Two Shades of Morning (8 page)

So far, maybe one out of ten young people present went to our church, which meant that Sibyl had lied about the party being a church party. Maybe, she had thought I’d feel guilty for not helping if she told me it was for the church; and again she was right. But what did she want me there for? I honestly hadn’t lifted a finger to help, so far.

A dented blue car came brattling up the road and slowed at the turn-off, girls giggling and the rear fender scraping with Mary Beth Sanders, taciturn and stocky, at the wheel. The car was as banged up as Mary Beth, who played basketball like a football player. Vaulting on crutches from the car and across the yard, her plaster of paris leg cast jutted before her body. She had a fleshy, freckled face, not at all pretty but popular.

The five girls who came with her were pretty, tan and wore ribbons on their ponytails. They’d made up their faces to match: mascaraed eyes with clumped lashes, rose-pink lips painted in smiles. Their blue jeans were dark blue and unblemished; Mary Beth’s looked as if they’d been sprayed with turpentine acid, but still the other girls hung around with her. Mary Beth sat on a hay bale, in the midst of the boys, clanking her crutches together.

The kitchen door slammed and Sibyl swept out. She was wearing a white cotton shirt with a long denim skirt and tan skin boots. Gobs of gold jewelry: earrings, bracelets, rings, even a huge turquoise at her throat. The strongest fashion—so odd and wrong for the area, the era, the occasion. An over-done, yet fresh appeal. Something a woman couldn’t put her finger on in a million years; something a man would go ape over. Too much perfume. Too much makeup. Too much smile. More in the manner than the clothes or the makeup: a certain jerky self-confidence that made other women shrink. No, not women. We were girls; she was the woman. The only woman there. Eve in the garden of Eden with many Adams. The allure, common enough, was as mysterious as the apple.

It wasn’t only me, this time, who was caught squirming under Sibyl’s heel. I could sense it in the other girls. They wandered about and looked bored. And they were bored with all the boys dosing on hay bales and talking basketball. But their eyes shifted too often to Sibyl. Something unbelievable, something extraordinary—to us—Little Town’s ordinary lot of woman.

I had the advantage because I’d been exposed early. They had only seen her at church or riding around Little Town in her red convertible. And those were not accurate impressions of the Sibyl on the ranch. Not that Sibyl was ill-at-ease away from Sharpe’s Ranch, but she was more masterful in her own realm, which complemented her mysterious appeal.

As she tossed her head back and laughed, I realized that she performed differently for company—same as the first time I met her—and she no longer considered me company. Before that, I hadn’t known why she wanted me around. I decided then and there that my lack of height made her more statuesque, my cute clothes made hers more glamorous, my lack of smartness gave her an extra edge. The prettiest girl ever at Monroe County High being used as a measuring stick for an outsider! I didn’t measure up and I didn’t like it. But what I hated most was not being able to pinpoint what made Sibyl glamorous and worldly and worthy—even on our small scale, the little world of Little Town. I saw the mystified looks pass along the row of other pretty faces that night, which was no doubt mirrored in mine. I wondered if they also knew it was a timed act, that Sibyl was dying, and the ring and the tent and the lights would vanish, leaving only popped balloons and popcorn cones to be blown away by the next wind.

But tonight she looked too lively to die. I watched her standing, talking, the sophisticated way she held her elbow with her left hand and a squat glass of Coke with her right—no liquor offered tonight—tipping it gracefully to sip. I swear there was nothing of death on her that night. Her brow was cool and smooth, a little too broad to be perfect. She seemed to have an uncanny ability to separate herself from yesterday and tomorrow, to block all thoughts of cancer and dying. That was the special appeal she had for me then ably holding the moment. I admired her that night, and I would admire her again, but the possibility that she had lied about dying surfaced ever so often, particularly when P.W. started noticing her.

She flirted with all the boys, but especially with P.W. She would sidle up to him and snigger secretively. The others seemed hesitant and confused, their intrigue showing only in slips. But P.W.—strutting till I thought he might crow—was dazed. He toasted double marshmallows for her after supper and hung to her like a fire in the cold.

