Ferris Beach (39 page)

“Yes, and taking care of a man takes time and money.”

They went on a few more blows, clearly sending little hidden meanings between them, every word intended to hit a target, some weakened and bruised area. “Maybe Katie would like to come visit me?” Angela asked, and again Mama’s jaw clenched tightly. “You can come any time you want.”

“Maybe she will,” Mama said. “But you’ll discover that when you put a child
with
a man, you
really
have a lot to take care of.”

“Child? Why Katie’s a young woman!” Angela put the pies on the table and lit a cigarette. “Before you know it, Katie will be having a baby. Won’t that be nice? A grandbaby?”

I think my face would have flushed with that thought anyway, but when the two of them looked at me, I felt totally transparent; I felt they each had a private movie of Merle and me behind the auditorium stage that one day, that they knew my every wonderful sensation and thought, that they knew my every fear and doubt. I was relieved when the phone rang—Misty this time—and I was relieved when Angela breezed into the foyer, smiled, and blew me a kiss, and then turned up the stairs, leaving my mother alone in the kitchen.

“You doing okay?” Misty asked, and I could picture her on the bed, legs Indian style as she played with the phone cord, as she looked at the photo of Mo leaning against the old Chevrolet, the photo of the two of us on her bulletin board, our arms around each other as we smiled at her dad, Misty draped in purple carpet remnants and me in red leotards; while he was taking our picture, Mo Rhodes was in the kitchen cooking Tuna Surprise
and filling the trick-or-treat bowl, and my father was across the street in his leather chair, smoke rings circling his head. “It’ll take awhile before you feel right again,” Misty was saying. “Just when you think you’re okay, then it’ll hit you again.” She paused, her voice wavery, and I heard her moving, maybe curling on her side, pulling a blanket up around her. “I still have that happen sometimes, a dream or something like that.”

“Are you okay?” I asked, feeling my own throat tightening, drying.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Kate. I shouldn’t be saying all this to
you,
but there’s no one else, you know? I can’t talk to my dad, and it would just hurt Sally Jean’s feelings.” She paused. “Dean can’t stand to talk about my mother at all. I don’t know, I guess it’s easier for him not to.”

I heard Mama coming through the dining room, heard the scuff of those same lavender bedroom shoes. “I just still can’t believe he died,” I whispered, knowing she was within earshot. I waited while my mother crossed the hall; she looked at me and then just lifted her hand as a goodnight, her eyes watery, that electrical manual in her hand. “I better go,” I said, amazing myself with the cool calmness. “And you can always talk to me, Misty.” She sniffed, apologized again. “Now we’re talking
graveyard
, huh?” she asked, and forced a laugh.

When I closed my eyes that night, the thoughts that came to my mind were all of my father, his voice telling jokes or odd little bits of trivia about obscure inventors and scientists, people he said society had not properly received. For a second I spied him in darkness, the lid of his coffin closed tightly, airtight sealing to hold in all the secrets and thoughts that he had failed to tell me. His collar was buttoned tight, starched and buttoned, a Windsor knot in the necktie, tighter and tighter. I sat with a start, unable to breathe with the sensation of darkness closing in, air growing scarce, the panic that causes the best of swimmers to lose control
and fight the one who has come to help, the panic that forces humans to riot and stampede, for air, for space, for freedom, the little and the weak shoved to the bottom, to the side, out of the way.

I could not stand to think of the question that Misty had asked in the kitchen the day I measured her for her uniforms; I could not stand to wonder whether or not our bodies are returned to us. The only way I could close my eyes again, was to
know,
to
believe,
that my father’s body was mere skeleton in a Sunday suit and that
he
had risen above it all and at that very moment was a part of the world, a part of my world, the very air I breathed in relief as I opened my eyes to the familiar wallpaper, pink roses climbing the walls. Angela did not come into my room during the night and I was relieved. My prayer that night was to blot my mind of everything except thoughts of Merle, and somewhere within those to fall asleep; I saw Merle sitting on the rough granite stone, his hair blown by an approaching summer storm, or I saw him crouched in the little shed, Converse sneaker pressed against the wall, Merle in the auditorium of Samuel T. Saxon, sockless foot propped on the seat in front of him, Merle in the second grade with dried Kool-Aid in his dirty palm, a snakeskin wrapped around his neck, Merle behind the moss green drapes as he pulled me on top of him, his hands warm on my back.

