Ferris Beach Read online

  “What if I wait until the end and nobody’s checked it out?”

  “There are other classes, you know,” she said, her lips pushed forward like all those cartoons of the North Wind getting ready to blow, and then she stomped off to yank Merle Hucks and R.W. Quincy by the arms and to tell them to stop rubbing their feet on the new indoor-outdoor carpet and then touching people to shock them. It was the only exciting thing going on in the library. “You’re gonna rub this carpet bare,” she said. There were perspiration circles under her plump arms even though it was wintertime. “Now find a chair.” She turned to heave herself back to the desk while they ran around behind her acting surprised like they had found chairs. Nobody pronounced R.W. Quincy’s name right, like the teacher begged us to do. “R Double U,” she would say, and he’d tell her his name was “R Dubyah,” that he was not a fancy talker and if his mama had meant for him to be named R Double U, then she would’ve called him that instead of R Dubyah. The librarian said it our way, which made our teacher give her a dirty look. R.W. was the tallest boy in the class because he had stayed back once in first grade and again in second; he wore a dirty piece of twine around his neck with a little blue ratfink hooked to it. Merle Hucks had a black ratfink with red eyes, which was supposed to be good luck since they were so rare.

  “So can I read Helen Keller?” I whispered.

  “Are you deaf?” she asked me, and R.W. Quincy, who was standing there wanting to check out a book on stockcar racing, said, “What? What, Miss Liberrian?”

  “The split-levels are here,” Mrs. Poole said the day Misty’s family moved in, and waved her hand at the row of houses as if she could make them disappear. “That kind of house is not designed for country like this, now is it?”

  I was nine that August, and for a month I had watched one big moving van after another bringing someone new to our street, always it seemed, a family with babies instead of someone close to my age. Misty’s house was identical to the other six split-levels already occupied and the three which were springing up around the corner. “I’d need bread crumbs to find my way home,” Mrs. Poole said, her pursed lips painted the same shade as the blooms on our fuchsia plant. “I hear somebody over on Maple,” she paused, pointing her thin finger through the split-levels to the street parallel to ours, “is building a ranch out of some kind of board that just goes its own way in the weather.”

  Misty’s house was my favorite of the whole bunch; it was white with blue shutters—electric blue, Mrs. Poole said in a hushed whisper later that same day while she stared at the big moving van with South Carolina tags. “I saw what looked like it might be a bar, you know to house liquor,” she whispered. “I’ve heard of neighborhoods going down this way.” Mrs. Poole kept talking but stared over at the Rhodeses’ house. “It happens slowly in the beginning, one house here, another there, and then before you know it, the decent people stop coming, and more and more riffraff come in, prices drop and so others can afford to come in.” She paused and then tilted her head toward the back of our property lines which ended in a tangled field of kudzu and a row of tiny pastel houses. “A colored family lives down there,” she whispered. “It can happen.”

  “Peacock blue,” Mrs. Rhodes said, smiling at Mr. Rhodes, a Sherwin-Williams paint sampler in her hand. Mr. Rhodes was up on a ladder putting the final touches on the trim of the porch awning. “Now nobody will mistake our house for another.” I had been standing on the curb for about three minutes, though it seemed like hours. Mr. Rhodes wore an old baseball cap to shield his face from the sun, but already his cheeks were bright pink like the skin on Misty’s sunburned nose. Misty looked just like him with that strawberry hair and doughy white skin, made even whiter in contrast with her mother’s tan, a shade so deep you might wonder if she was from another place altogether. “Do you think she’s foreign?” Mrs. Poole had asked and then turned back to her rose bushes, the nozzle of her hose tuned to a fine mist.

  “Peacock blue just like my Misty’s eyes,” Mrs. Rhodes said, and hugged this plump pale girl, who seemed to be much more interested in the superball that her skinny older brother was bouncing against the brick wall of the carport than she was in meeting me. “My Misty is just your age, nine going on twenty,” Mrs. Rhodes said to me and laughed, but Misty was still eyeing me suspiciously, and why wouldn’t she? I had come bearing a paper plate of delicate little homemade ladyfingers and my mother’s instructions to ask where they were from. If I had been in her shoes, I would not have trusted me either.