Robert Dale stood to the side and poked at the fire, smiling as if he were proud or maybe impotent. And yet Sibyl came off innocent, certainly not seductive, more like the ideal hostess with a celebrity guest. And P.W., poor thing, would have been dull if not for his virility and his basketball fame. I almost felt she was making fun of him, the way she laughed at all his flat jokes.

Except for a word or two during a game of Shanghai, he hardly spoke to me. Strolling the other couples up and down the road, Robert Dale, who led the parade, would call out, “Shanghai!” And as the girls moved forward to the next partner, snuggling as they strolled, a two or three minute interval allowed for a snatch at talk, a kiss, or an awkward wait for the next “Shanghai!” to be called. Sibyl and I among them, passing on. I thought we’d outgrown that! Shanghai was what we’d played at Pound parties as school kids: everybody would bring an approximated pound of party food and we’d dance or play Shanghai. How tasteless and downright tacky of Sibyl to pick that game for a party of mixed ages. I knew she justified it as “doing things the young people like”—I think she even said that to me. I felt stupid and ignored, as well as out-of-step. “Shanghai!”

After that, P.W. seemed to remember I was around only when he stumbled over my feet, literally. “Oh, Earlene! Hey, Sugar. You having a big time?” Then he followed behind Sibyl in the maze of hay bales placed about the fire. But the most amazing thing of all was how Sibyl treated me like an old best friend, a member of the family.

“You know where everything is,” she said, laughing and floating off. “Show Mary Beth and them to the bathroom.”

All the other girls went along for something to do, and I guess to see the inside of Sibyl’s house. I knew these girls, many of the cheerleaders, and had never seen them so dull. Only Mary Beth was unbothered, but she had nothing invested in the art of womanliness, no boyfriend, no beauty. She was enviable with her bumbling crutches, an excuse for lack of contrast. The girls tipped to doors and peeked in while waiting their turns in the bathroom. And I took the opportunity to check out the new Miss Monroe County High, June Crosby—too frail and wispy.

“I nearly bout slipped down and broke my neck back there,” said Mary Beth, vaulting along the hall from the bathroom and pausing to take in the living room.

“Those floors are slick all right,” I said, all at once feeling subjected to the creaking of her crutches in the still house; the way they sounded against the music outside and Sibyl’s high-rankling laughter.

“God! This ain’t bad atall!” said Mary Beth, hobbling to the sofa and sinking beside me with a bored sigh. The clank of her crutches filled the void of the house again. Any place without Sibyl seemed a void that night.

Mary Beth pressed her hand into the cushion between us, letting it spring back. “You don’t reckon it’s real down, do you?”

I shrugged.

“Where the devil did they get the cash money for all this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling more relaxed inside than out: it was like letting your hair down after it had been wound tight in a French twist all day.

“Little Robert Dale ain’t never had the loot for stuff like this,” she said, comical and alleviating with her lopsided mouth and dry brown hair. Easily identifiable flaws were such a Godsend! Her fat middle rolled up to meet her breasts as she bent forward and poked a finger into the toe of her plaster cast. “I wish I had me a clothes hanger,” she said, gazing about the room, not with interest as much as taking stock.

“When will you be able to play basketball again?” I asked.

“I got a few more weeks in this thing,” she said, and cracked her hardened knee with her knuckles. “Oughta be off by the time school takes in again.”

“I know you’ll be glad.”

“Yeah, I reckon.” She sprawled with her bad leg out, one arm folded over the top of her head. “They don’t nobody much come to the girls’ games nohow.” She let it lay—a dead snake.

I knew how she felt, how it hurt to use yourself up on something considered generally insignificant. It was my first time feeling that way, and I felt sick.

Outside again, the girls began making up excuses to leave. Except for Mary Beth, who’d made herself another hotdog and plopped on a hay bale. “Y’all better get you another hotdog,” she said to the other girls. “Ain’t everyday you get cocoalers and stuff for free.”

