Room Upstairs (20 page)

Whisky, that was the thing. Dot liked her glass - well, don't we all? She poured a stiff shot of bourbon, made a new pencil mark on the bottle, and climbed upstairs to Emerson's door.

‘May I come in?'

A groan.

Sybil opened the door cautiously. Dorothy was still on the bed. Her face was green and blue, like Danish cheese, and she was groaning faintly with each expiration.

‘Here's for what ails you!' Sybil said brightly, fancying herself as a bustling nurse-figure. She would have to look out her old sneakers.‘This will hit the spot.'

That was what Dorothy said when she gave Sybil fearsome concoctions like the sour wine and willow leaves. But this was the best bourbon. Old Somebody-or-other - Grandpa, Uncle, Cousin - they gave them these names.

‘Drink up Sybil Sybil,' the bird said when he saw her hold out the glass.

‘No, this is for your mother,' Sybil told him.

Dorothy shook her head feebly. ‘I can't move my arms.'

‘You're just weak. Here, Sybil will help you. Trust old Syb. You can depend on good old Sybilla. You can be sure if it's Westinghouse.' Keep cheerful, that was it. She put down the glass, and with a superhuman effort, pulled Dorothy forward a little and propped the pillows behind her.

‘No—' she protested, as Sybil picked up the glass again, but Sybil said: ‘Naughty, naughty,' and as an afterthought picked up a few of the mud coloured cough pills from the open box and popped them into Dorothy's mouth before she poured in a drench of whisky that made Dorothy gasp and
choke and retch. But she swallowed, her eyes streaming, and Sybil forced in another pill for good measure, and another swallow of liquor to wash it down, and left her.

It was a pity that Dorothy had vomited so much. All that good bourbon. When Sybil came back later, she looked as if she were in some kind of a fit, putting it on most likely, to get attention. There was too much mess to clean up, so Sybil put sheets of newspaper down over the worst places in Marma's hooked rug, and got a clean sheet from the linen closet and spread that over the rigid body, which seemed to be locked in some kind of conflict with itself.

A doctor? The thought of Montgomery flitted through her mind, his long bony limbs spreadeagled on some faraway tropic beach. But Dorothy would never see him, even if he flew straight to her in his swimming trunks. She would not let any doctor into her room. Even old Matson with his mumbling and grumbling and his: ‘That gall-bladder should have come out years ago.'

Sybil stayed upstairs and turned out her handkerchief drawer and her purse drawer, so as to be nearby in case she was needed. But she might as well be dead as far as Dorothy was concerned. There was no sound from the room, and when Sybil went back in there late that afternoon - how bold she was getting, popping in and out just as if it were any room in the house! - Dorothy seemed to be asleep. You could not hear her breathing. The mound of sheet that was her bosom did not seem to move at all, and although her eyes were open, they stared blankly when Sybil stood before her in the failing light.

Sybil put out a finger and touched her cheek. It was clammy like a toad. She went into Dorothy's old bedroom over the side porch to fetch a blanket, forgot what she had gone for, and became interested in the fat chestnut buds unfolding just outside the window.

When she went back eventually with the Mexican blanket that Theo had brought back from somewhere or other -Mexico? - Dorothy did not wake when she laid it tenderly over her. Sybil switched on the light, and Roger began to chirp and mutter, as he always did when a room was lit up.
Still no news from Emerson's bed. It was then that Sybil picked up the family photograph, knocking a jar of face cream to the floor, and knew that Dorothy was dead, because she just lay there and did not say a word.

*

In the days that followed these strange events, Sybil veered between being lucid and quite confused.

When she was confused, she could not remember what had happened to Dorothy. She expected to see her in every room she went into, stirring gravy, bending hippily to lay the fire, polishing a table with a hand fat and purple from the pressure she put into it. When she went into the front room upstairs to feed Roger, or to kneel at the window in a luxury of hate for the cars, it was quite a surprise to find Dorothy still there on the bed, looking a little worse each day and smelling, let's face it, Dot, terrible.

When her head was clear, she knew quite well that Dorothy was dead. But there it was. Nothing could be done. Inscrutable are Thy purposes, Lord.

