Ferris Beach Read online

  “Well, I suppose what she did was awful,” my mother said. This was her favorite way of qualifying, in the same vein as “we love people and like things.” What she did was awful. It seemed the qualifying phrase worked on all who lived and breathed or did not live and breathe, with the one slight exception of Angela.

  “We all suspected she might be with Gene Files, who was a highway patrolman. He had been a friend of their family, you know the children called him uncle and such. He and his wife, Betty, were over there all the time.”

  “Urn hmmm, it’s the same as that woman borrowing my meat thermometer.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.” Again, my mother had pushed poor pale Sally Jean into the corner. “I mean, no one will ever know. It’s clear that Mo was not thinking, but it could be that Gene Files was taking her to visit a friend in Atlanta. I mean there is no way of knowing” Sally Jean’s face, solemn and defeated, was indication enough that she had not heard what she wanted to hear. “A lot of people do believe that Mo was coming home to stay. We’ll just never know.”

  “No, not when they’re all dead.”

  “And it was a terrible car crash,” my mother whispered as she leaned forward, while Sally sat there like a bird charmed by the salivating quiver of a cat’s mouth, charmed and paralyzed with fear and not really knowing how to distinguish the two. Cats have the power to charm, Mrs. Poole’s housekeeper, Mrs. Landell, had once told me as she took her break on a kitchen stool. It’s all in the eyes. All of life is there in the eyes. When it’s time to die I can read it like a printed word, there in the eyes.

  Sally’s eyes were open and waiting, ready for the dull ache of truth to fill them. “Gene Files and the baby were crushed. They were on the side that got hit, the baby there asleep on the backseat.” Sally Jean stared into her empty coffee cup, probably able to recite in her head what came next. “Mo was thrown. It took them hours to find her. They searched in those wee hours with flashlights and lanterns, expecting the worst.”

  “Thomas talked to her that afternoon. She called him at about midafternoon.”

  “She called from somewhere in South Carolina,” Mama said in a normal speaking voice, and then lowered herself to a whisper again as if they had just taken a break from a ghost story. “Anyway, when they found her, they couldn’t believe that she was lying there as if asleep, not a mark on her face. Her neck was broken but there was not a trace of blood.” Sally was charmed to silence, paralyzed as she sat and stared at my mother. “Lord, forgive me,” Mama said, her voice returning. “I don’t need to be telling you all of this. My goodness, we should think on happy things, Christmas and the bazaar and such.”

  “I asked to hear it,” Sally said. “I don’t know why, but I felt I needed to hear it.” I wondered then how it must feel to step into someone else’s life as she had done, into a town where everyone knew your husband and his family and their past better than you did. You could change the furniture and the wallpaper in the bedroom and the shrubbery and the car you drove, but still she would be there, with every change in weather, with every date on a calendar. Time and time again I had heard Sally Jean tell my mother that Mr. Rhodes was the answer to all her prayers, and I could only wonder if she, in exchange, was an answer to his. I felt it was more likely that hers had been answered because his, the desire to have another chance, Mo Rhodes back in his arms and his life, were unanswered.

  Mo Rhodes had been uplifted by death, as if the abandonment of her family were fully erased in the events of that moment—headlights around a curve blinding Gene Files, a hand reaching for Buddy, that last breath drawn in anticipation of the impact which had hurled her into the damp, mossy undergrowth. Her death had saved Misty and her family the embarrassment of abandonment. With the exception of that one night when Misty talked about it all, whenever the topic arose, she addressed only the wreck, only the death, as if her mother had been returning from purchasing their Santa Claus or the food she would prepare for Sunday dinner.

  There was a change in Misty, a coarseness that showed her bitterness, the anger she would have felt if her mother had still been living, alive and well in some little apartment in Atlanta. Maybe Misty would have been invited to visit, would have received an occasional postcard. Maybe there would have been a plan to have one more child, a Files child to fully consummate this love, just in case Buddy had been a product of Thomas Rhodes. I knew Misty had imagined it all for herself; I knew she had a firm grasp of the truth no matter how many times she refused to look at it.

