Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

SOUTHERN COMFORT

“LOVE,” VICKI USED to say, “is like flushing yourself down the toilet: a nice cool ride, and a lot of crap at the end.” I was standing in the dorm mail room, rereading Anthony’s letter for the fifth time, but it still said the same thing: “Surely, by now you realize there can never be anything more between us…” I would definitely have to talk to Vicki.

I plunged up the stairs toward 308, still clutching the antiseptic green notepaper, and not even crying. I just felt numb all over. Vaguely I wondered what miracle Vicki Baird would accomplish to get Anthony back for me. She was bound to produce one. After all, she was a senior, pinned to a ∆KE, and she had actually invited Joan Baez to her high school commencement exercises. (Joan didn’t go, of course, but Vicki had received a nice letter from her secretary explaining that Joan was on a peace march with Dr. King, and wished her well. Vicki had the letter framed and hanging above her Donovan poster.)

Vicki’s door was the one with the poster of LBJ and Lady Bird dressed as Bonnie and Clyde. When I got there, a sign tacked to Lyndon’s nose said that Vicki had gone to the post office and would be back before dinner. I slumped down beside the door to wait.

How could Anthony do this to me? I was an English major, for God’s sake! Didn’t I stay in on Friday nights and write to him instead of going out? And no matter how many times people said it was uncool to still be tied to your high school honey, I’d always smile and say that we had been lucky to find each other so young. And now this. It was a judgment, I decided. A curse. I’d laughed when Sophy thought she was pregnant. Back in September, I’d gone to Rosh Hashanah services with her (and became-from force of habit-the first person to genuflect in the UNC Hillel), and she met a med student named Bundschaft. I tried to tell her not to go off and spend the weekend with him, but no! Sophy wanted to experience Life. She came back Sunday night with a green lab coat and a blow-by-blow account of the weekend. Told me I ought to try it with Anthony, and I’d sniffed and said that Southern men didn’t expect that kind of thing from their fiancées. I sniffled a little, remembering it. How did I know what Anthony expected? Some Yankee bitch at Duke might be screwing him on the fifty-yard line for all I knew. And then when Sophy thought she was pregnant-well, she had been rather melodramatic about it. Alternately planning to drop out of school and raise it alone or tell no one and brazen out the year. Finally one evening after dinner, when we were all walking back through the parlor where the guys wait on little loveseats for their dates, Sophy announced her latest plan: “We won’t tell anybody. And then in May when the time comes for the delivery, you can all come in and help me. We’ll boil water in the hot pots-”

At that point the absurdity of the whole situation overcame me-her period was only nine days late-and I dropped to my knees in the parlor, crying: “Oh laws a mussy, Miz Scarlett! I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!” It was wicked and I deserved to be punished-but it did put a stop to the planning. And then a few days later, Sophy had timidly taken the matter to Vicki, who glanced up from her chemistry book, studied the supplicant for a few seconds and flatly declared: “You aren’t pregnant. Go study.” At breakfast the next morning, Sophy had announced in hushed tones that Vicki had been proved right. The crisis was over.

I began to relax a little. Anthony ought to be easy after that miracle.

“Hey! McCrory! What are you doing sitting out in the hall?”

I looked up to find Sophy’s roommate P. J. Purdue hovering over me, dressed as usual in a black turtleneck and black slacks. She looked like a drill sergeant’s impersonation of Mia Farrow. I didn’t want to tell her about Anthony. P. J. Purdue was not what you’d call a sympathetic listener. In fact she was a Vietcong of the sexual revolution; her exploits had passed into campus mythology. P. J. Purdue had once humiliated a flasher in the campus arboretum. She’d been walking back from class when the guy jumped out of the bushes and exposed himself. He’d picked the wrong victim. Purdue said: “Are you bragging or complaining? Listen, buddy, I’ve seen Vienna sausages that were more impressive than that! Wait! Before you jerk off, I’ll lend you my tweezers!” The guy slunk off into the shrubbery and never worked that park again. I could imagine Purdue’s reaction to my broken heart. Purdue had lost her virginity in high school in the backseat of a ’63 Corvair, and she claims her reaction was: “That’s it? You mean, that was if?” I sometimes wondered if there was a Trappist monastery in Charlotte filling up with victims of Purdue’s sexual contempt.

