The Talk-Funny Girl Page 8

  Seven

  When my father and mother returned from one of their nights away they were never in the best of moods. I knew enough not to ask about where they had gone or what they’d done, but I couldn’t keep myself from wondering. They went riding in the hills, I imagined, and then had a restaurant meal and checked into a motel and made the bed bang against the wall. They were happy not to have me around.

  As always after one of these trips, my mother was too tired to cook. On the way home they had stopped somewhere and bought a pizza—cheese, onion, and pineapple, always the same. My mother ripped the top off the box and put the pizza in the middle of the table, tossed a stack of paper napkins next to it, set out three cans of Coke, and sat down. She lit a cigarette and laid it across her opened Coke can so the ash dropped over the side, and she dragged a slice of pizza across the table toward her, and took a bite, crust-end first as she always did. My father ate in silence, as he almost always did, chewing in slow circular flexes and running his eyes back and forth across the grease stains on the underside of the box’s cover as if he was working through a difficult problem and the pattern of the stains might give him some clue. There were eight slices in the box. My parents pulled three each toward themselves and left me two. They chewed and swallowed and drank and didn’t look at each other. I sensed, sometimes, a particular kind of shame or guilt between them when they returned from their overnight trips, though the possibility that they could feel guilty for having left me was an idea that made no sense.

  When we were finished that night, I got up and put the box in the trash barrel near the front door, threw the napkins in after it, wet a dish towel, and carefully cleaned the drips of hardening cheese from the tabletop. My father’s eyes followed my hands as I worked, peering at the curved lines of moisture the towel left on the wooden surface, sensing something, puzzling over something, looking for something. Without raising his eyes to my face he said, “What for the job, you Majie?”

  “I started on today.”

  “What for doing?”

  “Stonework.”

  My mother grunted. I understood by then that there were times when she did not like my father giving me any attention. It was one of the reasons I’d learned not to say much at the table, to eat and move as inconspicuously as possible and then disappear into my room. Those times when I felt a kindness from my father—for example, when I helped him stack wood in the yard and he talked to me about the different kinds of trees and what they were used for—my mother would often do something to pull his attention toward her. She’d yell a sarcastic remark out the front door. She’d come outside and try to make conversation with him when he obviously didn’t want to talk to her. She’d empty the trash loudly and kick the tin cans and paper boxes a little farther into the trees behind the house. Once, without asking him, she had even taken the pickup and driven herself into town. That had sent my father into a fit of spitting and stomping, but it had succeeded in swinging his attention back to her and away from me. It seemed to me sometimes that my mother had a secret need to be the only female on earth.

  “Smelling on stones?” she asked me in a mocking way. She took a long pull of her cigarette and slanted her eyes down the table almost as far as my father’s fingers. “Feeling stones down between the legs?” She laughed a short laugh and glanced at my father. “What, rubbing on stones for a genie coming out? You gotten three wishes, you Majie?”

  That finally raised a one-note, unsmiling grunt out of my father. He lifted his eyes and was admiring his wife, working his jaw muscles so the hairs on his beard jumped.

  “Taking of old concrete at the dump,” I said. “Putting the stones by a size.”

  “Where in?” my father wanted to know. He had a smear of pizza sauce on his beard, and his hair, color of rust and standing up in short, ragged points, looked as if it had been frozen as it was trying to escape.

  “Into the town.”

  “Where part of?”

  “Where was the church before. St. Mark’s. The person has work to make another church at there now.”

  They both had their eyes on me.

  “Keep lie-making,” my mother said. “And someone goin’ to boy you.”

  “I don’t want of to be boyed. It’s not a lie. You ask … you can come at town and even see. He told I can be with the job for one year I do good.” I thought of telling her about the boots then changed my mind.

  “And when’s pay for you? Christmas?”

  “Every on the month.”

  “Month,” my mother said. “Month?” She pulled hard on her Prime and tunneled the smoke out the side of her mouth. Her eyes flicked once to my father. “What about every week, lie-making Majie.”

