Ferris Beach (6 page)

“You know if I have another child, I’ll name it after Buddy Holly,” she said, once again staring out the window.

“What about a girl?” Misty asked. “I’m Misty of Chincoteague and she could be Trigger, or what about Mr. Ed for a boy?” She smirked, her pale blue eyes opening wide as she tried not to laugh. Then she leaned and caught her mother’s arm, squeezed it.

“Holly for a girl and Buddy for a boy,” she said. “And you, for the last time, are
not
named for a horse, though I love that book dearly, and it’s one you should read if you haven’t.” She hitched up her little purple hot pants and pulled a box of macaroni from the cabinet. I had heard this routine of theirs so many times that I could just about predict what she’d say next. “You were named for a woman from Ferris Beach by the name of Themista Rose Allen, who drowned in 1900 at the age of sixteen.”

“Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better!” Misty bit her s’more and then wiped the stringy marshmallow from around her mouth, her fingers held apart as she reached for a napkin.

“I heard the story of Themista Allen often when we lived there. It’s sort of a local legend and people still leave flowers there on her grave.” She wet a paper towel and then wiped Misty’s hand like she was five instead of thirteen. “She was wading across the inlet at low tide to meet a young man and lost all track of time. She knew her daddy would kill her if he found out she had
gone to meet this man, and so she had no choice but to cross back even though the tide had come in and the water was over her head.” It seemed each time Mo Rhodes told the Themista story it got a little bit better, and every time she told it, Misty made an analogy to the Red Sea crashing down; she said that when she imagined Themista’s young man, he always looked like Charlton Heston.

“No, I believe in giving a name another life “Mo said that day.” Especially the young. If you ever get up and turn on your radio and they are playing the best songs someone ever recorded back to back, then you know something has happened. I knew Buddy Holly had died before the announcer even said so. February of ’59 and you, Misty, why you were barely a year old. Dean was just three and that was about the time that he knew every single word of ‘Witch Doctor.’” Mo stared out at the rain as if she could see a three-year-old Dean standing there. “It was so cute to hear him do that.” She turned back, a string of marshmallow clinging to her silky shorts. “No, when they played ‘Peggy Sue’ right after ‘Maybe Baby,’ I knew.”

“My father’s sister died when she was seventeen,” I told them. My own voice sounded foreign telling this story I had only heard on a few rare occasions. “She died when she was having a baby.” I couldn’t picture Angela as a baby and instead got a picture of her stretched out on the beach, that man inching his way towards her, his hand crabbing across the faded quilt where she held the bottle of wine between her thighs.

“How awful,” Mo said with a slight shake of her head, tears coming to her eyes. “How terribly sad.” She went over to their stereo and turned up the volume for “True Love Ways,” which was the song I liked best on the album. I wanted to tell more of the story, how my father’s sister had never told them who the father was, how she was holding Angela within five minutes of her last breath, but it all seemed too sad to say aloud. Misty’s mama usually enjoyed a good sad story but that day she seemed
a little distant, a little jumpy. Besides, I wasn’t even sure if I remembered it all or not; my father had told me the story in bits and pieces over the years, a little here, a little there, the same way Mo told the Themista story.

“Here’s your favorite song, Kitty,” Mo said. I sat there and listened, with the whole house smelling of chocolate and marsh-mallow, rain pelting the kitchen window to the beat of Buddy Holly, and Misty poring over the long lean girls on the cover of
Seventeen,
futilely conjuring ways for us to become more desirable than anyone else in the seventh grade. “Themista never looked like this,” Misty said, and held up the magazine to show the flawless face of the young cover model. Mo came from the window and wrapped her arms around both of us, pulling us close so that we were all face to face. “No,” she whispered. “Because Themista was the
most
beautiful and now you two are the most beautiful.” I was waiting for one of Misty’s sarcastic remarks, but instead she just giggled, pressed her sticky lips against Mo’s cheek, and I imagined Angela saying Mo’s words to me, imagined me kissing her that same way. It was April then and by the time school got out, Mo had announced that she
was
going to have a baby, a
Christmas
baby, Holly for a girl and Buddy for a boy.

