Ferris Beach (24 page)

“You are absolutely right,” Misty mumbled. “I’m that kind of woman.”

“Misty,” Sally Jean said, looking as if she were on the verge of spouting some proverb when my mother burst out laughing.

“Misty is sure a card,” Mama said as she slowly pulled the pins from her hair and uncoiled it. “I don’t know what we’d do without her.”

“Be boring,” Misty mumbled, which made Angela laugh louder and harder than ever.

For the whole next day my mother toyed with her hair. I saw her several times just standing in front of the halltree mirror, pulling her hair this way and that, turning her head from side to side the way I had done so many times in an attempt to see what other people
saw
when I passed by. She even borrowed one of my
Glamour
magazines, the pages folded back to a make-over section, and Angela was right there egging her on. “You could
surprise
Fred.” Angela smiled knowingly, stepped closer. “He’ll love it.”

By the end of the next day, my mother’s hair looked like it had been cut with pinking shears. It kinked and curled all around her face and was rinsed dark and free of the gray. Her bangs stood out from her forehead in a Cleopatra look. She kept looking in the mirror, a worried expression on her face. Even Mrs. Poole had walked into our house and not said a word, acting as if she didn’t notice anything new, and all the while studying my mother furiously when she could steal a glance.

“Your mama looks like she just joined the Egyptian Marines, and Sally Jean looks like a damn carrot,” Misty said two days later when we were back out in the sun with Angela. “Damn it all to hell and back if she ain’t orange and if your mama’s hair doesn’t look like a frizzy pyramid.”

“Oh, now,” Angela said. “I was
trying
to help the two of them.”
Angela smiled, lips together, eyes filled with concern and pity. It was the same look she had given my father when he asked us what had ever made my mother think of doing such a thing to herself. “What do you
really
think, Fred?” Mama kept asking, and he replied, “One in a million.”

Angela told Misty she shouldn’t talk about my mother and Sally Jean, but nonetheless she laughed every time the two were mentioned. My mother, on that very day, had her navy shorts rolled up three inches higher than she normally wore them. Clearly Angela had started something. Sally Jean was daily coating herself in orange, and Mrs. Poole had even been spotted in a pair of chartreuse polyester shorts.

“You are so lucky,” Misty had said over and over. “Angela is so neat. Maybe she’ll take us to the beach and let us stay at her place. Maybe we’ll meet some boys.” Now she turned and looked at Angela, lifting her sunglasses up the way Angela always did before speaking. “You knew my mother, didn’t you?”

“I knew who she was.” Angela nodded. “And of course I saw her Christmas a year ago.” She looked at me to confirm the meeting. “What a beautiful woman she was.” Misty nodded and smiled. “I knew I had seen her before because how could you forget someone so pretty, right?” Misty nodded again. “The truth is”—Angela lowered her voice—“I wasn’t going to bring this up because I didn’t want to upset you, but I was at your mother’s funeral.” She sat back, looked first at Misty and then at me. “My boyfriend knew Mo, said he had for years, that she was a wonderful, wonderful person.” Angela leaned forward and brushed a piece of grass from the beach towel. “He said the same about your father, of course. He said he had never seen two people so much in love.”

“You had a boyfriend?” I asked, quickly counting the short months between her visit to our house and Mo’s death. She was barely separated.

“Yes.” She reached over and patted me. “I wasn’t divorced but
I was separated and if you’re wondering, I met him
after
I left my husband, okay?” She waited for me to say something. “You are your mother’s daughter, aren’t you, honey?” I looked up and she laughed. “Friends?”

“Oh, she doesn’t care if you had an old boyfriend,” Misty said. “Of course you had a boyfriend. I mean look at you. Why
wouldn’t
you have a boyfriend? That would be like my mother not having a boyfriend.” She stopped suddenly.

“This boyfriend of mine,” Angela continued, “he said he remembered when Mo had a little toddler and was pregnant, how radiant she looked and how your dad was always right there beside her.”

“That would’ve been when she was pregnant with me,” Misty said, and rubbed more lotion on her freckled pink legs.

“Well, you should be proud to have had such a beautiful mother. You have her eyes,” Angela said, and Misty beamed, her hair pulled up and wrapped in a little knot like Angela had suggested, loose tendrils falling onto her neck and around her forehead. Her beauty advice had not done much for my mother and Sally Jean, but she had worked wonders on Misty; I had high hopes that the same sort of transformation would come to me.