The morning after she shed, Anna Romiza arrived and found Sybil in the kitchen brewing a cup of instant tea, which she had always pretended to Dorothy was an offence against the traditions of her English ancestry, but which she really rather liked.

‘Where Miz Grue then?' Anna's broad, dark-fleshed face with the magenta mouth spread all over the bottom of it was a comfort to see. Sybil realized that she had been very much alone for hours. Had she been to bed? She could not remember. Her skirt looked somewhat wrinkled. She might well have slept in it.

She was on the point of telling Anna that Dorothy was dead, for Anna would know what to do, since she spent as much time visiting people in funeral homes as other women spend having coffee with the neighbours, when she was arrested by an extremely clear vision, like a sign from heaven, of that flat old lady with the rails around her bed as if she were a wild beast.

With Dorothy dead, that's where Sybil would go. They had
taken her there to show her what would happen if she did not behave. They had taken her there to try and trap her into being crazy enough to be locked up for good.

‘She's sick, Anna,' she said casually. ‘She'll have to stay in bed for a while.'

‘That's too bad.' Anna started for the stairs. ‘I'll go up and see if there's anything she wants.'

‘Oh no.' Sybil jumped up with an agility that surprised herself, and put a hand on Anna's muscular arm. ‘She doesn't want to be disturbed. She told me. I don't believe you'd better go upstairs at all, Anna. We can let the cleaning go up there just for now.'

‘You're the boss.' Anna said cheerfully. She did not like hauling the bulky old vacuum cleaner upstairs any better than she liked the idea of waiting on Dorothy.

‘Sybil Sybil Sybil.'

As she opened the door of Emerson's room, she half expected to see Dorothy sitting up in bed, demanding bran flakes and rose-hip syrup, but it was Roger, carrying on like a madman in his cage, with a stream of incoherent comment about Roger Grue and double double toil and trouble, which was what Dorothy always said when she stirred decoctions on Priscilla.

‘What's the matter with you?' Sybil asked him crossly, for he had startled her, which everyone knew was not good for her. ‘Do you want to go out?'

The bedroom window was shut. Dorothy had never thought much of the night air. Feeling clever, Sybil bent to check that the damper was across the chimney, and then opened the door of the bird cage.

Roger flew to the top of one of the bare posts at the head of the bed and stayed there. He stayed there all day, clutching its rounded top with curved claws, while Dorothy lay silent below, and Sybil fancied that her hair was growing, for when she lit the bedside lamp, she thought she could see more white coming in at the roots.

Anna had made lunch for her, and had left her something to heat up in the oven for her supper.

‘What about Miz Grue?' she asked before she left. She
despised Dorothy, but she was not going to see the poor woman starve to death.

‘I'm taking her up some soup.' Sybil took a can at random from the cupboard, opened it, and began to heat it on the stove.

‘You better dilute it with water,' Anna said, watching her narrowly.

‘Of course, ha ha, how silly of me.' Sybil took the saucepan to the tap and splashed in what she guessed was the right amount, for she had thrown the can away.'

‘You sure you going to be OK?' Anna was still standing by the door in her mauve coat and her shoes, her working slippers in her hand.

‘Of course. Don't fuss.'

‘I'll come by tomorrow.'

‘It's not your day.'

‘Every day going to be my day till that woman gets up to take care of you.'

So Anna came every day, and cooked for Sybil and did the marketing, and brought in what little mail there was. A letter from Jess. ‘My mother sends her best wishes. They are saving money to come over to the States for a visit.'

Well, I don't want them.

A postcard from Laurie, with a picture of a hotel like a jail. He had gone to Florida with a friend.

A letter from Montgomery, but Sybil could not read his handwriting.

A few bills, which she put on a spike for Laurie.

When she realized, because of the bills, that it must be the end of the month, she wrote out Dorothy's cheque and put it in an envelope, stamped it and gave it to Anna to mail on her way home.

Anna brought it back the next day without comment from Sybil's box at the post office, and Sybil took it upstairs and laid it on Dorothy's dressing table.

‘Sybil Sybil Sybil.' That was about all the bird would say these days, he was not much use as company. He stayed in Emerson's room most of the time, but if Sybil left the door open to air the place out a bit after Anna had gone home, he
would fly out and perch on the banisters to call to Sybil if she was downstairs.

