Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  Since that time—and that was a long time back—a man simply had not occurred. And gradually even the idea of a man has stopped occurring, so that without realizing it, without making any conscious decision, Sybill has put those things out of her busy, useful life as firmly as she sets out the trash on a Tuesday morning.

  Only sometimes there comes in even such a life as hers that kind of moment which comes to us all—a moment like a dark red leaf spiraling down through the summer air to land on the picnic blanket. So here’s Sybill, crying on the sofa in her tasteful condominium, having just offended her best friend Betty Long. Sybill, crying because suddenly there are big jagged holes in this life which has seemed to her now for so long like a roll of fabric over at Cloth World, floral print polyester perhaps, rolling on and on forever in a perfectly straight even path—

  Darkness is falling fast. Sybill stands up and presses her hot face against the cool glass of her sliding glass door and looks past her grill and the redwood railing of her deck, down into the pale blue glowing kidney-shaped pool below. Mr. Hollister is in there swimming laps, back and forth, as regular as a motorboat, leaving a regular wake. That young couple, the Martins, have put their baby in one of those round floats with a seat in the middle of it, in the shallow end by the steps. The Brown boys are swimming in the deep end with two other boys Sybill doesn’t know. She’ll have to speak to their parents, again. Some people will take advantage of you no matter how nice you are, abusing whatever privileges you care to offer . . . give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Momentarily, this thought cheers Sybill. But then she notices Marietta Billings, a divorced dancing instructor, over there in the darkness half hidden by a striped umbrella, not swimming at all of course, just sitting out in the heat with a man, probably a different man altogether from the one she had here this weekend. Sybill can’t see his face. Marietta is wearing white shorts, which seem to glow out in the night. Sybill sobs to herself. Across the pool lies Ed Bing’s apartment, #16A, and as Sybill watches from the darkness, she sees Ed Bing himself move past his lighted great-room door carrying—she thinks—a cup of coffee. Which pulls at her heart. A sweet man like that, fixing his own coffee, reading the paper alone . . . Sybill does not intend to tell anyone, not even Bob, what she did last week.

  While Ed Bing was out of town (in Richmond; he’d told her he was leaving and given her the number where he might be reached) Sybill went into his apartment, using her master key, and snooped around! She looked at everything: his disorganized pantry, his shelf of mystery novels, the photograph of his wife, the pictures of his only daughter and her three children, his plants (overwatered), his inadequate spice rack. Ed Bing turned out to be fairly tidy, for a man. She opened the top drawer of the chest in his bedroom and horrified herself by suddenly burying her face in the sweet dark little mounds of his rolled-up wool socks. Then she went careening into the bathroom—it was all so strange, the floor plan exactly like her own, yet so very different, like being in her own apartment, but dreaming—and for some reason the sight of the little hairs sprinkled all over the creamy porcelain bowl of the sink made her feel suddenly, terribly nauseous, so that she backed out of the bathroom and ran through his apartment and back to her own with the headache right behind her already, lights flashing at the corners of her eyes.

  Sybill, sliding open the door to her deck now and stepping out into the night, Sybill is so ashamed that she snooped in Ed Bing’s condominium. Maybe she would like—go ahead, admit it!—to have a date with Ed. There’s nothing wrong with that. To go to a movie, to have dinner (red wine, candlelight, a steak) at that new French restaurant out on the Williamson Road. She’d like to invite him in, after that, for a cocktail. But the very thought of him makes those lights start up, makes her massage her neck . . . Ed Bing gets up, disappears, reappears, then sits back down in the reclining chair in his great room. Ed is tall, thin, and large, and looks, Sybill thinks, like Gregory Peck. He probably got up to switch the channels on his TV. It’s nine o’clock; she wonders if he’s watching “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Below her, Mr. Hollister swims back and forth in the pale blue shining pool. The Brown boys yell and splash, and Marietta Billings, not caring a bit who sees her, kisses the man she’s with. Sybill gulps, leaning into the night, too old for any of this. She wonders what’s down there in her subconscious, if anything is; it’s probably just the Change of Life after all, it’s probably just her uterus exploding in all directions. She shakes her head. She looks up beyond the condominium complex to the sky beyond Mill Mountain, where stars appear. She’s having a total eclipse of the heart. Sybill goes in and gets a glass of Mateus and comes back out on her deck and sits down in the sticky hot night to drink it, and after a while, a little breeze comes up which might even be the fickle El Niño.

