Our neighborhood was never the same after Stracy White and her family moved in across the road. My mother and our neigber, Miss Hall mourned the loss of the farm land and the borns and the sheds which dated back to the 1800′s, I rejoiced in finally having the chance of someone my own age moving into my neighborhood. The days of blind folding myself and wondering around my room in Helen Keller simulation, were drowing to an end. I sat by the window, watching as moving van after moving van came down our street.
“The split- levels are coming! The split levels are coming!”, Miss Hall had said at a meeting of the historical society of which she and my mother and severl others attempted to stop the sale of the price of land in front of our homes. Known for her do-gooding and her big white Mercedes, Miss Hall was soon known as well for not wanting the sale to go thrrough.Our own house was bult in the early 18oo’s and my mother had gone to great lengths to learn its history. “There was a time when there wasn’t a house within ten miles of your’s”, a historion once told her when he had come to photograph the house to list it as a historical landmark. He gave my mother a lot of information what she carefully typed up and filed away with all her other historical stuffs. My mother had grown up in Germany and did not live in South Africa till her early twenties. She had many paper, like pedigress, that told of various ancestors we had on her side of the family. The shorpedges of her accent had been filed down over the years, slowed and softened and mixed with the smooth african accent, they appeared only occasionally when she talked about raking the yard or playing cards or how life was hard.
She fanned out brochures on historical organizations and showed me her collection of various pins and certifiicates, essays she had written in schools lectures she had given while teaching school, all the while ignoring my father’s comments on his lineage,which he said was a mix of German, Scotch, Irish, Dutch and whatever else took root down in South Africa. He had grown up in a small town outside of Durpan. “Your half German and half soda”, he said and raised his glass. My mother did not even look up from her paper work, her broad bony sholders bent slightly as she smoothed her fingers over some document to get the folds out. Sometimes she ignored him completely, unclipping and retwisting her thick hair and humming over his voice. Once dark, her hair was almost all gray and always pulled back into a bun.
My parents never really looked like they went together to me, even in the wedding photo that was placed on our living room wall above the fire place. I expected the real wedding couple to step in from wings of either side. My dad was a heavy man, always with a cigarette between his thick fingers, his gestures quick and animated as he moved through the house , forever pacing. Though most of his time was spent teaching math at the local IV league college, he always had great ambitions of writing a perfect murder story a mystery, one with a plot that had to be solved mathematically. It was not unusal for him to all of a sudden jump up and run into his office to write down a series of numbers while my mother shook her head and looked up at the ceilling. My mother was tall and lean, usually the tallest women in the room but never settling for flat shoes. For every animated move my father had, she had composure and reserve. The only time my mother lost her calm control were those few and in between times, like when my cousin Andrea showed up at our house and my father escaped behind the closed living room door or outside into the darkness of the parch to have talks with her, conversations that were not repeated or explained. Really, all I knew about Andrea was what he had told me, that his sister, unmarried and only seventeen, had a complicated delivery and died soon after, that his mother had raised the baby and as a result he felt that Andrea was more like his little sister or even his own child.
I have no memories of my grandmother, but he talked of her so often that I saw her in a magical sort of way, this little white haired lady whose husband had rana shrimping about of the cost of good hope , her face and hands a weathered brown from hot days spent surf fishing or shaking the sand from white sheets she hung on a line. When I am agined myself being left from the world like the little match boy, she was the one who came for me. My father said that she was a brilliant lady, a poet’s soul buried in a tough little shell; My mother described her as a poor sad woman who lost her mind.
My father’s name was Fredrick Timothy Cattier known to every one as Fred. My Gram’s told him that he was named after a lord, a noble man like the one’s she spent her entire life dreaming of, a poetic lord or knight to ride up and carry her off across the coastal plain, tilepools spraying and sand flying. She had originally wanted to name him from a knight.Her first choice being “Sir Arthur Conan Dayle”, but at the last minute decided that she liked Fred more then Art. “Why didn’t she just name you Robert?”, my mother onces asked, “it would have been the easiest route to a poetic name”. ” Had to be a lord or a knight” he replied, “You can call me my lord”. This from such a brilliant lady”, my mother said, and shook her head, giving me a “you see what i mean” look as she unclasped her bun. She held a gold bobby pin between her thin pink lips as she pulled herhair back more tightly. My mother’s name is Heidie, was tight lipped with teeth clenched on the tongue and my own Casey was like a short Sharpbite.
