Ferris Beach (44 page)

“I’m going home,” I said, without looking up from the Cover Girl ad. “I called Mama to come get me.”

“Well, I’m not surprised,” she said, and then just sat there for what seemed an eternity; she sighed as if she were going to say something, but instead shook her head and went to the bedroom. I watched through the open door as she pulled a straw bag from the closet and then began filling it with a beach towel and a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic, her radio and an old copy of
Cosmopolitan.
“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t spend my day waiting for Cleva’s arrival,” she said, and I shook my head.

“No.” I didn’t tell her that it had been an hour since I’d called. Within minutes, when Angela was preparing to make her exit, I saw the big green Checker round the corner and stop behind the Impala. My mother stepped from the car, her gardening shoes still on, and I knew that she had left immediately after hanging up the phone. She shielded her eyes and stared at the building. “She’s here.” I stood and put the magazine on top of the stack, shook and folded the sandy sheet.

“Must’ve flown,” Angela said, with a look of surprise, and sat down at the kitchen table, glanced at her watch as if to speed up my leaving.

“Bye.” I picked up my suitcase and opened the door. “Thanks.”

“Any time,” she said, and then I was out on the landing, my mother waiting beside the car. She did not move to hug or touch me as I put my suitcase in the big back seat, and neither of us spoke as she backed down the sandy drive. That child was standing in the doorway of the laundromat, her bare foot swinging back and forth as she studied her shadow. I saw Angela looking out her window, the drapes swung to one side, and then within seconds she was gone, the drapes closed. My mother was silent the whole way, her copy of
How to Be Your Own Best Friend
sticking up from her purse beside her on the seat.

“Misty has been worried about you” she said without looking at me when we turned the corner at Whispering Pines. “I told her you’d be over as soon as you could. I did
not
tell her anything else.” She was staring out at the canna lilies and that empty field where the kudzu had grown by leaps and bounds. “Merle called as well,” she said. “I took his number.” When I turned to reach for her, to speak, she clutched her purse and opened the car door. “We’re having Chef Boy Ardee pizza for dinner,” she said, and stood up straight, slammed the door.

By fall, when we had returned to E. A. Poe High and football season was well underway, with Misty high-stepping her way through each half-time performance, the canna lilies stood like a bed of corn stalks, brown and withered. After much deliberation, my mother asked Mr. Landell to come and dig them all up and to do with them whatever he pleased; she said that she didn’t know that she could stand to set them out year after year and then watch them grow like a red-alert reminder of my father’s death.

I spent my Friday nights that fall at the high school football games. Misty still depended on me to give my opinion of her twirling performance;
Did I throw it high enough? Did I look fat in the new uniform?
“You looked terrific,” I told her on the way home every Friday night, which was the absolute truth; Sally Jean backed up my every appraisal.

Usually I sat through the games with a group of girls from my class, their conversations on everything
except
football, while my thoughts were occupied by the upcoming game in Clemmonsville and how Merle and I had made plans to meet. I had seen Perry Loomis at two of the games; both times she was sitting with a guy who had graduated three years before, a tall thin guy with glasses and a military haircut. Perry was in one of the high school work programs where she went to class in the mornings and then worked a clerical job in the afternoons. I had overheard her tell someone that she was going to try to graduate in summer school so she could go to business college at night, that she was sick and tired of high school.

The day of the Clemmonsville game, Misty somehow managed to get out of riding with the band, and instead, the two of us rode in Sally Jean’s Toyota. “What are friends for?” she had asked and adjusted her skimpy little sequin suit, tossed her coat and baton into the backseat. She spent most of the ride talking about the difficulty of her latest routine, one which she herself had choreographed to go along with the band’s playing of “Time in a Bottle”; she said that she was talking a lot to keep my mind off of getting nervous, that it must work because Sally Jean did it all the time. When we arrived, Merle was standing at the main entrance just as he had promised. He was wearing a new denim jacket and hightop sneakers. He said that his hair was wet because he had just showered in the locker room. Every day after school he worked out in the weight room. He was getting in shape to go out for the track team.

Misty was running late; she nudged Merle playfully in greeting and then waved to us as she ran out onto the field, where the band was crowded in the end zone. We spent the first few minutes just watching Misty and laughing about the day she had whistled when Merle walked by my house. Our conversation was slow and a little awkward but got easier once we were seated up in the bleachers, his hand clasping mine tightly as Misty marched
out onto the field for the “Star Spangled Banner.” We sat on the Clemmonsville side, and throughout the game, people passed and spoke to Merle, called him by name, referred to this or that thing that had happened in school or after school. Though he introduced me as his girlfriend from Fulton, I felt oddly out of place; our conversations seemed to revolve around all those days in the cemetery or at Samuel T. Saxon.

After the game, we sat on Misty’s car and waited for her to emerge from the crowd. “I’ll call you soon?” He said it as a question, and I nodded, leaned in close to him to say good-bye; we sat that way, his breath warm on my face, until I saw Misty running up, her baton pumping at her side like a marathon runner. “Okay, go ahead and say it,” she said all out of breath. “I
almost
missed that catch there at the end of Time in a Bottle,’ but I didn’t.” As we drove away, I saw Merle walk over and join a crowd of people standing at the front of the Clemmonsville High School, and I felt the thirty-mile ride along the interstate beginning to lengthen.

We got a card from Angela in November that said she and Greg were going to spend the holidays in New Mexico.
Why would you go there for Christmas?
my mother asked over and over, which was what I wanted to ask her about the trip she had planned for us. Every chance I got, I sang, “Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays,” but she ignored me and continued planning our trip to Boston, where we would stay in a fancy hotel and have room service and do all sorts of fun things. She kept showing me brochures and maps, all of which I’d seen at least a dozen times before, each time her voice becoming more enthusiastic.

