Ferris Beach Read online

  Praise for Ferris Beach

  “Call Ferris Beach fine. Call it enchanting, touching, funny, tragic, sensitive, evocative, moving. Call it any synonym for wonderful, and you still won’t be doing it justice.”

  — The Houston Post

  “A really fine read . . . Jill McCorkle is a writer who has delivered on her earlier promise—and who promises still more.”

  — The New York Times Book Review

  “McCorkle hits all the right notes.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Delightful . . . A novel about family secrets, identity crises, and mother-daughter standoffs.”

  —Vogue

  “Whimsically entertaining and dramatically compelling.”

  — The Boston Globe

  “Beautiful and inspired . . . Rich with interesting characters.”

  — The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “McCorkle gets all the details right . . . She has written the kind of story that makes you smile with recognition even as it tries to break your heart.”

  — The Orlando Sentinel

  “A mature novel, full of complexity and compassion.”

  — The Village Voice

  “Gently funny and expertly crafted . . . Satisfyingly rich.”

  — The Dallas Morning News

  “Believable and well rendered . . . Illuminate[s] both the sadness and the possibilities of renewal in relationships.”

  — The Washington Post Book World

  “McCorkle writes with such insight into her characters that Ferris Beach is as personal as a letter and as visual as photos . . . Her skill at gently balancing humor and grief is masterful.”

  — Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Delightful . . . [McCorkle] has talent and style.”—Detroit Free Press

  “A thoroughly believable picture of growing up in a middle-class small-town family in the New South, in the 60s and 70s, after the throes of integration . . . As convincing as though she’d been lifting the story from her own teenage diary. The teenaged Kate Burns of Ferris Beach is a wistfully charming character.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

  “A many-layered and often mesmerizing novel.”

  — The Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star

  “McCorkle is a splendid writer . . . Ferris Beach is believable. And funny. And heartbreaking. But most of all, it’s a joy to read.”

  — The Cincinnati Enquirer

  “Deep, rich and lyric.”

  — The Palm Beach Post

  “McCorkle is a master . . . The charm of her vision stays with you long after the book is done.”

  — The State (Columbia, SC)

  “McCorkle illuminates character with ironic humor and empathic insight.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “A beautiful and accomplished novel.”

  — Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “With an unerring sense of pacing . . . McCorkle unfolds her story slowly but powerfully, and by the end, with profound —and earned—emotion . . . Ferris Beach is a near-perfect example of a balanced story, with characters drawn from life and not from caricature.”

  — Richmond News Leader

  “Endearing, evocative . . . Her writing is marked by a relentless curiosity and clear-eyed bluntness.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  “Marvelous.”—Library Journal, starred review

  “A marvelously readable novel . . . Its characters are so real that we miss them when the last page has been turned.”

  — Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “McCorkle’s writing shines . . . Her characters are finely drawn, funny, and right. Katie, the confused non-belle, rings true, and her story is as compelling as a soft southern night.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “McCorkle is a strong character writer; she creates people who slip off the page into your memory when you’re not looking.”

  — San Diego Union-Tribune

  “McCorkle’s fiction is full of wonderful ‘characters’ . . . Jill McCorkle’s little Bildungsroman of a woman of the New South is well worth reading.”

  — Houston Chronicle

  “What’s delicious about Ferris Beach is Katie’s funny, sad and even frightening discovery of complex truths about people and herself . . . McCorkle captures what’s unsaid, what her richly drawn characters feel, the emotional currents that tell them when something’s wrong or convince them that something’s perfect.”

  — The Charlotte Observer

  “Well-drawn characters . . . Ironic humor . . . Accurate and sensitive portrayal of the adolescent experience . . . Quick, humorous dialogue.”

  — The Grand Rapids Press

  “Impressive . . . McCorkle keeps getting better.”

  — Booklist, starred review

  Ferris Beach

  ALSO BY JILL MCCORKLE

  NOVELS

  The Cheer Leader

  July 7th

  Tending to Virginia

  Carolina Moon

  STORIES

  Crash Diet

  Final Vinyl Days

  Creatures of Habit

  Going Away Shoes

  Jill McCorkle

  Ferris Beach

  A NOVEL

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 1990 by Jill McCorkle.

  First paperback edition, Fawcett, September 1991.

  First Algonquin paperback, September 2009.

  Originally published in hardcover by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 1990.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Design by Molly Renda.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  McCorkle, Jill

  Ferris Beach : a novel / by Jill McCorkle.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13 978-0-945575-39-9 (HC)

  I. Title.

  PS3563.C3444F4 1990

  813′.54—dc20 90-37089 CIP

  ISBN-13 978-1-56512-931-3 (PB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  In celebration of Claudia and Rob

  One

  Our neighborhood was never the same after Misty Rhodes and her family moved in across the street. While my mother and our neighbor, Mrs. Theresa Poole, mourned the loss of the farmland and the barns and sheds dating back to the 1800s, I rejoiced in finally having the chance of someone my own age close by. The days of blindfolding myself and wandering around my room in Helen Keller simulation, spelling words into my own hand as I acted out Annie Sullivan’s role as well as Helen’s, were drawing to a close. Instead I perched by the window, watching as moving van after moving van came down our street.

