The Talk-Funny Girl (18 page)

When the teenage years arrived, though I was poorly dressed and poorly groomed, a few boys started to show an interest. One boy was a bit kinder than the others. His name was Aaron Patanauk—nephew to the welder—and if none of his friends was close by he would sometimes make a little conversation with me. Aaron and his family and his uncle had been regulars at Pastor Schect’s church for a while, and then stopped going. He was the first person I ever saw faced. I’d even walked to the front of the church with my parents and watched as they poked their fingers into the bag; I still remember the noises he made, whimpers and quick shrieks. He was a big gangly boy whose arms and legs moved like puppets’ limbs, hinged at the joint.

Aaron was sixteen and a half in ninth grade. During the summers when I was fourteen and fifteen, I had sometimes been allowed to ride my bicycle to Cindy’s house, which was just off Route 112 in the opposite direction from town. Aaron lived nearby, and sometimes when he saw me there he drove over in the truck his uncle had given him and asked if I wanted to take a ride. I always declined. Cindy and I called it the Ugly Truck because the driver and passenger doors were gray and
the rest of the truck a rose red, and the whole thing was dented and patched in a dozen places, the front seat torn, the tires almost bald. The next summer when Cindy and I went walking to the pond behind her house, Aaron followed along on foot. Sometimes Cindy left us alone, and Aaron and I talked a bit, and twice I let him kiss me, and once put his hands up inside my shirt. Somehow my father learned about it—I never understood how; Aaron must have told someone, who told someone else, and word had eventually circled around to my father or mother—and in a fit of anger he smashed my bicycle to pieces against one of his wood piles and forbade me from ever going to Cindy’s house again. The next year Aaron had some trouble and went away to a place we called Robertson’s Farm, which was a kind of minor-league jail for teenage country boys. He said he’d sent me some letters from Robertson’s, but I never received them.

In any case, when I came to school on the day after my facing, I rode with Cindy on the bus, as always. She asked only one quick question about what had happened. I answered with one quick lie. She had odd parents, too, and after the bicycle-smashing incident we’d fallen into an unspoken agreement not to talk about what went on in our families. My right eye was closed and purple, and there were small round bruises, like dark pennies, on my cheeks and throat and around my eyes. My top lip was still swollen. Things are different these days, of course. Teachers are more aware of abuse in the home, more willing to involve the police. But twenty years ago, at least where we lived, they would sometimes choose to ignore the signs of children being hurt. I was happy enough to be ignored; I preferred it, in fact. When Mrs. Land, my third-period teacher, asked about the injuries, I told her what I’d told Cindy—that I’d been in the woods near the end of the day and had run straight into a tree with a lot of low branches. It was an obvious lie; the other girls and boys laughed. After class Mrs. Land sent me to see the assistant principal, Mrs. Eckstrom.

I’d been to Mrs. Eckstrom’s office twice before, both times for conversations about my speech problems. I didn’t like the woman, didn’t
like the solid-color dresses she wore that always came exactly to the middle of her kneecap, didn’t like the sound of her heavy-heeled shoes in the corridor, didn’t like the way she made me wait outside her office where passing students could see and then ordered me inside and made me sit facing her across a desk with nothing on it but a sheet or two of paper and two perfectly lined-up pens.

“What’s this now?” Mrs. Eckstrom demanded. Her eyebrows made dark lines across the top part of her face. “Some kind of fight?”

“Nothing kind of,” I said.

“ ‘Nothing kind of’? What language would that be? The language of the woods? If you are a student here you will speak properly.”

“Yes,” I said.

“What happened?”

“I had a fall.”

“On school property?”

“No.”

“Do you need to see the nurse?”

I shook my head. The palms of my hands were wet so I tucked them under the tops of my thighs.

“What then?”

“I’m trying for … I’m trying to talk different now. Mrs. Land said to tell.”

“To tell
you.
”

“No.” I pointed at Mrs. Eckstrom across the desk. “To tell for you.”

Mrs. Eckstrom fixed her eyes on me, her gaze flicking to the bruises and closed eye. One blink. A widening of the nostrils. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Do you know that expression?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what your grandfather went to jail for?”

