Sybil (19 page)

The weeks after the funeral? Taking care of Ella? What was he talking about? She had done absolutely nothing about Ella. And she didn't know about the weeks after the funeral. She was becoming confused. When had the funeral taken place? Hadn't it just happened?

Then Sybil looked directly at her mother and made what she considered a bold plunge. "Mother," she asked, "what grade am I in?"

"What grade am I in?" her mother echoed. "That's a silly question."

They didn't tell her, didn't understand how urgent it was for her to know. They didn't seem to care. What could she tell them if they did care? Even if she tried, she didn't know what to tell.

Her mother turned to her and said, "What's the matter with you? You're awfully quiet. You're so different today."

Her grandfather, seeing how solemn his granddaughter looked when her mother said that, proclaimed, "Christians must always smile. It is a sin not to smile."

Her father rose to go. "I told Mrs. Kramer I'd be back to the store by one-thirty."

Sybil's father had worked in a hardware store since they had come back from the farm, where they had gone to live briefly as an economy measure when they had lost their money in the Depression. Sybil and her mother had come back first so that she could start kindergarten. Then her father went to work in Mrs. Kramer's hardware store. They were in their old house again, with her grandparents in their own part upstairs. Now her grandfather lived with them, it seemed.

Her grandfather got up to go to his room. "Cheer up, Sybil," he said. "If you smile and be cheery, life won't be dreary." He bumped against the corner of the dining room table.

"He's so clumsy," her mother said. "He bumps into everything. He bumped the stand by the door so often, the plaster is all chipped off."

Sybil lingered, saying nothing.

"I don't know what's the matter with you today," her mother said. "You're not yourself--just not yourself."

Sybil walked to the closet. Still searching for the red wool coat she had looked for in the school coat hall, she dawdled.

Her mother followed her to the closet. "By the way," she said, "I'd like you to drop in on Mrs. Schwarzbard after school. She has a package for me."

"Who is Mrs. Schwarzbard?" Sybil asked.

"You know perfectly well who she is," her mother replied.

Sybil, who had never heard the name, was afraid to make too much of it. She just stared into the frightening closet with all those unfamiliar garments, the visible symbols of the unknown events that surrounded her on this enigmatic day.

"What are you waiting for?" her mother asked. "Miss Henderson will be furious with you if you are late."

Miss Henderson? Her mother knew she was in Miss Henderson's class!

"Put on the mackinaw you wore this morning," said her mother.

Sybil did as she was told. Her mother didn't seem to think there was anything odd about doing that.

As Sybil left the house, she saw Carolyn Schultz and Henry Von Hoffman on the school side of the street. She waited until they had gone into the school. When she herself entered the building, she was torn between going to the third-grade classroom and going to the fifth-grade room. Her mother knew that Miss Henderson was her teacher, but Sybil still thought she belonged in the third grade. She tried the third grade first.

Miss Thurston was at her desk, sorting test papers. "How nice of you to come to visit," she said when she saw Sybil. "I love having my girls come back."

Come back? Sybil headed for the fifth-grade classroom. Walking gingerly into the room, she made certain she returned to the seat in which she'd found herself that morning.

The first lesson was arithmetic. They were doing fractions, but Sybil couldn't multiply beyond the 3's and 4's. The last thing she remembered was doing the 3's and 4's, in the spring of the third grade.

Then, they were doing decimals, and Sybil couldn't do them, either. Miss Henderson said something about multiplication. Sybil couldn't multiply. The teacher erased the board, wrote up new multiplication problems, distributed paper, and drilled for the next day's quiz.

Sybil stared from her blank paper to the blackboard and back again. Miss Henderson watched her; then she walked to Sybil's desk and leaned over her shoulder.

"You haven't written anything," Miss Henderson said crossly. "Now work 'em."

Sybil did nothing, and the teacher, with even more irritation than before, pointed to the blackboard and demanded, "What's this and this?"

Sybil just shook her head. "Now, Sybil," the teacher said, "what is it?" The other children laughed. Carolyn Schultz snickered. "Sybil," the teacher insisted, "tell me what the answer is."

"I don't know it. I don't know." Sybil's tone was hushed.

Miss Henderson turned on her. "But you've always been an A student. I don't know what's gotten into you." The teacher was furious. "Young lady, you had better get hold of yourself.

Or are you playing games with me?"

There was no answer to the baffled teacher's rhetorical question. Then, in total perplexity, the teacher, walking back to the blackboard, threw a parting shot over her shoulder: "You knew it yesterday."

Yesterday? Sybil was silent. For her--she was beginning to know it now--yesterday was never. Things had taken place that she was supposed to have done or learned of which she had no knowledge.

This was not altogether a new experience. At other times, too, time seemed to have been erased for her the way Miss Henderson had erased those numbers from the blackboard. But this time seemed longer. More had happened, more that Sybil didn't understand.

She had never mentioned this strange feeling to anyone. It was a secret she didn't dare tell.

But how much time had gone by? This she still didn't know. She was in the fifth grade and didn't remember being in the fourth. Never before had that much time passed. Things were happening to her of which she knew nothing and over which she had no control.

"Is there something bothering you?" asked Miss Henderson, who had come back to her desk.

"No, no," Sybil replied, with a brave show of conviction. "But I can't do the work."

"You did it yesterday," Miss Henderson repeated icily.

There was no yesterday. Sybil remembered nothing since being at the cemetery.

What she couldn't understand was that other people didn't know that she didn't know. Miss Henderson kept talking about yesterday as if she had been right at this desk then. But she wasn't here. Yesterday was blank.

At recess time the children scrambled out to the playground. Both the boys and girls had their baseball and softball teams. They chose sides, but Sybil stood alone--unchosen.