  “Wouldn’t you love to have peacocks in your yard?” Mrs. Rhodes asked, and turned to me. Her thick dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail as she stood there barefooted in cropped jeans, her toenails painted pale pink. It was her eyes that were peacock blue, and this Misty that she hugged up so close had just a washed-out version to go with her frizzy orange hair and freckled arms. I was about to nod that I’d love some peacocks, but before I could she was asking another question. “Fourth grade?” she said to me, which I came to learn quickly was her way of asking a question, all but the key words deleted—like hungry? tired? sad?, the way you might talk to an infant. “Yes,” I said and tried to take in all the things scattered about in their carport because I knew I’d be quizzed: a black sewing mannequin dressed in a lime-green miniskirt and halter top, a stone statue of a fish with its mouth wide open, a little miniature pagoda, bags and bags of gravel, and lots of little lanterns and tiki torches. “Pinetop?” she asked me, which was the name of the elementary school nearby, and again I nodded yes. Misty was still just standing there staring at me. She was slapping a flyback paddle against her bare thigh.

  “Let’s eat these cookies you brought. I just can’t wait.” Mrs. Rhodes grabbed me by the hand and then pulled both of us through the coolness of the carport, past the mannequin and rocks, and into the box-cluttered kitchen, where she poured glasses of Coca-Cola and put on an Elvis Presley record. I was not allowed to drink soda on a regular basis, but I didn’t say a word. Rather, I sat in complete awe of this woman whose purple wooden earrings swung back and forth as she talked. I envied the silent girl across from me.

  Misty. On first meeting, I thought her name a cruel joke, as cruel as someone huge named Bitsy or Teeny. “What’s your name again, hon?” Mrs. Rhodes asked. Her hips moved back and forth in rhythm with “Heartbreak Hotel.” “Mary Katherine—but people call me Katie,” I said and then without thinking added, “My dad sometimes calls me Kitty.” It slipped, this nickname my mother despised. “Kitty,” she said, and stared at me, smiling, while Misty gave me a dirty look. “I like that. I like the way it sounds, the same way I like Misty.”

  “Right.” Misty finally spoke. Her voice was nasal and much deeper than I’d expected from someone with such pale skin. “I was named for a horse. And you were named for a cat.” Her deadpan expression brought Mrs. Rhodes over to her chair.

  “No, honey,” she squealed in laughter and threw her arms around Misty’s neck. “You know the story of how I thought of your name.” She turned to me briefly. “Misty is named for Themista Rose Allen, a young woman I never knew but just heard about, sort of a local legend where I’m from.” She pressed her cheek against Misty’s. “You weren’t named for the horse, even though I did think that was such a romantic sounding name, Misty of Chincoteague, only you were Misty of Ferris Beach.” Misty just stared down at the vanilla wafers and ladyfingers on the paper plate in front of her, her mouth tightened into a straight line. “Johnny Mathis must think it’s a romantic name, too; he named a song that.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you’re named for the Three Stooges,” Misty of Ferris Beach said, and paused with a vanilla wafer in hand. “Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello!” she said, in perfect Three Stooges rhythm, and she was beginning to smile now, as if this was a routine the two of them had played through many times before.

  And then her mom, hand gently placed on Misty’s head, began singing, Look at me, I’m as helpless. . . “Oh yuk,” Misty Rhodes said and bit into a la
dyfinger, leaving a ring of powdered sugar on her lips. “These cookies are pretty good,” she said. “They’re almost as good as the store-bought kind.” Then for the first time, I heard that laugh, shrill and hyena-like. I often thought it was like in the comma rule When in doubt do without; Misty’s version was When in doubt, laugh, and the louder the better.

  “So what’s your brother’s name,” I asked. I could see him through the window, there at the base of the ladder staring up at his father. He was a perfect blend of mother and father, dark hair and pale skin. He looked like he was probably two or three years older than us.

