The Talk-Funny Girl (30 page)

I could see the outlines of Waldrup Road, and I walked along it at a steady pace, hungry again, feeling tired and weak but sure of what I was doing. I walked on, past the houses, past C&P Welding and Warners’—all dark—and the 112 Store, which had a light on in the back room. By the time I was crossing the bridge into town the first daylight was showing in the eastern sky. I wanted to go and have one look at the cathedral, but decided against that, too, and went straight to the pharmacy where I knew the bus stopped, though I didn’t know
its schedule. Twenty minutes later the bus arrived in a wave of engine noise and smoke,
BOSTON
in white letters on the front display. I asked the driver twice did it stop first in Watsonboro and he told me it did. The ticket cost nine dollars and fifty cents. I paid him, sat in the front seat beside my backpack, and watched the light change out the window as we went across the river and then south, the hills going slowly from black to green, the highway winding between them, the silvery Connecticut coming into view and then disappearing again. I thought that, since the driver was taking the interstate, my father would most likely not be able to catch me.

Twenty-three

F
or a minute after I stepped off the bus, I was confused. For one thing, I had barely slept. And, for another, the one other time I’d run away, the bus had left me in a different part of Watsonboro. Either the bus stop had been moved or I was remembering wrong.

A few steps from where I stood I saw a diner. I walked there, went in through the blue metal door, sat on a stool, and ordered eggs sunny-side up because my mother never cooked them that way, and sausage, and toast and orange juice and home-fried potatoes and a blueberry muffin. The waitress looked up twice from her pad and said, at last, “Somebody joining you?”

I shook my head. When the order had been placed, I went into the bathroom, glanced in the mirror, spent a long time washing the sweat and dirt from my face and hands, scratching the mosquito bites, and trying my best to straighten out my hair.

I ate slowly, scraping every bit of egg from the plate, every last piece of potato and crumb of muffin, drinking every drop of juice. By the time I finished, I didn’t care so much about the way the waitress was looking at me. I asked for a phone book, found my aunt’s name, and called from the pay phone outside the front door. “It’s Majie,” I said when I heard my aunt’s voice. “Marjorie.”

“Are you all right, honey?”

“Sarno’s Diner,” was all I could make myself say. I was staring at the words on the front of the building, and holding the phone in both hands, and looking down the street at every pickup that came through the intersection from the north. “Near of where the bus puts you. I can walk if you tell to me the way.”

“You stay exactly where you are,” my aunt said. “You don’t even go two steps from there. I’ll be there in four minutes. If you’re hungry, go inside and eat and I’ll pay when I get there.”

“I ate plenty,” I said, but by then she was no longer on the line.

Twenty-four

A
unt Elaine’s house was not large, a yellow bungalow on a corner lot with a porch in front and a flower and vegetable garden out back. In addition to her own bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bath, she had a small sewing room with a couch and a chest of drawers in it, and I moved into that room. I slept most of the first day. That night at supper I wasn’t in a mood to talk about what had happened. Aunt Elaine wanted to, I could tell, but I kept trying to steer my mind away from the house in the woods, as if thinking about it would create a kind of magnetism and draw me straight back, or bring my father and mother to the door with a chain saw and a knife. That night I couldn’t get to sleep and stayed up very late, thinking about them.

On my second day in Watsonboro, Aunt Elaine took me to two different stores and bought me clothes and toiletries—I hadn’t even taken my toothbrush. After three days, when it seemed my parents wouldn’t come looking for me, at least not right away, she and I fell into a routine that was nice enough but like a silent dance: The subject of my home life, of exactly what had happened to finally convince me to leave, sat like a hill of dirt in the middle of the dance floor. We maneuvered around it.

I was very agitated then, but our routine helped me calm down a
little. She made breakfast early every morning, then drove me to the bus station so I could ride north to school and keep to my work schedule. In the evening, Sands sometimes drove me back to Watsonboro and sometimes took me only as far as the bus station and waited there to be sure I got on the bus without any trouble.

