Ferris Beach (2 page)

My father’s name was Alfred Tennyson Burns, known to all as Fred. My grandmother had told him that he was named for a lord, a nobleman like the ones she’d spent her entire palmetto-spangled life dreaming of, a poetic lord or a knight to ride up and carry her off across the coastal plain, tide pools spraying and sand flying. She had originally wanted to name him for a knight, her first choice being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but at the last minute decided that she preferred Fred to Art.

“Why didn’t she just name you Robert?” my mother once asked. “It would have been the easiest route to a poetic name. Robert Burns.”

“Had to be a lord or a knight,” he said. “You can call me ‘my lord.’”

“This from such a brilliant lady,” my mother said, and shook her head, giving me a
you see what I mean
look as she undipped her bun. She held a gold bobby pin between her thin pink lips as she pulled her hair back more tightly.

Either way, my father had been affected by his given and almost-given names; he was forever quoting Tennyson or telling me in great detail a Sherlock Holmes plot. He was a Thomas Hardy fan, too, and at my birth had wanted to name me Arabella, which my mother said sounded like something you’d better hope not to get during pregnancy. I thought my life would have been so different if I had started off with another name, an inspirational name like Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie or Joan of Arc, Amelia Earhart. Arabella. I used to stand in front of the mirror in the entryhall of our house and run that name over my tongue in whispers. Just the movement of the mouth to sound the word was sexy, its open-mouthed ending coming with shallow, quickened breath. I would watch my plain face sound the word, and for a second it seemed like there was something else there. I
could say “Angela,” and my mouth would form the same shape, tongue pressed forward to shape the lull of the
l
, as when I said “bella.” My mother’s name, Cleva, was tight-lipped with teeth clenched on that long e, and my own, Katie or Kate, was like a short sharp bite.

I was five when I first met Angela. My father took me to Ferris Beach, making a big show when we crossed the South Carolina line. We stood for hours just listening to the roar of the surf and wedging our feet into the cool packed sand. Angela appeared at the top of a sand dune, her thick auburn hair blowing behind her. My father squeezed my hand and laughed out loud, as loud as the surf. “There she is,” he screamed, and then once again, almost in a whisper, “There she is.” She greeted me as if I were grown, her cool fingers gently cupping and covering my left cheek and neck where I had a birthmark the color of wine. (“It’s not your fault, Cleva,” I had recently overheard Mrs. Poole tell my mother. “I suspect God has his own reasons for painting her that way.”) Angela pressed her lips to that same cheek, and then she draped her many strands of beads around and around my neck while we ate the fried chicken she had packed in a basket.

“What was I thinking, Fred?” she asked. “I forgot something for the child to drink.” I sat there with her on the faded quilt while my father walked up the beach and through the dunes to the old bait shop to buy a carton of milk. She twisted the cork from a bottle and filled her glass with burgundy. The day was supposed to be a secret, but in the exhilaration of seeing the ocean for the first time, I let it all slip from my mouth into my mother’s ear, where it fell solid, lodging in her chest.

Not long after that we were invited by Mrs. Poole and some of her church friends to a picnic at Cherry Grove Beach, which Mrs. Poole said was “light-years better than Ferris Beach.” These women were quite a bit older than my mother, so I was the only
child
present. They didn’t even wear bathing suits but sat fully
clothed under big striped umbrellas, and the whole day was all planned as neatly as if bells went off in their heads to signal the next event. Keep your shoes on because the shells are sharp and will cut clean through to the bone. Set the places and we mustn’t forget to set
His
place, we mustn’t forget to thank
Him
for this cold fried chicken and the quart of milk. Don’t you forget if you get the urge in that warm salty water to take off your bathing suit and pee, that
He
is watching you, and
He
will know what you did, and if you have a thought about how good it feels to be all naked and running your hands down your body, then rest assured
He
will know. And, oh, my Lord, don’t even look to your left unless you want to see a suit that shows all that a woman has to show.

