“Popper!”
“Buck, stop that!” scolded Miss Eular, like a dog barking at its echo.
I straggled behind. I could see Mr. Buck’s white t-shirt flashing along the dim hall as Miss Eular toddled behind him.
“Popper,” yelled P.W., on the porch now, “keep out of my business.”
Miss Eular turned and said to me, “What in the world made Little Robert Dale want to get mixed up with that woman and her a-dying?” as if that were the point of the quarrel.
“Earlene?” P.W.called. “You coming or not?”
I tailed Miss Eular up the hall as she tailed Mr. Buck, ducking around him and grappling at his bloated sides. I felt I could only react to their rumbling—out of place in the usually staid house. But I couldn’t fuss with them, because of them: their rumbling which laid waste to my shock. All I could do was even up sides, bringing up the ranks with P.W.
“Wait, baby!” Miss Eular hollered. “Buck, you tell that youngun you’re sorry, right now. And I mean it!”
“I ain’t sorry a damn tall!” Mr. Buck, on the porch, was speaking to P.W. in the yard. “That woman’s just out to get ever man in the county slobbering over her. And that’s the truth! You think you’re the onliest one? Hell, no!”
“I ain’t slep with her, Popper!”
“You ain’t had to; she’s got you hung up like a dog, you and a bunch more ain’t got no better sense.”
“Buck, shut up!” said Miss Eular, behind him, a good foot shorter, trying to peep around at her only son.
“Earlene, I’m leaving.” P.W. stalked off up the sunken brick walk with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders scrunched.
“In love with her! Hog wash!” Mr. Buck guffawed. “Don’t never let me hear tell of you saying no such again.”
“Ain’t none of your business!” P.W. shouted back.
“Riding with the devil and going to the Lord,” one of them said—
Miss Eular, I guessed.
Each time a voice dropped, the frogs filled in. No room for my shock, so I wouldn’t be shocked. No room for me to speak, even if I’d felt like speaking. I tried to squeeze around Mr. Buck and Miss Eular, but they were tussling on the doorsteps, him batting against her flailing hands, missing and slapping her glasses to the pink hydrangea bush below.
“I told you, Eular!” he shouted, then saw me and started in. His face was so red I thought he might be having a stroke. “I’m sorry, honey.” His voice got low and raspy. He looked like a rubber doll I had as a child, sexless, round and hard.
P.W. was in the truck, starting it, revving the engine.
“That’s okay, Mr. Buck,” I said, still trying to pass between or around him and Miss Eular. “I want out of this marriage too.” But I kept thinking that none of this pertains to me. It’s between them. It was as if Mr. Buck had apologized for stepping on my toe; I’d accepted because I was in his way.
“No hell you don’t!” Mr. Buck stormed.
Miss Eular was crying now, gone off to sit on the settee.
“I’ve got to go,” I said to Mr. Buck, reaching up and patting him on the shoulder. “But P.W.’ll be back, you’ll see.” I was relieved that he didn’t return the pat, because I shouldn’t be consoled for shock I shouldn’t feel.
“He better not come back,” shouted Mr. Buck, bounding off down the hall.
“What kind of woman is she?” asked Miss Eular, peering up through eyes that looked shriveled without her glasses. She asked it as if she were curious, but I knew it was a statement, a condemnation of Sibyl.
How long had they known? He had come right out and said he loved her. Had everybody in the world known but me? Why hadn’t I known? I tried to walk normally to the truck, but my feet felt weighted, dragged numbly across a mass of tree roots. Tugging my shirt down over my hips, I could see my small pointed breasts in the light from the open truck door, deformities under my cheap cotton shirt. I could feel a smug look on my face, a tightness that made my eyes draw, though I didn’t feel smug. Robert Dale knows; he doesn’t care. Why? Who else? Aunt Birdie? Maybe that was why she never said anything for three days.
Oh, yes, husband-mine, I remember the time Sibyl’s screen door latched—excuse me, accidentally latched—the two of you inside, me outside, Robert Dale gone. I remember that time and I remember more, and Lord help me, I’m more a fool than you and Sibyl paired. I wished she had slammed the solid door instead.
“You love her?” I screamed, the sound scouring the inside of the truck—still no shock.
He drove on, staring ahead; he did switch on the headlights, as though it mattered.
“You love her,” I said again; my teeth clenched. “Did you ever love me?”
“I thought I did.” He was sweating, driving with one arm hooked on the steering wheel.
“I’ll be glad when she dies.” The words gushed through the gap of my mouth like blood from a wound, hot and justified, even cleansing.
He reached across and, like swatting a fly, slapped me across the face. I slapped him back, feeling good for the pain and pain I could cause. He swerved to the shoulder of the road, the rear of the truck slooping toward the ditch. The engine stalled and we sat still. He waited a few minutes—it seemed hours—then started the truck and spun out.
“The doctor just give her a few more weeks,” he said calmly. “That make you happy?”
“Yes,” I said, but thinking that if she left us now, we would have no base, P.W., Robert Dale and I. Sibyl was a silver bracelet and we were her charms.
In the singing of the tires on asphalt, something mad struck a tune loose in my head—whangy country. I got caught up in it, and the tune reeled on even after the wheels had stopped, renewing itself with a burgeoning in my groin. How strange to drum up a silly ditty in a crisis and get steamed in a fight. I’d never been slapped before, had never felt the pleasure of slapping—something almost orgasmic. And I really wanted P.W. Wanted him to love me—no, make-love to me—hot and steady, lasting through the night.
And the mood went on after the sun had set, truck wheels and tune whining in my head, me on the couch and P.W. in the bedroom, and I ran our past—Since Sibyl—back through the sieve in my head, all the little and the big things that gave my life Since Sibyl that false texture, the nothingness my life had been during that false period before I knew, like Eve before the knowledge of God and the apple and the weakness of Adam. I thought about the nights, Before Knowledge, when I would follow P.W. at night to check barns and run the heat on the coloring tobacco, the blasts of heat when he’d opened the door, us close in the suffocating dark, and that and everything else we’d done, our togetherness, I labeled null and void because he’d already crossed over the line and I hadn’t known.
I got up and went into the bedroom and tugged at his shoulder till he rolled over, face up and breathing even as if he’d been awake and waiting, or dreaming and was still hooked into that dream. Then I sprawled on top of him, fleshy-warm, melting into him, two cubes of ice. His lips were hot, liquified, his body hard and straining toward mine, a mad exploding of brain and flesh—bright lights going off: one flesh. I dissolved, formed again, and we started over—burgeoning flesh, bright lights, the start of life. The end.
I rolled away, newly formed and slick with sweat, a labor, and stood above him. “Now, we’re through,” I said.
“Earlene,” he sighed, as if there was more but he couldn’t say it, was too tired.
“What?” I said for pure meanness.
“Come get back in the bed.”
“No.” I stood there, curious, knowing.
“Now, look ahere!” he said, rising like Lazarus from the dead. “Did I get on to you about that damned Easter dress?”
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.”
* * * * *
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 si
ck? 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.
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