Creola's Moonbeam (3 page)

I sighed and headed outdoors. How I longed for the simplicity, and good skin, of my childhood at the beach.

But
that
was a story I’d thrown away.

by Honey Newberry

When I was a little girl, my older sister, Mary Pearle, and I could simply put on our bathing suits and run outside, slamming (always slamming) the rickety wooden door of the beach cottage’s screened-in porch. Free as the wind, the two of us would charge through sugary white sand and splash into the cooling waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

There was no sunscreen for us and there was no need for hats. Nor, in the Fifties, was there any threat of a shark biting off our toes. Of course, sharks had always been around, but those frighteningly dangerous sea creatures never came near the pristine Gulf waters off St. George’s Island where, for nearly two decades, we, the Butlar family, took our annual two-week vacation.

Wear hats? Not ever! That was true, with the exception of the summer of 1956,
The Year of the Bathing Cap
. A few weeks before our trip to the beach, Mary Pearle and I were thumbing through one of our mother’s fashion magazines when we came across a lush tropical beach scene, one with swaying palm trees, pounding surf, beach umbrellas, and gorgeous models lounging about in sugar-white sand.

The models were wearing rubber bathing caps, but much to our surprise and admiration, these were not the frumpy black kind that older women like Mother wore. These stunning women sported fancy caps in a rainbow collection of color that coordinated with their swimsuits. Mary Pearle, at age thirteen, simply had to have one.

Wanting to do everything just like my older and more sophisticated sibling, I had to have one, too. I was eleven.

Mary Pearle went along with my wishes not because she respected my fashion sense, but because she was not about to be the only girl around wearing the trendy accessory. I was her ready disciple.

Giving in to our fervent and relentless pleadings, Mother agreed to take us shopping. As expected, however, such a chic item was hard to find in the modest stores of Humphrey, our small, middle-Georgia town. Much to our dismay, we came home empty-handed. Fortunately, however, only a couple of days before we were to leave on vacation, Mother hit pay dirt.

Mary Pearle and I were sitting on the living room rug putting together a one-hundred-piece puzzle, which, coincidentally, was a tropical scene. My sister and I — I especially — always daydreamed about the beach.

Mother burst in through the front door. She stopped and posed in a victory stance. Her high-heeled feet apart, in her gloved hands she triumphantly clutched a shopping bag.

“Eureka!” She emptied the bag and produced two identical swimming caps. Covered in pink petals and topped with green leaves, their design was even prettier than the ones in the magazine.

“Ohh, Mother, thank you, thank you!”

We jumped up, scattering the sand and surf puzzle pieces everywhere. My sister and I squealed with glee as we stuffed our long brown ponytails into the flowered caps. We hurried to admire ourselves in the hall-tree mirror.

Mary Pearle preened. “Look, Harriette, it will match my suit
puuurfectly
.”

“Mine, too.”

Our mother beamed.

Our father, as he usually did, teased us, “We’ll surely be able to spot the two of you out in the water. Our darling daughters will be the only roses floating around with all those fish!”

“Oh, Daddy, you just don’t understand,” complained Mary Pearle. She was more anxious for his praise than for his good-natured teasing.

I had another concern. “I forgot about the fish, Daddy! I can’t stand it when they swim into me. I wish we could have our Gulf without those slimy fish.”

“Darling girl, it doesn’t work that way. Besides, those fish are more afraid of you than you are of them.”

“They couldn’t be.”

My sister wasn’t worried about fish or me. She was too busy prancing about in her cap. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, nearly supper time, and good gracious sakes, if she didn’t go and put on her swimsuit!

Daddy laughed at her. “Mary Pearle, are you expecting a flood?”

“D* * * *dddeee! Mother, make him quit!”

Mother laughed, too.

Though still three years away from getting her driver’s license, every time Mary Pearle Butlar wore her pink floral bathing cap she believed she was every bit as glamorous as her favorite movie star, Elizabeth Taylor.

I only prayed my cap wouldn’t attract fish.

My days of fearing fish are long gone. In truth, I believed Dr. Cox and his warnings about skin cancer. The sun was my enemy. The “well-seasoned” woman I’d become was far more focused on lotions to ward off that villain and on hats to make certain its rays didn’t alter my newly quaffed and colored hair. Yes, I’d made it to the hairdresser before the trip to the beach. I no longer looked as if a calico cat sat perched atop my head.

During one Memorial Day family beach trip, Mary Pearle and I talked about aging. While Beau played golf, we sisters talked, we laughed, we ate, we shopped, and we delighted in our favorite activity — walking the beach. Despite some major disappointments in her life, my sister still maintained her deliciously dry sense of humor.

“Mary Pearle, have you noticed that your boobs are getting, hmmm, are they getting bigger?”

We were walking on the beach at the time. Mary Pearle stopped and turned to me. Putting her arm around my shoulders, she assumed a serious posture and cleared her throat. “No, little sister, they’re not getting bigger. Just longer.”

“Longer?”

“Longer.”

For the rest of her visit, merely mouthing the word
longer
turned over my tickle box and Mary Pearle’s as well.

All in all, I yearned for childhood, for its effortlessness, for the old cottage of those simple days, and mostly for my family, the family who had so contentedly vacationed inside.

I grimaced as I pushed the button for my condo’s elevator. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if a shark were to take a small nip out of me. Depending on where he nibbled, of course.” The fierce fish might trim a pound or two from my mid-section. A free liposuction of sorts.

