Ferris Beach by Jill McCorkle

respect for Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie, and Helen Keller jokes were certainly out of the question. It was then that I realized your best jokes are at someone else’s expense. But whose? We finally agreed, much to my mother’s distaste, that we would tell Theresa Poole jokes. How many Theresa Pooles does it take to screw in a light bulb, and so on.
    My favorite one he did that very night while Mama was rearrangingher tumbled-forth vegetables. He filled a bowl with water and set it on the table. “This is the public swimming pool of Fulton. It’s the first day and here come all the white people.” He took the salt shaker and shook it over the bowl. “And here come all the black people. This is an integrated pool.” And he shook the pepper all over the bowl. “Everyone was swimming and having a great time when all of a sudden who came to the pool but Mrs. Theresa Poole and, oh, my God, she was in a
bathing suit.”
He ran around the table with his hands up to the ceiling, then clutched his head, up and down, up and down, while Mama rubbed a cucumber with Crisco to make it shine, all the while shaking her head back and forth. He stopped by the sink and put a little bit of dishwashing liquid on his finger. “She dove in the pool and . . .” He dipped that same finger in the bowl and when he did, all the little grains of pepper flew to the side. Mama turned away so that we wouldn’t see her laugh.
    For years he had cut the obituaries from several different newspapers. He kept them in a cigar box, sorting them statistically by age and cause of death and geographical region. He subscribed to the Sunday edition of all the major papers, which arrived in Fulton on about the following Thursday, so it was a routine thing for him to do his cutting on Friday nights during “Gunsmoke.” “Pass me those scissors, Miss Kitty,” he said in Matt Dillon simulation. The only thing that irritated my mother more than this voice was when he imitated Jimmy Durante.
    “Please,” Mama said. “I can’t stand when you call her that. Kitty sounds like, well, just like what you see there, like Miss Kitty.” She stood there and shooed a hand at Amanda Blake. “Miss Kitty with too much makeup and a spot drawn on her face. She’s the only woman on the whole show so you know what we’re to think.” I couldn’t help but laugh, all those jokes Misty had told me about Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty while we sat way up in the tree hoping to see some afternoon parkers.
    “Matt Dillon sure seems to like her,” he laughed, and went back to his cutting and sorting. “Lots of people draw on their faces, Marilyn Monroe did, for example.”
    “Well, she’s a good one to admire.” Mama sat down and opened her mouth as if she were about to comment on all those newspapers, and then stopped herself.
    “Most men think so.” He put down his scissors and lit a cigarette. “It seems to me there’s a lot of cancer in California.”
    “Well, there are a lot of people.” She stared at his cigarette, eyebrows raised as if to complete her thought, though I knew if he weren’t around and it were Theresa Poole sitting there, she would gladly smoke one herself.
    “Little Angela has a beauty mark,” he said, and just that easily I saw it all starting again.
    Mama drew in a long breath and let her copy of
Fondue Cookery
fall to the floor. “What
little
Angela has is a mole, a dark mole that sticks out just above her lip. And . . .” She stared at the glossy picture of little fondue forks there near her foot. “Smoking is hazardous to your health.”
    “It’s a beauty mark,” he dragged out, in an attempt to mimic Festus, who my mama also could not stand, exhaling a stream of smoke aimed right for her. “You could paint one on, Miss Cleva,” he continued. “Why don’t you paint one on?”
    She retrieved the book, which had recently prompted her to dip everything imaginable into melted chocolate, and held it in one hand, the fingers of her