  When conversations got bandied about in school, turning to the grotesque, Misty could charm the whole room with her coarseness. “Yeah, well, my mama got thrown thirty feet from a car; there were pieces of glass in her hair. The man she was with lost his head. When they pulled him from the car, his head fell off and rolled into the road.” She could make the whole class go silent, and then she’d laugh that laugh, her skin turning a faint pink. That’s how Misty spent much of the ninth grade, our last year at Samuel T. Saxon Junior High. She was the pale orange-haired girl whose mother had died a tragic death, and I was her tall birthmarked companion. I saw us as a pair to be pitied, though, Lord forgive me when I whine, Misty had convinced herself that we were a pair to be reckoned with and envied, and I clung to her hopes every step of the way.

  Twelve

  From my ninth grade English class, I could see the statue in front of the courthouse, a little stone man, his gun hoisted over one shoulder as if frozen in midmarch, a constant reminder of our Confederate dead. I saw the statue as a unique symbol of a unique town of which I was a part. I sat in the splintered, carved-up desk and imagined that the stone man could see me, the same way I had once imagined the Wilkins crew with all of their New Testament names could rise above the graves in Whispering Pines and look into my bedroom window. I sat there, my mind on everything except the vocabulary words on the old blackboard. The play of “The Miracle Worker” was in our textbook, and I couldn’t wait until we had grammar out of the way so that we could read it. I knew all of Annie Sullivan’s lines, and while I copied my vocabulary words, I imagined myself in Misty’s old granny glasses—if she could dig them up in that room of hers—playing the part.

  The first day I sat there, the same day that Misty told the homeroom about Mo’s death, I had not even been able to see the statue because the trees shading the old cracked sidewalks in front of the school were still full and green. Mr. Tom Clayton, who for years cut my father’s hair and who sounded just like that cartoon chicken, Foghorn Leghorn, once told me that the little stone man came down once a year to pee. I had believed him for years, no matter how many times my mother and Mrs. Poole said it was pure T foolishness. It still made me laugh to think about it.

  “Yessir, comes down,” Mr. Clayton said, arms crossed over his thin bowed ribs, a splat of tobacco juice off to his right, “pees, looks about the town of Fulton, says to hisself, ‘Yep, everything’s copacetic,’ then gets hisself a drink of water from the fountain there and heads back up till the next year when he has to pee again.” Mr. Clayton was the only person I ever knew who used the word copacetic, an old-timey-sounding word that seemed to fit that part of Fulton, the old part well divided from the area where the new junior high and high schools were under construction, and the new neighborhoods where homes seemed to appear overnight.

  Copacetic. I thought of the stone man a lot that fall while I sat day by day and watched him come into better view as the tall oaks and elms shed their leaves onto the school ground. I wrote Todd Bridger’s initials on my desk in pencil and then wiped them away, more out of habit than anything else. He didn’t seem like such a big deal to me anymore, though I probably still would have gone with him if he’d asked me; it seemed like Misty and I were the only two girls who hadn’t been with somebody. If the union only lasted twenty-four hours, like many of Ruthie Sands’s going-steadies, it was better than nothing.

  “Dean says that boys our age sometimes act opposite of what they mean” Misty tol
d me. Since Mo’s death, Dean had become very serious and grown-up acting; he always rubbed his smooth hairless chin and stared off in a philosophical trance when offering advice. He was very polite to me, sometimes too polite, calling me Mary Katherine or patting my arm as he spoke.

  “He says that if a boy acts like he’s not interested in you, then probably he is.” I did not have the heart to tell Misty that if this was true, then most of the boys in school loved us and hated Ruthie Sands, whose name was inked on their notebooks and the rubber toes of their sneakers as she cheered their various teams to victory, or hated Perry Loomis, a quiet, beautiful girl from out in the county.

  Still, wishful thinking or useless hoping or whatever, Misty and I were hanging in there. We wore crocheted sweater vests, gauchos, fringed boots, and macramé bracelets; every morning before walking to school, we went behind the Presbyterian church and carefully applied makeup, mostly just cover-up, her to the acne she had begun getting, me to my mark. Some days we wore eye shadow and mascara, too, but it hardly made a dent of a reaction in the general student body.

