Ferris Beach

by Jill McCorkle

  “I hear you,” she said.

  “Yes, they reminded me of you, these canna lilies.” He grinned at her and then began plotting how he’d plant them. “I decided to go for the bright red ones. Come July they’ll be six feet high.”

  “Thomas Clayton was all right,” Mrs. Poole was saying, “though he could be hard to get along with.” We both knew that Mrs. Poole had never quite gotten over the “Bo Poole School” comment.

  “I thought he was a fine man,” Mama said, and turned back to her orchid catalogue, causing Mrs. Poole to ask why on earth she would want to grow orchids, and why, why, why was she letting my father plant canna lilies. She spat the name as if it were poison, probably sorry that she had not thought of the fast tall hedge herself. My mother was watching him like a hawk, noting every time he stopped working and stood there mopping his flushed face. In her hand she held a letter addressed to him in Angela’s tiny printed letters, the return address simply the Ferris Beach Post Office. The last time my father had talked to her, he had suggested to us that maybe all was not perfect in paradise, that he couldn’t understand how she had the lousy luck and poor misfortune to keep winding up with men who changed like chameleons as soon as the marriage vows were spoken. “I guess they just learn they can take advantage of someone like Angela, you know, because she’s so trusting and generous.”

  My mother opened her mouth, one eyebrow raised sharply, and then as if having a second thought, swallowed, spoke softly. “Do you think that maybe she fits into the pattern? Maybe the men don’t change but are all just alike.”

  “What? You mean you think she chooses this?” he asked. “You think she asks for it? Only a fool would ask for such.” And she just looked at him, eyebrows raised as if to say, / rest my case, but then again, with a change of heart, said, “I think I see what you’re saying.” I had seen my mother with several self-help books recently, and I knew it was a struggle for her to practice these bits of positive thinking. “What I’m hearing from you is that Angela is being taken advantage of. You’re suggesting that Angela keeps giving people chance after chance and the benefit of every doubt there may be, and they all just keep slapping her down, poor thing.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Now she was watching as he knelt there in his clean white shirt and planted bulb after bulb. Mrs. Poole was tapping a cigarette on the edge of the table, still declaring her distaste for the flowers. “I love canna lilies,” my mother finally said, a fierce expression on her face as she turned in her chair. “There’s nothing on this earth that I love more than a big bed of bright red canna lilies.”

  “Well, I never knew you felt so strongly.” Mrs. Poole lit her cigarette and breathed in, one eye twitching slighdy, a tick she’d recently acquired to replace the memory she was beginning to lose. “Canna lilies, caladiums, it’s nothing to get miffed over.”

  “And I hate caladiums,” my mother said, folding the letter over in her hand. “I had some once and I hated the way I had to dig them up and store them year after year after year.”

  “Well, why did you replant them?” Mrs. Poole was asking. “There’s no reason to get hostile, to berate a poor little plant just for growing when you’re the one who planted it. You’ll have to dig up those cannas just the same way.”

  “It’s not always that easy,” my mother said. “You can’t always just dig up what bothers you. You dig it up here and it jumps up over there, doubling and tripling and spreading like a virus.”

  “Are we talking about the same thing, Cleva?” Mrs. Poole crushed out her cigarette and lit another. She had begun smoking only half of her cigarettes, convinced that the tar and bad stuff were in the second half. “I thought we were talking about canna lilies and caladiums.”

  My mother turned away from the window and looked at Mrs. Poole, studied her a full long minute before slipping Angela’s letter under a magazine and saying, “I thought we were talking about kudzu and bamboo and wisteria and things that are hard to control, things that take over if you let them and choke everything in sight.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Poole sat forward, elbows on the table as she narrowed her eyes. “I think one of us got way off track.”

  Twenty-three

  Much to everyone’s relief, Misty made majorette try-outs that spring, and I spent many hours counting off marches as she practiced her routines. It seemed she had grown half a foot in the past year and now was much thinner, her legs long and shapely as she kicked and marched. Her hair was long and Sally Jean had taught her how to French-braid it; they had spent one evening streaking it with Sun-In, just as Angela had recommended almost two years before. “Who would have thought?” she asked me so many times, a dreamy look on her face. “You with a steady boyfriend and me a majorette.”

