Two Shades of Morning Page 9
I became something of an observer during that period at the beginning of summer, laid-back and drowsy, much like Miss Avie Nell used to be in her slat chaise longue on the porch. Peering through a hazy window—that’s how watching Sibyl felt. At times, I even liked being at Sibyl’s, a certain edgy excitement to her craziness. Her place was like a vacation in a swanky resort. I didn’t have to cook. Also, I found that I’d missed high school. The year-long gulf, which I’d never noticed before, was bridged by those gatherings. I resented the shift of the limelight, true, having always been the prettiest girl in Monroe County, but just being Erlie Girlie in the wings was relaxing for a change.
I laid my mind to rest where P.W. was concerned, telling myself that he too liked the excitement of mingling with other people, which we’d given up when we got married. Laughing and cutting up with another couple, hanging out with high school kids. But I couldn’t stop feeling that something was wrong—a nagging guilt deep down of a wrong turn taken—as if we were edging toward a sex orgy and thinking about taking part. But the gatherings were all so innocent, fun and funny, not even a dirty joke told. Everything was funny, that is, except the undercurrents between me and Sibyl. And I couldn’t explain, especially to P.W., what was happening. How can you explain a suspicion of something sinister where there appears to be none
When I finally got the courage to try a glass of wine, Sibyl started drinking water. She made a point of walking around with a tall glass of it and glaring at me as if I was a sinner. A few weeks later, the liquor and wine disappeared from the hunt board.
Sometimes, all of us were cruel and critical: somebody out of style, somebody poor, or the man down the road who was too thin, his wife too fat. And Sibyl, usually starting it, would go along, then accuse me of being unchristian. She never accused me in front of the others, and they never caught on. When I would tell her off, she’d jump in her car and be gone, easing back a while later to apologize in front of everybody. She’d keep me on her prayer list, she said.
One afternoon, while Robert Dale was gone and she was in a mood to bake, she handed me a white wicker basket from the top of the refrigerator and jokingly shooed me out of the kitchen, telling me to go hunt goose eggs for her special brownie recipe. “They won’t rise right without goose eggs,” she said.
I stared at her, almost saying, You go, but went anyway while she and P.W. sat drinking root-beer floats at the bar in the kitchen, going because I was too stupid to say no. Going because she was sick and I was well. But I was bristling all the while as I plundered the straw nests along the banks of Bony Branch. The sun was shining. She hadn’t sent me out in the cold dark. Her crazy geese paraded and hissed along the edge of the raveling black water. I threw a rock and they skidaddled. Sibyl had heard that Windsor Palace had geese for security purposes and she’d bought six. The palace had only four, she’d said.
I stumped my toe on an oak root as I headed back toward the house, swinging the basket like a little girl. Tugging on the screen door, as though it was stuck, I heard her and P.W. laughing in the living room. I waited, so I wouldn’t disturb them, also to keep from seeming suspicious—to keep from embarrassing them and myself. I just stood there, gripping the handle of the basket and kneeing it in a sort of rhythm.
In a few minutes, she came to the door and flipped the latch and laughed. “How did that happen? Oh, well...” Then she turned back to the kitchen as P.W. wandered in from the living room. He was grinning, red-faced, his little finger daintily raised from his glass: his guilty look. Lately, he looked guilty over the least things—if he stopped at the juke on the Florida line before coming home, if his daddy nailed him for not noticing the latest invasion of tobacco horn worms, if he told me he loved me...
I began to doubt my own perceptions. I kept getting those isolated glimpses of her—the real Sibyl—while everybody else seemed to see what she showed them. Except Aunt Birdie, who was at that stage talking in riddles if she talked at all, but I was in too deep with Sibyl to hang around Aunt Birdie and risk her homing in on my turning. I realize now that no one in Little Town ever believed in Sibyl, anymore than they did in ghosts, both equally transparent and ephemeral. She controlled the church with her strong brand of charm, became president of the Women’s Missionary Union. They accepted her because it would be unchristian to reject her. And because it would be but for a season.
