Two Shades of Morning Read online

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She laughed, and it sounded like were great friends, out to party. She hugged me and I tensed, but she kept her arm around my shoulders until we got inside. Then she took on her old commanding attitude, walking ahead through the serving line, ordering the best steaks in the house for all of us. Her lead made me feel awkward and determined, so as we walked toward one of the round tables in the middle of the room, I stepped aside and waited till they got seated, then said, “No, I think we’ll sit over there by the window.” I strolled away, listening to them gathering their silverware to their trays and Sibyl braying. Not mocking laughter, this time, but happy laughter—anything suited her fine, she said; she wasn’t hard to please.

  “Let’s eat,” said Robert Dale, sliding into the booth and shaking his head, good-naturedly tolerating us like bad children. I hadn’t noticed until then that he had a new flat-top haircut. His head looked naked and vulnerable, the bald spot on top, almost obscene, a private part of him exposed.

  P.W. ate without saying a word. He was hunkered and neckless, either fuming about his parched tobacco or put-out with my new naughtiness. So I stepped up my act, realizing that Robert Dale and Sibyl were allowing me to exercise myself. Earlene’s night, they seemed to agree. I was being allowed to be naughty and that spoiled it. “How old are you, Sibyl?” I asked.

  “Why do you ask?” She daintily cut her salad to shreds.

  “Just wondering,” I said to leave the subject open.

  “Twenty-two.” “Oh, I thought you were older somehow.”

  “Why?” She tilted her head curiously.

  “You look older, around the eyes.” Another bosh shot.

  She stopped cutting and braced her forearms on the table. I thought she was going to throw her fork at me. I wished she would so everything would be out in the open. But she only laughed, the laugh of a parent on the verge of sending a naughty child to bed.

  If I’d given it more thought, I could have come up with something better to say, for instance: what did you and Bob-the-lifeguard do when you left me at the lakes? Or, what did you tell my husband on two separate occasions to try to break us up? Another one: why did you say that about me rubbing all over Punk? I should have, but I didn’t. Somehow I knew that anything I said would turn on me. So, I ate and only spoke when spoken to, even when she presented me with my gift. But then I was shocked speechless.

  We got to the movie theatre at least thirty minutes late, linked only by our warm breathing along the dark aisle as Robert Dale led in the search for seats. On the screen, Scarlet O’Hara was already at the barbecue, batting her lashes and wheedling her suitors into fetching more food. We shuffled into our seats, halfway down the right side of the theatre draped in wine velvet. Sibyl sat between Robert Dale and P.W., and I sat next to P.W on the outside nearest the aisle.

  I had seen “Gone With the Wind” three times before and knew practically every line, but the splendor of motion and colors on the screen kept me watching. I liked Scarlet because she was plucky and hated Melanie because she was sweet, exact opposite of the last time I’d seen it. The welling music and the romance of plantation life made me feel uplifted. But I’d outgrown it, thanks in part to Sibyl.

  I looked at her, hands folded in her lap, face changing shapes and shades with the flickering images on the screen, like morning clouds passing over the sun. Robert Dale and P.W. were hogging the armrest, watching a movie they’d often claimed to despise. All watching without me. And I thought about them teaching me how to roller skate, how they had guided me between them at the mobile roller rink that had set up one winter in the vacant lot facing the Baptist church. Rolling me round and round on the wooden floor clacking with rackety skate wheels, they’d risked their reputations, thirteen then and at that age when boys had to stick to boys, especially if the girl was still a baby, meaning under twelve. “Look at P.W. and Robert Dale helping out the baby,” the other boys would holler, skating foot over foot, backwards, to the inset rhythm of staticky music.

  The theme song of the movie, blaring from speakers each side of the screen, seemed suddenly mawkish. The odor of Coca Cola syrup too strong. I looked around at the rows of reddish faces, a hazy beam running the center of the three sections of seats, and back at Sibyl. She caught my eye and smiled. P.W. and Robert Dale looked at me and I looked away. Something sparked inside me: P.W. acted as if I’d done something to hurt him and he’d confided in Sibyl and she’d taken his side. The lights flickered on for intermission and I went to the restroom, not asking or inviting—big step for a country girl. When I got back P.W. had moved to the other side of Sibyl and was munching from a box of chocolate-covered raisins. Robert Dale was now sitting next to me, in P.W.’s place. The lights blinked and dimmed and the soundtrack rolled from lagging notes.