  Now we were in my kitchen, with Misty stripped down to her underwear as I helped take her measurements so she could order her uniforms. “You should be ashamed to undress here in broad daylight,” Mrs. Poole said, and shook her head. Mrs. Poole had begun spending more and more time at our house, and it was starting to get on my mother’s nerves. “Why doesn’t that step-mother of yours measure you?”

  “Sally Jean has a job,” Misty said, and turned to the side to thrust her chest toward Mrs. Poole. “Or she’d be glad to help me.” Mrs. Poole settled back in her chair, one of my mother’s prize needlepoint pillows crushed behind her back. Every day when Mrs. Poole left, my mother returned the pillow to the sun-porch and rearranged them all so that this particular one, most of it petit point which took my mother years to do, carefully hidden; then Mrs. Poole came back the next day and rooted through until she found it and carried it into the kitchen.

  “Mrs. Burns,” Misty said while I was measuring her hips, her voice very grown up and serious. “What do you think happens to somebody’s body when he dies?”

  “Oh my.” Mama closed the cookbook she had been studying, voice stammering as she avoided any mention of Mo. “Well, let’s see...”

  “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” Mrs. Poole said, and thumped her own ashes into the ashtray. I came very close to finishing our high school cheer, “Hate to beat you but we must, we must,” but didn’t when I saw how very serious Misty was.

  “Well, these Mormon boys stopped by yesterday and I let them in,” Misty continued.

  “Hush,” Mrs. Poole said and inhaled. “You had boys in while Sally Jean was at work?”

  “Not boys” Misty said, and I made her take her hands from her waist so I could measure. “Mormons.” She held her arms out so I could measure them. “We were talking and seeing what we agreed about and what we didn’t and they said that they do not drink coffee, tea or soda or alcohol, or smoke, or do anything bad for them because they’ll get their bodies back in the afterlife and want them to be in good shape.”

  “Well, I’d like to know if they’re allowed to wear a color other than orange.” Mrs. Poole ran her finger between the spokes of the Windsor chair beside her and then inspected to see if there was dust. “Any time I’ve ever seen them trying to sell a carnation in the Clemmonsville Mall, they’re all covered in orange.”

  “They’re not the Mormons,” Misty said, sighed. “Anyway, if that’s true then maybe it is true that the good die young, you know. They die young so that they have that good body for eternity.”

  “Doesn’t sound very fair.” I jerked her back around so I could recheck the measurements once more, hoping that the subject would change.

  “And what about people who burn?” Misty asked, and everyone instinctively stared out at the blackened field; the kudzu was starting to reappear in sparse bits of green, starting to climb and twist around the cinderblock rubble. The Huckses’ concrete clothesline posts still stood, a sagging line connecting the two.

  “Well, Cleva feels that people go to an in-between place and wait, don’t you, Cleva?” Mrs. Poole leaned forward and Mama just shook her head. “I thought you grew up a Catholic there in Boston, which has al
ways puzzled me, seeing as how you have only one child.”

  “Maybe it takes two Catholics,” I said, in an attempt to lighten the mood, and I realized I sounded amazingly like my father. Misty and I had long ago figured the Catholic angle when trying to find proof that I was not really my mother’s child. Misty had told me that no real Catholic who could have children would stop with one; it’s like Lay’s potato chips, she had said and fallen out laughing on Mo’s old purple bedspread.

  “And the Mormons think there are lots of different parts of heaven, like neighborhoods,” Misty was saying. “You know, like maybe our neighborhood would be for pretty good people and the new neighborhood over near E. A. Poe would be for better people and so on.”

  “This used to be the best” Mrs. Poole said. “And I bet if a vote was taken it still would be.”

  “Kind of defeats the idea of heaven, doesn’t it?” I asked, immediately sorry since it was Mrs. Poole who wanted to latch right on to the discussion, saying it all depended on whose idea of heaven I meant.

  Misty suggested that we take a little break, said she was tired of standing, her voice carrying over Mrs. Poole’s as she continued giving reasons why our neighborhood was superior both on earth and in heaven. Misty went to our refrigerator and opened the door. “Maybe I misunderstood what the Mormons meant,” Misty said. “That’s what it sounded like to me, okay?” She reached in. This,” she held out a bottle of Coke, “this is why I’m not a Mormon.”

