The Talk-Funny Girl Read online

  “I saw to Cary Patanauk today,” I told her, because I wanted her to speak to me then, not a kind word, necessarily, I just didn’t want silence. “Come after me for what Pa done.”

  She turned her eyes to me, squinting through the cigarette smoke. “He had something to say on you?”

  “Called on me ‘whore.’ ”

  “Curse word.”

  “I wasn’t who said it.”

  “Still a curse word. You been forgetting God these days, don’t you.”

  She turned back to her cooking and I waited another few seconds, glanced at her belly, and walked away.

  I was lying on my bed doing homework when my father came and knocked. It was the usual signal: three fast knocks on the doorjamb, a pause, three more fast knocks. When I looked at his eyes, the empty place inside me where the fear had been began to fill up again. There was no way to run this time, no other door to duck out of, nothing I could say that would work against all the hours the penance had been growing in my father’s mind. I stood up and went to him. He took my ponytail in his hand and marched me out the door, and as we went past, my mother gave me a look I couldn’t read. Pity, it might have been. Or victory. So I thought: Dousing now. But the water was getting warmer every day. At that time of year, dousing wouldn’t be bad enough.

  As we went down the front steps and across the yard, my father didn’t speak. Everything was the same as it always was when he doused me so I thought he’d stop walking at the stream, but, holding to my hair, he made me step on the rocks while he waded across, soaking his boots and pants almost to the knees. On the far side of the stream he broke his silence. “Pastor told to,” he said. “Pastor told to do.” We went farther into the woods. By then I understood it wasn’t going to be an ordinary penance. There was still some sunlight on the leaves. “Hunger you now,” my father said, but it didn’t make sense because I had been hungered before, and it was always done inside the house where I could smell food, and watch my parents eating, and so give a better payment for my sins.

  Far from the stream, at the very edge of our land, my father stopped next to an ash tree. I saw that he’d left a rope there, and I knew that he’d been thinking about what to do with me probably from the minute I ran out of the house. Or, more likely, my mother had been thinking about it, planting ideas, working him. All that time they’d been planning how to punish me for embarrassing them in front of Pastor Schect, for my disobedience, for the church being closed, for the sin and disapproval I’d brought upon us all.

  But then my father said something strange—it was as if he were talking to himself—“Flowers at for your mother from Cary Patanauk.”

  It took me a minute to understand. “No, Pa! I gave the flowers her! For to Ma being p.g. No! Not him!”

  I tried to turn and look at my father but he jerked on the ponytail once, hard, and let go. I started to cry. He picked up the rope and looped it around under my breasts and pulled me back tight against the rough bark. He looped the rope around my middle again and tied it off behind me and by then I couldn’t stop shaking. He ran it down around my ankles, circled them twice, and tied it off, then took my hands behind me and knotted the end of the rope around my wrists. “Hunger you now, you,” he said. “Bad. For bringing us the trouble.”

  “Pa!”

  “Shut!”

  “Not of from him! He came and see me today. He said—”

  “Shut, girl! And don’t never turn your back on a pastor never again. You broughten the devil on us now, girl you.”

  I pressed my shaking lips tight against each other. I was breathing hard. “She said, she said it, she said he on done it,” he was muttering over his shoulder as he turned. “Slice him on up now, too.” My father walked off through the trees the way he always did, his feet never stumbling on the uneven ground, one shoulder sloped down, his arms hanging straight, his legs going. The bottom of his pants were wet and his boots made squishing sounds that I could hear for a time even after I could no longer see him.

  At night in the woods the noises come up. Owls hooting through the darkness. Turkeys making their choking, screeching sounds. Sometimes, even from inside the house, we would hear a moose crying, or a bear snorting, or coyotes howling in a pack. I was used to those sounds. But as the last light went out of the woods around me, the world there turned quiet in a bad way. Full darkness came in like smoke around the high part of the trunks of the trees, and then I could sense the moon rising, the light it cast changing minute by minute. There were a few large moths fluttering around near my face, as if they knew how much I feared and hated them—on summer nights they would bang against the screens in our house, some as large as a fist—and knew I was helpless, and had come to pay me back for the times I’d slapped at one with rolled-up newspaper and killed it. Now and again one of them would brush against the skin of my neck as I stood there, or flutter along my arms, and I’d let out a yell. The mosquitoes buzzed and bit. I didn’t have to go to the bathroom but I knew I would have to at some point. And then what? My father had tied me so the ropes didn’t hurt, but after a time it became hard to stand up. The bark scratched me through my shirt, just at the clasp of my bra. I tried to work myself loose, but I made that effort only once, and without much hope: Ropes and traps and chain saws were things my father knew.

