Two Shades of Morning Read online

  “P.W. tells us he got drafted,” she said in a general sort of way and winged her thin arms on the sofa back.

  “That’s right,” I said, listening to her wheeze and wondering if my husband had also told her we were breaking up. Her hawk eyes told me that he had. I made a steeple with my fingers, what I’d always done when faced by a preacher or a teacher or God’s wrath. I felt myself hating her more than ever and flattened my hands on my lap, trying for love.

  She smiled, looking past me and out the bay window behind my chair. I started to turn and look too, but didn’t, and I was glad that I hadn’t been sucked in by her whims as I had in the beginning. Lifting my chin, I waited, giving her my time, the last I would give her.

  “I’ve got something to show you,” she said, bouncing from the sofa with her green silk dress swishing. The low bunched waist hid bones I’d felt when she’d hugged me.

  Never again would I wear green, that Easter-moss green that reminded me of hunting her goose eggs with a basket, while she was inside her house with my husband. But I would wear the pale green dress I’d bought with my blood to her funeral. In tribute and to get the good out of it before it went out of style.

  Following her up the stairs, I could smell Christmas, bay and nutmeg, with an undercurrent of medicinal scents, alcohol and camphor, maybe cancer. Always, in the background was Mae’s kitchen clatter and the plaintive drone of the air conditioner. And of course Sibyl’s music, her easy-listening, a repetitive orchestra piece that built to a crescendo and went sliding. Upstairs, in her ivory-toned bedroom, it was even stronger, notes lifting and subsiding like waves from ducts at the crown molding, intricate pieces she’d bought at some estate sale for her shell house’s final embellishment of facade.

  “Handel’s Water Music,” she said, heading for her closet. She swung open the double louvered doors and took out a hanging black plastic bag and stuck the hanger on a brass butterfly bracket by one of the doors. As she unzipped the bag, creamy lace oozed forth till a whole dress showed. Bent low, she scratched at an imaginary speck on the skirt, then took it off the hanger and held it up from her shoulders.

  “Well?” she said, her gilt eyes cavernous in her great face. “What do you think?”

  I told her I liked it, and she said what she always said—”Are you sure?” then went on to point out the different pattern of lace on the neck, a tatted-flower border, same as on the sleeves and waist. “Heirloom lace” she informed me, “the whole thing is, but look at the leaves on the skirt and bodice.” The dress was too girlish and frilly for Sibyl, nothing she would usually wear, heirloom or not; something I would have before though because it was romantic. Not a dress to be buried in, for sure. I, for one, wouldn’t have been caught dead in it.

  “It’s pretty,” I said, straining against the music that saved me from having to talk.

  She pressed the gathered skirt to her waist, staring down. “Too long, don’t you think?”

  “No,” I said, “I wouldn’t hem it.” Guess why?

  “You sure?” she asked, shifting the waist with one foot stuck out, showing baggy flesh stockings on a sparrow ankle. Always one flaw to make her appear vulnerable.

  She swished the dress in front of her, standing before a tall mirror tilted in its mahogany frame, and the lace smelled preserved, dry as parchment. Twisting to check all views, she licked her lips and, still holding the dress, went to her vanity and began uncapping lipsticks and holding them to the dress. Coral, red, fuchsia, pink and frosted pearl flashed in the mirror. Finally, going back to the first lipstick she’d tested, she closed it and crossed the room to hand it to me.

  I had thought she’d forgotten me until then. I took the lipstick, but her eyes never met mine. She seemed engrossed in getting ready to go somewhere; I knew where but it made no sense. Maybe I’d been wrong about the dress being for her burial; maybe she had a party in mind. I’d done this same thing before, stood and swore while she loaded me down, but I would do what she wanted one more time. And then thought maybe not as she stripped to her loose lace bra and panties, slipping on the dress and demanding that I pin the hem. She stood above me on an ivory brocade hassock, turning with the music while I tucked and pinned. My eyes kept locking on her wrinkled stockings, her wasted fingers grazing the folds of lace. Her hands were strutted with greenish veins, like plastic. I pricked my finger with a pin and gasped, slow tears dribbling to the lace; I would never again let somebody stand on my head to get to the top. I started to try to talk to her—I mean really talk, what we’d never done—but knew I’d be risking the resurrection of the old Sibyl, and we’d start over again, hating each other again, her hating me for not applauding her uniqueness, and me hating her for expecting it, and I’d be lost. Back where I’d started from. And if I did say whatever I would say if I could and she didn’t get cocky, if indeed she should step down from her ivory hassock and turn honest with me for once, I’d still be lost. Maybe she couldn’t handle it either, except by standing like a porcelain figure on a music box and turning till she broke.

