Black Mountain Breakdown (7 page)

“Of course I will keep the children, Karen,” Gregory says coldly.

“The children?
My
children? No, Gregory, you wouldn’t.” Karen is sobbing again.

“Oh, but I would!” says Gregory.

“Now what are
you
crying about?” Neva asks, as soon as Lorene has got Denny quiet.

“It’s just taking so long. I didn’t know you had to roll it up, too.” Crystal tries hard not to cry.

“Well, sure I’ve got to roll it up if you want it to look like anything,” Neva says.

Lorene comes over and gives Crystal a Kleenex. “Honey, don’t you want to look real cute for high school? School’s going to start in ten days.”

“I don’t care,” Crystal wails. “I don’t care if I look cute or not, I don’t care, I don’t care!”

Neva bites down on a bobby pin. None of her children would act like this. But then if it was her, she wouldn’t have stayed married to Grant Spangler long enough to have had any children in the first place.

But Lorene is patient with Crystal, explaining, “It’ll be done pretty soon and you’ll like it, you’ll see, honey. Oh, honey,” she says, hugging Crystal, “you’re just going to be so pretty!”

HIGH SCHOOL
is like a movie that Crystal has almost seen, starring herself and Tim Considine and Annette Funicello and a lot of other ex-Mouseketeers. It’s like
American Bandstand
, which Crystal and Agnes watch most days after school. But it’s not exactly like these things either, and it confuses Crystal to be in this movie.

Fall comes and drifts into October, frosty cold and dark in the early mornings so that there’s something secretive
and exhilarating about getting up and dressing, getting books together, and eating while the windows outside are still black. Crystal leaves her house every day in this excited, trembling state. She feels like she used to feel when she was swinging very hard on the big swings at her old school, the moment when she was up in the air on a level with the bars before she bailed out.

Agnes’s father takes them to school each day on his way to work. In the closeness of the car he smells strongly of Aqua Velva, so that Crystal has to open the window to keep from throwing up. Some mornings they have to pick up old Miss Marvell, who boards with Nancy’s grandmother, whenever she is substituting for somebody at school. Incredibly ancient, Miss Marvell has dyed her hair black and has bought herself a hairpiece to match. But this hairpiece is not as big as her bald spot, which causes Crystal and Agnes to roll over and over in the back seat every time they pick up Miss Marvell, shaking with awful, silent giggles at the way it looks from the back, the pale-blue rift of skin.

Agnes’s father drops them off at the old Black Rock High School where he went to school himself. The school has not changed much since then. It is large, two-storied, rectangular, with a lot of windows with small rectangular panes of glass in them. Some of the panes have been broken out and have not been replaced. Behind the school building itself is a collection of prefabricated shacks built to catch the overflow of students. No grass grows in the schoolyard. It is red dirt and has been that way for years, hard as rock in dry weather, clammy, red, sucking mud whenever it rains, the kind of mud that makes excellent mudballs. Part of the
schoolyard in front is paved in concrete, a sort of terrace, lined by the wooden fence with the green paint peeling off of it. It separates the concrete from the red dirt yard and runs along the sidewalk in front of the school. Boys sit on this fence or lean against it, watching the girls go by. In the mornings they are always there when Crystal and Agnes get out of the car. Three scraggly maple trees have been planted in the schoolyard by the Junior Women’s club as a part of their town’s beautification project. A flagpole is planted in a concrete block. Each week a different home room must put up the flag. Across a big gravel parking lot at the side is the elementary school where Crystal and Agnes went last year, a different world. Where they had their eighth-grade graduation wearing white dresses and wrist corsages and picked “Climb Every Mountain” as their class song. But they never go back there now.

