Ferris Beach

by Jill McCorkle

  “Let go,” I said, feeling my voice finally surfacing. “Let go.” I was on the verge of screaming when he looked up, his eyes tracing a line from my left cheek to my neck and back again; he let go and stepped away. I walked as fast as I could, and when I hit the bright sunlight, he began throwing the ball again, the dull thud rhythmically finding its way into my steps as I crossed the street to my own house. The shade of the porch was a relief, but I didn’t feel that I could really breathe until I got inside, the hardwood of our foyer cool against my feet, gardenia blossoms floating in a silver bowl on the table by the door, my face and neck flushed a deep splotchy red when I looked at myself there in the hall tree. I waited until my legs felt sturdy again before going to the kitchen, where my mother was washing mint leaves for the iced tea and putting up tomatoes while Mrs. Poole sat at our kitchen table talking about the upcoming Country Day Fair hosted by the Junior League. I knew she was really there in hopes of learning a little bit of news.

  “Well?” Mrs. Poole asked, her lipstick marking all but one of the cigarette butts in the crystal ashtray. I opened the refrigerator and looked in, feeling the cool air on my face and legs. “Is she with that highway patrolman who is supposed to be a friend of theirs?”

  “I don’t know.” I stood with the water pitcher in my hand, still unable to believe that Mo Rhodes had left, unable to believe what Dean had just done to me. Mo’s face was in my mind, her laugh; but more than that, I couldn’t help but try and imagine what the scene looked like at her end of the phone. Was she with Gene Files? Was she sitting in some strange hotel on a strange bedspread in some familiar outfit that smelled like her house, the honeysuckle sachets that she kept in her bedroom drawers? Was she wearing the gauzy embroidered blouse she had worn to the fireworks, or had she slipped off with her brightly striped terry cloth caftan that she wore every morning while drinking coffee and listening to the radio? Had she packed her clothes and hidden them somewhere, behind a bush, in the laundry hamper under the quilts and fried chicken? My mind raced as I stared into the refrigerator, the cool air feeling so good to my face where Dean had pressed his sticky mouth and pulled in on my skin like he meant to hurt me.

  “Honey, close the door now,” Mama said, and she looked older to me, wearing a starched white apron like you might see on a maid in a swanky restaurant. Overnight she seemed so much older, while Mrs. Theresa Poole was ancient-looking, ringed in her own cigarette smoke.

  “What kind of woman leaves her family?” Mrs. Poole asked, and looked at my mother.

  “She’s coming back.” I blurted the words without thinking, leaving out all the parts I knew to be true, that she was coming to bring Buddy home, that she had in fact left her family for her best friend’s husband, a man with great big hairy arms and a gun strapped to his waist.

  I spent most of the afternoon in the upstairs hallway, sitting on the little window seat there in the dormer and watching Misty’s house, waiting for Mo to get home. I watched the approach of a summer storm, the brisk wind, and then suddenly the sky was black, and tree limbs thrashed about. I saw Misty standing barefooted in their carport, lightning in the distance, dark clouds growing and swirling as she leaned against one of the wrought-iron posts. Her hair was blowing wildly, orange against the dark sky, while her dad stood leaning from the door and motioning her to come in. “Mother!” she screamed. “Mother!” Mrs. Poole was coming from her car, umbrella opened to the beginning drops of rain, and she also turned to watch Misty. “Mother!” I heard her scream over and over. We were all waiting, behind our doors or from windows above, watching and waiting.

  Now it was night, and the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, the roads still steaming. I wanted to call Misty but was afraid of Dean answering the phone; I still could not shake the odd feeling that came to me when I thought of his damp sour mouth on my face, his wiry body pressed against me, so close I could smell the detergent in his cotton T-shirt. She finally called me, but after two minutes her dad told her to get off; he was afraid Mo might try to call him again. “I saw you sitting in your window,” she said hurriedly, and laughed. “Man, oh man, did I put Mrs. Poole in a jerk.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to spy like that.” I waited but she made no response. “Misty?”

  “I don’t care,” she said hurriedly. “What do I care?”

  It had been over an hour since a car had turned onto our street, so I finally gave up and went to my room. I stood in the doorway with my eyes closed and felt my way slowly, step by step over to the window where I could feel dampness and a fine whistle of air around the old panes of glass. My mother took great pride in the distortion of some of our windows; it meant they were the originals with all their impurities, the waves and tiny pinhead bubbles signs of imperfection. “Of course this is nothing like what I showed you in Boston,” she had said numerous times. Besides visiting cemeteries, we had spent a lot of time walking Beacon Hill, up Chestnut Street to see the amethyst window panes, the “treasured accident” of too much manganese in the glass shipped from London. It puzzled me, the differences made in the perfect and the imperfect, how a flawed coin or piece of glass becomes more valuable. I felt the window with my fingertips, still intrigued by my dad’s explanation of how glass is a liquid and how over the years it runs, slowly, a movement hidden from sight or touch. It was possible that the glass in my window had been running, oozing that slow race, since the 1920s. There were windows downstairs that had been sliding downwards since the Wilkinses were in this house. Thinking of them, as I stood before the window that overlooked their resting place, made me shudder, so I turned and felt my way to the bed. My eyes were still closed as I settled under the sheet and spread. Even in the summer, I had to have the spread; the sheet did not weigh enough to make me feel protected.

