The Talk-Funny Girl Page 6

  “It sounds good,” my aunt said, but something in the way she said it made me suspicious. Just then, I remembered Zeke Warner saying he knew her, and I remembered Mr. Ivers telling me about the payment arrangement. “You know to him,” I said. “Or was he making a lie about it?”

  Aunt Elaine got up and went to the stove. She pulled open the oven door and bent down to look in, and it seemed that she was trying to keep from showing me the expression on her face. “He won’t hurt you, I’m sure of that.”

  “He told he is for paying you, not me.”

  “He won’t cheat you, honey. And you know I won’t.”

  “He said to pay eight dollars in for the hour. No girl can to make it eight dollars. Not too many of grown-ups make.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that,” Aunt Elaine said, coming back to the table.

  “Oh.”

  She smiled, but there was now clearly something crouching behind her face, not deceit exactly but some kind of disappointing secret about to be revealed. I knew eight dollars an hour had been an impossible amount and told myself I’d been right to hold my hope tight and not let it soar up.

  “Are you finished? Did you save room for a cookie or two?”

  “I’ll to clear off the dishes and so.”

  “No, stay. Sit.”

  “He won’t then give it for paying me? It was a trick?”

  “He will. But I’m going to keep some of that money in an account for you. How much did he say you’d earn in a week?”

  “One hundred.”

  “Okay. How about if I give you fifteen for yourself and another twenty that you can give your parents, and I’ll put the rest in the account for you for later. Would that be all right? It could earn some interest that way.”

  “Fifteen for me? Dollars to a week?” I stopped and looked down at my plate. I could feel the hope soaring up through the middle of my chest and I wanted to wrestle with it and get it to lie flat there and not cause me trouble.

  “You can say anything to me, honey. Always. Anything.”

  “For the, for my father, I could think … he isn’t liking twenty dollars from the one hundred.”

  “Let me take care of that.”

  “You will, but for twenty from the one hundred, he doesn’t like it sure. Or my mother much.”

  Aunt Elaine looked at me for a few seconds then went back to the stove. She took the tray out of the oven and set it on the stovetop to cool. One of the many things I loved about her was that, though I knew it sounded odd to her ear, she never tried to correct the way I spoke.

  “Your mother had a spatula last time I was here.”

  “Broke it up. She uses now the big knife. Sidewise.”

  “What does she do when she makes an egg?”

  “She boils.”

  The drawer Aunt Elaine opened and closed made a squealing sound. “Does she hit you, honey?” she asked then, not looking at me, working the knife under the edges of the warm cookies and lifting them carefully onto a plate. I will remember that question as long as I live, because it wasn’t something she had ever asked me before and because it was a moment when the truth—that ferocious animal—came nosing its way into my life. I shoved it back, naturally I did, but it was there, I could feel it. I could taste it.

  “No,” I said quickly.

  “Does your father?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” Aunt Elaine was still peeling cookies off the tray and sliding them onto the plate, piling them there in overlapping circles as if making a design, not looking at me, talking over her shoulder in a casual tone.

  “Could I drink one other milk with of them?”

  “As much as you want. I brought extra.”

  “Do you want?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  I poured the milk and put the container back in the refrigerator. Of their own will, my legs seemed to be pulling me toward my room. I stood at the refrigerator for a minute, sipping, keeping my back to my aunt.

  “Honey?”

  I turned and looked at her, a few drops of milk spilling onto my hand.

  “You can tell me. Nothing will happen.”

  “Nothing bad they do.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded and returned to the table. I had just taken one of the warm cookies into my hand when my aunt said, “What is ‘facing’ and ‘boying’?”

  I shrugged, avoided her eyes, concentrated on breaking the soft cookie in half.

  “You don’t know, honey? Really?”

  “I think in the school I heard kids say about it. Thank you and this cookie and milk. And the food for I’m thanking you.”

  For a long few seconds I chewed and sipped, feeling my aunt’s eyes on me but not meeting them. I was working hard to pretend to be a young, innocent girl in her eyes, to push the truth down hard into its hiding place and keep the anger from rising up. The rare good hour in that house had been turned toward the bad again, even by my aunt. I ate another cookie and still didn’t look up, and after a time Aunt Elaine ate one, too. The only other question she asked was about True Home and Country. I said it was a newspaper my parents looked at sometimes, that was all I knew. Though it felt wrong and risky to do it, I found a recent copy near the sofa and brought it to her, but she only glanced at it and set it aside, and let the conversation die.

  We washed and dried the dishes together. When everything was put away and clean, Aunt Elaine hugged me and said I was growing into a beautiful woman and I said I wanted to go to bed early because I was starting work the next day. I thanked her four or five times and let myself be hugged and kissed, and then, even though I could feel she wanted to go on with the earlier conversation, I went to my room and closed the door. My whole body was shaking. I climbed under the sheet and blanket with my clothes on and turned off the lamp and lay awake listening to the sounds in the woods, and I thought about the lies I had just told, and about what Aunt Elaine might read in the True Home and Country, about the mall and about steel-toed boots, and what might happen in the house if my parents came back early. It seemed to me that, in one day, some huge shift had taken place in my world—Aunt Elaine asking about things she’d never asked about before, the possibility of the job. It felt as though someone was lifting up the aluminum bucket and shining a light underneath it. I wanted that, of course. But at the same time it was like being in the start of an earthquake. Before that, whatever else happened, however bad things had been, you were at least sure the ground would stay still.

