The Talk-Funny Girl Page 3

  On that Sunday we climbed out of the truck and walked past two rows of small propeller planes, some of them tied to stakes in the earth. Years earlier, my mother, who liked machines and mechanical things—motorcycles, knives, guns (which my father wasn’t allowed to own because of some previous legal trouble we couldn’t speak about)—had let me go up and touch one of the propellers to see how sharp it was. But someone had seen us and told Pastor Schect, and he’d said something about it during the service—the worship of machines being just another of the devil’s tricks. That embarrassed my father, and from then on he’d forbidden us from going near the planes.

  The metal door of the assembly scraped open. Inside the Quonset hut, twenty rows of folding chairs had been evenly arranged on the concrete floor. There were more than a hundred chairs in all, as if Pastor always hoped for the day when his reputation would spread and the multitudes would arrive. On that morning three dozen or so worshippers sat in small clusters among the larger patches of empty chairs. They were country people like us, dressed in plain clothes, a sense of hard physical work hanging over them, and most of them lived, as we did, in a granite-and-pine world not reported on in the newspapers and not seen on television, in a pool of thoughts outside the main current of thought, in wood-heated houses and trailers and cabins where a newsletter called True Home and Country appeared in the mailbox twice every month. I have never been able to find out how my mother and father first learned about True Home and Country—from one of my father’s friends at Weedon’s Bar, probably—but once we started to subscribe to it our life changed. In my early years I remember some trouble in the house, arguments, a little violence, but good times, too, some sense of normal family life. I didn’t go to school then, but I was occasionally allowed to play with other children. And then, about the time I turned nine, the newsletter started coming, we began going to services at Pastor Schect’s, and it was as if a metal bucket was set upside down over the three of us. More and more, my parents pulled away from any connection with other people. More and more, they depended on the words of Reverend Pastor Schect for guidance, and the good times we’d had—at the quarry, fishing the stream—shriveled up and died as if there was no longer enough air or light or water to keep them growing.

  On a typical week there would be half a dozen children at the service, ranging in age from babies to teenagers. I was often the oldest. Once we stepped through the door of the building, children were not allowed to speak. When I passed close by one of the other kids, I noticed that many of them smelled like tobacco smoke—as I’m sure I did—and in their faces I could see something else that was familiar, a species of alertness, as if they walked through their days on early-winter ice, with thin spots they couldn’t see, places where they could fall through and travel, that fast, from the cold to something worse than cold.

  There were no hymnals—Pastor Schect didn’t believe God wanted people to sing—and no cushions on which to kneel. My mother and father and I found seats toward the middle, a safe distance from anyone else. We had been in our places only a minute or so when Pastor stood up from the first row of chairs and walked to his homemade plywood pulpit. He was on the short side, like my father, somewhere in his forties, I’d guess, and he had wavy hair he dyed black, and thick eyebrows and thick lips. His eyes were rarely still. As he did every Sunday, he wore a suit and tie with work boots, a combination intended to make him appear at once linked to the people he served and superior to them. Though he quoted it often, he didn’t ever read from the Bible during services. Now and again he’d lift the Good Book high into the air, or tap it with a finger, or point at it with a trembling hand, but I never saw him open it. At times, I had the sinful thought that he couldn’t read.

  The congregation rose to its feet. Pastor Schect eyeballed us for a few seconds then gestured for us to be seated. He took hold of the sides of the pulpit and began. “Sinners and hell-seekers, say,” he almost whispered. His voice was high-pitched and raspy. Then he repeated the phrase more loudly, so that the words echoed off the metal ceiling and seemed to come around behind you and take hold of the skin of your neck. “Sinners and hell-seekers, say!” he yelled. “God is disappointed in you to the point of abscondenment, say.” He paused and lifted his face to the rounded ceiling. He drew and released a breath, pressed his lips together for a moment, then opened his mouth and shouted, “I want the hell-bound children up here front of me now! All the devilsome children!” Nudged by our parents, all of us who were old enough to walk left our seats, formed a line, and shuffled to the front of the church. It was a ritual we had participated in before, and we knew how it would begin but not how it would end. “You are the worst of all sinners!” Pastor Schect shouted at us as we stood in a ragged row a few feet in front of the pulpit. “The very worst! Do you know it now?”

  I kept a sad expression on my face and nodded. The younger children glanced over and did what I did.

  “Because you don’t listen on every word, every single word, say, of your parents who brought you unto this world! God watches you every second, you know. Every second! Every time you disobey the substitute gods of your household, your sacred mother and father, you stab another knife in the cuts in Jesus’s hands and feet, you drive a long arrow into the womb in his side, say! Suffer the little children, the Good Book tells!” He lifted the Bible and glared into our faces one by one, his cheeks shaking and his unblinking eyes skipping over us as if we were pickets in a fence and he was riding past, trying to get an accurate count. With his other hand he pounded on the top of the pulpit. “Do you know it now?!”

  We nodded again and looked down.

  On that day, Pastor Schect let us wait a long time, let us know he was deciding what our punishment might be for the week, which one of the many penances he might choose from—to be administered there in the church, or later, at home, by our parents. And then he must have felt a rare tenderness for us, because he pursed his lips and shouted, “Go from me! Sin no more!”

