The Talk-Funny Girl Page 17

  Beyond the front desk I noticed again how cool it was, and how quiet. The floors were dark speckled tile, shining like stars. Everyone walked at a relaxed pace, as if thinking deeply. Sands and I went down a short hallway and then turned into a windowless room with a high ceiling. On the walls of the room hung paintings as large as the door of a car. Men and women stood still in front of the paintings, or went past them very slowly, sometimes saying a word to the person they were with or leaning in to read what was typed on the small piece of cardboard next to the bottom of the painting. Everything—the floor, the walls, the frames of the paintings, even the letters on the pieces of cardboard, everything was absolutely immaculate.

  The bright canvases showed apples on a table, and vases of flowers, and farmhouses set on green fields as if floating there. I felt that I already knew those things, beautiful enough but ordinary, and so once I’d run my eyes over a painting I tried to look at the other people in the room without letting Sands see I was doing that. I made a special study of two girls close to my own age, whose mother and father would periodically lean toward them and say things in quiet tones. They seemed to be sisters, or friends. Sometimes one of the parents would touch them on the shoulder.

  After we had made a circuit of the room, I told Sands I wanted to go around again, and I could see from the skin near his eyes that it made him happy. I didn’t say it was only partly to have another look at the paintings and mostly to study the way the people acted, the way they floated their eyes over the canvases as if the paint was whispering to them in a language they all understood.

  “Do you like them?” Sands asked when we were most of the way around the second time.

  “Can we go a more time again?”

  “Another time?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a different room I want you to see.”

  I nodded as if I had known all along that there was more than one room to the museum, but as we left the first room I turned and looked over my shoulder. I didn’t want to leave the colors and the cleanliness, the shirts and dresses and pants and faces. White faces and black faces and brown faces and what I thought of then as Chinese faces, all of them so calm. I didn’t want to leave behind the feeling that no one in the high-ceiling room was ever going to use his hand or her words to hurt any other person.

  “This is why I really wanted to come here,” Sands said as we crossed the hall that felt to me like a cool shadow and entered another high-ceiling room, larger than the first. I could see that there were works of art in frames in this room, too, but they had no color to them. A quick disappointment passed over me. But then some of the people in front of me moved on, and I stepped close enough to see that the framed pictures on the walls were drawings, not paintings. The drawings were of cathedrals, and made in pencil, and so perfectly neat and orderly that I wanted to climb inside them.

  I stopped in front of the first framed drawing, close beside Sands, and I didn’t move. The cathedral in the drawing was made with stones not unlike the stones we were using, various sizes, a bit rounded at the corners, the faces chiseled and uneven. It was a much larger building than even St. Mark’s had been, with a steep slanted roof three times as long from bottom to top as our driveway from mailbox to front door. There were at least a dozen arched windows and a large circular one above the main entrance. I didn’t want to blink. After a time, Sands moved on, but I stayed and stepped in closer. He’d told me not to touch the paintings, and I saw that no one else was touching the drawings, but I had an almost irresistible urge to reach out and run my fingers over them. It was as if the people who had set those stones in place were connected to me, mind to mind. And there was some kind of sadness to it, also, because the cathedral in the drawing was finished. There was no longer work for anyone, no activity showing in the smooth landscape around it. Still, I wanted to go inside it and sit, and look at the light coming through the windows, and understand the way the ceiling was supported, the doors cut, why the arches didn’t collapse under the weight above them. From the moment I’d started to lay the first course of stones at Sands’s side, some part of me had awakened, as if the laws of architecture and masonry had been sleeping in the depths of my brain. I’d watched him set the first stones, and this new sense of line, weight, and order gave birth to a happy creature inside me. As I stared at the drawings, that creature stood up and began to sing.

  I understood then why Sands would want to make a cathedral, because there was nothing in the structure in front of me that seemed connected to what had happened to him, or to what went on in the makeshift church in West Ober. Nothing. The stones created a space, and the space contained some feeling that life might turn itself around and be lit up with hope. For the first time it seemed true to me beyond any doubt that Pastor Schect had been wrong all those Sundays, that he had misunderstood and was causing my parents and the others to misunderstand. He had painted the wrong kind of God inside our heads. According to my old beliefs, that thought was a sin, surely. At the same time, it was as if I was standing in a shower, and the warm water was cleaning out something toxic inside my mind, washing it into the drain. Again, I had an urge to touch the drawing, and my hand lifted a little ways from my side. Sands turned and looked at me and I lowered it quickly. I wanted to touch him then—which was an unfamiliar feeling for me—touch his big arms and thin body, as a way of thanking him, or asking him to forgive me for thinking he might want to hurt me. No kidnapper would bring you to a place like this.