  Six

  On my first day of work, instead of getting on the bus, I walked from the high school to the place where St. Mark’s church had once stood, about a mile and a half. It was a sunny day, I remember, but raw, which was typical of April where we lived. The wind gusted hard down the valley. The roads had been sanded all winter and specks of grit flew against my cheeks so that I had to squint. Past the bank I went, with my backpack, my secondhand school jeans and wool hat, and my nagging worry about not having work boots to wear. That morning I had thought about asking Aunt Elaine for the money, then realized I wouldn’t have time to buy them anyway. Only one thing so far Mr. Ivers had asked me to do and I hadn’t done it. I went past the Boxing Club, the Christian Book Store, past the Laundromat and the empty shell where Video Nation had been, and then past another storefront that had been unoccupied for as long as I could remember, the FOR LEASE sign in the window strung with cobwebs and missing a letter or two. All that way I felt as though I was holding a thought in my hands—no boots, no boots—and fingering the edges of it.

  When I came near to the ruined church, I saw that Mr. Ivers had pulled his truck right up onto the weedy lawn and was throwing stones and pieces of concrete into the bed. The noises echoed down the sidewalk like gunshots in the woods. I took off my hat and squeezed it into my pocket because I thought it made me look young. I had a sudden urge to turn around and run, but my aunt had given me two dollars and two quarters to hold in my pocket for luck, and warned me t
here would be a feeling of nervousness before I actually got started. First-day-on-the-job jitters, she called it. She knew it well, she said, from all the different nursing jobs she’d had in the years when she was moving around. It was natural, like a first day at school, or a first date. (I didn’t tell her I had never been on a date; boys had asked me, three or four different times—a movie, school dances—but I said no without even bothering to check with my parents.) Aunt Elaine had made oatmeal, and given me the money, and said my mother and father would be home at the end of the day, and that they’d be proud of me for finding the job, she was sure.

  “You showed up!” Mr. Ivers said, almost the way a happy boy would say it. He looked at me almost the way a boy would look, too. Then he seemed to remember he was the boss, and a man, and he stood up straight, facing me, and immediately glanced down at my feet. “Are your boots in that big backpack?”

  I couldn’t seem to move my eyes away from him. I could see again how strong he was, just by the width of his shoulders and the thickness of his neck. He was wearing work boots and jeans and an old sweatshirt and he had brown leather work gloves on his hands. Seeing him there—throwing stones into his black truck, with no one bothering him, no police telling him to get off the lawn and stop stealing church property—made me understand that what he told me must have been true. He really had bought the church and really would be working there.

  “I can’t to have any money for boots now but I can at tomorrow maybe or another time.”

  He watched for a few seconds. “All right. Just don’t drop anything on your toes or you’ll be walking around in a cast for a month.”

  “I’m here for to work now.”

  “I’m glad. What do you like to be called?”

  “My father and my mother are calling me on Majie.”

  “May-gee? Do you like that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Marjorie then?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t like my name at all, I’d never liked it. “What do you want for you?” I asked him.

  “My first name is Arturo. My father’s name was Arthur and they named me after a writer they knew. But I don’t like it. As a boy when I played sports I had some friends who called me Sands. My middle name is Sanderson. You call me Sands, okay? And I’ll call you, what? Marge?”

  “Laney,” I said. It was a name I sometimes called myself in secret. “My second other name is for Elaine, like my aunt is.”

  “Good. Laney. There’s a pair of gloves for you in the cab, probably a little big, but I guessed.”

  “I have hands and feet that go big. The boys put their hands against of mine and they say it, on school.”

  “I bet they do.” He started to say something else and then stopped.

  When I put the gloves on—they almost fit—and walked around to the back of the pickup and stood near him, I felt as though the nervousness in me was being spoken to silently by a nervousness in him. It wasn’t what I usually felt around adults. In fact, I never remembered feeling it. When he talked to me, he pushed the thick glasses back up against his nose twice for every ten words, and he talked fast, sometimes looking at me and sometimes not.

  “What we’re doing to start off with here,” he said, “is getting rid of the bad stuff. Clearing the site. Okay? Once we clear the site we can start building, which is hard work but it’s also the fun part. But every job has a boring part, or some boring parts, and this is one of them. Take any small pieces of broken stone or concrete you can lift without straining, and whatever you do don’t drop them on your toes. Put them in the truck and push them back in as far as you can. We want to get rid of as much of the junk as possible before we build. Save the big ones for me. Then set the good stones—see, like this, ones we can use—set the good ones aside in piles if you can lift them and try to sort them basically according to size. Large, medium, and small. That will make it easy later, okay?”

