Sybil (18 page)

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The glimmer of the metal casket in the streak of sun momentarily superseded the gray of the day.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.

The kitchen, Sybil noted with alarm, was light green. It had been white when last she had seen it. "I liked the white kitchen," Sybil said.

Replied her mother, "We went through that last year."

Last year? Sybil wondered.

Her father was in the sunroom, reading an architecture magazine while waiting for lunch. Sybil went in to speak to him. Her playroom was in the sunroom, and she kept her dolls in the window seat. The dolls were there, as they had always been, but there were more of them. Where did that big, beautiful, blonde-haired doll with the bright face and shining teeth come from? It wasn't hers.

Her father looked up from his magazine. "Sybil," he said, as he noticed her for the first time, "aren't you late?"

"Daddy," she blurted, "what doll is that, the great big one?"

"Are you playing games?" he replied. "That's Nancy Jean. You won her in a contest. You were so excited about it."

Sybil said nothing.

At the dining room table there were four place settings instead of three. What was the fourth one doing there? There didn't seem to be any company. This time, however, she was not going to ask any questions. She had been too embarrassed by the doll, Nancy Jean.

There was the thumping of a wooden leg, the familiar thump that had always brought her visits with her grandmother to an end, the thump, thump, that had always frightened her. It was her grandfather, all six feet of him, with his goatee and his bald head. What was he doing here? Why did he sit at their table? The grandparents' living quarters, whether they were living upstairs or downstairs, were always separate from theirs. Each family ate by itself and did not enter the other's sphere. That was her grandmother's rule. But her grandmother was dead. Newly dead and already the rule was broken.

Her father said grace. Her mother passed the food. The fried potatoes were passed around twice. There were some left. Her father took the dish and said to his father, "Dad, here are some more potatoes."

Her mother said pointedly, "It went around twice."

"He'll hear you," said her father with a pained expression.

"He'll hear you," her mother mimicked. "He won't hear you. He's deaf, deaf, and you know it."

In fact, her grandfather hadn't heard. He continued talking awfully loudly, the same old talk about Armageddon, one of the last battles that was to take place on earth before the end of time. He was talking of Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. He talked of the seven last plagues, the war that was coming with China, and how the United States would join Russia against China. He talked of how the Catholics would come into power, how some terrible day there would be a Catholic president.

"There could never be a Catholic president," said Hattie.

"Mark my words," Sybil's grandfather said, "it will come to pass. Those Romans will rule the world if we're not careful. Those Romans, they will bring us trouble without end until the end of the world!"

Her mother changed the subject. "Willard," she said, "I had a letter from Anita today."

"What does she write?" her father asked. Then turning to Sybil he remarked, "I'll never forget how wonderful you were about taking Anita's little Ella off our hands those few weeks after grandma's funeral when they were staying here."