My mother was like a different person the next day; it was as if she had gotten up from her bed and made a vow to bend as far as she could possibly bend to make things right with Angela, or maybe she had made the promise the night before as she lay there alone, the sheets still smelling like my father; maybe she had promised
him
in some sort of silent prayer or thought or hope that he could hear her.

“I’m sorry I was so short with you yesterday,” she said, and poured a cup of coffee, held the pot out towards Angela in question. “I just was not myself.” She filled Angela’s cup and then joined us at the table, where she had prepared a huge breakfast, the kind she only fixed on special occasions, with waffles and omelets and biscuits and ten different kinds of jam on the lazy susan. “You can understand that I was not myself?”

“Oh, Cleva,” Angela started, her thin robe loose in the front. “It was just as much me.”

I watched, expecting my mother to flinch with
shared
blame, perhaps
wanting
a full apology, but she just nodded in agreement.

“And,” Angela said, right hand rubbing her temple, “mine was also liquor talking. Liquor has always made me feel mean.” She laughed and nodded, looked at me. “Really, it’s like Jekyl and Hyde or whatever.”

“You’re welcome to stay a few days.” Mama sipped her coffee; all that food spread in front of us and no one had even taken a bite. “I don’t know what your situation at home is, and ...” She held up her hand in protest as Angela started to speak. “No, it’s none of my business, I know that.”

“Everything is really fine at home,” she said. “If only Fred could have known just how fine it is.” She speared a waffle and reached for the butter. “And I do need to be getting back. I’ll call the bus station right after we finish.”

“But last night the way you said that you’d call Greg before you rode the bus, well, that sounded—” Mama stopped short, sighed. “Forgive me, there I go again.” She leaned back and took another sip of coffee, shook her head when I tried to pass her the waffles.

“Oh, I didn’t mean for it to sound that way, no.” Angela reached and turned the lazy susan, touching the lid of each jar as it passed. “I just meant he’d have to take off from work, and that’s not such an easy thing.”

“I see,” Mama said. “Well, then I’ll drive you home.”

“Oh, no, Cleva, you have way too much to do. I wouldn’t even think of it. No, no.” Angela was sitting up straight now, shaking her head adamantly.

“I could drive,” I offered. After weeks of waiting for my sixteenth birthday, I suddenly realized it was just ten days away. “You’d have to be with me.” I looked at my mother and she nodded, but again Angela insisted that we forget that idea, that she would ride the bus, it was no big deal.
Why, it was even sort of relaxing just to sit on the bus and ride.
She was acting the same way Sally Jean used to act when caught picking up rocks, her pockets
full as she denied that
that
was her reason for standing in the center of the yard.

Angela left that day with the promise that she would return for a meeting with the lawyer to discuss the will. “Fred wanted you to be there,” Mama told her. “He wanted to make sure that you always had help if you needed it.” We were at the bus station, me in the driver’s seat, Angela with the back door open and one foot already on the pavement. It was raining, the asphalt steaming as the wipers squeaked and the motor idled. “But you know that, don’t you?” Mama turned and looked at her, the rain blowing into the car, Angela’s face damp and plain, no make-up. Angela nodded and then with the quick sound of a kiss, was racing up to the station, her suitcase in hand, as she pulled open the old screen door with the Pepsi advertisement rusting on it.

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t let us drive her,” Mama said, and shook her head. “There’s always a mystery, isn’t there?” She shrugged and then we rode in silence. The rain was coming down so hard that when I pulled into our driveway we had to sit there until it slacked up. It was barely afternoon but the streetlights were on and in front of us the canna lilies swayed stiffly. “Yessir, I like ’em tall and healthy,” he had said proudly just a few days before, pointing first to the lilies and then to my mother and then to me.

