The Talk-Funny Girl (20 page)

I didn’t tell him that my mother had allowed me to go because she was drinking when she signed the permission slip and did it as a kind of joke. I didn’t say that when my father found out I’d been to see a museum, and been to see a college, he conferred with Pastor Schect about
it and they decided I needed to receive a special penance, and that was the first time I’d been hungered.

“Have you seen other colleges?”

“I never.”

“How many times have you been to Boston?”

“No times.”

“Montreal?”

I shook my head.

“Maine?”

“No places,” I said. “We go, we used to go up West Ober at church there. We go at Watsonboro when for Thanksgiving with Aunt Elaine in her house. We go acrost on the river too in Westminster for when my dad needs a fix for his truck because a man knows that work there and goes to church at where we do.”

“You mostly stay around home then.”

“Most.”

“Are you curious about Boston?”

“Afraid.”

“Of the city?”

“Sure. All those animals they have at there. Bears. Moose. Cougar.”

He didn’t laugh. Again. If I could have controlled the urge in me I would have stopped trying to make jokes with him. I never made a joke at school. At home, there wasn’t much in the way of lightheartedness. With Sands, with his serious face, his thick glasses, his big muscles, his shy way, his mysterious intentions … I made jokes.

“Tell me, really,” he said.

The trees I saw out the side window were similar to those I saw at home, though there were more pine, spruce, and hemlock at that altitude, with white birch mixed in. There were some
MOOSE CROSSING
signs, and high-tension wires, too. Now and again I saw a house on a hillside, a lawn cut out of the woods around it, cars or a truck in the driveway. Once, a swimming pool. I swiveled my head to watch as it fell behind. Sometimes as we drove I could see towns from above, and I
could tell the way they’d been built around factories and churches, the flat gray roofs and pointed steeples, the roads coming together. Pastor Schect didn’t allow movies or TV; he was very strict about those things and mentioned them often in his sermons. But I’d seen television several times at Cindy’s house before my parents had forbidden me to go there, and sometimes at school there would be a movie. At Aunt Elaine’s, when my aunt and mother were in the kitchen preparing the Thanksgiving meal and my father was pacing the backyard spitting tobacco and muttering, I sometimes turned on the TV and watched for a little while with the voices muted. It was one of my small rebellions. In the 112 Store, in the pharmacy downtown, and in the library at school, I’d looked at magazines and seen New York and other places, photographs from other countries. I saw girls my own age dressed in fancy clothes, sitting together in a restaurant, laughing, and I read the letters they wrote about skin problems, boyfriends, making out, and trouble with their parents, who wanted them home at a certain hour after a date. I studied those pictures and letters for many minutes at a time, committing them to memory, building around them whole imaginary worlds. And at moments I felt myself drawn toward those worlds like the big pale luna moths at my window screen on a July night.

“I don’t for why know I’m afraid,” I said to Sands. “Because of there could be the black people maybe. Other kinds of, too.”

“I’m half-black.”

I was only partly surprised. Probably more surprised at the easy way he said it than the fact itself. Aaron had said something about it, and on some level, I’d known from the moment I’d first seen Sands that he wasn’t exactly a white man. Dark-skinned men and women were exotic to us, tourists with New York license plates, pictures in a textbook or a magazine, one or two families here and there. “Your mother or of your father was, which person?”

“My father.”

“You see them at town on days,” I said. “Going back at New York from after skiing the mountain, or driving for the leaves color. They
eat, they get gas to the cars. For a while there was one black girl at ninth grade where I go at school … The kids wouldn’t make laughing at you and that?”

“Not so much where I lived, no.”

I wanted to ask him then where he had lived, what kind of place it was where you could be half-black and not laughed at, not chased out of the school, not hit or spit on or have your dress ripped open from behind, but I was still hearing the matter-of-fact tone of his voice when he told me. We went some miles without either of us speaking, and I slid my eyes sideways to examine, for the hundredth time, his skin and hair and mouth.