  I shared elbow space with Robert Dale on the armrest, testing my my feelings when our skin touched. Testing the pressure of my arm against his, which he didn’t seem to notice. I kept my arm there and felt only a faint pulsing sensation I couldn’t make into something more. I wondered what it would have been like if we had married—sleeping together—and wondered if he wondered too. Was he still hot for me? Did he remember, could he help remembering, the ongoing kisses, the sly knee-brushings, meetings in the woods behind his house? I felt powerful remembering the times I’d left him panting and begging with those sad dark eyes. And P.W. had never been far away, either in the flesh or in my head.

  Following a basketball game one freezing night, we’d driven P.W. home, all the way across the county on those washboard roads. Still breathing his sweat, after he got out, I’d kept my place in the middle of the seat of Robert Dale’s pickup, his hand grazing my knee each time he shifted gears. I must have been fifteen, not a day over sixteen, inspired by my own prettiness.

  The heater was chuffing hot air around my cold feet, the truck jolting over ruts, the scream of the glass-packs shrill in my ears. My left arm kept brushing his, lean and soft beneath his sweater. I could smell his clean hair when I turned; his face was tinged orange by the band of light from the radio. I could hear him breathing, even in the weak drifting melody of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” I could love him easily that way, strung out on a song, light as down. I had only to tilt my head to his—knew what effect it would have on him—and he swerved off the road, onto the shoulder, braking and groping. He was rough, unpracticed, not at all like P.W. I actually made that comparison: he was clammy and pasty; P.W. was dry and smooth. Robert Dale was eager to please me; P.W. was indifferent. But Robert Dale couldn’t do without me. And I handled him, I handled him well.

  #

  Outside the theatre, after the movie, we had to wait for Robert Dale to go to the restroom. Guess he figured he might as well, since Sibyl usually insisted on standing around and gabbing with us while the crowd poured out. She would touch each of us on the arms, talking, till everybody who might be somebody had cleared the glitzy blue front of the theatre. But this time was different; this time she was waiting for a purpose—only God knew what!—which had nothing to do with waiting for her husband. She just stood with her chin lifted, her fingers grazing the folds of her yellow sun dress, as sober as I’d ever seen her. When the last moviegoer, a dumpy man in a tight Polo shirt, tripped north up the sidewalk with his popcorn lingering on the night air, she tapped off behind him in her smart white pumps. Robert Dale caught up with me and P.W., two paces behind Sibyl. The man crossed the street, and Sibyl tapped on up the sidewalk. When we got to her car, I stopped, watching them march on, past one, two, three lit shop windows. I’d be damned if I would follow her another step! Whatever she was up to, she could do it without me. I was onto her tricks.

  “Catch up, sugar,” Robert Dale called, turning and motioning, then following again, two steps behind P.W., who was still marching two steps behind Sibyl. I took off too, staying close along the store fronts, and gazed in the windows. Then I stopped, a blaze of surprise spreading from my head to my toes. The dress was on d
isplay in Miss Crawford’s window, tacked by the shoulders with its skirt spread across the case, my after-Easter dress. Above it hung a sign that read: SUMMER SALE HALF PRICE $25.00. I still owed thirty. I had to walk to keep from fainting.

  So this is Sibyl’s gift—showing me up for the charge-fiend I am.

  But when the others stopped walking it was at two shop fronts down, facing that window. My face felt florescent white, but I knew I wouldn’t faint. I’d take it as it came. I went over and stood next to P.W., looking in the window with him and the others at a massive portrait of Sibyl on an easel behind the glass.

  Her expression in the portrait is innocent and demure, with a hint of mischieviousness in a slightly raised brow. The eyes dominate it. Her dress is a sedate forest green with a single strand of pearls. She poses languidly on a Chippendale chair, hands folded on her lap. Her hair is brushed back to show her high forehead. No freckles, no flaws. An aura of light radiates around her from a cloudy background. But what stands out most is a tiny hollow above her right eyebrow.