I was five when I first met Andrea. My father took me to Durpen beach. We stood for hours just listening to the roar of the surf and wedging our feet into the cool packed sand. Andrea appeared at the top of a sand dune, her thick auburn hair blowing behind her. My father squeezed my hand and laughed out load, as loud as the surf. “There she is!” he screamed, and then again almost in a whisper,”There she is”. She greeted me as if i was a grown man, her cool fingers gently cupping and covering my left cheek and neck where I have a birthmark the color of wine. “Its not your fault Heidie,” I overheard Miss Hall telling mother, “I suspect God has his own reasons for painting him that way.” Andrea pressed her lips to my cheek, and then dropped her many strands of beads around and around my neck while we ate fried chicken that she had packed in a basket. “What was I thinking Fred? I forgot something for him to drink.” I sat there with her on the faded quilt while my father walked up the beach and over the dunes to the old bait shop to get a carton of milk. She twisted the cork from a bottle and filled her glass with burgundy wine. The day was supposed to be a secret but in the exhilaration of seeing the ocean for the first time I let it all slip from my mouth into my mom’s ear, where it fell solid, logging in her chest.
Not long after that we were invited by miss Hall and some other church friends to a picnic at Cherry Grove Beach, which she said was”light years better then Durpen beach” These women were quite a bit older then my mother, so I was the only child present. They didn’t even wear bathing suits but sat fully clothed under big striped umbrellas, and the whole day was all planned as neatly as if bells went off in their heads to signal the next event. Keep your shoes on because the shells are sharp and would cut clean through to the bone.Set the places and we mustn’t forget to set his place, we mustn’t forget to thank him for this food. Don’t forget if you get the urged in the warm salty water to take off your bathing suit and pee that he is watching you and he will know what you did, and if you have thought about how good it feels to be all naked and running your handsdown your body, then rest for sure he will know. And, oh, my lord, don’t even look to your left unless you want to see a suit that shows all that a woman has to show. I spent much of the day digging in the sand by the edge of the water, barging my feet and then letting wave after wave wash them clean. The things those women talked about were things that could keep you awake for the rest of your life, death and illness and poverty and insurance policies and he will get his due. It was so easy to sin, as easy as telling a white lie, or saying damn or saying that we come from monkeys, or kissing the glassy paper mouth of a movie star on aposter. And how could God keep it all sorted, all these direct lines,these prayers that were shot up at him like bullets, Cross crossing, ricocheting, contradicting, negating ” I just hope that she will live until young Matt graduates from college. Well i just hope she dies quickly and quietly- at peace. How can you be wishing her dead like that? I for one pray that there will come a day when there is a cure for cancer. I pray for the doctor’s in the laboratory, I have a cousin whose son-in-law is working at the NIH in Johannesburg’s. I pray they don’t get a divorce even though my cousin says she prays for the best for both of them.
If his eyes had been just on those three striped umbrellas on the Cherry Grove stand, he could not have met their demands, not even to mention those of the rest of the world. This was prime time, a Sunday afternoon, and the thought of having to sort through all those requests made my head spin. It was that very day that I attached to Andrea everything beautiful and lively and good, she was the easy flow of the words and music.The waves crashing on Durpen beach as I spun around and around because I could not take in enough of the air and the seagulls as they swooped and whined, Andrea was energy, the eternal movement of the world, the blood in my veins and the wind in the bare winter branches that creaked and cried out in the night like tried ghosts in search of a home. She was the answer to a prayer and I thought about that day at Durpen beach often, recreating every word and every movement before I fell asleep. By the time I was eight, when her face was getting hard for me to remember, I would imagine her holding my hand and spelling secrets messages into them.
By then i had read the bio of Helen Kellernine times, each time finding something new, each time conjuring what was left of my memory of Andrea. “You cannot check this out another time this year,” the pintop librarian had said when I tried to check the book out for the tenth time. she was amazed by all the noise a classroom of eight year-old can make by just entering a room.
“Somebody else might want to read about Helen Keller”. “What if I wait until the end and nobodies checked it out?” ” There are other classes, you know,” she said, her lips pushed forward and then she stomped off to yank Sven green and R.W. Jones by the arms and tell them to stop rubbing their feet on the new indoor outdoor carpet and then touching people to shock them. It was the only exciting thing going on in the library. “You’re gonna rub this carpet bare; Now find a chair”, she tuned to heave herself back to the desk while they had found chairs. Nobody said R.W.Jone’s name right,like the teacher begged us to do “R Double U” she would say, and he’d telll her his name was “R Dubyah” that he was not a fancy talker and if his momma had meant for him to be named R Double U, then she would have called him that instead of “R. Dobyah”. R.W was the tallest boy in the class because he had stayed back once in first grade and again in second, he wore a dirty, piece of twine around his neck with a little blue rat fink hooked to it. Sven Greens had a black rat fl ink withred eyes, which was supposed to be good luck since they were so rare ” So can I read Helen Keller?” I whispered ” Are you deaf?” she asked me and R.W Jones who was standing there, wanted to check out a book on stock car racing said “What? What Miss Librarian?”