“Do you know …,” Sands said, and then he hesitated, glanced at me across the seat, turned a dial on the dashboard to bring a bit of air into the cab. I was sure he was going to go on and tell me more about black people, until he said, “About sex and all that?”

That question changed the mood inside me. It made me feel young. Made me suspect him again after I thought I’d completely gotten past that. Trying not to let him see, I moved over another inch closer to the door. People said the girl who’d been kidnapped and killed across the river—maybe all the girls—had been abducted by a black man. I’d heard that at school. It had made another spot on my mind. My thoughts about Sands shifted completely, as if a bank of clouds had glided in suddenly across what had been, only seconds before, a clear blue sky. A certain voice was activated in my inner ear and the voice said that this was exactly the way a person who kidnapped someone would act: talking to you in order to get you into his truck, preparing it for weeks, step by step, letting you say no first and then getting you to trust him and then asking again. Tricks like that took time, which was why the girls had been disappearing at the rate of one only every five or six months. The man would trick you into his truck like that, and then he’d start talking about sex. It seemed to me that I’d read about this in one of the magazines.

“I know for what means a rape is.”

Sands sent me a puzzled look, pinching up his face almost the same way he did when he banged his finger between two stones. A terrible quiet rose up between us then. He made the truck go faster.

“I know for it hurts,” I went on, because, even raised on silence as I had been, I couldn’t bear a silence like that one. “I’m not so young.”

Again Sands squeezed his face. I saw three lines of wrinkles to the side of his eye, and for once he looked older than the boys I knew. After another few seconds he said, “You sound like you think I asked that because I want to have sex with you.”

“Don’t it?”

“You sound like you think I’m going to hurt you.”

“You made speeded the truck up.”

He laughed then, in just the way a kidnapper would laugh, a man who had fooled you into trusting him, and then took you away and raped you and killed you and threw you dead in the weeds at the side of a logging road for a hunter to find the next year. I know it was illogical and foolish of me to be thinking like that—Sands was ten times more deserving of trust than, for example, Aaron Patanauk. But Aaron was my own kind. White. Shy. Small-town. Bad, yes, but the kind of bad I knew. For all his kindness, Sands’s way of being in the world was an alien creature to me.

“I just asked because I wanted to be sure you knew, so that nothing happened to you, so that you didn’t have bad information about it, that’s all.”

“I’m not for a little young of a girl. I’m not for slow in at school.”

“I know you’re not. If you want me to stop talking about it, I will.”

I said nothing. I watched the skin near his eyes and then the tendons of his wrist as he squeezed the steering wheel.

“I was molested as a boy. Do you know what that is?”

“Everyone person knows it.”

“A man—he was a minister—did sexual things to me when I was ten and eleven. I was asking because I wouldn’t ever want things like that to happen to you, that’s all.”

“Nothing of that didn’t happen on me. And wouldn’t of neither because my father would to kill the person if he ever.”

“I don’t think it will happen. If it does, you should always tell someone. Tell your aunt, or me, or a teacher. Anyone you really trust.”

I thought about that for a moment, searching my list of adult acquaintances for one of them I could imagine talking to about such a thing. I said, “Nothing of that happened.”

“You said that. Okay.”

“And I’m not any of ten years old, in the case if you didn’t see.”

Sands squeezed the wheel and couldn’t look at me. “You’re a beautiful young woman. Anyone with half a brain would see that. That’s why I asked you. There are men who might want to hurt you, or take advantage, that’s all.”

We drove along in a rippling silence. My thoughts skipped back to what I’d been doing with Aaron in the truck on Old Quarry Road. In school, Aaron had said to me something very similar to what Sands had just said—that I was beautiful—and I’d recognized it both times as a lie, a tactic, exactly the opposite of what I’d been hearing from my mother, over and over again, for as long as I could remember. “How do you are friends with Aunt Elaine?” I said. The words had been living on the underside of my tongue for a long time. I sent them out into the air as a way of not talking about what we had been talking about.