  I didn’t know how long we stood. It could have been an hour or only minutes. But I know there was no noise. I didn’t know if the traffic had stopped in tribute or rerouted to another street. The city was as still as a frozen country night before the first stirrings of morning.

  And then the rain came, the kind of rain that seems to have been going on all along and you have just stepped out in it. No drizzle increasing to a downpour, but steady rain, like silver threads streaming through the dark from invisible spools.

  Sibyl seemed entranced by her own portrait, her clay-shaped face lifted to the window. She looked naked and honest with her gold hair melting on her shoulders, with her yellow dress clinging like hot lava. “I want you to have it,” she said, still appraising it.

  I knew she meant me, and I supposed P.W. and Robert Dale knew too, because they just stood staring at the portrait with her, sharing with me only the fragrance of stale popcorn and raw rain on concrete.

  The first image that came was of me stumbling over that gigantic picture when I was old and gray, of those sharp gilt eyes pinning me down for a hundred years, that timeless face always watching me at home in my only peace. I never thought of putting it in a closet or of selling it to someone who needed an ancestor. I only thought of it with me forever. “Thank you,” I said, head down to keep from drowning.

  And then I thought about the dress, the one priced down in the window, which had turned out not to be Sibyl’s gift after all. That damn dress! Hadn’t anybody noticed it? I felt sure that Sibyl had, and I wondered if in some small way the moment of the portrait exhibition had been spoiled. I hoped so; and maybe Sibyl had been just as surprised as I was and had hoped that P.W. wouldn’t notice and be distracted by the stand-out dress, by the sign advertising summer sale, half price, $25.00. I hoped she felt cheated; I knew she’d caught on because she never missed a beat.

  On the way to the car, I stopped, statue-still, in the rain before Mrs. Crawford’s shop window, challenging Sibyl. She was trying to keep me walking by walking on—me, usually trotting behind. But I just stood there in the blurry light, forcing them all to stop, the very lapse in the number of heel clicks a signal.

  “P.W,” I called, motioning with a finger.

  He came back and stood before the window, stooped and drenched, hands in his pockets regardless. With the rain streaming down the plate glass, it worked like a trick mirror, the two of us, comically sad and country-squat, knees rolling flab. “I bought that dress, P.W.” Rain hissed like fire on the concrete.

  He looked at me, his slick, fresh face puzzled. Then he stared at the dress, leaning into the glass, face distorted round. “You paid twenty-five dollars for a dress?”

  “I paid fifty for it.”

  Robert Dale behind me was a laugh in the trick mirror. Sibyl, farther away, was lost, out of the limelight.

  “When?” P.W. said.

  “Easter. This past Easter.”

  “With what?”

  “With your money, P.W.”

  He shook his head. Then he looked at the dress, really looked at it—portrait forgotten. “By God, you did!” he said and laughed.

  I stepped closer to the window and he did too. Noses almost touching glass, water sheeting before us. “We can’t afford stuff like that, Earlene,” he whispered in my face with its skin slipping down. “I never figured you to be wasteful.”

  “I am though,” I said. “I’m wasteful and worse. I’m mean to the bone and fed the hell up with you and your bull. I never should have married you.” I pranced off, knowing they were all gawking. Rack one up for me.

  Robert Dale caught up and put his heavy wet arm around my shoulder. “If you need money, sugar, I’ll let you have some.” I didn’t answer because I didn’t need money and I didn’t not-need money and I had no idea what I did need.

  Robert Dale drove home, and I sat up front with him. We were first to the car, so Sibyl and P.W. ended up in the back. Nobody talked except Sibyl, who was waxing poetic about the tiny hopping frogs on the highway that made the gravel look alive, the beauty of the rain, liquid stars, and such and such shit. P.W. was a breathing lump behind me. We had to “have coffee” when we got to Sibyl’s, though we never drank a drop that night—that was just more of her stuff! She went on about all the things she wanted to do with the time she had left, and all of them involved money. She didn’t say “die” and the dress was never mentioned again. She was onstage, lead role. Without real interest, I went to the bookshelves in the sun room, while P.W. and Robert Dale cleared a space on the main wall of the living room for the new portrait: my portrait of Sibyl.

