Ferris Beach

by Jill McCorkle

  When I finally got Angela on the phone, she said that she would come as soon as possible, that her car had died and she’d have to find a way. She talked that fast way of hers—What was Cleva thinking to make him work in such heat? and Why didn’t you call me sooner?—and then she paused, sobbed into the phone. “What am I going to do without Fred?” she kept asking me, as if I knew the answer, as if we weren’t asking that same question.

  She arrived at our house in a taxi the next day with just enough time to change her clothes before the funeral. She came in with an overnight bag, a tissue held to her nose, sunglasses never removed, as she gave Mrs. Poole a brief nod and rushed upstairs to the room where she had stayed before. Five minutes later, she was back in the foyer with us, wearing a black jersey dress that hit several inches above her knee and black leather platform sandals. I saw Mrs. Edith Turner’s mouth drop open, and my mother’s would have too if she had not been staring out into the yard where the bright red canna lilies stood six feet tall, the large dark leaves forming a thick hedge.

  Angela sniffed and dabbed at her cheeks all the way to the cemetery; my mother never even looked at her, just kept her hands clasped neatly on top of her little black clutch as she stared out the darkened glass of the funeral home limousine. “I’ve ridden in a limo before,” Angela whispered to me. “But it was under much happier circumstances.” She drew in a sharp breath, voice shaking, nostrils flaring as she tried to speak. “Fred was more than an uncle to me.” At this my mother turned slightly, gave her a weak smile. “Fred was more like a brother. Or more like a father.” It was a sizzling day, not a cloud in the sky as people stood there by the graveside and wiped the perspiration that rolled down their faces and necks. Unlike Whispering Pines, the new cemetery had been cleared in one big swoop and now they were starting over with seedlings of trees here and there. It was a barren stretch like a desert, straight gridlike marks dividing the plots. I knew then why my father had wanted to add extra space to Whispering Pines, to make a place for himself beneath the old shade trees that leaned against our house.

  Mr. Rhodes had brought an extra-long extension cord so he could plug in a small record player in the outlet of the little office of the cemetery. He had gone the day before to measure the distance and now, Ethel Waters’s voice, despite the bumps and gristle of my father’s old worn-out album, came through loud and clear. / sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free. I glanced in the distance and saw Merle leaning against a monument, awkward and stiff in a suit Pd never seen, maybe his father’s, maybe Mr. Landell’s, a dark navy tie and jacket which he kept on in spite of the heat. He held his hands in front of him, and of all the people who were fanning and mopping their brows, Merle never moved; it was as if he were frozen there. Overhead birds were flying, and far away in the distance was a humming like a lawn mower or an airplane. I felt my mother’s hand on my arm and realized that the song had ended, the prayer as well, and now Mr. Rhodes was playing “Graveyard Dream Blues” just as my father had requested. Blues all around my head. Mama was pushing me forward, and I concentrated on everything except the hole in front of us, and the pile of earth ready to fill it in. Instead I thought of my father stretched out on the living room rug. “C’mon Kitty,” he teased. “All you gotta do is roll me up and drag me down the hall.”

  That night my mother, Angela, and I picked over all the food that had been brought; there was more food than the three of us could ever possibly eat, and Mama in a tactful way had suggested that Angela take a lot of it home with her. I knew she was trying to find out when Angela was leaving exacdy and also if she was still with her husband, but the plan didn’t work and Angela just nodded and said that she sure would. She was sitting there, auburn hair parted down the middle and hanging to her shoulders as she held a drumstick in one hand and a cigarette in the other, a glass of my father’s scotch in front of her. “You know,” she said, chin trembling all over again, “Fred was more than an uncle to me.” She paused thoughtfully, took a drag off the cigarette, then put down the drumstick so she could sip her drink.

