Two Shades of Morning (9 page)

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 back.

“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.

#

When I woke up, I thought at first that I’d only dozed, but the sun had sank to behind the pavilion on its hill of sand. I turned to look for Sibyl and the lifeguard and they were gone. I sat up and checked out the swimmers and those nooning on the pier, all the way up to the entrance of the pavilion. No white swimsuit, no bronze suit of skin.

I had to get home and fix supper. The skin on my back stung, and I figured I’d been cursed with a one-sided sunburn. I decided to go inside the pavilion, where she had to be, and followed the pier to the concrete walk leading up the shore. At the sheltered entrance, some teenage boys were throwing ice from snow-cones at a group of girls, who dodged and squealed and covered their look-alike heads. I pushed through the turnstile and went inside, stopping to let my eyes adjust to the dim room. Blasts of jukebox music and pinball knocks caused a skirmish in my head, a roaring that made my ears clog. Rows of booths fingered out from the windowed walls each side of the dance floor. I checked each booth for Sibyl. A young couple, scrunched together in one of the seats, was sharing a hotdog and some French fries, and I felt the first claws of hunger inside.

I sat in an empty booth next to a screened window facing the parking lot and tried to figure where Sibyl could be. And it hit me that if she was really gone, her car would be gone too. Sparkles of red kept bursting before my ears; my thinking was delayed. I looked out where she had parked, and in place of her red convertible sat a blue Mustang.

“My God!” I said. “She’s left without me.” I got up and went to the front door to look again, as if a window screen might have screened the truth. She had really gone! Somebody put a nickel in the jukebox and the music blared again, a fast song. None of those young people even looked at me. I felt old enough to be their mother, but not old enough to be on my own.

A new crowd in fresh sun dresses and shorts shuffled in for the evening—dancing, talking, eating. I wandered back to my booth, stopping along the way at a water fountain. My money was in the car and I thought I might starve. I always got thirsty when the water was off at home. I’d give Sibyl thirty minutes, then I was calling home. That meant calling Daddy to come get me because P.W. would still be at work.

After thirty minutes, I made it an hour, then two. If I called Daddy, Mama and Aunt Birdie would know I’d chosen to go with and be dumped by Sibyl, rather than go shopping with them. Also, if Daddy picked me up, I’d feel like a baby.

I watched the sun hover in the pines and filter through the window screen, with a dusting of twilight along the curvy dirt road that led to the pavilion. When the sun wallowed behind the pines, I spotted the red convertible gliding up the road then pulling into the parking lot. I stood to go, then sat again when I saw that a man was driving. Then I recognized Sibyl’s golden hair on the passenger side and Bob the lifeguard driving. I stamped out the door, headed for the car. I guess I thought they’d jump or something, but they ignored me and talked on, sitting in the car, while I leaned against the hood. The engine was ticking hot, and the hood felt warm on my arms; my face and back were burning up. They both got out and she walked behind the car to get to the driver’s side. Dressed now in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, he started to walk away.

“Bob, wait a minute,” she called, and he strolled back—boyish now and strangely familiar to me. She slid a dog tag on a beaded chain over her hair, flipping it underside-up, and handed the chain to him. He walked backwards to the pavilion, smiling as he slipped the chain over his own head.

She started the car, and I got in, slamming the door.

“Well, I hope you had a good time,” she snapped.

“What?” I couldn’t believe her tone—her tone of accusation, this time, not words. Hot spider legs crept up my spine.

She drove fast, staring straight ahead with her strong jaw set, her bottom lip pursed—a fake pose of confidence that she’d bested me again? She took the deep, shady curve around the lake, without slowing, with an air of expectancy that belied that look.

I couldn’t take my eyes off that tanned bisque face. Had I mistaken what she’d said again—how she’d said it? Maybe she really meant she hoped I’d had a good time. I started shaking my head. No, I knew what she said and how she’d said it. She was blaming me for falling asleep, for making her wait, in case I should tell. I went crazy.