  Whipped, I placed the book I’d been scanning back on the shelf and went out through the carport door into the pricking rain. I didn’t want to play anymore, I didn’t want to think anymore, and I might not want to live anymore. I started home, bypassing home in not thinking, along the muddy road in the dark, not stopping till I got to the last light on the right.

  I stepped onto Aunt Birdie’s porch, listening to the soft pitter of rain on tin for a minute before I knocked. She came right to the door. She didn’t say, “What are you doing out in that rain, child?” Or “You’ll catch your death of cold.” She hugged me while I cried, then walked me into her living room decorated with crocheted dolls and candlewick pillows and embroidered white curtains.

  Then she built a fire in the fireplace and bundled me in a quilt made of scraps from Uncle Pap’s old shirts. When the fire was burning good, hunks of junk iron wedged among the wood began to wink and glow, radiating the heat.

  She left me sitting in a rocker before the hearth, saying only, “You’ll be all right, you’ll be all right,” while I hiccupped and cried. Safe as long as the rain held the world at bay, as long as the fire kept ticking. A rhythm I could hold to, cozy in the unworldly house. On the mantel shelf, a wind-up clock competed ticks with the fire, out of time.

  Her iron bed, covered with a nubby white chennile spread, stood along one wall of the living room, so that she could sleep near the fireplace in winter, I supposed; or maybe since Uncle Pap had died she’d chosen to give up their bedroom on the west side of the house. Except for the kitchen on the back, a small dim closet, she’d closed off the rest of the house and stored her accumulation of belongings in the rooms no longer used. Still, she kept a stack of Sears & Roebuck catalogues in the corner at the foot of her bed, each spring and fall adding a new edition to the collection. I recognized one of the paper margins I’d snipped from a catalogue halfway up the stack when I used to cut paper dolls from the models. She’d braided the oval rag rug in front of the fireplace from my childhood clothes, ginghams and plaids in long-gone popular colors—my life brought together before my eyes. I lay on the rug and curled like a cat, glad to feel spoiled and special again.

  Aunt Birdie left the room and when she came back she was dressed for bed, carrying a long white flannel gown like the pink one she wore. Her mouth, caved in without her teeth, made
her look older; her red hair, brushed straight down her back, made her look young. Without a word, she handed me the gown and toddled off toward the bed while I stripped my wet clothes and stood sniffling with my hind-side warming.

  “Come to bed when you get ready,” she said, folding the cover back in two triangles and sliding in on the side by the wall. The gentle creaking of the metal bedsprings filled gaps between the ticking of the fire and the rain and the clock.

  I slipped the gown over my head and sat in the rocker again, staring at the fire till I got drowsy. Then I got up and pulled the chain on the overhead bulb and as the white light extinguished, firelight danced on the walls.

  #

  For three days I ate chicken soup in the womb of her cabin, not as a child, but as a woman, a sick woman in need of sanctuary. Aunt Birdie, laying her routine aside, sat next to me in front of a fire we didn’t need, crocheting and rocking and waiting until I was well. The windows fogged over with our breathing and the heat, as the rain pelted the panes, tapping like the outside trying to get in.

  The clock ticked, unseen, only time, and time was measured by darkness and light and need. Sometimes I would cry and she wouldn’t see. Her faded red head kept twitching in a satisfied way, as if her crocheting was coming along. Now and then she spat a projectile of of snuff into the fire and the dry odor combined with the chicken soup and old magazines. A horse shoe winked from the embers, grew cold.

  If P.W. ever called anybody I don’t know of it. Aunt Birdie may have called him on the sly, but I doubt it. He would know where I was. Besides, nothing bad ever happened to anybody in Little Town. “She gave me a big picture of herself,” I said, on the third day, said it as I were picking up in the middle of a conversation.

  “Do you want it?” she asked, rocking without pause.

  “No ma’am.”

  “Don’t take it then. You don’t have to.” “I know I don’t have to. But I probably will—it’ll look good hanging over my couch.”