Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (8 page)

I tossed her the letter with a terrible smile that indicated that I was incapable of speech. She began to read Anthony’s inhibited scrawl, her eyes getting wider and wider at every word. “Damn!” she said, jumping up from the bed.

She began rummaging around in the medicine chest, muttering something about Duke students, which Anthony was, and bastards, which Anthony had certainly proven to be. Finally she turned around holding a prescription bottle, from which she extracted two white pills. “Valium,” she said, filling a glass. “Take two. I’ll be right back.” She hurried out of the room in the direction of the phone, while I sat there sniffling with a mental image of Anthony superimposed over scenes of my becoming a nun or perhaps opening a small lending library. I was just administering Chaulmoogra oil to a leper in the African veldt when Vicki reappeared and announced: “You are dating a brother at the Phi Kapp House tonight. He is probably a lizard, and you’re going to enjoy yourself if it kills you.”

This was my wisdom from the oracle of Addison Hall? “Vicki, I can’t!” I wailed. “I just want to slink off into my room and never come out again. If I even look at a boy today, I’ll probably throw up!”

Vicki nodded. “I see. And what do you want?”

I could practically see her looking around for the mice and pumpkins. “I want Anthony back,” I blubbered. “I haven’t dated anybody else since I was sixteen! I’ll never love anybody else! I want Anthony to hold me like he used to—”

Vicki was brisk. “That’s enough of that! Hysteria
makes you puffy. And you have to be presentable by seven o’clock. Go take a shower.”

I looked at her piteously, through brimming eyes. “I
have
to go?”

“You have to.” Then she relented a little. “Well … if it’s too much of an ordeal, then at ten o’clock you can tell him you’re a diabetic and you have to come back to the dorm to take an insulin shot.” Vicki believed in lying.

I said I’d go.

A few minutes later I stood in the shower contemplating my own misery. My own true love had just proved to be a creep and no one understood. Maybe I should have stood on the ledge of the new library building until a whole crowd gathered and the Channel Five news department sent a camera crew over. How would you like your letter read on the six o’clock news, Anthony? Meanwhile, I was stuck going to a fraternity party with a total stranger. I was not the frat party type. Anthony and I were strictly free flicks and duplicate bridge people. It was going to be awful.

“Flush!” came a scream from the other room.

Automatically I stepped out of the path of the shower, as I heard the whoosh of a toilet flushing. Strictly a reflex action; if I’d thought about it, I would have stayed under the shower and gotten scalded. It would have gotten me out of the blind date anyway—and who knows, if my frail form were swathed in bandages in Memorial Hospital, maybe Anthony … After that I waited for somebody else to flush, but nobody did.

Addison Hall has neurotic toilets, so one important feature of freshman orientation is toilet training. If you flush while somebody is taking a shower, all the cold water to the shower is cut off, and you have an irate burn victim to confront. So we devised a system whereby if someone is taking a shower, you yell “Hush!” before you do it, so they’ll have time to crawl in the soap rack until
the crisis is past. The older girls spent a lot of time in orientation programming us to yell flush. I internalized this command so well that when I went home for Thanksgiving, I got up at seven
A.M
. and yelled “Flush,” forgetting I was at home. My father yelled back: “It won’t obey spoken commands!”

When I got back to my room, everyone had already gone down to dinner, but there was a note on my door from Vicki:
Don’t wear black!
How did she know? I skipped dinner, as I thought suitable for a person in my state of bereavement. After finishing off a third of a package of Oreos to pass the time, I halfheartedly put on my navy blue church dress and went down to Vicki’s room for inspection and final instructions.

“Navy blue.” She nodded. “I approve. You’ve made your statement without being obvious. Now just be relaxed and try to enjoy yourself. And for heaven’s sake, don’t talk about Anthony!”

“I have no small talk,” I said mournfully. “What can I say to this person?”

Vicki thought for a moment. “Well,” she said. “I used to pretend to be an exchange student from Denmark. That was always good for a tour of the campus, but that won’t work for you, Mary Frances. It takes practice. You’re just going to have to play it by ear.”

