

“Don’t smoke,” Aunt Elaine said. “And don’t dawdle.”

Amazingly, my parents sat, though my father kept himself half turned away.

Aunt Elaine came around behind me and put her hands on the back of my chair. “For this kind of thing,” she said in the frying-pan voice, “people go to jail. Do you know about that law, Curtis? Do you know about it, Emmy?”

Out of the side of my working eye, I saw my mother and father look away from me, as if I was a dirty thing, dangerous to them in the way an infectious disease might be. I did not ever remember hearing my parents’ names spoken in that room. The names seemed to knock against the walls and the glass in the windows and then come echoing back over the table like the sound of frozen tree branches cracking on a winter night.

“Do you?”

“Not if the pastor what tells you to,” my father said through his teeth. I looked at him. He was squinting his eyes, slanting them down to the floor.

“You believe that, don’t you?” Aunt Elaine told him. “You’re that much disconnected from reality that you believe it.”

“Gone from out my house,” my father said.

“Is that what you want, Curtis? Really? Because if I go from this house now, I don’t ever come back, and not only don’t I come back, but no money comes back with me, not Marjorie’s money, and not any more of my own. No money, no food, no clothes, no gasoline for the saw, no repairs for the truck. No lawyer when you need it, no bail, no insurance. Not anything. Is that what you want?”

My parents didn’t speak. For me, it was the same as when my father took the plastic off the outside of the windows in spring. One sheet, then another, one opening-up after the next. Light in the house.

“I have eighty dollars for you,” Aunt Elaine said, turning to my mother and then my father as she said it, her voice stronger in one ear and then the other. “Twenty dollars a week, which is your share of the money from what Marjorie earned for working a straight month.”

“Majie,” my mother corrected her.

“I am calling her by her name. Eighty dollars a month is nine hundred sixty dollars a year. I came to give you the eighty dollars because she has finished working one month. And I brought food—fried chicken in a box, apples, and bread—the way I always do. I’m going to give you the eighty dollars, and I’m going to tell you what is going to happen. Marjorie will not be hit again. Ever. Not by the preacher, and not by you. Not ever. I am going to give her money every week for buying clothes and things she needs, and you are not going to take it away from her for your own spending. When I get home, I am going to call the police and report what goes on at the church, without mentioning her name or your names. If you want to fight that, good, fine, you go talk to the police about it, but I am going to close down the church. In two weeks I’m coming again with twenty dollars more, and I am going to take Marjorie out and have lunch with her, and look at her, and talk to her, and if I see the smallest mark on her from you, or hear the smallest little bad story about what you’ve been doing to her, then you are going back upstate, Curtis, to be with your dad. And, Emmy, you are going right with him to the woman’s side.” Aunt Elaine stopped for a breath. I could feel the back of the chair shaking but I didn’t know whether my aunt or I was causing it to shake. “Now,” Aunt Elaine said, moving her hands onto my shoulders. “If you have something to say back to me, you say it. It’s your house, Curtis, you’re right, and your and Emmy’s daughter here. But things get taken away from people who don’t care for them. Even dogs get taken now, when they’re badly treated. Dogs, never mind young women. You want to say something to me, you say it.”