Ferris Beach (19 page)

As the weather got colder and the old radiators of Samuel T. Saxon hissed and clanged, I was often reminded of Mr. Clayton’s story about the stone man. It was on those days when the phantom struck, which is to say that either R.W. Quincy or Merle Hucks had peed on the radiator in the boys’ bathroom, leaving the whole school and the rusty old heating system to reek of urine for days. We all knew one of them was doing it, but no one was about to tell. Nobody wanted to tangle with either of them or both, rather, since they were always together; every morning they came to school smelling of bowling-alley food, the hot-dog relish and onion rings they had had for breakfast. For me the worst part was when we had a class picture taken for the yearbook and I had to stand in the back right beside them because I was so tall.

Tall.
Now that was a problem. I used to lie in bed at night and will my legs not to grow another inch. I contemplated binding my feet off like the Japanese women so that they would never grow beyond their present size seven. I was only three inches shy of being as tall as my mother, and I was fearing the worst, that I was also going to be five feet eleven and wear a size nine-and-a-half shoe. “Tall and thin like a fashion model,” all the salesladies said when I went to buy a new coat, all of them careful
not
to look too long at my left cheek. The coat was beautiful, white simulated-fur, which was what everyone was wearing. It felt wonderful, once I was safe behind my bedroom door, to hold out my arms and spin around, head thrown back as if I were taking in the skyscrapers of New York City like Mario Thomas in “That Girl”; though one look in my full-length mirror shouted back that I looked like a big naked Amazon hiding under a bear rug. I needed only a bone in my nose to get my picture in
National Geographic.

As I sat in my desk at Samuel T. Saxon, I willed the little stone man to smile at me. I willed my legs to stop growing and I willed my face a pure flawless white and I willed
someone
other than Dean Rhodes to think of me. Of course these had been my regular requests for several years; the one request that I had been able to drop from the list was the one I uttered constantly prior to integration,
that I not get hit over the head with a Pepsi bottle, my throat slit with the glass.
The stories had come to us again and again, riots and fires and fights and names called out in hatred. Integration had come and black, white, city, county, we were all scared. We were all
waiting
for whatever was supposed to happen, to happen. Now two years after the fact, we had stopped waiting and, instead, gray winter recesses were spent leaning on the radiator in the girls’ bathroom, Misty and Lily Hadley dancing in front of the warped mirrors over the row of ancient sinks, their voices sweet and pure, as they belted out “I’ll Be There” by the Jackson Five. With integration fears put to rest, I had more time to will my body to stop growing, to will that I would suddenly look
more like my father’s family, that I would look just like Angela.
We must bring salvation back.

The only good thing to come out of getting so tall was the new coat, to be able to
finally
throw away the old blue nylon carcoat with the babyish gingham lining that I had worn for several years. I wanted to take all the clothes that I had outgrown, pile them up in the backyard, and strike a match, burn the bits of gingham and bows that look so ridiculous on tall people; I wanted to squat by the fire like a native woman, a bone in my nose and a skull around my neck, snakeskins wrapped around my throat like what Merle wore way back in the second grade. From the billowing black smoke I would cast a spell; I would carry us back to the day at Ferris Beach, when Angela, my face cupped in her smooth warm hands would say,
I’m going to take you home now, Kitty. You know you belong to me don’t you?,
and my father would nod as I turned to him, though he would have to look away, unable to face losing me. I would carry us back to that rainy day at Misty’s house when we cooked s’mores, when Mo was there, able to pick up the phone and call Gene Files,
Look Gene, this isn’t right. I can’t do this. I love my family too much to leave them. I want to live too much to leave them.

My mother took the wadded-up clothes and carcoat and neatly folded each piece. “Someone will be thrilled to get these,” she said. “Why they’re all so nice and like new. Like this Villager.” She held out a cotton blouse decorated with little tucks and covered buttons—like new but way out of style. “It may be the nicest thing that person owns.”

