Black Mountain Breakdown (30 page)

Roger slips it on her finger. “I bought this two weeks ago in Washington. It just kind of reminded me of you,” he says.

They cling together in shadow now. Roger snaps on a light, and Crystal looks at the ring. “It’s so beautiful,” she says.

Roger kisses her hard and Crystal says, wanting him, “Oh, just come on, Roger. Come on now. Nobody will ever know.”

“
No
,” Roger says. “I think I can wrap it up in a week, OK? I’ll let you know.” He kisses Crystal again and puts on his hat and leaves by the screen-porch door.

Crystal goes into the bathroom and turns on the light. She looks at herself in the mirror: messy hair, no makeup, filthy wrinkled dress. The
femme fatale.
She holds up her hand, and the ruby flashes red in the mirror, red as blood in the mirror, holding secrets. But what about her classes? Darryl Whiteside has done better this year than he ever has before. Ellen Livingston just wrote a sonnet for her, last week. But of course they can find somebody else to take
over her classes. It won’t be hard at all to find somebody else. Roger is inevitable. He has always been inevitable, but she hasn’t always known it. She washes her face, plucks her eyebrows, brushes her hair until her scalp is tingling. The idea of Roger slides all over like body lotion, covering her, working in. It’s so comforting, really, to have somebody again to tell her what to do. She goes through all the clothes in her closet, deciding what to leave and what to take. She goes through all her shoes. She does her nails. Then she turns out the light and lies down on her bed and cries and cries as if her heart might break.

THE FIRST AGNES
hears about it is in the Rexall, where she is having her lunch, when Brenda Looney comes bursting in at the door. Brenda Looney, a teller at the Levisa Bank and Trust, sees everybody and knows what’s going on all over town. She wears these harlequin glasses. Agnes has never cared for her and she never stands in Brenda’s line when she goes to make deposits at the bank. But here comes Brenda, slamming into the Rexall on her break, can’t wait to tell it.

“Did you hear about Roger Lee? Roger Lee Combs?” she asks, talking to Mrs. Ritten, who works at the cosmetics counter and is a big friend of hers, but her shrill voice carries all over the store. “
Well
,” she goes on, and although two counters are in between Agnes and Brenda Looney, Agnes can imagine how she looks, how she would draw up her mouth, “Roger Lee Combs and Crystal Spangler have
run off!
Eloped! They say he left a note for his wife.”

“Why, Lord, they can’t elope!” Mrs. Ritten cries. “He’s married! You can’t elope if you’re married.”

“Well, run off, then,” Brenda Looney says in her loud voice. “It’s the gospel and I’ll swear it.”

“Oh, and those poor little twin girls!” cries Mrs. Ritten. “That’s just awful! I can’t imagine Roger doing a thing like that. He’s just too nice of a person. Or Crystal Spangler either one, to tell you the truth. I’d gotten real fond of Crystal.”

“Well, that’s what they did all right,” Brenda Looney says. “I didn’t know if you’d heard it or not.”

“That beats everything,” Mrs. Ritten says.

“What does?” asks old Mrs. Tyler Rockbridge, coming up, and they tell her and they tell everybody who comes their way. They say that Judy Bond Combs is under heavy sedation and her mother is being flown in on a private plane which Roger Lee is paying for.

But you can be sure that everybody shuts up pretty quick when Agnes gets up out of her booth and goes over to the cash register. They forgot Agnes was in there. Agnes takes her time, too.

“I want two packs of Dentyne,” she says, “and put it on the bill, please, Sue.” Agnes doesn’t have to tell Sue what she had for lunch. She always has the same thing, a tuna salad and a Coke and a small bag of barbeque potato chips. Agnes takes her time leaving—somebody connected to the Spanglers has to show some dignity, after all—and you could hear a pin drop. On her way past the cosmetics counter, Agnes sees the Coppertone ad up over the lotions, that
little girl with her hair in pigtails and a dark tan. Agnes could just cry about Roger Lee’s poor little twin girls.