  It amazed me how much faith Misty had that it would all get better, that we would wake up one day and the world would have simply flipped to our side. In spite of her toughness, or maybe because of it, Misty’s optimism was stronger than ever; she was determined that she was going to win, believed that she had to win. Sometimes I felt Mo was standing there, her fingers smoothing cover-up on my face, encouraging me to believe, to try, to hope. I was amazed that such faith could survive, and I was even more amazed that it could grow and strengthen.

  Copacetic. Mr. Clayton died that very fall, alone in his shop, a copy of the local paper, turned to my father’s article about naming the new high school, there on his lap. My mother had headed up the committee to name the school, and Mr. Clayton along with Mrs. Poole and several others had been members. My mother’s suggestion of Edgar Allan Poe was one that brought quite a bit of controversy. Why on earth would you name a school for him? A drunkard who married a child and wrote horror stories. My mother, though she didn’t confess this at the meeting, wanted to name the school after someone who shared her history, and he was the only famous person she could think of who was born in Boston and lived in the South.

  “I say we go for Thomas Jefferson,” Edith Turner had said, hands deep in the pockets of her long tunic, a fashion she always wore, people forever saying how she looked just like Bea Arthur of the TV show “Maude.” “It’s a good name. Always has been. Always will be. Stonewall Jackson is also a good one.”

  “I’d like to suggest that it be named for my husband,” Mrs. Poole had said, and looked around, indignant that no one else had made this suggestion.

  “Let’s see now,” Mr. Thomas Clayton had said. “The Bo Poole School. No, I just don’t think so. Nevermore. Nevermore.” He laughed and sat back down, and my mother in describing the meeting to us later that night said she felt that Mr. Clayton’s comment had convinced the rest of the committee just to give up and go along with her.

  “Well, please, God,” Mrs. Poole had mumbled at the end. “Let’s abbreviate. E. A. Poe will sound much better.”

  “I second it,” Mrs. Turner said. “If there’s no Thomas Jefferson then I say E. A. Poe is my second choice.” She turned and held a hand to her mouth, laughed. “Bo Poole School.”

  Guns were fired at Mr. Clayton’s funeral, and the few men who were left from the First World War wore their uniforms. Mrs. Poole stood there with Mr. Poole’s old machete and motioned for blanks to be fired from a gun as if it were a cannon. A farmer from out in the county used his crop-duster plane to come into town and spiral and twist and leave trails of smoke like a dogfight. That was all people talked about for months, but I thought of Mr. Clayton’s old-timey word most on glorious fall days when it seemed the whole dingy classroom turned to bronze, as the leaves sailed and twisted across the dirt schoolyard, some flapping and clinging to the crumbling brick and thick wavy windows. The glass in the windows of Samuel T. Saxon had been oozing for a long, long time, a slow-motioned journey that would soon end with a wrecking ball.

  Copacetic—the word seemed to fit, bringing to my mind cornucopia and harvest, an abundance of life and color. It made me think of Mo just the year before as she stood in her front yard and arranged decorations of huge corn stalks and bales of hay, her poncho stretched over her rounded stomach, cheeks flushed as she called us to see her creation. It made me think of Angela, hair like copper, as she leaned her head against the porch swing.

  It was peaceful there in class, peaceful when our English teacher assigned us to just sit and read silendy until the bell rang. Very few people read; some passed notes or talked, others drew little doodles, names, or initials on their notebooks. One day I looked up to see Perry Loomis take a note from the boy behind her. She read it, then turned and looked at Todd Bridger, smiled and nodded. Right before my eyes she was going through all the motions I had so carefully choreographed and played over in my head so many times. I clutched the little paper ball in my pocket where I had written several sets of initials earlier that day, all the people I kind of liked, which is what Misty always insisted on doing, and rubbed it together until my fingers were silver-gray with pencil lead, and all evidence that I had ever included Todd Bridger or anyone else on such a list was destroyed.

  Since the first day that year I hadn’t been able to help looking at Perry Loomis, to study her the same way I caught myself studying Merle Hucks and his slicked-back hair. Perry had thick blond hair that hung past her shoulders and dark brown eyes, made darker by the paleness of her face. Perry Loomis was beautiful and all the boys were talking about it, though it seemed they focused more on her body than her face. I had noticed that Todd Bridger seemed to stop to pull up his socks or to readjust a notebook whenever she was near.

