Two Shades of Morning Read online

  #

  When I woke up, I thought at first that I’d only dozed, but the sun had sank to behind the pavilion on its hill of sand. I turned to look for Sibyl and the lifeguard and they were gone. I sat up and checked out the swimmers and those nooning on the pier, all the way up to the entrance of the pavilion. No white swimsuit, no bronze suit of skin.

  I had to get home and fix supper. The skin on my back stung, and I figured I’d been cursed with a one-sided sunburn. I decided to go inside the pavilion, where she had to be, and followed the pier to the concrete walk leading up the shore. At the sheltered entrance, some teenage boys were throwing ice from snow-cones at a group of girls, who dodged and squealed and covered their look-alike heads. I pushed through the turnstile and went inside, stopping to let my eyes adjust to the dim room. Blasts of jukebox music and pinball knocks caused a skirmish in my head, a roaring that made my ears clog. Rows of booths fingered out from the windowed walls each side of the dance floor. I checked each booth for Sibyl. A young couple, scrunched together in one of the seats, was sharing a hotdog and some French fries, and I felt the first claws of hunger inside.

  I sat in an empty booth next to a screened window facing the parking lot and tried to figure where Sibyl could be. And it hit me that if she was really gone, her car would be gone too. Sparkles of red kept bursting before my ears; my thinking was delayed. I looked out where she had parked, and in place of her red convertible sat a blue Mustang.

  “My God!” I said. “She’s left without me.” I got up and went to the front door to look again, as if a window screen might have screened the truth. She had really gone! Somebody put a nickel in the jukebox and the music blared again, a fast song. None of those young people even looked at me. I felt old enough to be their mother, but not old enough to be on my own.

  A new crowd in fresh sun dresses and shorts shuffled in for the evening—dancing, talking, eating. I wandered back to my booth, stopping along the way at a water fountain. My money was in the car and I thought I might starve. I always got thirsty when the water was off at home. I’d give Sibyl thirty minutes, then I was calling home. That meant calling Daddy to come get me because P.W. would still be at work.

  After thirty minutes, I made it an hour, then two. If I called Daddy, Mama and Aunt Birdie would know I’d chosen to go with and be dumped by Sibyl, rather than go shopping with them. Also, if Daddy picked me up, I’d feel like a baby.

  I watched the sun hover in the pines and filter through the window screen, with a dusting of twilight along the curvy dirt road that led to the pavilion. When the sun wallowed behind the pines, I spotted the red convertible gliding up the road then pulling into the parking lot. I stood to go, then sat again when I saw that a man was driving. Then I recognized Sibyl’s golden hair on the passenger side and Bob the lifeguard driving. I stamped out the door, headed for the car. I guess I thought they’d jump or something, but they ignored me and talked on, sitting in the car, while I leaned against the hood. The engine was ticking hot, and the hood felt warm on my arms; my face and back were burning up. They both got out and she walked behind the car to get to the driver’s side. Dressed now in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, he started to walk away.

  “Bob, wait a minute,” she called, and he strolled back—boyish now and strangely familiar to me. She slid a dog tag on a beaded chain over her hair, flipping it underside-up, and handed the chain to him. He walked backwards to the pavilion, smiling as he slipped the chain over his own head.

  She started the car, and I got in, slamming the door.

  “Well, I hope you had a good time,” she snapped.

  “What?” I couldn’t believe her tone—her tone of accusation, this time, not words. Hot spider legs crept up my spine.

  She drove fast, staring straight ahead with her strong jaw set, her bottom lip pursed—a fake pose of confidence that she’d bested me again? She took the deep, shady curve around the lake, without slowing, with an air of expectancy that belied that look.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off that tanned bisque face. Had I mistaken what she’d said again—how she’d said it? Maybe she really meant she hoped I’d had a good time. I started shaking my head. No, I knew what she said and how she’d said it. She was blaming me for falling asleep, for making her wait, in case I should tell. I went crazy.

  “You’re not dying,” I blurted. “If you were, you’d be getting yourself right.” I didn’t say “right with God,” though I thought about the sign on a tree at Walton Creek with its missing “G.”