  “The split-levels are coming! The split-levels are coming!” Mrs. Poole had announced at a meeting of the historical society at which she and my mother and several others attempted to prevent the sale of the stretch of land in front of us. Known for her do-gooding and her white Lincoln Continental, Mrs. Poole was soon known as well for that proclamation.

  Our own house was built in the early 1800s, and my mother had gone to great lengths to learn its history. “There was a time when there was not another house within ten miles of this one,” a state historian had told her when he came to photograph our house and list it on the state historical register. He gave her a lot of information which she carefully typed on heavy bond paper and filed away with all of her other historical information. My mother had grown up in Boston, and didn’t live in the South until she was sent to a girls’ school in Virginia
. She had many papers, like pedigrees, that told of various ancestors. The sharp edges of her accent had been filed down over the years, slowed and softened; they appeared only occasionally when she talked about raking the yard or playing cards or how life was hard.

  “You, Mary Katherine, have the best of both worlds,” she told me the day we were pulling together all of the paperwork necessary for my joining the Children of the Confederacy. I was not thrilled over joining a club, but it was one of those times when it was just easier to go along with her. She had relatives who had served on both sides, so finding the name of the necessary ancestor was as easy as flipping open one of her books. I think her greatest ambition was that I, too, spend my summer mornings at little meetings where I had to dress as if it were Easter Sunday.

  She fanned out brochures on historical organizations and showed me her collection of various pins and certificates, essays she had written in school, lectures she had given while teaching school, all the while ignoring my father’s comments on his lineage, which he said was composed of Scotch, Irish, Polish, and whatever else took root down in South Carolina. He had grown up in a small town the other side of Ferris Beach.

  “You’re half Scotch and half soda,” he said, and raised his glass. My mother didn’t even glance up from her yellowed certificates, her broad bony shoulders bent slightly as she smoothed her fingers over some document or the Formica tabletop. Sometimes she ignored him completely, unclipping and retwisting her thick hair and humming over his voice. Once dark, her hair was almost completely gray and the severe pull of her bun made her look older than she was.

  My parents never looked like they went together to me, even in the wedding photo that was permanently placed on our living room mantel. I expected the real spouses to step in from the wings on either side. My dad was a lean man, always with a cigarette between his thin fingers, his gestures quick and animated as he moved through the house, forever pacing. Though most of his time was spent teaching math at the local community college, he had great ambitions of writing the perfect murder mystery, one with a plot that had to be solved mathematically. It was not unusual for him to suddenly jump up and run to write down a series of numbers while my mother shook her head and looked up at the ceiling. My mother was tall and big-boned, usually the tallest woman in the room but never settling for flat shoes. For every animated move my father had, she had composure and reserve; the only time my mother lost her calm control were those times my cousin Angela showed up at our house and my father escaped behind the closed living-room door or out into the darkness of the porch to have talks with her, conversations that were not repeated or explained.

  Really, all I knew of Angela was what he had told me, that his sister, unmarried and only seventeen, had a complicated delivery and died soon after, that his mother had raised the baby and as a result he felt Angela was more like his little sister or even his own child. I had no memories of my grandmother, but he spoke of her so often that I saw her in a magical sort of way, this little white-haired lady whose husband had run a shrimping boat, her face and hands a weathered brown from hot days spent surf fishing or shaking the sand from white sheets she hung on a line. When I imagined myself being lifted from the world like the Little Match Girl, she was the one who came for me. My father said that she was a brilliant lady, a poet’s soul buried in a tough little shell; my mother described her as a poor sad woman who lost her mind.

  My father’s name was Alfred Tennyson Burns, known to all as Fred. My grandmother had told him that he was named for a lord, a nobleman like the ones she’d spent her entire palmetto-spangled life dreaming of, a poetic lord or a knight to ride up and carry her off across the coastal plain, tide pools spraying and sand flying. She had originally wanted to name him for a knight, her first choice being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but at the last minute decided that she preferred Fred to Art.

  “Why didn’t she just name you Robert?” my mother once asked. “It would have been the easiest route to a poetic name. Robert Burns.”

  “Had to be a lord or a knight,” he said. “You can call me ‘my lord.’”

  “This from such a brilliant lady,” my mother said, and shook her head, giving me a you see what I mean look as she undipped her bun. She held a gold bobby pin between her thin pink lips as she pulled her hair back more tightly.

