Ferris Beach (26 page)

“Nice to know where your loyalties lie,” she said to me and then went and stood by the window, her hand quivering as she held the cigarette up near her cheek. “And no, I don’t smoke”—she turned to my father—“at least not very often, but you’re not going to quit no matter how many times the doctor tells you to, so I might as well do as I please. And you eat too much pork, too,” she said. He looked like he was about to laugh but caught himself.

“Did she say anything?” She was looking at me again, her face pale. “Like, did she tell you she’d come back or never again or thanks for letting me eat and sleep here free of charge, kiss my foot or anything?” Her face was red, her voice shaky. “Did she tell you how many times we’ve gone through this? Way back in the beginning with husband number one, who was barely old enough to drive?” She took a deep drag from the cigarette and held it, the smoke slipping out as she began talking again. “Did she tell you what a terrible substitute mother I was? What a witch to try and keep her from running away with any Tom, Dick, or Harry who passed by?”

“Cleva,” my father said and was there, his hand on her waist. “Come on now.”

“No.” I shook my head. “She didn’t say anything about you.”

Right before time for us to go to the fireworks, Angela called to say how sorry she was to take off like that, that she decided on the spur of the moment to take Greg up on his offer to give her a lift back to Ferris Beach. She had realized suddenly, in the wee hours of morning, that she was on the threshhold of a new life, that she saw a whole new future for herself.

“She said to tell you thank you, Cleva,” my father reported as we drove to the Army Reserve field. “That she hopes you can forgive her this once. She said to tell Kitty how much she enjoyed all the fun times, sunbathing and talking.” Mama sighed and shook her head.

Mr. Landell was just pulling Mrs. Poole’s Lincoln into the parking lot of the old A&P as we crossed the street to the field. Mama said that she was not looking forward to Mrs. Poole’s explanation of where she got her
adirondack
chair, that she hoped to God she didn’t say adirondack once or she thought she might just ignite and head for the moon. Again my father looked like he might laugh but thought better of it and lit a cigarette instead. Fortunately, Mrs. Poole had brought a canvas director’s chair. “Easier on Mr. Landell’s back,” she said, as she hooked a little umbrella onto the back of the chair and pulled it around and over her head to serve as a roof so she could legitimately smoke her pack of Salem 100s. I felt Misty’s absence stronger than ever, and I kept thinking of things I needed to tell her, how Mrs. Poole had spent thirty stupid minutes talking about
little
Ruthie Sands going to prep school so as not to have to
participate
in integration, how I had heard the DJ on the radio say that they were going to open a new dedication line, how sometimes the thought of walking into that brand new high school made me feel so scared I felt sick, and how she was the best friend I had ever had and ever would have, and how I would give anything in the world if her
mother had not left home. The band played a jazzed-up version of “Never My Love” as the tall leggy blond twirled her fire baton, the orange pom-poms on her boots shaking with every step. She was now the chief majorette and I knew that somewhere in the darkness of the trees and shrubs was her boyfriend, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he looked forward to when all this ended and he had her in that red GTO, parked on the other side of Whispering Pines.
It’s amazing what being sixteen and in the backseat of a car can do to jour head.

By the end of the summer, things were back to normal and I stopped wondering when we would hear from Angela. There had been many nights when I awoke, thinking I heard her tiptoe into my room; somehow I allowed myself the luxury of overlooking that last night when she had talked about Mo, and I focused instead on all the nights before it. I missed her being there, on the foot of my bed or under the covers beside me, as she told story after story about the various loves of her life, as she laughed like a teenager into her pillow.

Mama stopped rolling up her shorts, and began mourning the long hair she had had her whole life. “What on earth was I thinking?” she asked repeatedly. Oftentimes she wore long scarves, which she knotted at the back of her neck like a simulated bun. Mrs. Poole denied that she had ever worn chartreuse shorts when someone else referred to the outfit, and Sally Jean stopped dying her legs orange. Ruthie Sands moved to her girls’ school in Virginia and R.W. Quincy was caught spray-painting “We Surrender” on the base of the Confederate statue, which prompted a new circulation of memories and little stories about Mr. Thomas Clayton, his tale of the statue needing to pee, and his announcement that all was copacetic. And finally, Misty began measuring time by the approaching first day of tenth grade at E. A. Poe High, rather than by Mo’s leaving home. Finally that first year was over.