To be left out was a new, terrible experience. In the past the children didn't leave her out of anything, and she couldn't understand why they did now.

When school was over, Sybil waited until the last child was safely out of reach and then started for home. She wasn't going to Mrs.

Schwartzbard, whoever she was, to pick up her mother's package. Her mother would be furious. But there was nothing she could do except accept the fury, as she always had.

In the school's main lobby, with its cold, austere marble, Danny Martin called to Sybil. Danny, who was a year older than Sybil, was a very good friend. They had many long talks on the front steps of the white house with black shutters. She could talk to Danny more than to anybody else. He had been at her grandmother's funeral. Maybe she ought to ask him about the things that had happened since then. But what a fool he'd think her if she asked him outright. She would have to find subtle ways to make her own discoveries.

Danny walked across the street with her. They sat on the front steps of her home and talked. One of the things he said was: "Mrs. Engle died this week. I went with Elaine to take the funeral flowers to invalids and shut-ins, just as I went with you when your grandmother died."

When Danny said this, Sybil remembered, as if it were a dream, that a girl whom they called Sybil but who wasn't Sybil went with Danny Martin to distribute her grandmother's funeral flowers to the sick and poor of the town. As in a dream, she remembered watching that girl. It felt as if she had been beside this other Sybil, just walking along. And she couldn't be certain whether or not it was a dream. But although she knew now that time, unaccounted-for time, had passed since the funeral, this was the only memory that came back. Otherwise there was nothing but emptiness, a great, cavernous emptiness between the moment that a hand had grabbed her at the cemetery and the time that she first found herself in the fifth-grade classroom.

Had she dreamed about that girl and those flowers? Or had the event actually happened? If it was a dream, how could Danny be in tune with it? She didn't know. But she didn't know about many things that had happened during this time, cold, blue, unreachable. To forget was shameful, and she felt ashamed.

The vague memory of the girl who had distributed the funeral flowers gave Sybil the incentive to ask Danny about all of the things that were different.

Houses had been built. Stores had changed hands. The town was not the same. Sybil knew that she could ask Danny about any or all of it.

"How come the Greens are living in the Miners' house?" Sybil asked.

"They moved there last summer," Danny replied.

"Who's the baby Susie Anne is pushing in the buggy?" Sybil wanted to know.

"That's Susie Anne's little sister," Danny explained. "She was born last spring."

"Who is Mrs. Schwarzbard?"

"A dressmaker who came to town a year ago."

Danny never asked, "How come you don't know?"

Sybil was freer with Danny Martin than she had been with any human being except her grandmother. The freedom with Danny was the more remarkable because it came during the spring, summer, and fall of 1934, the very period during which, tricked by time, Sybil enshrouded herself in a green aloneness and fortified her usual reserve with a special invincible armor against the world.

Danny became the antidote to the loneliness and vulnerability Sybil experienced after "coming to" in the fifth grade. Inexplicably, she had lost her friends. And, although her fundamentalist faith had always set her apart from other children, it was now as if they were noticing it for the first time. Now, because she could not do all the things they did--because of the prohibitions of her faith--they directed at her the sinister epithet "white Jew."

Less painful, too, because of Danny, was her father's coolly critical counsel, "You should be able to talk to people and to face the world," and her mother's reactivation of an old complaint, "I never know from one day to the next what mood you'll be in or what kind of person you'll be."

If it weren't for Danny, Sybil knew she could not have endured the humiliation at school, where, because of her problem with math, her marks had gone down. Without Danny, Sybil could not have withstood her mother's unrelenting accusation: "But you used to know the multiplication tables. You used to know them. You're just pretending to forget. You're a bad girl--bad." And without Danny it would have been impossible to weather the stormy confrontation with her mother over the lost place in the school's honor roll, regularly published in the Corners Courier for the whole town to see. "You were always there," her mother lamented. "I don't know what I would do if I had a dumb child. You're bright. You're only doing this to hurt me. Bad. Bad!"

Although Sybil didn't actually enumerate these things to Danny, she felt that without her doing so, he somehow understood. Sybil felt so close to Danny that there were times when she would have liked to talk with him about why time was so "funny," and about how unaccountably she had discovered that she was eleven years and two months old without ever having been ten years old--or eleven. But in the end this was too painful to talk about even to Danny. Besides, her reluctance grew with the recollection that when some years earlier she had expressed this thought to her mother, Hattie had laughed sarcastically and chided, "For land's sake, why can't you be like other youngsters?" All the same, time, Sybil knew--even though her mother scoffed and Sybil was afraid to tell Danny about it--was funny.

Upon occasion, however, Sybil was able to forget the strange, immutable subject of time--when she sat on the front steps talking with Danny, or when they played in the sunroom, where he made Shakespearean costumes for her dolls, transforming Patty Ann into Portia, Norma into Rosalind, and a nameless boy doll into the fool in Twelfth Night. Just as miraculously, Danny transformed going to a party from a terror to a pleasure. While the parties of the past, attended only at her mother's harping insistence, went unremembered, the parties to which Sybil went with Danny were never forgotten.

When Sybil was with Danny, she was able to forget that otherwise she walked alone. And she was alone. In the morning she was careful not to leave home until after she had ascertained that none of her classmates was in sight. After school she lingered at her desk until all the other children had left. When she walked on Main Street, doing some errand for her mother, she often crossed from one side of the street to the other six or seven times in a single block to avoid an encounter with one of the townsfolk. Turning from everybody else, she turned to Danny. Danny, without erecting barriers against other children, turned as surely to Sybil as she did to him. Sybil and Danny just naturally assumed that when they were old enough, they would marry. Sybil firmly believed that when this happened, time somehow would cease to be funny.