Two Shades of Morning Page 3

  “Oh, well,” she said, sitting back again. Her tawny fingers shimmed on the table, as though in a secret pact with her two selves.

  The term “changing subjects” took on new meaning for me—I’d never seen anyone so thoroughly change subjects, never been in a situation so changeable. I’d thought I was immune after yesterday.

  Sibyl acted as if she’d just come into the room and sat down. “Have you found your Easter dress yet?” To me—she was talking to me now.

  “I haven’t even looked,” I said.

  “Well, you better get busy. Easter’s two weeks away.

  “I’m thinking about not getting a new Easter dress this year.” I wished I hadn’t said it before the words had leaked from my lips. I always bought a new Easter dress; everybody in Little Town did. Now, I knew I couldn’t buy one. I felt robbed.

  “Well, I saw this sweet little lavender cotton at Sears the other day,” she said, watching me as if I might run off with her cake. “I don’t know if you could wear that color, but it’d be real slenderizing on you.”

  If she hadn’t been dying, I would have slapped her. I had honestly thought that dying people were always on their best behavior, seldom sinned.

  A welcome housefly buzzed above the cake in the center of the table.

  “Robert Dale!” Sibyl shrieked. “Get that thing out of my house!” “Where’s the flappet, sugar?” He stood, jarring the table.

  “Robert Dale!” she chimed with the dishes.

  P.W. skimmed his hand over the cake and nabbed the fly—”There, I got it!”—and flung it at the wall behind.

  “A lil ole fly wouldn’t hurt nothing,” said Robert Dale, eating again.

  “Robert Dale, you know how I feel about insects.” She spoke low, as if that was part of their secret.

  “Well, I be derned!” said P.W., swabbing at the white tablecloth with his sauce-streaked napkin. “I went and got spaghetti on your good tablecloth.”

  Was he trying to lure her away from his old buddy, mama-quail style, by turning her on himself?

  “My grandmother’s tablecloth,” said Sibyl, blowing at her high wan forehead. “No problem, Mr. Bronson can probably get it out.”

  I could tell that P.W. wasn’t studying Robert Dale and his dilemma, just as I could tell that neither had any idea who Mr. Bronson was. They might have if the drycleaners had been located in the deerwoods, instead of Tallahassee. I knew only because I picked up names quick and made connections. Also, unlike them, I was onto her game, to-the-manor-born, and all that crap. I was relieved to know, then I could avoid her. I could stand her for a night as long as I felt it would end. Then I got curious: how far would Sibyl go with her act? She had to be looking pretty bad to Robert Dale and P.W. by now. As Mama would have said, To be so obvious is to be so crass. I would make her more obvious. I smiled and asked her for a toothpick—”Got a pecan hull between my teeth.” “I don’t buy toothpicks,” she said, “but I have dental floss in the upstairs’ bathroom.” But she said it with such lack of dressing me down that it was hard to grasp. P.W. never did grasp it. Maybe he was high on beer.

  “Here,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket, “I got one on me you can borry.” Was he picking at her too?

  I took the toothpick and propped my elbows on the table, picking crassly.

  She ignored me. My scalp prickled. I could sense the cogs of her mind turning over new strategies. What did I care? I wouldn’t be bothered with her again. Mama would have said I was rude, but Aunt Birdie would have said Sibyl deserved it for whispering in company. What had they been whispering about?

  “I’m gonna help out with the dishes,” P.W. said, up and scurrying around the table, stacking her gold-rimmed china like paper plates at a barbecue.

  “Oh, you don’t need to do that,” she said, rushing behind him. “That’s what I’ve got Mae for.”

  “No siree!” he said. “I wouldn’t feel right after you working so hard over supper.”

  She tried to steady the stack of quavering plates. “You really aren’t supposed to,” she said, as if that mattered to P.W. Watkins who had always chewed gum in church, and who had never washed a dish in his life.

  “I’ll just rinse ‘em off then,” he said, whisking around the Oriental screen that separated kitchen from dining.

  She trailed. “But I’ve got a dishwasher.” “Y’all got a pretty house here, Robert Dale,” I said, really sorry for him because he looked so out-of-place in his own place.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said—how he always spoke to a lady.

