The Talk-Funny Girl (11 page)

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 around 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.

His face, when he finally turned it to me, was almost purple. “Turpetine!” he screamed. “Go at 112, boy! Turpetine! Turpetine! Turpetine!”

I had blisters on the backs of my heels, and I thought for a moment about changing from my father’s boots to sneakers, but it seemed wiser to get out of the yard as fast as I could, so I hurried off down the driveway and onto Waldrup Road, staying along the edges where the mud wasn’t deep, moving as quickly as the boots and the blisters allowed. I felt like a clown in the clothes, of course, the rope belt, the man’s shirt, the baggy pants. I felt as though I was hurrying along in a hot spotlight, and I was sure somebody from school would see me and tell the whole world. At the corner of Route 112, the right boot went sideways and fell off. I stopped and laced it up tighter. As I passed C&P Welding I couldn’t keep myself from looking at the building, but there was no sign of Cary Patanauk there.

In the 112 Store, Mrs. Jensen sold me a can of paint thinner on credit (“Margie, are you helping your dad in those clothes? Nobody calls it turpentine anymore. Why, you’re all out of breath!”) and I carried it back as fast as I could and found my father sitting on the oak stump where he split wood, his chin on his chest, his hands resting palms-up on his knees, covered in sticky caulk. I unscrewed the can, only to find a
thin metal seal over the opening. My father was lifting his heels up and tapping them on the dirt in an impatient rhythm. “Screwendrive!” he yelled. “Screwendrive!” I went to the shed, found a screwdriver, and poked it through the seal. He held his hands out in front of him and I poured some paint thinner on them and watched him rubbing his palms together furiously, then trying to get the caulk off with a rag. He didn’t look at me. He put his hands out again, and I poured more paint thinner into them, and I could feel my mother watching us from the half-open window, getting ready to make one of her remarks. She seemed to me incapable of not making those remarks—little acid-tipped darts aimed at her husband’s eyelids and lips—but, at the same time, she had an understanding that there was a line she shouldn’t cross. On those times when she did cross the line, accidentally or otherwise, my father would respond, usually after some delay, with a show of craziness. It was like a lion roaring in the jungle,
Stop or I’ll kill you!
Once, when I was very young, probably only about four, he burned down a larger and better-built shed that had occupied the place in the yard where the ramshackle shed now stood. An hour or so after their argument—I was too small to understand what they’d been fighting about—he went to the shed and methodically took out the shovels and chain saw and his traps, laid them in neat rows some distance away in the dirt, with me and my mother watching from inside the house. He spread gasoline along the base of the outside wall of the shed, set the can down with the rest of the tools, and tossed a match. I had the feeling my mother liked seeing him that way, that it excited her. It was one of my earliest memories, watching that shed burn, the scarlet flames licking up near the trees, my father standing ten yards away with his arms hanging down and his head tilted sideways. Another time he flattened two tires of his truck and left it sitting like that for a week. Another time—this was when Dad Paul went to jail and my mother said he deserved to for what he’d done—he punched his good hand through a pane of glass in the living room and it was a long time before he could stop the bleeding.

In the midst of the caulk and paint thinner cleanup, my mother
opened the window and called over, “Messy job, huh?” My father didn’t respond. His face didn’t change. After another minute, he stood up. He ran the rag over the stump of his left index finger and wiped it uselessly across the caulk on his pants. When he threw it on the ground, I reached to pick it up, and he aimed a kick at me and caught me in the back of the left thigh. I fell over, surprised. Except for two whippings with braided willow branches, it was the only time he’d ever actually struck me. I picked up the rag and limped over and threw it into the woods where my mother tossed the trash. Then I put the roll of tar paper back in the shed, and the caulking gun, and I looked around for any more nails on the ground, making sure there was nothing left anywhere that might remind my father of the project.