Mrs. Poole was forever having a tea of some kind or another, and there were many women in town, my mother included, who thought her teas were the greatest thing since God said Let there be light. If there was a reason to have a tea—wedding, baby, debut, retirement, charity drive—Mrs. Poole was ready to have it. In the wintertime, when the trees in the side yard were bare and spindly, I could just sit on our porch and watch the women come and go, but in the spring, I had to creep closer, or climb one of our trees. The teas were always elaborate and the women were expected to dress for the occasion, mohair or Ultrasuede, whatever happened to be the thing.

“What on earth do they
do
over there?” Mo Rhodes asked me one day. It was the fall of eighth grade and she was clearly pregnant, her woven poncho stretching over her stomach, as we sat
in their Camaro and waited for Misty to come out the front door of Samuel T. Saxon Junior High. “Just this morning there has been a florist truck and the Coca-Cola man, and I swear I think I just saw the butcher from Winn-Dixie going in.” She glanced up in the rearview mirror, looking first at me as I sat there in the small low backseat, and then at herself, rubbing a light fingertip over the edges of her dark lashes.

“I don’t know what they do,” I told her. “Talk, I guess.”

“Don’t you just know they
talk”
Mo laughed and cranked the car so she could turn on the heat. It was one of those drizzly days, leaves sticking to the windshield, headlights on; it looked much later than three o’clock. She turned on the radio and pressed the buttons, up, down, static coming and going until she finally turned it off. “That woman was known for all of her talking when / was a child.” Somehow, it was not so difficult imagining Mo as a child; the picture that came to me was one of a child Liz Taylor, a young Velvet Brown racing Pie across an open field.

The rain was coming down harder, and I watched Merle Hucks and his brother, Dexter, and R.W. Quincy huddled up near the breezeway that led to the cafeteria, just beyond the rush of water that poured from the old rotted-out gutter. They had their hands cupped to hide the cigarettes they held, Merle’s hair wet and stringy, pushed back from his eyes; I had once seen Merle hide a lit cigarette in his pocket when the principal walked by. Dexter Hucks, though two years older, was several inches shorter than Merle and the shape of his face and his features reminded me of a scrawny little bird. He rode a motorcycle and had all kinds of biker patches sewn to the back of his denim jacket. I couldn’t help but wonder
who
had sewn them on.
Would
his mother do that, or had
he,
this tough guy who threatened to spit on you if you looked at him wrong, sat down one night with needle and thread and done it himself? Misty’s brother, Dean, had told her that Dexter Hucks had “done the deed” too many times to count, that half of the condoms she had counted probably belonged to
him. Dexter had once been suspended from school for asking a teacher to “step behind the bushes and see what a real man could do.”

“Where is Misty?” Mo asked, revving the engine. “I have some people at our house. I told them I’d just be gone for a second.” In over four years I had never seen Mo Rhodes getting impatient but lately she had been. Misty said it was the baby’s fault, hormones out of control. Finally I saw Misty coming out the door, her arms wrapped around her notebook, bell-bottom jeans dragging the muddy schoolyard as she made a run for the car. Dexter Hucks had his hands up to his mouth and he yelled something, but I couldn’t hear what because of the radio. Merle, his hands in his back pockets, turned and watched as Misty got in the car. Several times I had seen him working at Mrs. Poole’s house during one of the teas; she had him carrying Coke crates or sweeping the porch, washing windows. I imagined that he was heading there now, head tucked down as he made a run across the yard, Converse hightops drenched as water sprayed with each step. Dexter and R.W. were still standing under the breezeway, smoking; Dexter flipped up the skirt of a black girl who walked by them just as we pulled away.

“Should I give that child a ride?” Mo asked, and motioned to Merle who was already a block closer to home than we were.

“No!” Misty screamed and began wiping her composition notebooks on the car seat. “I’m sorry I’m late but old Mr. Billings made our science class go back to the cafeteria and one by one apologize to the woman who collects the dishes.” She looked at me, laughed. “Like our class was the first to ever splash her.” It was common practice in the junior high to slam silverware into the little bucket of water rather than place it there. If the woman was standing beside it collecting trays and wiping them off, she got sprayed with water. I knew Mo was preoccupied when she didn’t even ask Misty what that meant,
splashing
the woman. Usually she had to know everything; Mr. Rhodes, Dean,
and Misty often called her Curious George and joked about her incessant why why why.

