Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (5 page)

Just before he reached the square of sidewalk where we were standing, I dropped my eyes and gazed intently at a wad of chewing gum fossilized in the pavement. As soon as he was out of earshot, Carol Lee breathed rapturously into my ear, “He smiled at me, Elizabeth! He actually smiled at me.”

“What did you expect him to do? You were staring at him like he was Baldur the Beautiful. He probably thought you were a dangerous lunatic, and he was trying to pacify you by not making any sudden moves.”

Carol Lee wasn’t listening. “His eyes are the most beautiful shade of brown,” she sighed.

“Like horse manure,” I said briskly. “Can we go home now?”

It is a half-mile walk from the high school to Sycamore Street, where Carol Lee lives—around the corner and two houses away from me. I yawned all the way home, listening to Carol Lee’s endless babbling about the mysterious senior. There was no point in trying to work up any enthusiasm for her latest obsession, because Carol Lee fell in love about every three weeks, always with some good-looking total stranger, and after she wore herself out scheming over ways to meet the object of her affections, and speculated endlessly on what he was “really” like, she would lose interest and direct her attention to another victim.

Honestly
, I thought,
she might as well develop a crush on Paul McCartney; he is no less unattainable than any of her other crushes
. Carol Lee disdained movie poster romances, though; she dwells in possibility, which in her case is a very long commute from real life. She never actually dated any of her idols; in fact, I think she barely spoke to any of them. The chief victim of her delusions was me: I had to hear about Mr. Wonder-of-the-Week in our nightly phone conversations. The only thing that made it bearable was the short duration of each crush. About the time I got bored with hearing about the Piggly Wiggly bag boy or the minister’s son, her fantasies had a cast change, and the whole process began again. I predicted that this crush would last exactly one week: the time it would take Carol Lee to notice that the bouncing Mr. X wasn’t wearing his class ring.

A week later, though, Carol Lee’s ravings showed no sign of tapering off, and I was beginning to worry.

Friday night the phone rang.

“Elizabeth! I found out what his name is. You know—
the
boy.”

Of course I knew. She had scarcely talked about anything else in days. “Hello, Carol Lee,” I said. That was encouragement enough.

“His name is Cholly Barnes, and he’s—”

“Charlie?”

“No. Cholly. C-h-o-l-l-y. It’s a family nickname. Short for Collins or something. My informant wasn’t sure. Anyhow, he goes to the Grace Methodist Church, and he drives a green Chevy. He’s a photographer for the yearbook staff, and he plays the guitar. He likes apples—”

“And he’s going with somebody else.”

“What?” gasped Carol Lee. “Oh. You noticed that he’s not wearing his class ring, didn’t you? He lost it on a fishing trip. Actually, he doesn’t date much.”

“According to the FBI wiretap, I suppose?”

She laughed. “I just talked to a couple of girls who know him, that’s all.”

“Like his mother and sisters?”

“He doesn’t have any sisters,” Carol Lee replied promptly. “But Daddy knows his grandfather.”

“Oh, Carol,” I said (and I was
not
quoting Neil Sedaka), “have you no sense of decency? What will you do next? Start peeking in his windows?”

“Hey, that gives me an idea!”

“Oh, no …”

“Tomorrow is Saturday. We can go for a bike ride.”

“And?” Actually I didn’t want to know.

“We can ride by his house. I found out where he lives, too. Maybe he’ll be outside, mowing the lawn or something.”

“Absolutely not. I refuse. I am not going. You can’t make me.”

I said that the whole mile over to his house. “This is ridiculous!” I said that about fifty times, too. I don’t know why I kept muttering. Carol Lee wasn’t listening, and I didn’t need any convincing.

We kept going around and around the block. I began to
feel like a vulture. To relieve the monotony and take my mind off how stupid I felt, I started counting the bricks on the left side of his house. The only reason I kept going was loyalty. Carol was my friend, and it was my duty to stand by her in her madness.
Sancho Panza on a Schwinn—that’s me
, I thought.

