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.”
Two
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.
“Angela, Angela,” he said over and over, his voice muffled in her thick hair. He pushed her back and looked at her, so young-looking and glamorous in her two-piece sparkly gold suit that hit right below her navel.
“And you”—Angela stepped back from my father and stared at me—“Mary Katherine Gates. I’m so glad to finally meet you.” She squatted down, a rush of her scent coming to me with the ocean air, perfume or shampoo like gardenias. She studied me carefully, her eyes lingering on my cheek as I reached up to hold it. “Oh, don’t hide your pretty little face,” she whispered, and took my hand. Her lips were coated in a pale pink frost like cotton candy. “She looks like a Burns,” Angela said, and twisted her hand round and round the brightly colored beads she wore, their turquoise blue a perfect match to the terry cloth coverup and the barefoot strapped sandals she carried. “See the copper in her hair?” Angela lifted a strand of my hair, and I strained to see it as well. “And those fine full lips.” She pinched my cheeks in like a fish face and then lifted her fingers to her own mouth. “Perfect for doing this,” she said, and played her lips up and down while humming like a funny musical instrument or underwater sounds. “And Freddie,” she said, and looked up, my dad’s shadow falling over her like a net, “you are a sight for sore eyes.” She blinked hard several times. Her lashes, separated and painted black, had left small brush strokes just below her thin arched brows.
“Yes,” he whispered, and reached out to touch the strand of hair which fell near her eye. “So are you.”
“How’s the general?” she asked and laughed, her question confusing me until my father said, “Cleva’s fine. You know she really has missed you.”
“Yeah, right.” She waved a hand. “I’ll fry like a french fry if I don’t put on some lotion.” She leaned in close to me, and again I got a deep breath of her gardenia smell, as rich and sweet as our backyard in the early summer.
We sat on her quilt while my dad walked up and over the dunes to go buy some milk for my lunch. She scooped the sand and uncovered a bed of coquinas, their polished, colorful shells seen briefly before they began to dig their way into hiding; she placed one, purple and white, into my palm, and then one by one curled my fingers down around it. “Don’t say I never gave you anything,” she said, and threw back her head laughing, her tongue stained deep red from the wine, her teeth as white as the shells that glistened with each wave. Her hand was cool, lightly touching my cheek as if it were a burn or a tear, something painful.
When we left Ferris Beach, she was still sitting there, her hands stretched out behind her, knees bent, head thrown back like in a cover-girl photo. The sun was low in the sky, heavy orange light that made even the most run-down of the bait shops appear gold-flecked and misty, like in a dream.
“I’m meeting someone,” she had said when we left her there.
“A man?” my father asked, and she turned her face toward the ocean, leaving us to stare at her profile, and at her beauty mark, a round dark mole just above her lip.
“Always the big uncle now, aren’t you?” she asked, laughing softly, her own voice drowned out by a circling gull. “I’m a big girl now, Freddie. Cleva will tell you.” She reached out and moved her hand like a crab on the sand to his foot. “I’m a lot older than I look.”
“So am I,” I said as a way to rejoin their twosome, perhaps to get her to crab her soft hand with those long, glazed nails my way, and they both laughed.
“I just turned twenty-two, remember?” she asked, twisting a strand of her hair round and round her fingers. “I’m legal, dear uncle, white, single, the works.”
“Well,” my father said as he stared out at the ocean, then took a deep breath. “I’m just about always at the college.”
“Always?” she asked, laughed again, little lines gathering around the corners of her eyes.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She waved her hand and then reached and took hold of his. “Monday through Friday. I’ll be in touch.” She nodded and then turned to me. “And I hope you
will keep in touch, too.” She pinched my nose lightly and then let her hand linger near my cheek.
“You can touch it again,” I told her. “It doesn’t hurt.” But she just smiled and then let her hand drop to the sand, her glazed nails disappearing in the shiny white grains. “Leave, leave,” she said, waving her hands again. “You two are going to be in big trouble with you know who if you’re late for supper.”
