Two Shades of Morning Read online

  When I was eight, a traveling circus had stopped over in Little Town, at the vacant lot facing the Baptist church. Penned horses had been loosed on the ring, but tethered by the command of a seedy, middle-aged woman in a sky-blue costume. Rhinestones from her tutu kept throwing prisms of light on the khaki tent walls as she popped her whip again and again until the horses clopped in a uniform circle. She lunged onto the last one, vulgar but sure, her strutted legs scrambling astride, and snugged her rump into the pit of the horse’s back, as if she’d hollowed it with her crotch over years of contact. Her eyes snapped about the gaping audience for her earned praise, and we, obeying the eyes, not all that overwhelmed by the spectacle, clapped dutifully, as if the shame would be ours not to give her her due, even though we’d seen better. It was the commanding gleam of the eyes and not the feat that had prompted us to clap. Spurred on by our adulation, she smiled with gold-starred teeth and aligned the horse alongside another, stood, and deftly placed a yellow-soled foot on the back of the other horse while sustaining a canter in time with the herd. The two horses separated and she drew them together with the grip of her toes and balanced with out-stretched arms as she shot that look again, daring us not to clap. It came like a swarm of locusts, fragile and thin and filling, and her penetrating eyes impaled us. They were glittery blue, all that was left of the unusual about her. She was suddenly shaky and wasted, scrambling again to the seat her calloused crotch had molded with a relieved and fractured gaze, wishing for a greater trick with which to wow us. But she was spent, keeping to her circle that went on and on. Finally, she bounced to the sawdust on uncertain feet, opening her arms and bowing, her eyes rending with a mendicant plea. We applauded and forgot her before the next act came.

  #

  Sibyl had gone inside the house to change when the first pickup truck of boys arrived. Mostly they were basketball players, friends of P.W.’s and Robert Dale’s, who were still part of the team. Basketball was the only sport at Monroe County High and everybody loved it. Graduated heroes were never forgotten and played against the high school team each spring and fall, bringing all the surrounding communities to the old gym.

  That evening, P.W. and Robert Dale were almost as close as they used to be, like magnets back to back. Standing before the barbecue pit, they roasted wieners while the younger boys watched. They were sarcastic with each other, often cutting, but familiar, cautiously feeling their way into a corner of friendship.

  Robert Dale, in a green apron with a C&S bank logo, turned a row of pink plumping wieners on the grate, to expose brown marks on the undersides. P.W. held a long pan and shoved it playfully at Robert Dale. “You boys might not know it,” Robert Dale said to the fellows standing around, “but y’all are lucky. Old P.W. here like to never got out of school—he could still be there playing guard for y’all.”

  “Yeah,” said P.W., “and look who couldn’t hit the wall, much less a basket.”

  The boys scattered out, laughing at the older boys—still boys in basketball lingo—whose names were engraved on at least half the trophies in the school case.

  Another truck load of boys came up, pulling off the drive to the cluster of oaks by the barn. They got out, casual, straggling and proud, and strolled over to the barbecue and spoke to P.W. and Robert Dale, to each other—never “Hey, how are you?” but slapping shoulders and delivering stiff punches in the stomach and snide remarks that unraveled into basketball talk. Still, the best dern team in the district!

  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 o
r 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.