  “I could, sure,” I said, and I started picking up pieces of rubble and putting them in the truck as Sands had been doing. He watched me for a minute and smiled; I could see it out of the side of my vision. I reminded myself that the manager at Emily’s Dough Nuts had been nice on the first day, too, and that Pastor Schect had seemed like a kind uncle when we’d first started going to the Quonset hut in West Ober.

  Work is something I’ve always had a talent for. From a young age I did most of the cleaning around the house. (My mother didn’t mind cooking, but washing toilets or sweeping the floor or dusting—those things were alien to her. It wasn’t so much that she refused to do them, as that she had the ability—I don’t know if she was born with this or developed it—not to see that they needed to be done.) I often helped my father with repair projects (which he did very poorly) and with cutting and stacking stove wood (at which, like many men in those parts, he was an expert). From my work at home and from my year and a half at Emily’s, I knew how to listen to instruction, to keep my opinions to myself, to try to please the person who paid me.

  It didn’t take long for the work to take away the afternoon chill and for me to begin to understand, without asking, which pieces of stone Sands wanted to keep and which pieces he wanted me to load into the truck. While I concentrated on the broken strips and chunks of old mortar—setting them in the bed as he showed me, so that they rested tight against one another near the cab end—he wandered around the remains of the church putting the heavier stones into piles. In an hour and a half the pickup bed was full, and I called over to tell him that.

  Set against the background of the small stone rectory—abandoned and not as badly damaged as the church—Sands looked like a strange figure. With his giant’s arms and thin body, his scraggly ponytail, his dark skin and thick eyeglasses, the way he had of being large in the world, physically, and yet shrinking back behind a quietness, even when he spoke, it was as if he was carrying around another person inside himself. I was like that, too—carrying a real seventeen-year-old there underneath a foolish little girl—and so I could almost see that other person inside him. But I thought it would be wise not to let Sands know that I could see it.

  “Dump run!” he called out boyishly, and he started across the piles of stones with high-stepping strides that made him look like a clown.

  I had never liked the dump, even after the name was changed to “transfer station.” I hadn’t liked it, in part, because, on the few times my father let my mother drive, she would take me there in the pickup to discard those pieces of household trash she didn’t throw into the woods, and then she’d go into a small wooden house, a shack, really, where people brought old clothes and hung them on plastic hangers or left them folded on shelves. From my first memories, just about all my clothes had been transfer-station hand-me-downs, some of them in good condition but none especially pretty or well fitting. Almost the only new things I owned had been given to me by Aunt Elaine, a series of birthday and Christmas gifts sent in the mail—the backpack; the knit sweater and scarf; a yellow, blue, and red striped long-sleeved jersey; the warm pajamas—and they were treasures to me, gems marking a thin path through a landscape of the shabby and plain.

  On route to the transfer station, driving slowly with the full truck bed, Sands talked again about the work, and again I could sense that nervousness in him and it sucked away some of my own. He didn’t smoke and didn’t comment about the driving habits of the other people on the road. He had all his fingers. I looked at him only in quick glances, but I listened beyond the words. “Water damages a building, any building, even a stone one, and in this case fire and the explosion damaged it first and let the water in. But there’s some solid material there—I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise—and so the first step is to clear everything down to the foundation, and then to see if you can use some of the damaged stuff. You need to have a foundation that’s level and plumb. Do you know what plumb is?”

  I shook my head. There was an image of a piece of fruit in it.

  “Plumb is when the sides
of something go straight up from the earth. So the corners and sides of that foundation—we have to make sure they’re plumb and level.”

  “Okay. How for to do it, though?”

  “Good question. I’ll show you when we get back. With a tool called a level, that has small tubes with liquid and air bubbles in them. Or sometimes, if you need to check over a long distance, with a transit—which I don’t have—or a clear plastic hose with water in it, which I do. Water finds its level at each end of the tube.… Anyway, once we get to that point—where the foundation is in good shape—then we start laying the stone for the walls. Later, in order to get to the higher work at the tops of the walls and the roof, we’ll build wooden staging to stand on. So you’re going to learn carpentry skills, too. If you stay with it.” He looked at me, turned onto the gravel road that led to the dump. “Have any questions so far? Don’t be shy.”

  “I’m not for shy.”

  “Sure you are. Don’t be.”

  “Maybe you’re for shy,” I said, out of a hurt place in me, a place that didn’t want criticism or attention to flaws. I hadn’t meant to say it and was surprised to hear the words come out. Two mistakes now, I thought, the boots and this.

  He looked at me, turned in at the gate. “You’re right. I was shy as a kid. Still a little bit sometimes.”

  “Why for?”

  “Long story.”

  I focused on sitting up straight—it was something Pastor Schect insisted on—and trying to think before I spoke, but the man who seemed like a boy inside didn’t appear to be angry with me about the boots or the questions, and, as sometimes happened with Cindy or a teacher in school, I felt that I could step out of the circle I kept myself in. I thought of it not as a circle exactly but as a wooden keg, like the kind you could still get pickles from at Boory’s. I stood in the middle of the keg, a naked girl, holding it up around me, putting words out over the edge of it, timidly, and waiting to see what response they brought. “How can you to know where what goes?”