“No.”

“You truly don’t?”

“No.”

“Well let me give you three pieces of advice then. First, stop
drinking. Second, learn to speak correctly. Third, if the day ever comes that you have children of your own, male children especially, and if your grandfather is back in circulation by then, keep them away from him. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Go.”

A
t lunch, Aaron sat directly across the table from me in the cafeteria. His boxy head was tilted to one side and he waited until no one else was around and then said, “Looks like you got faced.”

“Aren’t you a smart to of notice.”

Aaron smiled. “Hurts, don’t it? But only a few days. Then they usually don’t never face anybody twicet.”

“I think Pastor Schect is going to call some trouble on for himself when he keeps to facing kids.”

“Your dad gonna fix him?”

“Somebody would.”

“People worry about your dad, you know. Word is he kilt a man when he was younger an me.”

“Who lied that?”

“My uncle. Only it ain’t a lie. Maybe he kilt other people, too.”

“He never kilt,” I said, but inside myself I had the same feeling that had come over me when Mrs. Eckstrom mentioned Dad Paul. It was as if the walls of my mind were crashing out sideways, creating a new, larger room, and the new room had bureaus and closets in it, and the shelves and drawers contained secrets coiled like snakes.

“He never about hits me,” I said, which was not exactly the full truth, but I was used to saying it to the teachers and was able to repeat it to Aaron with some conviction.

“It was a long time ago, but my uncle says it happened.”

“Your uncle hasn’t a lie maker ever either, right?”

“Girl chaser not a lie maker,” Aaron said. Another smile. His top
front teeth folded one over the other. “The talk-funny girl,” he said, but almost kindly. “Everybody’s still goin’ on about the big church you’re building in town. It looks nice.”

“I make some money on it.”

“Sure. You’re lucky. Could I drive you home someday after you’re done working?”

“So you can put your hands up at my shirt, that’s why.”

“Aren’t you smart to guess,” he said, and he smiled and stood up, with the hinges flexing in his legs, and he went across the cafeteria like a puppet worked by strings from above, lifting his knees and swinging his shoulders, leaning his boxy head to one side.

W
hen I went to work that day, I could tell Sands was looking at the marks on my face, and I was glad he didn’t mention them. But the facing and having to lie about it had stirred a small circle of anger in me. Something had started to shift and change. The few minutes with Mrs. Eckstrom had made me think, again, about the way I talked, made me think about Dad Paul and my father. The half hour with Aunt Elaine had upset me at a depth of emotion where I wasn’t used to spending time. Many years earlier, I had set a heavy blanket over the feelings in that deep place, but now I felt them—just started to feel them—moving their arms and legs and pushing up toward the light. I tried hard to keep from thinking about what my parents would do, what kind of punishment was boiling now in the stew of humiliation in my father’s mind. After years of practice, I was very good at concentrating on the present moment—schoolwork, housework, and now stonework—and putting off the inevitable hour of penance until it actually arrived. But something was starting to change.

That week, because the days were growing longer, Sands asked if I could work an extra half hour each afternoon—he’d pay me more, of course, he said, or that extra half hour could go to pay off the boots. I agreed without having to think about it. The cathedral was starting
to have a shape. In the section we were building (which, Sands said, was going to be only about a third of the eventual size, but he wanted to have one part of the building roofed in before the snow came), the walls were as high as my chest. I could see the outline of the front door, and the lower part of the two windows in the front wall, and three each, evenly spaced, along the sides. At the base of those windows, we had to lay down what Sands called “sill ribbons,” long pieces of red sandstone that contrasted in a way I loved with the grays and browns of the rest of the stones. The sills were too heavy for him to lift up that high on his own, and I couldn’t lift them at all, so we built a system of moveable wooden steps, four feet wide, to help us get the sill ribbons in place. Sands lifted one end up onto the first step. I held it there by leaning all my weight against it to be sure it didn’t slip. He went over to the other end of it, said, “Ready?” and then lifted while I held my side.