When we got to the top of the dunes, my father turned to look back and she was still there, her arm raised and waving to a man on the beach; I couldn’t tell much about the man from that distance, only that he looked very tan and wore a cap pulled low on his forehead. He moved towards her like in those commercials that switch to slow-motion. I walked backwards up the huge dune, expecting her to turn and wave one last time. “Take one more look at the ocean, Kitty,” my father said, but he was not watching the ocean. He was watching Angela, who by then had her head leaned against that man’s shoulder as he hugged her close.
“Who was that man?” I asked.
“I guess a friend of hers.” He pushed me towards the dunes and the bathhouse where I had left my clothes, both of us turning to wave once more but she wasn’t looking. My father was silent as he drove, smoking one cigarette after another, checking his watch again and again. The sun was so low that I could stare right at it without hurting my eyes, and we drove toward the orange light, weaving along the small bumpy highway that cut through an empty stretch of marshland.
When we got home Mama was out on the front porch, her hands in the pocket of her gardening jacket. Her hair, pulled and pinned and sprayed into place, was hidden under a multicolored scarf tied at the back of her neck. “I was getting worried!” she called out. Her cheeks were flushed with color. “Supper’s about ready.” She rearranged the clay pots of geraniums on the porch rail as we walked up. “I was beginning to think you’d left me.” She laughed a quick laugh, her eyes never leaving his face.
“We had a great time,” he said. “I drove the new Buick they had. Boy, is she a beaut.”
“Must’ve been a convertible.” She put her fingertip on my nose and pressed lightly, then turned the collar of my blouse upright, slipping the neck to one side; her fingers felt cool to my hot shoulder as she touched the line of white where my bathing suit had been. “Yes, some convertible at that,” she whispered, glanced at him once and then turned away. “C’mon, Katie, I think a nice lukewarm bath and some Jergen’s lotion will feel real good to your sunburn.”
“Well, sure, she got some sun. We pass right by the turn to Merriman Lake on the way to Clemmonsville. You know that. Went for a swim after we finished car shopping.”
“At the lake?” Now she looked at me, her eyes steady, and I nodded just as he had done, and then in no time he had his arm around her and had coaxed her into a laugh by demonstrating the difference between a proper and an improper fraction. Proper, he said, and guided her onto the sofa, placed me up on her lap. Improper, he said and placed me on the center cushion, motioned for her to sit on me.
But later, when I was stretched out on a cool sheet, nearly asleep, and Mama’s hand was rubbing lotion into my back, I mentioned the waves rolling and rolling and the little animals that dug their own secret hiding places. With my eyes closed, I could still feel the movement of the sea, the surge and pull as I stood at the edge while my father and Angela waved to me from the quilt where they sat side by side. Like the waves and the energy I had felt on that shore, I could not contain myself.
“You went to Ferris Beach, didn’t you?” The movement of her hand never stopped and I just nodded. “Did you like it?”
I nodded, my eyes so heavy I found it difficult to focus on the roses of my wallpaper.
“Did you like . . .” Her voice slipped off like into a well and there was a long pause. I could hear her breath, a deep inhale. “Did you like your cousin?”
“Yes.” I dozed then, flowing in and out as if I were riding a wave, her hand on my back, her lips brushing my cheek, the soft yellow glow of the ruffly pin-up lamp above my bed.
After that night, our trip was never mentioned again. The only time I heard Angela’s name for a long time after was late at night when I lay in bed and climbed the roses on my wallpaper, up and down, as their voices carried through the vents. He said, You aren’t her mother, Cleva, and she replied, But I wanted to be.
Maybe it was on one of those nights, when I heard their voices muffled and unintelligible, that I came up with the Helen Keller game, the prelude to all those afternoons I spent blindfolded in my room as I remembered Angela and that day at the beach. I would lock the bedroom door, blindfold myself, and then I would begin, pacing off the familiar spaces of my own room. It was amazing how quickly I became disoriented, my hands stretched out, expecting to find the chenille bedspread, to touch its rough nubby knots, and striking only air. It seemed the more I tried to find my way, the harder it became, the harder to breathe, like the panic that comes suddenly in deep water. I would end up ripping the blindfold from my face, blinking back the daylight, always surprised by the softness of my room, with its the pink floral wallpaper and the stuffed toys on the window seat. When I could comfortably make my way without panic, I added the earplugs I had found in my mother’s medicine chest. “Katie? Katie, what are you doing up there?” my mother called with each bump and stumble, her voice faint like the distant buzzing of a fly. Helen could not have even heard that. Helen could not have answered had she wanted to. The frustration of it all was overwhelming and left me feeling dizzy and tired.