The choir, mostly made up of lil’ ole ladies, stuttered over fancy new hymns, heads bent to study the new choir books bought by Sibyl, while Miss Effie picked out the complex arrangements at the piano. Even during spring revival, when the Baptists and Methodists swapped choirs, our choir failed to make the sour notes sweet. But the Methodists were impressed with the effort, with the new hymns only Sibyl could sing. You could tell they wanted her, and Miss Lavenia would gladly have given her to them.
The choir had always tolerated Miss Lavenia’s special screech trailing on “Amazing Grace.” Even the Methodists had grown used to the grating sound. I’d always thought it was a special effect, she’d sung it with such rapturous confidence. One hard look from Sibyl, when Miss Lavenia fouled the new hymns, and she quit. If Sibyl had been critical of everybody who hit a sour note, she’d have been left singing a solo. I knew I couldn’t sing, so I’d quit when Sibyl started. I probably would have quit anyway, to be honest, because I was having trouble keeping up with the garden—putting up vegetables in a race with P.W.’s mama to fill up my freezer first—and my new social life. Thursday nights, choir practice nights, I took off from Sibyl and the freezer to sit around the house.
But the town knew Sibyl was passing-fancy; she would come and go like others before her. They would endure. They were never really swayed. Her following was of the very young and naive. And she was necessary, the town elders seemed to suggest, to teach us of the nuisances we would invaribly run into. At times, I believed Sibyl would die; they doubted it, or maybe thought of course she could die—we all could. So what? We had a whole cemetery near the Withlacoochee River bridge that needed expanding. Sibyl was part of the cycle of life and life would go on.
#
Sibyl no longer came to our house—again no explanations and none expected. Early one hot Friday morning, she called to invite me to go with her to the Slurry Lake pavilion.
As usual on Fridays, I’d planned to take Mama and Aunt Birdie to Tallahassee. I didn’t know why shopping trips had to be on Fridays, unless they’d picked up the habit from some of the pulp-wooders’ and loggers’ wives, who had to go into town on Fridays to get their husbands’ pay checks and go to the grocery store. But the clock in the tower of the old Tallahassee courthouse could have been set by our routine: off to the downtown Jew stores at ten, we would mosey along the block toward the courthouse square till 11:30, then cross Broad Street to eat dinner at King’s Grill. The Friday Special: buttered grits, sweetened cole slaw, and oniony fried hushpuppies that tasted like the mullet—salty, browned, fishy filets, ruffled around the edges. When the dinner whistle gonged at 12:00, we’d be sipping syrupy iced tea.
But on that lazy Friday morning of Sibyl’s call, I wanted to go with her to Slurry Lake where the music glimmered with the sun across the lake. Mama and Aunt Birdie could wait till tomorrow or Monday. They should learn to drive, or Daddy should take them, not drag out some moth-eaten excuse about how he hated to go anywhere. He needed to get out, do him good.
I called Mama to tell her I couldn’t go, half-expecting her to question me about why and give me a good excuse to snap at her. But she said fine, she didn’t really need to go anyway. She would wash sheets and hang them in the sun. I didn’t call Aunt Birdie because she might guess I was going with Sibyl. I didn’t know why I didn’t want her to know, but I was tired of feeling guilty. I needed a day off and I wanted an early suntan. Sibyl pulled up and honked her car horn, light and jaunty toots in time with the song on the radio—”Big Girls Don’t Cry,” by the Four Seasons. She was wearing a tailored white tunic over a white swimsuit and her long tan leg
s glistened in the sun. Her gold hair was sun-bleached in strands and caught up in a ponytail, not too high or too low, just classy. She was more striking that day than I’d ever seen her, riding high in her red convertible with the top pleated back. I made myself taller by perching on a crooked leg with the wind whipping at my broomsage hair. As we passed Moore’s store, facing the Little Town courtyard, Mr. Len and Mr. Taft waved from their bench out front. We waved back, then stared ahead at the ribbon of gravel running in the sun.
Big girls don’t cry, Big girls don’t cry,
Big-ig girls, they don’t cry-yi-yi, they don’t cry,
Big-ig girls, don’t cry—that’s just an alibi—Big girls don’t cry, big girls don’t cry, big girls don’t cry...