“The split- levels are here” Miss Hall said the day Stacey’s family moved in , and waved her hand at the row of homes as if she could make them disappear, “That kind of house is not designed for the country like this one is it?” I was nine that August, and for months I had watched one big moving van after another bringing some one new to our street. Always, it seemed, a family with babies instead of some one close to my age. Stacey’s house was identical to the other six split-levels already occupied and the three which were springing up around the corner. “I’d need bread crumbs to find my way home” Miss Hall said her pursed lips pained the sameshade as the bloom on our fuchsia plant. “I hear somebody over onmaple” she paused, pointed her thin finger through the split level tothe street parallel to ours ” is building a ranch out of some kind ofwoad that just does its own way in the weather”
Stacey’s house was my favorite of the whole bunch, It was whitewith blue shutters, electric blue Miss Hall said in a hushed whisper. Later that same day while she stared at the big moving van with Durpen tags ” T saw what looked like it might be a bar, you know to houseliquor” she whispered ” I’ve heard of neighborhood’s going down this way”, as she looked over at the White’s home, “It happens slowly in the beginning, one house here another there, and then before you know it, the decent people stop coming, and more and more riffraff come in, Prices drop and so other can afford to come in.” She paused and then tilted her head toward the back of our property lines which ended in a tangled field of kndsa and a row of ting pasted houses “a colored family lives down there, it can happen”
” Peacock blue” Miss White said smiling at Mr White a Sherwin-Williams paint sampler in her hand Mr white was up on a ladder putting the final touches on the trim of the porch yawning “Now nobody will mistake our house for another” I had been standing on the curb for about three minutes, through it seemed like hours. Mr White wore an old baseball cap to shield his face from the sun, but already his cheeks were bright pink like the skin on Stacey’s sunburned nose. Stacy looked just like him with that strawberry hair and doughy white skin, made even whiter in contrast with her mother’s tan, a shade so deep you might wonder if she was from another place altogether. “Do you think she’s foreign?” Miss Hall had asked and then turned back to her rosebushes, the nozzle of her hose tuned to a fine mist. “Peacock blue just like my Stacey’s eyes,” Miss White said, and hugged this plump plane girl, who seemed to be much more interested in the soccer bull that her skinny older bother was bouncing against the brick wall of the car port than she was in meeting me, “My Stacey is just your age.Nnine going on twenty,” Miss White said to me and laughed, but Stacey was still eyeing me suspiciously, and why wouldn’t she? I had come bearing a paper plate of delicate little homemade ladyfingers and my mother’s instructions to ask where they were from. If I had been in her shoes, I would not have trusted me either.
“Wouldn’t you love to have peacock in your yard?” Miss White asked, and turned to me, her thick dork hair was pulled back in a ponytail as she stood there barefoot in cropped jeans, her toenails painted pale pink. It was her eyes that were peacock blue, and Stacey who was hugged up close had just a wash out version to go with her frizzy orange hair and freckled arms. I was about to say that i would love some peacocks but before i could she was asking another question, “Fourth grade?” she said to me, which I came to learn quickly was her way of asking a question, all but the key words deleted “Yes,” I answered and tried to take in all the things scattered about in their carport because I knew I’d be quizzed: a black sewing mannequin dressed in a lime green miniskirt and holter top, a stone statue of a fish with its mouth wide open, a little miniature pagoda, bags and bags of gravel and lots of little lanterns and tiki torches “pin top”she asked me,and again i nodded yes.
