Two Shades of Morning (2 page)

Mary Lou, my latest best friend, told me that P.W. Watson—that little sandy-headed boy—wanted to go with me, had sent her straight away to tell. Then, smothering giggles, she handed me a note from Robert Dale, in which he said basically the same thing. I didn’t know Robert Dale and I weren’t going together. We always went together everywhere; Daddy had even driven the two of us to camp, instead of sending us with the county agent.

But P.W. was cuter—clear blonde hair sheared high above molded ears, his scalp, silvery, shining through. He wore different colors of the same striped shirts, knit shrinking from the waist of his khaki shorts. He sweated even while he swam, moisture beads popping on his thorny scalp; he could dog-paddle without ever ducking his head. At nightly socials, in the open pavilion on the lake, all the girls tried to dance with him, but grinning with his teeth too big for his chubby pink face, he would stick close to me. I would stagger dances between him and Robert Dale and sit between them on the sandy shore during vespers while the sun set over the wind-shirred water—I swear I loved them both!—and there was no tug between us. But by Friday of the second week, I didn’t want to ride home with Mama and Daddy and Aunt Birdie, who had driven over to pick me and Robert Dale up. I pitched a fit and rode back with the county agent to be near P.W. So did Robert Dale.

“Scat!” Punk shouted, and the cat streaked toward the house. Aunt Birdie and I were on the front porch, brushing our feet on a raised-daisy mat.

“That white’ll shore show up dirt,” she said, fingering the clapboards by the door. “Just wait till the wind goes to flirting up that plowed dirt out yonder.” That said, she rapped on the door.

I straightened my skirt; at least it was clean. “She’s got her radio running and can’t hear.” Aunt Birdie knocked again, mumbling, “If she wants it, she better come on.” Then she hollered to Punk, “Ain’t she home?”

“Yassum,” he said. “She don’t answer though, less you rings the doorbell.”

I pressed the lighted tab on the door frame and chimes traveled inside like a handheld music box.

The door opened almost immediately and there stood Sibyl. Taller, up close, and darker, with hazelnut eyes and golden hair (not falsely brash, but tinted) and a shaped-clay face that loomed like the moon. Smooth, thick skin, the kind that looks permanently tanned. Coral lipstick, her only makeup, whitened her scalloped teeth. But it was her eyes, those smirky hazel eyes, that zapped you. And while she zapped us, I searched her for signs of sickness and doubted the rumors about her dying. She looked too healthy, too sure. Sure, maybe, that I was giving her the once-over, and standing there as if she knew she was unique and was used to being scrutinized and her tolerance for scrutiny was one more quality that made her unique. “Well?” she drawled and laughed. And if she hadn’t laughed, I might have tried to like her. “I brung you a little jelly,” said Aunt Birdie, “put up last year.” She still held the jelly as she stepped onto the plush white carpet.

I brushed my feet again and followed.

“I’m Sibyl.” She cocked her head; her hair was swooped into a beehive with topaz pins along the tuck. She was dressed up—too dressed-up not to have been waiting for some of the locals to stop by and gawk.

“Birdie Hall.” Aunt Birdie laughed crustily, then added: “Miss Sibyl, huh?” She turned, traipsing back onto the porch, and spat wildly into the hedge of trimmed boxwoods, then traipsed again into the room, wiping her mouth with her handkerchief.

Sibyl must have thought Aunt Birdie had changed her mind and was leaving, but I knew the white carpet had prompted her to get rid of her snuff. Also, she had just confirmed her suspicions of Sibyl being pretentious. A dead give-away was Aunt Birdie calling somebody Miss or Mister in that strong tone. “You must be P.W.’s little wife?” Sibyl said to me.

“Earlene,” I said, feeling the scour of those hot eyes for the first time. First times, last times stayed with me, but I was never too sensitive about Sibyl, her actions and reactions. I looked about the narrow living room, stunned by the glare of twin chandeliers shimmering on glass. White walls, white floors, white upholstery and mirrors in varied shapes, duplicating the starkness of the room. But still the whole of it seemed rich, and Aunt Birdie and I were poor and plain, the stuff of stale old houses and cheap mobile homes. The luster of new, blending with the fragrance of roses and Sibyl’s sophistication, set me apart like an ottoman set to trip over in the middle of a room. I felt shorter than the little girl I thought I’d left at home when I’d married P.W. the year before. Aunt Birdie’s earthiness balanced the scales for me that day; she would have given Jackie Kennedy pause. She simply checked out the chairs and the angular doodads and paintings—one with ruches of red like blood on black ink scratching—looking up and about with unabashed awe, and exclaimed honestly over what she knew to be a squandering of unaccounted-for money. But she didn’t say that. What she said was, “Little Robert Dale must of struck oil down yonder at Bony Branch.”