  All along the walls hung drawings of cathedrals and churches and chapels, exteriors and interiors, some in frames taller than either of us, some in frames smaller than the smallest stones we laid. I stopped for a long while at each one and each time had the feeling that my mind was being washed clean. I could sense people around me but I didn’t look at them. Small spurts of bad feeling rose up into the cleanliness—thoughts of Pastor Schect, the police interviewing my parents, boying, dousing, the stained fabric on the seat of Aaron’s truck. Then the incredible idea that Aunt Elaine might actually be Sands’s mother. I wanted to let all of it be washed away. I wanted, with my new, pure mind, to go to the stream where my father doused me, and put in a small boat there and ride that boat down along the rocky stream as far as the river that went along beside Route 112, and then turn and travel that river as it grew wider, pass beneath the bridges near town, and then under the larger metal bridge my father sometimes fished from, and then splash down on the Honey River, past the mills and into the big river, the Connecticut, and drift away across the ocean to the places where other kinds of people made buildings like this and drew pictures of them.

  I went around four times. By the end, Sands was sitting on an armless wooden bench in the center of the room and studying me as attentively as I was studying the drawings.

  There were even more rooms, it turned out, but Sands said we’d save those for another visit; the exhibits there had nothing to do with stonework and contained vases and statues and sculptures he didn’t think I would like as much.

  When we were outside again—the light pressed into my eyes and the buildings there seemed only halfway real—Sands kept turning to look at me. “I forgot something, be right out,” he said, and leaving me at the truck, he went back toward the museum. After a few minutes of waiting for him, I felt the world around me coming back into focus, but it wasn’t the same as it had been, and I wasn’t the same. On a peculiar impulse, as if possessed by a different Marjorie Elaine Richards, I walked over toward the shed where the attendant was staring at a miniature TV, and I stood a few yards away from it, watching the images jump and shift. The man looked over his shoulder and flapped his hand for me to come closer. I was surprisingly unafraid. His skin was as black as a piece of coal beside the railroad tracks, but I noticed that the palms of his hands were pink. He turned his back on the TV to make a slow examination of my face, my hair, my clothes. “How was that museum?” he asked, in what seemed a genuinely friendly way.

  “Good.
”

  “Which part was the best?”

  “Those the cathedrals,” I said. He kept his brown eyes fixed on me, as if waiting for me to say more. “My friend and me do a work with stone. We’re making of one.”

  Unlike most people I spoke to for the first time, the attendant seemed to have little trouble understanding me. He didn’t squint or shake his head. He didn’t correct me.

  “Whereabouts?”

  When I told him the name of the town, he slanted his head to one side as if he didn’t know it. “Let me see those hands,” he said. “Tell if you’re fibbing.”

  “I don’t to fib.” I took two steps closer and held out my hands, palms up, and the man took them in his long fingers and studied the calluses and scratched skin. After a minute he squeezed the hands gently and let go. “God bless you then,” he said. “Make a good one.”

  “We could.”

  “I bet you could. Make one as beautiful as you are.”

  I felt my face grow warm, but I resisted the urge to look at my feet, the way I might have done in school. “You go in of the museum?” I asked him.

  “Sometimes I do.”

  I nodded, watching him, aware of the flickering screen behind him, the darkness of his skin, and then of Sands’s familiar footsteps.

  “Thank you,” I said to the man.

  “What for, young lady?”

  I turned away from him without answering and went to the truck.

  We ate in a restaurant where the tables had cloths on them, and cloth napkins, and the waitress tried very hard not to look at my sweatshirt and boots. It didn’t matter to me so much then. I was used to it, for one thing, and, for another, my mind kept looping back to the drawings in the museum. Every time that happened I felt the peculiar cleanness inside me again, as if all the world’s evil had been conquered by sheets of off-white paper in neat frames. I knew the bad things were still there, but if I concentrated on the drawings, it seemed, for a little while at least, that the power had been sucked out of them. Sands didn’t say much at first. He seemed comfortable in the restaurant. He didn’t look around to see how the other people were dressed and how they were sitting and eating. After asking me if I liked spaghetti with tomato sauce, he ordered for both of us and then sat staring out the window at the street, as if his mind was also being pulled back to the museum. I wondered if we could go back for another little while, and if I should ask him, but I was starting to worry about the time by then, and when I would get home, and what I’d say if my parents asked where I’d been.

  “You look a little like to Aunt Elaine,” I told him.

  “Makes sense.”

  “We would be cousins for each other now,” I said. The thought—strange and amusing—had just occurred to me.

  But Sands quickly shook his head. “No. Not by blood,” he said, as if the idea bothered him. “Your mother and Elaine aren’t real sisters. Your mother was already a year or two years old when she moved in with Elaine’s dad.”

  I went quiet again, worried I’d said something wrong. When we were finished eating and Sands was drinking a second cup of coffee, and I was sipping slowly from my glass of Coke, he handed something across the table in a paper bag. “A small present,” he said.

  I held it in two hands. I could feel that a woman at the closest table had turned to look at us. The object in the paper bag was heavy, and I set it down on the table where my plate had been and I couldn’t raise my eyes.

  “You can take it out of the bag, you know, Laney.”

  “I know of it.”