“Thanks,” Misty whispered. “I wish I could look
just
like my mother.”

“You’re getting there,” Angela said. “Your hair will never be as dark as hers, but your features are
identical”
She said the word with such authority that I believed her, too. “I
love
this hair of yours,” she continued. “You know, I’ll bet with a little Sun-In you can be blond, like a pretty strawberry blond.”

“Yeah?” Misty looked to me for my opinion and then turned back to Angela, playfully punching her arm. “But if it turns out like Kate’s mama’s hair or Sally Jean’s legs, we’re gonna run you out of town. Right?”

“Right,” I said, and watched my mother as she worked in the gazebo, wearing those rolled-up shorts, her hair hanging in wild
angles. She was clipping roses from the vines that grew up and down the trellis sides, and she had an armful, pale pink petals against her tan arms. I tried to imagine her pregnant, tried to imagine my father catering to her, helping her in and out of chairs, stroking her full abdomen.

“Did you have a boyfriend when you were our age?” I asked Angela. In answer she quickly cut off her “yes” and softened it with a
but:
“But people seemed to get together so much younger, got married so much younger, you know? So many people
married
their high school sweeties.”

“Who was your high school sweetie?” Misty asked. “Some real stud, I bet.”

“He wasn’t bad.” Angela stared out at the field and shook her head, laughed. “And yeah, he was pretty cute.”

“How long did you date him?” I asked, and she shrugged, waved her hand. “A year? Two?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Was he the
only
one?” I asked, conjuring my own picture, a seventeen-year-old Angela, her auburn hair swinging shoulder length; I imagined white socks and saddle shoes as she raced out onto an empty football field to meet
him
, tall and thin with pale green eyes, and all the while she was trying to decide how she was going to break the news to him, this
accident
that had happened, this accident of a child who she would have to get rid of in some way or another if he didn’t marry her.

“What is this, Twenty Questions?” she asked. “We’ll call
you
Curious George.” Misty smiled a drowsy smile and pulled a magazine up over her face, the smooth flawless face of Cheryl Tiegs staring up into the bright blue sky. The Huckses’ back door slammed shut, and within seconds, I glimpsed Merle as he cut through the cemetery; he was wearing a white T-shirt and I could see him in and out through the trees as he made his way to the street. I felt Angela nudge me with her toe, and when I looked up, she nodded her head in the direction Merle had gone, and
winked at me. “Maybe I should ask you guys some questions,” she said.

“Fire away,” Misty said, her voice muffled by the slick pages. “I have no secrets.”

My mother was humming “Strangers on the Shore,” as she moved out into the yard and over to the bed of hybrid roses. Despite the hair and rolled-up shorts, she was attractive in her own way, with her high cheekbones and full lips. Her steps quickened as she walked around the yard, ending her repertoire with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” which had been playing on the radio incessantly for a couple of months.

“Your mama ain’t half bad,” Misty said, and lifted the magazine. She wrinkled her nose, mouth screwed up to one side in what was
supposed
to be the look of a learned critic. “Her singing, I mean.” Under Misty’s supervision of song choice and Temptations-style stepping, Lily and the Holidays had come in second in the school talent show. I was still amazed that I had been up on the stage with them, my arm entwined with that of Roslyn Page, while we did several
Yes, I wills
in the background of “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” as Misty and Lily alternated parts, Misty sounding as much like Diana Ross as Diana Ross.

“Maybe your mama wants to be a Holiday,” Misty said, and laughed, nudged me with her elbow, and then whispered, “Halloween,” which made Angela laugh a drowsy laugh as she lay stretched out on her towel, all of my secrets in the palm of her hand.

Angela told me that she had come to visit us because she needed to get away from the beach for awhile, to take a break, get the salt out of her joints. “I had a failed romance,” she said one night as she sat on the foot of my bed in the slat of light from the corner streetlight, her legs pulled up under her thin cotton gown. “He was so handsome,” she said, and paused, thinking. “He kind of looked like the guy who played Maverick.”

