The Talk-Funny Girl Read online

  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

  Although 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.

  The 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

  Our 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

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Epilogue

  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

  There 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.

  At that time of year the river that winds beside that two-lane country highway was swollen with snowmelt, and the leaves from the previous fall were matted and damp on the road shoulder. I went along in my hand-me-down pants and sweater and tied-back chestnut-brown hair and made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t go home without having found a job. The night before—it was their way of acknowledging my birthday—my parents told me I had to get what they referred to as “full-pay work.” I’d worked “part-pay” for as long as I could remember: mother’s helper and babysitter for other families that belonged to Pastor Schect’s church, and then cleaning the grease racks and sweeping the floor at Emily’s Dough Nuts until the chain doughnut shop came to the town and sent Emily’s out of business. All the money from those jobs went to my parents, who did not work for either full or part pay. My mother bought the food and cooked. My father cut our stove wood, fished the stream behind our house, and sometimes was able to sell the skins of animals he trapped in the woods in late winter. Every month he received a disability check for back troubles he didn’t suffer from. But all that together wasn’t really enough for us to live on, even the way we lived, so they told me it was time to find real work. If I had to quit school in order to help support the family, my mother said, I wouldn’t be the first person in the world to put up a sacrifice.

  The blackflies hadn’t come out yet—still too cold for them—and the trees hadn’t gone into bud or blossom. Set along the north side of the road stood two small wood-frame houses. When I returned to make that walk again, on the same date in April, those houses were still there and had worn-out American flags flying from their front porches, snowmobiles in the yards, one rusted car, one pickup, a bow target left over from hunting season. Just as they had years before, lumber trucks rumbled down out of the hills loaded with ash, pine, hemlock, and oak, and the sound echoed in the valley where the river ran. You could still feel the hard fist of northern New England winter in the hills to either side. I liked being outdoors, though, I’ve always liked it. And, as a girl, I enjoyed that walk especially, because, in the same way school did, it made me feel connected to the world of people, the more-or-less sane, more-or-less normal world.

  On that birthday walk into town the first place that offered any chance of work was C&P Welding. It has long been out of business now, but in those days it was housed in a low, cement-block building close beside the road, with a gravel lot out front. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I stopped in there—out of spite, I think, to upset my parents and to show I wasn’t afraid of the owner, Cary Patanauk, a snake of a man. There had always been some unexplained trouble between Mr. Patanauk and my father. Though I hadn’t really met Mr. Patanauk before that day, I’d seen him a few years earlier in the church we attended, and I’d heard about him often enough. I knew his nephew at school. The Patanauk name was a kind of curse word in our house, and it’s probably a mark of how foolish I was then, how naïve in certain ways, even at seventeen, how angry deep down inside, that I set foot in that building at all.

  There was an old-fashioned metal knocker on the door. In my mind I can still see the coppery shine where people’s fingers had rubbed away the blue-green tarnish. I lifted the knocker and let it fall. No one answered. I waited, knocked again, thought I heard a voice, and pushed the door open. Inside, there was a mess of gas cylinders, metal parts, and tools, and Cary Patanauk stood at a wooden table mending what looked like a tractor axle. The room smelled of oil and acetylene. Mr. Patanauk closed down the blowtorch, lifted the welding mask, and looked at me.

  “I come for a try for paying work,” I said into the sudden silence, because that was the way I spoke then, with a private, mixed-up grammar that belonged to my father, and to his father, and to me. Even my mother started to talk that way after she’d been married to my father for a while. My kids think I’m joking when I reproduce that speech now. No matter what I say, no matter what their father tells them, they think that, at the very least, I must be exaggerating.

  Mr. Patanauk’s eyes went from my face to my chest and back to my face again. “You come for a try for paying work?” he mimicked.

  “Yes. I could.”

  “You could what?”

  I looked away from him. Beside me hung a calendar, notes scribbled on some of the days and, on the top half, a mostly naked woman holding a welding torch across her middle.

  “You could what?” Mr. Patanauk said a second time. I looked at him and noticed that he hadn’t shaved in several days. His pants were held up with suspenders.

  “Any of a thing for pay.”

  He watched me. “Your father and granddad talks of a that of a way, too,” he said in a voice as mean as smoke. There was a kind of vapor surrounding him, a nastiness, a vulgar stink; the words seemed to slide out of that.

  “I have a good liking for work.”

  “I could give you lots of jobs,” he told me after thinking about it for a few seconds. Across the skin of his face crawled a kind of purplish hope, or need, and it was mixed in with the sense that the world ow
ed him a debt. You could feel the anger in him, too, a quarter inch below the surface. The way he used the torch seemed angry, the way he shut down the flame, the way he stood with his arms drooping. “There’s a lot of things you could do for me,” he said, out of that anger. “But you’d have to not say a word about it to your crazy old man or your mother.”

  “I couldn’t not say on them.”

  “Good money for it, you know, and you might have some fun.”

  I shook my head.

  “You wouldn’t even have to talk right. You wouldn’t even have to talk at all.”

  I had, then, the nervous habit of bending my lips in between my teeth and biting down on them. I did that. I shook my head. We were standing probably fifteen feet from each other.

  Mr. Patanauk let his eyes run over me one more time, top to middle and back again, then with a jerk of his head he nodded the mask down over his face and fired up the torch, and after a few seconds I realized the conversation was finished and I turned and went out the door.

  A quarter mile beyond the welding shop stood a brown shingled house with a sagging roof and a sign out front: 112 STORE. It’s still there, though it’s been fixed up now, and painted a lighter color, and they sell, along with a few groceries, toiletries, and lottery tickets, used CDs and movies from a table at the back. It was the place my mother shopped when my father wouldn’t drive her into town. She complained that prices were unfair at the 112, and she made up for that by stealing things in small amounts—a can of baked beans, a box of tampons, one of what she called the “fold-papers” she liked to read. The young owner of the store then, Mrs. Jensen, never caught her in any of those thefts, or maybe only pretended never to catch her, and always treated me with a reserved country kindness. No doubt she had some idea what went on in our family, but probably she felt—as most people felt in those parts and still do—that what happened in our house wasn’t any of her business, that it was part of life, that I’d survive it the way so many other children did. On that day she greeted me with a pleasant voice and when I asked about work she told me things were slow just then, money was tight all around. But I could stop back in a few months if things seemed to have turned a little for the better. She looked at my sweater and pants and sneakers. “Are you hungry, Margie?” she asked. “I have some muffins I made this morning and they’re not going to sell. I could give you one, and some milk if you wanted.”