Everybody else had gone into the barn and were gathered around tables, talking in groups, Sibyl, P.W., and Robert Dale among them. I started to tell P.W. I was going on home but decided not to. Everybody was laughing at some joke Sammy Dee had told, and I didn’t feel like laughing. My head felt fuzzy, white sparkles going off behind my eyes. I was almost to the barn door when Robert Dale came up behind me; he took my arm and smiled, his face drawing close, very close.

“You bout wore out?” he asked, keeping step with me.

“Yep,” I said. “I’m sorry, I thought I’d just go on home, not bother anybody.”

The fire in the barbecue had burned down to a pulsing glow.

“I’ll walk you,” Robert Dale said, placing his arm around my waist, his head next to mine, walking toward the dark road.

I eased away and he laughed, seeming to catch on that I was thinking about how it used to be with him and me. We didn’t talk. I think if we had, we’d have had to talk about Sibyl, and we couldn’t—not then. Our going-together had been more him than me, and now his feelings had vanished like rain when a front moves through. Sibyl would have that effect on a man. Suddenly, I felt crazy-jealous. So odd! I’d dumped Robert Dale for P.W., not the other way around. He’d never even asked why, and I hoped he never would, because the only answer I could give would be that P.W. was sexier.

“Night, sugar,” Robert Dale said at my front door, opening it and waiting for me to go inside.

“I’m sorry, Robert Dale,” I said, turning to face him.

“What for?” He’d already started to walk off.

“For breaking you away from the party.”

He laughed and I watched him lope off through the door-shape of light, sloped shoulders rounded, a slight swagger. If I’d said what I started to say—I’m sorry I dumped you for P.W.—I think he’d still have strolled off with a swagger, whistling down the road. Shanghai!

#

I don’t know what time it was when P.W. came in, but I sensed something wrong in the way he undressed. Stripping off his shirt stiffly and letting it fall to the bedroom floor, his breath coming shallow and not caring if I fussed because he didn’t place his clothes on the chair. He sat on the edge of the bed, his side, then lay down, away from me, not at all settling in. We had never slept a night without gluing bodies back to front, each sensing when the other needed to turn—perfect timing, like sleep-dancing—drifting in and out of sleep to make love.

I opened my eyes wide. Oh, God, he knows about the dress! No, he couldn’t. Punk? No. If he knew about that he’d be bawling me out for getting myself talked about. That’s how I’d summed up that problem: rubbing all over Punk would mean getting myself talked about. And just who would be doing the talking but Sibyl? Had she said something tonight? The dress wasn’t it. If she had been going to tell him about the dress, it would have been at church, and she hadn’t even mentioned the word “new” that day. “I like your dress,” was woman-talk, meaning the same thing as new. And besides, she couldn’t know I’d charged it.

“P.W.” I leaned across him, searching the dark breathing form for his face. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” he snapped, measuring breaths.

“Don’t give me that!” I tugged him to his back. “What’s this all about?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m sleepy.” He turned away and bunched his pillow under his head.

I sat up, dark deflecting on my eyes.

Oh, well, that was Sibyl’s last chance. I did once think how bad I’d feel if she should die that night after I’d been so unfriendly. Surely there was some way to get around having to see her. I’d seen it done all my life: my neighbors called it “sweeping around your own back door” or “minding your own business.” I think they probably never had to put up with a Sibyl before. There was nothing to do but end it with her.

I touched P.W.’s side, the rib I was made from, and he jerked free.

* * * * *

Chapter 7

At that stage I must have been making resolutions only to break them, but staying away from Sybil’s was not so easy. P.W. went and I tagged along—no longer mad with each other, just crazy. Nothing had been resolved; the mad phase had simply worn itself out. Still, he hadn’t told what happened the night of the cookout. When I asked he said “nothing,” as though it was something, but he had decided to be sweet and let it slide. So did I.

