Ferris Beach (43 page)

“I don’t want anyone to take his place,” I said. “You make it sound like it didn’t mean anything and it did.”

“This is some serious deja vu.” She stared ahead at the straight
flat road. “Yeah, I know it meant something. I remember when I was saying those exact same words.” She inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke out her opened window. “I mean, I
do
understand what you’re going through. Cleva and I went this same circle.” She laughed, tossed her cigarette out the window. “Boy, did we ever. That’s why / got married that time, so please, God, don’t go and do that.” I opened my mouth to speak but she continued. “Now, I know you think you’re in
love.”
Just the word in her mouth sounded like a disease; she tried the radio again, but all she got was the news so she turned it off. “But you’ll live through it. Look at me.”

I smelled the salty sea air before we ever crested the old drawbridge. It was almost dark, but I could still see the water, dark and shimmering under the lights of the fishing pier, bright white bulbs strung on a wire. Angela turned on her headlights as we rode down the main road, small pastel cottages along the way, rope lines where towels and bathing suits whipped back and forth with the breeze.

“Does your apartment face the ocean?” I asked, breaking the long silence, and Angela laughed, patted me on the leg.

“It ain’t the Waldorf,” she said. “But there’s a view.” She laughed again. “I guarantee that you’ll have a view.” She turned off the main road and rode inland along the waterway where there were fishing boats lined up, huge nets thrown over their sides. She turned on a dirt road near the marina and parked in front of a blue cinderblock building. “I live upstairs,” she said. “Some friends of mine live in the ground apartment.” As I watched her bend in front of the side-view mirror and brush a fingertip over her eyelashes, it all came back to me: my mother’s look of shock, the sick gnawing emptiness I felt.

I followed her up the metal staircase and waited on the landing as she fumbled with the lock. There was a laundromat across the street, a big
CLOSED
sign in the window. Angela switched on the
yellow porch light. “Home, sweet home,” she said, and pushed the swollen door forward, clicked on a dim overhead light. There were dishes in her sink, sparse furnishings with sandy, threadbare upholstery, a floor-to-ceiling lamp with adjustable lights like some kind of insect; a square of lime green shag carpet covered the center of the floor.

“Now you’ll sleep here in the guest boudoir,” she said, and pointed to the cot in the corner, a bird dog print sheet dragging the gritty linoleum. She swung back the loud orange drapes just behind the cot. “And here’s the view.” She waved her hand and there I could see a streetlight, the laundromat, and the bait shop. “It’s not
great,
but I’d say it beats the hell out of a cemetery.”

She went into the bedroom and turned on the lamp. Her bed was unmade and clothes were piled over a straight-back chair. “Is this Greg?” I asked, and pointed to a snapshot wedged up in the corner of her mirror. She nodded. He was standing in front of the gates of Graceland. “What happened to y’all?”

“Nothing happened.” She opened her suitcase and pulled out her thin nightgown, draped it over the foot of the bed. “He’s still around. His job requires that he travel, is all.” She stopped unpacking and stared at me. “We have not split up if that’s what Cleva has been saying. Just wait, he’ll be here tomorrow night.” I stepped back into
my
room, not wanting to imagine tomorrow when the man in the photo would be there. The telephone was beside her bed, but I still wasn’t ready to call Misty; by now she had probably been over to my house and my mother had told her everything that happened.

There was a small TV up on the kitchen counter, the antennae bound in aluminum foil. I was about to turn it on when Angela came out in her thin robe and went and stared into her empty refrigerator. “Do you mind eating eggs?” she asked, and I shook my head. “TV is broken,” she continued.

“This wasn’t your first time, was it?” she asked, and set a plate of scrambled eggs on the table. “Cleva wants to believe this
was it, the great loss of virginity, but I told her not to get her hopes up.” Angela held her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, blinked against the smoke as she reached for the loaf of bread on the counter. “What Cleva
really
wants to believe is that she got there in time. Virginity intact.” She was waiting, eyebrows raised as she blew a stream of smoke, and I knew she was expecting an answer. “Well?” she asked, and I looked away from her, scooped some of the eggs onto my plate. “Look, I know you don’t want to talk,” Angela said, and sat down. “But just tell me that you
do
know something about birth control.”