The whining radiators of Samuel T. Saxon did not put out nearly enough heat and the large windows shook with every wind. Most of us wore our coats throughout the day, making the classroom a jungle of fake fur. About the only girl in our class who didn’t wear a fur coat was Perry Loomis, who always wore the jacket of whatever boy she was going steady with that week; she wore his jacket and often a thick-linked ID bracelet with his
name or initials. She had already gone with Todd Bridger twice, and in between those times she had gone with a boy who was three years older and lived down the street from the Huckses, a boy who, so Misty had heard, smoked a lot of dope and also had “done the deed” too many times to count. That’s who Perry was with when we left for Christmas vacation, a boy named Walter; I had seen his name written on the front of her geography notebook. It didn’t seem to stop the other boys from fawning and waiting, hoping their numbers would come up in a week or two; even Dean Rhodes had asked us about that
little blond girl
in our class. Most of the girls in our class despised Perry Loomis, but I couldn’t help but envy her; it was almost like having a crush, so taken with this person’s appearance, so much wishing I could claim it as my own. I saw her in the same way I saw Angela, the way I had seen Mo, glittering and shining, rare like a jewel.

The Christmas parade of Fulton did not physically amount to much, usually just a few flatbed tobacco trailers that had been decorated by local service clubs with cotton-snow and elves; sometimes high-school girls stood poised, waving the stiff formal wave of beauty queens while the tobacco beds rocked and swayed beneath them. There were usually a few Shriners scattered about on mopeds, their horns and whistles blowing, and of course the high school band was in full force, the majorettes drawing wolf-whistles from the high school boys who sat on parked cars and smoked cigarettes.

All of this took place year after year, the band and majorettes and floats all wedged between a police car with siren going and Santa bringing up the rear. Santa was usually perched on the back of a Volkswagon convertible made to look like a sleigh, cardboard reindeer strapped to the hood. The parade of 1972 was the same.
Mama and I stood in front of a store called Foxy Mama which specialized in Afro wigs. Misty was supposed to meet me there, and I kept scanning the crowd for her orange hair while the band approached. I liked the way the steady beat of the drums seemed to make my heart beat louder and faster. As the parade got closer, I was torn between wanting to grip my mother’s arm in excitement and wanting to walk three blocks down so as not to be identified with her.

Across the street, I saw a souped-up red GTO, its owner stretched out on the hood with some other boys as he waited for her, his girl, that blond majorette, to march his way. If I turned to the side, I could see my reflection in the window of Foxy Mama, my hair much too curly for the shag haircut I had gotten. I willed my hair to look like Perry Loomis’s, all one length and with flaxen waves like a princess. “What’s so great about Perry anyway?” one of the girls in my class had asked in the bathroom one day. She was one of Ruthie Sands’s friends, one of the few in that group who had not gone to private school when we integrated. “I just don’t see why all the boys like
her”
She looked around, her light hair filling with electricity as she brushed. Six of us stood there in front of the dark wavy mirrors, the old bathroom cold and smelling of rusty radiator heat and various mixtures of cologne. The graffiti on the walls dated back at least twenty years.

“I know why,” Misty said, winking at me. Lately, she had been trying her best to attract interest in the two of us and what she called our “knowledge of the world.”

“Because she’s new,” I said, giving my contribution to the conversation in a way that seemed too well rehearsed yet still carried no impact at all.

“Nope.” Misty slung her arm around my shoulder and squeezed. “It’s because she puts out.” I felt my face redden as the other girls stepped closer. Misty had them, these Ruthie Sands groupies, right where she wanted them. “Todd Bridger has all but
done the deed
with her.” I knew Misty was quoting what Dean,
Mister Maturity,
had told her; she was nodding, mouth stretched in a knowing grimace. The words left me feeling odd as if my insides had been twisted, and I forced the same nervous laughter that came from the other girls, so as not to show my embarrassment; or was it envy? I felt as if they had all seen right into my head—seen the way I had strutted across my mind in that fake-fur coat, like maybe I was Ann-Margret on my way to meet Elvis, seen the way I had kissed Todd Bridger or some faceless, nameless boyfriend in the back of the Cape Fear theater, and then taken his hand and pressed it to my chest. I had imagined I was there in the red GTO as that high school senior inched his hand over to the majorette’s thigh; imagined that I looked just like Perry, that I
was
Perry Loomis.

“Well, what did he do exactly?” Lisa Burke asked in her high little-girl voice.

“Use your brain now,” Misty said and crooked her finger to give a hint. “Kate knows.” She patted me on the shoulder and again gave me the look which meant
lift your chin.
“Kate and I know a lot.”

