The Talk-Funny Girl (23 page)

“A nothing.”

My mother put the cigarette to her mouth and took a long drag, looking at me through the smoke. “Worked?”

I nodded.

“You’re all clean of.”

“Why’s Pa mad?”

“Why you all clean of?”

“We worked on with the wood a little for it, then to see a man at the windows. Why is he?”

“Drunk. From Weedon’s.”

“For why?”

My mother put the cigarette to her lips and sucked on it, then blew a long gray stream of smoke out through her nostrils, all without moving her eyes from me. “I’m p.g.’s why. Baby land. Almost forty-year-old woman wasn’t careful, gets p.g. Husband smashes a chair against the kitchen and makes sticks for a drum like a boy.”

“You’re not, can you?”

“Little thing about not bleeding for four months tells ya. Puking out your guts every morning tells.”

“Not for really?”

“Money! The money! The money!” my father was screaming inside.

My mother hooked one thumb back over her shoulder and smoked with the other hand, half closing her eyes as she inhaled. This time she blew the smoke up with her lower lip protruding. “Show you a trick,” she said. “For your good luck.” She walked to the woodpile—my book was hidden on the far side—and took two billets off the top of it. For some reason I remember that they were white birch, the bark papery and curling away from the wood. You didn’t need kindling with white birch, even when it was cold. You could just put it in the stove, touch a match to the bark, and watch it burn. My mother dropped the two pieces on the dirt in front of her then pushed them a few feet apart with the toe of her sneaker. “So’s you know,” she said. She touched the one billet with her toe and said, “Bleed number one.” Then touched the
other billet and said, “Bleed number two, after one month. See, you Majie?”

“Yes,” I said.

My mother squatted and set the last inch of her burning cigarette on the ground in the middle and left it there, longwise, the hot end pointing at one piece of firewood and the mouth end at the other. Smoke rose from it in a gray twirl. Inside the house, my father was screaming and drumming with the chair legs. My mother looked up at me, and I could see something like a splash of youth on her features, a momentary affection for me, all mixed in with a tough-girl attitude that did not have the slightest trace of fear or worry or self-pity in it. “This here”—she pointed to the cigarette—“is the time when the man-seed grows on good ground in you. Right here.” She stood up and twisted her foot on the cigarette until it went out. “I forgot that oncet, and now lookit.”

We could hear my father banging sticks on the floor in a crazy rhythm, and then a piece of the back of a chair came flying out the open door and skidded on the dirt near the front step. My mother and I looked at it there, and I thought for a moment she would laugh. “Like this is just what he did, your smart pa, when I told him I was p.g. with you. Almost just the same, except in the place we lived over there in town.”

I felt the remark like a kick in the stomach. I swallowed and tried not to show anything. After a few seconds I said, “When is the baby to supposed to be?”

“Before snow. So now you quit school and stay home to help me on it.”

“I don’t want to for quit school.”

“I don’t want to for having another little shit in the house.”

“What could you do?”

My mother swiveled her head at the question and sent her eyes into me like two screwdrivers. “Do?” She reached into her shirt pocket for the package of Primes. “Get fat. Scream. Bleed. Carry home somethin’
what eats and shits. Do? I had a baby to die on me oncet, he tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“Aunt Elaine, she tell?”

“Didn’t never.”

“Carried it half the long time and he died because of my sins. Paid that penance. Now I owe another one to God.”

Late that night I went out and got the book and hid it in the back of my closet.

Eighteen

O
n the following Saturday, a week after the museum visit, Aunt Elaine came to see the cathedral for what I think was the first time. She hugged me, checking my face for fresh marks while pretending not to, then she walked around the work site, running her fingers over the stones that had been cemented in place, and the wooden staging, and listening to Sands tell her how we were going to finish this first section, so we’d have inside work when the cold weather came. How we were going to put the windows and doors in, make the arches, put the roof on. How, next summer, we’d begin another section, connected to the first.

