Ferris Beach (3 page)

“No, honey,” she squealed in laughter and threw her arms around Misty’s neck. “You know the story of how I thought of your name.” She turned to me briefly. “Misty is named for Themista Rose Allen, a young woman I never knew but just heard about, sort of a local legend where I’m from.” She pressed her cheek against Misty’s. “You weren’t named for the horse, even though I did think that was such a romantic sounding name, Misty of Chincoteague, only you were Misty of Ferris Beach.” Misty just stared down at the vanilla wafers and ladyfingers on the paper plate in front of her, her mouth tightened into a straight line. “Johnny Mathis must think it’s a romantic name, too; he named a song that.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you’re named for the Three Stooges,” Misty of Ferris Beach said, and paused with a vanilla wafer in hand. “Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello!” she said, in perfect Three Stooges rhythm, and she was beginning to smile now, as if this was a routine the two of them had played through many times before.

And then her mom, hand gently placed on Misty’s head, began singing,
Look at me, I’m as helpless
. . . “Oh yuk,” Misty Rhodes said and bit into a ladyfinger, leaving a ring of powdered sugar on her lips. “These cookies are pretty good,” she said. “They’re almost as good as the store-bought kind.” Then for the first time, I heard that laugh, shrill and hyena-like. I often thought it was like in the comma rule When in doubt do without; Misty’s version was When in doubt, laugh, and the louder the better.

“So what’s your brother’s name,” I asked. I could see him
through the window, there at the base of the ladder staring up at his father. He was a perfect blend of mother and father, dark hair and pale skin. He looked like he was probably two or three years older than us.

“Flicka,” Misty said, and again laughed that laugh. “Do you think he’s cute?” In the same way that Mrs. Rhodes asked her key-word questions, Misty asked the impossible-to-answer kind. If I said no, which was my impulse after having seen his thin pointed features and the blue veins visible in his cheek, then they would be insulted. If I said yes, then I was in for teasing or my own humiliation when they told him and he responded to whether or not he thought
I
was cute. I shrugged.

“Misty,” Mrs. Rhodes said, and smiled. “If you aren’t a card and a half. Don’t embarrass Kitty.” It sounded so odd for her to call me that, and I knew that I had made a terrible mistake in telling her about the nickname. “And I did not name the child Flicka even though I was tempted.” She turned to me, her eyes briefly lingering on my birthmark. “His name is Dean. James Dean Rhodes.”

“But we like to call him Flicka.”

“Now, cut that out, you.” Mrs. Rhodes swatted playfully at Misty. “Kitty’s not going to want to come back if you act this way.” She went to the kitchen window and rapped on the glass. “Dean? Dean?” she called until he ran over and pressed his face flat against the glass like a Pekingese. “Cookies?” I decided I’d leave while he was coming in, so I stood up.

“Is that a birthmark you have?” Misty asked, and leaned forward, her bare legs squeaking on the red linoleum seat of her chair.

“Misty!” Mrs. Rhodes stepped forward, hands on her hips, and I focused on the tiny gold chain around her ankle while I nodded, while James Dean Rhodes walked past us and opened the refrigerator.

“It’s just a question,” she said, more to her mother than to
me, and then reluctantly she reached out and tugged on the back of my T-shirt. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, and quietly pushed my chair away from the table to stand. “I need to go home.”

“Oh, I wish you’d stay,” her mother said. “Why, you haven’t even met Dean. Dean, this is Kitty from next door.”

“You can call me Katie,” I said, but he just shrugged and went back to drinking from a water jar that had his name stuck to the top with masking tape.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Misty continued, her face not showing any emotion at all. “I think it’s kind of neat.” She was trying way too hard by this time. “It’s sort of shaped like Italy, you know, like an old granny boot.”

“Misty.” Mrs. Rhodes’s face was as red as her husband’s, but something in what Misty had to say, though not my favorite thing to hear, had struck me. It did sort of look like Italy; she was completely honest and I found I liked that.

“I have some granny glasses,” she told me. “Want to go to my room and see?”

There was more in her room than I had ever seen, big paper flowers and fans and a stuffed bear that filled one whole corner. She had a chewing-gum-wrapper chain that reached all the way around her room, and it was made from only Clark’s Teaberry and Clove, making her whole room smell like those wax lips and whistles that we all bought at Halloween.

After demonstrating the Teaberry shuffle several times, making her little ceramic-dog collection rock on the top of her dresser, she showed me how to make a chain. She played “Hold On” by Herman’s Hermits on a record player she had right there in her room. Misty had also memorized every single word of “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and quoted it while I sat there on her bright orange-and-yellow swirled bedspread.