  I fell asleep fighting the impulse to imagine Mo in the burly arms of Gene Files, to think of Dean as he pinned me against the wall of their carport. I did not want to know what I looked like at that moment; I did not want to see my own look of horror and fear, my impurity. And yet those are the photos that win prizes, those moments of torture and pain, those moments when human faces, like Mr. Rhodes’, split to reveal the deepest, darkest fears.

  I didn’t want to think of my own impurities; I didn’t want to think of Mo Rhodes kissing that man, with all that hardware swinging from his belt. I concentrated on the street noise as a means of escape; with my eyes closed I tried to measure the distance of the coming and going of the cars on the interstate. I kept expecting to hear a car door slam, and that would be my cue to wake and run to the window. The cars were coming and going, rounding the turn there at the city limits, under the overpass bridge, where a billboard boasted the cheapest cigarettes in a hundred-mile radius, past the Texaco station and the new riding stables, the Stuckey’s restaurant which Mrs. Poole said was way overpriced for the service. I imagined myself in a car driving it all, around and around, every square inch until I felt I could have done it blindfolded.

  I woke to the rhythmic creak of our front porch swing, and when I opened my eyes it was gray out the window. A slight breeze lifted the white curtains like a tired ghost. I ran into the hall and down the stairs, certain it was Misty there. The boards of the porch were cool and damp beneath my bare feet, and before I even turned to answer her hushed whisper of my name, I glanced across the street at her house. All the lights were on inside, illuminating her dad, who stood, bare chested and in his pajama pants, in front of the picture window, with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Dean was in the carport, the yellow light framing his body as he sat there waving a golf club back and forth.

  I knew before even looking over at our swing that something was not right. Misty was in her yellow seersucker pajamas, barefooted, her hair pulled straight back and held down with a pink barrette. She was holding Oliver on her lap and stroking his back rhythmically, as he arched and stretched against her hand.

  “Misty?” I asked, and stepped toward her. “
What are you doing?” A car I didn’t recognize pulled up and stopped in front of their house, and after a few minutes a man and a woman got out.

  “My mother is dead,” she whispered, and my whole body went cold like ice water rushing over me. “And Buddy.” I just stood and watched her, unable to move, every creak and pull of the swing chains causing my chest to tighten and ache. “They wrecked.” Her whisper was a monotone like you might use to tell a ghost story or a joke, leading up to a “boo” or a punchline, but instead her words just stopped and lingered there. I hadn’t noticed Dean coming over, and I jumped with the sudden sound of his voice.

  “Aunt Edith and Uncle Ray are here,” he said, not looking at me at all. “Daddy said to come home right now.”

  Misty got up without saying another word and followed him across the street and up to their front door, where now in the picture window I could see this woman, Aunt Edith, Mr. Rhodes’s sister, with her arms wrapped around his waist, her cheek pressed against his thin stark chest. They stood there as I went to sit where Misty had been, her seat still warm, Oliver still waiting, in hopes of another rub. I could barely see over the tips of the lagustrum bushes and into their picture window, where Uncle Ray stood with his arm around Misty. She looked so pale, so much smaller as she stood there beside him. The whole lot froze like the end of a play, and then Aunt Edith pulled the drapes, leaving me to only imagine what was going on behind them. It had not registered with me yet. I could not believe that Misty had just been here, this very seat; it was as if I had dreamed it all until our phone rang and then I knew it was truth. It was as if I could sit and watch the whole town wake and respond to the news—cake pans pulled from the pantry, chickens frying, florist trucks up and down our street. By noon the wreath on their door was already drooping in the heat, and everyone knew the whole story.

  Ten

  When Mo died I felt she took with her some knowledge of my own life. There was a look of recognition the time Angela met her face to face in the front yard; there was a moment when the two stood there, mouths about to drop open in an “Oh, it’s you” but then a change of heart, a thought that it’s better not to speak. I imagined that Mo knew the whole story, knew all about Angela’s young marriage. I imagined that Mo had been wanting to sit down and tell me the whole story, that she had been waiting for just the right time.

  I thought of it all, only to feel guilty for thinking of myself while Misty lay beside me, her eyes red and swollen, her breath restless as she turned from side to side, periodically getting up to look from my front window to her own house. “He’s gone to bed now,” she had reported with her last look, sighing as if relieved. The hands on my clock glowed ten after two.

  It had not fully registered with any of us, and still didn’t the next day when Misty was rummaging through her mother’s drawers in search of a handkerchief to take to the funeral. I was over there, but the impulse to turn and run was almost more than I could stand. Mr. Rhodes was in Buddy’s room, just sitting in the rocking chair with a stuffed turtle on his lap. He stared at the turtle and passed it gingerly from hand to hand as if it were made of glass. I was in the hall, waiting for something to happen, knowing that something had to happen. The only saving grace was that Misty’s Aunt Edith was there to tell everyone what to do.