Before I could think up an excuse for camping outside Vicki’s door, Purdue said: “Anyway, you’re just who I wanted to see. I want your wastebasket.”

“My wastebasket?”

“Yeah. My parents are coming down for the weekend, and ours is filled with cigarette ashes and God-knows-what. So we want to borrow yours.” She walked away. “Bring it down to our room!” she yelled back.

I was too dazed with personal sorrow to argue. I gave up my vigil outside 308, and went to deliver my chaste and virginal wastebasket to their den of iniquity. Sophy was sprawled out on her bed under the poster of the statue of David-with a fig leaf taped in a strategic area. She waved a languid hand at me as I came in.

“Hi, kid! Still subscribing to Modern Bride?”

“Not for long,” I said. “I just got a kiss-off letter from Anthony.” There’s something about Sophy and Purdue that makes people blasé about anything.

Purdue looked up from The Village Voice. “So that’s why you were camped outside Baird’s door! Trauma case. Tough luck about the boyfriend, though!”

“What should I do?” I quavered.

Purdue shook her head. “Nah. All that emotional counseling crap is strictly Baird’s department. Now if you had a sexual problem, I’d be the one to go to!”

Sophy snickered. “Not Baird!”

Purdue shrugged. “Oh, you mean the phone call? That was a stitch. But we were freshmen then.”

“What phone call?”

“Freshman year for us. Vicki Baird was always a missionary, even back then. Everybody’s aunt. But she was pretty naive herself, having just got here from Middle Earth, North Carolina, or someplace. So one day the hall phone rings and she answers it, and this guy says he’s going to jack off.” Purdue made the appropriate hand motion to illustrate the procedure. “Got it? Yeah, your basic obscene phone call. Well, Baird was such a twit with her shrink complex that she thought he was going to commit suicide. So she stays on the phone with him trying to talk him out of it, for chrissakes! ‘Oh, don’t do that. Life is beautiful. I’m sure there are people who care about you.’ Finally, the guy says he feels much better, and she says she’s glad. Guy says: ‘Can I call you back?’ And the idiot says: ‘Oh, yes! Any time you feel like this, you can call and talk to me!’ So Baird hangs up the phone feeling like a minister of grace. That glow lasted until dinner that night. We’re sitting at the table-”

Sophy stopped laughing long enough to interrupt. “Yeah, Baird says to P. J.: ‘Oh, Purdue, some poor guy called our hall this afternoon and he was so depressed he was going to jack off!’ And Purdue freaked. Coffee went everywhere.”

“Did you tell her-”

“Yeah, she took it pretty well. Baird’s okay. She’s a big help to sensitive types.” She looked meaningfully at Sophy.

“I’ve aged a lot since September!” snapped Sophy.

She had, too. Since the Bundschaft incident, Sophy had taken up the pill, and a succession of rugged primates who may have been football players. She called this her zaftig period, which we took to mean something like hunks. No one was ever exactly sure what Sophy was talking about, because she had arrived at our Waspish Southern school from Queens, New York, speaking something which was decidedly not English. “Listen!” she’d say to us in the laundry room. “Don’t let me nosh, anymore, okay? I hate to kvetch about my weight all the time, but I have such tsuris with my metabolism-” And we’d say: “You wanna run that one around the barn one more time, honey chile?” Mutual comprehension arrived in a few weeks’ time. Now I knew what tsuris was. Boy, did I know!

“Listen, thanks for the trash can,” Purdue was saying. “And you know, if you wanna write that shit Anthony a nasty letter, I’ll be glad to help, but-” She shrugged. “Advice to the lovelorn-that’s Baird’s department.”

I nodded solemnly and trudged back to 308. The sign was off Lyndon’s nose, so I knocked.

“Come in!”

Vicki was sitting on her bed, frowning at a chemistry book. She looked up when I came in and her eyes widened. After leaving Purdue’s room-where crying is not permitted-I had let all my misery wash back over me until I had reached a climax of self-pity. I looked wretched enough to command her full attention.

“Mary Frances McCrory! What is the matter?”

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.