Many of the boys in the tenth grade spent a lot of time talking about Harleys. Boys who would one day drive Volvos and BMWs and sip martinis on decks, boys who
knew
the closest they would get to a motorcycle was breathing fumes on the interstate, talked about Harleys. Some even imitated Harleys, their lips pressed together and sputtering air like some engine at the starting gate. They fantasized themselves as free-flying bikers leaning to and fro on black leather seats, Steppenwolf lyrics blasting in their heads.

“My brother just bought a Harley,” Merle announced one day, looking at the class in a way that called for silence. He was leaned back in his seat, the collar of his denim jacket pulled up on his neck so that his hair fell over it. He had his feet propped up on the back of Misty’s chair, and she didn’t even shove them away.

E. A. Poe had brought to us—along with its spic and span
linoleum floors, gum-free water fountains and graffiti-free walls—rows of new desks with pastel plastic seats and backs, the aluminum legs splayed like some kind of insect. You couldn’t even hide anything in your desk anymore, for there was just a wire basket beneath you, any balled-up paper or trash fell right to the floor. The school also had huge ultra-modern windows that didn’t open except for a tiny transom at the top, making the school like a greenhouse from August to mid-October.

But now it was late fall and there was Merle’s sockless foot propped up on Misty’s light blue plastic seat back. It was cold that day, the sky gray beyond the glass wall, the brand new crystal-clear glass. Mr. Grange, the gym teacher and baseball coach, had told Merle if he couldn’t come to gym with clean socks and gym shorts then not to come at all.

And so, even though he was the fastest runner in the whole school and one of the most feared on the basis of his last name, he had spent every gym period of football season sitting in the school auditorium and staring up at the slick new stage, where the chorus people sat in straight metal chairs and sang the same song over and over. Misty had been telling me of his presence since the second week of school, told me how he sat there and laughed every time they sang the song, which at that particular time happened to be “Spinning Wheels,” a favorite (though several years old) of Mr. Radley, who led the songs. Mr. Radley had thin greasy hair and looked like a little lost toothpick beneath the large colorful dashikis he wore. He liked to use the latest jargon, or what he
thought
was the latest,
ten Jour good buddy, groovy, light my fire, yeah, I can’t believe I ate the whole thing, and the devil made me do
it; he did a high five to every black student he saw, lifting his puny little fist symbolically. Misty was one of only three white students in chorus; she had tried to talk me into joining, but I joined Homemakers of America because I really enjoyed just sitting in front of a sewing machine for an hour without a lot of talking going on.

Even in late November when the chorus worked on Christmas carols for the upcoming assembly program, he had them end by singing “Spinning Wheels.” All that semester, people were dropping out of chorus like flies, much to the surprise of Mr. Radley, who had told the principal that he feared the
kids
were in need of a
hipper beat
and though they had “Spinning Wheels” fine tuned, he thought he might also try “Proud Mary”;
yeah, let it all hang out. Big wheels keep on turning.

By early December, just a couple of weeks before Christmas vacation, the chorus was
still
singing “Spinning Wheels,” and Merle was still going sockless, still spending his gym time in the auditorium. The skin of his ankle was not as white as you might think it would be from looking at him, and he had hairs there on his lower leg that were much darker than any on his head.

He was in my geometry class, and I couldn’t help but look at him as he sat there staring out the window, a pencil over his right ear, a hole in the knee of his jeans. Someone had just asked him about his brother Dexter, where was he and what did he do now that he had dropped out of school?

“He’s around,” Merle said, and glanced over at Perry Loomis, who was methodically drawing and then penciling in little tiny squares on a piece of notebook paper. “He’s got a girl, for one thing.” Perry looked up and the way the two of them looked back and forth at one another made me feel queasy. Perry Loomis was even more beautiful than the year before, her wavy hair longer and clipped back on just one side, the other side loose and tumbling near her eye; it was the same way Angela had wanted me to wear my hair. I hadn’t really talked to Perry since that day in the bathroom, just said hello when I passed her in the hall. We never really looked each other in the eye, and I always considered myself lucky when she spoke back.