“Were you playing Helen Keller again?” Mama asked me at supper one night. My father turned his head to one side and coughed a laugh into his linen napkin. “I just don’t think it’s healthy,” she continued. “I don’t think it’s good to close yourself up in a room and pretend to be blind. My goodness.” She brushed a strand of hair, damp from the heat of the kitchen, back from her face. “For one thing, it’s making light, making a game out of a horrible thing. What if you were blind. Imagine that.”
“Sounds to me like that’s what she’s been doing,” my father said, got up and walked over to the buffet where he kept his scotch in a cut-glass decanter. “Lots of response to my editorial the paper published about how we need a traffic light over near the junior high school.” I knew he was trying to change the subject, to get me off the hook. I wanted to tell her that it was her very own words, her very own—“What if YOU were this way or that way or the other way, then YOU would realize that a little birthmark is NOT the end of the world”—that had gotten me imagining Helen’s life in the first place.
Mama let him change the subject, praising his editorial, saying how everybody, even Mrs. Poole, said he was the best freelance writer that paper had ever seen. He continued talking through dinner about the history of the stoplight. “They cut this from the article,” he said, wiping his mouth, his eyes focused on the checks in the tablecloth as if he were counting them. “I thought it was the best part, too. You see, the stoplight was invented by a man named Garret Morgan. Now think. Just think how many lives he has saved since the invention.”
“Am I supposed to guess a number?” Mama asked, because nine times out often he did have an answer for what sounded like hypothetical questions.
“No, just want you to think,” he said. “To get a feel for the importance of this man. He also invented the gas inhalator. Again, all those lives saved.”
“And?” My mother leaned forward, waiting impatiently for him to loop back around to his story.
“Well, when people found out he was black, they cancelled their orders for the masks.” His fingers traced the checked lines on either side of his plate. “He had to get a white man to sell his invention, but they cut that from the article. I said it was a terrible thing, right up there with what happened to Bessie Smith.” I asked who she was, and then we were off and running on a brand new tangent. “What kind of father am I that you don’t know Bessie Smith?” he asked repeatedly. “I’m a failure,
a complete failure.”
“Not complete,” she said, and laughed, the conversation once again winding back to all the compliments she received about him, what a fine teacher he was, and so on.
I thought she had forgotten the whole Keller episode, but when I went to bed that night, she came into my room and read me a poem called “Lord Forgive Me When I Whine,” which was about a person walking around and feeling sorry for himself until he passed a crippled person, a blind person, deaf and so on, which made him feel small and stupid and insignificant to have ever felt sorry for himself when he had legs and eyes and ears. Downstairs Bessie Smith sang “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” full blast. I think what Mama really wanted to say was something like Be careful what you wish or be careful what you say because things come true. If you cross your eyes, they’re liable to stick and stay that way forever.
Merle Hucks could flip his eyelids inside out, and that’s what I thought about when Mama left the room. He would flip them inside out and then have blood-red eyelids like little caps where his eyes should’ve been. “What’ll you do if they stick like that, mister?” our third-grade teacher had asked him, while R.W. Quincy was up and running circles around the classroom.
“Get a job at the fair.” Merle turned and looked right at her with his eyes flipped that way. “Big money in eyelids. Buy all the liquor and women I want.”
After my mother read “Lord Forgive Me When I Whine,” I confined my Helen play to nighttime when I was certain she was in bed; I felt my way about the room until I stopped before the window that faced the cemetery. If I could guess the slant of the moon on those tall iron gates before looking, then I owed myself a quarter. I never told anyone else about the Helen Keller game, not even Misty. More and more, the game took place in my mind, like a thought or a silent prayer.
I kept a small transistor under my pillow and listened to a station in Fort Wayne, Indiana; it was as far as I could get from home without static, and I tried to imagine the invisible lines connecting me, millions of threads stretched over rooftops, crisscrossed with television antennae that rotated when the station was turned. Fort Wayne, Indiana, was far far away but Petula Clark sounded just the same.
Ferris Beach Page 3