  * * *

  On her second visit to the hypnotist, Sybill sits rigid, gripping the arms of the wing chair. Bob smiles. Outside, through the glass door, it’s raining cats and dogs.

  “Relax,” Bob says. “It won’t work unless you relax.” Today he’s wearing a little black shirt outside his pants and looks somewhat more mysterious, more astrological. Betty would approve. Behind him, over Mill Mountain, lightning flashes.

  “Go ahead and start,” Sybill says.

  “Flex your fingers,” Bob says. “Rotate your whole hand, like this, around your wrist. Now rotate your whole arm, like this, first one arm and then the other. Go ahead, that’s good.”

  “Are you doing it?” Sybill asks. “Are you starting now?”

  But Bob smiles his sweet tired smile. “No, Sybill,” he says. “This is a relaxation technique. Now drop your head back, like this, and rotate your head. Now with your head still back, make chewing motions with your chin, like this.” Bob’s pink Adam’s apple wobbles above his black collar.

  Chewing motions! This is just the kind of thing she’s been afraid of. “Listen,” Sybill says. “Believe me, I’ll relax. You just go right ahead and do it, I’ll be fine.” Sybill feels a strong sense of urgency; just last night, in the parking lot, Ed Bing gave her a long quizzical look that she felt was almost a proposition. Or an invitation, that’s what she means. “Stop that chewing,” Sybill says irritably to Bob, who stops immediately while Sybill says how sorry she is to be rude.

  “An apology isn’t necessary,” he says. “Of course you feel a great deal of conflict and anxiety occasioned by what we propose to do here today. In one way, you want to let go, to give up your pain.” Sybill stiffens in her chair. “In another way, you feel intensely violated. You wish to maintain your control, your privacy. You may, of course, stop this at any time. Just because we make a decision doesn’t mean we can’t change our minds. Sometimes our decisions are the wrong ones.”

  “Just do it,” Sybill says.

  “Sybill—” Bob leans forward gently, one hand on each knee, while a soft swish of rain blows against the door. “I can’t just ‘do’ it, as you demand. I may not ‘do’ it at all. I’d like to chat a bit with you now, as a matter of fact, and then I may or may not feel that I want to try to induce a trance.”

  Sybill swallows. She woke up with a headache last night at three twenty-five, stayed awake until five thirty, slept until seven. “Shoot,” she says.

  “Well—” Bob leans back in his chair. “Why don’t you begin by telling me about your family? We mentioned this briefly at our last session.”

  “I don’t think that has a thing to do with any of this,” Sybill says.

  “Possibly not, possibly you’re entirely right there, but let’s just proceed for a moment along those lines.” Bob puts the tips of his fingers together, making a little tent. “Your parents,” he prompts her.

  “Well, my mother is a lady, I mean a real lady, in spite of this little town she’s lived in all her life, the town I’m from.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Booker Creek, it’s right outside of Marion. In the mountains, close to the
North Carolina line,” Sybill says. “Anyway, Mother always tried to give us culture and advantages all along. For instance, she writes poetry. She had a book published about twenty years ago, by the Colonial Press in Richmond.”

  “How old is your mother now?”

  “Seventy-five,” Sybill answers right away.

  “And she lives alone?”

  “Yes, well, of course she has some help but yes she does live alone, she’s lived alone for the last ten years. She’s so proud,” Sybill says. “It’s hard to do anything for her. And of course she runs everything in town.” Sybill smiles and Bob smiles, too.

  “Your father died ten years ago?”

  “Yes, well, it was nine years ago I guess, and it wasn’t my father actually, it was my stepfather, Verner Hess, who’s the only father I ever remember, as far as that goes.”

  “Aah. And what was he like?”

