The Talk-Funny Girl Read online

  “I’m for thanking you, but no today.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded, stomach empty. “Today’s a day for to finding work.”

  “Well, good luck then.”

  Next along the route was Warner and Sons Gravel and Stone, where Zeke Warner took my name and said they had nothing there for seventeen-year-old girls unless they happened to know how to drive a dump truck, but if something came up he’d be sure to get in touch. Did I have a phone number I could leave?

  “We aren’t to have one,” I told him. “Pastor Schect isn’t liking for us to have on a phone or the TV or to curse.”

  “Well, the not-cursing’s probably a good idea. I know your aunt Elaine. I’ll contact you through her if something comes, or I’ll mention it to your father if I see him at Weedon’s. Okay?”

  I thanked him and went along.

  On that afternoon I walked all the way into town and back, just under eight miles. Fourteen or fifteen places of business I made myself step into—Art and Pat’s Diner, the Sewing Shop, the chain doughnut place—and the answer was the same in all of them. It was a bad time for the country, especially bad where we lived. Along the Honey River, which ran through town and fed the Connecticut, the concrete of the bridge abutments had broken away in places, showing rusting reinforcing rod. There were men in old clothes and dirty hats fishing from the span. On the street corners there were knots of kids my own age—some of them turned and looked at me as I passed—smoking cigarettes and spitting, dressed dark and shabby, slanting their eyes around as if any minute somebody in a car with out-of-state plates would drive up and hand them a small package of delight. The paper mills and machine shops—industries that town had been built on—were closing, one after the next. People were losing their houses, and a sucking quicksand of debt was forming along the banks of the river where the factories had been. Who was going to have extra money to pay a seventeen-year-old girl?

  Even used to walking as I was, that trip exhausted me. In the cold dusk I found my backpack behind the beech tree and set off on the last leg, down Waldrup Road. By then it was almost dark. The tree trunks were black and the stream was loud and I had to stay near the edge of the road where the mud wasn’t deep. I saw our mailbox, tilted at a crooked angle on its post, and then, beyond my father’s stacks of stove wood, a square of yellow light that was our kitchen window.

  My mother was sitting on the counter with a bottle of cheap wine beside her and a mug of it between her legs. The ceiling light made shadows near her eyes. “Damn better say you found something, you Majie,” she said. She and my father were the only ones who called me by that name, MAY-gee. No one calls me that now.

  My mother took a drink from the mug. I watched the muscles work in her thin neck and her legs jiggle as if small animals inside the jeans were trying to break free. Her hair, dark as used motor oil, had fallen loose and hung down along the sides of her jaw. She had full lips like I do and a straight small nose and pretty green eyes buried in the shadows and in webs of wrinkles. If we had a little money and she fell into a certain mood she’d buy herself a bottle of Hammonds Rosé and sit for half a day on the counter or the couch, her shoulders hunched and her eyes cast down, and she’d drink her way through most of the bottle. There was something methodical about the way she did it, something brutally efficient, as if she was feeling her way back, decision by decision, across an unlit landscape mined with regret. There was something quietly terrifying about her when she drank; her regret had a murderous quality. People told me then, and have told me since then, that my mother was very attractive as a girl and grew up in a family that wasn’t desperately poor. She had a stepsister—my aunt Elaine—seven years older, and a stepfather who worked in a hardware store and had one wife and then another who died young. After the second of those deaths—my grandmother’s—a kind of wildness broke loose from inside my mother. Against the advice of every relative and friend, she started riding around with the man who would become my father, Curtis John Richards. Curtis John was known for swan-diving from the top ledge—sixty-five feet—into the quarry and climbing up into the treetops during thunderstorms. He scaled the trellis of the railroad bridge at night to mark his initials there in gold paint. C j R, you can still see them. He struggled in school, and had a father who taught him how to fight and drink and chew tobacco and not much beyond that. He pronounced his last name as if it were French Canadian—it wasn’t—and that probably seemed exotic to my mother. He had a motorcycle, which she loved, and a future painted in the bleakest of northern New England colors, which she couldn’t see. He was twenty-six. My mother married him a day after she turned sixteen and no longer needed her stepfather’s consent. She didn’t speak about it very much, but from the one-or-two-line comments she passed down to me over the years, I understood that she liked being married, at least in the early going. In that part of America, in those years, among the girls she called her friends, it counted for something to be able to say the words “my husband” and to show off a real gold ring. In the warm weather, she and Curtis John liked to go riding in the hills. When it was cold, she told me, “We drunk and screwed.”

  Having a child had not been part of their plans, if they had any plans, and once I was born, what little chance they had for a prosperous, peaceful life seemed to evaporate like river splash on hot stone. My mother was nineteen and a half when I came into the world. She didn’t like to get out of bed in the night to mix formula. She didn’t like people telling her to give up cigarettes. She didn’t like changing diapers, or making regular appointments with the pediatrician, or taking the stroller to a place where there were sidewalks and meandering around with other young mothers, discussing the joys and troubles of parenthood. She hated having to give up the motorcycle rides, and she didn’t appreciate the change in her sex life that having a baby in the house brought on.