  A pea-sized dot of my blood stained the lace on the back of her dress, and I watched it to keep my balance while she stood before the tilted mirror. When I looked up, catching her image in the mirror, she was watching me with an earnestness I can’t explain except to say what it wasn’t—not watching for my response to her trying to shock me or for whether she’d impressed me, nothing to do with her trying to show me up for the unsophisticated imp that I was; maybe at that point she was simply trying to figure out if I really liked the dress—something that absolute, that trite—because she figured I’d have said I liked it regardless. I was learning that it is our preoccupation with the trite things that we can afford to show.

  Feebly, she stepped down, as if some debilitating change had taken place on the hassock, and strolled to the vanity, rummaging through a gilt jewelry case on top. I thought she was going for her rings, because her fingers were bare for the first time. The music stopped but she picked up the tune, humming, and I realized that she’d been all along. She leaned into her image in the mirror and tilted her head, clipping on a pair of small cameo earrings. She seemed unaware of the quiet settling on the room with only her humming and the ringing of locusts out the window. All fixed, she prissed to the bed and sat on the edge, fanning her dress, little-girl style. Then she eyed me, standing by the door with my arms crossed. “Well,” she said, “that’s it.”

  Did she mean “that’s it” about her life? Or did she mean “that’s it” for the evening? I didn’t answer because there was no right answer. I started to say I had to go, to make up some excuse to excuse myself from that finalizing look. But I just leaned there in the doorway, till she had to say something—one of us did.

  “I don’t know about this style,” she said, adding, “on me.” Gazing down at the dress, at the tiny leaves in the skirt.

  My voice went off like a harmonica in the quiet. “Wear it if you want to, if you don’t want to, don’t.” If she was about to give it to me, I wasn’t taking it—she’d left me enough already.

  “It’s old, you know,” she said.

  Was that a joke? Was she saying she was sorry about the Easter-dress business? “Yes,” I said, “I can tell the lace is old.”

  “You don’t get it, you never got it.”

  “What?”

  “My point.”

  “Which is?”

  “To pack it all in—living—while I could.”

  “That’s not living—tromping all over people. Taking advantage.”

  “Manipulating’s the word, right?”

  “Right. Manipulating.”

  “You don’t know me, my life, what it’s been like. You don’t know what it is to be on the verge of living and have to die. To know you’re dying.”

  “I do now.” I stood straight. “I just hope I’ll be remembered for what I’ve built, not for what I’ve torn down.” I started to go. “I’ll pray for you,” I said, and I would.

  “Tell
Mae when you start out I said to make rice with the roast for supper.”

  I could go now. “I’ll tell her,” I said and backed out the door, watching her eyes radiate a warning that if I didn’t go now, we’d have to start over again, us hating each other again.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 11

  When the phone rang before sunup, several days later, I had a feeling it would be Robert Dale. I’d also had a feeling that Sibyl would die in the morning while the sun hides behind where the sky stops. All he said was “Earlene, can you come over?” and I said “Yes” and sat on the couch, watching out my window for the black hearse to leave, for it to glide with a hum of finality up the road that had been fresh-graded just for Sibyl. It was over. And I can’t tell you how peaceful and yet eerie it felt, knowing she was gone now, how still the morning, how dead her house looked behind tatters of gauzy moss. Yesterday, the last of August, and today, the first of September and close enough to cool to call it fall. Yesterday, the geese hissing unsettled along the branch, and today, no sign of them anywhere, just stillness flattened under the bluing sky, the kind of hush that makes your ears ring. Dull thuds that don’t roll.