  “Oh, a sweet man, I guess. I mean everybody thought he was sweet, and I guess he was, he was a very popular man, but he wasn’t very strong, you know, not like she is. He never had strong opinions on things, or knew very much, or laid down the law to anybody, he left it all pretty much up to Mother except for the actual running of the dimestore. He liked to be in the store, up front talking to people. He just loved that. But he wouldn’t wear a sports coat, even in the winter, or if he did he took it off . . . He always wore a starched white shirt and bright blue suspenders, I guess you could say they were his trademark.” Sybill is very surprised at the way Verner Hess has appeared in her head as clear as a bell, wearing those tacky suspenders. She’s surprised by her warm rush of feeling. Sybill remembers herself at six, six or seven, snuggled down in a big box of pink cellophane straw in the basement of the dimestore while the “girls,” as Verner Hess referred to the women who worked for him, made Easter baskets. Easter baskets didn’t come prepackaged in those days. Sybill is really surprised to find herself with so much to say about Verner Hess since actually, throughout her youth, she thought of him as a source of mainly embarrassment, occasioned by what she perceived as his dullness, how ordinary he was, and how limited. When Sybill remembers Sunday dinners, for instance, Verner Hess seems about as important as the woodwork.

  “My mother is such a lady,” Sybill says. “Of course she’s sort of bossy, and I suppose some people don’t like her because of that, but you can’t help admiring her. It was really a mismatch,” Sybill says.

  “But a long marriage . . . ”

  “Oh yes, let’s see, it must have been thirty years. He worshiped the ground she walked on. So I suppose they were happy enough, as far as those things go. Of course, it wasn’t the Me Generation,” she adds tartly. “But I tell you, you’re looking up the wrong tree here, I have a perfectly ordinary family I think even if some of them are of course obnoxious and my mother married beneath herself.”

  The rain has slowed down to a pale gray drizzle out there in the garden, where roses droop.

  “Tell me about your real father,” Bob directs.

  “I don’t know why I said that,” Sybill says. “Calling Verner Hess my stepfather, I mean. Verner Hess was my father for all intents and purposes, and that’s that.”

  “Yet he was in fact your stepfather . . . ” Bob is like a cat, Sybill thinks suddenly, sneaking along a garden wall in the dark.

  “Just forget it,” she says. “I have these two aunts, you’d just die if you got a load of either one. I mean they’re so crazy you could get papers on them in one minute flat.”

  Bob makes the tent with his fingers, looking at her, and Sybill goes on. “Fay and Nettie, that’s them, and Mama hasn’t had a thing to do with either one for years and years. As you might imagine. Neither do I, of course, if I can help it. They live out at the One Stop on Route 460, in two rooms behind the store. Nettie runs the service station—she must be, let’s see, seventy by now. I can’t believe it! And Fay, that’s my other aunt, has never been right in the head. So she stays out there with Nettie. She used to live with Mother, years ago.”

  “And you mentioned, I think, a sister named Candy—”

  “That’s my next-youngest sister, Candy Snipes, who is a beautician by choice,” Sybill says. “She could have gone on to school the same as the rest of us, but oh no. Too busy dating the boys, just couldn’t be bothered with school. Ran away and got married. You can imagine how upsetting this was for Mother, for Candace to do it that way. Candy is just infantile, even now. That’s one reason I’m glad I live here, so I don’t have to see Candy all the time. If Candy takes after anybody, it’s Nettie. Certainly it’s not Mother, I have to say.”

  “And your other brothers and sisters?”

  “Well, there’s Arthur, he’s in his early forties now and pretty much of a mess himself, if the truth be told. He’s divorced. And then there’s Myrtle who married that nice dermatologist, Dr. Don Dotson, she’s certainly the best of the lot, even though we don’t always, of course, see eye to eye. But actually we get along fine.” Even though Myrtle has always had everything she wanted in this world and still does, without lifting a hand . . . “Then there’s Lacy who’s an intellectual. Lacy got all the brains from Mother, you might say, although she has never put them to any good use.” Imagine spending your parents’ money on years and years of graduate school and then just up and deciding you won’t even bother to write your dissertation! Imagine that! “Arthur still lives in Booker Creek. So does Candy of course and Myrtle. Lacy lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She’s kind of an egghead, as I said. You know what I mean.”