“Well, I just wish I had known,” she said. “Our new carpet came today and Betty came to help me rearrange everything.”

“Today? It’s already in?” It didn’t take much to make Misty happy; she had been talking for weeks about how her mother had always wanted and was finally getting purple shag, the long pile, for her bedroom. “Is Betty still there?” I had met Betty several times; she was a close friend of Mo’s who had waist-length frosted blond hair and had once lived in California.

“Yes,” Mo said. “That’s why I’m in such a hurry. Betty came and brought Gene with her so we could move the furniture around. It’s the man’s day off and I’m sure he doesn’t want to spend it raking purple carpet.” I had met Gene before, too; he was the man who had once promised Misty that if he ever met Sgt. Barry Sadler he’d get his autograph. Of course he hadn’t met
him,
but what he had done was get Misty and Dean free tickets to go see the
real
shot-up car of Bonnie and Clyde, which was on display in a big trailer in front of J.C Penney. The ticket sales went to buy new automobiles for the highway patrol. Misty had so many free tickets that we went three different times, each time in awe that those were the
real
bloodstains and
real
bullet holes. Misty could quote every single word of “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde,” and it seemed the tune stayed in my head for weeks after.

When Mo stopped in front of my house, Merle was just a tiny speck rounding the corner six blocks down Wilkins Road, and the local radio station van was in Mrs. Poole’s driveway. “Now what has that woman got going on?” Mo laughed, and then waved to Gene, who was standing alone in the Rhodeses’ living room and looking out the picture window. “Come over and see the carpet,” Misty said when I got out. “Or just call me.” Misty and I talked on the phone every single night for at least an hour. Sometimes we didn’t even talk, but just laid the receiver down and
tuned to WFRO NightBeat, which was the local radio show, and went on with whatever we were doing, homework or looking at a magazine, and occasionally yelled for the other to pick up.

Mama met me at the front door, her high heels clicking as she walked over to stand in front of the hall tree, where she started toying with her hair. I knew that she had just had it fixed that morning, a smooth perfect French twist, teased and sprayed, and now she had to get from our house to Mrs. Poole’s without it getting ruined. “We should build an underground tunnel,” my dad had said on another such occasion.

“My goodness, I was getting worried.” Mama opened one of those little plastic hats that will fold to the size of a quarter and carefully placed it on her hair. “Your father will be home before too long. I should be back well before six, but just in case, the roast is in the refrigerator and all the instructions are on the table.”

“Why is the radio station there?” I asked, and followed her onto the porch, waited while she opened her umbrella and surveyed the puddles along the sidewalk. She waved to a carload of women who passed slowly and then parked right near the edge of our yard.

“Mrs. Poole is heading up UNICEF and she’s going to advertise for the Halloween carnival.” The rain was coming down harder now, and I could hear the streetlights prematurely buzzing on. Merle Hucks ran through Whispering Pines, hurdling the lower tombstones as if he were on a track. Mama didn’t notice him there or she would have said something. Instead she thrust the umbrella in front of her as if it were a shield and she were leading the battle. “Back soon,” 1 heard her call as she lumbered forward, bits of mud flipping up on her hose. I was convinced that part of Mama’s allegiance to Mrs. Poole was the fact that they were the two tallest women in town; they could be friends without making the other feel huge.

The light came on in Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes’ bedroom and then
I could see them all passing back and forth, and furniture being moved. I caught an occasional glimpse of Misty’s orange hair.

The cars kept parking at Mrs. Poole’s, the rain coming down harder all the while. Everything I ever read or saw at the movies or on TV had a part for Mrs. Poole; I might have to take away her long Salem cigarettes, fuchsia lipstick, and color-coordinated pantsuits, but there was always a part for her. She was the busybody neighbor, the wicked witch, and the teacher with the ruler in her hand. She was that misplaced woman who attempted to maintain aristocracy in a primarily blue-collar town. Having teas was just one way to go about it. She could see no merit in
any
changes, whether it was the Coca-Cola bottle getting taller or Mo Rhodes turning the yard of her split-level into a Japanese garden, or black children walking the halls of Samuel T. Saxon Junior High. She was the pillar of the community because she could afford to be; Mr. Robert Manchester Poole, known to the town as Bo, had left her in fine shape financially.