  Walking over, I could see Robert Dale standing in the carport door, either waiting for me to come or for her to go. Waxy-pale in the stopping place of death. He didn’t speak, simply stepped aside for me to go in, for me to make coffee and sit silently beside him at the dining table till the sun sliced across the yard waking the shadows of the oaks. “She said you’d know what to take to the funeral home,” he said and got up to put his cup in the kitchen sink. “Thought you might go up there with me.”

  “I’ll go tell P.W. and change clothes first.” Our voices resounded throughout the house as if it were empty. I’d always heard you don’t need to ask if somebody is dead; you can feel the absence of life, the very soul sucked away, and that’s how her house felt.

  I walked back toward the trailer in the tracks of the hearse that had sketched her leaving—evidence—and still didn’t believe she was gone for good. The new sun was glinting on Aunt Birdie’s tin roof at the end of the road, and a white cloud passing rippled shadows across the fields like the hand of God waving.

  “Sibyl’s dead,” I said, standing above P.W. sleeping on his stomach with his arms out-flung.

  He opened the eye I could see, unblinking while he waited for it to sink in. Then he rolled to his back and placed both hands behind his head, staring up at the sun on the ceiling. No sound but the crickets outside the window.

  I went on to the bathroom with my heart racing against the down-drag of having broken the bad news—the good news? just news—how it had been just like I might have imagined, though I never had, how good it felt, but never did, and soaping under the spray of water felt cleaner.

  Back in the bedroom, I scrambled around under the edge of the bed for my black patent pumps, facing P.W. He turned on his side, away from me, turning again as I went to the other side to search for my lost shoe.

  When I got to Sibyl’s house again, I sneaked in to keep from speaking to Mae, who I could hear talking on the phone in the kitchen, and followed the route of sunlight through the living room and up the dim stairs. “Robert Dale,” I called, standing in the open bedroom door. Hearing the shower in the adjoining bathroom, I went on in, and the first thing I saw was the bag that held the dress Sibyl had shown me on the butterfly hook by the closet door. A sealed white envelope was pinned to the black plastic. I unpinned it, reading first my name in tiny upright writing, then ripped it open and read the message: “Earlene, Maybe you did get the point after all. But I’m not sorry, not a bit. And I’m not dead because I’ll never be forgotten. Can you say that? P.S. Don’t forget the skin case. Sibyl.” I turned the note paper over, looking for more, toeing the snakeskin case on the floor. Nothing. Not even “thanks.” The shower cut off.

  “Robert Dale,” I called, “I’m in here.”

  “Okay.” His voice was strangled. I wondered about shock and how it worked and the term didn’t fit because we’d all known for so long that Sibyl would die.

  I gathered the dress and the travel case and left, glancing back, almost expecting her to be seated on the bed, her head back-flung, laughing.

  Going downstairs I met Mae, wringing her hands in her apron.

  “Lawd, Miss Earlene,” she said, “if I knowed she was shorenuf fixing to die, I be right here to holp out.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I patted her arm and started to speak; her mouth flew open.

  “Miss Earlene, you ever b’lieve she was?” she whispered, blaring her black liquid eyes.

  “I don’t know.” I sat on the sofa. Had I really believed Sibyl would die? I hadn’t.

  “Weren’t but yesterday me and Punk was right here talking to her,” Mae said, “and her done one foot in the grave.”

  I couldn’t tell if Mae was really shook or just behaving the way she thought I expected. “Mae, I reckon you know once word gets around, everybody’ll be coming over with food.”

  “Yas ‘um, sho will now.” “Just ask them in and tell them Robert Dale’s gone to the funeral home. Okay?”

  “Yas ‘um,” she said. “I done called Punk to come on. Mr. Robert Dale say ain’t no need to but I do anyhow, now do you blame me?”

  #

  I drove Sibyl’s silver T-bird again, silently ruminating on things tangible and near: silence, so thick you could touch it, and Robert Dale with his head resting on the back of my seat.