I spent much of the day digging in the sand by the edge of the water, burying my feet and then letting wave after wave wash them clean. The things those women talked about were things that could keep you awake for the rest of your life, death and illness and poverty and insurance policies and
he will get his due.
It was so easy to sin, as easy as telling a lie, or saying damn or saying that men come from monkeys, or kissing the glossy paper mouth of a movie star on a poster. And how could God keep it all sorted, all these
direct lines
, these prayers that were shot up to him like bullets, crisscrossing, ricocheting, contradicting, negating.
I just hope that she will live until young Owen graduates from college. Well, I just hope she dies quickly and quietly—at peace. How can you be wishing her dead like that? I for one pray that there will come a cure for cancer. I pray for the doctors in the laboratory. I have a cousin whose son-in-law is working at the NIH in D.C. I pray they don’t get a divorce even though my cousin says she prays for what is best for the both of them.
If his eye had been just on those three striped umbrellas on the Cherry Grove strand, he could not have met their demands, not even to mention those of the rest of the world; this was prime time, a Sunday afternoon, and the thought of having to sort through all those requests made my head spin. It was that
very day that I attached to Angela everything beautiful and lively and good; she was the easy flow of words and music, the waves crashing on Ferris Beach as I spun around and around because I couldn’t take in enough of the air and sea gulls as they swooped and whined. Angela was energy, the eternal movement of the world, the blood in my veins and the wind in the bare winter branches that creaked and cried out in the night like tired ghosts in search of a home. She was the answer to a prayer and I thought about that day at Ferris Beach often, recreating every word and every movement before I fell asleep.

By the time I was eight, when her face was getting hard for me to remember, I imagined her holding my hand and spelling secret messages into them. By then I had read the biography of Helen Keller nine times, each time finding something new, each time working on the alphabet on the last page, each time conjuring what was left of my memory of Angela.

“You cannot check this out another time this year,” the Pine-top librarian had said when I tried to check the book out for the tenth time; she was exasperated by all the noise a classroom of eight-years-olds can make just entering a room. “Somebody else might want to read about Helen Keller.”

“What if I wait until the end and nobody’s checked it out?”

“There are other classes, you know,” she said, her lips pushed forward like all those cartoons of the North Wind getting ready to blow, and then she stomped off to yank Merle Hucks and R.W. Quincy by the arms and to tell them to stop rubbing their feet on the new indoor-outdoor carpet and then touching people to shock them. It was the only exciting thing going on in the library. “You’re gonna rub this carpet bare,” she said. There were perspiration circles under her plump arms even though it was wintertime. “Now find a chair.” She turned to heave herself back to the desk while they ran around behind her acting surprised like they
had
found chairs. Nobody pronounced R.W. Quincy’s name right, like the teacher begged us to do. “R Double U,” she
would say, and he’d tell her his name was “R Dubyah,” that he was not a fancy talker and if his mama had meant for him to be named R Double U, then she would’ve called him that instead of R Dubyah. The librarian said it our way, which made our teacher give her a dirty look. R.W. was the tallest boy in the class because he had stayed back once in first grade and again in second; he wore a dirty piece of twine around his neck with a little blue ratfink hooked to it. Merle Hucks had a black ratfink with red eyes, which was supposed to be good luck since they were so rare.

“So can I read Helen Keller?” I whispered.

“Are you deaf?” she asked me, and R.W. Quincy, who was standing there wanting to check out a book on stockcar racing, said, “What? What, Miss Liberrian?”

“The split-levels are here,” Mrs. Poole said the day Misty’s family moved in, and waved her hand at the row of houses as if she could make them disappear. “That kind of house is not designed for country like this, now is it?”

I was nine that August, and for a month I had watched one big moving van after another bringing someone new to our street, always it seemed, a family with babies instead of someone close to my age. Misty’s house was identical to the other six split-levels already occupied and the three which were springing up around the corner. “I’d need bread crumbs to find my way home,” Mrs. Poole said, her pursed lips painted the same shade as the blooms on our fuchsia plant. “I hear somebody over on Maple,” she paused, pointing her thin finger through the split-levels to the street parallel to ours, “is building a ranch out of some kind of board that just goes its own way in the weather.”

