Two Shades of Morning (14 page)

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Thinking each day toward the end of August that I’d go to Aunt Birdie’s, I stayed on at the trailer. By some miracle P.W. and I tolerated each other, not fighting or loving or hashing over Sibyl or the war. We were like old friends rooming together who have drifted apart before the lease is up.

It was too hot for coffee, but P.W. drank the last cheap, bitter-black sip of chickory-laced Luzianne. I’d given up coffee, having only drank it in the first place because of Sibyl, to prove that I could. She’d insinuated that maybe I wasn’t old enough yet. “You want a glass of milk?” she had asked and laughed, passing out cups of coffee—a gourmet blend, bought fresh-ground from the A&P in Tallahassee. At barn gatherings, we would down a whole pot while playing Canasta, and it always made my stomach gnaw. Canasta did, too. Standing at the kitchen counter that morning, trying to bleach scorch-rings from the white Formica, I wished I knew why I’d matched her cup for cup. I wished I knew why after only one year, P.W. wouldn’t even look at me when I stood in the same room. I wished I knew what had caused the cottonwood I’d planted from a switch to now be dying. In one year, the tree had grown almost to the height of Sibyl’s century-old oaks, its palm-sized leaves flourishing; jointed, hastily-grown roots taking over my yard, crowding out our cheap septic system. And though mornings were cooler now, and it was not yet fall, the cottonwood leaves were shedding and drifting like wadded brown paper to the knee-high Bermuda grass. P.W. sat on the couch and gazed out the window at the showering leaves. The phone rang but he never moved.

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Aunt Birdie was as mum as Sunday when I went there. It took all I could do to get her to talk—she was “sweeping around her own back door” now.

“When...how did you find out about Sibyl and P.W?” I finally asked and relief poured over her craggy face.

She was as unpredictable as Sibyl. She slubbed words like knitting yarn at first: “I could say I heared it at the post office, but truth be told, I’d done figgered as much.” Suddenly, she gushed, spouting off about how “some people” don’t care who they step on as long as they get what they want. Even in the church—”some people” don’t care about God. “They believe they believe, they just don’t know what believe means.” And if you asked her, she believed Sibyl was out to take a shortcut to respect, before she died, by building a reputation. Aunt Birdie explained that carefully, lowering her voice to a terrifying rasp and cutting her eyes wildly at Mama on her porch across the road watering houseplants. “She (Sibyl) ain’t got nothing going for her but what she can buy,” Aunt Birdie said. “She ain’t been brung up to know the difference—that they is a difference—in being thought well of and being thought well off.”

“Birdie?” Mama called, holding onto a porch post and leaning out.

“What you want, Natalene?” Aunt Birdie called, and while Mama told her, Aunt Birdie told me about Sibyl, most of which I didn’t catch because both she and Mama were talking at once.

“Natalene,” Aunt Birdie called, as weary of Mama as she was of Sibyl—the idea of a Sibyl. “Hush up and water your Hen and Biddies plant.”

“Earlene,” Mama said, beating the doormat on the steps. “Come by here before you go.”

“Yes ‘um,” I shouted.

“And tell your Aunt Birdie to send my sleeve-pressing board home.”

“Aunt Biride, did y’all have a fight?” I asked.

“How come you to ask that?” she said.

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Mama clapped her hands over mine as I sat in the white metal glider on her porch. “Sugar,” she said, “me and Daddy want to know if you’re eating all right.” She sat facing me in a straight chair. White hair webbed around her strained face, sticking to her pink lipstick. “Yes ‘um,” I said, feeling moisture build under our stacked palms, feeling the cool metal slats on the backs of my legs—holding on.

Across the bright sand road, Aunt Birdie sat watching us from the porch where I’d left her. In the hot wind scudding high white clouds, she looked wild, a fright. Her eyes were a milky jade color. Strands of faded red hair stood electrified around her pale stern face. Her puffed-up body was grandly situated in the rocker, like a ruler’s on a throne. “What’s that place on your neck?” Mama said.

My hand flew to the hickey below my left ear. “A mosquito bite.”

“It’s dog days, you know. Put some Methiolate on it.” Her eyes brimmed with unasked questions. “Daddy’s worried.”

Mama’s worried, I thought. “Don’t worry about me, I can take care of myself. I’ve done told y’all.”

“Yes,” she said, patting my hands on the stack. “I’ve got all confidence in you.” She stood and pressed her fingers to her temples. “I don’t know what went wrong.” “Nothing you did, Mama.” I started gliding, the back of the glider knocking the wall in time with the wind buffeting a corner of tin on the roof.

She turned and stared at me, then at Aunt Birdie on the porch across the way. “I do know I tried...”

“Yes ‘um.”

“Daddy and them don’t think so, but I think you take after my little sister,” she said.