  She started singing, nasal and low, glancing off at a dusky field along the straightaway toward home. A field bordered by woods where dark would come stalking like a panther. The song wasn’t anything I’d heard before—mostly she was humming—no popular song and I think she was only making it up, singing to drown me out. I didn’t let that stop me. And sometimes I’d touch on the truth, and when I did it would show in a tiny hollow above her right eyebrow.

  “You’re the biggest liar and hypocrite I’ve ever met,” I shouted. My lungs filled with the scent of cooling earth and ached. I lifted my face to let the wind blow at my hot eyes. “You take me for a fool—all of us. Robert Dale’s never been the same since he met you.”

  She started rapping on the steering wheel with her rings and singing louder—a song in narrative. I didn’t get the drift; I didn’t try. “Why’d you wear that old dress on Easter?” I said.

  “Why did you?” she said.

  I was shocked that she’d spoken; but then she went on humming and fiddling with rearview mirror. I decided to skip the petty business and go for the gut truth. “Because a new dress is beside the point of Easter.”

  She looked confused—around the eyes—and I was glad. But the joy I got from the spring of truth was spoiled. What if she was dying? My tongue wouldn’t stop.

  “I don’t know what happened that night after the cookout to make P.W. mad with me, but we’re doing good now. And you better stay out of it.”

  We were at that point passing P.W.’s folks’ home-place, a rundown farmhouse with oaks in the yard and fields of rank green corn and tobacco surrounding it. I thought I spied his mama out back, picking peas from her garden, bent like a broken scarecrow. I hated picking peas with her, always dreaded every visit with her and Mr. Buck, but I wished I was there now. Sibyl drove on, the road lonesome, gray and twisting.

  “You have no class, Erlie-honey,” she said, turning on the radio. “Not an ounce.”

  I could taste the brass of hate. “The only claim you have to class, Sibyl, is buying and dying.” Another bosh shot?

  A hollow formed above her brow again and her face went white. Pleased as I was, I bit my tongue.

  #

  Whether or not I’d handled her right, at least I’d handled her, which was better than I’d been doing.

  She didn’t drive me home. She didn’t speak to me again. She parked under her carport, and I got out. I walked along the road in the thickening buzz of locusts and dusk with a calmness I can’t explain except to say I felt light, my lips tingled.

  I cut up, floured and fried chicken in less than an hour; usually it took at least two, and generally by the time I got around to cooking chicken, it would be half-rotten in the refrigerator and I’d have to bury it in the backyard.

  Only one piece burned that night—a thigh with a charred patch on the brown crust. Maybe I was finally getting cooking down pat. I went to take a bath. My blistered back was beginning to draw, and looking in the mirror, I saw that my face was stained red on one side, drained white on the other. I looked bad and knew I’d look worse when I started to peel. Still, getting into the shower, I felt good, and getting out I felt better. I turned on the radio and smeared Noxema on the burns I could reach. I’d have P.W. finish my back when he came in, and I’d tell him everything, make him see the real Sibyl. But when he didn’t come in by nine o’clock, I got less eager and more worried. Thrown off by what-ifs. What if the tractor had overturned on top of him? What if h
e’d wrecked his pickup, driving as fast he always drove? What if he’d had a fight with his daddy and was off sulking and drinking at the county line?

  Knowing he’d have stopped by his mama’s house before starting home, I called Miss Eular. I dreaded worrying her; she was such an edgy woman, and if he was all right, he’d get on to me for bothering her and “telling on him” for coming in late. I played up to her in a high cheery voice: “I just got in...,” I said. “Oh?” she said. Had I cooked supper for her only son? (She didn’t say that, but I knew she was thinking it.) “Just wondered if he came by?” I said. “How come?” (You know he did, he always does, and what’s going on?) She said all that in two little words: How come?

  “I was just wondering,” I said.

  “He did but he’s done gone, early on,” she said.

  “Thank you, Miss Eular.” I hung up on the questioning silence.