“You’re not dying,” I blurted. “If you were, you’d be getting yourself right.” I didn’t say “right with God,” though I thought about the sign on a tree at Walton Creek with its missing “G.”

She started singing, nasal and low, glancing off at a dusky field along the straightaway toward home. A field bordered by woods where dark would come stalking like a panther. The song wasn’t anything I’d heard before—mostly she was humming—no popular song and I think she was only making it up, singing to drown me out. I didn’t let that stop me. And sometimes I’d touch on the truth, and when I did it would show in a tiny hollow above her right eyebrow.

“You’re the biggest liar and hypocrite I’ve ever met,” I shouted. My lungs filled with the scent of cooling earth and ached. I lifted my face to let the wind blow at my hot eyes. “You take me for a fool—all of us. Robert Dale’s never been the same since he met you.”

She started rapping on the steering wheel with her rings and singing louder—a song in narrative. I didn’t get the drift; I didn’t try. “Why’d you wear that old dress on Easter?” I said.

“Why did you?” she said.

I was shocked that she’d spoken; but then she went on humming and fiddling with rearview mirror. I decided to skip the petty business and go for the gut truth. “Because a new dress is beside the point of Easter.”

She looked confused—around the eyes—and I was glad. But the joy I got from the spring of truth was spoiled. What if she was dying? My tongue wouldn’t stop.

“I don’t know what happened that night after the cookout to make P.W. mad with me, but we’re doing good now. And you better stay out of it.”

We were at that point passing P.W.’s folks’ home-place, a rundown farmhouse with oaks in the yard and fields of rank green corn and tobacco surrounding it. I thought I spied his mama out back, picking peas from her garden, bent like a broken scarecrow. I hated picking peas with her, always dreaded every visit with her and Mr. Buck, but I wished I was there now. Sibyl drove on, the road lonesome, gray and twisting.

“You have no class, Erlie-honey,” she said, turning on the radio. “Not an ounce.”

I could taste the brass of hate. “The only claim you have to class, Sibyl, is buying and dying.” Another bosh shot?

A hollow formed above her brow again and her face went white. Pleased as I was, I bit my tongue.

#

Whether or not I’d handled her right, at least I’d handled her, which was better than I’d been doing.

She didn’t drive me home. She didn’t speak to me again. She parked under her carport, and I got out. I walked along the road in the thickening buzz of locusts and dusk with a calmness I can’t explain except to say I felt light, my lips tingled.

I cut up, floured and fried chicken in less than an hour; usually it took at least two, and generally by the time I got around to cooking chicken, it would be half-rotten in the refrigerator and I’d have to bury it in the backyard.

Only one piece burned that night—a thigh with a charred patch on the brown crust. Maybe I was finally getting cooking down pat. I went to take a bath. My blistered back was beginning to draw, and looking in the mirror, I saw that my face was stained red on one side, drained white on the other. I looked bad and knew I’d look worse when I started to peel. Still, getting into the shower, I felt good, and getting out I felt better. I turned on the radio and smeared Noxema on the burns I could reach. I’d have P.W. finish my back when he came in, and I’d tell him everything, make him see the real Sibyl. But when he didn’t come in by nine o’clock, I got less eager and more worried. Thrown off by what-ifs. What if the tractor had overturned on top of him? What if he’d wrecked his pickup, driving as fast he always drove? What if he’d had a fight with his daddy and was off sulking and drinking at the county line?

Knowing he’d have stopped by his mama’s house before starting home, I called Miss Eular. I dreaded worrying her; she was such an edgy woman, and if he was all right, he’d get on to me for bothering her and “telling on him” for coming in late. I played up to her in a high cheery voice: “I just got in...,” I said. “Oh?” she said. Had I cooked supper for her only son? (She didn’t say that, but I knew she was thinking it.) “Just wondered if he came by?” I said. “How come?” (You know he did, he always does, and what’s going on?) She said all that in two little words: How come?