I pretended to work but I watched my aunt closely. I noticed that she didn’t ever touch Sands, though she often stood close to him. At moments, it seemed to me they were almost like friends, but that something else was involved, too, and that Sands was talking much more than he usually talked—about the different kinds of stone, the type of wood the beams had to be made from and where he’d get them, the angle of the roof, the weight of the snow, the building inspector’s latest visit—all of it in a way that made it seem there were other things he wasn’t talking about but wanted to.

Aunt Elaine glued her eyes onto his face as he talked. She asked
questions. She said, over and over again, how wonderful the building was going to be, how spiritual. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, is what I saw in the forward tilt of her body and heard in her voice. I loved you. I’m sorry for what I did.

I thought it wasn’t the worst thing you could hear in the voice of your mother.

I was glad, when Aunt Elaine was driving me into town for lunch—just the two of us—that she acted in a way I thought of as “plain” with me and spoke straight without having hidden things in her mind. Instead of going to an actual restaurant, we went to Boory’s store, which was at the northern edge of the downtown. As it does even still, Boory’s offered shelves of canned soups and baked beans, beef stew, boxes of macaroni, cream of wheat, salt, cornmeal. There was an old penny-candy counter made of glass in a frame of dark walnut, where the candy bars cost fifty cents apiece in those days. In the middle of the store stood three old-fashioned Formica-topped tables surrounded by unmatched chairs, and the young woman behind the counter—who had a tattoo of a crucifix on one bare shoulder and a tattoo of a skull on the other—served customers from a small chalked menu of sandwiches and soup. For dessert there were cookies and homemade muffins.

We sat at the table farthest from the cash register. Aunt Elaine was wearing a blue T-shirt with gold stripes across it, and her hair came down in waves from the top of her head, falling on her shoulders in a splash of brown and gray. She suggested I try something different—the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich—with my lemonade. She had the split pea soup and coffee.

“Ma’s p.g.,” I said, after the second bite. I had told no one. The news had been bubbling inside me all week at school and at work and running like a constant loud noise beneath every minute I was in our house.

Aunt Elaine stopped eating and put down her spoon.

“She told it for me when I came back after Boston with Sands. Pa
was for breaking up one on the chairs for the eating table. He had to go over at the dump for another one. Now he goes a lot outside like always and he doesn’t to talk.”

“She told you herself?”

I nodded.

“Due when?”

“At October or November, I think. She told she was to give it the name Jesus, but maybe I think she was saying it at a joke. She said for me that I quit school to help for the taking care of.”

“Quit school?”

I swallowed, watched her face. You didn’t have to look very carefully to see a reflection of Sands’s face there.

“You don’t want to quit school, do you?”

“I can do in school for pretty good. One teacher told I would be near the best of everybody but for if early on I went like I should.”

“Or if early on I had done something for you,” Aunt Elaine said.

“You weren’t to living near here anywhere then.”

Aunt Elaine touched the spoon to her soup and made a circle with it there. “Your father’s upset?”

“Sure. For the money about it … And probably the work about it, some.”

Two customers—a man and a woman in bicycle shorts and T-shirts—came into the store and spoke to the clerk behind the counter, and paid for something she gave them. When they left and no other customers came in, I had the strange and wonderful feeling that any words at all could be sent across the table that separated me from my aunt. I didn’t know what caused that feeling—my mother’s news, or something in the plain way Aunt Elaine was speaking to me, or what I’d seen in Boston, or what Sands had said in the truck on the way home. For whatever reason, the dam of sticks and mud I’d built inside myself had been creaking and splitting all that week, and now, suddenly, some more snow had melted and it burst apart. “Sands told me something,” I began.

Aunt Elaine watched me.

“You’re his true mother.”

She waited almost no time at all before answering me. “That’s right.”

“With of a man who is black.”

“With a man I loved.”

“He left you alone to having a baby.”

“I left him is truer than he left me. And then he died.”