Sands didn’t answer. It was clear to me then, from his silence, that what he wanted to talk about was sex, about the way I looked, about what men could do to me. It was, I suspected, the reason he’d offered me the job in the first place, the reason Mr. Warner had said he wanted to “train” somebody. I knew a little bit about that kind of training. Hurt, hurt, hurt.

But after another stretch of awkwardness Sands said, “She’s my mother,” and for me then it was as if the truck door flew open and the pavement of the interstate was flashing by a few inches from my face. In another instant I would fall out.

“That’s a weird of a joke,” I tried.

“Isn’t a joke.”

“I was to my aunt Elaine’s house for three times. You weren’t ever there, and not any other kids neither weren’t, or any pictures of kids, or any husband or a boyfriend.”

“She gave me up to be adopted when I was a few hours old.”

I listened without looking at him, concentrating on the words.

“She had an affair in the summer after her first year of college and got pregnant. The man was black. Jamaican. Her parents were furious about it, her father especially. Partly because of her being pregnant, and mainly because of who had gotten her pregnant. Her father helped her hide the pregnancy by sending her away, and he made her promise she would give the child up—give me up—when I was born. Even your mother doesn’t know. Nobody knew.”

“She gave you off?”

He pushed his lips out and made five or six small movements with his chin, half nods.

“That’s worse for than …”

“Than what?”

“Than of anything.”

“Think so?”

“Sure so. At least for a person is supposed to be having a mother or and a father.”

“I had parents. I had good parents. They were an older couple, in their early fifties when they took me. Both black. They’d never been able to have children of their own and always wanted to, and they didn’t mind a baby who was half-white. He was a college professor, at Penn. She had a little florist shop in Center City until they decided to adopt, and then she sold it so she could stay home with me. They were as good parents as anybody could ask for. They’re both dead now. They were pretty well off. The money I got from selling their home—the house I grew up in—and what they left me, that’s what I used to buy the church. And what I live on.”

“And for to paying me,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“But you had somebody touch you on the wrong.”

“My parents didn’t know about it.”

“Because of you never had told.”

“That’s right. I was afraid to tell them. Ashamed. They were religious people. To them, a pastor was like God’s friend sent down to save us.”

“Aunt Elaine didn’t all that time know where you went, from one day?”

“We both went looking for each other and we finally found each other not too long ago. We met in New York City the first time—I’ll take you there, too, if you want, it’s my favorite place—and then, a few weeks later, I drove up from Philadelphia to see where she lived. Watsonboro. She took me for a ride up to the town where we work, where the cathedral project is, and then out on the road where I drop you off every night. I think she was going to introduce me to you and your family but changed her mind at the last minute and we ended up just going into Warners’ and talking with her friend there. Zeke. You know him. I think she dated him for a while or something. I saw the town, and what was left of the church, and I had been working with stone for a long time—with a stonemason during the summers when I was in high school and college, and then on my own—and I’d always wanted to build something special. Something that would last. I’d just inherited the money, less than a year earlier. I’d been thinking of getting out of the city. And when I saw the church it all came together. I asked Zeke Warner and he said he had a feeling I could buy it for not very much money, and then I had the idea to build my cathedral. He called Elaine when you came in looking for a job, and she told me.”

I filed this bit of information away, tried not to show any reaction. But I understood that I had been part of a complicated plan, a kind of trick, and while some of me was happy about the result, I’d never liked
to have things hidden from me, and I wondered about what other secrets my aunt and Sands were keeping. I said, “To build a cathedral is an idea that for a weird person would get.”

“I’m a weird person. You ought to have figured that out by now.”

“I did figure,” I told him. “I just think of how much weird, is all. Weird which of a way.”

Sands smiled and I watched his mouth and thought that if he was a kidnapper, he was good at making up stories that made him seem like he wasn’t.

“Weird which of a way besides in the way a pastor did bad things on you and so now you think to build up a church.”

“There are different kinds of churches.”