“James Garner,” I said, sitting forward and waiting for the rest of her story. I was already in bed, the covers over my legs. These late-night talks, what Angela called our “heart to hearts,” had happened every night of the two weeks she’d been there. Pd hear her creep into my room and stand ghostlike beside my bed. “Kitty? Kitty?” she would call. “Are you asleep?” Sometimes she sat at the foot of my bed, and other times she crawled in beside me to whisper her stories.

That same night she told me about her first marriage. “It only lasted a couple of months” she said. “I was so dumb to have done it.” She sighed. “Old Cleva has never let me forget it either.” Once again I imagined the teenage Angela with her long ponytail swaying from side to side as she slow-danced around a jukebox, “Young Love” or “True Love Ways” playing sofdy.

“We couldn’t wait,” she said, “and then as soon as it was all done, as soon as we came away from that justice of the peace, I knew in the pit of my stomach that we’d never last.” She laughed. “It’s amazing what being sixteen and in the backseat of a car can do to your head.”

I lay there beside her, lulled by her voice.

“Then of course I went and married a man who wanted to keep me locked up like a little doll,” she continued. “He got insanely jealous if I even spoke to another person. Fred and I were always so close that I just naturally talked about him a lot and Ken, that was his name, Ken just couldn’t stand it.” She rolled towards me, head propped in her hand, the streetlight catching and lighting only one side of her face like a Harlequin doll. “I was waitressing at the time and I knew all the regulars so you know I was always chatting, not flirting, mind you, just talking.” She paused and I strained to open my eyes wider, to stay awake so as not to miss any of her story. “Ken just jumped to the wrong conclusion is all.” She paused, breathed deeply. “One thing led to another and Ken ended up slapping me one night, in the face. I got scared and I called Fred. He came to help me, and I was almost through with my packing when Ken walked in and slugged Fred right in the stomach. I was scared to death he’d broken a rib. I said, ‘I hate you, you big son of a bitch,’ and now, Kitty, you for one know that I don’t normally talk that way.” I nodded and sat up a little. “And of course you remember how Fred brought me here and let me get myself pulled back together while I got the separation all legalized.” I nodded. “Cleva was fit to be tied. You remember, don’t you?” I didn’t respond. “Well, she
was,
whether you knew it or not.”

“Why?” My question was simple, but it left Angela completely silent, the glowing clock by my bed ticking off the long quiet pause.

“Why not?” she finally asked, and then quickly continued. “You remember the day that I came over here before that, the day I saw Mo Rhodes? Well, I came to tell Fred that I was afraid, and I really was. I really feared for my own safety.” She sighed. “I mean maybe Cleva felt I shouldn’t have involved Fred, but I didn’t have anybody else to help me. You know she is real insecure; I mean it’s not like she was
ever
the belle of the ball.” She leaned closer, her head touching mine as she whispered. “Good grief, she was over thirty when they got married. I mean, people are doing that more and more these days, but when she was coming along, she was considered
old,
an
old maid”
She laughed. “Okay, now it’s your turn to tell me something.”

“I don’t know what to tell.” I lay staring at the ceiling, the streetlight casting a distorted image of the window. Just the night before I had looked out and would have sworn I saw Merle sitting on the tombstone, the glow of a cigarette near his face.

“Well, you can think of
something”
she said. “I’m not going to tell anybody.”

“Well.” I paused, trying to think of something to tell her. “I’d like to have a boyfriend.” I waited for her to respond.

“And?”

“Well, that’s it. That’s a wish that I have.” I waited and then felt her side of the bed shake as she muffled a laugh in her pillow.

“Oh, Kitty,” she said. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“It’s a lot,” I told her. “I mean, I’ve never really had one before and sometimes I wonder if I will. Maybe I’ll be an old maid. Maybe it’s hereditary.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” She sat up and leaned over me, and I held my breath as I imagined the dream come true:
Why, it can’t be hereditary because you are not your mother’s daughter, you are my daughter, Kitty, mine.
“Why, there will be hundreds
who’ll like you, who’ll
love
you,” she said instead. “Why, poor old Fred will have to beat them off with a stick. He has said so himself. He’s told me so many times that he plans to deal with your dates the same way he dealt with mine.” She paused. “You know Fred was like my daddy. He’d sit a boy down and ask him what his intentions were, where were we going and when would we be back and what is a logarithm.”