  “What do you think?” Misty called out, and when I walked into her mother’s room, where the bed was carefully made, she was standing in front of the full-length mirror with a multicolor scarf tied around her forehead. “Do I look like Rhoda on ‘Mary Tyler Moore’?” she asked, and when I shook my head no, she began crying again.

  “Stop it.” Dean burst into the room, pushing me to the side and yanking Misty by the arm, twisting until her skin turned pink under his grip. “I’m sick of you acting this way. Daddy is like a zombie, and you’re a basket case. Just stop. Stop!” He screamed and slapped her face with his open palm. Then he stood there and waited while she held her cheek and slowly sat up, eyes wide and empty. “It’s time to go. See if you can get him to come out now.” He nodded his head toward the nursery and then headed for the door. I stepped to the side to let him pass, but he stopped right in front of me. “What are you looking at?” he asked, getting right in my face. “You’re in the way over here.” He looked me up and down and then stepped back. “I ought to slap your face, too. It’d be good to make your cheeks match for a change.” Instinctively my hand went back to its old position of covering, and had it not been for the sight of Misty leading her dad like a blind puppy from the room, I probably would have left and never come back.

  It seemed the whole town was in the church, where it was standing room only. In just a few hours there would be a crowd in the small neighboring town where Gene and Betty Files lived. For the thirty-odd hours that Mo Rhodes was out on the highway with her lover, both running away, deserting homes, spouses, children, for those hours, they were the talk at every table, on every phone—cheap and dirty and hussy and whore, low and lousy and thoughtless and cruel, stupid and hellhound and not worth the breath in their bodies. And then forty-eight hours later it was as if nothing had happened: Mo Rhodes had made a mistake and was on her way home. She was coming home. All the people who just one day earlier had voiced shock and disgust were now talking about the last time they saw her, about which recipes they had in her energetic scrawl with which humorous instruction. And didn’t she look just like a young Liz Taylor? Wasn’t she such a beautiful woman? Wasn’t it the most tragic loss this town had seen? A woman and her baby? And there was no mention of Uncle Gene except to say “all” died, “both” cars. There was no mention of the receipt from the Motor Lodge, where only one room was rented, no mention of the letters neatly tucked away in the zippered part of her purse. It was almost as if the town had killed her; hatred and accusations and condemnations had riddled her name like bullets just the day before, and yet, now that she was no longer alive, no one would voice an opinion, no one would say that what she had done was right or wrong. There was such a difference in condemning the dead and condemning the living, though I failed to grasp what it was.

  I was at the front of the church, in a pew behind Misty and her family. I concentrated on the stained-glass window so that I would not picture Mo sitting alone on that same quilt we had sunbathed on just the week before when she sprawled out beside us and told story after story of her own adolescence—the time she slapped a boy’s face for trying to kiss her, the time she won a dance contest down at Myrtle Beach, the time she won a blue ribbon in a horse show just because the judges, all male, liked the outfit she was wearing. I had waited that day for my story to be told next, all the secrets that she knew about my family, but instead she talked about the Fourth of July and how she knew a boy while growing up who was blinded by a faulty Roman candle, talked about how fireworks were dangerous and that we should always be very, very careful.

  She was alone that night as the Roman candles lit up the sky, alone on the quilt just like Angela was years before as my father and I walked over the sand dune and left her there on Ferris Beach. Like Mo, Angela had been waiting for a man to come for her. Was a man so important that she would sacrifice her children—her life? Was she even thinking of what would happen in a day or week or year? Was she really coming home to stay like everyone now believed—a belief designed to preserve whatever self-respect Mr. Rhodes might have left? And why wasn’t she very, very careful, why didn’t she tell him to be very, very careful. I stared at the colored glass, at Jesus with his pure solemn face, hands outstretched to the flock of lambs, always ready to take them in while the afternoon light came through the reds and blues and yellows. I could not bear to look at Buddy’s coffin, no bigger than a little foot locker. Suffer the little children to come unto me. But please don’t let them suffer.

  It seemed the service took forever and the strained silence remained long after the last amen, long after the chords of organ music ended; then finally we were out the door and heading for the final ride to the cemetery, the new one
outside the city limits. “A blessing,” my mother had said, “that there weren’t spaces left in Whispering Pines, that Thomas would not have to pass by her grave every day.”

  It was when I was getting into the car that I thought I saw Angela, a flash of auburn hair and a black silky dress, a man I did not recognize, a car I’d never seen. I looked around throughout the graveside service but I didn’t see her or that car again. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that it was her, and the more it reminded me that the one person who could have revealed any truth to me, or would, rather, was there in front of me, her life ended for the sake of one lousy man. And here she was in the family plot, and one day Mr. Rhodes would be beside her and any passerby would look at them there side by side—husband and wife—when the truth was that had she lived, she would have been far, far away from here; she would have been in Atlanta just as they had planned.