“I have a picture of Sgt. Barry Sadler,” she said, and opened a drawer, pulling out a picture of the singer. His little green beret
was cocked to one side. “My parents’ friend Gene was in the 82nd Airborne Division.” I wasn’t sure
exactly
what that meant, but I just nodded in agreement, acted impressed because clearly she was. “Gene says if he ever meets Sgt. Barry Sadler that he’ll get his autograph.” She could also sing “Secret Agent Man” by Johnny Rivers and did so while she twirled her baton over and under her extended arm, doing
the pancake
she called it.

And she did have some granny glasses, dark-green glass in rectangular wire frames; “Like a hippie,” she said, while rearranging her paper flowers in one of those melted and stretched-out Coke bottles. Like Annie Sullivan, I was thinking, wanting those glasses for my own.

“You can borrow them sometime,” she told me as she put the glasses back in their little plastic case. She unwrapped her last stick of Teaberry gum, bit half, and handed me the rest. “You can borrow them right now if you want.”

“It’s peacock blue,” I reported to my mother and Mrs. Poole, who sat in the kitchen waiting for my report, under the guise that they were planning the big Fourth of July celebration. They both looked so plain and somber compared to Mo Rhodes and her loud-colored pillows and sparkly wall hangings in Oriental designs. Our house looked so sparse and bare compared to the big paper fans and parasols that belonged to the Rhodes family, or to their ceramic table shaped like an elephant. “And they came from Ferris Beach.” I tried to say the place as if it meant nothing at all to me, as if I hadn’t spent thousands of hours thinking about that one time I had been there, but all it took was the set of my mother’s chin to make my cheeks grow hot.

“I find that hard to believe,” Mrs. Poole said. “I certainly don’t visit the place but certainly I am familiar with most of the names dwelling there.” I wanted to say that names don’t dwell, people do. “Mr. Poole and I used to take the train and spend a long weekend there every fall. Of course, that was back before you
moved here, back when Ferris Beach was a quaint little fishing village and not,” she paused, looked at my mother and shook her head, “well, not like it is now.” Mr. Poole had been dead for my whole life and all I knew of him was what I had overheard my father say that other people in the town had said: that he had a lot of money, was a powerful man politically, and no one knew why and how he had managed to marry and live with Theresa Poole all those years.

“Misty liked Ferris Beach,” I said, watching my mama’s back stiffen. “She’s my age and has an older brother. Mrs. Rhodes grew up here in town. She moved to Ferris Beach when she married Mr. Rhodes, who was from around there.”

“Hush,” Mrs. Poole said. “Then you know I’ll know who she is. What was her maiden name?” I shrugged, still thinking about all those boxes they had to unpack and trying to imagine what was in them. “What’s her first name?”

“Mo,” I said, tempted to do the hello hello hello, just as Misty had done, only my mama and Mrs. Poole wouldn’t have gotten it, a waste of perfectly good breath. “I think her whole name’s Ramona.”

“Ramona.” Mrs. Poole sat up straighter, her finger in the air like she was about to make an important announcement. “Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Her father kept the horse stable down near the river.”

“I know she likes horses,” I said.

“Oh, of course.” Mrs. Poole raised one eyebrow, her face pokerlike. “I do indeed recall that family, the Wileys. Yes, Mo Wiley. She is much younger than us but I do remember her.” I wondered why Mama let Mrs. Poole carry on with that “us” when Mrs. Poole must’ve been at least fifteen years older. Mama poured her another cup of coffee, no sugar no cream. “She was riding horses when she was just a teeny little thing. I used to see her over in the pasture where the highway is.” Mrs. Poole pushed away the ashtray and sipped her coffee with her pinkie hooked;
that awful fuchsia lipstick of hers smeared on the cup. “But they were not
her
horses,” she said with authority. “They belonged to the boarders, who did not really like a seven-year-old child exercising their horses.” She looked at me when she said this, as if to say that nobody liked children—period. “The Wileys did not have a pot to—” She paused, still staring at me.

“Pee in,” I added, to which my mother raised a stiff eyebrow.

“Nor a window out of which to throw it.” Mrs. Poole sat back and relaxed by letting her hands rest on the table. She could not stand to end a sentence with a preposition.

“I wonder if Mrs. Rhodes knows Angela?” I asked boldly, the excitement of the time I had just spent at Misty’s lingering with me. My mother looked up as if in slow motion. Mrs. Poole was leaning forward to hear my mother’s response.

“I wouldn’t know,” Mama said. “She might.”