  Both he and P.W. were gentlemen, by rural standards. Rednecks, true, but redneck gentlemen. And both observed the line drawn between male and female roles: the men brought it home and we cooked it. Simple and primitive, but it worked in Monroe County. The rest of the world would have been appalled at our simplicity. But what did we know of them, or they of us? What we knew of the world would be what Sibyl taught us—she came to represent that other world then, in an odd way. Television was fantasy, Sibyl was real. The threat of the draft hovered like a flock of buzzards, otherwise what was happening in Viet Nam was irrelevant. Sibyl was the closest we would come to change.

  Slushing along the muddy road home that night, P.W. said that Sibyl was just curious, meaning peculiar in redneck lingo. “Well,” I said, “I feel sorry for Robert Dale.”

  “She don’t mean nothing by how she acts.”

  I knew he thought I was jealous by the way he held back what he really thought—what he had to think. “I’m not jealous,” I said, “if that’s what you’re thinking.

  “I didn’t say you were.” He laughed and pulled me closer under the tent of his jacket. “She ain’t none of our business no how.”

  “Good! Then we don’t have to see her anymore.”

  “Won’t Robert Dale be hurt?”

  “He knows how I feel.”

  “Did you tell him?” “No,” I said, “he just knows.”

  “That’s up to you.” He squeezed my waist. “You’re still the prettiest girl in Monroe County.”

  “I don’t care about that.” I snatched away. “Didn’t you even notice how she did about the dress?”

  “Dress! What dress?”

  “My Easter dress.” Again, I wished I hadn’t said anything; maybe I could have bought one after all. I hiked off ahead in the slough of rain.

  “Don’t go getting mad at me cause you’re mad at her,” he yelled. “I don’t know what’s got into you, but I don’t give a flip about neither one of them.”

  When we fought during the day, he’d stalk off; at night, he’d walk through fire to keep me from sleeping on the couch.

  * * * *

  I washed every dish I could find, cleaned the cupboards and put all the dishes back, anything to keep from thinking. The shag carpet had needed vacuuming for two weeks, so I did that too, glad for the whiny roar of the machine. I picked up a cushion, P.W.’s socks, moved the ottoman from its mangy rim of shag pile. Found a cookbook I’d been looking for under the couch. But my mind kept flitting to Sibyl and her floors and her praying for me, the heathen, and her, the angel, in her gilded heaven where right now new floors were being laid, the inequity of it all, whatever it was. I rammed my foot on the power switch of the cleaner and listened to it die and the sound of trucks next door come alive. Sibyl. I would clean the bathroom, musty with damp towels, and forget her. Let her stay where towels never molded. All she had to look forward to was buying stuff. And dying.

  “She thinks she can get away with anything because she’s dying,” I said to myself, the rough, undone me in the flower-embossed mirror above the lavatory. I dropped the toilet brush in the middle of the floor and headed out the kitchen door, banging it shut.

  As I started along the peened blue wall of the trailer, I almost tripped over the yard rake belonging to my next-door neighbor, Miss Lousie. Sweep around your own back door, Aunt Birdie would say. Yes. I picked up the rake and crossed our grass-knitted yards, scolding mys
elf for not taking it back before. How many times had I passed Miss Louise’s house, on my way to Mama’s, and still forgot the rake? I had to get myself together—quit putting off things and neglecting the house. Starting now, I would clean regularly, instead of letting jobs pile up; I’d put Sibyl in her place and forget she was there; and I’d break my childish habit of noon walks to the end of the road where I always ate dinner at Mama’s or Aunt Birdie’s.

  “Miss Louise?” I called, halting at her carport door.

  “Come on in,” she hooted and scuffed to the television set and cut the volume on “Search for Tomorrow.” On any given weekday, the slow grating melody of the soap’s sound track, coming from all the look-alike houses, would converge along the dirt road.

  I scraped the tines of the rake on the concrete floor so she’d think I hadn’t heard; she was secretly hooked on soap operas, like everybody else, except Aunt Birdie. On Sundays, our preacher would preach against the soaps, and by Monday, all of my elderly neighbors would be hard at it again. I hadn’t got started yet, but I was considering taking it up. Maybe help to break some of my other bad habits—roaming the road, eating between meals, and sleeping till ten in the morning. And I could sew while I watched the stories.