Stacey was still just standing there staring at me. She was slapping a fly paddle against her bare thigh. “Lets eat these cookies you brought. I just can’t wait,” MissWhite gripped me by the hand and then pulled both of us through the coolness of the box- cluttered kitchen, where she pored out glasses of Coca Cola and pot on a Elvis Presley record, I was not allowed to drink soda on a regular basis, but i did not say a word. Rather, I sat in complete of this women whose purple wooden earring’s swung back and forth as she talked. I envied the silent girl across form me, Stacey on first meeting I thought her name a cruel joke as cruel as someone huge named bitsy or tighne “whats your name again, Hun?” Miss White asked her hips moved back and forth in rhythm with “heart break hotel”
“Casey Arther Timothy Cartier” but people call me Case” I said and then with out thinking added,”My dad sometimes calls me “kitty cat”, it slipped, this nickname my mother despised “kitty cat” she said and stared at me, smiling while Stacey have me a dirty look “I like that,I like the way it sounds, the same way i like Stacey”. “Right,” Stacey finally spoke. Her voice was nasal and much deeper then I’d expected from someone with such pale skin “I was named for a horse. And you were named for a car” her deadpan expression brought Miss White over to her chair. ” No honey,” she squealed in laughter and threw her arms around Stacey’s neck Yyou know the story of how I thought of your name.” She turned to me briefly. “Stacy is named for Stacy Rose Allen, a young woman I never knew but just heard about, sort of a local legend where I’m from.”
She pressed her check against Stacy’s “You weren’t named for the horse, even though I did think that was such a romantic sounding name, Stacey of Chengdu, and you were Stacy of Durban Beach.” Stacy just stared down at the vanilla wafer and lady fingers on the paper plate in front of her, her mouth tightened into a straight line.”Johnny Mathis must think its a romantic name, too he named a song that.” “Yeah yeah yeah and your named for the three stooges” Stacey said and paused with a vanilla wafer in hand ” Hello? hello? hello?hello?” she said, it 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 Stacey’s head began singing “Look At Me I’m As Helpless”…..”Oh Yea” Stacey said and bit into a lady finger, leaving a ring of powdered sugar on her lips, “These cookies are pretty good,” then for the first time, I heard that laugh shrill and hyena-like. I often thought it was like in the common rule, laugh, and the louder the better.
“So whats your brother’s name,” I asked I could see 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 three or four years older then us.”Flicka” Stacey answered and again laughed that laugh. “Do you think he’s cute?” in the same way that Miss White asked her key-word questions, Stacey’s asked the impossible-to-answer kind. If I said no, which was my impulse after having seen his cheek 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, I shrugged. “Stacey of you aren’t a card and a half. Don’t embarrass kitcat” it sounded odd for her to call me that, and i knew that I had made a terrible mistake in telling her about my nick name. “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 James Bean White” “But we like to call him Flicka” “Now cut that out you ” Miss White swatted playfully at Stacey Kit cat’s not going to want to come back if you act his way” she wentto the kitchen window and rapped on the class. “Dean? Dean?” until he ran over and pressed his face flat against the class like a Pekingese”cookies” I decided I’d leave while he was coming in so I stood up.
“Is that a birthmark you have ” Stacey asked and leaned forward, her bare legs squeaking on the red linoleum’s seat of her chair ‘Stacey!” Miss White stepped forward hands on her hips, and I focused on the ting gold chain around her ankle while i nodded, while James Dean White walked past us and opened the refrigerator. “Its just a question” she said more to her mother than to me , and then reluctantly she reached out and tagged on the back of my T-shirt. “I am sorry,” she apologised. “It’s okay, ” I quietly pushed my chair away from the table to stand. “I need to go home”. “Oh! I wish you’d stay, why, you haven’t even meet Dean. Dean this is Kit Cat from next door.” ” You can call me Casey” I said but he just shrugged and went back to drinking from a water jar. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feeling, I think its kind of neat, It’s sort of shaped like Italy, you know, like an old granny boot” “Stacey” Miss White’s face was as red as her husbands, but something in what Stacey had said, 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 “wont to go to my room and see?” There was more stuff in her room than i had ever seen, big paperflowers and fans and a stuffed bear that filled on 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 Tea berry and Clove, making her white room smell like those wax lips and whistlers that we all bought for Halloween. After demonstrating the Tea berry 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’shermits on a record player she had right there in her room. Stacey had also memorized every single word of “the balled of the green berets”and quited it while I sat there on her bright orange and yellowswirled bed spread.
“I have a picture of Sgt Barry Saddler” she said, and opened a drawer, pulling out a picture of the singer. He’s little green beret was cocked to one side “My Dad’s friend Ted was in the 82nd Airborne Division” I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but just nodded in agreement and acted impressed because clearly she was. “Ted says if he ever meets Sgt Barry Saddler that he’ll get his autograph” she could also sing “Secret Agent Man” by Johny Rivers and did so while she twirled her baton over and under her extended arm, doing the “pancake” shec alled it. And she did have some granny glasses, dark Green glasses 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 sometimes,” as she put the glasses back in their plastic case, she unwrapped her last stick of Tea berry gum. Bite it in half, and handed me the rest “you con borrow them right now if you want.”
