Ferris Beach (10 page)

Having exhausted the Keller biography, I had begun anew, reading and rereading Anne Frank’s diary, hearing her “Dear Kitty” as an endearment of myself. I read the letters so often, so snared by her “Dearest Darling Kitty” that sometimes I almost believed that I
was
her Kitty, and that she was still very much alive and writing her letters, and sometimes I caught myself suddenly filled with hope for her salvation and future. Just as I had imagined the Wilkinses and Annie Sullivan and even Angela, I could close my eyes and see her there in her pinafore, thick dark hair clipped on one side; I could stare at the picture I had seen so many times until it was colored, until her deep blue eyes narrowed
with a laugh. Maybe she would describe the changes in herself now that she was getting older, the way she saw Peter in a different light, the way her mother did not understand her at all, the way she would like to hoist the dirty children off the street and in through her window so that she could bathe them and mend their clothes. Her voice came to me with a Southern lilt similar to my own. I had also managed to lift any rough edges and hesitations from the voice of Helen Kellar, which I heard in a rich Southern baritone, a voice very similar to the one I had assigned to Angela, since I could no longer remember how she sounded.

I wanted to cling to the sensation that there was someone out there for me, someone simply out there, hovering, loving. I wanted to believe that I, too, would one day be there, uplifted and held by the truth of it all, that there would be someone out on a sleeping porch crouched and shivering while the world spun back around to day, someone who would wonder what purpose there could be to it all, and I could, with the breath of a weeping willow, with the honesty I felt when I looked into Misty’s clear blue eyes, lean down and whisper an answer as soft as ducks down.

It was during Christmas vacation, a late afternoon, when Angela came to our house and waited on the front porch until my father got home. She looked so different from the way I remembered, and yet I knew immediately it was her. She was wearing low-slung bell-bottom jeans with a chain belt and a fuzzy fringed vest made out of what looked like pinto pony. Her dark red hair was parted down the middle and clipped back from her face; she wore large gold hoop earrings and a suede choker with a peace sign sewn in Indian beads.

“Kitty? Little Kitty?” she called, and rose from the swing when I came up the steps. “Look at you.” Her voice was higher, flatter than I recalled. She hugged me close, her gauzy Indian-print shirt smelling of incense and cigarette smoke. She kissed my right cheek then pushed back, holding me at arms’ length. “You’ve grown so. You’re what, thirteen?”

“Yes.” I stood while she returned to her seat in the swing and took a little beaded cigarette case from her suede fringed purse. “I’ll be fourteen the first of August.”

“Of course,” she said, and lit her cigarette, took a deep draw and pushed off the porch floor with the toe of her black crushed patent-leather boot. “I remember that day well.”

“You do?” I waited for her to say more but she just smiled, pulled a tube of lip gloss from her little bag and applied it. Across the street Mo Rhodes pulled up in the driveway and began unloading groceries from the trunk of her Camaro. The baby was due in only two weeks and she looked like it could come any minute as she stood there, hands pressing in the small of her back. Reaching one hand in the driver’s side, she beeped the horn several times for someone, Mr. Rhodes or Dean, to come and help her. I yelled hello and she turned and waved a bunch of carrots.

“Are you going to spend the night with us tonight?” she called, and I nodded. “Are you going to eat dinner?” She looked both ways and came across the street while she motioned for Dean, who was in his sock feet, ankle weights on those thin ankles, to take the groceries inside. She came up our walk, hands in the pockets of her gray pea jacket, which did not stand a chance of buttoning, her dark curly hair pulled up in a twisted knot on top of her head.

“I think Mama expects me to eat here but I can go ask,” I said. Angela stood up to look over the hedges and then the two of them just looked at one another, then smiled slightly. “I’ll just eat here.”

“No,” Mo said, and came up our steps, hands clasped on her stomach. “You go ask your mother if you can eat with us. I think we’re just going to go to Hardee’s, and then I thought we could ride around and look at decorations. There’s not much else I can do these days.” Then she turned slightly and nodded to Angela, who was lighting another cigarette. “Hello.”