I looked in the rearview mirror at the crossing with its blinking red light that nobody heeded. At the post office next door to the store, which doubled as a library: when Miss Nona, the librarian, had replaced her elderly father as postmistress, she had moved the books from the courthouse to the post office. The books, like the new brick courthouse and post office, were property of the State, as were the sidewalks unreeling in the sun for children’s skates and bicycles to zip alongside the zooming traffic of 122, north-bound for the dip at Walton Creek.
If not for the State we’d still have had dirt roads. The county didn’t believe in change anymore than they believed in Sibyl Sharpe and her way of doing things, but they’d hauled fill-dirt to level aged ruts in front of her house anyway. No one knew why, anymore than I knew why I was riding west in her brand-new car, looking back at my hometown like a stranger.
Set among the old clapboard store and the steep-roofed Masonic Lodge at the crossing, the flat-top courthouse and post office looked like the start of a new town with new rules. The courthouse was for work now, since the ancient, white, two-story building had been torn down. It had been used for revivals when the outlying hamlets joined each spring, and for weddings, even the courtroom upstairs, dusty and hollow, transformed for festive occasions. We rarely held court, except under the guise of prosecuting bootleggers, once in a blue moon, who had been nabbed by revenuers and let go when they turned their backs and hightailed it out of Monroe County.
Local politicians had been forced to take to the bench in front of Moore’s store after the old courthouse porch had been taken down. The lumber still lay under Web Holmes’ hay shelter to prevent waste. If anyone needed boards for a bookshelf or a chicken coop, they helped themselves. It was, after all, our tax money that had built the courthouse in the first place.
Somehow we kept the old school, a couple of blocks east, when the State went on its new-brick spending spree. The school house, lofty and sprawling, was built of red bricks (probably what saved it from sure destruction) and served as primary, elementary and high school combined. If it was good enough for our elders, it was good enough for us. No one had told them yet that they should want us to have better.
I’d never considered us peculiar until I saw us that day in the rearview mirror of Sibyl’s car. We’d heard all our lives that we were one of the least populated counties in Florida, license plate tag number 180, space-abundant and people-scarce. When we’d gone away to basketball games, we’d waved our red and black banners from the school bus windows, never aware or caring that we might be considered quaint.
Few locals ever left the county after high-school graduation, and few strangers came to live there. If they did, they didn’t stay long. Not that they were unwelcome, they simply didn’t fit in. They could not abide our quaint mores’ and motives. We welcomed them warmly, and just as warmly told them goodbye, going on with our little-town routines.
Sibyl was passing through.
#
Slurry Lake was tucked in the pinewoods between Tallahassee and Monticello, the only place to swim if you weren’t a member of a country club or didn’t own your own pool. Unless you went to one of the Florida beaches, a day’s trip there and back. So, when the public schools let out for the summer, the old wooden pavilion, set lengthwise on the upslope of shore, would be brimming with teenagers and children from the surrounding counties.
Inside, pinball machines lined a whole wall, their thumps and rings as regular as a pulse; the high mineral smell of boat oil on water drifting through the large open windows that ran whole wall spans of the single long room. Music from the jukebox non-stop, like the non-stop squeals and laughter, like the non-stop crank of the turnstile between the dance hall and the lake, a grinding sound followed by a settling clack. A wooden pier elled onto the lake, with a high-dive and a regular diving board, the paying swimmers contained within a crib of clear aqua water.
Sibyl dropped her white tunic on the sandy shore and waded in, looking over the crowd as she stood thigh-deep and squirted water through her fists. Creeping out toward the deepening-green tiers of water, till it shuddered beneath her chin, she began to swim toward the end of the pier where the high-dive stood against the merging lake and sky, beryl at its bounds.
I felt almost sorry for her, watching her check out the young crowd: the cutsy trendiness of the dolled girls; the gutsy awkwardness of the boys—all out of her league. At least I was young enough to share the girls’ tendencies toward pimples and ballooned buttocks from too many French fries, their shave rashes on mottled legs. Swimming in Sibyl’s wake, I watched her climb the ladder to the pier and sit on the edge, splashing water with her toes. Her white one-piece swimsuit glared in the sun and looked odd in the midst of cheap, boy-legged swimsuits. The music did seem to glimmer across the water, just as I’d imagined, but Sibyl being there took the fun out of it. She looked ridiculous with her toes pointed in a put-on pose, but she also looked vulnerable.