  “He’s to paying a—” I stopped because my father had fixed his eyes on me with a certain bitterness I recognized. Things weren’t the way he wanted them to be. Almost always, it seemed, things weren’t the way he wanted them to be. The events of living were a constant disappointment to him. Sometimes I disappointed him, sometimes my mother did, sometimes it was the weather, or the lack of money, someone at Weedon’s, another driver on the road, the governor, the president. Only Pastor Schect, it seemed, was exempt. I sensed this quick swing of mood in him from downcast to on guard to angry as if it was my own mind traveling that route. I knew he felt ashamed about not having a job, and I knew his feelings about Aunt Elaine, and I was trying to find a way to tell him the details of the payment arrangement without lying about it, or seeming to brag about it, and without mentioning my aunt’s name. Something, some spider of bad feeling, scurried up from between my legs and along my spine—it was the feeling I always got when they talked about boying me. My father was watching. I decided to tell the truth. “He is for to paying Aunt Elaine on the every month and Aunt Elaine is for to paying some with you and—”

  “Some?” my mother said. She had her eyes on my father, not on me. “That sounds a big mistake, that some word. Either that or somebody’s gettin’ boyed.”

  It didn’t take much for her to lead my father where she wanted him to go, to aim his disappointment in whatever direction pleased her. He pondered this turn of the conversation for a few seconds, his lips working and the four fingers of his left hand tapping out a tune on some imaginary tabletop drum skin. I could hear the breath going into and out of his nostrils.

  “Pastor Schect don’t like on no other church workin’,” he said.

  “It’s not as a real church. And there will to be good money for—”

  “Lie-makin’,” my mother muttered.

  My father chewed his lips for a few seconds, scraped his eyes back and forth across my face, drummed his fingers in the broken rhythm, and said, “Tomorrow you to stay to home and we put a fix on the roof then, boy.”

  “But tomorrow is for a work day. I won’t get some money.”

  “Boys don’t to give their man a backtalk,” my father said, and he stood up and went stomping out the door. Another few seconds and I heard him working in the darkness, splitting wood, which was, for him, the kind of relaxation that watching sports on TV or having a beer with friends would be for another man. I heard the maul hit—bang—and then there was a pause, another strike, bang, a pause, and then the sound of the billets (my father called them “bullets”) being tossed into a pile. He was working in just the light from the window, but I knew he could have done the job with his eyes closed. I heard another strike.

  My mother smoked in a satisfied way. “I’ll bring home a big money paying for you,” I said to her. “Know how much?”

  She went on smoking and didn’t look at me. She was listening to the sounds of the wood-splitting the way another woman might listen to a piano being played in an upstairs room by someone she loved. When I started to speak again, she raised the hand that held the cigarette. Her wedding ring was loose there between the knuckles, and I remember seeing scratches on the back of her hand and wondering if she and my father had fought when they were away. “I’ll put your boy clothes o
ut at the bed tomorrow,” she said. “And don’t tell me you dint have no warning on it neither, you Majie.”

  Eight

  Whenever I was walking the roads, or—before my father smashed up my old bicycle in one of his fits—whenever I was taking my long solitary bike rides along Route 112, I would occasionally find myself carrying on a debate about which was the worse penance, boying or dousing. Dousing had the physical pain to it, but it didn’t last long, and I had learned a way of being strong inside during it. Even in March or April, when the water in the stream had been ice not long before, I had trained myself to turn the cold on my skin into some other feeling and pretend I liked it. I wouldn’t make a sound. Sometimes when my father released me with a tap on the shoulder I would walk, not run, to the house just to show him how strong I was, how unaffected by the punishment.