“Now, who is Angela?” Mrs. Poole was still leaning forward. “Not your sister. No, you don’t have a sister. Is Angela Fred’s sister?” Mrs. Poole was rifling through her purse for a cigarette.

“Niece.”

“She doesn’t visit very often.”

“Hardly ever,” Mama said, her voice falling into its original sharpness, her pronunciation like a harsh honk of a goose. She turned to me then. “Kate, why don’t you run tell the Rhodeses about the Fourth of July picnic and how the whole town comes. Tell Mrs. Rhodes if she has any questions I am happy to answer them.”

“Find out what all those rocks are for,” Mrs. Poole called after me, and then I heard her continue talking to my mother. “I just can’t imagine what all those rocks are for. And that little wooden structure like something of the Orient. What could that be for? You know I don’t think much of the Japanese, haven’t since the war. Mr. Poole was in the Pacific, you know, purple heart and various other citations.”

My mother’s steady flow of yesses and uh huhs were like little
commas punctuating all that Mrs. Poole had to say. Every now and then, my mother smoked a cigarette—Mrs. Poole’s lengthy tales seemed to trigger the desire—though she would never have let my father know; it was her mission to monitor his heart, to get him to give up his three-pack-a-day habit. Her lectures would be meaningless if he caught her in the act. She breathed in and out heavily, emitting a stream of smoke, while nodding along with Mrs. Poole’s words. “I have Mr. Poole’s machete and you must’ve seen it.” Yes. “Yes, hanging there by the fireplace. He wrote every day from the Pacific. He said, ‘I killed a Jap yesterday.’ Just like that: ? killed a Jap.’ You know Mr. Poole was quite the man’s man.” Uh huh “Yes, hunt, fish, win citations for bravery, you name it. He said, Theresa, don’t you
ever
buy anything made in Japan, which of course I wouldn’t have even thought of doing. Cheap. I don’t go for cheap.”

By the end of that first week, Mrs. Poole stood on her front porch and watched Mo Rhodes spread rocks all over the lawn, digging up what little bit of grass had begun to grow. She dug a little goldfish pond, in the middle of which stood her fish statue, a fat, friendly-looking fish in sandstone, and she planted a big clump of pussy willows out near the street. “Oh God, oh God,” I heard Mrs. Poole mumbling, her head shaking from side to side. The little pagoda was the mailbox and in a perfect line from top to bottom said: Rhodes, 202 Wilkins Road. “Oh God, oh God,” she said. “Do let a strong wind come and carry it all off, every pebble you might chance to find. Please just do that for me. Please just answer this one very small prayer and I’ll never ask for anything else.”

Ferris Beach, just by its very name, had always made me imagine huge Ferris wheels and strings of blinking lights, and cotton candy whipped and spun around a paper cone like I had seen at the small carnivals that passed through town from time to time. My father had grown up just a few miles from there, and he talked about it often, the ocean, his father’s boat, the sea gulls circling overhead. I was five the day he took me there, and what I remembered most was the excitement of it all, a surprise, a secret, my mother thinking that we had gone to Clemmonsville to look at new cars. My bathing suit was rolled up with his in a bath towel on the backseat.

“You’re going to meet your cousin, too,” he said, turning his head to grin at me. “She’s gonna love you.” He emphasized
love
, laughed as he twisted the radio knob up and down. All we could pick up was the faint static of the Clemmonsville station.

Ferris Beach was nothing as I had expected; there wasn’t even an amusement park there, just a pier and lots of bait-and-tackle shops, no motel or tall buildings like in Clemmonsville, just a trailer park and rows of small pastel houses, much like that stretch behind our backyard. Still, I stopped asking to see amazing Ferris wheels when I began to smell the salt breeze and held my hand out the car window to feel the damp mist that seemed to hang in the air and sparkle like a spider web.

“You’re about to see the ocean,” he said as we crested the old wooden drawbridge, and sure enough, when we came down the hill, I saw green water, smooth as glass way out where it met with the sky, and rolling and cresting and breaking up near the sand. I could not take it all in fast enough, and when we finally got to where we could park and get out, I ran out onto the sand. I kept checking to make sure my father was still there and he was, squatted by a dune, rolling up his trousers. I waited and then the two of us, holding hands, stepped into the water, the waves breaking on our ankles and then on my legs. He lifted me each time a big wave threatened to hit me above the waist—and then I saw Angela. Watching her come down the dune was almost like seeing a movie in slow-motion, seeing every step of her long bare legs, her feet sinking into the hot loose sand. My dad’s hand left my shoulder and flew up in a wave, back and forth, back and forth, like a flag heralding the beginning of a parade. She was beautiful there on top of the dune.