Sibyl laughed, tipping her head back. “Y’all make a place and set down.”

“On this?” said Aunt Birdie, patting the cushion of the curved white sofa.

“That’s what it’s for.” Sibyl flashed her fat teeth.

I thought of her teeth as expensive, like the leggy ballerina figurine poised next to Aunt Birdie’s red mayhaw jelly on the glass coffee table.

Aunt Birdie plopped on the sofa, and I perched next to her blunt knees. I was no longer the prettiest girl in Little Town.

Sibyl lit on a velvet chair like a harlequin butterfly and crossed her legs with a gold shoe peeping from the hem of her silky black jumpsuit. Her foot twitched steadily while she talked. At times her voice grew coarse, but she checked it and continued in her lilting drawl, which I supposed represented the cream of middle Florida: all “R” sounds dropped from words, remaining consonants purled and vowels brayed.

That afternoon, following tea sipped from bird-bone thin demitasse cups, Sibyl took us on a tour of the house. Aunt Birdie lagged on the stairs, nursing her bunions, and stared down at the polished living room, while Sibyl and I waited on the top landing.

“I been after Robert Dale to have y’all over,” she said. “He told me about you all being so close.”

“We grew up together,” I said. “He and P.W. are old buddies from way back. Used to work together.”

She smiled and said, “Oh yeah!” as though she had suddenly made some important and shocking connection. I didn’t know whether to laugh or leave. “Robert Dale told me all about you,” she added.

As Aunt Birdie hobbled alongside, Sibyl took her natural lead, chortling. Aunt Birdie glanced at me, giving only that, a glance, as if to say the cause of my puzzlement didn’t call for a reprimanding stare. A spendthrift hypocrite. Don’t credit her with more. And off she trudged in Sibyl’s footprints, fagged and bored with the final phase of the tour.

I tagged behind while Sibyl exhibited more rooms of white. They were furnished like the living room: lead crystal and harsh contemporary paintings, much like a furniture showroom.

She perceived my dwindling interest right away; I could see it as our eyes mirrored impressions. I smiled too late to cover it. “Y’all live in that little trailer on the other side of me, right?” she said.

“The blue one.” I caught my mistake.

“Isn’t it the only one on this road?”

“I guess so.”

“I don’t see how you stand it.” She dusted the top of a dark cherry bureau with her palm.

“They ain’t got no choice till P.W. can get on his feet,” said Aunt Birdie, becoming more apparently disgruntled the longer we stayed.

Sibyl smiled condescendingly at Aunt Birdie and a chill stole over me. It was as if she knew something you didn’t or couldn’t know, had some power that rendered you powerless, as if there was only so much and she possessed it all. Never mind the cutdowns; you can’t match them. And I never did.

I didn’t know until it was too late, and knowing made no difference anyway, but Sibyl’s power was not in her ingenuity, nor in her unscrupulousness, but in her ingrained ability to confuse.

* * * * *

Chapter 2

A slow drizzle set in the next evening and struck up sounds of quarreling among the frogs at Bony Branch. A continuous treble rising like vapors over the swampy woods behind our mobile home.

P.W. and I had been summonsed to dinner at Sibyl’s. Dinner was midday for us, and we stood gaping out the kitchen door after Mae had delivered her mistress’s message—”Miss Sibyl say be there at seven tonight, and she don’t mean eight neither.” Dodging mud holes in my yard, she tramped back toward the tall white house softened by smoky drapes of Spanish moss.

P.W. ducked inside and headed for his recliner, which served as a divider between our living room and kitchen. “You reckon Her-highness thinks we just gone drop what we doing and run right over?” he said.

Earlier, expecting a full afternoon of rain, he had left his tractor in his Daddy’s tobacco patch and rushed home to make love, and we’d started too soon, were sated before the drizzle even set in. Now we were both feeling mellow and drained, looking forward to sleeping to the pitter of rain on the metal roof. “I don’t know who she thinks she is,” he said, “bossing people around.”

“Who does she think she is!” I laughed and sat on the arm of his chair for him to scratch my back; his hand went up automatically, scratching under my t-shirt as he gazed off. “You haven’t met Sibyl yet!” I said. “But we have to go; Robert Dale will be hurt if we don’t.”