“Are you sure this is what I should do? Go out with this guy?”

“I’m positive. It’s exactly what you should do.”

“What’s he like, anyway?”

“I have no idea. I have never met him. Was that the house phone?” She jumped up and ran out into the hall, and I heard her say: “By the grace of God and the genius of Alexander Graham Bell, you have reached the third floor of Addison Hall.…” It was too late to invent a migraine. He was here.

She walked me down the stairs for moral support. “It’s
going to be just fine, Mary Frances. Let go of the banister.” We peeped out the doorway into the parlor and saw him standing nervously in front of the gilt-frame mirror.

Fortunately, he looked nothing like Anthony. He was tall and angular, with hair, eyes, and skin all the same neutral shade of tan. His face was impassive. He looked as if he had never had a thought in his life.

“I couldn’t warm up to him if we were cremated together!” I hissed to Vicki.

“He looks like a moron. Now go out there and be charming!” she hissed back, giving me a push.

I walked over to the Brown Thing and gave myself up. He acknowledged my existence with a grunt, and we put on our coats and walked out into the rain. In the seven minutes it took to walk from Addison to his fraternity house, we managed to cover a great deal of trivia. Such as: where are you from? what’s your major? what year are you? and do you know Bernie Roundtree from your hometown? In seven minutes we had exhausted every possible conversational gambit I could come up with for the entire evening. And I couldn’t become a diabetic until ten o’clock.

I learned that the lizard’s name was Hampton Branch III, that he was a history major, planning to go into law or politics, and several other bits of information that passed through my mind leaving no impression whatsoever.
Perhaps I should have written myself a script
, I thought. Hampton and I didn’t talk much for the rest of the walk. There weren’t many subjects that he was qualified to discuss, and I wanted to commune with my sorrow. I didn’t feel like telling him the history of nursery rhymes (“Ring around the Roses” is a recitation of plague symptoms), which is what I usually do to entertain strangers. His fraternity house was a blur in the mist. I wouldn’t be able to recognize it if I saw it again. When I try to picture it, I get
House of Usher
with Vincent Price standing on the porch.

I followed Hampton downstairs to the party room,
where two hundred identical people were herded together shouting at each other over the music. The room was dimly lit, tiled, and furnished entirely in contemporary American bodies, arranged in small circular groups, holding drinks, laughing. Unfortunately they were alive, and might have to be conversed with.

Hampton, I noticed, had lurched over to the jukebox and was seeing to it that “My Girl” would play thirty-six times in succession. Dutifully, I followed.

I was standing there studying the checkerboard pattern on the floor, when I suddenly realized with horror that I had not spoken for nearly twenty minutes.

“Hamp, I’m sorry I’m so quiet!” I blurted. “But today I just broke up with the guy I’ve been going with for three years.”

“Gee,” said Hamp.

An electronic scream shook the room, and the lights on the jukebox faded out. A combo, with the name
THE FABULOUS PROPHETS OF ECU
painted on their drums, had just set up in a corner of the room, and they were either warming up or playing their opening number. It was hard to tell which. The couples surged toward the dance floor, pressing us up against the bandstand with approximately two feet of space in which to move. Hampton was spinning around like a wound-up toy mouse to the blare of the band. I moved mechanically to the rhythm, but really the noise was wrapped around me like a cushion, too loud to scream through, holding my thoughts inside. I thought about all the trivial things I’d been saying to Hampton, and all the real conversations I used to have with Anthony. It was an odd wake to bury three years. Hampton disappeared briefly between dances and came back with two plastic cups of warm beer, one of which he pressed into my hand. I smiled and nodded, indicating that I understood I was to drink it. I sipped enough of it to get the level down so it wouldn’t slosh while I was
dancing, I had only managed to drink two-thirds of it. Hampton, by then, was several beers away.

I wondered what time it was. Nine-thirty by now, surely. But on reflection, I decided that I could think about Anthony here as well as anywhere. The music prevented conversation, and the company was certainly no distraction.