Of course, as she reminds herself so many times later, it wouldn’t have done any good. Roger Lee has a lot of money by that time, and he gives Judy Bond the most alimony anybody every heard of. Judy builds herself a new Cape Cod house in Richlands and then marries Dr. John Wheeler two months after the divorce goes through. Dr. John Wheeler is a gynecologist at the Clinch Valley Clinic in Richlands. Crystal and Roger Lee come back from Florida and move fifty miles over to Bluefield where Roger Lee has some mines anyway, and they just lay low for a while. Nobody in Black Rock says a word about them, at least not to Agnes. It’s exactly like they have both fallen into one of Roger Lee’s mines. They get married eventually, of course—Roger Lee wouldn’t live with anybody without marrying them, Agnes reflects, he was always too nice for that—and about a year after this, all of a sudden Crystal comes out of retirement. Lorene and Odell have kept in touch with Crystal anyway, going over there to visit, and for all Agnes knows, Sykes and Bunny and Neva and anybody else might have been over there, too. Agnes herself hasn’t been invited. Of course, it isn’t any of Agnes’s business and she isn’t about to ask. Besides, every time she thinks about Crystal Spangler, it makes her want to either cry or else throw up.

But then Crystal comes out of retirement, so to speak, and everybody in Black Rock sees what she’s up to. The first thing Agnes knows, Crystal is all over the
Southwest Virginia Messenger
, smiling out of the society page every Sunday like she deserves to. Mr. and Mrs. Roger Lee Combs
return from Jamaica! Mrs. Roger Lee Combs has an intimate luncheon! Mrs. Roger Lee Combs heads the Heart Fund! That one really cracks Agnes up. She shows it to her mama, who says, “Well, I think that’s real nice.” Another day her mama says, “Well, they always were
in love
,” right in the middle of nothing, but Agnes knows exactly who she’s talking about. Her mama thinks it is romantic.

AND LORENE IS
beside herself. As she tells Odell one night after supper, while they are cleaning up the dishes, it makes her feel really good to know how things will work out for the best in the end. She takes her rose-flowered plates up out of the soapy water one by one and runs hot water over them, putting them in a wet straight glistening line in the plastic drainer, and it seems to her right then that her whole life has gotten to be that way, as clean and orderly as those hot round dripping plates.

“Things work out for the best in the end, huh?” Odell says, goosing her, but she slaps his hand away from her hip.

“No, I mean it,” she says. “I’m serious.” She wrings out the dishrag and lets the water out of the sink.

“I’m serious, too.” Odell is behind her, reaching around her waist to grab at a breast. Odell smells like onions and Marlboros and work, a hot male smell, breathing right into her neck.

“
Honey
,” she says, stepping sideways away from his hand to wipe off the counter top, “listen to me a minute. You know what I mean. You know how it used to be around here. I guess you get the bitter with the sweet, as they say,
but that’s all we got for a while and you know it. And now look! I never thought Sykes would amount to a hill of beans, for instance. Nobody else thought he would, either. And I never could tell what Crystal was going to do next. You know how she changed. But I guess it’s all over with now. That’s what I’m saying. I used to tell myself, ‘Now, Lorene, all you can do is keep on doing,’ and that was true, of course, but you still don’t know how it’ll all come out. You never know a thing about something when you’re in the middle of it, and that’s the Lord’s truth. But just look at Crystal now!” Lorene takes off her apron and rubs cold cream into her hands. “Look at Sykes!”

“Don’t look at Jules,” Odell says, grinning at her. He likes to get a rise out of Lorene now and then. She slaps him—playfully, he thinks, with her sweet-smelling cold-cream hand, but then she slaps him again.

“Whoa there.” Odell grabs both her hands. “I’m just kidding you. I swear. Why, Jules is all right. He just turned out different from what you thought, not a thing in the world you can do about it. He’s probably just as happy as he can be, out there in L.A.”

“You reckon?” Lorene perks up.

“Sure,” Odell says. “Why, California is the best place in the world for Jules.”

“I guess so,” Lorene agrees. “Anyway, he’s got a good job.”

“See what I’m telling you?” Odell grins and Lorene smiles back and shuts up about it. Odell squeezes her hand and then goes on into the front room to watch TV, her own man, now so big he fills up the whole door when he goes
through. What she ought to do is put Odell on a diet, and put herself on it, too. Lorene thinks she’ll start the diet on Monday, after she makes that German chocolate cake she bought all the ingredients for today. Odell just loves German chocolate cake. But he’s right, about Jules: let sleeping dogs lie, leave well enough alone. Still, he can’t have any idea of what it’s like to bear a child, wash his clothes and feed him and tend to him for sixteen years— Lorene remembers turning on the shower, hot, and standing in there with Jules screaming, when he was little and he had those asthma attacks—doing all of that, and then have him just disappear from the face of the earth. Because California might as well be the moon, as far as Lorene is concerned. Oh, it happens all the time and she knows it; it’s not all that unusual. Look at poor old Belle Varney: one of her boys, Horn, killed in Vietnam, Daris off working on the Alaska pipeline, Belle getting old all alone in that house down the road, not even bothering to grow tomatoes anymore. Plus she and Odell have a big time, they’ve still got their health, knock on wood, and three normal grandchildren to boot. I better count my blessings, Lorene thinks, and stop standing here in the middle of the kitchen like a fool. Odell laughs out loud and Lorene smooths her hair and then heads for the front room, where she will sit on the couch with him and watch Carol Burnett.