  The phone rang at nine-thirty just as Merle had said, and I ran out into the hall to answer; I could hear voices in the background, his parents’, a television. Oftentimes he just called to say good night and that’s what we did then, the comfortable silence in the telephone line a promise that we’d see each other the next day when he finished at the warehouse. I forgot to thank him for coming to the funeral, to tell him that I saw him there, at the far edge of the crowd. “Good night,” he said again, and I just sat there with the receiver pressed to my ear, the buzz making me feel numb. When I walked back to the doorway of the kitchen, I could hear Angela saying that same thing over and over. I just waited there in the darkness of the dining room, the furniture like dark shadows. I knew I could have felt my way over every inch of the room, so exact and precise was that room kept; the chair my father always sat in, a head chair with tooled mahogany arms, was against the wall on the far side of the china cabinet. I sat down in the darkness, watching and listening. “Fred was much more like a big brother to me. He was like the father I never had.” My mother chimed in at the end with her, and Angela looked up suddenly, sharply. “Don’t make fun of me, Cleva,” she said. “I loved Freddie.”

  “I loved Freddie, too,” Mama said, and began clearing the table. “And he was a lot more to you.” Mama’s voice got higher and faster just as it had in the car that same morning as we drove from Seymore’s. “He was your guardian, and I’d say he did more than the average guardian angel.”

  “Money, right? We’re talking money. Well, I have never taken a cent that I didn’t deserve,” she said. “Think what you want.” Angela stood and drained her glass, placed it with a firm clink onto the lazy susan. “You promised to take care of me.” She drew her thin robe tightly around her and faced my mother. “You were supposed to be like my mother, Cleva.” She laughed and slapped her hand against the table. “That’s what you told me one time, remember? ‘Oh, Angela, I hope you can think of me like a mother.’” My mother’s face flushed with her mimicry.

  “And I tried my best,” my mother said. “You’re the one who never tried. And no, it’s not all money. We had the money. It was feelings, our feelings, my feelings.”

  “Oh, I tried,” Angela said. “But I tried for Freddie, not for you. You never gave me a chance. You criticized everything I ever did. From the first day I moved in with you, you were telling me what to do.”

  “Not everything.” Mama sat down in a chair, propped her feet on another, ankles crossed. “You know that’s not true, Angela. You also know that you weren’t always honest with Fred. You took advantage of him.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if he was alive.”

  “No, but now we don’t have to pretend.” My mother reached up and wiped her eyes, then kept her hands on her cheeks. “Kate?” she called, and I jumped with the sound of my name, backed out into the darkness of the foyer and answered her from there. “Come here a second, honey.”

  By the time I got back into the room, Angela was apologizing to my mother; she turned as I came through the door. “Oh, Katie,” she said. “I’ve just been so terrible to your mother and here she’s been so good to me. Why, I guess I’m just so racked with grief I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “What happened?” I asked, and my mother opened her mouth but before she could speak Angela jumped in.

  “It was all my fault,” she said. “I hurt Cleva’s feelings in the worst way. I told her how just over Christmas, Fred had asked me to try and help her get herself looking better, you know like we did that summer with her hair.” Angela shook her head from side to side, patted my mother’s stiff shoulder, ever stiffer with her touch. “But I guess I didn’t say it very tactfully, did I?”

  “No, you didn’t,” Mama said, and went back to wrapping pies and cakes in aluminum foil. “Now, Angela, I believe you said you prefer pie to cake so I’m going to choose a couple that are easy to travel with, maybe this
pecan from Edith Turner.” She wrapped the pie and then put it in a paper bag. “And this Dutch apple that Maralee Landell baked.” There. She folded and wrapped the bag over the two pies and then handed it to Angela. “These should be easy to handle on the bus.”

  “The bus?” Angela’s face went solemn. “I’ll call Greg before I get back on the bus. That’s why I was so late getting here, because the bus stops in every hole-in-the-road town.”

  “You’re leaving?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mama said. “I begged Angela to stay but she’s got to get home. She’ll be leaving tomorrow. You know she’s got a man to take care of.”

  “Yes, and taking care of a man takes time and money.”