“Close as me and him’s been, you’d think he’d of brung her by before now. Just up and married out of the clear blue! Not a word to nobody but Miss Lettie—saying he was in love, or some such—but even she didn’t figure on him jumping the gun that quick.” He dropped his hand from my back. “Way I see it we don’t owe him nothing.”

I got up and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. “Let’s don’t be too hard on him, P.W. He was probably afraid people around Little Town wouldn’t know how to take her. She’s different.” I didn’t know why but suddenly I wanted to go. Maybe I didn’t want to cook, maybe I was curious about P.W.’s reaction. His instincts were sharp as an Indian’s.

“Well, still looks to me like he’d of broke the news before he brung her home.” His blue eyes looked brighter in his blistered face. “Course, he ain’t never mentioned no girl since I took you off his hands.”

I laughed and flicked water at him, then stared out the kitchen window at the woods where dark started.

“I ain’t kidding, sugar,” he said, “I do think he was crazy about you.”

“No, he was not!” I hated it when P.W. turned serious. “We were friends, that’s all, probably cause y’all were.” “You sure that’s all they was to it?” He lunged and yanked up my shirt tail on my naked butt as I headed for the bedroom to get dressed.

P.W. was really too smug in himself to suspect that I had seriously considered marrying Robert Dale. Probably wouldn’t have bothered him anyway. But I kept it to myself, believing that telling might hurt P.W.’s ego, or somehow diminish what I’d had with his best friend. Robert Dale and I had just faded, like a powdery prom corsage pressed in a book with only its colors memorized. And whatever had been among the three of us—call it friendship, call it love—ended when P.W. and I got married.

As for Robert Dale not having brought his new bride over, that didn’t seem at all strange to me. Folks in Monroe County had little patience with formalities. If someone was born or died, folks came. They went to weddings and church and baptisms on the Withlacoochee River, to reunions and basketball games, and any other goings-on at the same high school they’d graduated from for half a century. Carting one’s bride house to house was unnecessary: Monroe Countians figured they’d meet her soon and often in the course of the long marriage. Golden wedding anniversaries were big in our little town.

#

I dressed up that night. My best pink a-line knit and black pumps. My fake pearls, I took off, then put them on again. Pleased with how I looked and Sibyl bedamned. Glad that my hair curved smoothly from a side part. Usually, in wet weather, it frizzed. We walked up the road in the dark rain, latched to one another with P.W.’s jacket over our heads. Matching strides and cozy in the peal of frogs, we shared breath with his head bent to mine. I was shorter by half a foot, but we fit like lovers chiseled into the same stone. His hand kept riding to my breast from our crisscross of arms. I shrugged it away, giggling in the hypnotic beat of rain on his jacket, and we kissed without once breaking stride.

“Let’s don’t go,” he whispered.

“We got to.” I squeezed him, his stocky body fleshy-warm.

“Ain’t no law says so.” He lifted me so that my feet cleared a puddle.

“P.W., don’t!” I squealed. “We’re almost at the door.”

“We can turn around right now if I say so.”

We might have too. P.W. was like that; he never did what he was supposed to and I never cared. I would have followed him home, just as I followed him duck hunting and to see his mama and daddy, even though I hated going. He went to church with me on Sundays and I knew he liked to sleep late.

#

Robert Dale opened the door and Sibyl’s easy-listening music ghosted around his lanky body. He looked odd against that backdrop of white and glass, like a deer tipping in a whatnot shop. He smiled, his lips patchy-pale, and I thought about him smiling like that at our Beta Club convention in Atlanta. Not really putting on, but stiff because the occasion called for formal. Was he nervous about whether Sibyl would like us? I hated to think of him that uptight all the time. He hugged me, pumped P.W.’s hand, all of us saying what we always said—just tripe—but guarded, definitely guarded tripe. Naturally, he’d be worried about us accepting Sibyl—who could blame him? She was as different as hot from cold, as day from night—I could come up with a thousand opposites.

“What you been up to?” Robert Dale said to P.W.

P.W. beamed, his blue eyes stretched, and I could tell he was just as impressed and confused about the house as I’d been yesterday. Then they became strangers, trying out grown-men talk. The scent of roses came first into the room, then the augering timbre of Sibyl’s voice. I’d always thought of rose perfumes as cheap but powerful, quickly growing stale, and decided to test the fact on her.