I now know that Sibyl wouldn’t have said anything about Punk to P.W. because that would have tipped her hand. If she had, I could have called her a liar and had it out with her then, and P.W. and I might have hacked out our differences and gone on, and Robert Dale might have been freed from his gilded cage. Regardless, P.W. and I were never the same. We still had sex with the mindless constancy of love-bugs, but we didn’t make love anymore. We groped, got satisfied, showered and dressed at the trailer, then went to Sibyl’s. Intimate gatherings at her informal invitations. And although she was aware that I knew her other side, she seldom showed it. The glimpses I got came in wry smiles or in winks—squeezing motions of her eyelids against censoring irises of light—except for the name she dubbed me: “Erlie Girlie.” She’d say it and hug me while P.W. and Robert Dale laughed. She sweetened the slur by nicknaming P.W., “Petie,” and Robert Dale, “Rober’ Dale,” Punk’s and Mae’s pronunciation, but in a playful tone that couldn’t be questioned.

P.W. was high on her and she played him like a hand of cards. I thought he was mostly flattered by her attention, but I knew he admired her too. He kept saying she was “different,” how dull most women could be. All the boys who came regularly and rode her horses found her different (the word I want and don’t want is “captivating”). None of the girls ever came back, except Mary Beth, and she came only to eat and to be near Sammy Dee Royals. He never noticed her.

I became something of an observer during that period at the beginning of summer, laid-back and drowsy, much like Miss Avie Nell used to be in her slat chaise longue on the porch. Peering through a hazy window—that’s how watching Sibyl felt. At times, I even liked being at Sibyl’s, a certain edgy excitement to her craziness. Her place was like a vacation in a swanky resort. I didn’t have to cook. Also, I found that I’d missed high school. The year-long gulf, which I’d never noticed before, was bridged by those gatherings. I resented the shift of the limelight, true, having always been the prettiest girl in Monroe County, but just being Erlie Girlie in the wings was relaxing for a change.

I laid my mind to rest where P.W. was concerned, telling myself that he too liked the excitement of mingling with other people, which we’d given up when we got married. Laughing and cutting up with another couple, hanging out with high school kids. But I couldn’t stop feeling that something was wrong—a nagging guilt deep down of a wrong turn taken—as if we were edging toward a sex orgy and thinking about taking part. But the gatherings were all so innocent, fun and funny, not even a dirty joke told. Everything was funny, that is, except the undercurrents between me and Sibyl. And I couldn’t explain, especially to P.W., what was happening. How can you explain a suspicion of something sinister where there appears to be none

When I finally got the courage to try a glass of wine, Sibyl started drinking water. She made a point of walking around with a tall glass of it and glaring at me as if I was a sinner. A few weeks later, the liquor and wine disappeared from the hunt board.

Sometimes, all of us were cruel and critical: somebody out of style, somebody poor, or the man down the road who was too thin, his wife too fat. And Sibyl, usually starting it, would go along, then accuse me of being unchristian. She never accused me in front of the others, and they never caught on. When I would tell her off, she’d jump in her car and be gone, easing back a while later to apologize in front of everybody. She’d keep me on her prayer list, she said.

One afternoon, while Robert Dale was gone and she was in a mood to bake, she handed me a white wicker basket from the top of the refrigerator and jokingly shooed me out of the kitchen, telling me to go hunt goose eggs for her special brownie recipe. “They won’t rise right without goose eggs,” she said.

I stared at her, almost saying, You go, but went anyway while she and P.W. sat drinking root-beer floats at the bar in the kitchen, going because I was too stupid to say no. Going because she was sick and I was well. But I was bristling all the while as I plundered the straw nests along the banks of Bony Branch. The sun was shining. She hadn’t sent me out in the cold dark. Her crazy geese paraded and hissed along the edge of the raveling black water. I threw a rock and they skidaddled. Sibyl had heard that Windsor Palace had geese for security purposes and she’d bought six. The palace had only four, she’d said.

I stumped my toe on an oak root as I headed back toward the house, swinging the basket like a little girl. Tugging on the screen door, as though it was stuck, I heard her and P.W. laughing in the living room. I waited, so I wouldn’t disturb them, also to keep from seeming suspicious—to keep from embarrassing them and myself. I just stood there, gripping the handle of the basket and kneeing it in a sort of rhythm.