  At the time I was born, my father had work in a small plant that made hand tools. His parents had never lived together; his mother died when he was ten. After that, his father, Dad Paul, raised him in a three-room apartment above the gas station, taught him about trees and ropes and female anatomy, took him on rides to Montreal. From the start Dad Paul liked my mother—he had “a big side of him,” my father used to say—so as a grand present to mark the birth of a grandchild he gave his son and daughter-in-law his four-room “camp” on twelve acres in the woods. The camp had been used for hunting and was not much more than a cabin, poorly insulated, cold in winter, but out of sight of any neighbors, and the privacy suited my father. His own father’s gift was something he mentioned, with great pride, dozens of times over the years, even long after Dad Paul had been sent away.

  We moved into the camp just before I turned one. When I was two, my father’s place of work closed down. After a few weeks, he found, at a lower salary, a job in another small plant where they made plastic picture frames and TV remotes. And then something happened—what, exactly, I’ve never been able to find out. There was some kind of trouble, an accident or a fight. My father told me once that he’d taken a fall and hurt his back, but I don’t think that was the true story. After a long stretch of legal squabbling and a series of consultations with doctors, the company let him retire on what he referred to with some pride as “part but permanent disable.” In order to keep the checks coming, he had to pretend to be physically unable to do any kind of work, so he stayed in bed for a few weeks, carved himself a cane to use when he went out in public, and parked in the handicapped spaces whenever he thought he could get away with it. After the accident, though, if that’s what it was, trips to town became rare for him; except for a couple of friends he’d had enough of people by that point in his life, and he preferred to spend his time alone in the woods, coming home only to eat dinner and sleep. Once every few weeks we’d all go into town, or we’d go to the quarry for a swim on very hot days, but for the most part my father kept himself away from other people.

  “Mister Warner told he might have a work to
give,” I said to my mother. I set the backpack down at my feet.

  She squeezed the mug between her thighs and made a drunken, pinched-eye face I’d seen before, hundreds of times. It was an expression that promised nothing good. “Might?” she said hoarsely.

  I nodded and looked away.

  “Look on me in my eyes, you Majie you.… Might?”

  “Probly will. Next week he could of.”

  “You lie maker. Probly dint even go.”

  “I went.”

  “Your dad in’t gonna like that might you said.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Fishin’ the bridge. Might in’t gonna work for him today, give at his mood, I’ll lay cash money.”

  “He’ll to know I went.”

  “Light in a ciggo for me, Majie.”

  “I don’t like to light in, Ma. I’m tired. I—”

  “Light in or I’ll go douse ya, no matter how big you think you are now. I can still take you, too, I’ll show you some time on that.”

  “I don’t want being doused. I don’t want fighting.”

  She made a witch’s laugh, a sound with little sparklers in it, alcohol and smoke, a ribbon of meanness winding it up in a bow. “God douses the bad,” she said. “Light in one then, girl.”

  I went to the cupboard where she kept the carton of Primes, took down and opened a fresh pack, tapped out a cigarette, and lit it for her, pulling the smoke into my mouth and blowing it out as quickly as I could. Cigarettes tasted like dirt to me—I hate the smell of them even now—like the dust raised from cars passing on Waldrup Road at the end of summer. My mother watched me smoke, one puff … two … three … then reached out a hand that was thin and shaking and let me pass the cigarette over to her. She kept her eyes on me while she drew a deep drag. She held the smoke as long as she could, shot it out her nostrils, and smiled. “Pa might douse ya, though.”

  “I don’t want to being doused. Call on Mr. Warner if you can’t believe me. Call on Mr. Patanauk.”

  “Hah. Your father would cut me on up if I even spoken the man’s name. Fricken chainsaw me. And don’t to give mouth, girl you.”

  I waited to see if she had anything else to say, then went into my room and lay facedown on my sagging bed. I closed my eyes and thought, for the millionth time, about finding a way to leave. But, beyond a few coins in my pants pocket, I had no money. How would I run away? Hitchhike? After what had been happening in those hills then? I thought of Aunt Elaine, and the one time I’d tried to run away, and what happened afterward. I thought of the birthday gift she’d just sent, and was surprised and happy that my parents had let me keep it. I fell asleep thinking about that and was awakened by my father’s knocking.

  The door was open. He knocked on the casing, as he always did, in bursts of three. Rap. Rap. Rap. Again. Again. Again. He stood there staring and knocking until I sat up, rubbed my face, and walked over to him. Without saying anything, he took hold of my ponytail and marched me through the main room of the house, where the table had been set for supper, and out the door. Full darkness had fallen by then, but my father went across the yard without a misstep. “Three douses, three douses,” he chanted quietly as he went. And then: “For be the lazy girl not to finding the job, three douses, she say.”

  “You don’t to have to, Pa. I did and tried hard.”

  “Have to is not wanting to. God say. Your mother say. Pastor say penance for keeping children on to the good.”