He’s never going to come out
. I pictured him lurking behind the living room curtains, watching two giggling freshmen in orbit around his block.
There’s no way he’s coming out of that house
, I thought.
He’ll stay barricaded in there until doomsday. He won’t check the mail; he won’t retrieve the newspaper; he won’t go to school on Monday. He’ll never come out. He’ll probably leave instructions that when he dies, they are to cremate him in the toaster oven and flush his remains down the toilet. Meanwhile we’ll just keep circling. And Carol will never leave. We’ll be doomed to an eternal bike path around this block
. I could hear Rod Serling solemnly describing our trajectory: “Elizabeth MacPherson and Carol Lee Jenkins, two typical teenage girls with ordinary hopes and dreams, who started out on a Saturday morning bike ride, and ended up perpetually circling, forever straining for a glimpse of Cholly Barnes as they hurtle past the brick ranch house on Maple Street, trapped in an orbital obsession known only in
The Twilight Zone
.”

Finally I’d had enough. I was tired, sweaty, hungry, and, above all, I felt utterly foolish. “Look, Carol Lee,” I said, edging my bike to within earshot. “I’m going home now. I’ve got motion sickness.”

“Oh, just a few more minutes,” said Carol Lee. “He’s bound to come out sometime.”

“Sorry,” I told her. “I’m all pedaled out.” As we turned the corner onto Fourth Street, I steered my bike away from Carol Lee’s and headed straight for Elm Avenue. I was going home. I glanced back to see her pumping furiously along, determined not to abandon the vigil.

I had been home about two hours—long enough to
take a half-hour bubble bath, fix myself a sandwich, and immerse myself in
The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker
—when the phone rang.

It was Carol Lee, wailing.

I almost dropped the phone. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Oh, Elizabeth! The most
awful
thing happened.”

She’s been hit by a truck
, I thought.
She’s in the hospital, and they’ve allowed her one last phone call before they cut off her—oh, wait
. I suddenly remembered who I was dealing with. This was Carol Lee Jenkins, the Star-Spangled Queen of Melodrama, to whom every hangnail was a tragedy, and she was no doubt calling on her pink Princess phone from her white lace French Provincial bedroom in perfect health.

“What happened?” I sighed.

“He saw me!”

“What?”

“He saw me. Cholly Barnes
saw
me. He came out to get the newspaper, and he was just straightening up as I came around the block, and he looked right at me.”

Maybe something did happen
, I thought.
Maybe he smiled and waved for her to stop, and then he went over to the curb to chat with her, and they hit it off beautifully, and now she’s calling to tell me that they’re going to the movies later tonight. Oh, wait, this is Carol Lee’s theoretical love life. Motto: “Not on
This
Planet.” Okay. Maybe he went out into his yard, picked up the biggest rock he could find, and waited for her next revolution
.…

“Okay,” I said. “He came out into the yard, picked up the newspaper, and saw you. Then what?”

“That’s it,” said Carol Lee. “Then I came home.”

“So he saw you. Why are you hysterical? Oh, wait. Did he catch you rooting through his garbage cans?”

“No, of course not!”

I didn’t think there was any
of course
about it, but I
was relieved that she had restrained herself. “Okay, he saw you on your bike. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“No!” She was wailing again. “I just wanted to see him. I didn’t want him to see me.”

I told Carol Lee that if that was her idea of a romantic encounter, she would be much better off falling in love with a Paul McCartney poster, but she was not amused. Well, I thought, at least I’ve heard the last of Cholly Barnes.

I hadn’t, though.

Carol Lee continued to stake out a lunch table so that she could keep Cholly under surveillance while we ate, and her obsession with him showed no sign of letting up. She managed to discover his birthday, his dog’s name, his food preferences, and about a zillion other completely useless biographical details, all of which she regaled me with as we watched him eat. If Taylor High had offered a course in Cholly Barnes, we would have passed it with honors.

Phase Two of Carol Lee’s Doomed Romance began early in May. One afternoon she set down her lunch tray with an expression of tragic suffering on her face. I thought it was the meat loaf that had prompted this air of gloom, but as she sat down, she said, “Oh, Elizabeth, it’s
May
.”