  “Sin no more!” the adults all said together.

  We returned to our seats. Pastor Schect took a few seconds to calm himself, walking this way and that, shaking his head in disappointment. After a time he abruptly stopped moving, looked into the faces before him, and swept into the main part of the service, a sermon-talk that rambled from the biblical plagues to various whoremongering degenerations and illethal government officials who populated the cities of our troubled land. He went on and on, making up some words and mispronouncing others, casting the net of his disapproval over boys who listened to music, and girls who showed their legs and rode bicycles, and politicians who took our money and led us down a path to spiritual ruin. Some weeks he talked for more than an hour and a half, his voice rising into a shriek, his arms waving wildly so that one or two of the inexperienced younger children made the mistake of giggling and were hit. He paced back and forth at the front of the church. Windmilling his short arms, he screamed out things like “What happens to sinner is that sinner die and transcend down through the bottom of the grave to hellfire, say, and inside hell he is chewed on by rats, and burned up by fire, and froze up hard in ice, and then burned up again and he is forced to survive in his own filth, say! His own uncommunicated lusts! His own blood passion! He rot like sliced-up meat, say! Like deer gut buried in leaves and left! And all that time the fire keeps to burning him up, say, burning him up for wicked transmagressions, unblessed sex and other disobediences, that he committed in this life!”

  When Pastor came to the end of what he had to say he stopped as suddenly as a radio going off. He wiped the sweat from his throat with a huge white handkerchief that he pulled from his back pocket like a magician, he touched the Bible once in a gesture of reverence, then he returned to his seat taking big breaths as if he’d just finished a race. The families waited a moment to be sure he was through, then we all filed out and formed a line on the right side of the church. We went up and put money—no coin allowed, say!—into a woven reed basket (it was said
to have come from Egypt) at Pastor Schect’s feet, and we all made a small bow to him. Sometimes I’d see a five- or ten-dollar bill there, but my father and mother always gave one dollar each, and always folded it twice in half so that the number couldn’t be seen.

  That day, as we sometimes did after the check had come, we drove straight from church to the special brunch at Mimi’s in Ober. All you could eat for three dollars and ninety-nine cents, a smorgasbord of eggs and bacon and potatoes and oatmeal, with sticky buns and hot chocolate for dessert. We always sat in the same booth in the back corner—if it was occupied, we waited for it—and ate until our stomachs hurt.

  On that Sunday, after his third plateful of food, my father wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, looked at me across the table, and said, “That Zeke Warner said on me down Weedon’s that you go there Monday after school has done. His place to work. He might to have some kind of job in for you, girl. You might to bring some money for at last.”

  I nodded in a restrained way, then went up to get another cup of hot chocolate so my parents wouldn’t be able to see the expression on my face.

  Three

  The following Monday after the school bus left me off, I hid my backpack behind the beech tree again and made the half-mile walk to Warner and Sons Gravel and Stone. I felt as though two large hands were pulling at me, one from each side—on one side was the moment when I walked into my house without a job and looked into my mother’s and father’s faces; and on the other side was another moment, a dream, something I was trying not to let myself think about.

  I was a fairly tall girl, but the tires on the trucks in the Warners’ parking lot came up to my shoulders. I could hear loud engines at the back part of the complex of buildings. I could hear the sound of crushed stone rushing down a metal chute, and I could smell diesel smoke and stone dust. Inside the building, two stocky, round-faced men took orders over the phone and wrote them on sheets with carbon paper between. There were no girls working there that I could see. In contrast to Cary Patanauk’s shop, with its naked-women calendars on the walls, the Warners had put up an old framed photo of President Reagan—just retired then—and nature photographs, still ponds reflecting hillsides in foliage season. I hadn’t noticed them on my first visit. I stared at the colors and tried to make myself calm down.

  One of the men told me to sit in a chair and wait, and I tried to keep my posture good and not let my eyes wander around. I guessed—I hoped—that they were going to offer me some kind of position in one of the small offices. Filing. Answering the phone. A real job. My parents would be happy. Pastor Schect would be pleased if he heard. I wouldn’t be doused anymore, or boyed, or hungered. There was even a fantasy, hiding behind the legs of the dark figures that populated my inner world in those years, that I would be able to lift my parents out of the life they lived, a life that seemed so much more meager than almost any life I saw around the town. I would be able to buy my father new work clothes and a real fishing rod, my mother a new blouse and shoes. Or I would escape into a different life altogether. For as long as I could remember, my dreams had circled around the same image: a house near town with a tidy lawn on which a black and white dog ran and jumped, a clean car sitting in the driveway. Grass on the yard instead of stones and dirt and piles of cordwood; neighbors instead of trees. In my fantasy I was always dressed in a light-colored skirt and a new summer jersey; I was playing with the dog, tossing a ball or a stick. I was a different girl, and this girl’s mother, who was a different mother, who looked something like Aunt Elaine but younger and thinner, came to the door and watched me for a few seconds and then called out, in a musical voice, that there was cider and chocolate-chip cookies on the table. Was I coming in, or did I want to wait until Dad got home from work?