  “Turn on the radio, Earlene,” he said.

  I toggled one of ten buttons on the sleek dash and the screech of violins flooded the car.

  “Not that,” he said, bolting upright and fumbling till he found a rock station, then sprawling again.

  I drove on between close flanks of pines that threw mesmerizing striped shadows from the sun that seemed to have shifted southward overnight: equinox. Sun and shadow tricks played on Robert Dale’s face—sporadically pale under the shave rash, then manly harsh and dark—and felt I knew him no better than I’d ever known Sibyl. And maybe I didn’t like him any better either. When we got to Tallahassee, I decided that he was asleep—his eyes were closed and he was breathing through his mouth—and there I was alone, driving Sibyl’s car, trying to find my way to the funeral home to take her clothes to be buried in. So strange, me in Sibyl’s car and her at the funeral home, powerless, immobile, limp. No, anybody else could die, but not Sibyl. She was right.

  Even when we got to the funeral home, P.W. waking up and drawing back into his shell of silence, I didn’t believe she was there. I knew it, but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe they could have drained her vital body of blood and refilled it with preserving fluids. This had to be a ruse, one of the games Sibyl played; any minute now, she would glide from one of the toned-down rooms, gather her share of the hot-house flowers and we would go home, back to her shrine where she would once again match expressions with her portrait.

  Robert Dale never said she was dead, neither did the mortician with the long silver face and tucked chin. In a restrained voice, he told us she had selected her rosewood coffin in advance and that we could view “the body” at six p.m. I did not believe that her breathless body, maybe reclining on a slab right now, would be transferred to the casket, all dolled up as she had been in the cameo earrings and dress, not without her overseeing the arrangements, the party we would throw.

  I wished they would say it, the two men mumbling in the sunny room. Just two little words; such economy, such virtue in “she’s dead.” But they only stood, hands clasped reverently, while a matronly woman in mortician’s makeup took notes at a baroque desk.

  “No, she didn’t have any kin,” Robert Dale mumbled, shifting feet and sliding his hands in his pockets.

  What about her mother in Orlando? I’d known that the new ancestors in the portraits were phony, but a living mother she visited was real. “She took care of all the arrangements in advance,” said the silver-faced mortician, d
ismissing us.

  Still no mention of death.

  In the car, I asked him: “Robert Dale, what about her mama?”

  “She didn’t have a mama, Earlene,” he said to the windshield. “Didn’t have anybody she ever told me about.”

  “But she said...”

  “Nobody,” he said, gazing out the window.

  When we got back to the house, familiar Chevys and Fords were parked about the yard, leaving the driveway clear. I was relieved to be among people I knew again. Getting out with Robert Dale, I could smell baked ham and candied yams, butterbeans and pear pie. There were sounds of ice tinkling in glasses and kitchen clatter and muffled voices inside the house. I knew those voices and knew that tone reserved for death.

  So, Sibyl was dead.

  Miss Beulah Stark met us at the door, folding Robert Dale in her big bear arms and rocking as she said, “I’m shore sorry to hear about it, honey.” He bogged in her massive bosom with his face buried in her neck. “Lettie’s on her way,” she added.

  He passed into a long line of waiting arms: Miss Winnie, second, wiped her coon-like hands on a dishtowel, then draped it over his shoulder while she hugged him. “I love you, sugar,” she said. “The Lord’ll give you strength.”

  Letting go of P.W., she hugged me, saying, “I know y’all were real close.”

  “Yes ‘um,” I said and started to cry—not for Sibyl, but for everybody in the world who had or would die, for everybody left to endure those church-lady hugs, to dissolve in the raspy hush of their nylon stockings. I didn’t fit there, receiving condolences from the community/church funeral brigade, but they brought death home to me. So, while they came straight off Robert Dale to me, I bawled, ugly gulps that set it all in motion, all the time hating myself for putting on. But I was really crying, crying because I felt phony, because I had all these bad thoughts running through my head. I was crying because of the general and universal powerlessness over death. Crying simply because the presence of those community mothers made me cry.