“It’s peacock blue,” I reported to my mother and Miss Hall who is sitting in the kitchen waiting for my report, under the rouge that they were planning the big Easter celebration. They both looked so plain and somber compared to Mo White and her loud. Colored pillows and sparkling wall hangings in Oriental designs. Our house looked so sparse and bare compared to the big paper fans and parasols that belonged to the White family, or to their ceramic table shaped like an elephant.
“And they came from Durban 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,” Miss Hall said ‘I certainly don’t visit the place but certainly I am familiar with most of the names living there,” I wanted to say that names don’t live, people do. “Mr Hall and I used to take the train and spent a long weekend there every fall. Of course, that was back before you moved here, back when Durban 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 Hall had been dead for my whole life and all I knew of him was what I had over heard 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 Miss Hall all those years “Stacey liked Durban beach” I said watching my mom’s back stiffen “She’s my age and has a older brother. Miss White grew up here in town. She moved to Durban beach when she married Mr White, who was from around there.” ” Hush! Then you know, I’ll know who she is. What is her maiden name?’ I shrugged still thinking about all those boxes they had tounpack and trying to imagine what was in them. “Whats her first name?” ‘Mo,” I answered tempted to do the hello hello hello just as Stacey had done, only my moma and Miss Hall would not have gotten it, a waste of perfectly good breath. “I think her whole name’s Mortha” “Martha” Miss Hall sat up straight, her finger in the air like she was about to make on important announcement “Oh. Its on the tip of my tongue, her father kept the horse stable down near the river” ” I know she likes horses’ ” Oh of course” Miss hall raised one eyebrow her face pontier like” I do indeed recall that family the Wileys. Yes Mo Wilay. She is much younger than us but i do remember her” I wondered why moma let Miss Hall carry on with that “Us” when Miss Hall must have been at least fifteen years older, Moma 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 Pasteur where the highway is” Miss Hall pushed away the ashtray. “They belonged to the borders, 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 Wiley’s did not have a pot to…..” she paused, stil lstaring at me. “Pee in” I added to which my mother raised a stiff eyebrow. ” Nor a window out of which to throw it”
Miss Hall sat back and relaxed by letting her hands reast on the table. She could not stand to end a sentence with a preposition. “I wonder if Miss White knows Andrea?” I asked boldly, the excitement of the time I had just spent at Stacey’s lingering with me. My mother looked up as if in slow motion. Miss Hall was leaning forward to hear my mother’s response. “I wouldn’t know. She might” moma said. “Now, who is Andrea?” Miss Hall was still leaning forward, “Notyour sister no. You don’t have a sister. Is Adrea Fred’s sister?” Miss Hall was rifling through her purse for a cigarette.” “Niece. She does not visit very often; Hardly ever,” moma said her voice falling into its original sharpness, her pronunciation like a honk of a goose. She turned to me then “Casey, why don’t you run and tell the Whites about the Easter picnic and how the whole Town comes. Tell Miss White if she has any questions I am happy to answer them.” ” Find out what all those rocks are for,” Miss Hall called after me, and then I heard her continue talking to moma “I just can’t imagine what all those rocks are for. And that little wooden structure looks like something out of the Orient.What could that be for? You know, I don’t think much of the Japanese, haven’t since the war. Mr Hall was in thePacific, you know, Purple heart and various other citations.”
My mother’s steady flow of yes and uh huh’s were like little commas punctuating all that Miss Hall had to say even no and then, my mother smoked a cigarette. Miss Hall’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 this three pack a day habit. Her lectures would be mean nothing if he caught her in the act. She breathed in and out heavily, emitting a stream of smoke, while nodding along with Miss Halls words “I have Mr Hall’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’ you know, Mr Hall was quite the man’s man” uhhah “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 the first week Miss Hall stood on her front porch and watched Mo White spread rocks all over the lawn, digging up what little bit of grass had begun to grow. She dug a little gold fishpond, in the middle of which stood her fish statue a fat, friendly-looking fish in sandstone, and she planted a big clump of pussywillows out near the streat ” Oh My God, Oh My God” I heard Miss Hall mumbling; Her head shaking from side to side. The little pogoda was the mail box and in a perfect line from top to bottom said: Whites, 202Evea Road “Oh My God she said ” do let a Strong wind come and carry it all off, every pebble, please just do that for me. Please just answer this one very small prayer and I’ll never ask for any thing else.”