“Hello.” Angela leaned her head against the chain and blew out a thin curl of smoke. “Looks like you don’t have much of a wait.” She laughed and Mo nodded. The late afternoon light made Angela’s hair brighter, the coppery glow of a new penny. “If I were you,” she said, her attention on me, “I’d go out to eat. It’s always nice to go out to eat.”

“This is Angela, Angela Burns,” I said, stumbling to think of what I should call her, my father’s niece, my cousin, the relative I haven’t seen since I was five. “And this is our neighbor, Mo Rhodes.” Again they smiled at each other. “Mrs. Rhodes used to live at Ferris Beach.”

“Of course,” Angela said, eyes squinted as if she were giving Mo a careful study. “Yes. I knew I had seen you before.”

“Yes,” Mo said quickly, and then turned her attention to the open trunk across the street, Dean standing there with two bags and trying to lift a third. “I better go help him,” she said. “Kate, just give us a call. Nice to see you, too.” She nodded quickly in Angela’s direction and then headed back, her boots making a grainy click on our sidewalk. When she got to the Camaro, Mr. Rhodes wrapped his arm around her, his other hand rubbing her stomach. Angela stood against a post, cigarette held up near her cheek as she watched them. “Is that Mr. Rhodes?” she asked and I nodded. “Hmmm.” She shifted her weight and turned towards me, blowing a short puff of smoke off to the side. “He’s not the type I’d imagine her with.”

“Why?” I asked, still feeling awkward under her gaze.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She laughed. “Don’t you ever look at people and ask that?” She waited for me to nod, while taking a deep drag on her cigarette. “I thought it when I first met Cleva,” she whispered. “Cleva was not what I expected for Fred.”

“How long have you been here?” Now I was wondering if she had even knocked on the door or rung the bell. Did my mother even know that she was out here? I could smell the faint traces of
onions, garlic, and peppers browning, the beginnings of spaghetti sauce, and I knew my mother was just on the other side of that door and down the hall. Already the light was on in the foyer, and any second she would turn on the one over the front door.

“Not long,” Angela said, and pushed off again, thumped her cigarette over the banister. “I didn’t see Freddie’s car so I figured he wasn’t here.” Though different from my memory, she was still very pretty. I tried to imagine her meeting my mother for the first time; I had no idea when that even would have been, whether it was before or after they were married.

“Kate?” I jumped at the sound of Mama’s voice and turned quickly. “Misty just called to see if you want to go to Hardee’s with them. I told her that I’m cooking spaghetti but that if. . .” She stopped when she saw Angela and just stood there with the door held open. She was wearing the size nine-and-a-half fluffy purple slippers I’d given to her for her birthday; I had known when I bought them, little satin heels and feathery wisps like from a boa on the toe, that they were way out of character for her; in this picture with her gray tweed skirt, long gray sweater vest, face frozen in dismay, the contrast was grotesque.

“Why,
Aunt
Cleva.” Angela thumped her cigarette into the yard and stepped forward, hand outstretched. “It’s been such a long long time.”

“Yes, it has.” Mama turned to me then and began speaking in high gear. Why didn’t I go pack my things to go to Misty’s and wasn’t it nice of them to invite me to go to Hardee’s but she insisted on paying for mine and just to go right in her bedroom and get the money from her purse. It was so sweet of Mo to even have me when that baby could come any day now especially since it’s the third child. I felt her pulling me, a quick hug and then she pushed me into the foyer and shooed me upstairs. There was a lilt in her voice and laugh that I’d never heard before; it was as unnatural as those strange yellow lights they had put up near
the interstate to make you think it was daylight. My mother was not herself; it was as if Angela had some strange power that had reduced her to a nervous babbling stranger.

I quickly grabbed my gown and toothbrush, a couple of dollars from my parents’ room, and then waited quietly at the foot of the stairs, hoping that I could hear what they were saying. “I don’t understand why you do this to us,” my mother said, and I leaned up against the dark wall as she walked past, the front door closing behind her, cutting off Angela’s words, what sounded like a laugh. I could hear Mama in the kitchen so I carried my overnight bag out onto the porch, carefully easing the door so Mama wouldn’t hear. Angela was still just sitting there with a cigarette, one leg pulled up under the other while she leaned her head against the chain. I spoke to her again and hopped up on the porch rail, my feet locked behind the spindles. It was getting colder and I pulled the neck of my coat up closer. It was not even five o’clock and already it was dark. Soon the streetlights would come on and slowly the neighborhood would light up, Christmas trees and all the adornments that Mrs. Poole had called sheer tackiness. “And to think they do all this bulb-blinking and snow-spraying and so forth in the Lord’s name,” she had said.