  In the years my parents had been reading True Home and Country I had been hungered half a dozen times. Of the various penances, it wasn’t the worst. In the woods, with the insects and cool darkness, it felt harder, though. There was no food to smell, but it grew cool quickly at that time of year, and I didn’t know if my father was coming back for me that night, or the next day, or ever. I wondered if Pastor Schect would come himself to administer the final penance, running an arrow into my side the way it had been done to Jesus, or nailing my hands to the tree. I wondered if Sands might come looking for me if I didn’t show up to work. Or if Aunt Elaine might sense I was in trouble. I wondered if you could freeze to death in early June or die from being bitten by too many mosquitoes, but I told myself I wouldn’t be afraid until something happened to make me afraid. I wouldn’t let my mind move more than a few seconds into the future. I wouldn’t imagine things that hadn’t yet happened. I told myself to listen hard and concentrate on the changing light, and not to think about food or the moths or the mosquitoes. But as the moon moved higher, my shoulders and middle back started to hurt, and I needed to pee, and the hunger gnawed at my insides, gently at first, and then with a sharper edge.

  An hour passed. Another hour. At one point a moth fluttered around my nose and lips and I spat hard to make it go away. My mind went from the hunger, to my bladder, to the fear, and then from those things it turned and circled back to Pastor Schect and his God, a punishing God, an angry man in the sky.

  But those thoughts were soon washed away by the pure hurt of standing there. Another hour passed. My legs started to shake. The mosquito bites on my neck and arms itched. The sharp ache between my shoulder blades made me try to move against the rope, and I let out small sounds, crying against the pain, distracting myself from it.

  And then, well into the night, against the background of small forest noises, I thought I heard a rustling in the leaves. The sound stopped, started again, stopped. I peered into the darkness and thought I saw a shape there, moving toward me. Another minute and I understood it was a person, not an animal. I saw a glint of moonlight on metal. A knife, I thought it must be, and then I knew my father had come to kill me. And then, three more seconds, and I saw that it was my mother. Walking, turning her head, searching.

  “Ma!” I called out, wondering if I should.

  My mother’s face turned to me and she came walking straight at me with the knife held in her right hand. I looked at the very small bulge above the top of her pants, another life there, another mouth to feed.

  “Don’t kill of me, Ma. To have only one in now the house.”

  My mother laughed her smoky laugh.

  “Don’t, Ma. Kindly
don’t.”

  She laughed again and stood in front of me, dangling the knife and watching me strain against the ropes. She swatted her free hand at the insects. She said, “I come to let you off, to eat and that.”

  At those words, a big sound came out of my mouth, one huge loud breath that had a note of something terrible in it.

  My mother went behind me and took hold of the ropes, trying to make sense of them with her hands.

  “Don’t cut,” I said. “Just to untie. Or he’ll know was you who done.”

  “Hah,” my mother said. “Smart Majie.”

  But she seemed to hesitate again, for too long a time. Instead of untying the ropes, she reached around the tree, put a hand on my shoulder, and left it there, and I couldn’t understand what she was doing. It was like being touched by something that had no feelings, by a machine, by a cold branch of a tree.

  “Ma. Kindly.”

  My mother didn’t speak. She moved the hand back and forth once near the base of my neck so that the small hairs stood up there and on my arms. Then she said, “God and the moon have those times,” and waited, and waited, and then at last began to work the ropes.

  The moment I was free, I scratched at the mosquito bites furiously, then stumbled away a few steps—my legs weren’t working right—pulled off my pants and underwear and crouched in the leaves with my feet spread wide. My mother laughed at the sound. When I was finished, I put on my pants, and my mother and I started back toward the house. At first I led the way because she said she couldn’t see in the darkness, but soon the moon was a bit higher, and the trees not as dense, and she moved up even with me and then a step ahead on the path. My legs were slowly coming to life, the pain in my back partly fading. I was hungry, but all I could think about was what my father would do to me when we got home. I said, “Pa told me you said Patanauk broughten the flowers.”

  “Hah.”

  “You dint say it?”

  My mother walked on without answering.

  I could hear the stream in the distance. The path was visible in the moonlight. I worried my father would be waiting in the yard and that they had something else planned. Hungering at home. Or worse.

  “Tell you,” my mother said, then she fell quiet again, and then she stopped walking. I came up even with her. She glanced over at me, then away. She slapped herself on the shoulder to kill a mosquito. “A time before you,” she said, then she started walking again and I had to hurry to keep up. “Time before you, your pa was off away, been time for a little bit.” She went a few more steps without speaking and seemed to me to be wondering whether she should go on with the story or cut it off. “Been time upstate. Six month.” She shifted the knife to her left hand and reached into her shirt pocket with her right, as if there were a package of Primes there, but her hand came away empty. “Cary Patanauk forced me … almost forced me. Your pa come back from upstate and learned it. Wanted to kill Cary Patanauk then. But didn’t want to go back upstate though. See?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now so … Cary Patanauk will be always at his mind. Why he says, ‘Hurt, hurt, hurt,’ when he does me. Never forgets one thing, your pa.”

  “You didn’t tell to him Patanauk broughten the flowers?”

  “You broughten me those.”

  It seemed to me she was avoiding the truth, the way she sometimes did, without actually lying. I said, “So he’s for just to thinking it then? In his mind?”

  My mother didn’t answer, seemed not to have heard the question. She walked on quickly, and at last she said, “So okay? See, Majie?” in a distracted way.

  “Was it me born from when Cary Patanauk forced you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Ma?”

  Over her shoulder my mother said, “The baby what died it was. A curse.”

  “Not me then?”

