Disconsolate, tortured, Sybil would sometimes hasten from the porch steps, the attic, or the front hall to the upper floor of the house, where Grandma Dorsett lived.
Her grandmother's place in Sybil's life was pivotal; it was, after all, her grandmother and not her mother who cared for Sybil as an infant. Then, too, while her mother was volatile and ambivalent, her grandmother was balanced and constant. And in the sanctuary of Grandma's home were many mansions--the recollections of small experiences that loomed large in the retrospect of Dr. Wilbur's consulting room.
Grandma would take Sybil in her lap. Sitting there, the child would draw pictures on the drawing paper that her grandmother always had ready for her. Proud of what Sybil drew, her grandmother would hang the drawings on the wall beside the oil paintings she herself had made many years before. Grandma, who had many jars of dried prunes, apricots, and figs, would take Sybil to the kitchen cupboard and let Sybil choose whatever she liked. Grandma let her open the drawers and fold everything she wanted to fold. One day Sybil found a baby picture of herself in one of the drawers. When she saw that picture, stored so carefully, she realized freshly that Grandma really liked her. There was even greater proof when Grandma came to Sybil's defense when Hattie accused the child of being bad. "Now, Hattie," her grandmother would say, "she's just a child." And Sybil remembered, too, the times when she felt sick. When, finally, Grandma came down to stay with her, Sybil, who had been unable to take food, suddenly could eat. Besides, when Grandma laughed, it was nice; it didn't hurt at all.
The visits upstairs with Grandma were never long, however. Her mother allowed only a set time and, as the visit proceeded, Sybil could feel that time was running out. There was so great a need and so little opportunity for its fulfillment that when her mother mounted the stairs to reclaim Sybil, the child could feel time literally slipping away.
When Grandpa came home, however, it was Sybil herself who brought the visit to a close. She didn't like her grandfather, a large, burly man, given to rough play. The sound of his wooden leg on the stairs, which heralded his approach, made her tell her grandmother: "I have to go now." In reply Grandma would smile understandingly.
When Sybil was four years old, her grandmother had a stroke and was sometimes not herself. She would wander around Willow Corners not knowing her way. Sybil made it her job to find her grandmother and bring her home, protecting Grandma until she recovered as for so long Grandma had protected her.
For five years after her recovery, Grandma Dorsett continued to protect Sybil. But, when Sybil was nine, Grandma was afflicted by a new illness--cancer of the cervix--which worried Sybil and made her afraid.
9
Yesterday Was Never
There was a coffin in the big house in Willow Corners, and they were going to take it away. It was almost one o'clock, and through the window of the white kitchen with its speckled linoleum Sybil could see the men from the funeral home bringing in the folding chairs for the service.
"Go to your room," her mother told her. "Mama will come and get you when we're ready and you can come down for the funeral."
Her mother then gave her a lollipop to lick while she waited. She lay on the bed, toying with the lollipop. She could hear voices downstairs, distant voices that, since she had been removed from them, had nothing to do with her. Then for a while she heard nothing.
Suddenly her father was standing over her. "Come on," he said, "the service is all over. You can come with us to the cemetery."
They had forgotten her. They had promised she could come down for the service, but they hadn't kept their promise. She was nine years old. The service had taken place in her own house. But they left her upstairs, with a fool lollipop as if she were a baby. She could not, would not forgive her parents.
On went her coat, on went her tam and plaid scarf. Down the stairs she went, past all those people, silent and motionless, on to the sidewalk. "You're to go in this car, Sybil," the minister said.
Inside the car were her uncle Roger and his wife, another Hattie, whom she didn't like. Her uncle and her father looked so much alike that the minister had put her with the "wrong" daddy. She was upset.
She was also disturbed because this was her grandmother, yet she was the one her father and mother, so busy with all those other people, overlooked or pushed around. It was unfair. The tears, ice cold, stayed within her. She never cried aloud.
The car had stopped. They were walking toward the Dorsett family plot on a road in a cemetery in the village of her grandfather's birth. He was the first white male to be born in the county.
Walking here, Sybil thought about death. Death, she had been told in church, was a beginning. She couldn't quite see that. Her grandmother had told her that someday Jesus would come to raise from the graves those who loved Him. Then, Grandma had said, she and Sybil would be together forever in the earth made new.
Uncle Roger and Aunt Hattie led Sybil to where the family was standing: mother and daddy, Aunt Clara and her husband, Anita and Ella (two years old), and, of course, grandpa. Together they stood some ten feet from her grandmother's grave, silent beneath an overcast Wisconsin sky. It was a cold, windy April day.
The gray metal casket, with banks of flowers over it, had been placed near the grave. The minister was standing beside it. "And I saw a new heaven," he began, "and a new earth ... and I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ... and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain. ... And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new."
Sybil saw not the metal casket, the flowers, or the people; what she saw was Mary, her Canadian grandmother married to a native of Willow Corners, living in .his town. An outsider to the people in his church, Mary had been forced to do his bidding. She loved to read, but he had stopped her with the injunction: "Anything but truth is false." Religious writings alone were true, he thought.