Merle’s father had rented a house in Clemmonsville, and they were all set to move two weeks from Saturday. Merle and I were trying to ignore it, hoping that something or someone would intervene and change the plans. In the meantime the days were passing so quickly; my mother filled in every second of every day with an activity that could prevent her thinking of my father. “I just want to get through it,” she told me. “We meet with the lawyer the end of next week, and then we’ll get through it.” She was reorganizing every cabinet and every closet and every
drawer. A huge box in our living room marked for Goodwill was where she put his clothes, stacks of crisp white shirts, some ink-stained but most bleached like snow. I came in once to find her kneeling with one of the shirts pressed to her face, but with my presence, she straightened up quickly and went back to business as usual—though that weekend passed without her washing her bed sheets, a first in the history of her adult life.

Everyone made too much of my birthday, as if the overindulgence could make us forget; even Mrs. Poole came bearing a twenty-five dollar gift certificate from Ivey’s. “Sixteen is special,” she said, smiled, and then added, “I do hope you’ll buy something
nice”

Misty and Sally Jean had a surprise party which included half of E. A. Poe High School. “You know, I’ve been dying to have a party anyway,” Misty said. “And what better reason is there than your best friend’s birthday?” The music blasted as people spilled from house to carport to backyard, where they had resurrected Mo’s old tiki torches and had them glowing in the four corners. I got more albums and charms and eye shadow than I had ever seen, and most of them didn’t even have cards; they were from people I hardly knew, who handed them over, smiled, and said happy birthday. Misty had made up a whole list of songs that Sally Jean was supposed to play in sequence as I opened my gifts: “Sixteen Candles,” “Only Sixteen,” “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful,” and the Beatles’ “Birthday.”

“What about the regular song?” Sally Jean had asked and Misty answered her with a laugh and a sigh and an “Oh, Sally Jean,” and then the two giggled, both talking faster than the speed of bullets. There were a lot of people there from Dean’s class, people who I knew
of
, their faces filling the high school yearbook as Student Council officers and cheerleaders and best-all-around seniors. Many of them already seemed so adultlike as they stood there in their khakis and loafers, smoking cigarettes and talking
about SAT scores and university courses. “I’ll be taking pre-SAT, of course” I overheard Misty saying to the guy she had a crush on, her wooden earrings dangling with each word. She saw me watching her but never broke her stride for a second. “My stepmother quizzes me on vocabulary all the time.” She glanced at me, eyebrows raised but not a smile cracked. “She has the most
incredible
vocabulary.”

Merle and I ended up spending much of the party at the edge of the yard, in two webbed aluminum lawn chairs pulled as close together as we could get them, our hands clasped tightly as we watched the party from our dark corner as if it were a movie. I heard Misty calling for the “birthday girl” several times, but she got side-tracked in conversation or else she decided to leave us on our own. My mother had come briefly, to watch me blow out the candles on the huge cake she had made herself, to watch me open my gifts, but now she had gone back across the street, Merle and I watching as she went in, blazing a trail of lights through the house. Since my father died, she had stopped going around turning off unnecessary lights; instead she wanted more, constantly. She had bought a nightlight to plug into an outlet in the hall just outside her bedroom door.

“Do you even know all these people?” Merle asked, and I shook my head. Todd Bridger and some of the other boys from our class were standing around the food with several seniors. Dean Rhodes had his arm around a girl who was taller than I was, her hair similar to mine. Misty had told me that she was the salutatorian, but you’d never know it to talk to her, that she could even be funny sometimes. “Bet you’ll be asked out by a bunch of them,” he said, and squeezed my fingers. “As soon as I move . . .” His voice dropped off as he waited for me to deny what he was thinking. I was still hoping there was going to be a change in plans; I knew that if Merle hadn’t been there with me, I would be moving through the party like Misty’s shadow, Misty turning and pulling me up beside her, referring to me constandy
as she had always done. I looked over where Misty was dancing, her hair twirling as her partner dipped her in rhythm with the Tarns:
Be young, be foolish, but be happy.
Misty had told me that our summer project was to learn to shag like crazy, that that’s all people did at college fraternity parties, Dean had told her all about it. “You know it’s true,” Merle said, and I turned suddenly, head shaking, no; no, it was not true. I couldn’t think about Merle leaving; I couldn’t think about my father.