“Does he still have a Harley?” Todd Bridger asked. “Does he ever let you ride it?”

“Do we know this girl?” another boy interrupted.

“I doubt it,” he said, and tossed his head to one side to get his bangs out of his eyes. “I really don’t know her myself.” He was looking out the window again, at the gray sky, treeless schoolyard stretching towards the new track and baseball field.

“Hey, I bet your brother . . .” Todd Bridger leaned in close to Merle, his hand cupped to hide whatever indecent thing he had to say, all the other boys looking on and nodding with authority. It was not hard to imagine where they would all be in ten years, twenty, thirty. Even at that age, even as they acted interested in Harleys and mimicked Merle’s toss of his head, they were as predictable as the Fulton Christmas parade. Merle just shrugged his shoulders, no reaction at all.

“I heard that,” Misty said, and then looked over at me. “I’ll tell you what they said later.” I just nodded and opened my math book to last night’s assignment. I could feel their eyes on me like so many woodburners going through my skin. I hated when Misty did that to me, pulled me into a conversation where I clearly did not belong.

“How would you know the first thing about it?” Todd asked, and that face we had all loved for so many years reshaped and focused into that of a cowardly little jerk.

“I know
plenty,”
Misty said, and looked at Merle but did not look so long that she’d be in another staring battle with him. “I do.”

“Yeah? How could you?” Tony Bracy, a sour-faced little know-it-all, puffed up his cheeks at Misty and held his arms out to the side like he was waddling. He had just moved to Fulton over the summer and had already experienced the rising and falling of the new-person syndrome. He prefaced everything with “Nobody in
Greensboro
would do
that,”
or wear that, or say that; he called Fulton “Gritville” and said he couldn’t wait to go off to prep school the next year.

“Who’d touch
you?”
he continued, having collected a little
audience for himself. “God, nobody would want that!” It was Napoleon’s complex, Hitler’s fever, little man’s disease, and there was an epidemic that year, some of the guys standing eight inches taller than they had the year before, shadows of beards and deep voices, and others like Todd Bridger and his sidekick from Greensboro, little and hairless and taking it out on the world.

“You’re a pig,” Tony said after Misty told him to go to hell by way of Greensboro and Virginia. He made a snort sound in the back of his throat. “You’re just a big fat pig.” He knew the soft spot; he had looked her over and found what would hurt the most, even though she wasn’t
really
fat at all. By then she had lost quite a bit of weight, but the pressure spot was still there. Now she sat, cheeks flaming and pale eyes watering in anger.

Our math teacher, a young pretty woman right out of college, was in the doorway talking to Mr. Radley, listening to him humming, “No, no, no, no, I don’t smoke it no more.” She was nodding hurriedly, the same way my mother did when trying to get Sally Jean or Mrs. Poole off the phone. I willed her to come in and begin our geometry class. I willed her to come in so the teasing could stop. Misty’s face was still flaming as she sat quietly, quieter than I’d ever seen her. I needed to do something, say something, but I was afraid to speak out.

“Leave me alone, you stupid son of a bitch,” she finally hissed, leaning forward on Merle’s desktop, the fringe of her purple sweater vest falling onto his open book.

“Yeah, your mama,” Tony said, and thrust his hips, legs apart in a suggestive way. “Right,” he said, but Todd was no longer right behind him. “Her mama.” He pointed at Misty and everyone got quiet. Todd Bridger’s face was the one that was red now.

“My mother is dead,” Misty said through clenched teeth, tears standing in her eyes, ready to roll with the least flutter of a lash. “And for your information—” The whole class was listening now, our geometry teacher shifting her weight back and forth as Mr. Radley scratched his thin hair and continued to talk full
blast, his hands all over the place like frenzied birds let loose. It was clear that if Mr. Radley was the last human on earth our teacher would, if at all possible, go to another planet; he was so pitiful that you didn’t even want to laugh.