I looked doubtfully at the meat loaf. “Yes,” I said. “I don’t mind May, myself.”

“But school will be over in a few weeks.”

“Yes. That prospect doesn’t distress me, either. I’ll be out of Mrs. Baxter’s geometry class forever.”

“But he’s
graduating
!”

“Oh.”

“I can’t live without him.”

It was useless to point out that she wasn’t even remotely living
with
him. “You’ll get over it,” I said, as consolingly as I could manage.

“I’ve lost him. We had so little time together.”

None, actually
, I thought.

“I’ll never forget him, though,” said Carol Lee. “I’ll probably go off and tend lepers in the African veldt, or run a small lending library somewhere, and I’ll grow old and gray, with only my memories of
him
to sustain me. But I shall suffer in silence. I shall never speak his name again.”

I began counting the hours until graduation.

A week later the euphoric phase of the obsession returned. Carol Lee came down the steps after school, squealing in ecstasy. “Guess what I’ve got!” she said, in tones suggesting possession of the Hope diamond or an Irish sweepstakes ticket.

“Offhand I’d say schizophrenia,” I replied.

“No. Look!” She reached in her pocket and took out a small white square of cardboard. “His calling card!” she said, handing it over for inspection.

I took the slightly creased and grubby
Jeremy Collins Barnes
card, studying the engraved italic script with polite disinterest. “Very nice,” I said. “Where did you get it?” I pictured Carol Lee throwing him down on the floor of the hall and searching his pockets.

“One of the senior girls got it for me,” said Carol Lee. “Look on the back! He
wrote
on it.”

I turned the card over. There in tiny, script letters, Cholly Barnes had written:
I shall pass through this world but once. If there be any good that I can do, or any kindness I can show, let me do it. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again
.

I didn’t think he would pass at all.

But he did. He passed, and he passed us in his white cap and gown as the seniors marched in two rows down the concrete steps of the stadium on graduation night. It is hard to bounce to the beat of “Pomp and Circumstance,” but Cholly Barnes managed to do it. I watched
the white tassel bob its way down the steps of the bleachers and onto the field with the rest of the senior class, waiting for commencement exercises to begin. Carol Lee sat beside me in the bleachers, shredding a damp tissue and murmuring, “He’s leaving. He’s actually leaving.”

“We all have to go sometime,” I muttered.

“But he’s going away, and I’ll never see him again.”

“You never see him now,” I pointed out. “Except when you have him under surveillance, I mean. Maybe you could take some snapshots of him, and have them made into a poster. It would be about the same, you know.”

“He’s really leaving,” her voice trembled with misery. “He is going out of my life.”

“You look like a basset hound!” I hissed at her. “People are staring at you. Snap out of it!”

“I’ll never forget him,” said Carol Lee in her most mournful tones. “I’ll treasure the memory of him forever.”

Ah!
I thought,
the Nobility Phase of the Grand Passion has kicked in
.

“I’ll treasure these memories of him, and someday when I am old and gray … when I’m thirty-five … I’ll tell my children about my first real love.”

“If your memory isn’t gone by then. Advanced senility.”

Carol Lee gave me a reproachful look through her tears, and I decided to save my breath. We watched the rest of the graduation ceremony in silence, punctuated by an occasional sniffle from the Bereaved One.

At last it was over. The diplomas were handed out, the mortarboards were thrown into the air, as the seniors had been carefully instructed
not
to do, and the spectators filed onto the field to mingle with the newly certified high school graduates. As we left the bleachers, Carol Lee trailed behind me in silent misery.

After a few moments’ reconnaissance, I spotted Cholly Barnes, diploma in hand, chatting with three of his classmates.

“Why don’t you go over and congratulate him?” I said. “He’s standing right over there with some of the other seniors.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!” whispered Carol Lee.

“Sure you could. It’s a public celebration. Just go over and say, ‘Congratulations. Best of luck in the future.’ ”

She looked stricken. “No, I couldn’t,” she said. “I don’t
know
him!”

We stood there for a few more minutes watching flashbulbs pop in the twilight, and then we turned and watched the white figure, gown flapping, bounce off into the warm June night.