  She stopped and glared at me. “Did you die? Was you the baby what died?”

  “No.”

  “Is you a nigger baby from China?”

  “No, Ma.”

  My mother looked away in disgust and started walking again and said nothing else as we stepped single-file across the rocks in the stream and went past the woodpiles and up the front steps. Inside the house, she went straight to her room and closed the door there as quiet as ice melting. On the counter was half a pan of corn bread, which I thought she’d left out purposely for me. The flowers were gone. Very quietly I poured myself a glass of water and drank it and ate the corn bread standing up. Then I drank another glass of water, trying to make no sound at all. When I was finished I went into my room, which was faintly lit with moonlight. I set my backpack on the bed and unzipped it. I put one pair of pants into it, one shirt, two changes of socks, and underwear. From the hiding place in the closet I took my money and the cathedral book.

  I didn’t lie down on the bed, though I wanted to. I sat on the floor with my back against the bedpost and my small clock sitting between my knees. Most days my father got up early, sometimes as early as five. Dozing off a few times, I waited until four o’clock, then put my clock in the backpack and put the backpack over one shoulder and crept into the main room and out the front door. To avoid making a sound, I didn’t close the door all the way.

  I could see the outlines of Waldrup Road, and I walked along it at a steady pace, hungry again, feeling tired and weak but sure of what I was doing. I walked on, past the houses, past C&P Welding and Warners’—all dark—and the 112 Store, which had a light on in the back room. By the time I was crossing the bridge into town the first daylight was showing in the eastern sky. I wanted to go and have one look at the cathedral, but decided against that, too, and went straight to the pharmacy where I knew the bus stopped, though I didn’t know its schedule. Twenty minutes later the bus arrived in a wave of engine noise and smoke, BOSTON in white letters on the front display. I asked the driver twice did it stop first in Watsonboro and he told me it did. The ticket cost nine dollars and fifty cents. I paid him, sat in the front seat beside my backpack, and watched the light change out the window as we went across the river and then south, the hills going slowly from black to green, the highway winding between them, the silvery Connecticut coming into view and then disappearing again. I thought that, since the driver was taking the interstate, my father would most likely not be able to catch me.

  Twenty-three

  For a minute after I stepped off the bus, I was confused. For one thing, I had barely slept. And, for another, the one other time I’d run away, the bus had left me in a different part of Watsonboro. Either the bus stop had been moved or I was remembering wrong.

  A few steps from where I stood I saw a diner. I walked there, went in through the blue metal door, sat on a stool, and ordered eggs sunny-side up because my mother never cooked them that way, and sausage, and toast and orange juice and home-fried potatoes and a blueberry muffin. The waitress looked up twice from her pad and said, at last, “Somebody joining you?”

  I shook my head. When the order had been placed, I went into the bathroom, glanced in the mirror, spent a long time washing the sweat and dirt from my face and hands, scratching the mosquito bites, and trying my best to straighten out my hair.

  I ate slowly, scraping every bit of egg from the plate, every last piece of potato and crumb of muffin, drinking every drop of juice. By the time I finished, I didn’t care so much about the way the waitress was looking at me. I asked for a phone book, found my aunt’s name, and called from the pay phone outside the front door. “It’s Majie,” I said when I heard my aunt’s voice. “Marjorie.”

  “Are you all right, honey?”

  “Sarno’s Diner,” was all I could make myself say. I was staring at the words on the front of the building, and holding the phone in both hands, and looking down the street at every pickup that came through the intersection from the north. “Near of where the bus puts you. I can walk if you tell to me the way.”

  “You stay exactly where you are,” my aunt said. “You don’t even go t
wo steps from there. I’ll be there in four minutes. If you’re hungry, go inside and eat and I’ll pay when I get there.”

  “I ate plenty,” I said, but by then she was no longer on the line.

  Twenty-four

  Aunt Elaine’s house was not large, a yellow bungalow on a corner lot with a porch in front and a flower and vegetable garden out back. In addition to her own bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bath, she had a small sewing room with a couch and a chest of drawers in it, and I moved into that room. I slept most of the first day. That night at supper I wasn’t in a mood to talk about what had happened. Aunt Elaine wanted to, I could tell, but I kept trying to steer my mind away from the house in the woods, as if thinking about it would create a kind of magnetism and draw me straight back, or bring my father and mother to the door with a chain saw and a knife. That night I couldn’t get to sleep and stayed up very late, thinking about them.

  On my second day in Watsonboro, Aunt Elaine took me to two different stores and bought me clothes and toiletries—I hadn’t even taken my toothbrush. After three days, when it seemed my parents wouldn’t come looking for me, at least not right away, she and I fell into a routine that was nice enough but like a silent dance: The subject of my home life, of exactly what had happened to finally convince me to leave, sat like a hill of dirt in the middle of the dance floor. We maneuvered around it.

  I was very agitated then, but our routine helped me calm down a little. She made breakfast early every morning, then drove me to the bus station so I could ride north to school and keep to my work schedule. In the evening, Sands sometimes drove me back to Watsonboro and sometimes took me only as far as the bus station and waited there to be sure I got on the bus without any trouble.