Little by little, with time allowed for Sands to rest, we moved the sill up onto the top step of the makeshift stairway. I prepared a small batch of mortar, my face so sore in the gritty wind I was nearly crying into the mixture, and Sands showed me how to trowel it evenly onto the layer of stones where the sill would rest. When that was done, it wasn’t hard to move the sandstone across and onto the mortar. Sands checked it with his level, tapped it a bit this way or that with the heel of the trowel handle, then we stood back and admired the work.

“Do you see how it’s slanted on top, down away from the inside of the building?”

“Sure,” I said. “So the water can run away out, if while it rains.”

Sands looked at me the way he sometimes did, a way that partly pleased me and partly made me uncomfortable. I thought it might be the way an older brother would look at me, if I’d had one. “You’re smarter than you act,” he said.

“Same on you,” I said, but again he missed the joke, and again I told myself to keep my comments within certain boundaries, not to forget that he was my boss and could take the job away at any time. There
wasn’t another adult on earth I felt I could joke with, not even Aunt Elaine, but something in Sands brought out a different part of me.

“Why, though?” he said, still looking.

I kept my eyes on the windowsill and shrugged. “If you have a like for school, you don’t show, that’s all.”

Sands watched me for another few seconds. “Why not?”

“You’re not of as smart as you look, for asking that.” He laughed but didn’t look away. “Your father talks like you do.”

“Same as.”

“And your mother, too?”

“Not so as much but sure.”

“Did they send you to school when you were first of the age to go?”

“I’m of my same grade except one now.”

“Right, but did they send you?”

“They taughted me home until I was nine. I learned cooking, all the trees’ names, things for fishing, to cutting wood.”

“Those are good skills to know.”

“Reading now I like. In my room a lot of times I do it if I have on a book from the library at school.” He seemed to be watching me in a different way, peering down inside me, and the whole conversation was making me feel I had tiptoed out onto a high wire over the Connecticut River. I didn’t know if it was wiser to go forward to the far bank or retreat. “Now we can might lift the other one,” I said.

But Sands wouldn’t let the subject drop. “Do the teachers bother you about it? The way you talk, I mean?”

“Just today one had bother for it.”

“But that doesn’t matter to you?”

“No,” I said, not looking at him. “I can to work fair without it.”

“The reading helps you?”

“A lot it does help.”

“I could give you some books if you want.”

“Thanks. But at home I have already.”

He watched me a minute, and I could feel he was getting ready to ask what had happened to my face, so I walked off toward the next sill ribbon without saying anything.

A
fter work that day and on Wednesday (the bruises were faded to a dull yellow by then and my right eye was nearly open) Sands drove me to the 112 Store as always. I liked it that there was no cigarette smoke in the cab and that he sometimes played music or listened to the news on the radio. My hands and arms were tired from the work, but no longer sore, and a strange new kind of pleasure filled me up on those rides, something left over from the few minutes we spent at the end of the day, looking at what we’d accomplished. I kept waiting, half-afraid, half-hopeful, for Sands to ask me a second time to go to Boston. “It’s coming along beautifully now,” he said, which wasn’t the way anyone else I knew talked.

I thought of making a joke about it, telling him that
he
was the one who talked funny, that he might be a man after all but didn’t sound like it, but as the words were coming up I diverted them and tried something safer. “A lot of people now put their eyes on going by. One of them came with his camera and took. You were at for work near the back part.”

“Just wait until the windows go in. I have a guy in Hensonville making them. Stained glass. One day we’ll take a ride over there and you’ll meet him.”

I’d heard of Hensonville. It was a hill town across the big river where the most recent disappearance had taken place, the girl on her bicycle. I felt the familiar tickle of fear run up along my back but made myself ignore it. “Who can be in at the window then? Jesus?”

“No,” Sands said, but, though I waited, he didn’t offer anything more about it, and I didn’t ask again.

He turned in to the store parking lot and kept his truck engine
running. I took some extra time zipping up my backpack and wrestling it onto my lap, thinking he might ask about Boston again if I waited long enough. But he didn’t. I thanked him, as I did every day, then got out and started off along the highway toward Waldrup Road and home.