In a few minutes, she came to the door and flipped the latch and laughed. “How did that happen? Oh, well...” Then she turned back to the kitchen as P.W. wandered in from the living room. He was grinning, red-faced, his little finger daintily raised from his glass: his guilty look. Lately, he looked guilty over the least things—if he stopped at the juke on the Florida line before coming home, if his daddy nailed him for not noticing the latest invasion of tobacco horn worms, if he told me he loved me...

I began to doubt my own perceptions. I kept getting those isolated glimpses of her—the real Sibyl—while everybody else seemed to see what she showed them. Except Aunt Birdie, who was at that stage talking in riddles if she talked at all, but I was in too deep with Sibyl to hang around Aunt Birdie and risk her homing in on my turning. I realize now that no one in Little Town ever believed in Sibyl, anymore than they did in ghosts, both equally transparent and ephemeral. She controlled the church with her strong brand of charm, became president of the Women’s Missionary Union. They accepted her because it would be unchristian to reject her. And because it would be but for a season.

The choir, mostly made up of lil’ ole ladies, stuttered over fancy new hymns, heads bent to study the new choir books bought by Sibyl, while Miss Effie picked out the complex arrangements at the piano. Even during spring revival, when the Baptists and Methodists swapped choirs, our choir failed to make the sour notes sweet. But the Methodists were impressed with the effort, with the new hymns only Sibyl could sing. You could tell they wanted her, and Miss Lavenia would gladly have given her to them.

The choir had always tolerated Miss Lavenia’s special screech trailing on “Amazing Grace.” Even the Methodists had grown used to the grating sound. I’d always thought it was a special effect, she’d sung it with such rapturous confidence. One hard look from Sibyl, when Miss Lavenia fouled the new hymns, and she quit. If Sibyl had been critical of everybody who hit a sour note, she’d have been left singing a solo. I knew I couldn’t sing, so I’d quit when Sibyl started. I probably would have quit anyway, to be honest, because I was having trouble keeping up with the garden—putting up vegetables in a race with P.W.’s mama to fill up my freezer first—and my new social life. Thursday nights, choir practice nights, I took off from Sibyl and the freezer to sit around the house.

But the town knew Sibyl was passing-fancy; she would come and go like others before her. They would endure. They were never really swayed. Her following was of the very young and naive. And she was necessary, the town elders seemed to suggest, to teach us of the nuisances we would invaribly run into. At times, I believed Sibyl would die; they doubted it, or maybe thought of course she could die—we all could. So what? We had a whole cemetery near the Withlacoochee River bridge that needed expanding. Sibyl was part of the cycle of life and life would go on.

#

Sibyl no longer came to our house—again no explanations and none expected. Early one hot Friday morning, she called to invite me to go with her to the Slurry Lake pavilion.

As usual on Fridays, I’d planned to take Mama and Aunt Birdie to Tallahassee. I didn’t know why shopping trips had to be on Fridays, unless they’d picked up the habit from some of the pulp-wooders’ and loggers’ wives, who had to go into town on Fridays to get their husbands’ pay checks and go to the grocery store. But the clock in the tower of the old Tallahassee courthouse could have been set by our routine: off to the downtown Jew stores at ten, we would mosey along the block toward the courthouse square till 11:30, then cross Broad Street to eat dinner at King’s Grill. The Friday Special: buttered grits, sweetened cole slaw, and oniony fried hushpuppies that tasted like the mullet—salty, browned, fishy filets, ruffled around the edges. When the dinner whistle gonged at 12:00, we’d be sipping syrupy iced tea.

But on that lazy Friday morning of Sibyl’s call, I wanted to go with her to Slurry Lake where the music glimmered with the sun across the lake. Mama and Aunt Birdie could wait till tomorrow or Monday. They should learn to drive, or Daddy should take them, not drag out some moth-eaten excuse about how he hated to go anywhere. He needed to get out, do him good.