“Kate?” Again Mama was at the door, and this time her face was serious as if I had committed a crime by coming back out on the porch without telling her. “Can you come help me just a minute?” She smiled and gave Angela a quick nod before closing the front door behind us. “Now, before you go over to Misty’s I want you to help me do one thing.” I followed her into the kitchen, where she had a little bag of garden peas which she wanted me to shell. I mentioned that they were having spaghetti and surely weren’t going to have peas with it, and she said she needed these for a casserole she was making to send to a woman whose husband was in intensive care and would I
please
just shell them. Her face was red as she stressed each syllable while buttering more garlic toast than the two of them would ever eat. I
knew that she was nervous and that she had gone to great lengths to
find
something for me to do.

“Why is Angela here?” I asked and she just shrugged, shoulders sloping as she leaned forward to wash the dishes in the sink. After having looked at Angela, I thought she looked so large; her broad back moved up and down as she rinsed each piece of flatware, turning it over and over in her hand, the steam making her hair damp and still flatter than before. “Is she here to visit or what?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, how did she get here?”

“I don’t know.” I could see her vague outline in the window, but shifted my gaze instead to take in the houses on the other side of the field, several of them lined in brightly colored bulbs that had already begun the nightly blinking. “I guess your father will know why she’s here.”

“Shouldn’t we ask her in, though?” I threw the hulls into the trash and stood there waiting for her to acknowledge me, and instead she watched those blinking lights that just the night before she had called a fire trap.

“Hello. Hello.” The front door slammed, and my father kept calling out his greetings of hello, good evening, happy holidays, seasons greetings, bon appétit, and peace be with you until he found us in the kitchen. “Why the long faces? Ho, ho, ho.” He grabbed her around the waist and nuzzled her thick neck. It was one of those moments when I couldn’t help but wonder what the Sprats had ever seen in each other. He kissed her cheek, peck peck peck like a starving chicken after some corn, and finally she turned and looked him in the eye, her shoulders dropping as she sighed.

“Where’s your niece?”

“Gone.” He waved his hand. “You know Angela, breeze in and breeze out. Here today and gone tomorrow.”

“Yes.” Mama sat down at the table and just left the spaghetti
sauce lid jumping and spitting and the sink half full of dishes. He went and readjusted the eye of the stove, then stood behind her chair, his fingers stroking her cheeks. “Anyway, what are we doing tonight?” he asked, his voice light as he playfully shook her shoulders.

“I’m spending the night at Misty’s,” I told him, at the same time showing Mama the bowl of little green peas. “How did Angela leave?”

“A friend picked her up,” he said, while Mama traced her finger up and down the little squares on the oilcloth. I pictured the man from the beach, cap pulled low on his forehead as the two of them loved up in the cab of a truck.

“I bet Misty is waiting on you, honey,” she finally said. I kissed them both, then lingered in the hallway waiting to see what I could hear. They must have known I was waiting, listening, because there was a pause and then my father told her a joke about Round John Virgin. He told her what the weather forecast was for the weekend, who was number one in the NBA, how many people made a C on his exam. She said, My and Isn’t that something and Well.

As I walked out, I heard my father go to his study and within moments Jolson’s voice burst through loud and clear with “Mammy.” I stood on the porch and the cold air felt good as I took a deep breath and tried to reconjure the picture of Angela there in the swing; already her voice was leaving me again.

Misty’s yard was all lit up, little red and green blinking lights in the azalea bushes and up and down the pagoda mailbox. There was a plastic reindeer up on the roof, his nose blinking red; and in the picture window, which was edged in spray-on snow, I could see their tree, a silver tinsel one with pink and blue ornaments, a silver star on top. It was not my taste in decorations either but I loved seeing them; I loved the nerve behind doing something so elaborately. “I don’t believe in killing trees,” Mo had said when she refused Misty’s begs to buy a real one.