I looked into my aunt’s face, then away. I ran my eyes around the wood floor, the narrow pine boards shrunken away from each other by fifty winters of woodstove heat, the varnish long ago worn off except in the corners of the room where no one set foot. The thought came to me that it might have been true that my father had killed a man—certainly he’d seemed capable of that the other day, with his screams and crazy drumming—and that possibly it had been the man who’d gotten Aunt Elaine pregnant. If Aunt Elaine had been in college, my father would have been about the right age … if there was a right age for killing someone.

“What was my mother of a girl?” I said, instead of asking.

“Fairly good in school. Fairly well behaved in the early years. Pretty.”

“You can see it on her still.”

“Yes, you can. Before her mother married my father there had been some trouble in her family. Neither of them would ever speak of it, but my father mentioned something once in a vague way. Your mother’s biological father had beaten her mother, I think. Badly. Regularly. We weren’t close enough for me to ask about it. I was so much older for one thing and she was very young when they came to live with us. And for another, whenever I tried to ask her about her life she’d make a joke and walk away or change the subject. She was never an easy person to talk to.”

“Not still.”

“When I tried to do things for her, take her places, buy her things, she resisted. She preferred her friends at school, and that hurt me, and
so, after a while, I pulled back. She never knew about my pregnancy. My parents sent me away before anyone could see.”

Aunt Elaine paused to take a sip of her coffee and I noticed her breathing had changed.

“Do you know everything you have to know about how women get pregnant?” she asked.

“Why is everybody asking on me now?”

“Do you, honey?”

“I know for it hurts. What you do for boys to be happy. I know.”

I was surprised then to see a silver film of tears come up in my aunt’s eyes. She didn’t bother to wipe them, but for a minute she couldn’t speak.

“Why would you to give Sands away at another person?”

“My father forced me to. Or almost forced me.”

“How?”

“He told me I had to, if I wanted to stay in college, if I wanted him to continue to be my father.”

“Maybe they had something for a penance for you if you didn’t. To punish you.”

“I don’t know that.”

“Sure they could.”

“I don’t know. I just did what he told me. I think, deep down inside, there was a part of me that wanted freedom, that was selfish, so I don’t blame them completely. It was my decision.”

“But couldn’t of the man helped you?”

“He had worked for several summers at an apple orchard—do you know where Walpole is?—cultivating and pruning the trees. I got a job there one summer. I sold apples and vegetables and pies at the stand on the road. We had a wonderful connection from the start. We talked and took walks after work. We went swimming, we kissed, we made love, I got pregnant right away. He was Jamaican, five and a half years older, and he was going to have to go back to Jamaica when the fall harvest was finished. Unless I married him. I had finished one year of
college. I wanted to be a nurse, to break away from the life we had at home, which was stifling to me. At the same time, I wanted to keep the baby, at least part of me wanted that. And the man said he wanted to keep it. But my parents—it was my father, mainly; my stepmother, your mother’s mother, was a very passive woman—told me it would ruin the rest of my life. He said I had to decide quickly, or he’d stop paying for college. He said I’d end up like some of the poor families we knew, where the girls got pregnant in high school and lived the poorest kinds of lives in dreary apartments near the mills. He said I’d never be allowed to live peacefully in this area with a black husband. But I had a stubborn part of me, and I was in love. I decided I would keep the baby and go to Jamaica and marry my boyfriend. His name was Edmund. At the end of the apple season—I was only two months pregnant then—when he was going to have to go home soon and I was going to have to go away so nobody would know about the baby and I could say I was at school, I arranged to meet him at the bus station. We were going to Boston first. He’d saved up money and we were going to fly to Jamaica and start a life there. I packed one bag of my things without my parents seeing. Your mother was young then, eleven or twelve. She had her own room. She didn’t know anything about it. I sneaked out of the house that night and I had my bag of clothes and a few things, and I went out the back door very late, and I made it as far as the sidewalk in front of the house … and there was my father, standing there, holding a glass of whiskey at his hip, smoking, watching for me. He must have been waiting for hours.