  They went on a few more blows, clearly sending little hidden meanings between them, every word intended to hit a target, some weakened and bruised area. “Maybe Katie would like to come visit me?” Angela asked, and again Mama’s jaw clenched tightly. “You can come any time you want.”

  “Maybe she will,” Mama said. “But you’ll discover that when you put a child with a man, you really have a lot to take care of.”

  “Child? Why Katie’s a young woman!” Angela put the pies on the table and lit a cigarette. “Before you know it, Katie will be having a baby. Won’t that be nice? A grandbaby?”

  I think my face would have flushed with that thought anyway, but when the two of them looked at me, I felt totally transparent; I felt they each had a private movie of Merle and me behind the auditorium stage that one day, that they knew my every wonderful sensation and thought, that they knew my every fear and doubt. I was relieved when the phone rang—Misty this time—and I was relieved when Angela breezed into the foyer, smiled, and blew me a kiss, and then turned up the stairs, leaving my mother alone in the kitchen.

  “You doing okay?” Misty asked, and I could picture her on the bed, legs Indian style as she played with the phone cord, as she looked at the photo of Mo leaning against the old Chevrolet, the photo of the two of us on her bulletin board, our arms around each other as we smiled at her dad, Misty draped in purple carpet remnants and me in red leotards; while he was taking our picture, Mo Rhodes was in the kitchen cooking Tuna Surprise and filling the trick-or-treat bowl, and my father was across the street in his leather chair, smoke rings circling his head. “It’ll take awhile before you feel right again,” Misty was saying. “Just when you think you’re okay, then it’ll hit you again.” She paused, her voice wavery, and I heard her moving, maybe curling on her side, pulling a blanket up around her. “I still have that happen sometimes, a dream or something like that.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked, feeling my own throat tightening, drying.

  “Yeah,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Kate. I shouldn’t be saying all this to you, but there’s no one else, you know? I can’t talk to my dad, and it would just hurt Sally Jean’s feelings.” She paused. “Dean can’t stand to talk about my mother at all. I don’t know, I guess it’s easier for him not to.”

  I heard Mama coming through the dining room, heard the scuff of those same lavender bedroom shoes. “I just still can’t believe he died,” I whispered, knowing she was within earshot. I waited while my mother crossed the hall; she looked at me and then just lifted her hand as a goodnight, her eyes watery, that electrical manual in her hand. “I better go,” I said, amazing myself with the cool calmness. “And you can always talk to me, Misty.” She sniffed, apologized again. “Now we’re talking graveyard, huh?” she asked, and forced a laugh.

  When I closed my eyes that night, the thoughts that came to my mind were all of my father, his voice telling jokes or odd little bits of trivia about obscure inventors and scientists, people he said society had not properly received. For a second I spied him in darkness, the lid of his coffin closed tightly, airtight sealing to hold in all the secrets and thoughts that he had failed to tell me. His collar was buttoned tight, starched and buttoned, a Windsor knot in the necktie, tighter and tighter. I sat with a start, unable to breathe with the sensation of darkness closing in, air growing scarce, the panic that causes the best of swimmers to lose control and fight the one who has come to help, the panic that forces humans to riot and stampede, for air, for space, for freedom, the little and the weak shoved to the bottom, to the side, out of the way.

  I could not stand to think of the question that Misty had asked in the kitchen the day I measured her for her uniforms; I could not stand to wonder whether or not our bodies are returned to us. The only way I could close my eyes again, was to know, to believe, that my father’s body was mere skeleton in a Sunday suit and that he had risen above it all and at that very moment was a part of the world, a part of my world, the very air I breathed in relief as I opened my eyes to the familiar wallpaper, pink roses climbing the walls. Angela did not come into my room during the night and I was relieved. My prayer that night was to blot my mind of everything except thoughts of Merle, and somewhere within those to fall asleep; I saw Merle sitting on the rough granite stone, his hair blown by an approaching summer storm, or I saw him crouched in the little shed, Converse sneaker pressed against the wall, Merle in the auditorium of Samuel T. Saxon, sockless foot propped on the seat in front of him, Merle in the second grade with dried Kool-Aid in his dirty palm, a snakeskin wrapped around his neck, Merle behind the moss green drapes as he pulled me on top of him, his hands warm on my back.