Now they rush into their home rooms, terrified of being tardy. They are never tardy. In home room Crystal checks her things carefully to be sure they’re all there: the three-ring notebook with the colored dividers, one for each subject she’s taking, English, alg. 1, French, social studies, biology. Crystal also takes chorus and phys ed on alternate days. If she makes cheerleader, she’ll have to drop chorus. Her home-room teacher is Miss Dale, who teaches home ec in her little kitchen in the basement of the school between the cafeteria and the locker rooms. Miss Dale makes all her own clothes. Her home room is a boring, efficient procedure, something to be gotton through every morning. Miss Dale calls roll and then somebody, usually Jubal Thacker, gives a prayer, and announcements take up most of the rest
of the time. When the P.A. box crackles ominously, they can tell that the principal, Mr. Viers, is listening in. Agnes is not in Crystal’s home room. Pearl Deskins, who has been kept back two grades, is. Pearl wears a little round pearl collar on her sweaters, and straight, tight skirts; she’s becoming quite friendly to Crystal. They whisper in home room. Crystal’s home room also has rough boys in it who drop their pencils so they can look up the girls’ skirts; Pearl Deskins warns Crystal of this. It has a couple of junior varsity football players, and it has a lot of kids from up in the hollers who are poorly dressed and more nervous than Crystal. She is always nice to them. Once Crystal found one of the girls, Suellen Clevinger, eating her lunch in the girls’ bathroom because she was ashamed of what she had brought, cornbread and milk in a pint jar.

Classes go by fast. Crystal’s French teacher is Miss Martin, who wears very short skirts and sits up on top of her desk. While they are working, Miss Martin moves around the room and puts her hand on the back of the boys’ necks. The football coach, Mr. Swiggert, is Crystal’s biology teacher. He’s a nice man, but he doesn’t know any biology. He assigns a section each day and gives a test on it the next day from his teacher’s book. In class he tells jokes. One day when they are studying the circulation of the blood and poor Bobby Lukes is reading aloud, stumbling over all the words, Crystal has to get up and leave the class because she feels like she’s going to scream; she can’t stand to think about the circulation of the blood. She can’t stand to look at the little blue veins in her wrist. Crystal also has trouble with algebra. She doesn’t understand the signs. Her teacher,
Mrs. Marshall, gives her extra work whenever she misses the problems in class. But she doesn’t understand the extra work either, so Agnes does it for her.

Crystal likes English class, though, where her teacher is Mrs. Muncy, a blue-haired stocky woman who won’t put up with any foolishness. If you have Mrs. Muncy, you learn the parts of speech. You also have to read one outside reading book every six weeks from a list Mrs. Muncy made up. Everyone else hates Mrs. Muncy and thinks this is unreasonable, but Crystal likes her. She loves to go to the board and diagram compound-complex sentences.

At the end of each class, the bell rings and they have three minutes to get to the next one. Crystal is always late. Sometimes it’s because she can’t work the combination on her locker. Most times, it’s because some boy is carrying her books for her. Often, too, she starts to drift when she walks down the tiled, crowded halls and sees all those faces coming up at her, so many faces, all different. You can pick out the kids from the hollers easily: they look different, somehow, from the town kids. A few are paler, or wall-eyed or crook-necked, but most seem bigger and healthier-looking. However they look, they look different. Crystal smiles and smiles at everybody; she really wants to be popular. At the end of the day, her mouth hurts from smiling so much.

Agnes and Crystal could ride the bus home if they wanted to, and sometimes they do. But the bus smells. It’s so full of people, so slow. It takes forever to go the two miles from school to home, and then they can’t get off in front of their own houses but have to get off at the Davidson Apartments, a bad place where a lot of people on welfare live, the men
sitting out sometimes on old wooden Coke boxes right by the road, smoking, with their hair greased back and their T-shirts on, and they yell things at Agnes and Crystal. Nothing bad, usually something like “How’s school, honey?” or “What’d you learn today, sugar?” but there’s some tone, some insinuation in their voices. Several of these men have tattoos. And a passel of children runs off the bus each time and into the Davidson Apartments, whooping and grimy, rushing behind the thin doors where their mamas wait with another new baby, as likely as not.

Things happen in high school.

Crystal makes cheerleader, much to her surprise. She is the only ninth-grader chosen. The football team elects the cheerleaders and it is whispered that Crystal got it for her looks, that Becky Ball has a higher jump, that Susie Knight can do a cartwheel and land in a split. Crystal hears these rumors and cries. But no matter. At the first game she’s right there, running out onto the field in her gold-and-black uniform, the black V-neck sweater with the big gold letters BR, the short black skirt with the gold pleats, the gold knee socks, the new black-and-white saddle oxfords. Lorene is so proud. The football games are held at night and Crystal can’t see much of the crowd because of the lights. She’s surprised when the crowd actually cheers along with the cheerleaders. Lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight. Crystal is amazed that the crowd does all these things. It’s cold out there on the field, but Crystal isn’t cold. She feels something like a fire inside her every time she jumps, each time the crowd yells. When they make a touchdown, she thinks she’ll die.