I didn’t answer, just moved my food around, but she continued. “I asked Cleva if she had ever talked to you about whether or not you needed to be on the pill.”

“What?” I stared at her. Neither she nor my mother deserved anything from me.

“Well?” she asked. “You do know something about birth control, don’t you?”

“Do you?” I asked suddenly, and looked at her, her face frozen with a look of surprise. “You’ve been with enough people. Do you know what to do?”

“Well,” she said, face flushed as she tossed her hair over her shoulder, “I believe someone is a little defensive. Look.” She sat forward, elbows on the table. “The worst that happens is you weren’t careful and you have to do something about it. It’s not that hard; mistakes
can
be corrected.” She pushed away her plate of eggs and lit a cigarette. “You just don’t want to keep making them.”

“Like you? How many mistakes have
you
made?” I asked, my voice shaking. “You are always so ready to talk about Mo Rhodes and her mistake, to say all those awful things about her, so how about
you”

“Mo? We’re gonna dig that poor woman up again?” She stood, swung back the orange drapes and stared out at the empty laundromat. “I told you about Mo. Mo did
not
practice birth control.” She laughed. “Baby number three proved that.”

“She was a good person.”

“Believe what you want.” She strolled around the room, one hand on her hip, the other with her cigarette held up near her mouth.

“She was,” I said, suddenly determined. I wanted to
make
her take back everything she’d said about Mo. I wanted to twist her arm behind her back until she gave in and told me what I wanted to hear.

“Mo was a good person. Gene was a good person. They just couldn’t stay out of each other’s pants.” She stopped and stared at me, tears in her eyes. “He was screwing Mo Rhodes for years,
years,
and everybody in a fifty-mile radius
knew
it, and all the while I thought—” She stopped suddenly, breath rapid, and there was no need for her to complete the thought. It fit into place as easily as a puzzle piece, a bit of information I could use. Her bitterness towards Mo crystalized, and though it didn’t make what Mo did right, it somehow lightened the load of words Angela had handed me that other night when she talked about how pitiful Misty was with her
orange
hair.

“That’s why you didn’t like Mo,” I said, and pushed my plate away as well. Whether I was right or not, I finally had a face for the man on the beach, Angela leaning into Gene Files, laughing there as my father and I walked up the dune.

“Oh, who cares?” she asked, and ground her cigarette in the sink, making a hiss as the ash hit a wet spot. “Think what you want to think. I’m not a bad person either, Kate.”

“I didn’t say you were.” I waited, feeling her right behind me, so close I could hear her loud sighs. I wished I could stop all that was happening, had happened, and play through it all before I continued, but there was no stopping. “I used to think you were my mother,” I said, and focused on the loud drapes, the lights of the pier in the distance. I heard her laughter, loud and then soft.

“Why would you have ever thought that?” she asked, frozen there beside me.

“You were such a secret, a mystery.” I shrugged. “There were lots of possibilities.” I avoided looking at her, even when she pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. “You left home when you were seventeen, and so the age was just right. I thought that maybe my parents couldn’t have a child, and so they agreed to take me. That way they would have a child, and you could have your own life.”

“Do you think you watch enough movies?” she asked. “Really. Why would you ever concoct such a crazy story?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It didn’t used to sound so crazy.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” She shook her head and laughed again, lit another cigarette. “Though I can see why you’d be wishing for a new mother. Cleva would die for sure if she heard that one.”

“It was
possible”
I said, throwing Misty’s favorite word to her. “And I really
wanted
it to be true. I really wanted you to love me.”

“Don’t we all want to be loved?” She shook her head. “Don’t you see?” She reached across the table, palms turned upwards. “I do love you, but that’s
my
story.
My
life.” She was patting her hand against her chest. “That was my mother, okay? That was my seventeen-year-old mother, only my story is easier, you see. My mother just died right then and there. I wanted a mother. I wanted a mother who loved
me,
okay? Obviously Cleva didn’t fit the bill. You can see that, can’t you, since she doesn’t even fit it with her own flesh and blood.” She stopped, took a deep breath, voice catching. “That’s
my
story, okay? So come up with your
own
tragedy.”