WHEN CRYSTAL COMES
over for a visit that summer, this is all Agnes hears from Lorene and her mama and everybody else in town for two weeks running: how attractive Crystal is, how
Crystal hasn’t aged a day, how she has a diamond wedding band that will knock your eyes out. Agnes is down at the hardware store and misses the big visit herself, and even though Crystal calls her up from Lorene’s she’s just too busy to come to the phone. Then Roger Lee enters the Democratic primary for congress and, further,
wins
it, so Mrs. Roger Lee Combs has her picture on the
front
page of the Bluefield paper, just like she’s Jackie Kennedy or Betty Ford. And even Agnes has to admit she looks good.

CRYSTAL SITS IN
the white quilted armchair in her living room and watches the caterers swarm through the dining room and the kitchen like so many bees. One of them seems to be singing in Spanish and she likes this, likes the way the sound comes out foreign and strange from her own kitchen, out past the rest of them setting things on the dining-room table, out into the living room itself, where it is finally lost in the high ceilings and turning motes of dust in the last of the sun which comes in across the Oriental carpets from all the windows. The caterer’s song rings high and sweet, barely audible, just like a song in her mind. Maybe it is. She really ought to go get dressed. The living room is spotless: Mary came today and brought her little cousin to help her clean for the party, a tiny black teenage girl who turned out to be, of all things, hugely pregnant, so that Crystal had to resist the urge to
help
her, all day. (“Baby,” Roger would have said, she can hear him saying it right now, “remember who the help is.”) So she did not. Now Crystal fluffs up the quilted
pillow by her side in the white armchair, aimlessly, then smooths it out on her lap. Fan pattern: yellow and red, picking up the warm dusty-rose shade of the walls. This is a beautiful room. Everybody says so. This pillow reminds her of Mary’s cousin’s stomach, black and full of baby, and her not much more than a baby herself. Sixteen, maybe. Barely. Roger has said she can have a baby nurse any time she wants to have a baby, but she won’t. Not now, she says, and Roger says don’t worry the nurse will do everything. But she won’t, not now, not yet. There are some things she knows a baby nurse can’t do, but she doesn’t think she can do them, either, and she hasn’t told Roger this. Later, she thinks, and the caterer’s song goes on in the back of her mind. There will be shrimp, crepes, asparagus rolled up in toast. Crystal is sleepy. There will be chicken livers on toothpicks. Mary comes into the living room still straightening here and there and putting out extra ashtrays, her face so severe and abstract that Crystal goes upstairs. Mary takes a party like the second coming, and Crystal is not even dressed.

She runs a bath and gets into it, sinking down to her chin. When they used to have parties it was so hard: she had to do it all. Now it’s easy, but it’s not fun anymore, not like it used to be when she stayed up the night before, baking bread. Or was that fun? At least it took hours, filled time.

She comes out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam with the lavender towel wrapped around her, all pink-faced from the heat; and Roger, reading a newspaper in the armchair, smiles. He’s dressed. He’s been dressed for an hour, downstairs on the sun porch supervising the bar.

“You’d better hurry up,” he says. In truth Roger loves
her lassitude, the way she trails in and out of rooms and leaves her cigarettes burning in ashtrays. He likes to find her car keys, to pick up the clothes she took to the cleaners four months before.

Crystal crosses the carpet to her dressing table and unpins her hair. It falls just short of her shoulders, waving damply, and she brushes it with the absolute concentration she always assumes in front of a mirror, like a glaze has come over her face. Roger is charmed, watching from the chair. Right now Crystal looks to him exactly as she did in high school, when they were so young and he loved her so much. Her still face, the huge blue eyes so open they broke your heart. Roger remembers a coat she had in high school, red-and-black plaid with a missing button, third one from the top. Roger remembers everything.