  In a few minutes, the phone rang, but it was only Miss Eloise, my neighbor, calling to share her tip on watering down an off-brand of shampoo. Finally, I told her I had to go but I’d try the shampoo tip.

  By eleven o’clock, I was frantic. I’d been through all the what-ifs again and added some, torn between being worried, mad and suspicious. I looked at some magazines and did my toe nails, then lay face down on the couch with my burning back up.

  Aunt Birdie’s voice spirited into my living room: A woman shore does a lot of waiting. The remark had stuck because it was her sole revelation about personal trouble between her and her husband, Pap—dead going on five years—and because it was the truth. A woman sure did do a lot of waiting. The statement had also stuck in my head because she’d said it to me, not to Mama or Miss Lettie with me in earshot, and her saying it to me meant I was a woman now, a waiting woman. She had told how Uncle Pap and Emmet Moore, who used to own the grocery store in Little Town, would get to drinking and go out riding with a girl they called “Candy Block,” known to be “loose.” Emmet Moore had bought a new Ford convertible (the same one parked in my backyard) and they’d be gone for days. Evidently, Aunt Birdie would wait; she never got to the point, if there was a point, but she told how she’d waited and had been too ashamed to go even to the post office. A woman shore does a lot of waiting had been her before-marriage talk to me.

  Earlier, I had turned on the radio, listening to music that kept running into news—more on the Vietnam war, how many Americans had died that day, names of places as distant to me as old-age. At twelve o’clock, I turned it off, beyond worry, beyond mad, numb and perking my ears for the sound of P.W.’s pickup slowing on the highway and turning off on our road. I knew exactly how it would sound speeding up to our trailer, glass-pack mufflers crying then dying at the back door. Pacing, I started thinking, linking thoughts: where would he go? where did he usually go? Lately, nowhere but to work or to Sibyl’s. My scalp prickled—a signal I trusted to alert me to snakes under foot and lightning close by.

  I went out the kitchen door and gazed across my yard to hers, bright as moonlight under the four security lights hung from the oaks. I could see a pickup parked beside the house, on the outside of the carport, but I couldn’t tell whether it was P.W.’s blue truck or Robert Dale’s green one—the fake moon-glow of the lights turned everything gray. Squinting, I crept down the steps and across my yard, toward her house, my eyes never leaving the gray truck, until I got close enough to make out a ding on the right door where P.W. had kicked it a few months ago.

  Relief poured over me, then anger. I started back to our trailer, getting madder. Why hadn’t he at least called? Why had he gone there when he knew I was home? I could understand how he might have thought I’d be there and stopped by, but to stay when I was home... I ran up the trailer doorsteps and into the kitchen. At the stove, I dumped the peas and chicken and rice and rolls into the big pot full of chicken grease, went again to the door and slung the gumbo to the grass, losing the pot too.

  “I could kill you, P.W.!” I hollered. “I’m sick of this!” I hated him more than I’d ever loved him. The after-ring of my voice and the clattering pots vibrated the trailer, made it feel hollow and flimsy as a playhouse. In a few minutes, I heard his truck start next door, and I headed for the couch, curling into a tight trembling ball.

  He stomped up the back doorsteps, pausing to look at the strewn food. Then he walked into the kitchen, looking askance at the gravy he’d tracked on the green and white tiles. When he got to the living room, he stopped and stared at me.

  “Where have you been?” I asked, trying to remember simple words I’d learned when I was two, but the thundering in my head muddled them.

  “At Robert Dale and them’s,” he said and sailed his cap with the fertilizer emblem through the charged air to his throne, the recliner.

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “I bet you ain’t got the least notion, have you?”

  “What?” I stood up; my hair did too.

  He was dirty and dusty, straight from the fields. His blue eyes bluer in his gray-coated face. One knee, cocked before him, stuck out through a tear in his jeans. He looked pitiful and abused, and I was the abuser, the infidel who had slit his pants.

  “Oh, no,” I said, staying in that one spot. “She’s not going to do that to me, not this time. Just let me tell you all about sweet Sibyl.”