  After class I told Misty about the note I had seen passed to Perry Loomis, and she just shrugged. “Todd is such a jerk,” she said, and then grinned as she watched R.W. Quincy stick out his big foot and trip a skinny little studious-looking girl from the seventh grade. “Hey, come on over to my house and we’ll watch ‘General Hospital.’ We were walking down the sidewalk towards our neighborhood. All around us leaves whirled in the air, lifted and blown with each passing car. She turned several times, casting quick glances over her shoulder. I knew she was looking for R.W. Quincy. “Wait until you see what I did to my room last night. I got a black light and now all the posters look great, the way they’re supposed to. Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison have got the whitest teeth.” She kicked a rock and I watched it skip ahead of us.

  As the weather got colder and the old radiators of Samuel T. Saxon hissed and clanged, I was often reminded of Mr. Clayton’s story about the stone man. It was on those days when the phantom struck, which is to say that either R.W. Quincy or Merle Hucks had peed on the radiator in the boys’ bathroom, leaving the whole school and the rusty old heating system to reek of urine for days. We all knew one of them was doing it, but no one was about to tell. Nobody wanted to tangle with either of them or both, rather, since they were always together; every morning they came to school smelling of bowling-alley food, the hot-dog relish and onion rings they had had for breakfast. For me the worst part was when we had a class picture taken for the yearbook and I had to stand in the back right beside them because I was so tall.

  Tall. Now that was a problem. I used to lie in bed at night and will my legs not to grow another inch. I contemplated binding my feet off like the Japanese women so that they would never grow beyond their present size seven. I was only three inches shy of being as tall as my mother, and I was fearing the worst, that I was also going to be five feet eleven and wear a size nine-and-a-half shoe. “Tall and thin like a fashion model,” all the salesladies said when I went to buy a new coat, all of them careful not to look too long at my left cheek. The coat was beautiful, white simulated-fur, which was what everyone was wearing. It felt wonderful, once I was safe behind my bedroom door, to hold out my arm
s and spin around, head thrown back as if I were taking in the skyscrapers of New York City like Mario Thomas in “That Girl”; though one look in my full-length mirror shouted back that I looked like a big naked Amazon hiding under a bear rug. I needed only a bone in my nose to get my picture in National Geographic.

  As I sat in my desk at Samuel T. Saxon, I willed the little stone man to smile at me. I willed my legs to stop growing and I willed my face a pure flawless white and I willed someone other than Dean Rhodes to think of me. Of course these had been my regular requests for several years; the one request that I had been able to drop from the list was the one I uttered constantly prior to integration, that I not get hit over the head with a Pepsi bottle, my throat slit with the glass. The stories had come to us again and again, riots and fires and fights and names called out in hatred. Integration had come and black, white, city, county, we were all scared. We were all waiting for whatever was supposed to happen, to happen. Now two years after the fact, we had stopped waiting and, instead, gray winter recesses were spent leaning on the radiator in the girls’ bathroom, Misty and Lily Hadley dancing in front of the warped mirrors over the row of ancient sinks, their voices sweet and pure, as they belted out “I’ll Be There” by the Jackson Five. With integration fears put to rest, I had more time to will my body to stop growing, to will that I would suddenly look more like my father’s family, that I would look just like Angela. We must bring salvation back.

  The only good thing to come out of getting so tall was the new coat, to be able to finally throw away the old blue nylon carcoat with the babyish gingham lining that I had worn for several years. I wanted to take all the clothes that I had outgrown, pile them up in the backyard, and strike a match, burn the bits of gingham and bows that look so ridiculous on tall people; I wanted to squat by the fire like a native woman, a bone in my nose and a skull around my neck, snakeskins wrapped around my throat like what Merle wore way back in the second grade. From the billowing black smoke I would cast a spell; I would carry us back to the day at Ferris Beach, when Angela, my face cupped in her smooth warm hands would say, I’m going to take you home now, Kitty. You know you belong to me don’t you?, and my father would nod as I turned to him, though he would have to look away, unable to face losing me. I would carry us back to that rainy day at Misty’s house when we cooked s’mores, when Mo was there, able to pick up the phone and call Gene Files, Look Gene, this isn’t right. I can’t do this. I love my family too much to leave them. I want to live too much to leave them.