  “There you are,” Miss Louise said, appearing behind the screen door. She wiped her hands on her apron and pushed the door open for me to come in. “I thought I heard somebody.”

  “I don’t have but a minute, Miss Louise, but I thought I’d bring back your rake.” I leaned it against the outside wall by the doorsteps.

  “You don’t have to be in a hurry,” she said.

  “I’ve had it going on two months,” I said then caught on that she hadn’t meant no hurry about bringing back the rake but about visiting. “You can take a minute to come in and visit with me before going on to your mama’s.” She passed through the spanking yellow kitchen to the narrow den where the TV screen was dimming to a speck of light.

  “I was just fixing to start on a dress for June Lee,” she said, patting a stack of cut-out fabric layered with tissue patterns.

  “How’s she liking her new job at the bank?”

  “She’s getting the hang of it.” Miss Louise fluffed the back of her blue-gray hair where it had matted from the recliner headrest. The orange corduroy chair was imprinted in the shape of her long slender body.

  “I haven’t seen June in I don’t know when,” I said and sat on the sofa next to Miss Louise, both of us looking at June Lee’s

  graduation picture on the mantel shelf.

  We’d been friends in school but never really close; I was popular and pretty and she was bookish and plain. Her elaborately framed glasses overpowered her heart-shaped face and made her keen features recede. Well, at least she’d landed a secretary job in Tallahassee. Now, we had less in common than ever. Still we tried; she wrote to me and sometimes I wrote back.

  “Have you been to see Little Robert Dale’s new house yet?” asked Miss Louise.

  “Yes’um, Aunt Birdie and I did the other day.”

  “I bet it’s a sight.”

  “Yes ‘um, it is.”

  “Me and Eloise and Lavenia’s been talking about giving them a little housewarming. What do you think?”

  “That would be sweet,” I said, trying to imagine my three elderly neighbors tottering over there with their gifts of crochet. I couldn’t picture a platter-sized starched and fluted doily on Sibyl’s dining table. Miss Louise’s specialty. Everybody in Little Town ordered her crochet handiwork for Christmas presents: Christmas tree ornaments of angels and bells, stiff and paper thin, even valances for doors. Not a house in Little Town was without one of her valances on the back door, except Sibyl’s. “Y’all think about it,” I said, “and I’ll be glad to help out.” I figured they probably wouldn’t do a party for Sibyl because, in spite of their neighborliness and their narrow views of the world, they’d understand that Sibyl was like a character on one of their soaps, to be observed, purely for entertainment.

  “Tell your mama and daddy hello for me,” she said, seeing me out the door.

  I felt cross with her for knowing I’d go to Mama’s, but already I was strolling west toward the house where I’d grown up. Across the road, Miss Eloise vanished around the side of her house and ducked back to wave.

  “How’re you, Miss Eloise?” I called.

  “Fine, honey, how’re you?” she called, sprinting before I could answer.

  I fully expected her to send hellos to Mama and Daddy, too, and looked for Miss Lavenia, next door to Miss Eloise, to pop from her house with the same message. How could I expect them not to see me on daily walks to Mama’s? I’d been doing it every day for a year. They probably timed their soap operas by my passing.

  No doubt they were bored since their children had grown up and moved away and they’d retired to their transplanted mill houses. Having cleared their lots of old farm houses in the fifties, they’d replaced them with those four-room square, wood frame mill houses bought from the cotton mill camp, across Walton Creek, north of Little Town. The cotton business had fazed out in the farming areas in the past twenty-five years, and the mill shut down. The campsite remained a bare-dirt monument to the only industry allowed or desiring to locate in Monroe County.