When Misty finally got to the parade, she whispered that she was late because she had stopped by Lisa Burke’s house to loan her a copy of
Valley of the Dolls.
She assured me that I could read it next, and then she launched into her latest discovery, which was that Perry Loomis had to wear turtlenecks a couple of weeks ago because that older boyfriend of hers gave hickeys like mosquito bites. My mother and Mrs. Edith Turner turned and stared at Misty, Mrs. Turner giving Misty the pitying look they had all given her since Mo’s death. Misty smiled sweetly, and then when Mrs. Turner wasn’t looking, shot her the bird. The band was in front of us, and I felt my heart quicken as I watched the majorette and the boy on the GTO exchange looks, then a wink, lips puckered.

“The downtown has gone to pot,” Mrs. Turner screamed, and
pulled her mauve tunic close around her. “I don’t know how on earth they stay in business.” She pointed to the Afro wigs on display, her head shaking back and forth. She had the habit of constantly removing her glasses and letting them swing on the rhinestone-flecked chain around her neck while she cleaned the lenses again and again with a little wadded-up piece of tissue, a nervous habit, I suspected, for she had already confessed to being “scared of the coloreds,” her fear being that “they are taking over the town; give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” My father called Edith Turner
the paranoid image of Theresa Poole.
Fortunately, the parade was too crowded for Mrs. Poole’s adirondack, and instead she sat up in the manager’s office in Woolworth and looked to the street below.

“What’s it like at the schoolhouse? Hmmmm? Problems with them?” I realized that she was talking to me. “I said I bet they cause trouble there at the schoolhouse, taking over, using double negatives.” I just stared at her not knowing what to say. “I do declare if your face hasn’t improved. I would swear that place has gotten smaller or paler or something.” She looked at my mother and nodded and then continued without even taking a breath. “And those children from out in the county”—she cleaned her lenses, peeked through and then cleaned them again—“bad. I hear they are so bad. The filthy language. Filth.”

“It’s bad, the language is awful, just awful,” Misty said, and nudged me right as Todd Bridger and some of the other boys from our class stepped into the crowd on the other side of the street. I kept losing sight of him while Mrs. Turner and my mother discussed how important it was to line a commode seat with toilet paper before sitting on it. Mrs. Turner said it was especially important at places like the movie theaters where they no longer had a separate bathroom for the
colorea.

“Is she stupid or what?” Misty asked, and then she was waving and calling out to Dean, who was on the other side of the street. I just stared straight ahead, concentrating on the huge bare tree
limbs and the bright blue sky, and the little stone man down at the end of the block where the parade would circle onto the next street. The crisp wind stung my face and gave me a good excuse to put my gloves against my cheeks. “The language is
filthy,
” Misty whispered in mimic. “What a stupid old bitch.”

I saw Perry Loomis like a flash over on the other side of the street, and it was like she was looking right at me. One day I had said hello to her in the hall, and she had looked surprised, as if to ask who did I think I was speaking to her. She had quickly nodded and then hurried past, her books up to her chest. Now I saw her face in and out of the crowd, the boys from my class not far from where she was. I looked past the float with what was
supposed
to look like the nativity but instead looked like some hippies in a barnyard; I had decided that I
would
speak to Perry again if I got the chance, even with Misty right there beside me. The high-school drama students who were manning the float had
live
animals, and now Joseph had thrown down his walking stick and was wrestling a sheep who was butting the chicken wire that enclosed the flatbed trailer.

Once the animals were under control, and Santa finally passed, the crowd thinned. Children ran through an alley to catch the parade going back the other way. Again I saw Perry, now turning away from the curb and walking toward the corner. She was wearing a light-blue carcoat that for the world looked like the one I had outgrown, and she had a little baby propped up on her hip like a grocery bag. I had once overheard Todd Bridger say that Perry’s mama was never at home and they could do as they pleased as long as Perry cooked supper and changed her little brother’s diaper. I lifted my hand when I thought she was looking but instead I got the same blank stare she had given me in the hall that day. Todd and some of the other boys were standing around her, but she seemed uninterested as she shifted the child from hip to hip, turning to smile as if she were paying attention to what they were saying, though she looked as if her thoughts were
miles and miles away. It hardly seemed fair that anyone should be so pretty, with such thick wavy hair and large dark eyes.