Sybil could see her grandmother in her long skirts, her hightop shoes, her white hair, her small blue eyes, her warm, sweet smile.
What Sybil heard were not the words of the minister but her grandmother's gentle voice saying, "It's all right, Hattie," when her mother had said, "Sybil, you mustn't bounce on grandma's bed."
Her grandmother's big bed was high and soft. Sybil bounced on it all she liked. Her grandmother would scoop her up, rock her and say, "Sybil, Sybil, Sybil." When she was with her grandmother, there was no hollering. Home, just downstairs, seemed miles and miles away--a memory to forget.
Sybil would show her grandmother her drawings, and her grandmother would say, "Wonderful," and hang them on the wall. Her grandmother had a big box by the window, and she had a lot of magazines and papers in it, with all the children's pages, which she saved just for Sybil. And she let Sybil draw pictures, and Sybil stayed inside all the lines, coloring neatly. Her grandmother liked what Sybil did.
Her grandmother let Sybil set the table and didn't say Sybil did it all wrong. If Sybil did do something wrong, her grandmother didn't get mad at her. Sybil could tell her lots of things, pleading, "You won't tell mother, will you?" Her grandmother would say, "I never tell Hattie anything that you tell me." And she didn't.
There were flowers in the woods where Sybil had walked with her grandmother to the river, but now the minister was saying, "For so much as it has pleased Almighty God to permit our sister, Mary Dorsett, to fall asleep, we do tenderly commit her body to the ground ..."
Asleep. Her grandmother was asleep. They would not again walk together to the river. Only the flowers would be there--the flowers all alone, without her grandmother and also without Sybil.
"... Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the hope of her joyful resurrection through Jesus Christ, Our Lord."
The wind howled over Sybil's father and her uncle Roger in silent grief, over her aunt Clara, wringing her hands and moaning hysterically, over these grown children bereft of
a mother. It howled over her grandfather's soft moan. Sybil alone, her throat constricting, her chest growing heavy, and her fingers becoming prickly and numb, was dry-eyed.
The wind was cold. The feeling was icy blue with brown specks. Anything that is cold is not love. Love is warm. Love is Grandma.
Love is being committed to the ground.
The glimmer of the metal casket in the streak of sun momentarily superseded the gray of the day. The casket was in the hands of the men who had come to do a terrible thing. They had lifted the casket and were beginning to lower it. Inch by inch, moment by moment, they were pushing her grandmother down deep, more deep into the earth. They were burying love.
Everyone was weeping now, but still Sybil's eyes were dry, dry as the barren world that stretched before her, a world in which nobody said, "Sybil, Sybil, Sybil," a world without anyone to listen when she tried to talk, a world without love.
Propelled by powerful feelings, galvanized into locomotion, Sybil found herself moving forward. It was one or two slow steps at first, but then there were more steps, faster steps toward the banks of flowers over the lowered casket. She was at the grave, her body poised to jump into it, to join her grandmother forever.
Then there was that hand grabbing her arm with a swift, sharp movement. The restraining hand was pulling her, dragging her away from the grave, away from her grandmother.
The wind howled. The sky grew dark. There was nothing.
That hand with its overwhelming force was still pulling her. Its pressure was deeply embedded in her flesh. Her arm ached with the soreness engendered by the sharp, jerky movement.
Sybil turned to see who it was who had so forcibly removed her from her grandmother. Was it her uncle Roger, her father? They were not there.
There was no grave. There were no banks of flowers. No wind. No sky. Daddy and Mother, Uncle Roger and Aunt Hattie, Aunt Clara and the rich old man she married, the minister, all those other people were not here.
Instead of a grave there was a desk. The banks of flowers were blackboards. Instead of a sky there was a ceiling. Instead of a minister there was a teacher.
The teacher, who talked quickly in short nervous sentences, was tall and thin. She wasn't Sybil's teacher. Miss Thurston, her teacher, spoke slowly and deliberately and was stout and of medium height. The third-grade teacher was Miss Thurston. This should be Miss Thurston, but it was Miss Henderson. Sybil knew Miss Henderson as the fifth-grade teacher. What has happened? Sybil wondered. It was no dream. The room, a regular classroom in the school she had attended since kindergarten, seemed normal between its four walls. Only it wasn't her classroom. The windows of the room faced the east, not the west, as they did in the third-grade classroom. She knew all the rooms in the school, and this, she knew, was the fifth-grade classroom.
Somehow she had gotten into this fifth-grade classroom. She had done something wrong, a terrible thing. She had to get out, had to get back to the third grade where she belonged, where Miss Thurston had probably marked her absent. She had to apologize to Miss Henderson for being here, had to explain to Miss Thurston for not being there. But what was the explanation?
Then she began to notice the other children. There was Betsy Bush across the aisle, Henry Von Hoffman in front of her, Stanley, and Stuart and Jim and Carolyn Schultz and all the rest. Well, she thought, the whole third grade is in here.
Most of these children had started with her in kindergarten, and she knew them well. They were the same children, yet they were not the same as when she had seen them last. They were dressed differently from when they were in the third grade. They looked bigger than they had been before she left for her grandmother's funeral. How could that be? How could all these children get bigger in a moment?