The last time I’d seen Anthony, we went to dinner at the Pines, and then sat down under a tree in the arboretum and talked about life. It had been dark and quiet there, with stars shining between the leaves, and Anthony had held me while we talked. I had felt that I really belonged there. Now I didn’t belong anywhere, and I didn’t know what to do or say when smiling cardboard people came up and screamed imitation questions. I wished I could explain all this to Anthony, because he would understand. But he didn’t care now. He didn’t care at all.

There was a sudden silence in the room, and I was there again. The Fabulous Prophets of ECU began to play a slow, sad melody, “I’ll Be There,” and people began to surge together. Hampton returned from orbit and looked at me with a curiously human expression. Without a word, he held me. I clung to him, occasionally remembering to move my feet, thinking how good it felt to be close to somebody. It felt warm and safe … and … just the way it always did with Anthony.

Suddenly I knew why Vicki had sent me. She wanted to put an emotional Band-Aid on my suppurated ego. And I nearly fell for it. But she was missing the point: I didn’t want to feel better, I wanted to get back at Anthony! By the end of the slow dance, Hampton and I were looking at each other with new interest: I was seeing an instrument for revenge, and he was seeing a five-foot-three-inch mound of fresh meat. When he suggested that we go for a walk in the arboretum, I didn’t even pretend to think it over.

We left the party hand in hand and headed for the arboretum in silence; we still couldn’t think of anything to
say to each other. Hampton led me to a spot between two large azalea bushes that he apparently knew quite well, and we sat down on the wet ground. Fortunately it had stopped raining. At this point I considered mentioning my inexperience, but I decided to rely on dance etiquette: let him lead and do your best to keep up. What followed could best be compared to having a pelvic exam while someone blew beer and Lavoris fumes in your face. After a discreet interval—the time it took for Hampton to smoke one Benson & Hedges cigarette—he walked me back to my dorm. As we reached the front door, Hampton shuffled his feet awkwardly and mumbled: “I’ll call you.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Good night.” I didn’t offer to tell him my real name; I was inside and running up the stairs before he got to the edge of the porch.

When I reached the third floor, the hall was dark and quiet—most everybody was in Vicki’s room and the door was half open. Confessions would be heard until one A.M. I hesitated outside her door for a moment, staring down the barrel of LBJ’s machine gun, and then I turned and walked off toward the lair of P. J. Purdue.

There comes a time when you outgrow Vicki Baird.

F
RANCHETTE BELTED HER
car coat over her swollen belly and eased her way down the icy back steps. Ramer was still in the shed. Her breath made little puffs of smoke in the chill morning air as she stumbled down the path toward the road. She hurried as if she could still hear the cries coming from the crate out front, or the sound of the hatchet on the hen’s neck.

She didn’t look back as she made for the dirt road beyond the trees. The crocuses she’d planted were beginning to put up green shoots. It was going to be an early spring, and that was good. Soon she wouldn’t have to worry about the pipes freezing, or about having to carry firewood in her condition, when Ramer went out drinking and left her alone. She couldn’t stop to look at the plants just now, or to check for deer tracks in the yard. She wished she could do something about the prisoner in the crate, but she couldn’t. She had left the kettle boiling on the stove, and the butcher knife laid out on the newspapers, just like Ramer had asked her to, but she had to get out of there.

If she ignored the catch in her side, she could be around the bend to Della’s trailer in five minutes. Della worked the lunch shift at her uncle’s diner in town, so she’d be leaving soon. If Franchette said she had a doctor’s appointment
on account of the baby, Della would let her ride in to town with her for nothing. She couldn’t tell Della the real reason she wanted to go. Della’s man was living over across the river with a bleached blond dental assistant, and he never sent Della a cent for the kids or the payments on the Pontiac. Della would laugh and say that pregnant women always got fanciful, that Ramer was being protective like a man ought to be, and he was a heap better than some. Maybe he was being protective, but Franchette didn’t think so. She thought he was saving his own pride at the cost of hers. And the worst part was the way he’d done it. It was like the Bible story turned inside out, but she hadn’t seen that until today. Della couldn’t be made to understand. She’d say: “Ramer killed that old stray hen. So what?”