  Boying had no pain to it, but usually it went on for a whole day. And it seemed to bring out a hidden evil in my mother and father that I never saw when they doused or hungered me. When he was holding me by the hair and marching me across the yard toward the stream, when he was leaning down and filling up the bucket, I often had the sense from my father that he didn’t actually want to do what he was doing. That it was Pastor Schect’s idea, or my mother’s, not his. That he was only following instructions in the hope of not being punished himself in the afterlife. My mother showed an occasional spark of feeling about it, too. If it was an especially cold day, she might heat up a can of soup for me to eat when I came out of the shower, or let me have two or three sips from her coffee mug as soon as I stepped into the house.

  But boying seemed to stimulate an evil humor inside them. It was almost like a game they played together, and it was a ritual they seemed to need to perform every few months in order to release something from their troubled hearts. When I was being boyed, I had the feeling that a whole nest of snakes was crawling inside me, slithering around, moving up toward the inside of my skull, where they would swarm and swirl and writhe. And on the day after being boyed, if I had school, I found it was difficult to look anyone in the eye, even my friend Cindy; even Aaron Patanauk, who had taken to talking with me more and more often, and not making fun of the way I spoke. He’d even given me a few compliments on the way my body looked. When the day of boying was over with, my mother would take the clothes I’d been wearing and put them in the pile she took to the Laundromat, “to wash off the Majie in them,” she said, and I would go to bed in just my underwear, lying on my side staring at the dark wall. I’d push my hands down inside my underwear but not do anything with them there, just hold myself that way until I fell asleep.

  In the morning after our pizza dinner, I woke up thinking about school and work and the new boots, and then I saw that my mother had set a pair of my father’s briefs out on the end of my bed, and his work pants with pins inserted to hold the cuffs up on the legs, and a length of rope for a belt. She’d put one of his white T-shirts on the pile, a flannel shirt, socks, and an old, worn-out pair of boots he never used anymore and that were so big I knew I’d have to struggle all day not to fall over myself in them.

  On boying days there would always be a job to do, a house repair project usually, something my father had been putting off for a long while and that I knew he’d have trouble completing once he started. It was almost as if he really did want a son there to help him. That day the job was roof repair. During the winter a leak had appeared in the living room ceiling, staining the old Sheetrock with coppery circles. When I was eating my oatmeal, my father came to the door wearing a tool belt with a hammer hanging down against his thigh, and nails—squat, wide-headed roofing nails—overflowing the pocket. “Fetch on the ladder, boy,” he said.

  On my way to the sink, walking sloppily in the too-big boots, I spooned the last of the oatmeal into my mouth. I rinsed out the bowl and hurried outside to the doorless shed where my father kept his traps and chain saw and cans of gasoline and oil. The summer before, he’d worked for a whole week to fashion a homemade ladder out of two saplings and arm-thick oak branches, all lashed together with elaborate knots and nailed for good measure. The ladder was leaning sideways against the shed. I carried it over to where he stood near the front steps and he took it from me and rested it against the edge of the roof.

  I watched him, the rungs roped on unevenly and bending beneath his weight, the roofing nails dripping out of the pouch as he climbed. “Handen me up what tar paper, boy,” he called when he reached the top of the ladder.

  I went back to the shed and found the roll of black paper, tall as my waist and heavier than a basket of wet laundry. I hoisted it onto my shoulder and carried it over to the house, wondering why my father had climbed the ladder first and asked for the whole roll, instead of cutting a smaller piece and carrying that up.

  “Broughten it here.”

  I balanced the tar paper on my shoulder with one hand and used the other to hold the rungs of the ladder. When I’d brought the roll up to him I stood with my hands on the top rung and watched as he worked. He took his hunting knife out of its sheath, nine inches long and sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel. He opened the roll, flattened a section of the paper against the roof, and began working the tip of his knife into it, cutting a pattern that was more or less square. I could see he was pushing down too hard on the knife, running the sharp tip through the worn shingles on the roof and the half-bare papered sections, but I didn’t say anything. My father made cuts for the other three sides of the square, all of them too deep, then pushed the roll aside so he’d be able to set the square of paper in place. But he pushed too hard; the roll went over the edge of the roof. It slammed down against the front steps, breaking off a piece of rotten wood, and rolled partway open.