Walking from the bus station to school—only about a mile—and, later in the day, from school to the work site, I was constantly alert. I expected to see my father’s truck come spluttering around a corner and pull up to the curb, or have him step out of a doorway in front of me; I expected to reach the cathedral and find both my parents there waiting for me, new penances whirling in their minds.

In the first week, especially, I was sure my father would simply appear at Aunt Elaine’s house one day, the way his own father, Dad Paul, used to appear at our house in the woods. I’d come out of my room early in the morning, and Dad Paul would be sitting there at the table like a ghost in flannel shirt and suspenders. The first twenty times I stepped out of Aunt Elaine’s sewing room I looked nervously around the kitchen and living room. I knew the lock on the door would do nothing to stop my father, but I locked it anyway when Aunt Elaine was out of the house. Once my father realized there would be no more eighty dollars a month coming to him from my work, I thought there would be nothing to keep him away. But day after day I didn’t see him on the streets of the town, or at the house, and little by little the fear started to drain out of me.

Aunt Elaine worked from three in the afternoon until eleven. I made supper for myself, and often made something for her, too, and kept it in a covered pot on the stove or in a covered dish in the refrigerator in case she was hungry when she got home. At night, I locked the door and did my schoolwork. It was past the middle of June. There was only a week of school left. We’d finished the exams and reports, and the rest of the work wasn’t taken seriously; I did it for myself, mostly. With the sunshine pouring through the windows, and the summer air whispering at us, it was all my teachers could do to keep the kids from
breaking into celebrations in the classrooms and halls. I had one more encounter with Mrs. Eckstrom, who called me into the office to tell me I was going to be promoted, my work was satisfactory, even strong in some classes, but there had been discussions among my teachers at a recent meeting and it was going to be “exceedingly difficult” for me to be awarded a diploma if I didn’t do something about the way I talked. “You won’t make a very good advertisement for the school system, will you, if you walk around town talking like you do.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t of.”

“Won’t. Not won’t
of.
”

I nodded and acted in as agreeable a manner as I could and she waved a hand and told me to leave. The conversation had some effect on me, though, I have to admit. Being away from my parents had some effect, too. Once or twice I experimented with saying things to Sands that were a little different from the way I usually said them. He didn’t seem to notice.

On the first two Sundays, instead of going to church, which was what I expected her to do, Aunt Elaine slept late, then suggested we walk into downtown Watsonboro. We had breakfast both times in a place where there were ten different kinds of tea in boxes on the shelf, and things on the menu that I’d never seen before. Whole wheat pancakes. Eggs Benedict with spinach. Yogurt drinks. I asked my aunt about all of them but was content to keep to foods I knew: eggs and sausage and juice.

Afterward, we walked to a small bookstore that opened at noon. Since moving to my aunt’s, in addition to eating as much as I wanted, I was allowed to stay in the shower as long as I wanted—an unimaginable luxury for me—and I’d started washing my hair every other day, and spending a long time brushing it, and my clothes were not used clothes from the shed at the dump but new jeans and colorful short-sleeved shirts, and even a pair of sandals, something I had never worn but took an immediate liking to. There was a young man working in the bookstore, not much older than Aaron, and he showed me
where to find books about stonework, and recommended other things he thought I might like to read. On our second visit, when I was sitting in a corner paging through the books, he came over and stood near me and asked why I was interested in masonry. Was my dad or my boyfriend a bricklayer? Was I working on a project at school?

“No, I’m for making a cathedral with a friend I’m having,” I said, and he nodded and blinked his eyes fast and soon drifted back to the front desk. He hadn’t said anything about the way I talked, but it was easy enough to read the confusion on his face. That small moment with him had some effect on me, too, but I wasn’t yet ready to let go of the shield of my broken-up speech. I didn’t feel I could just all of a sudden blend into the normal world, as if I’d always been welcome and comfortable there. I couldn’t let myself trust people, not completely, not even Sands and Aunt Elaine. Ask someone who was in prison for seventeen years what it’s like when he first gets out, how easy it is to put on a good shirt and pants and go order dinner in a nice restaurant.