Betsy Bush, assured and confident as always, was waving her hand as usual to answer the teacher's question. She acted as if she belonged here. All the other children did, too. None of them seemed to think there was anything wrong about being here. Why should Betsy be answering questions when Miss Henderson was not her teacher?
Sybil's eyes turned next to the page of the notebook open on her desk. She thought of concentrating on the page and forgetting all the nonsense. But it could not be done, for the page made no sense to her, and in her present state of mind the notebook only induced more terror. There were lots of notes, but she hadn't taken them. There was completed homework, which she hadn't done, but she noted that the homework was consistently graded A. However urgently she forced herself to minimize the meaning of all this, the more terrified she became.
She tried hard to shut her eyes to this teacher who wasn't hers, to this classroom with the windows on the wrong side, these children, blown up beyond their normal size and dressed in strange clothes they hadn't worn before. It didn't work.
Sybil began to feel a strange compulsion to examine herself. were her clothes "different"? Was she bigger, too? Her eye descended to her own dress. It was of yellow voile with green and purple embroidery, as totally unfamiliar as those of the other children. She hadn't owned it, didn't remember her mother's buying it for her, hadn't worn it before, and hadn't put it on this morning. She was wearing a dress that didn't belong to her in a classroom in which she didn't belong.
Nobody seemed to think that anything unusual was happening. The third-grade children kept on answering questions about things she'd never studied with them. She didn't understand any of it.
She looked at the clock above the teacher's desk. It was two minutes to twelve. She would soon be saved by the bell. Waiting, she was overtaken by panic. Then the bell sounded, and she heard the teacher's high-pitched nervous voice saying, "Class dismissed."
Sybil decided to sit still. She was afraid to move, afraid to face going home. The children, however, made a mad dash to the coat hall, shouting, laughing. The boys, shoving with their elbows, pushed their way past the girls.
Sybil saw them leave, going quickly out of the coat hall. She was certain that they must have just grabbed their coats, helter-skelter, without any semblance of order. The way the children acted was very bewildering and frightening.
Tense before, she became even more tense as she watched them. Miss Thurston knew how to keep order, and this mad scramble could not have taken place in her class. Sybil had always heard, however, that Miss Henderson could not manage a class. Because of the way the children acted it suddenly seemed that this might be Miss Henderson's class after all.
Everything was running through her mind at such speed that she was unable to make any sense of it and to do the sensible thing: go home. When she looked up, the room was deserted. Certain that the other children had indeed gone, she rose slowly from her seat and walked even more slowly to the coat hall.
Inside the hall she realized that she wasn't alone. There was Miss Henderson putting on her coat. It was too late to turn away.
Except for being on the opposite side of the building this hall was exactly like the one in the third grade. All the classrooms and all the coat halls were alike. There was nothing unfamiliar about this one.
There was just one coat still hanging, a plaid mackinaw. She had never seen it before, but she went over and examined it. She looked for a name tape to find the name that belonged to the coat. Miss Thurston always had the children put their names on two pieces of tape, one for the coat, the other to be placed under a coat hook. There was no name either under the hook or in the coat. Miss Henderson was about to leave. "Sybil," she asked, "why don't you put your coat on? What's wrong? Aren't you going home for lunch?"
Instead of replying Sybil simply continued to stare at the unfamiliar coat, reflecting that it was not surprising that Miss Henderson knew her name. In the tiny town of Willow Corners everybody knew everybody else. Miss Henderson repeated: "Aren't you going home for lunch?" Then, with Miss Henderson's eye on her, Sybil finally put on the coat. It fitted her perfectly. Miss Henderson left, but Sybil lingered until she could be certain that the teacher was so far ahead that they wouldn't meet on
the stairs.
Sybil walked slowly out of the old red-brick school building. On the corner across the street was the big house with black shutters, her home. Before crossing the street she looked to see whether anyone was coming. Certain that nobody was looking, she crossed.
Top, waiting on the front steps, barked his welcome. She gave him a quick hug around the neck before hurrying into the house. She wanted to be inside among familiar things, eager to see this morning's confusion at school fade away at home.
In the small entrance hallway, however, her longing for normality was crushed. When she hung the plaid mackinaw in the hallway closet, none of the clothes she remembered was there. Unfamiliar reds, greens, and yellows leaped out at her. Turning abruptly from the closet, she started to go into the downstairs bedroom, where her grandmother and grandfather had lived during her grandmother's last illness. The extra door to the room was plastered up; it was strange that they had done this so quickly. In the living room she found some of her grandmother's furniture incorporated with theirs. How quickly they had rearranged things. And what was that on the breakfront? A radio! They had hesitated about buying a radio because her grandfather said that it was the work of the devil.
Mother called from the kitchen, "Is that you, Peggy? You're so late."
That nickname again. Her mother, who didn't like the name Sybil, had invented the name of Peggy Louisiana for her. When she was cute or funny, the way her mother liked her, her mother would call her Peggy Louisiana, Peggy Lou, Peggy Ann, or just Peggy. Evidently her mother liked her today.
Sybil Page 13