“It’ll get better after this year,” Misty told me, whispering because Sally Jean was in the kitchen all set up in front of her sewing machine; strands of red sequins covered the floor as she worked on the uniform Misty would wear in the Fulton Christmas parade. “Don’t you remember how awful it was until that
first Fourth of July had come and gone?” She sighed, all the while watching Sally Jean, who held straight pins between her lips. “It wasn’t great after that, but it was a lot easier.”

By Christmas vacation, the calls and letters to and from Merle were not nearly as frequent as they had been, and it seemed when we did speak, the pauses got longer and longer. That day in Mr. Poole’s study seemed so far away, all clouded and blended with everything that had happened, sealed behind the drapes of Samuel T. Saxon, sealed like my father’s vault. Merle had once said that it might be good for him to be spme place where no one had heard of his family, where the very mention of his name didn’t conjure an image, and it seemed he now had that, new friends and new teachers. He could have a wish come true, a new start, a second chance.

My mother never mentioned that day to me, and though we often talked our way around it, it seemed I could never get close enough to tell her I was sorry I had ever wished her away. That I
was
my mother’s daughter, and that for every time she had misjudged me, I had also misjudged her. It was a breezy winter day when we drove out to put a poinsettia on my father’s grave, that granite ship break, break, breaking. I held the flower upright while she packed dirt around it; she periodically stopped to look at the tombstone and shake her head. When we finished, she asked to drive and had just cranked the Checker, heat blowing from the vents at our feet, when out of the blue she started telling me how much she had loved Angela, how much she wished that Angela had never run away from home to get married. “You know she’s a smart girl, smarter than you’d think,” my mother said. “And she’s very pretty. It’s a shame she’s
not
someone’s mother.”

“I never
really
meant,” I started, but she reached and patted my hand, took hold of it as we sat there in front of the grave.

“I know that,” she said. “I know a lot.” She stared straight ahead, hair pulled back loosely on her neck. “I know that Fred is getting a good laugh if he sees us sitting here in the green monster looking at that ugly, ugly headstone.”

“Is everything really okay?” I finally asked as she put the car in drive and we began moving.

“Oh, yes.” She looked at me, dark eyes glistening. “It’s copacetic.”

We drove home in silence, past the Confederate statue, the large empty lot where Samuel T. Saxon had stood. “It’s so hard without Fred, isn’t it?” she asked, and I nodded. “But just you wait, Katie, this vacation will be good. I’ll show you a statue to the
Union
dead,” she said, and laughed. “I’ll show you the Public Gardens and the Alcotts’ house, the Alcotts’
graves,
for heaven’s sakes. Let’s see if their tombstones can compare.”

“You really did love him, didn’t you?” I asked when we were almost home. She waited a long minute before answering.

“You think I’d choose a life of grits and black-eyed peas and summers so hot I could have a damned heat stroke for nothing?”

“Does that mean you might want to move some day?” I thought then of Merle all settled in a new world, new friends, a new place, a second chance, but I also thought of all the things familiar in our life, Misty in her split-level, Mrs. Poole with her constant chatter, which more and more was directed at car dealerships, Honda, Toyota. In a way my mother and I
were
getting that second chance. And maybe Angela was looking for her new chance; maybe she had already found it. Maybe she was planning to appear one day on our front porch and surprise us with the order, the happiness of her life.

“Why, of course not,” she said. “This is home.” She turned the corner at Whispering Pines, and we drove past, the bare trees swaying. Somewhere in the distance I heard Christmas music,
Angels we have heard on high.
In spite of winter weather, Sally Jean’s yard was still green, and as we got out of the car, I saw Misty out
there practicing, her baton spinning, glinting silver in the bright clear light as she twisted and kicked. Sally Jean was standing in the living room window proudly watching this high-stepping girl she had grown to love; she was an answer to a prayer, a second chance. Misty tossed the baton high into the air, my mother and I watching as it spiraled against the bright blue sky and then fell neady into her outstretched hand, a whole world of possibilities spinning around her.

Ferris Beach

What to Wear on the First Day
at Lumberton High . . .

Reading Group Guide

A person who publishes a book willfully,
appears before the populace with his pants down.

—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

The Suede Vest?

As a teenager I had a recurring dream. It was one of those slow-motion dreams. I was running on the beach, a beach towel wrapped around me. I stopped to look at the ocean and off fell the towel. The voices began as I bent to pick it up—chitchat, laughter—and lo and behold, I turned to face the entire population of Lumberton High School rising up from behind the dunes, their fingers pointing as I raced about looking for my towel, only to discover that it was gone and there were no trees or means of camouflage in sight. A beach, a meadow, my own backyard—the setting might change, but the outcome of the dream was always the same: blatant exposure, humiliation.

If there is some kind of Freudian analysis of this dream, I prefer to remain ignorant. I diagnose it as simple self-consciousness, insecurity, the kind of thing that made me, one cold day in eighth grade, opt to go bare-legged rather than wear a pair of pantyhose with a
run.
I thought a run was surely more noticeable than snow-white gooseflesh. It was this same thinking that brought on the dilemma of the suede vest—the one with fringe that, on the store dummy, looked wonderfully
groovy
(though that was a word I could never pull off). I thought I’d die if I didn’t have it. And then it haunted me from my closet for over a year because I was afraid to wear it—I thought it might call too much attention to
me.
In the same way, I feared using the hip lingo of Rowan and Martin’s
Laugh-In
or acting as if I were part of the Brady Bunch or the Partridge Family. It was unnatural (though I knew many people who
did
pull it off), and I felt that I would be striking a false and obvious pose. I feared the worst, someone asking,
So who do you think you are, anyway?