‘What is it?' she would call back. But he would never say. One morning, he called so loudly from a picture frame in the hall that the milkman heard him.

‘Her ladyship wants you.' He winked, brown and handsome from his surfing holiday. The milkman had not liked Dorothy since she told him that his orange juice curdled even quicker than his milk. She was like that with the tradespeople. Always too sharp. Alienating local friends whom Sybil had known since they were tiny bullet-headed boys dressed up in sheets, mewing at her door for Halloween candy.

‘Sybil,' Roger said again, and coughed.

‘How is she?' the milkman asked, not even simulating concern.

‘A little better, thank you. I'm keeping her vary quiet.' She shut she door almost in his charming face, for if Dorothy was calling her, she had to get up there double quick, dot and carry orno.'

Some days she grew confused between Roger and Dorothy. Some days she knew it was Dorothy on the bed and Roger on the bedpost. Some days she talked to Dorothy for long spells at a time, and it seemed that Dorothy answered in her head. Is that so? she said, and: You've told me that anecdote before, lady. How about putting on another record?

Some days it seemed that Dorothy was there, her presence everywhere in the house, with a chance of meeting her around evary corner. Some days it seemed that she was gone for good, and Sybil would rove freely through the house, calling out dreadful things about her, and sticking out her tongue at the snapshot of Dorothy in her high red boots in the snow, which curled in the frame of the sitting room mirror.

She spent quite a lot of time in Emerson's room, pottering, fiddling, looking at everything Dorothy had. What a pretty pocket book! She took it off to her own room, gay bouquets of flowers on a little basket, and put it on her purse shelf, where it looked surprisingly at home. Why shouldn't it? It was her pocket book that Jess bought for her at Bonwits last summer.

She found her nail scissors with the stork blades in a drawer with a mess of old lipsticks and cracking rouge. She found her reading glasses on the closet shelf, wrapped in pink face tissue.

Sometimes, Dot, you carry a joke too far. She wrinkled her nose. If she could have caught Roger and put him back in his cage, she would have opened the window, but he had been free since she let him out.

It was a good thing Dorothy had lost her sense of smell, Sybil thought dottily, shutting Emerson's door and going downstairs with her head feeling light as a dandelion ball, or she could never have lived with it.

*

On one of her meanderings through the house, enjoying her freedom, still half expecting to hear: ‘What are you up to now - you'll trip and fall again,' Sybil wandered into Ted's room and saw Bella's dummy, naked and headless, pushed carelessly among the litter of picnic baskets and dusty dress boxes at the end of the narrow room.

Poor Marma. There's not much respect for the dead.

Sybil stood the dummy upright. The waist was quaintly small, but the bosom was noble and dominating. It looked a bit like old Dot, to tell the truth. How would it look in that navy dress with all the gilt buttons running down the front like a Guardee?

Dorothy liked dressing up. Here was something she could enjoy, bad shape as she was in. Puffing and uttering the small oaths that came quite often to her lips now that there was nobody to hear, Sybil got hold of the dummy by the neck and dragged it through to the other part of the house, its wooden stand bumping and scraping on the uneven floorboards.

She took it into Emerson's room and stood it in the hollow in the middle of the floor, and dressed it up in Dorothy's new outfit, with two towels stuffed in the front to take up the slack. Headless, it did not look much. What was it Dorothy had done in the days when she was trying to frighten Sybil to death?

Dorothy's Easter bonnet was in a box on a high shelf. Sybil
knocked it down, bringing with it a pile of shoe boxes and a beach hat that said Cape Cod, Mass. The Easter hat was a flowerpot in full bloom. Ridiculously young, Sybil had thought at the time, but Dorothy was headstrong about hats, making that dead set face in the mirror at the store that made the hat look even less suitable than it was.

It nested in tissue paper. Sybil wadded that up and balanced it on the dummy's wooden neck, with the flowerpot hat on top.

‘There you are Dot,' she said, either to the dummy or the body, it did not matter which, ‘in all your glory. I do try to please you, you see. Never say I don't try to do anything to please you.'