Crystal attracts attention out there on the field. Boys start calling her up, even juniors and seniors. One of the boys who calls the most is Roger Lee Combs, a football star. His father owns the Family Dry Goods Store downtown. Roger Lee is a nice boy with a nice family and a yellow Ford of his own. He is very tall, with wavy brown hair, and it’s rumored that he will make all-state.

Crystal dates Roger Lee Combs and holds his hand in the movies. They switch hands when their hands get too sweaty. She goes to the Homecoming Dance with him and dances very close when they play “The Twelfth of Never,” her favorite song, and Roger Lee’s sports jacket leaves an indented crossweave pattern which lasts for a minute or two on her face. At lunch he buys Peppermint Patties for her and she saves the wrappers in a little silver stack in her bureau drawer at home. She has decided to be in love with Roger Lee.

But there’s this boy in her biology class, Mack Stiltner, a mean country boy that she keeps looking at. She knows she shouldn’t look at him, but she can’t help it. Most days he isn’t even there; he cuts school all the time. Mack Stiltner has long dark hair and bad teeth and a bad reputation. He wears shiny black boots and terrible-looking loud shirts. But he has ropy white muscles in his skinny arms. He has a way of putting his feet up in class and leaning back, head cocked, like he doesn’t give a damn. He stares at Crystal all the time out of his strange eyes, half blue and half greenish gray, no color really. He does not smile. In the hall when Crystal is laughing and talking with her friends or flirting with Roger Lee Combs, she sees him: just staring. He knows
she’s too good for him. Crystal knows this, too. But she can’t help herself—she begins staring back.

Now that Crystal has to go to cheerleading practice and all the away games, Agnes takes up 4-H. Immediately she becomes an officer. She wins the school 4-H contest with her demonstration of how to make potato salad. Agnes prepares the potato salad in front of the judges, describing the nutrient value of each ingredient and the history of the potato as she goes along. Now Agnes is practicing for the district 4-H contest, making potato salad and giving her speech at home, until Babe refuses to eat any more.

On Saturday mornings Crystal takes piano lessons from Miss Belle Varney, at Miss Belle Varney’s house, where the walls inside are stucco and Miss Varney has cactuses growing everywhere in pots. Miss Belle Varney raps Crystal hard on the knuckles with a ballpoint pen if Crystal has failed to practice. There’s a funny smell about Miss Belle Varney’s house, as if she’s always cooking meat loaf. Crystal memorizes “The Trisch-Trasch Polka.”

Crystal can’t fix upon a handwriting. She writers a different way each day. Sometimes she favors a tight, small, back-slanted hand. Other times she writes in a forward sprawl similar to the signatures on the Declaration of Independence. Sometimes she prints: rounded, uniform letters with squatty capitals. It changes every day.

There’s a stir in the neighborhood; it is discovered that Chester Lester has never learned to read. A dressed-up lady comes to tell his mother, who has a bad back. Chester Lester is furious, setting fire to the inside of his mother’s Chevrolet. But the Chevrolet doesn’t burn well, and by the time
the volunteer fire department gets there Chester is bored with all of it and helps them extinguish the blaze.

The young French teacher leaves mysteriously in November. She is replaced by a fat blond young man named Mr. Roach, who waves his hands a lot and cooks quiche Lorraine for the class. They are astonished, and several parents protest. Mr. Roach is so strange. But he remains until the end of the year, when he goes back to graduate school at Charlottesville.

Crystal reads
Madame Bovary
and
Miss Lonelyhearts
from Mrs. Muncy’s list. She writes a poem comparing life to a candle flame, and Mrs. Muncy reads it aloud to the whole class while Crystal blushes furiously in her seat.

One Friday night, her aunts Grace and Nora appear at a football game, wildly out of place, to see Crystal cheer. They sit with Lorene. Mack Stiltner sits on the second row hunched over in an old red plaid shirt, smoking cigarettes and talking to some other wild boys, staring at her, and Roger Lee Combs makes a sixty-yard run. Crystal thinks she’s going to explode, but she doesn’t. Her color deepens and she jumps higher and higher and shakes her pom-poms wildly, and everyone says she’s the very best cheerleader of all.