  The top edges of the paper bag had been rolled together. I unrolled them, reached inside, and took out a large book, absolutely new and undamaged. On the hard, shiny cover was a photograph of an enormous church, and, inside, the pages were as clean and shiny as ice on a pond, with photographs and drawings of the same churches we’d seen in the museum, and some others that hadn’t been there. When I had looked at a few of the pages, I tucked my chin down against the top of my chest so Sands couldn’t see my eyes.

  “I had a feeling you liked the drawings we saw,” he said after a few seconds, and I heard the note of shyness there again, the unsureness that seemed to hover around him whenever he wasn’t actually working with his hands.

  It let me raise my eyes, at least, though I couldn’t speak.

  “This book has some of the great cathedrals of Europe in it, and a little bit about all of them, about the people who designed and built them, the construction techniques, all that.”

  I was glad the waitress chose that moment to come and bring the check. Sands took money from his pocket, counted it, set it on the check, and looked at me again. “Like it?”

  I nodded, and saw from his face that it hadn’t been enough of an answer. “Thank you,” I managed to say, but that wasn’t enough either. In his eyes I thought I saw something that hadn’t been there before, as if he was interested in me the way one or two boys at school sometimes showed an interest. It lasted only the smallest second, and I wasn’t really sure it had even actually been there. He was standing up, so I stood up, too, still trying to find something to say that would be equal to what he had done. He’d gotten the kindness into him that Aunt Elaine had, I told myself. She’d given it down to him. The apple fell near to the tree.

  I had the book clutched in one hand and the paper bag in the other. We went out the door and along the sidewalk and back to where Sands had parked his truck, and all the way I was trying to think of the words I could speak into that look on his face. When we were sitting in the truck again, when we had our seat belts on, when he was watching in the side mirror and backing up and then getting ready to pull out into traffic, I said, “Thank you for of five hundred times,” and a flicker of a smile went across his face, and I didn’t take it as a sign that he was laughing at me.

  Sixteen

  Sands maneuvered the truck out of the tangle of Boston traffic and onto the interstate, and neither of us said a word as he drove north into the hills. By the time we left the big highway and turned onto the far eastern end of Route 112, still more than three-quarters of an hour from my house, I had paged through the book twice, slowly, and read a little about the designs I liked best. A hundred questions had risen up in my thoughts but it was hard to make myself say anything to Sands just then. I was thinking about the expression I might have seen on his face in the restaurant, about the feeling it made in my body, and about the museum, and about Boston, and about his pastor, and about Aunt Elaine, and about how I was going to keep my mother and father from seeing the book and finding out where I’d been. On top of all that, as we drove, it began to seem to me that there was something troubling in Sands’s silence. It made me think he was angry at me, or disappointed, and I didn’t understand what I’d done.

  “I’ll drive you home if you want,” he said, and I clearly heard a sour note in his voice.

  “No. I like of to walking that road.”

  I saw a wrinkle of what appeared to be hurt around his mouth. When we’d gone about halfway from the interstate exit to the corner of Waldrup Road, he said, “I want,” and then paused a minute, and went on, “I want you to talk with me the way other people talk.” He turned his face to me across the seat for a second, then back at the road.

  “Why for what?”

  He moved his shoulders up and down. The shyness was on him again, and something else. “Because I know you can. Because I know how smart you are, and talking the way you talk makes you sound like you’re very young, or … slow … that’s all.”

  “Why could it matter for at you?”

  “I’m just asking you to. I’m not telling you. I’m not saying it will have any effect on working with me. I’m just asking.”

  “That’s why you made me going at Boston?”

  Sands pushed his foot down hard on the brake and skidded the truck onto the gravel shoulder. The beads on his rearview mirror swung back and forth. He let out a big breath then snapped the key to off and faced me. I could
see clearly then, in spite of all his praying and peace talk, that there was a part of him that could hurt a person. I could see it in the way the breath went into and out of his chest, so much like the way my parents breathed when they were upset, but with something else on top of it.

  “Look,” he said, not loud but with a lot of force. “Will you let someone be kind to you without always suspecting them of having a bad motivation?”

  I just stared at the scar on top of his forearm. “Sure,” I said. The word wobbled in the air as if it had three syllables.

  “Everything from giving you the work to driving you home to taking you to Boston you interpret as some kind of strategy to hurt you.”

  “Girls have getting hurt,” I said, “around in here.”

  “I know that. I have a college friend here, she’s in the state police, she’s working on those cases. I know about them. Everybody does.”

  “She’s a she? And on for the state?”

  “Yes. She’s part of the team that’s investigating them.”

  “She’s … you’re liking her for a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t at work yell on me.”

  “I’m not yelling at you.”

  “For the sounds you are.”

  “I’m frustrated, that’s all. You have a wall around you. I’m saying you could open a door in the wall and let me at least look in. I’m not going to—”

  Sands stopped abruptly and I moved my fingers closer to the seat belt clip, hoping he didn’t see. The eyeglasses were shaking on the bridge of his nose.