Writing The Women and Girls of Sybelia Drive

The Women and Girls of Sybelia Drive

by Karin Cecile Davidson

There is the beginning, the occasion for writing the first words, the passages in which two young girls awake to “the sound of wreckage, of breaking glass. The sharp, close shattering of glass on a hard surface.” Let’s start with those girls. Florida girls of the 1960s and 70s. LuLu—forever curious, feisty, angry, stirring things up. Rainey—shy, careful, bitter, navigating her way. Both lose fathers to Vietnam, LuLu temporarily, but also in how profoundly changed her father is upon returning home, and Rainey permanently, as her father goes missing on a mission and is never found. But it isn’t fathers, brothers, or boyfriends who decide the novel’s course: it is the girls and the women. 

Awash with viewpoints, for in times of war, even on the home front, a multitude of voices rises up, in cries, in clamor, in the act of breaking glass, and the novel decides its direction. Mothers make things happen here: Minnie, Lillian, Eva. Even in her ambivalent recklessness, LuLu’s mother Minnie will decide a course of action, forcing events and then slowly reeling them in, righting them into her own version of how life should proceed, her Marine Corps husband and her children forsaken and eventually gathered together again.

Lillian will never forgive the men in her life, bound to their oaths of honor, but will find moments of reverie in vials of Miltown, in a thousand shards across her carport, and in long, slow midnight swims across Lake Sybelia. And Eva, impossible Eva, will examine desperation from every angle, her Army husband MIA, her daughter Rainey growing up in another household, her eyes on the prize.

Esther, the elementary school principal, will keep her eyes on the children; Vita will press embroidered handkerchiefs and extra bottles of Barolo into the hands of the military wives who frequent her little grocery; and Hélène will stare through her slow-moving dementia at the girls running through the citrus grove, remembering her own girlhood and a version of love. The women’s desires will guide the narrative into round, unexpected places, and they will create an urgency to imagine the world beyond the pages, for women then, for women now. 

When An imagines touching her toe to the floor just as the sun rises, in defiance of the rule that on the first day of the new year a father or a brother must be the first to touch a foot to the ground, she imagines another kind of world. One in which the war in Vietnam, the American War, never happens, that all is promise and possibility, life flying forward, with sweets on the tongue and laughter and the song of the green-winged pigeon.

But the beginning has to do with wreckage, for that is what war does. Along the tree-lined curves of Sybelia Drive, neighbors will gather in disbelief. And in the center of this moment, Lillian Walbright, the druggist’s wife, will stand alone, “her shoulders rounded and shaking, a pale pink remnant of china held limply in one hand.” Rainey and LuLu will be there, too, witnesses. “A pathway lined with thick green ferns [will lead] from the front door of the Walbrights’ modern, multi-windowed house to the carport. A sea-green Impala … parked there, surrounded by scattered shards of broken glass. Bits that seem cruel, amazingly sharp, and others oddly curved in an almost inviting way.”

Here is the moment when we turn a corner to realize how much farther this story can go, how much higher these girls and women might reach. The novel spans the ten years between 1967 and 1977, when the war in Vietnam is determined in part by Lyndon B. Johnson stepping aside and Richard M. Nixon becoming President. One might surmise then that there are limits to what these characters might reach, but while they may not be invested in the women’s movement, they make strides in their own discrete ways. Their lives have been irreversibly altered, pinned between past and present and forced toward a future that has already been decided by the past.

As Rebecca Solnit states in Hope in the Dark: “We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room … for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that … produces that forward-directed energy called hope.”  

In this way, and in this kind of telling, despite their small-town, southern lives, the women of Sybelia Drive evolve, and their lives broaden into a mosaic of what much of America at that time looked like. There is hope here, twisted into every conversation, every gesture, and every act. In floods of sunlight, under the shade of lemon trees, from the far end of a long wooden dock, they look out at how life has changed, the glimmer of hope, of expectation, in their glance. And still, they remain Florida daughters and mothers who will invite you for a swim, or to help bake a pie piled high with meringue, or to simply wave from the porch at the world wandering by.

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Karin Cecile Davidson is originally from the Gulf Coast. Her stories have appeared in Story Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Five Points, Colorado Review, The Los Angeles Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. Her awards include a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a 2018 Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, a 2015 Studios of Key West Artist Residency, a 2014 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a 2012 Orlando Prize for Short Fiction, the 2012 Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, and a 2012 Peter Taylor Fellowship.

Her fiction has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net, as well as shortlisted for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, the Nelligan Prize, the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, and the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition, among others. She has an MFA from Lesley University and is an Interviews Editor for Newfound Journal. Her writing can be found at karinceciledavidson.com.

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