Misty’s house was my favorite of the whole bunch; it was white with blue shutters—
electric blue
, Mrs. Poole said in a hushed whisper later that same day while she stared at the big moving van with South Carolina tags. “I saw what looked like it might
be a bar, you know to house liquor,” she whispered. “I’ve heard of neighborhoods going down this way.” Mrs. Poole kept talking but stared over at the Rhodeses’ house. “It happens slowly in the beginning, one house here, another there, and then before you know it, the decent people stop coming, and more and more riffraff come in, prices drop and so others can afford to come in.” She paused and then tilted her head toward the back of our property lines which ended in a tangled field of kudzu and a row of tiny pastel houses. “A colored family lives down there,” she whispered. “It
can
happen.”

“Peacock blue,” Mrs. Rhodes said, smiling at Mr. Rhodes, a Sherwin-Williams paint sampler in her hand. Mr. Rhodes was up on a ladder putting the final touches on the trim of the porch awning. “Now nobody will mistake our house for another.” I had been standing on the curb for about three minutes, though it seemed like hours. Mr. Rhodes wore an old baseball cap to shield his face from the sun, but already his cheeks were bright pink like the skin on Misty’s sunburned nose. Misty looked just like him with that strawberry hair and doughy white skin, made even whiter in contrast with her mother’s tan, a shade so deep you might wonder if she was from another place altogether. “Do you think she’s foreign?” Mrs. Poole had asked and then turned back to her rose bushes, the nozzle of her hose tuned to a fine mist.

“Peacock blue just like my Misty’s eyes,” Mrs. Rhodes said, and hugged this plump pale girl, who seemed to be much more interested in the superball that her skinny older brother was bouncing against the brick wall of the carport than she was in meeting me. “My Misty is just your age, nine going on twenty,” Mrs. Rhodes said to me and laughed, but Misty was still eyeing me suspiciously, and why wouldn’t she? I had come bearing a paper plate of delicate little homemade ladyfingers and my mother’s instructions to ask where they were from. If I had been in her shoes, I would not have trusted me either.

“Wouldn’t you love to have peacocks in your yard?” Mrs. Rhodes asked, and turned to me. Her thick dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail as she stood there barefooted in cropped jeans, her toenails painted pale pink. It was her eyes that were peacock blue, and this Misty that she hugged up so close had just a washed-out version to go with her frizzy orange hair and freckled arms. I was about to nod that I’d love some peacocks, but before I could she was asking another question. “Fourth grade?” she said to me, which I came to learn quickly was her way of asking a question, all but the key words deleted—like hungry? tired? sad?, the way you might talk to an infant. “Yes,” I said and tried to take in all the things scattered about in their carport because I knew I’d be quizzed: a black sewing mannequin dressed in a lime-green miniskirt and halter top, a stone statue of a fish with its mouth wide open, a little miniature pagoda, bags and bags of gravel, and lots of little lanterns and tiki torches. “Pinetop?” she asked me, which was the name of the elementary school nearby, and again I nodded yes. Misty was still just standing there staring at me. She was slapping a flyback paddle against her bare thigh.

“Let’s eat these cookies you brought. I just can’t wait.” Mrs. Rhodes grabbed me by the hand and then pulled both of us through the coolness of the carport, past the mannequin and rocks, and into the box-cluttered kitchen, where she poured glasses of Coca-Cola and put on an Elvis Presley record. I was not allowed to drink soda on a regular basis, but I didn’t say a word. Rather, I sat in complete awe of this woman whose purple wooden earrings swung back and forth as she talked. I envied the silent girl across from me.

Misty. On first meeting, I thought her name a cruel joke, as cruel as someone huge named Bitsy or Teeny. “What’s your name again, hon?” Mrs. Rhodes asked. Her hips moved back and forth in rhythm with “Heartbreak Hotel.” “Mary Katherine—but people call me Katie,” I said and then without thinking added, “My dad sometimes calls me Kitty.” It slipped, this nickname
my mother despised. “Kitty,” she said, and stared at me, smiling, while Misty gave me a dirty look. “I like that. I like the way it sounds, the same way I like Misty.”

“Right.” Misty finally spoke. Her voice was nasal and much deeper than I’d expected from someone with such pale skin. “I was named for a horse. And you were named for a cat.” Her deadpan expression brought Mrs. Rhodes over to her chair.