  “What is going!?” my mother yelled from the kitchen.

  My father spat toward the roof’s ridgeline, away from me. I could hear him muttering. He held the cut square of paper in his hands as a gust of wind blew, then he leaned both hands on it and pressed it down against the part of the roof he assumed to be leaking.

  “Reach and hold for that side, boy, you boy,” he said. Still with my feet on the ladder, I leaned over and placed my hands flat, several feet apart, along one edge of the square. In that position, I could feel my breasts hanging down against the T-shirt (my parents wouldn’t let me wear a bra on boying days). Girl, girl, girl, I said in my own mind. Girl.

  My father took two nails from the pocket and put them between his lips. Another gust of wind came, and when he went to take hold of his side of the paper the nails slipped out of his mouth and went bouncing down the slope of the roof and over the edge. “Go, boy,” he said. “See sure they ain’t put now where the tires will make flat for the truck.”

  I climbed down and searched for the nails until I found them. I picked up another half dozen as I went. I heard my father muttering, and when I looked up I saw the square of black paper floating softly down toward me. It landed beside me in the dirt.

  “Boy!”

  I brought the square of paper up the ladder, only to find that it had been torn fairly deeply into one side. I went back down and carried up the now dented roll again. My father made another square, uneven, larger, threw the roll violently over the edge of the roof, put one nail into his mouth, flattened the square onto the old shingles, took the nail out quickly, and banged it home with his hammer. He banged in two more nails while I held the loose edges, then he banged in several more in no particular pattern and took his knife and tried to trim the excess away. It wouldn’t trim easily, so he tore at it with his red hands. “Boy, broughten a caulkin’,” he said. “Truck. Shed.”

  I climbed down. In the truck I found a new tube of gray caulk, and in the shed the metal caulking gun used to apply it. I carried the supplies up the ladder, and after some moments of struggle, my father fixed the tube of caulking into the applicator, hacked off the plastic tip, held the whole thing in his hands as if he was squirting a fire hose, and made an attempt to spread a bead of caulk evenly aroun
d the edges of the new square of paper in order to seal it. But he’d cut off too much of the tip, and the caulk came flowing out in a thick burst, onto the tar paper and onto his pants. He couldn’t curse—Pastor Schect would not allow it—but his teeth were grinding against each other, and just then, with her perfect timing, my mother opened the front door and called up, “Goin’ good?”

  “Okay,” I answered quietly, but my mother let out one of her cigarette-smoke laughs as if she knew better.

  My father was wiping the hand with the missing finger on the tar paper, smearing gobs of sticky gray caulk in wide swaths. His face, on the reddish side at the best of times, had gone the color of a ripe strawberry. “Rag,” he spat out. “Towel, boy.”

  “Ma want put up for a towel?”

  “Boy talkin’ to me?” my mother replied. She stepped out, trying to catch a glimpse of my father, but the edge of the roof still hid him from her view.

  “Some trouble on at the caulkin’, Ma. Quick.”

  “It’s for boys to get towels,” she said, shifting her eyes toward the roof again and speaking loudly enough for her husband to hear.

  “Ma!”

  I could see that my father had sat back on his heels with his wrists on his knees and his hands hanging down, a posture of defeat. There were beads of sweat shining on his forehead. He breathed in once, twice, and then shouted out, “Devil!” and threw the tube and caulking applicator off the roof. I watched it fly awkwardly through the air, end over end, and make landfall a few feet from the shed. I could see the caulk on his work pants and on his hands, in the hair of his wrists. By the time I had hurried down the ladder in search of a rag, he’d left the roof and was climbing down, too, his hands leaving sticky gray reminders on the sapling rungs. Feet on the ground again, he lifted the ladder from the bottom as if it weighed two pounds and carried it over to the shed, brushing past me, knocking over cans inside, traps, wires, an old rusted rake with a broken handle, trying, with sticky hands, to fit the ladder where it would not fit, then remembering where he kept it and throwing it down outside.