  “I’d be ashamed of myself if I was you, Earlene,” he said, shaming me with his eyes. “She told me and Robert Dale all about what you did.”

  “She what?”

  He started for the bathroom, passed right by me, mumbling something remarkably fresh and relevant: “And her dying of a rare blood...”

  I was spared the final word by the shower’s drum roll on the thin stall walls. “Rare,” I said. Trying to make sense of something, I started walking, going nowhere really but toward the back door, for what reason I couldn’t say, only going and the door happened to be open, a convenience. I went through it, then through the mush of food on the grass. That damned Bermuda grass! Big Girls do cry...

  Big Girls do Cry

  Big Girls do cry

  Crying and feverish, I was off to Sibyl’s, gliding toward the lights of the house that changed faces like its mistress. The moss in the oaks embossed eerie shadows on the yard in the fake moon-glow. A whitish film on the red paint.

  Before I got to the carport, I saw the back door open and Robert Dale push the screen wide and turn to reach behind him. Sibyl, wan and stooped, held his arm and stepped out, then stood a minute to wrap herself, as if she was cold on that hot summer night. Robert Dale opened the car door and she slid in ahead, her lambent hair going dull.

  I stepped behind one of the oaks and watched as he got in beside her and started the car, then circled out to the road. Frozen, I kept my eyes on the red tail lights accented in the dark along the dirt road to the highway.

  #

  That night I lay on the couch, listening to P.W.’s sleep-breathing in our bedroom, waiting for Robert Dale to come and tell us it was finished; seeing, as I dozed, the red house vanish and the old house rise and our starting over.

  The next morning the telephone woke me with a startling trill I wasn’t used to when sleeping in the bedroom. I could feel the trailer was vacant, could smell the stale grease of last night’s frying. Sunlight through the front wall of windows filled every space. I stumbled toward the phone on the opposite wall, glad it was over, and got ready to comfort Robert Dale.

  “Yes?” I said, lifting the receiver and waiting through a holocaust of silence on the other end. It should be this way, I thought, a pause before the grand announcement. “Erlie? Is that you?” Sibyl’s mocking voice, her laugh.

  I must have said something, but I only remember the receiver cold in my hand, like the wrung neck of a mean rooster.

  “Erlie, I just wanted to call you up and let you know I’ve put everything behind us. Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” I said, sitting on P.W.’s throne and stretching the telephone cord taut.

  “Did a
nybody tell you I’m in the hospital?” She waited for me to answer.

  “No.”

  #

  “Well, I am,” she said, going on in a high-happy tone.

  The sun scrolled up with flecks of dust and skin I could feel sloughing.

  “Bob, my doctor, is pumping me full of antibiotics and glucose. Said I just got too much sun yesterday, you know.” She paused again.

  I thought about Bob-the-lifeguard and Bob-the-doctor, first-name basis and all that rot. I started to bring yesterday up but knew it was as pointless as the Easter dress.

  “Well, anyhow I just wanted to do my part,” she said, “and let you know where I am in case you need me. Let’s just forget yesterday, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said in a dead voice.

  “I forgive you. Bye, now.” The phone clicked and something clicked in my head: whether she died today or tomorrow or never died had nothing to do with me. Oh yeah, I might traipse over there with my dumb husband—I would and I did—but I would never feel guilty again for hating her. I felt born to hate her, just as we were both born to die.

  #

  When Sibyl got home she acted as if nothing had changed, but everything had for me and P.W. He treated me like he hated me at first—avoiding me, staying out nights, coming home only to sleep. Finally, he started coming home every other night or so to eat supper, which I’d kept cooking regardless. I was civil; he was cold. Inside I was raging, rabid with what I now knew but didn’t know how to make anybody else know—what to do with what had come clear to me through the haze around Sibyl. Too, I honestly thought somehow P.W. and I would make up and put an end to our fighting. Aunt Birdie always said that even a cow’s tail has an end. Maybe that’s why I went to Sibyl’s again when she invited me, why we became a foursome again. Also, I felt that to know Sibyl—what she was up to—and not fight back at that point was smarter. I wasn’t defeated, only retrenching for the final battle.