W
e had one of our silent lunches, baked beans and bacon, my father wearing different pants and eating very slowly and my mother trying not to smile between bites. For the rest of the day my parents left me alone but wouldn’t let me change out of the clothes, so I read a schoolbook in my room, then went out and sat on a stone by the stream because I’ve always liked the sound of running water. Missing a day of school didn’t matter much to me, but I worried Sands would fire me for not coming to work, and I tried to trace back the line of events that had led to my penance. What could I have done differently? How could I change things in the future so this wouldn’t happen again? Was there some way to impress Pastor Schect with the amount of money I’d be earning, maybe put a dollar of my own in the woven basket, so that he’d tell my parents good things about me? Or was the idea of working on another church such an enormous sin that no amount of punishment or sacrifice could erase it?

It was typical of what I’d do after a penance—that kind of desperate searching for answers—but it was useless, and part of me knew that. There was no particular logic to my parents’ thinking. Something came into their minds. They held that something up against the
background of what they’d been hearing in the Quonset hut in West Ober, and reading for years in
True Home and Country
, and then my mother would make a suggestion to my father, and eventually he’d agree. In their minds, in Pastor Schect’s mind, a child being punished according to the Ancient Way of the Lord was an act that paid for the sins of everyone on earth, as if we were underage stand-ins for Christ on the cross.

In later years, long after these penances were finished, I told a therapist about them and she asked why I hadn’t run away. “I did run once,” I said. “To my aunt’s. But after two days I went back home. My aunt tried everything she could to keep me from going back, but I lied and told her it had happened just that once, an argument, a small punishment.” The therapist asked me why I had done that and I wanted to say, “Because I knew I was a sinner in the eyes of God. Because I wasn’t at home in the peaceful world. Because I wanted my father to love me.” But the real reason runs deeper than that, scurrying around behind the walls of the pain museum. Any person who goes back to being beaten knows about that. The real reason hides in a deeper place.

Nine

A
s always on the day after a boying, I woke up feeling disconnected from my body. I was happy to be able to dress for school in my own clothes, but, with my underwear especially, it almost felt as though I was putting the fabric over someone else’s hips, shoulders, and breasts, and that was not a feeling I liked. I went into the kitchen and before I’d even poured myself a glass of lemonade or taken a square of the gingerbread my mother had made, I said, “Pa and you should to let me to work for this job. For the money they’ll be, I—”

“Who’s not letting you?” my mother said over her shoulder. She turned from her place at the table, ran her eyes over my pants and shirt and sneakers and nodded the way she did when she was satisfied with something.

I knew enough then to swallow the next words in my mouth. Just from seeing that she had made gingerbread I should have known my mother’s mood was good—which almost always meant my father’s mood had been good, also, before he went out to the forest. From the gingerbread, from the expression on her face, the corners of her eyes slightly turned up, her mouth relaxed … I understood that the winds had shifted during the night. It was important not to do or say anything to shift them back.

“Go work for all you want to,” she said, then she returned to her coffee and her food.

I drank half the glass of water, wrapped two pieces of gingerbread in a paper napkin, lifted my backpack onto one shoulder, and stepped out the door. As I went along Waldrup Road eating my breakfast, I tried, for the thousandth time, to puzzle out the mystery of my parents’ thoughts, to see if there might have been some trick there, behind my mother’s encouragement. I had been boyed; that always flushed some of the anger out of them. But it was more complicated than that, more complicated even than what they might have done with each other in the bedroom at night, or how much money they still had in the jar on their bureau, or what they’d decided they’d get from me in the way of income. Their moods shifted the way a bat flew at twilight, not in a straight line, not according to any pattern anyone else could understand. That morning, unless there was a trick, the winds that blew across my parents’ inner landscape had simply turned in a different direction. They would be happy now, for a day or two; my father would be contentedly splitting wood when I came home, and might carry his plate to the sink after dinner, or sit on the couch and listen to his wife read. My mother might touch me on the shoulder before I went to bed, or ask for a kiss.