  Twenty-five

  My mother was like a different person the next day; it was as if she had gotten up from her bed and made a vow to bend as far as she could possibly bend to make things right with Angela, or maybe she had made the promise the night before as she lay there alone, the sheets still smelling like my father; maybe she had promised him in some sort of silent prayer or thought or hope that he could hear her.

  “I’m sorry I was so short with you yesterday,” she said, and poured a cup of coffee, held the pot out towards Angela in question. “I just was not myself.” She filled Angela’s cup and then joined us at the table, where she had prepared a huge breakfast, the kind she only fixed on special occasions, with waffles and omelets and biscuits and ten different kinds of jam on the lazy susan. “You can understand that I was not myself?”

  “Oh, Cleva,” Angela started, her thin robe loose in the front. “It was just as much me.”

  I watched, expecting my mother to flinch with shared blame, perhaps wanting a full apology, but she just nodded in agreement.

  “And,” Angela said, right hand rubbing her temple, “mine was also liquor talking. Liquor has always made me feel mean.” She laughed and nodded, looked at me. “Really, it’s like Jekyl and Hyde or whatever.”

  “You’re welcome to stay a few days.” Mama sipped her coffee; all that food spread in front of us and no one had even taken a bite. “I don’t know what your situation at home is, and ...” She held up her hand in protest as Angela started to speak. “No, it’s none of my business, I know that.”

  “Everything is really fine at home,” she said. “If only Fred could have known just how fine it is.” She speared a waffle and reached for the butter. “And I do need to be getting back. I’ll call the bus station right after we finish.”

  “But last night the way you said that you’d call Greg before you rode the bus, well, that sounded—” Mama stopped short, sighed. “Forgive me, there I go again.” She leaned back and took another sip of coffee, shook her head when I tried to pass her the waffles.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean for it to sound that way, no.” Angela reached and turned the lazy susan, touching the lid of each jar as it passed. “I just meant he’d have to take off from work, and that’s not such an easy thing.”

  “I see,” Mama said. “Well, then I’ll drive you home.”

  “Oh, no, Cleva, you have way too much to do. I wouldn’t even think of it. No, no.” Angela was sitting up straight now, shaking her head adamantly.

  “I could drive,” I offered. After weeks of waiting for my sixteenth birthday, I suddenly realized it was just ten days away.
“You’d have to be with me.” I looked at my mother and she nodded, but again Angela insisted that we forget that idea, that she would ride the bus, it was no big deal. Why, it was even sort of relaxing just to sit on the bus and ride. She was acting the same way Sally Jean used to act when caught picking up rocks, her pockets full as she denied that that was her reason for standing in the center of the yard.

  Angela left that day with the promise that she would return for a meeting with the lawyer to discuss the will. “Fred wanted you to be there,” Mama told her. “He wanted to make sure that you always had help if you needed it.” We were at the bus station, me in the driver’s seat, Angela with the back door open and one foot already on the pavement. It was raining, the asphalt steaming as the wipers squeaked and the motor idled. “But you know that, don’t you?” Mama turned and looked at her, the rain blowing into the car, Angela’s face damp and plain, no make-up. Angela nodded and then with the quick sound of a kiss, was racing up to the station, her suitcase in hand, as she pulled open the old screen door with the Pepsi advertisement rusting on it.

  “I don’t know why she wouldn’t let us drive her,” Mama said, and shook her head. “There’s always a mystery, isn’t there?” She shrugged and then we rode in silence. The rain was coming down so hard that when I pulled into our driveway we had to sit there until it slacked up. It was barely afternoon but the streetlights were on and in front of us the canna lilies swayed stiffly. “Yessir, I like ’em tall and healthy,” he had said proudly just a few days before, pointing first to the lilies and then to my mother and then to me.