  “So what are you?” Mrs. Poole asked, inching forward on her chair.

  I watched Misty turn her head from side to side as if in thought before walking right up to Mrs. Poole. I was expecting her to use Jimmy Stewart’s line from Shenandoah when he was asked if the boy was a Yankee or a Reb, and just give her last name, but instead she said, “I’m a majorette,” and then she did a little turn, an imaginary baton doing a figure eight in front of her.

  Tony Graves had asked Misty for a date just the Friday night before, and she told him that she was washing her hair, that she hated the thought that his breath could be trapped there in her telephone wire and please not to call again. She had also turned down Dean’s old friend, Ronald, the one she had loved so madly the night Buddy was born. If R.W. Quincy’s name ever surfaced, she made a horrible face as if on the verge of gagging. “Can you even believe I ever thought about liking such a loser?” she had asked. “I mean, isn’t it incredible how much can change in just a few months, or in a few years really?” She had her eye on a friend of Dean’s, a boy who would graduate that spring with Dean and the rest of the Class of 1974; he was going to Davidson in the fall. She had already been invited to a graduation party, and Sally Jean had promised that she could get any dress she wanted.

  “I do not believe,” Mrs. Poole was saying, voice loud and angry, “that I will have to spend forever with this arthritis the way that it’s begun to take over my knees. Do you, Cleva?” Mama was at the window staring out over the yard. My father had become obsessed with gardening, more so than she’d ever been, and she monitored the time he spent out there, especially now that the days were dry and hot; the remainder of spring and the long summer stretched ahead of us like the Sahara. “I cannot believe that I will be stuck with this body for all of eternity and Mr. Bo Poole will have himself a nice fifty-four-year-old body. I do not believe that drug addicts who scream and holler and call it singing and kill themselves with too much medication in their veins can have a twenty-year-old body, and that I’m given this.” I had never seen Mrs. Poole so upset, her face fire red, that one eye twitching.

  My mother’s voice was calm as she turned from the window. “We don’t know what waits for us,” she said, and paused. “I believe that that is a good thing.”

  “Well, I know what I think” Mrs. Poole’s bottom lip trembled, and she looked away until she could toughen up.

  “And no one can take that away from you, Theresa,” my mother said, while Misty and I stared in amazement at the weak side of Theresa Poole.

  “Whoever would’ve thought we’d really get there, Katie?” Misty asked me again late that afternoon as we sat on the front steps, the trees of the Samuel T. Saxon schoolyard within view. The main part of the school building was still standing. “You going with Merle Hucks and me a full-fledged majorette. I wish,” she paused and I knew in that second what she was thinking, / wish my mother could see us now, “I wish that we could be like this forever. These youthful bodies. I wish—” She turned towards me as I anticipated the familiar, the wish that Mo was watching us, Mo looking just as she had looked the night of the fireworks, but then she elbowed me and laughed. “I wish Mrs. Poole would move. I wish she would have to spend eternity in a split-level.” We laughed, still marvelling at Mrs. Poole and the way the whole neighborhood was talking about how she was beginning to fail

  There was a warm breeze, causing the leafy branches of the tall oak tree in Whispering Pines to move back and forth against the clear blue sky. It had been a long time since Misty and I had sat on that low-hanging limb, and I was about to suggest that we walk over when Sally Jean pulled up from work and asked Misty if she still wanted to go shopping for a new bathing suit. Mr. Rhodes had said that he’d never seen anything like it, that Misty and Sally Jean would buy anything if it was on a sale table. “You are two peas in a pod,” he had said, and smiled proudly at the two of them with their arms full of shopping bags. “I don’t buy anything that doesn’t pass mustard,” Sally Jean said. Now, Misty was off and running across Wilkins Road, greeting Sally Jean with a peck on the cheek as the two of them walked across the thick green carpet of grass to the front door. “See you later,” Misty called to me, Sally Jean joining her with a wave. “I’m going to buy the green and purple Hang-Ten suit we saw in Glamour. What do you think?” I nodded, turning back to the tree and its tip-top branches; it had been there for hundreds of years.