  “Flicka,” Misty said, and again laughed that laugh. “Do you think he’s cute?” In the same way that Mrs. Rhodes asked her key-word questions, Misty asked the impossible-to-answer kind. If I said no, which was my impulse after having seen his thin pointed features and the blue veins visible in his cheek, then they would be insulted. If I said yes, then I was in for teasing or my own humiliation when they told him and he responded to whether or not he thought I was cute. I shrugged.

  “Misty,” Mrs. Rhodes said, and smiled. “If you aren’t a card and a half. Don’t embarrass Kitty.” It sounded so odd for her to call me that, and I knew that I had made a terrible mistake in telling her about the nickname. “And I did not name the child Flicka even though I was tempted.” She turned to me, her eyes briefly lingering on my birthmark. “His name is Dean. James Dean Rhodes.”

  “But we like to call him Flicka.”

  “Now, cut that out, you.” Mrs. Rhodes swatted playfully at Misty. “Kitty’s not going to want to come back if you act this way.” She went to the kitchen window and rapped on the glass. “Dean? Dean?” she called until he ran over and pressed his face flat against the glass like a Pekingese. “Cookies?” I decided I’d leave while he was coming in, so I stood up.

  “Is that a birthmark you have?” Misty asked, and leaned forward, her bare legs squeaking on the red linoleum seat of her chair.

  “Misty!” Mrs. Rhodes stepped forward, hands on her hips, and I focused on the tiny gold chain around her ankle while I nodded, while James Dean Rhodes walked past us and opened the refrigerator.

  “It’s just a question,” she said, more to her mother than to me, and then reluctantly she reached out and tugged on the back of my T-shirt. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, and quietly pushed my chair away from the table to stand. “I need to go home.”

  “Oh, I wish you’d stay,” her mother said. “Why, you haven’t even met Dean. Dean, this is Kitty from next door.”

  “You can call me Katie,” I said, but he just shrugged and went back to drinking from a water jar that had his name stuck to the top with masking tape.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Misty continued, her face not showing any emotion at all. “I think it’s kind of neat.” She was trying way too hard by this time. “It’s sort of shaped like Italy, you know, like an old granny boot.”

  “Misty.” Mrs. Rhodes’s face was as red as her husband’s, but something in what Misty had to say, though not my favorite thing to hear, had struck me. It did sort of look like Italy; she was completely honest and I found I liked that.

  “I have some granny glasses,” she told me. “Want to go to my room and see?”

  There was more in her room than I had ever seen, big paper flowers and fans and a stuffed bear that filled one whole corner. She had a chewing-gum-wrapper chain that reached all the way around her room, and it was made from only Clark’s Teaberry and Clove, making her whole room smell like those wax lips and whistles that we all bought at Halloween.

  After demonstrating the Teaberry shuffle several times, making her little ceramic-dog collection rock on the top of her dresser, she showed me how to make a chain. She played “Hold On” by Herman’s Hermits on a record player she had right there in her room. Misty had also memorized every single word of “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and quoted it while I sat there on her bright orange-and-yellow swirled bedspread.

  “I have a picture of Sgt. Barry Sadler,” she said, and opened a drawer, pulling out a picture of the singer. His little green beret was cocked to one side. “My parents’ friend Gene was in the 82nd Airborne Division.” I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but I just nodded in agreement, acted impressed because clearly she was. “Gene says if he ever meets Sgt. Barry Sadler that he’ll get his autograph.” She could also sing “Secret Agent Man” by Johnny Rivers and did so while she twirled her baton over and under her extended arm, doing the pancake she called it.

  And she did have some granny glasses, dark-green glass in rectangular wire frames; “Like a hippie,” she said, while rearranging her paper flowers in one of those melted and stretched-out Coke bottles. Like Annie Sullivan, I was thinking, wanting those glasses for my own.

  “You can borrow them sometime,” she told me as she put the glasses back in their little plastic case. She unwrapped her last stick of Teaberry gum, bit half, and handed me the rest. “You can borrow them right now if you want.”