  I could hardly remember those two-generational farm houses, which had been taken down board by board and stored under sheds, except for the wayfarer rooms blocking off one end of the six-rocker front porches. But I knew the houses had been similar to the Sharp house. Built in the mid-eighteen hundreds, the farm houses had been designed to accommodate wayfarers, who needed a spot to drop their packs and stay the night. A single door to the wayfarer rooms, opening suspiciously to the porch only, permitted them access to the road that had brought them. The following morning they would leave—with or without their breakfast grits, depending upon their host’s invitation, or absence of, which was determined by the overall impression of the drifter: mean eyes, a scar, mumbling (especially in a Yankee accent), how early the drifter rose. Hospitality had been extended when the wayfarer got there with the understanding that it could be withdrawn if he turned out to be a freeloader. Regardless, scriptural charity had been served.

  Sometimes it seemed that the warm manners of those old southern families had been stored with the lumber from their farm houses, as if they’d retired them to accommodate a new age. And yet they still gave. I later learned how unstintingly they gave.

  Those new houses came to resemble the people who lived in them. This new style of living represented their retirements, their attempts at self-indulgence. Mr. Sam and Miss Lavenia even invested in a room air conditioner. All had rented out their farms, eating steaks once a month, instead of once a year, and bought new but plain cars without chrome. Now their dream houses, bright-faced with fresh coats of paint, looked drab next to Sibyl’s. Had she built a house to die in, her dream house, like the dream houses of my neighbors?

  I was still at that stage where I could go to a funeral and leaving the cemetery feel my own untouched newness coursing through my hot body, a breeze on my face—no pain, not even a hangnail—and get high on supper coming up and after that making love. Bold in my own foreverness, that poor soul back there hoisted over his grave, nothing to do with me and mine. My neighbors would die, Mama and Daddy would die, Aunt Birdie would—and then I wouldn’t feel so frisky walking away from their graves. Would Sibyl really die? If she did, so could I.

  I had to quit hating her, just in case. The business about the dress was petty and I knew it, just as I knew it wasn’t all and maybe not half of what it portended. Aunt Birdie had some inkling, and if I could get her talking about the dress, she would tell what was on her mind. Besides, I wanted her to side with me, not so much about the dress as what it stood for; she would understand the injustice, how Sibyl had gaffed me. Aunt Birdie wasn’t above a little spitefulness herself.

  Having always lived across the road, Aunt Birdie was my inherited aunt. The handle of aunt, lik
e the affection, had stuck since the first of countless mustard poultices she’d plastered on my sick-chest. A widow alone, her family was the church and the community—especially me and Mama and Daddy. My high school beauty pageant gown had been sewn by her busy hands, a strapless blue net with flounces of lace. She had stitched a ruffle up on the bust and starched it to stay, to conceal my breasts.

  “Good girls don’t run around showing theirselfs,” she’d said. “I don’t give a hang what the style is!” I had won the beauty pageant, even with that ruffle up to my chin, more relieved than flattered—I wouldn’t have to compete again. The annual beauty pageant was a project of the Future Homemakers of America, and all Home Economics students were obligated to participate, in club and contest, regardless of their qualifications. Student protests were rewarded by a stiff lecture from the Home Economics teacher, Miss Bohannon. Her bleary-green, insinuating eyes could pierce the toughest hide, leaving no doubt in your own heart that you were not only disloyal to your club but irreverent to the universal role of homemaker, and that you probably preferred spending beauty-contest night smooching in a parked car at the county dump.

  I felt as though I’d won the contest by default, because the next-to-the-prettiest girl at Monroe County High, Betty Jean Guess, had started her period before the pageant and refused to go on stage. Some of the boys, out there hooting, might see the bulge of her Kotex through five layers of tulle.

  Foil stars revolved from the stage ceiling on varied lengths of twine. We hoped that the audience could see only glittery, air-spun stars, but we, in our pastel clouds of net, knew the twine was there. The scenic backdrop, tempera globs and strokes of Sunday-school-book blue, green, yellow and red, across a giant scroll of freezer paper, was what it was, up close. (The theme of the pageant was “Stairway to the Stars,” emblazoned in silver glitter on paper taped to the back curtain.) From the rear of the ancient, musty auditorium, red and yellow finger-dots blurred to fields of flowers on palm-swirls of green pastures. The tree trunks, fists of muddy brown, had emerged into the shape of live oaks. We’d been amazed. Up close, on stage, we had to hold on to the vision from a distance to avoid disillusionment.