  E. A. Poe High was more of a greenhouse than my father could have ever hoped to construct, and all during the month of April when the air-conditioning system was broken and the heat was unbearable, we got to leave at noon. Willow Pond was not far from the old Samuel T. Saxon Building, and on many afternoons, after parting ways with Misty, who had majorette practice, that’s where Merle and I walked; we usually carried a bag of stale bread or some popcorn to feed the ducks. My father had taken me there a lot when I was growing up, but we had stopped going after one particular trip when we witnessed a duck attack and kill a sea gull who was going after the same piece of bread. The scene kept him awake for nights after, and he still referred to the day as the Great Gull Massacre, refusing to take me back to the pond for that reason. “This from the man so interested in death and murder,” my mother had said, gathering up some bread crumbs and bringing me herself.

  Now it seemed that whole part of town was in a sad slow decline, as if it were the remains of a war zone, old homes stripped for their flooring or hoisted up and moved across town, leaving big empty spaces like craters. For years it had been my mother and Mrs. Poole’s biggest fear, and now with the steady stripping away of Samuel T. Saxon the end seemed inevitably close. As much as they had complained about the row of little pastel houses where Merle had lived, the fire had left the property up for bidding, and very soon there was going to be an Exxon Station; Close enough to hear folks drive over that bell, I bet, Mrs. Poole had said countless times. My mother was already talking about a nice tall fence; my father, pencil in hand, was eager to draw a plan of her desires.

  Merle’s family was still living in the Econo Lodge, which he said made the high school feel cool and comfortable. His father had already started working in Clemmonsville, and as soon as he found a place to live and school got out, they’d be moving. “I’m gonna try to stay here, though,” Merle said, and squeezed my hand. “I’ve got good reasons to stay here.” He spoke the word as if there were serious doubts about his destination. “Of course, I’ve never been anywhere else, never been where people don’t say, ‘Oh yeah, you’re a Hucks.’”
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  The last day that Merle and I walked to Willow Pond was in late May, summer vacation only two weeks away, so close we could all feel it, an energy that pulsed through the sterile halls of E. A. Poe. It was a Friday and neither of us carried books; we got a ride with Misty, who now had her driver’s license and was forever borrowing Sally Jean’s Toyota. She dropped us off in front of the stone soldier, and then we walked along the bumpy sidewalk, sometimes holding hands, always trying to stay in the shade of the huge oaks and elms growing there.

  We stopped in front of Samuel T. Saxon; the main part of the building with the office and auditorium was all that remained. I could see the roof of my house in the distance, the top of the gates to Whispering Pines. I hesitated when Merle asked me to go in with him, partly because my parents had already told me a zillion times not to hang around there, but more so because there was a big NO TRESPASSING sign on the door. Still, I was easily persuaded that day, the sky a cloudless bright blue. “We shouldn’t be doing this, you know,” I whispered, while he looked around and then pulled open the big heavy door, just far enough for us to squat and slip under the heavy black chain.

  “Forgive us our trespasses,” he said, then laughed, and I suddenly thought of him gripping my wrists, begging my secrecy that day in Whispering Pines. The ancient flooring creaked with every step we took, and it was eerie to look in the old office, with the wavy pane of glass still in the door, and see it bare, a clutter of empty boxes stacked in one corner. “I sat in there often enough didn’t I?”

  “And you should have.” I leaned in close. “Anybody who pees on the radiator.”

  “Never.” He shook his head and then raked his fingers back through his straight hair, streaks of it already sun-bleached. “R.W. did it, but I never did.” He said R. Double U just like the teachers had always tried to make us do. He laughed at first and then stopped almost suddenly. “Old Frankincense didn’t turn out too good, or well, or whatever, did he?” I shook my head, wondering who corrected his English often enough that he had formed the habit of catching his own mistakes. “It’s hard to believe that that R.W. who was my friend for so many years is the same R.W. who was in Dexter’s club.” He shook his head as if to rid the bad thoughts. Misty had spotted R.W. working at a gas station when Sally Jean had taken her way out in the country to practice driving.