  Either way, my father had been affected by his given and almost-given names; he was forever quoting Tennyson or telling me in great detail a Sherlock Holmes plot. He was a Thomas Hardy fan, too, and at my birth had wanted to name me Arabella, which my mother said sounded like something you’d better hope not to get during pregnancy. I thought my life would have been so different if I had started off with another name, an inspirational name like Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie or Joan of Arc, Amelia Earhart. Arabella. I used to stand in front of the mirror in the entryhall of our house and run that name over my tongue in whispers. Just the movement of the mouth to sound the word was sexy, its open-mouthed ending coming with shallow, quickened breath. I would watch my plain face sound the word, and for a second it seemed like there was something else there. I could say “Angela,” and my mouth would form the same shape, tongue pressed forward to shape the lull of the l, as when I said “bella.” My mother’s name, Cleva, was tight-lipped with teeth clenched on that long e, and my own, Katie or Kate, was like a short sharp bite.

  I was five when I first met Angela. My father took me to Ferris Beach, making a big show when we crossed the South Carolina line. We stood for hours just listening to the roar of the surf and wedging our feet into the cool packed sand. Angela appeared at the top of a sand dune, her thick auburn hair blowing behind her. My father squeezed my hand and laughed out loud, as loud as the surf. “There she is,” he screamed, and then once again, almost in a whisper, “There she is.” She greeted me as if I were grown, her cool fingers gently cupping and covering my left cheek and neck where I had a birthmark the color of wine. (“It’s not your fault, Cleva,” I had recently overheard Mrs. Poole tell my mother. “I suspect God has his own reasons for painting her that way.”) Angela pressed her lips to that same cheek, and then she draped her many strands of beads around and around my neck while we ate the fried chicken she had packed in a basket.

  “What was I thinking, Fred?” she asked. “I forgot something for the child to drink.” I sat there with her on the faded quilt while my father walked up the beach and through the dunes to the old bait shop to buy a carton of milk. She twisted the cork from a bottle and filled her glass with burgundy. The day was supposed to be a secret, but in the exhilaration of seeing the ocean for the first time, I let it all slip from my mouth into my mother’s ear, where it fell solid, lodging in her chest.

  Not long after that we were invited by Mrs. Poole and some of her church friends to a picnic at Cherry Grove Beach, which Mrs. Poole said was “light-years better than Ferris Beach.” These women were quite a bit older than my mother, so I was the only child present. They didn’t even wear bathing suits but sat fully clothed under big striped umbrellas, and the whole day was all planned as neatly as if bells went off in their heads to signal the next event. Keep your shoes on because the shells are sharp and will cut clean through to the bone. Set the places and we mustn’t forget to set His place, we mustn’t forget to thank Him for this cold fried chicken and the quart of milk. Don’t you forget if you get the urge in that warm salty water to take off your bathing suit and pee, that He is watching you, and He will know what you did, and if you have a thought about how good it feels to be all naked and running your hands down your body, then rest assured He will know. And, oh, my Lord, don’t even look to your left unless you want to see a suit that shows all that a woman has to show.

  I spent much of the day digging in the sand by the edge of the water, burying my feet and then letting wave after wave wash them clean. The things those women talked about were things that could keep you awake for the rest of your life, death and illness and poverty and insurance policies and he will get his due.
It was so easy to sin, as easy as telling a lie, or saying damn or saying that men come from monkeys, or kissing the glossy paper mouth of a movie star on a poster. And how could God keep it all sorted, all these direct lines, these prayers that were shot up to him like bullets, crisscrossing, ricocheting, contradicting, negating. I just hope that she will live until young Owen graduates from college. Well, I just hope she dies quickly and quietly—at peace. How can you be wishing her dead like that? I for one pray that there will come a cure for cancer. I pray for the doctors in the laboratory. I have a cousin whose son-in-law is working at the NIH in D.C. I pray they don’t get a divorce even though my cousin says she prays for what is best for the both of them. If his eye had been just on those three striped umbrellas on the Cherry Grove strand, he could not have met their demands, not even to mention those of the rest of the world; this was prime time, a Sunday afternoon, and the thought of having to sort through all those requests made my head spin. It was that very day that I attached to Angela everything beautiful and lively and good; she was the easy flow of words and music, the waves crashing on Ferris Beach as I spun around and around because I couldn’t take in enough of the air and sea gulls as they swooped and whined. Angela was energy, the eternal movement of the world, the blood in my veins and the wind in the bare winter branches that creaked and cried out in the night like tired ghosts in search of a home. She was the answer to a prayer and I thought about that day at Ferris Beach often, recreating every word and every movement before I fell asleep.

  By the time I was eight, when her face was getting hard for me to remember, I imagined her holding my hand and spelling secret messages into them. By then I had read the biography of Helen Keller nine times, each time finding something new, each time working on the alphabet on the last page, each time conjuring what was left of my memory of Angela.

  “You cannot check this out another time this year,” the Pine-top librarian had said when I tried to check the book out for the tenth time; she was exasperated by all the noise a classroom of eight-years-olds can make just entering a room. “Somebody else might want to read about Helen Keller.”