The possibility of my losing twenty pounds of baby weight had long since passed. I have two children-—a daughter, Mary Catherine, and her younger brother, Butlar. Butlar will turn twenty-four on his next birthday. I’ve carried those extra pregnancy pounds for a quarter of a century.

“Diet? Drat, I forgot my diet drink,” I scurried back inside the condo. On the way out, I grabbed a handful of cheese crackers. “Energy for a brisk swim.”

The smell of mildew hung like a damp cloud in the elevator. I attempted to hold my breath for the four-floor descent. “Can’t,” I gasped. I coughed in the dampness. Continuing my pattern of complaint, (perhaps due to my own sense of guilt for spending money to be there for the entire summer?) I thought about how cumbersome it was to carry all my necessities.

As a child, an old inner tube and favorite beach towel — the one with a pink poodle romping in the sand — were all the equipment required. Now I carried a towel, a folding chair, a drink, snacks, an umbrella, a new novel, lip-gloss, sunscreen, and my ever-present cell phone.

I reminded myself of an overburdened burro making the long trek into the Grand Canyon.

I caught my reflection in the elevator doors. Mirrors seem to be everywhere when one is feeling fat. “Am I shrinking to boot?” I wailed. “When did I become, well, so
compact
?” Alone in the smelly elevator I made yet another observation, “My bottom half is rising while my upper half is sinking.”

The elevator stopped on the second floor.

“And good morning to you, too!” I responded to the cheery couple as they stepped on. “Yes, it’s a perfectly marvelous day. I couldn’t be better.”

The elevator stopped on the first floor. “Go ahead,” I motioned for them to exit ahead of me.

Taking another glimpse at myself, I muttered, “A pear on popsicle sticks, that’s me.”

I made my way toward the beach, following a wooden walkway across a sand dune. At the base of its wooden steps, I passed a shower and stepped onto the sand. The convenient beach shower is a modern marvel to me. No longer do vacationers have to deal with sand in their sheets and everywhere else! I admire that innovation every single time I pass an outdoor shower, because I can still hear my mother’s constant vacation lament, “Harriette Ophelia Butlar! Mary Pearle Butlar! I just finished sweeping. Don’t you two children be tracking any sand into this clean cottage!”

I was named for my mother’s maiden aunts, Harriette and Ophelia. As a teenager, I believed with all my heart that, had the two dear old ladies been given more modern names, neither would have remained a spinster.

I must admit I was always envious of my sister’s name, Mary Pearle. How often I wished that I’d been the firstborn and thus named for my glamorous aunt on our
father’s
side, Mary Pearle Butlar Armstrong, who worked in the fashion industry in New York. Rarely had Daddy’s baby sister returned to Georgia, but the couple of times she came, in the late 1950’s, it was as if royalty had come to visit Humphrey.

I could hardly tolerate my sister during those few days. Being around her namesake aunt inflated her ego even more than usual.

“Mary Pearle Butlar, you are acting like
you
are the fancy lady from New York City,” I’d complain. “You are nothing but a plain little Georgia girl, a little girl from Humphrey, exactly like me!”

Didn’t do a bit of good. She’d stick out her tongue and priss away with her nose stuck straight up in the air.

I loved Aunt Harriette and Aunt Ophelia. Those fine Southern ladies could not have been any dearer to me, but never once did I plan to turn out like either of
my
namesakes.

When I grew up — having spent the first twenty-two years of my life as
Little Harriette
, or, on days when I displeased my parents,
Miss Harriette Ophelia Butlar —
I was eager to change my identity.
 
The Lord above was to provide the perfect solution.

If only that story weren’t at the county landfill now.

Harriette Ophelia Butlar

Weds

Beauregard Lee Newberry

June 24, 1967

—
Headline from the Humphrey, Georgia
Banner

I was a sophomore at the University of Alabama when I met the charming, funny, and very popular Beau Newberry. We were introduced at a sorority-fraternity pledge swap. The next three years raced by as we juggled classes, football games, fraternity parties, sorority dances, and make-out sessions in the university’s main library parking lot. Beau Newberry and I were married just after our graduations.

The date was selected through a lottery system, as each of my engaged sorority sisters lobbied for those all-important Saturdays in June of 1967. (We wanted to be in one another’s weddings, so we drew numbers.) I secured June 24. My former roommate, Ruth Anne Oliver, stopped speaking to me and hasn’t spoken to me since.

Ruth Anne, bless her heart, was divorced one year later and blamed the whole debacle on me. A noted fortune teller in Tuscaloosa had given her the third weekend of June as the perfect lining up of the moon and stars for Ruth Anne and her fiance’s astrological signs. But, according to our lottery rules, Ruth Anne’s wedding
had
to occur on the second weekend. Who knew?

I
am
sorry, Ruthie.

Beau and I married in the very same church in Humphrey where Mother and Daddy had married some three decades prior. It was the big event of the summer for Humphrey. Eight bridesmaids and twice as many groomsmen marched into the standing- room-only congregation. Mary Pearle, already married and, thankfully, only
slightly
pregnant at the time, served as my matron of honor. My attendants, with their tightly teased, lacquer-sprayed, helmet-like hair, wore soft green dresses with fashionable A-line skirts and short, white gloves. Each carried a bountiful bouquet of gardenias with English ivy that streamed down onto the church’s floor.