  “It’s peacock blue,” I reported to my mother and Mrs. Poole, who sat in the kitchen waiting for my report, under the guise that they were planning the big Fourth of July celebration. They both looked so plain and somber compared to Mo Rhodes and her loud-colored pillows and sparkly wall hangings in Oriental designs. Our house looked so sparse and bare compared to the big paper fans and parasols that belonged to the Rhodes family, or to their ceramic table shaped like an elephant. “And they came from Ferris Beach.” I tried to say the place as if it meant nothing at all to me, as if I hadn’t spent thousands of hours thinking about that one time I had been there, but all it took was the set of my mother’s chin to make my cheeks grow hot.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Mrs. Poole said. “I certainly don’t visit the place but certainly I am familiar with most of the names dwelling there.” I wanted to say that names don’t dwell, people do. “Mr. Poole and I used to take the train and spend a long weekend there every fall. Of course, that was back before you moved here, back when Ferris Beach was a quaint little fishing village and not,” she paused, looked at my mother and shook her head, “well, not like it is now.” Mr. Poole had been dead for my whole life and all I knew of him was what I had overheard my father say that other people in the town had said: that he had a lot of money, was a powerful man politically, and no one knew why and how he had managed to marry and live with Theresa Poole all those years.

  “Misty liked Ferris Beach,” I said, watching my mama’s back stiffen. “She’s my age and has an older brother. Mrs. Rhodes grew up here in town. She moved to Ferris Beach when she married Mr. Rhodes, who was from around there.”

  “Hush,” Mrs. Poole said. “Then you know I’ll know who she is. What was her maiden name?” I shrugged, still thinking about all those boxes they had to unpack and trying to imagine what was in them. “What’s her first name?”

  “Mo,” I said, tempted to do the hello hello hello, just as Misty had done, only my mama and Mrs. Poole wouldn’t have gotten it, a waste of perfectly good breath. “I think her whole name’s Ramona.”

  “Ramona.” Mrs. Poole sat up straighter, her finger in the air like she was about to make an important announcement. “Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Her father kept the horse stable down near the river.”

  “I know she likes horses,” I said.

  “Oh, of course.” Mrs. Poole raised one eyebrow, her face pokerlike. “I do indeed recall that family, the Wileys. Yes, Mo Wiley. She is much younger than us but I do remember her.” I wondered why Mama let Mrs. Poole carry on with that “us” when Mrs. Poole must’ve been at least fifteen years older. Mama poured her another cup of coffee, no sugar no cream. “She was riding horses when she was just a teeny little thing. I used to see her over in the pasture where the highway is.” Mrs. Poole pushed away the ashtray and sipped her coffee with her pinkie hooked; that awful fuchsia lipstick of hers smeared on the cup. “But they were not her horses,�
� she said with authority. “They belonged to the boarders, who did not really like a seven-year-old child exercising their horses.” She looked at me when she said this, as if to say that nobody liked children—period. “The Wileys did not have a pot to—” She paused, still staring at me.

  “Pee in,” I added, to which my mother raised a stiff eyebrow.

  “Nor a window out of which to throw it.” Mrs. Poole sat back and relaxed by letting her hands rest on the table. She could not stand to end a sentence with a preposition.

  “I wonder if Mrs. Rhodes knows Angela?” I asked boldly, the excitement of the time I had just spent at Misty’s lingering with me. My mother looked up as if in slow motion. Mrs. Poole was leaning forward to hear my mother’s response.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Mama said. “She might.”

  “Now, who is Angela?” Mrs. Poole was still leaning forward. “Not your sister. No, you don’t have a sister. Is Angela Fred’s sister?” Mrs. Poole was rifling through her purse for a cigarette.

  “Niece.”

  “She doesn’t visit very often.”

  “Hardly ever,” Mama said, her voice falling into its original sharpness, her pronunciation like a harsh honk of a goose. She turned to me then. “Kate, why don’t you run tell the Rhodeses about the Fourth of July picnic and how the whole town comes. Tell Mrs. Rhodes if she has any questions I am happy to answer them.”

  “Find out what all those rocks are for,” Mrs. Poole called after me, and then I heard her continue talking to my mother. “I just can’t imagine what all those rocks are for. And that little wooden structure like something of the Orient. What could that be for? You know I don’t think much of the Japanese, haven’t since the war. Mr. Poole was in the Pacific, you know, purple heart and various other citations.”