  When I started to speak again he tugged once, hard, on my hair. My father was small but very strong. It made no sense to try to get away. When we reached the stream he turned me with his hands on my shoulders and made me stand facing the house, arms at my sides. He took a metal bucket he kept there for that purpose, filled it three times, and three times poured the water—cold as ice at that time of year—over my head. I forced myself not to make a sound. When it was finished, he tapped me on the shoulder and I hurried across the dark yard and back into the house. I shut the bathroom door, wrung out my clothes, and took a hot shower—five minutes on the small plastic timer my mother had found at the dump and my parents kept on the back of the toilet—then I dressed in the new pair of flannel pajamas Aunt Elaine had mailed me as a birthday present, and a pair of thick socks. I said a prayer for forgiveness, wiped up the water on the floor, hung my wet clothes over the shower curtain rod, and went and sat with my mother and father for the blessing.

  My father hadn’t had any luck fishing, so that night we had the last of his venison sausage, canned beans, two slices each of white bread, and lemonade made from powder. My parents talked a little—about money, about how high the stream might get with the melted snow. I listened. When they told me to, I stood up and cleared the table, then went into my room and closed the door almost all the way and did my schoolwork. I liked the work. I remember, at that point, we were studying how people in Africa lived, and I liked reading about the types of food they ate, and the way the families would sit around a fire at night telling stories. Mr. Anders said some of them lived in tribes, the way the Indians had lived in America, and although they didn’t have cars and television, they spent a lot of time with their families and out in nature and some of them had happy lives.

  When I’d stayed in my room as long as I thought my parents would allow, I walked back out into the main room. I could sense they were in a different mood—which usually happened after they’d given me a penance. It was the way they sat at opposite ends of the couch, my mother, half-sober by then, reading a fold-paper, my father staring at the floor, as if lost in a pleasant memory. They raised their eyes to me and had nothing bad to say. I went to tell them good night. My mother kissed me on the mouth with her smoky, winey breath. My father didn’t touch me, but he looked into my eyes and seemed to be wondering if there was any lasting hurt from the dousing. In the lamplight I could see a few short bristles of gray mixed into the brick-colored hairs of his beard. He said, “Tell a prayer for us and for Pastor Schect on your knees in there now, girl.”

  So I went into my room and did that, ran my hands over the soft cloth of the birthday pajamas, and in a few minutes I was asleep.

  Two

  On Sundays we drove to the “Lord of God’s House,” as my mother and father called the Assembly of the Good Risen Christ. The Lord of God’s House was a Quonset hut on the grounds of a private airport that still exists, in West Ober, Vermont, half an hour northwest of our town and on the other side of the big river. The assembly was presided over by a man who called himself the Reverend Pastor Schect. Among his other ideas, Pastor Schect believed it was sinful for girls and women to wear a dress or a skirt into the Lord of God’s House. So on that Sunday, as always, I put on my corduroy pants and a clean white shirt with a collar. My mother set out plates of eggs and toast. We had breakfast, then climbed into my father’s pickup and made the drive to West Ober with the cab full of cigarette smoke and my left leg bent up under me so it wouldn’t be in the way of the shift.

  When he wasn’t changing gears, my father steered with the middle finger of each hand (he was missing the index finger of his left hand from a chain saw accident) and watched the road with such intensity that I sometimes glanced over to see if he was even blinking. It turned out that his check had come the afternoon before, which was the reason he and my mother had been up late, drinking and making noise in the bedroom.

  My father didn’t like the interstate. Too many fast cars, he said. Too much police. But I think there was something else involved—a premonition, a superstition, a sense that the big highway was connected to a world that would never respect him, a world in which he existed only as a clump of country dirt, “a possum piss,” as he would have put it. We passed through the north end of our town, crossed the river on a covered bridge there, and then instead of going up the entrance ramp we took the old two-lane highway that ran north-south. I looked at the bare cornfields as we went, at the gray river that moved in and out of view behind them. There were farmhouses set at a good
distance from each other, the barns red and the silos silver-topped, sometimes a small herd of dairy cows in a field. One of the farms was where a young girl, not much older than I was then, had lived before she’d been taken. Two other girls had disappeared in those parts over the previous eighteen months. Some people said they’d run away, but the families didn’t think so, and the police didn’t, and none of the girls had ever been seen or heard from since they disappeared. The whole area lived under a blanket of fear because of the disappearances. You’d see parents waiting at bus stops with their fifteen-year-old daughters. You saw more state police in the town. Some people had started locking their houses for the first time in generations, though my parents never went to that extreme.

  As it passed through West Ober, the highway curved east, the speed limit dropped from fifty to thirty, and I studied the houses by the road there—the steep slate roofs, the covered porches. I wondered what the rooms looked like inside, and what it felt like to have neighbors, and if there were certain kinds of things people didn’t do in the privacy of their family life because there were other people close by. On the mountain behind the houses I noticed strips of white still showing on the ski trails.

  Downtown West Ober has now become a low-key tourist destination, with bed-and-breakfasts and a few art galleries, but at that time it consisted of a white clapboard church, a two-pump gas station, and a grocery store. Beyond it were more houses set close together, the yards slightly larger. When we’d gone past that stretch of houses, my father turned left onto a paved road, and half a mile up that road, he turned right, onto airport property. It is one of the only places I have not been able to make myself go back to.