When we were walking home from the bookstore that day, Aunt Elaine asked if I was happy. It wasn’t a question I ever remembered hearing and not something I often thought about then. With the exception of the first minute she’d seen me, in front of the diner, and one attempt on that first night, she’d been good about staying clear of the hard subjects. We talked about everyday things: the weather, items I should pick up at the market, errands I might do, gardening, the progress of the cathedral, whether Sands was coming for dinner on a certain night or staying up at the rectory. Then, on that walk, she suddenly said, “Are you happy?”

“I don’t think about being it,” I answered. We were on the sidewalk, going past the front yards of tidy wooden houses. People were out in some of those yards planting flowers, or fixing a front gate, or washing their cars or trucks with a bucket and a sponge and a hose. I was surprised at the way those people, who didn’t seem to know Aunt Elaine by name and didn’t know me, would greet us as we went past, smile at us, say something about the weather.

“What do you think about?” Aunt Elaine asked when there were no people nearby.

I think about my parents every minute, I wanted to tell her, but I was still not ready for that conversation so I shifted to another truth. “I think about to living the life God gives me.”

We turned a corner, heading away from the river and the center of town. There, still a twenty-minute walk from my aunt’s front gate, the houses were farther apart, some of them with large yards and neat lawns. Walking side by side, we climbed a long slope, and it was much easier for me than for my aunt. I knew she had cigarettes in the house, and I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to sneak them, that I was used to people smoking.

“Is that what the pastor told you to do?”

“In the start. Now I want to do it for my own. Do you think on that? On going to church and God and that?”

“Not much.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. I think about what I have to do around the house, or someone we’re taking care of at work, and about you and your life, and Sands and his life, and wanting you both to be happy.” She fell silent for a few steps and then added, “I think about your parents.”

“I do,” I admitted. “My mother special, getting big with the baby and that. And then what it could be like there now.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“Do you want that I do?”

“Not at all. I’m just wondering.”

“Not all much.”

“Do you think that was the way God meant for you to live? I mean with your parents. The way they treated you.”

“For then it was. Otherwise it wouldn’t of been.”

“And for now?”

A man was mowing his huge lawn, riding back and forth in even lines on his mower, and for a few minutes the noise made it impossible
to speak. I watched two squirrels in the middle of the street, stopping with their tails up, and then hopping across to the curb and scampering up the back of a maple tree, fighting and chirping at each other. I noticed we were near a catalpa tree, my favorite, and that it had dropped its flowers—like miniature orchids—in a white and pink circle on the concrete. I didn’t want to answer the question, but when Aunt Elaine asked it again I said, “I have two feelings in me now. One is for good, strong. And one … I think God now will to punish me for what I done. Send my father killing me, or some other way.”

“For what you did?”

“Leaving away my parents. My mother p.g. and everything. My father wanting for me to help in the woods and to bring in money, and my mother to help at the cooking and that.”

We walked along. At the top of the hill my aunt was breathing hard and she couldn’t make any more conversation until the road went flat again. Her house appeared in the distance like a small square sun, the pine tree out front, the porch with three chairs on it, where we sometimes sat with Sands at night and drank cold tea.

“What if …,” Aunt Elaine said, and then she waited. “What if God wanted you to have a life with a man who loved you and treated you well, and children who loved you, and work you enjoyed, and enough money to buy the things and do the things you wanted, and a house that was peaceful and clean and nice to live in? What about that kind of life? Do you ever dream of something like that?”

“You don’t to have that life,” I said, because as she was describing it, I felt two fists pushing through my shirt and through my skin and through the muscles over my belly and down far inside me. “Cindy doesn’t to have it. Aaron Patanauk doesn’t to. My mother and father.”