  Bob grins. “Who’s the youngest?”

  “Lacy. And she’s real pretty, too, or she would be if she kept herself up. They wear anything in Chapel Hill.” Sybill squares her shoulders, in her off-white, linen-looking suit. You dress up to visit a doctor, that’s one of the things her mother always taught her, just like you wear clean underwear every day and wash out a tub the minute you’re through, and keep an open box of baking soda on the refrigerator shelf at all times, to absorb odors. Sybill is proud to be her mother’s only responsible child—to be, in some ways, her mother’s only child. Talking to Bob is fun, but this is Sybill’s money down the drain. Suddenly, she’s tired of fooling around. “Let’s go for it,” Sybill says.

  “As I count to five,” Bob begins, and Sybill is thrilled, really thrilled, he’s finally doing it, she wishes Betty could be here, too—“As I count to five, slowly, you will fall into a deep, deep sleep. While you are asleep, you will have a dream which concerns your headaches. You will dream about that time in your life which is most closely associated with your headaches, that time which you cannot remember now. You will remember that time, and you will dream about it, and when you wake up, you will tell me your dream.”

  It won’t work. Then Sybill wonders, in a moment of pure idle pain, why none of them—her brother and sisters—ever liked her. But of course that’s foolishness, of course they liked her, they like her now, and look how things have turned out, anyway, most of them living such messy lives! The way yours will be if you take up with Edward Bing. Suddenly Sybill remembers the rush of cold air the day she threw up her office window, saved from love by the abrupt departure of Joe Ross Miller. She remembers how the cool air tingled on her face. It won’t work.

  “One, ” Bob says. He clears his throat modestly, apologetically. “You feel as if you have weights on your eyes, your eyelids are so heavy, your eyes are closing now of their own accord. Two. You are growing very, very sleepy. Your feet feel heavy, very heavy. It’s time to let them go, relax and just let them go, let your legs go now, that’s right, and your arms, Sybill, you’re letting go, letting go, letting go. Three. You are asleep now. You are soundly, soundly asleep. Four. You feel yourself beginning to dream, to slip into the dream, to . . . ”

  * * *

  “Five. You are almost fully awake now. You stretch, you yawn, you are waking up now. Your eyes will open when you are ready.
” Sybill knows the voice, that’s Bob, but she can’t really hear him because of the awful, awful pain in her head, just like somebody’s taking an ax and chopping straight into her brain, it’s so bad she can’t even speak, she simply can’t say a thing. From a long way away, she hears Bob’s slow smooth voice . . . “your headache. You will not have this headache. You will go back to sleep now, now as I count one . . . ” Sybill thinks she hears the rain outside; she sleeps.

  Later, waking up, she’s surprised to find she’s so tired. Lord! is she ever tired, so tired it’s all she can do to hold herself up in this chair. Sybill looks at her watch and it’s four fifteen—three hours she’s been here, doing what? Sleeping. A waste of time. A waste of money. Sybill wonders if he’ll charge her by the hour, or just make up a flat rate for the day. She won’t pay seventy-five dollars, that’s all there is to it. It wasn’t her fault she slept so long.

  “Okay,” Sybill says. Her own voice sounds funny, ringing in her ears. And outside it’s still raining; it seems it’s been raining for years. Sybill envisions huge modern houses sliding down cliffs into the ocean. But this isn’t California, or Nevada, or even Utah.

  “Tell me about your dream,” Bob says. His black shirt is all crumpled; it looks like construction paper as he leans forward in his chair.

  “In the dream I was real little,” Sybill begins in a voice which is not her own, or at least it’s a voice which she doesn’t have anymore, that mountain twang she has so carefully gotten rid of. “I’m real little and I wake up in the night. I call for Mama but she don’t come. I called and called for Mama but she didn’t come, and it was thundering, and the thunder came into my window. The lightning came into my window too. I saw the lightning come into my window and it flashed in the mirror too, the one over the dresser, I could see everything then, Molly and the pillow too and my new silver brush-and-comb set, and the ruffle around the dresser. Fay made that.”