Mama couldn’t stand Aunt Wannie Mae, never let me have a thing to do with her. Flaming red hair and campy clothes, going on her fourth marriage to some man in Atlanta.

“I never should’ve let you go home with her that time,” Mama said, picking up her broom by the front door and sweeping down cobwebs above my head. “Her giggling and what-all.”

Aunt Birdie needed a gun across her lap to finish the picture.

I giggled, imitating Aunt Wannie Mae. “You know I only stayed one day at Aunt Wannie Mae’s and I swear she only said shit twice.”

“Watch it, young lady!” She stood the broom by the door and started wringing her hands. “Daddy says...”

“Mama, if I’m reading you right, you’re blaming me for the breakup of my marriage, right?” “Of course not...I never...I just...”

“Yes, you are.”

“Well, maybe you just gave up too easy’s what I meant.”

“P.W.’s to blame.” “Aw, honey, he’s a man, men are like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know.” She looked everywhere but at me.

“You mean sex-crazed, right?”

“Well, I guess you could call it that.”

“Me too. I like sex too.”

She stooped before me. Hands on her knees, looking me square in the eye. “Never. Never. Let. Something. Like. That. Pass. Your. Lips. Again. You hear me?”

Aunt Birdie across the road was nodding in her satisfied way.

A volley of shots rang out over the river swamp, west of the house. I jumped, and Mama dashed to the end of the porch, peering into the woods. Aunt Birdie sat stiffly.

“Mama,” I said, getting up and going to her, “what was that?”

“He’s drinking a little.”

“Who? Daddy?”

She nodded, buttoning the top button of my pink striped shirt.

“He’s always drank a little, Mama,” I said. But from the way she was looking—that doomed look—I knew he was drinking a lot. “What’s he shooting at? How come?”

“Squirrels. That business with y’all and Little Robert Dale.”

“God, Mama!”

“Watch it!” The sheer skin on her face had gone splotchy red and hot.

“Mama, you’re not making sense,” I said. “Is he shooting squirrels because he’s mad with P.W.?”

“Out of season.” She crossed the porch to her broom, lifted it high and started sweeping cobwebs again.

“Mama,” I said, following her, “I’ve done told y’all to let me and P.W. handle this by ourselves. I thought you and Daddy understood that. Aunt Birdie’s not messing in our business.”

Mama stopped sweeping and propped on the broom handle. “I want to know one thing,” she said. “Has he hit you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“When he married you, Daddy told him if he had to hit you he better bring you back home.”

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Chapter 10

Although I was through with P.W., I wasn’t quite done with Sibyl. I would see her through to the end. Why? Because neighbors were neighborly in Little Town, regardless, and especially when somebody was sick? Because Sibyl was my dying neighbor, and I would have no peace till my neighbor died? Not exactly. I was over that. I simply couldn’t resist seeing how far she would go before she went; besides, I had nothing better to do but sit and sort the possibilities now that I was grown up. And too I was doing the best I could till I could do better. But this time I wouldn’t cringe from her slaying unpredictability. Not even when she called me to come over and see her burial dress.

I’d taken to watching her again, and hardly a day passed that she wasn’t strolling under the oaks or spelling in the gazebo with her lifted face larger since her body had shrunk. Still, she didn’t fit the picture first formed in my mind of the languishing sick-lady. Just frailer now, less apt to be cocky.

But at the door that day, she was her old confident self, in charge even of her death, it seemed, as if she’d planned it. And she had. “Earlene,” she said and hugged me, stepping aside for me to come in. I could feel her ribcage traced on my chest like a tombstone of chalk rubbing. Her in-set hazel eyes were smudged beneath like tarnish on copper. Wispy bangs covered her bony forehead with curls at the temples to make up for her thinning hair.

Only God knows the day and the hour, I thought, trying hard not to think, not to smirk. I may have said something absurd, such as “How are you?” because she laughed, tossing her head back till the cords of her scraggy neck showed. I smiled my visiting smile.

“I was just asking P.W. yesterday how come you hadn’t been over lately.” Same old tone. She sat on the sofa, tucking one stockinged foot under her green flared dress. Above the sofa, her portrait hung between two lit pewter sconces. I sat in a chair across from her, trying to direct my gaze at Sibyl in the flesh, but my eyes were drawn like a bird’s to a snake to the Sibyl on canvas. “I just got it,” she said, nodding to the portrait. “Like to never got it away from Bill Edmondson; said it’s the best thing he’s ever done.” She turned, folding both legs beneath her, and peered at it as if checking for a likeness. “I told him I was leaving it to a friend.” Her feverish eyes charged me. All her pluckiness and poisonous vigor had been transferred to the portrait I would take home to haunt me after she made good on her promise to die.

“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.

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