I called Mama to tell her I couldn’t go, half-expecting her to question me about why and give me a good excuse to snap at her. But she said fine, she didn’t really need to go anyway. She would wash sheets and hang them in the sun. I didn’t call Aunt Birdie because she might guess I was going with Sibyl. I didn’t know why I didn’t want her to know, but I was tired of feeling guilty. I needed a day off and I wanted an early suntan. Sibyl pulled up and honked her car horn, light and jaunty toots in time with the song on the radio—”Big Girls Don’t Cry,” by the Four Seasons. She was wearing a tailored white tunic over a white swimsuit and her long tan legs glistened in the sun. Her gold hair was sun-bleached in strands and caught up in a ponytail, not too high or too low, just classy. She was more striking that day than I’d ever seen her, riding high in her red convertible with the top pleated back. I made myself taller by perching on a crooked leg with the wind whipping at my broomsage hair. As we passed Moore’s store, facing the Little Town courtyard, Mr. Len and Mr. Taft waved from their bench out front. We waved back, then stared ahead at the ribbon of gravel running in the sun.

Big girls don’t cry, Big girls don’t cry,

Big-ig girls, they don’t cry-yi-yi, they don’t cry,

Big-ig girls, don’t cry—that’s just an alibi—Big girls don’t cry, big girls don’t cry, big girls don’t cry...

I looked in the rearview mirror at the crossing with its blinking red light that nobody heeded. At the post office next door to the store, which doubled as a library: when Miss Nona, the librarian, had replaced her elderly father as postmistress, she had moved the books from the courthouse to the post office. The books, like the new brick courthouse and post office, were property of the State, as were the sidewalks unreeling in the sun for children’s skates and bicycles to zip alongside the zooming traffic of 122, north-bound for the dip at Walton Creek.

If not for the State we’d still have had dirt roads. The county didn’t believe in change anymore than they believed in Sibyl Sharpe and her way of doing things, but they’d hauled fill-dirt to level aged ruts in front of her house anyway. No one knew why, anymore than I knew why I was riding west in her brand-new car, looking back at my hometown like a stranger.

Set among the old clapboard store and the steep-roofed Masonic Lodge at the crossing, the flat-top courthouse and post office looked like the start of a new town with new rules. The courthouse was for work now, since the ancient, white, two-story building had been torn down. It had been used for revivals when the outlying hamlets joined each spring, and for weddings, even the courtroom upstairs, dusty and hollow, transformed for festive occasions. We rarely held court, except under the guise of prosecuting bootleggers, once in a blue moon, who had been nabbed by revenuers and let go when they turned their backs and hightailed it out of Monroe County.

Local politicians had been forced to take to the bench in front of Moore’s store after the old courthouse porch had been taken down. The lumber still lay under Web Holmes’ hay shelter to prevent waste. If anyone needed boards for a bookshelf or a chicken coop, they helped themselves. It was, after all, our tax money that had built the courthouse in the first place.

Somehow we kept the old school, a couple of blocks east, when the State went on its new-brick spending spree. The school house, lofty and sprawling, was built of red bricks (probably what saved it from sure destruction) and served as primary, elementary and high school combined. If it was good enough for our elders, it was good enough for us. No one had told them yet that they should want us to have better.

I’d never considered us peculiar until I saw us that day in the rearview mirror of Sibyl’s car. We’d heard all our lives that we were one of the least populated counties in Florida, license plate tag number 180, space-abundant and people-scarce. When we’d gone away to basketball games, we’d waved our red and black banners from the school bus windows, never aware or caring that we might be considered quaint.

Few locals ever left the county after high-school graduation, and few strangers came to live there. If they did, they didn’t stay long. Not that they were unwelcome, they simply didn’t fit in. They could not abide our quaint mores’ and motives. We welcomed them warmly, and just as warmly told them goodbye, going on with our little-town routines.

Sibyl was passing through.

#

Slurry Lake was tucked in the pinewoods between Tallahassee and Monticello, the only place to swim if you weren’t a member of a country club or didn’t own your own pool. Unless you went to one of the Florida beaches, a day’s trip there and back. So, when the public schools let out for the summer, the old wooden pavilion, set lengthwise on the upslope of shore, would be brimming with teenagers and children from the surrounding counties.