“Tired?” I asked, paddling around her, then grabbing hold of the pier.
“No, not really,” she said, staring at the sky above the pitch of the pavilion roof.
I could see death in her cracked-glass eyes, again little more than tiredness, that straining-to-rest look she wore so well. Aware by that time, I knew that with a flick of her smart head, the tired look would vanish and she would shine. But for now—that rare nugget, now, for which I seemed always to be panning, feeling it slide through my fingers—I climbed up and sat beside her, staring off with her at the sun-blared sky.
A lifeguard in skimpy black trunks strutted along the pier in our direction, pushing screaming girls over the side. He was as bronze and smooth as a courthouse statue, his molded flesh and sinew a strain on believability. Powerful and proud and slickened with oil like wet clay. His hair was brown, peroxide-gold in streaks. All tall and brawn and oozing arrogance.
When he got to me, I glowered at him and shook my head. I knew he thought I was cute and I liked playing games and no man that well-made was made of anything real. I didn’t want my hair to get wet.
Long clean feet curling gracefully on the slats, boards giving with slight screaks in tribute, he bypassed me for Sibyl, a smile playing on his symmetricle face.
She looked up and smiled, all her thick teeth dazzling in her sunned face. Her hands glinted with too many rings to distinguish the wide gold wedding band at a glance. He sat on the other side of her, as if he’d intended it all along but had to clear the pier of bothersome children. The girls in the water sputtered and giggled as they scrambled toward the pier, watching him.
Sibyl stroked Coppertone oil on her luminous skin, and if anybody had been drowning, they’d have been shit out of luck, as P.W. would say, because the lifeguard’s hot gaze was fixed on Sibyl.
“Do my back,” she said to me, handing me the bottle of oil.
I was jealous, then—and I’m not sure that’s the right word, because I wasn’t smarting; if anything I was laughing at myself, at how sure I’d been of my power over boys. Besides, up close, the lifeguard’s face was peeling, and he couldn’t hold a candle to P.W. I did wonder if he noticed Sibyl’s hunched shoulders, the dime-sized freckles on her back, if he noticed my shoulders, how true, how smooth and boneless was my bac
k.
“Get my shoulders,” she said to me. She was from Orlando, she told him. He was from Tallahassee, just graduated from high school and planned to go to medical school. “Oh?” she said.
Well, she was from Orlando. I capped the bottle.
His name was Robert but she could call him Bob. “Bob,” she repeated as if she learned fast. “Oh, this is Erlie,” she added, cutting her hazel eyes at me. I waited for her to add “Girlie,” but she didn’t.
“Hi!” he said, ducking to speak, and I said “Hi,” watching his reflection break on the boat-chopped water below.
I got up and lay face-down across the hot planks, watching a green slit of water shimmer between the crack. Their talk sank beneath the laughter and squeals of the other swimmers, while the music and the waves lapped under the pier. A motor boat roared past on the other side of the pier and the waves clapped, burbling it its wake.
Listening to the distant murmurs that didn’t matter and those that did, I felt mellow and sad. Mellow where the fingers of sun traced P.W.’s touch that morning. His daddy was probably fit to be tied for him holding up tobacco-gathering one whole hour. First light, up and at ‘um—his daddy’s motto. I smiled at the slip of green water where sand shifted grain by grain, and it was like seeing time move.
Sibyl’s whiny voice somehow linked P.W., his touch, me and time—not in that order—even the water, which was deep, but looked shallow because it was clear, the shifting sand that layered the same as it washed. I started to get up but I was afraid—afraid of Sibyl. Her whine sliced through me. So, I rode with the colossal waves in my minute strip of green, floating, drowsing in the familiar sounds reminiscent of well-being, of a place, of a time, of a song. Secure, charmed by the motionless depth now, I separated her whine like an egg.