  Though I had no idea where the image came from—I had sneaked a few minutes of TV, twice, at Aunt Elaine’s, and a few times at Cindy’s, maybe that was it—I’d been picturing myself in that imaginary house for as long as I could remember. As I grew older the picture evolved—there had been swings and a slide in the yard once; now those were gone. Still, familiar as it was, whenever I became aware of having this dream, I tried to make myself stop. I had learned to take my hopes by the throat and choke them almost, but not quite, to the point of death, though I found, on that day, sitting in the warm office with men laughing quietly, pictures of ponds and the former president on the wall, and the prospect of an actual job awaiting me, it wasn’t so easy to do that.

  After a long time, Zeke Warner called me into one of the small rooms. He sat at a desk that was covered with piles of forms and envelopes, and he looked more frightening than on my first visit. His big head and oval face hadn’t been set against a background of hope then. Looking at the mess of papers on the desk, I had an urge to tell him what a good worker I was, that I could make the desk neat, could sweep out the office and dust the file cabinets. I could chop wood, if he wanted, to fill the stove in winter. But the words never made it as far as my lips. After a few seconds Mr. Warner looked up and smiled, but when he failed to ask me to sit down I could feel the sides of the house of hope starting to slump and sag against each other, the imaginary mother disappearing behind the door, the dog running off. Mr. Warner searched for a minute, and then, from beneath the overlapping layers in front of him, he pulled a scrap of notebook paper on which something was printed in blue pen. He held it out to me, in a kind way, but also slightly distracted, as if he had more important things on his mind. “This fellow,” he said, “is looking for a helper. Somebody he can train. I know your family a little bit, your aunt Elaine and I are friends, did I tell you that the other day? I know about your dad and granddad. I liked the way you walked in here and asked for work. That took courage. So when this fellow came asking, I recommended you like you were the queen of England. Make sure you call him, okay? Don’t make me look bad.”

  “Okay, yes,” I said. My hand was trembling when I reached it toward him and I was afraid he might see. “I have a thank you for it very much.”

  “I know you do,” Mr. Warner said. “And don’t look so worried. You’ll do fine. I can see the worker in you.”

  “I want to be it.”

  He smiled and dropped his eyes back down to his desk, a signal that I should leave. I whirled around clutching the slip of paper and hurried out of the office. A huge black cloud puffed up around me. The words “Somebody he can train” rang in my ears like something my mother would yell in one of her moods, the kind of thing you might say about an animal. I wasn’t going to be working at Warners’ then, but for a strange man I didn’t know. I had an image of the man putting me in traces like a plow horse, training me to haul loads of stone up a hillside. I went out past the drivers and clerks in the main room, out past the dump trucks with their huge tires, and I walked all the way back to the bus stop thinking that now I would surely run away again. Whatever the consequences, I would run. I had the backpack. Aunt Elaine would give me a few dollars. I would go to the Greyhound station in Watsonboro and take a bus to Montreal or Montpelier and find a job as a waitress there, or in a factory. I walked a tar road between two cold ideas: run away, or go home right then with news that the Warners hadn’t given me a job after all. I would be doused, or boyed, or given the hunger or the face.

  It wasn’t until I reached the beech tree and retrieved my backpack from its hiding place that I actually calmed down enough to look at the slip of paper. It read “MR. IVERS” in a neat hand. There was a phone number. I stood still. I had twenty-five cents in my pocket. My parents had given it to me reluctantly, only because the teachers told us to carry twenty-five cents in case we could make a phone call and report the person who was kidnapping girls, or in case we were kidnapped ourselves and escaped and needed to call the police. I fingered the coin, then made myself turn around and walk back up the highway as far as the 112 Store. I took my backpack with me for comfort. I slipped the quarter into the pay phone at the side of the building, dialed the number, and said to the ma
n who answered, “Could Mister Ivers be there to talk?”

  Four

  Only a week or so before my birthday, a fourteen-year-old girl had disappeared from a town on the other side of the river in Vermont. She had gone to visit a friend. On the way home, her bicycle had gotten a flat tire (the bike was found soon after her parents reported her missing; the police decided she must have tried to hitchhike home when that happened, rather than making the long climb back on foot so late in the day). I had heard the story from kids at school and the details from my friend Cindy, and I’d listened to Pastor Schect say it was payment for the girl’s sins, and I’d thought about her a hundred times. As I’d done with the other disappearances, I went into the school library after lunch and read about the victim in the newspaper and stared at the picture of her face. But I felt that I knew this girl better than I knew the others. I knew she’d been tired, worried about what her parents would do if she arrived home late, that she’d heard a car approaching and, without thinking, had held out her thumb. The car had stopped, she’d gotten in, and the man had driven her down one of the dirt roads that snaked through the hills there, killed her, and buried her in a place no one would ever find. In rare better moments, to keep the terror of it from my mind, I wondered if it could have been a boy who’d stopped, and the girl had liked him and run away with him, and they’d gone off to somewhere like Mexico or California, and she was refusing to call her parents because she hated them and wanted them to worry. Someday she might come back, I told myself, and maybe the other girls would come back, too … but I knew it wasn’t so.