“I thought I heard y’all come in.” She clipped on a great gold earring and tossed her head, her neck-length gold hair separating in strands of unset waves, as if she’d shampooed and let it dry naturally. Another mark against her.

“You’ve met my wife, haven’t you, Earlene?” Robert Dale turned to the stereo console and started reading the cover of a record album. You had to know him as P.W. and I did to know he needed a break from that wearing-down smile and that shopping-mall music.

“We met yesterday,” I said.

“Well, don’t you look precious!” said Sibyl and tugged my left sleeve. Then she smiled at P.W., dismissing me. “Isn’t anybody gone introduce me?” she said, and laughter glimmered in the room where rain was only wetness on our clothes. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “This is my husband, P.W.” And while she stepped up her act, I checked her again for signs of cancer: her eyes were a bit drowsy, but her snappy mannerisms concealed any weakness.

“Did you offer everybody a drink?” she asked Robert Dale.

“Not yet,” he mumbled, still with his back to us.

“You’ll just have to overlook Robert Dale’s bad manners,” she said.

“Anybody want one?” Robert Dale turned, grinning slyly—same grin as when we were children, smoking behind his house.

Next to the console stereo was a blonde credenza with several bottles of liquor displayed. No wonder Robert Dale was so miserable! Men in our neck of the woods drank—lots of them drank a lot—but they didn’t keep it in the house, and they never offered it to their women.

“Believe I’ll take a Bud,” P.W. said, sly too, daring me with a guilty grin. I shook my head at P.W.; his neck looked shrunk. Mama would have died if she’d known either had asked me.

“I’ll have white wine,” Sibyl said, unfazed as she would be in snow.

Baptist or not, I wished I drank.

#

During supper, little things kept popping up to tick Sibyl off with Robert Dale. With each new episode—say, him slouching in his chair, or setting his water glass down too hard (Sibyl didn’t serve iced tea like everybody else)—I would think that now, having corrected him, she might get on with being civil. But halfway through the meal, I decided they must have been arguing before we came and wished we’d waited a while longer before butting in.

Always pale, Robert Dale’s face turned blotchy-red, a marbled effect. Sometimes he would snap back at Sibyl, or gesture proudly—yes, proudly!—for us to ignore the little woman. So strange: he kept smiling and acting amused with her, amused with himself for having her. And yet he was weary, slightly haggard, no good at the game. I felt myself wearing down with him. My shoulders ached. But, to my surprise, P.W. was having a good time. He was charming and silly-witty, maybe because he figured the evening was almost gone. If we didn’t leave soon he would fizzle like a recording when the power goes off.

When he didn’t fizzle, I felt like slapping that silly grin off his face. But I was relieved too because his silliness got us through one hour of winding spaghetti on forks, coddled with spoons, at Sibyl’s insistence that it was the Italian way to eat “pasta.” Robert Dale’s new blue shirt looked like worms had tracked it with blood. Before dessert, she ushered him off to change into another new shirt—the creases, evidence that it was new, besides he told us.

“You shouldn’t tell stuff like that,” she whispered aside in honeyed bleeps. “People’ll think you’re bragging.”

“I ain’t bragging,” he laughed, “just telling the truth. I’ve never had no two new shirts at the same time.”

I’d had enough of him too. “What kind of cake is this?” I asked Sibyl.

“Italian cream,” she said.

“It’s real good.”

“Thank you. I made it myself; Mae would’ve ruined it if I’d let her bake it.”

The cake was absolutely the tallest I’d ever seen without toppling. Ten layers at least, a white column with chopped pecans sprinkled on cream cheese icing. I wondered how she’d got the nuts to stick on the sides.

“You got to get this recipe, sugar,” P.W. said, bent over his plate for another fork full.

“Okay,” I said.

“I don’t give out my recipes.” Sibyl posed with her fork in midair.

P.W. wasn’t undone. “I don’t blame you. This one’s too good to just give out; you could made a bundle selling it.”

“I wouldn’t sell it either,” she said. “I just make it for special occasions.”

She kept eating, candle light reflecting off her square bisque face. The collar tips of her white shirt looked like tiny dove wings on her neck.

Cake-incident still fresh as the icing in my mouth, I watched her switch from smiling to near smirking, as she’d done on the stair landing yesterday. She leaned close to Robert Dale and whispered in his ear. His eyes cut from her to me, on the other side of the table. “Remember what you told me...you know?” she hissed. “Can I bring it up now?” He smiled while she whispered, listening with merry dark eyes, first shrugging, then shaking his head.

“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.