Her breath was rapid as she leaned back in her chair and studied me. I felt her gaze and instinctively held my hands up to my face, my wrists touching beneath my chin.

“What, a birthmark?” she asked. “Use some make-up, cover it up. It’s not so easy just to walk in a door and say,
Love me. Somebody please love me.
Heaven knows, I’ve tried too many times. Your father loved me.” She moved around the table and squatted
by my chair. “He is the only person who ever really loved me. Be thankful you had him.”

I didn’t look at her; her hand was on my arm, squeezing, twisting the skin to make me look at her. “I’m sorry for what I just said.” She let go, put her hand up to my cheek, but I jerked away. “We all want a fairy tale, Kitty,” she whispered. “Nobody wants the truth. But sooner or later you learn that there are no fairy tales; there is no glamorous mother hidden on a faraway island, no prince on a white horse, no treasure chest full of jewels.” She kissed me quickly on the top of the head. “That’s the real story and the truth is that I’m sorry that’s the truth.”

“Me too,” I said, and then Angela went in her room and closed the door, leaving me to the dirty dishes and stack of old magazines in the corner. I thumbed through a two-year-old
Glamour
as I tried not to think about anything. I heard Angela dial the phone several times, with each try slamming the receiver; finally she was talking, whispering. “Please don’t wait until the weekend again,” she said, and I imagined her on the rumpled bed, ankles crossed as she stared at the little photo in the corner of the mirror. With every whisper I imagined that she was talking about me, telling
my
story, recreating the scene that had nothing to do with her. I turned the pages, flipping past lipstick and nail polish, faster and faster as I tried not to think of my mother as she bent down in the dark hallway and turned on her nightlight. More than anything I wanted to be at Misty’s, the two of us stretched out on her bed, as I told her the whole story. She would lean close to me as I talked. I willed myself into her room, surrounded myself with the picture of that room, the chewing gum chain, the picture of Mo. I wished more than ever to be there, to have Mo come in and stretch out at our feet. And even better, I wished to run out into the street and hear my father’s music, to run inside and find him in his study. I wished that I could make my mother understand how she had misjudged me. I wished that I could go back and at least close the door to Mr. Poole’s room, at least have that extra
minute to wake and tell Merle. I thought about it all for most of the night, unable to sleep until the sky turned a light gray.

When I woke it was noon and Angela was gone, I assumed to the seafood place where she worked. I didn’t give myself a second to change my mind, but went in and sat on her rumpled bed and dialed my number. It rang for what seemed forever, and I imagined my mother pacing the foyer, back and forth, back and forth in those bedroom slippers, her face set stubbornly as she refused to give me the satisfaction of an answer. I was about to hang up when she was there, out of breath, and I knew then that she had been outside; she had been as far as the canna lilies when the phone brought her running through the yard and onto the back porch. “Hello?” she called again.

“Please come get me.” The words were barely out of my mouth before she said,
Yes, I will,
and hung up the phone.

Forty minutes later, I stood by the window and began waiting, trying to imagine what my mother must be thinking, all that she must be planning to say on the ride home. Angela’s Impala was in the drive and I was wondering how she got to work, if she walked to work, when I heard her laugh and then saw her step out from the apartment below. I sat quickly, pulling the sheet around me as if I’d just gotten up; when she was halfway up the metal stairs, I opened one of the magazines that I had read cover to cover the night before and studied the flawless face of Cheryl Tiegs.

“I was wondering when you’d wake up,” she said, and closed the door.

“I thought you were at work.” I watched a woman going into the laundromat, a yellow sheet draped around her shoulders as she prodded her dirty-faced child into the cinderblock building.

“Not today,” Angela said. She was wearing a bright yellow bathing suit top and a pair of white jeans. “So, what do you want to do? Go swimming? Play putt-putt?” She stepped closer. “My
neighbor, Jake, might go with us. He’s
a friend
of Greg’s.” She emphasized the
wordfriend
and then contined. “Did you bring a suit?”